Quote Originally Posted by ForteNightshade View Post
People are very much aware of this terrible practice, which is why they've straight up let jobs die. Monk and Ninja were the least played jobs by a mile prior to their respective buffs. Red Mage is already getting tossed in the grave. Frankly, I find it a little embarrassing players feel the need to stop playing their preferred jobs because the dev team ignores feedback.
Pick your poison. You either have a slow balancing process to tweak everything into position, or you have massive swings in DPS with FotM classes as the devs fumble about trying to balance classes that don't get balanced.

The only thing that could actually speed up this process without breaking everything would be to open up test servers for the patches ahead of time. Period. End of story. What the devs are doing is frustrating, but in terms of game theory, it is the best possible approach without opening up the floodgates to let in more data faster and allow them to balance with a wider assortment of data.

And the devs, as much as it sucks to hear this, should take player feedback, but largely ignore it outside of the most general and widespread feelings. Pleasing the playerbase will ruin the game faster than anything else, whereas taking the feedback and then working it into their vision will always be the best approach, if the feedback fits their vision.

And stop exaggerating. I'm in a group that runs with the 2 worst DPS right now, RDM and DNC, and we're doing just fine. The classes are viable, which is a hell of a lot better than how MCH launched at the start of SB, or AST during the literal entirety of HW. Slow and steady is best for the game, but nothing will stop the playerbase from acting irrationally to every tiny little thing.