Openly admitting to ignoring the players

[BooPoo]

I had to think about how to approach this post, or rather how to explain the developers choice of deliberately changing their design philosophy.

Currently, healers and tanks alike, even DPS's to an extend, are designed from a point of 1-10. That means our developers are creating jobs and mechanics associated around them with people of lower skill in mind. This will scale up with content in difficulty, as more mechanics and movement is involved. Say, your satisfaction with a job in easy content is surprisingly low. That is 1. because you enjoy content through the scope of your job, and 2. there simply isn't enough mechanics involved in dungeons and other content to make up for the lack of job actions to occupy you. As a healer, being forced to press 1-2 ad nauseam, while being heavily underwhelmed by the lack of engaging mechanics inside content, will wear you down.

The reason why pressing 1-1-1-1 or 1-2 works in other games like FPS games is essentially because you are occupied by a multitude of different processes. Your attention is being drawn away from the complexity of your class, because the brain cannot deal with 5-10 things happening at a time. The player input has to be drastically lowered as a result.

There will be a point when the amount of new players and influx will hit a plateu. The reason I showed this particular image associated with a panel held by Square Enix is simple. Right now, the common perception of this game is that they care deeply. As I like to analyze trends and see patterns emerging across, eventually once, there will be a dent in growth. Companies rely heavily on public perception to pitch their products and maximize their profits.

As long-time fans will become even more vocal over time, the perception that our developers care so much will start to crumble. The silent ones leave. Since they cannot manage the same numbers as they did previously, they will be hard-pressed to make a decision. The growth has ultimately stopped, and what's left are different factions; all asking for changes. It is impossible to satisfy them all. Increasingly, the company will put them under pressure for the lack of income growth. It's easy to see where all of this will lead.

As much as I agree healers need improvements I think the amount of healer players is still very very far from being able to make an impact. Also gotta count the ones who like the current design, have no complaint whatsoever, or simply don't care. Online forums are echo chambers and neither you or I know exactly how many of the actual healer players would go on protest for some changes that will happen only once an expansion.

You have to understand the people who come on official forums and participate in these discussions like you and me probably make up a negligible portion of the playerbase. Most players don't take part in optimizations, hardcore content, parsing etc. They are okay as long as the story is good, music is beautiful and contents are accessible (aka low skill floor). And SE seems to be able to do just that for the past few years.