Dear SE, stop homogenizing jobs

[Deceptus]

Log in queues months after 5.0, sure is dead here.

Yet I go into post 70 zones and there's less than 10 people in the whole zone (instances added up)

Just because there's a queue doesn't mean the game is vibrant and full of players.

[Saefinn]

We can stop homogenized classes as soon as people stop asking for balance. People will stop asking for balance when they get over their personal favorite classes not being the nest for a raid tier.

My solution? Make every raid teir use different classes with different strengths. You may go 1 savage tier not playing SAM because it's not needed and 3 casters are. You can have multiple jobs on a character so the only excuse not to pick up another job to do current tier is because you are entitled and whiny.

They kinda did this in FFXI with Abyssea, they made it so only certain jobs were needed. It was terrible. They corrected this in the next content they did because it locks people out of the jobs they play or forces players to level something they don't want to level. I was one of the stubborn ones who refused, but I was at a disadvantage.

[linay]

If you really want balance to not be an issue, then get rid of duties that makes balance desirable: extreme, savage, ultimate. Then feel free with your "job identity" as much as you want as no one else would care what you play. (No one else should care what you play now, but they do, so meh, job balance it is.)

[Brandedblade]

Geez, its almost like the population tends to go down when theres down time between patches. And that it spikes back up after the patch comes out, and that it will go back down again until the next patch.

[Nemmar]

Honestly i gotta say at this point that it's a fallacy to say Balance is directly correlated to homogenization.

Balance is only the process of looking at data and making corrections to the math. Homogenization means having the same skills and it is ludicrous to me to say that exists outside the shared role abilities. If you are advocating for the removal of those, i can see where you are coming from and i agree it would probably be for the best. But the rest is nonsense as far as i'm concerned.

[ForteNightshade]

If you really want balance to not be an issue, then get rid of duties that makes balance desirable: extreme, savage, ultimate. Then feel free with your "job identity" as much as you want as no one else would care what you play. (No one else should care what you play now, but they do, so meh, job balance it is.)

To be fair, people are only up in arms this much because job balance is laughable right now. No one would care if Bard was slightly weaker than Dragoon. But when the latter can outright die and still perform better than a top tier Range player? People are gonna care.

[linay]

To be fair, people are only up in arms this much because job balance is laughable right now. No one would care if Bard was slightly weaker than Dragoon. But when the latter can outright die and still perform better than a top tier Range player? People are gonna care.

That's fair, and my response to that is such an imbalance is caused by a desire to make the jobs different and they haven't found a way to please both sides. If they ever can, then great, but until they do, I think balance is preferable to job identity, especially when identity can still be discerned from other things.

[linay]

Balance is only the process of looking at data and making corrections to the math.

I agree with the rest of your post, but on this, balance is not just about math. If there are two defensive abilities, and one can protect against all attacks and the other can only protect against physical (or magical) attacks, then there is an imbalance between the two. There is no math to correct here.

Either make the second ability able to protect against all attacks or make the first ability only able to protect against some attacks and make sure enemies and bosses do all kinds of attacks, enough to warrant both types of abilities. The second option might seem good for both balance and job identity, but in practice, one or the other would be better by some margin and then people who don't really need it would still insist on the better ability (aka meta), thus still enforcing imbalance. Thus, the first option would be better as a role identity, with different animation for the job identity.

[frostmagemari]

Yet I go into post 70 zones and there's less than 10 people in the whole zone (instances added up)
Just because there's a queue doesn't mean the game is vibrant and full of players.

Geez, its almost like the population tends to go down when theres down time between patches. And that it spikes back up after the patch comes out, and that it will go back down again until the next patch.

That doesn't mean that it's a good thing. Less people around makes you feel like the game isn't as lively, and the game being less lively makes people who want the social aspect of MMOs to start thinking of going to places that are more consistently lively.
Honestly, they should have worked on their server capabilities to be able to handle a larger load of people and create a more fluid sharding system so they can have fewer servers, instead of things like World Visit. All World visit ended up doing was gathering more people up in the bigger worlds and making the lower pop worlds feel even more empty (And frankly, i've seen more off-server gil buying advertisements than local gil advertisements now)

[Grann-Goro]

As long as new jobs will be added, homogenization will be mandatory.

If the battle system was made for teams of 15 to 20 people, maybe it could be different...
But here it's a game made for teams of 8 people with 17 different jobs (and even more incoming...)

At the beginning (2.0), there were only 9 jobs.
It fitted better the idea of 8 people groups, and jobs could be more different.