This whole Meta Party thing is hurting me. x_x

[Eli85]

This is a simple dichotomy. Either the battle logs are accurate or inaccurate. If the developers have information that isn't being relayed to the players, then the current logs lie. You cannot get around that.

Battle logs, from the player perspective are accurate; however the developers have all of the battle logs and can see how combat plays out from a coding level, and, therefore, have a more complete picture of the data.

It's quite easy to get around that.

Really? Why have developers outright acknowledged high level players are better than they are. Having a vague idea and being capable of executing do not necessarily correlate. In the case of FFXIV, all their testing is done with God Mode on. It was among the primary reason Gordias failed so spectacularly. They balanced individual mechanics with invisibility on but never tested how putting everything together in a normal environment would work.

If they aren't better than World First or even good raiders. They won't know the same intricacies we do. I reiterate, the devs never anticipated people would do prepull shenanigan with Ninja and Warrior hence why Infuriate is now locked behind active combat and Hide refreshes your Mudras. Those changes were in direct response to players figuring out better alternatives. Going further back, Yoshida even admitted he thought tanks tanking outside Defiance/Shield were insane. Yes, the Producer, couldn't fathom why people did that.

None of this disproves the notion that the developers (who created the game) have a greater understanding of the game than players do. Players come up with a different tactic than they anticipated in one raid tier; it does not mean that the players now have a greater collective understanding of how the game works.

No, you need to understand how PR operates. Developers lies, or stretch the truth if we're being generous. You needs look no further than Destiny 2 and some of its insidious tactics of late. In fact, Bungie advertised experience gains that players eventually discovered were being throttled, i.e. intentionally lowered to prevent skilled players from advancing too quickly. When caught, they claimed a bug... then doubled the necessary experience. And we haven't even covered the nonsense EA tries to get away with.

We're not talking about Bungie or EA. We're talking about S-E. Yet even still, there are two different kinds of statements: selling the game (this is where lying or stretching the truth) and explaining how an aspect of the game works (this is where Yoshida's comments fall). The developers answered the meta by looking into game data (objective dataset) and gave an opinion based on what they found. This is not a lie or PR. It's forwarding an objective conclusion based on objective datasets.

Your entire argument hinges on a simple philosophy: Jobs are all secretly balanced due to "higher quality data" that we are not privy to. If this were true, the developers are idiots for not releasing this information. Why? It destroys the meta. Because until the playerbase has objective, written, proof, they will always fall back on FFLogs and ACT. No one cares what Yoshida claims. They want numbers that can be cross referenced and properly scrutinized. By your insistence, the developers have this information, but won't release it because... reasons? Furthermore, this inherently makes job changes pointless. Why did Black Mage get a fairly high buff? Why is Samurai slated for one? According to you, there is no meta, thus neither job has any reason to see changes. At least to their damage.

Basically, your stance makes the dev team appear as utter fools who possess the tools to destroy a culture they openly dislike ((FFlogs) yet won't, and make job changes to already balanced jobs because... boredom, I guess?

Why do you think Yoshida said what he said? He wants to make it clear the meta is a fiction. Their data and data analysis supports this. Not sure why the message is so hard to understand.

That is simply not true, except for a moment just after the creating.
There have been many, many cases throughout history of people making things behave in ways thought impossible by the original creator. This is because they had spent enough time using and analyzing the item in question that they had obtained a far better understanding of its behaviour than the creator ever did.

This is factually incorrect. When you create something, you know how the minutiae fit together, how the different element interacts together, you know it better than any fan could ever do. Sure, I'll give you that fans can come up with solid understandings, present something new, but that never, ever replicates a creator's understanding.

Unfortunately, OP of your quoted post has never seen speedruns or anything. A lot of game developers are so surprised and excited/a little embarrassed to find out how much better the players know their game than they do.

I have seen speed runs, the silly and irrelevant concept that it is. But I have seen it. Would you like to tell me what other things you know for a certainty that I haven't seen?