Suggesting Ideas for Blue Mage with feedback & Removing Limited Job Status

[Liam_Harper]

Basing success of a job on whether people got the mount is bizarre. It could be a reaction to the Binding Coils and Alexander (Savage) as much as it is to the Job. Maybe people don't want to do that content, but love their BLU.

"BLU failed because people didn't do this content" is nonsense.

You can't win with these forums.

If your thoughts are based on facts, the facts aren't good enough and don't represent enough people. If you go by impressions, it's not good enough because you don't have statistics and facts.

No one in my FC plays BLU. No one on my FL or linkshells play it. There are 0 groups in PF right now. There are 0 BLU mages beside the carnival NPC on my realm. Why do we need to pour development resources into this because a tiny handful on the forums who also have zero statistics (and probably don't play BLU much either) think it's doing ok?

[TeraTyrantShadic]

You can't win with these forums.

If your thoughts are based on facts, the facts aren't good enough and don't represent enough people. If you go by impressions, it's not good enough because you don't have statistics and facts.

No one in my FC plays BLU. No one on my FL or linkshells play it. There are 0 groups in PF right now. There are 0 BLU mages beside the carnival NPC on my realm. Why do we need to pour development resources into this because a tiny handful on the forums who also have zero statistics (and probably don't play BLU much either) think it's doing ok?

This thread isn't about winning a side, this thread is to suggest ideas and come together as a community to help give creative and constructive ideas for the developers and Yoshida to work with. If they will ever see this thread. However I can agree with your statement on that we don't have the statistical data to make a clear judgement weather or not that Blue Mage is a successful idea.

Hearing your personal experience disheartens me, but I agree not many are playing as Blue Mage. As of this posting they are used to cheese Aurum Vale for the Irregular Tomestones and when that is over Blue Mage will be down to either a small handful of players or to no one. I am not sure who said it was in an ok-state, however I have to say it does prove a point in my document. When it uses the hype Blue Mage's popularity soars through the sky, but overtime after a month or a week the activity of use such class will die down. Which is why I think either making 2 separate Blue Mages is good as a few on this thread have suggested or removing limited job status altogether and from then on developing proper full jobs allowing them to run in current general content. Not everyone will be pleased or happy. However it is these times where we need to come together and solve the puzzle together and lend our ideas and creativity to developers to solve their vision of Blue Mage without altering too much that it loses its identity. We don't decide weather the developers will be pouring development time into it, but it never hurts to try.

[TurtlesAWD]

If your thoughts are based on facts, the facts aren't good enough and don't represent enough people. If you go by impressions, it's not good enough because you don't have statistics and facts.

So let's talk about something that I think is key to helping understand the frustration here beyond just fact/opinion: Inductive versus Deductive reasoning.

A deductive argument is one in which the premises guarantee the conclusion. Deductive arguments have 2 properties: Being Valid, and being Sound. A Valid argument is one where the premises do in fact guarantee the conclusion, while a Sound argument is one that is Valid, and also each premise is true. For example:

All Blue Mages are Disciples of Magic. The Primary Attribute for Disciples of Magic is Intelligence. Therefore the Primary Stat for Blue Mages is Intelligence.

This is argument is Valid (if the Premises are true, the conclusion must be true). And because the premises are true, we know the argument is sound.

A valid, but unsound, argument could look something like the following:
All Blue Mages are Disciples of Magic. All Disciples of Magic use Katanas as their primary weapon. Therefore, all Blue Mages use Katanas as their primary weapon.

If the premises of this argument were true, the conclusion would be true. It is therefore a valid argument, however, obviously no DoM uses katanas, so the premise being false means the argument is Unsound.

It should be noted that for the purpose of being Sound, an argument can have all true premises, and a true conclusion, and still be Unsound, if the premises don't support the conclusion. For example:
Some Disciples of Magic can access the Masked Carnivale. Blue Mages are a Disciple of Magic. Therefore, Blue Mages can access the Masked Carnivale.

In this case all of the premises are true, and the conclusion is true. But the argument is unsound, because I could have just as easily said "Some Disciples of Magic can access the Masked Carnivale. Black Mages are a Disciple of Magic. Therefore, Black Mages can access the masked Carnivale. Although the premises are still true here, the conclusion is, naturally, not. The way in which the argument is constructed - whether the conclusion does in fact follow from the premises - is relevant to whether the conclusion we're intended to believe follows necessarily from the statements that back it up.

To make a deductive argument that Blue Mage is a failed class based on deductive reasoning is, for this reason, going to be likely impossible - as has been noted, to get the kind of data necessary to guarantee the truth of our premises will require metrics and information that players don't have access to, not to mention that information has to be argued in a way that disallows for extraneous information to have led us to misidentify cause and effect, or relevance of information.

So with that in mind let's take a look at the other kind of arguments, Inductive.
Inductive arguments don't guarantee the truth of their conclusion, they can only argue, weakly or strongly, for something's probability. let's consider a pretty straightforward example:
In the morning today, the sun came up. In the past at the start of each day since humans have been recording history, the sun has come up. Therefore, tomorrow morning, the sun will come up.

The argument for the sun coming up tomorrow based on the fact that on available fact that on all previous days it has done so is pretty strong - but obviously can't be considered necessarily true. The argument doesn't account for the kind of collisions or explosions that happen in space which would throw off the underlying gravitational mechanics keeping the earth in the sun's orbit. A deductive, Sound argument that proves the sun is going to come up tomorrow would likely involve a lot of math.

So because we likely don't have the kind of information we need to make a good deductive argument about blue mage popularity, our argument can only really be inductive. The statements "No one in my FC plays BLU. No one on my FL or linkshells play it. There are 0 groups in PF right now." are essentially an inductive argument meant to prove exactly that. But, well, every single one of these can be counterargued by someone's personal experience indicating the exact opposite. My free company may play blue. My friends and linkshells may play it. I may see 5 blue mage groups in party finder right now (okay, this is an exaggeration. I see one.)

So I don't particularly think it's a strong inductive argument. Why would I believe a broad claim about the community as a whole based on your personal experience, rather than my own?