Results of a reddit job satisfaction poll

[Rasikko]

At this point, this has gotten toxic to the point of being laughable, and I just ignore any opinion that basically says everything is great because you cannot prove, to an arbitrary level of confidence, that its not.

Everything was great during Heavensward, until lots of people HERE started to run their mouths about the battle system/tanking. Things cascaded from there and you know the result. Now people are wanting to "undo" the very things they asked for because it obviously wasn't as great as they thought it would be, and SE can't and is trying to find a middle ground.

[EtherRose]

To the surprise of absolutely no one who's payed attention for the last three expansions, Monk's are unhappy with their job.

Who'd have thought that if you don't fix the problems players have their job for literal years, they're unhappy with it.

Mmmm, no. MNK was great up until ShB. See, this is where the community stands in that reddit post. Everybody has different preferences. And a small amount of what 2700 replies isn't that big compared to the actual player base. Also, unless someone went through and read every single reply, how would we know if all of them are disappointed or they find no problem at all? In conclusion just because a small part of the community finds their job not like how it used to be or lame doesn't mean the rest of us think the same.

[Lufir]

Everything was great during Heavensward, until lots of people HERE started to run their mouths about the battle system/tanking. Things cascaded from there and you know the result. Now people are wanting to "undo" the very things they asked for because it obviously wasn't as great as they thought it would be, and SE can't and is trying to find a middle ground.

What *Dark Arts* was *Dark Arts* so *Dark Arts* great *Dark Arts* about *Dark Arts* Heavensward jobs?

[Sylve]

Mmmm, no. MNK was great up until ShB. See, this is where the community stands in that reddit post. Everybody has different preferences. And a small amount of what 2700 replies isn't that big compared to the actual player base. Also, unless someone went through and read every single reply, how would we know if all of them are disappointed or they find no problem at all? In conclusion just because a small part of the community finds their job not like how it used to be or lame doesn't mean the rest of us think the same.

I mained Monk through all of ARR and loved it for the simplicity in its 'dance' of positionals and buff upkeep.
Could never work Chakras and TK into my rotation in a way that felt organic to my muscle memory.
Stormblood didn't change that lol. The riddles were just .. weird to me. The core rotation of Monk is still very much the ARR monk i remember, Its all the stuff floating around it that led me to abandon it because it just never felt right to play.

Shadowbringers feels a bit better but still can't enjoy it the way i used to in ARR and I'm really not entirely sure how they could bring that back, short of turning Tornado Kick and SSS into DRG-esque combo extensions to the basic DK/BS - TS/TS - SP/Demo.
As an aside though .. They really need to change the Fist buffs into something meaningful.

[SpeckledBurd]

Mmmm, no. MNK was great up until ShB. See, this is where the community stands in that reddit post. Everybody has different preferences. And a small amount of what 2700 replies isn't that big compared to the actual player base. Also, unless someone went through and read every single reply, how would we know if all of them are disappointed or they find no problem at all? In conclusion just because a small part of the community finds their job not like how it used to be or lame doesn't mean the rest of us think the same.

The devs literally apologized for Stormblood Monk for being a poor evolution of the job on stream during the lead up to Shadowbringers. It was not a good version of the job at all.

The fact is at the end of Heavensward the devs threw up their hands and gave up on fixing jobs until the next expansion, specifically Monk and Paladin. Stormblood Monk was a flop from the beginning and they fixed none of the major problem with it even though the devs knew of the major problems as early as 4.1 when they told players "If there's enough outcry against Riddle of Fire's slow they'd change it" (there was and they didn't), then they threw up their hands at the end and said they weren't making play fixes anymore, leaving Monk waiting again. Monk is now looking at Shadowbringers being the third expansion where its playerbase is going to be told "Please wait until the next expansion for fixes" even though the DPS forums are full of threads complaining about 3 expansions worth of iterations of Monk and the devs response has been to do nothing.

[Kougeru]

2700 entries is more than enough. You'd only need about 400 entries to have a 95% confidence level considering active FFXIV population (using 600 000)

With 2700 entries you have a marginal error of about 2%, meaning the real result will be within +- 2% of the survey's result.

This is of course only truly the case when you have a random sample, but having a truly random sample is usually impossible.

I'm assuming those on reddit will be more of the high end FFXIV players and less casuals than in the actual game (as you can see by the results). From statistics point of view it still looks like a very decent survey you can get great information from imo.

Also the fact that I think nobody is surprised by those results if you've been on these forums for some time, I feel like kind of seals the deal on its credibility.

Normally, yes. However this is from one very specific place. A place well-known to be an echo chamber. To have an actual confidence level that high we would need to have the results from players all over the country, fairly evenly.

But like an earlier response pointed out, MOST people are actually happy with their job so this poll actually suggests we're moving on the right direction

[MPNZ]

Everything was great during Heavensward, until lots of people HERE started to run their mouths about the battle system/tanking. Things cascaded from there and you know the result. Now people are wanting to "undo" the very things they asked for because it obviously wasn't as great as they thought it would be, and SE can't and is trying to find a middle ground.

The quality of HW largely depended on aspects of bartle's taxonomy the players in that taxonomy enjoyed and which job's they mained and how they played them, IMO. And, the devs just literally giving up on they're playerbase's ability to complete challenging content is the primary reason for the entire simplification of kits and the second being crossbar bloat. The job issues were then repeated with different jobs in StB and again in ShB. IMO, they need to stop overly changing the jobs that work and lean to read the room

[shao32]

What *Dark Arts* was *Dark Arts* so *Dark Arts* great *Dark Arts* about *Dark Arts* Heavensward jobs?

Dark arts spam meme is from SB not HW, on HW dark arts was fine.

[Halivel]

67.2% players are hardcore? Just this section alone says a lot about the statistical accuracy of this poll. Also, EX Trials aren't hardcore, despite being end-game.

According to LuckyBancho April report, 16.584 people have Ramuh mount from Eden. Let's multiply it by, I dunno, 2 to count those who either didn't get mount or didn't clear all floors yet. This will do for about 33.168 people who potentionally is doing current raids at the moment (not those who will catch up later or after next tier release).

According to same LuckyBancho April report, there are about 862.032 active players. 538.950 are level 80. If 33.168 people cleared e5s, then:
33.168/538.950*100% = 6,15% of 80 lvl playerbase.
33.168/862.032*100% = 3,84% of entire active playerbase.

We can also count the % of people who has mount from previous Eden tier (without multiplying it this time, since it's not current tier and most of HC player who's interested already cleared it). Some of these people most likely catched up after 5.2 release, but okay. So, 116.083 people have mount from e4s, (count from same report):
116.083/538.950*100% = 21,5% of 80 lvl playerbase.
116.086/862.032*100% = 13,4% of entire active playerbase.

As usual, truth is somewhere inbetween, so HC playerbase is, likely, somewhere in 10-15% range. No matter how you look at this, HC playerbase, while isn't small, is very far in size from what this poll suggests it to be. As a result, we have an amount of players that is normally enough for polls, but it's a very specific range of people, with probably strong feelings about the topic of the poll. Also we apparently can conclude that western raiders are more active at reddit than other types of players.

Is the opinion of these players still valid? Sure, it is. Is its scale large enough to say "majority doesn't like this and likes this"? No. That said, no poll outside of the game is accurate, because every single social network has a very specific, biased community. Reddit does, Twitter does, Facebook does, this very Forum does, too. The only way to get an actually accurate info is an official, one time per-account, survey right in the game that pops up once you log in. Even then there will be some statistic error because there will be people who will ignore it, and there are also people who hold more than one account, but it will have a higher chance to gather a somewhat reliable info, than any other desperate attempt to gather info in social networks that have the concentration of very specific part of community.

Using social networks for feedback is useful when it's about something what doesn't affect the entire playerbase (like adding some specific costumes based on demand or some niche QoL functions), but when it's about jobs balance, it's... complicated. For this in-game surveys are much more preferred, but we still don't have them, for whatever reason.

Link for LuckyBancho April report.

[dinnertime]

It's already been stated it's a Reddit poll. Of course if compared with the data of the entire playerbase or different sections of the community, it's inaccurate. That is very obvious.
Still, this is credible information because they are still the opinions of people who do play the game and took the time to actually form an opinion. 2.8k people taking a survey is actually a good number, too. If anything, it's interesting how it's almost similar to what I've seen here on the forums.