SE: Holding back information won't stop criticism, it will only delay it and is bad.

[AcaciaTyrannia]

Honestly, the playerbase as a whole is annoyingly uppity. I can't blame them for deciding to hold back information.

yeah! how DARE we complain to the company raking in money hand over fist from us!

[Gula]

People are foolish and stay subbed even when they're not playing.
Others are slow and don't complete content very quickly, so they have a lot of things they haven't done.
We also have sunk cost fallacy; see: people are foolish.
A large part of the game stays afloat on nostalgia.
There are of course people who play just because it's FF; see: nostalgia.
New players come in through advertisement.
A lot of people keep playing just to play with their friends.

Not saying this accounts for all the people who come and stay subbed. But there are various reasons people will play this game or just stay subbed to it that have little to do with it being a good game.

This also isn't a bad game by any means. But their devs have been making some horrible decisions for the past few years. I'd like to think at least most people can acknowledge that.

I don't think the decisions they've made are horrible. Fallout 76, was horrible. XIV is not Fallout 76. Even with millions of dollars, a company can only do so much and as the game grows, its clothes are unfortunately several sizes too small with little way to alter them. Let's say XIV is put out of commission for 2 years to give every person what they want (and impossibility but let's assume just so), to be rebuilt from the ground up with no spaghetti code or 1.0 elements. XIV is also the cash cow that keeps on giving. It's all fixed up, players are somewhat happy, but they've been denied their favorite pass time for 2 years, other IPs may not be bringing in the same level of money, and SE as a whole loses money from what XIV brought in.

The simple thing is, the long term may not justify the short term. So players can deal with it, or unsub.

There are many, many aspects of XIV to be looked at in unison while also adding more. The clothes are too tight, but it's not cutting off the blood circulation just yet. When limbs start to turn purple and the money drops, then the emergency glass may yet be broken to address problems that the silent majority take in stride. See the millions lost from XV, and suddenly Remake appears.

[Hanayumi]

Guess they got tired of people flooding forums and reddit with the bandwagon mentality of "they broken my job" stuff before actually trying out the job out 1st, lol. To be fair devs do a pretty decent job of keeping jobs balanced to the content. Changes bad or not, you can totally clear the content they set you up for with any battle job so... *shrugs*

[QT_Melon]

Guess they got tired of people flooding forums and reddit with the bandwagon mentality of "they broken my job" stuff before actually trying out the job out 1st, lol. To be fair devs do a pretty decent job of keeping jobs balanced to the content. Changes bad or not, you can totally clear the content they set you up for with any battle job so... *shrugs*

I think we should still make false equivalent arguments like how a 3D model of a butt that's easily reversible as is loot rolls to Job Balance.

I understand the message of the OP but to make such a statement without doing other Job Balance comparisons just looks silly. Instead it's loot rolls and later someone made the statement about the Nier booty, which makes it look like the playerbase has little knowledge on how job balancing works :/

[DRKoftheAzure]

Now for the biggest question about excluding balance adjustments from pre-lim patch notes; What was so bad in the balance adjustments that they had to exclude balance adjustments from pre-lims altogether?

[Cithaerias_pyropina]

Guess they got tired of people flooding forums and reddit with the bandwagon mentality of "they broken my job" stuff before actually trying out the job out 1st, lol. To be fair devs do a pretty decent job of keeping jobs balanced to the content. Changes bad or not, you can totally clear the content they set you up for with any battle job so... *shrugs*

Heavensward bowmage says hi. 3.0 to 3.3 AST says hi. Useless Stormblood WHM Lilies say hi. Shadowbringers pre-buff Scholar says hi.

[Mahrze]

Guess they got tired of people flooding forums and reddit with the bandwagon mentality of "they broken my job" stuff before actually trying out the job out 1st, lol. To be fair devs do a pretty decent job of keeping jobs balanced to the content. Changes bad or not, you can totally clear the content they set you up for with any battle job so... *shrugs*

You're ruining my righteous indignation. How dare you restrict my hyperbolic tendencies?

[Satarn]

Yeah, making changes with even less exposure to player feedback is a great idea SE. /s

Just because the job design team apparently can't figure out how things will play out until the players get to "test" them on live servers, doesn't mean that experienced players and theory-crafters can't correctly analyse obvious changes either. I mean honestly, people have figured out how Anatman will be used before the expansion, something SE somehow couldn't predict despite having full access to game version they could test it on.
Yes, there are those who will jump to wrong conclusions, but there's also plenty of people who have enough knowledge of how their job and game mechanics in general work, that they can easily discern how that gameplay will change if you move certain pieces around. Same with people who do math on Balance and can achieve correct estimates of how things will change if you tweak potencies, by applying these numbers correctly and running sims.

And what is this crap about doing it "for the players' sake"? How does having information early "hurt" the players? Because some people might jump to wrong conclusions and panic for a couple days? There's plenty people who hold utterly wrong beliefs about how jobs work in their live-version state, while they're playing them - how is that different? Also can we address how technically "testing" the jobs in game should tell us jack all about their performance because, you know, we're not supposed to have parsers according to TOS? So officially we're running on no data either way, lmao.

They should communicate with players more, not less while making more gradual changes, instead of keeping us completely in the dark before they rework a job into something completely unrecognizable in one fell swoop and then hope the new version works.
Give us the information on what you want to do earlier and check what we have to say about it, then maybe try to apply some of that before you make final changes.

[Laphael]

Heavensward bowmage says hi. 3.0 to 3.3 AST says hi. Useless Stormblood WHM Lilies say hi. Shadowbringers pre-buff Scholar says hi.

Oh, yeah, i remember the outcry after the live letter and patch notes and SE immediatly reverted all the changes before release because of the outcry..... wait....oh right, the outcry changed nothing...

[Deceptus]

Now for the biggest question about excluding balance adjustments from pre-lim patch notes; What was so bad in the balance adjustments that they had to exclude balance adjustments from pre-lims altogether?

SMN's got too good. Can't have Yoshi-P's favorite job (BLM) falling behind.

Back in WoW's early days we used to say "Kalgan Plays a Mage" because mages were never in a bad spot very long because the lead designer played them.