Automatic Job Balance System

[Mystrum]

I believe we just need to ask for more transparency on a week to week basis, instead of having to constantly wait for a Live Letter or a 5.08 patch, 5.09 patch, hell, 5.1 patch etc. it seems that a lot of players are eagerly anticipating some sort of news that "hey, this week at Square Enix we've been researching some ongoing issues with [insert Job Here] or hey, Gunbreakers we hear you, your sounds sound like a wet towel being smacked into someone's behind" we hear you, we're working on a fix.

If they had a devoted team that communicated to the players, I know I for one would be calm knowing that the team is looking at these potency issues with certain jobs.

We have a dedicated and devoted team, however what you desire is more communication.

That said, it took over a year to create new formula for damage calculations in encounters and overworld with an overhaul of combat systems. Tweaks occur at patch intervals and major changes happen in planned segments. The Chinese Fanfest translation gave an incredible amount of insight into how YoshiP and the FFIX Team plan their resources and how it is mapped out over a two year development period and the patches therien while coordinating all teams involved.

I am going to sound incredibly patronizing saying this, but to expect at least four different teams (Encounter, Job, Coding, and Translation) on the FFXIV Dev team to bend over backwards in their already full schedule to sit down with community Reps for every region and YoshiP to detail every bit of their work just so a few people can feel better about what may or may not be in development for every job on weekly basis is absurd.

It is a wonderful notion I agree with the sentiment honestly. That said SE is a Japanese video game developer, not an American one. There are social and cultural precedents in office environments that differ greatly from Western preconceptions which must be acknowledged. The easiest way I can sum this up is the Vulcan proverb from StarTrek "Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." In this case as it is a need of the few it would be illogical to deviate from an effective schedule that has been used since HW. If the state of the business demands it then you can expect change.

I realize this is a poignant response, and we are all human in the end after it is all said and done. So we will have to agree to disagree on this one.

It's actually much more simple than what you guys are thinking.

Let's say the maximum potency per second BLM do is 100, and SAM is 99. This is the maximum these two Jobs will ever do on it's own.
Now, let's say Eden Savage every BLM still do a max of 100, but every SAM is doing a max of 96 because of the encounter design. The Auto balance system would buff SAM in order to reach 99 potency per second.
That's it. The success of this system entirely depends o how SE will program the data collection of it. Just by looking at FFlogs we can see that every encounter has different Job rankings, and this is because of the encounter design.

This can even be a not automatic system. But SE still needs to implement this feature to adjust inbalance of encounters between Jobs.

Encounters are not designed to have everyone do the same damage outputs. And that is taken into account in the calculations and the overall fundamental design. YoshiP explained in the SHB Job Preview live letter that they look at the "Role" first and then move from Pure DPS down to DPS with Utility. Pure DPS will and or should be at the top of the list as BLM is. They recognized that SAM was not and have started tweaking as required to fit that paradigm. In the Ranged Physical Role as an example it is MCH > BRD > DNC, with MCH having the highest personal dps potential to the DNC having the lowest but the largest group enhancement potential. It is on the players to take the tools given in their chosen job to make that job achieve its maximum designed potential in the framework created by the game designers. If there is a glaring fault in the chosen design the Dev team will make the choice to change it. They themselves do play this game as well.

And if I may be so bold how would a composer know the beauty of different conductors and orchestras playing their music with the varying tones and pace if they are all uniform and the same! Where is the exaltation of practicing your job and seeing improvement as you master it? How would you know when the player who does nothing to prepare themselves does the same output as someone who spent weeks honing themselves?

This is not about numbers it is fundamentally about a mind set. A mind set that I can only see as wanting to turn combat in FFXIV into that of a mobile game or something you could play on a tablet. WoW did that and look where that got them along with the other poor design choices.

On a technical level the very system you want even if done by real people is only suited for PVP centric MMO's whos source code has been designed with instance specific controlled encounters or mobile games with limited skill sets. In those settings Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) works just fine. In FFXIV we have Overworld combat, Instanced Combat, PvP Combat (I list it separately because its done separately with its own skills), Raid Combat, and Solo Trial Combat. All of these are worked with in job balancing were talking the flying spaghetti monster from hell in coding trying to put DDA into all of that. And it would have to be uniform or portions of the community would scream from the deepest pit of the seven hells to the very pinnacle of the heavens. FFXIV just does not have the hardware, software, or human base required to do this cost effectively at this time. Even then if it was integrated it would be done as a tool to make it easier for the Dev team to do their jobs not to make it so every player no matter how good or bad they are does the same damage.