Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[shao32]

JP Forums get more looked at than NA ones for sure. Partly because it's a JP game whose main target are JP players, and another part that the JP forums are usually not as, lack of a better word, emotional than NA ones. A lot of JP posts are very concise, to the point, with reasoning and examples, pros and cons, etc, etc. The word of mouth I have heard is the community managers scrape the forums, consolidate the information, then feed it back to Dev HQ for them to mull over. There definitely used to be way more interaction on the forums from the community managers, unsure what started the decline, most likely it just turned into attacks and name calling. Especially with how hostile the forums have become lately, I'm not surprised they aren't sticking their neck out to the community chopping block.

It's funny bcs JP players think the Devs listen more to us than them and are actually JP players that had been called for being specially agressive against the devs recently due to some SAM stuff.

At the end of the day i think Yoship has decided he will push his vision of job design on us and if you are one of those wich job/role get affected the most and don't like it to bad as he bassically say himself on the job changes presentation of EW.

[SeverianLyonesse]

I feel the need to consolidate a few prior posts into something more succinct, because it is an important observation I think some people in this thread haven't grasped:

FFXIV, with every expansion, is moving closer and closer toward an action RPG combat model. By that I mean it is more about attacking and dodging than it is about strategic ability selection on the level of FFXI's elemental weaknesses or GW2's condis/boons.

The inherent structure of action-oriented gameplay makes healing an ancillary feature, not a necessary one. In action games, dodging (and to a lesser extent shielding) serve as the primary means of defensive/reactionary gameplay that healing serves in other types of games like turn-based RPGs (and, if we wanted to dig even deeper, even in a lot of turn-based RPGs healing can be a fairly optional role with sufficient strategy and pure healers are typically shunned for jobs with more versatility and damage options).

What a lot of "healers should heal" proponents simply do not seem to grasp is that, unlike doing DPS which is mandatory, healing is not and will increasingly fail to be a fundamental, full-time job in an action-oriented MMORPG. The devs can make jobs as beefy or squishy as they want to create some vague need for a tank role, but they cannot create enough situations that *ensure* that healers will actually have (fairly dealt) damage to heal when most of that damage is preemptively addressed through dodging or shielding. Healers in action games are *failsafes*, not *fundaments*.

This does not necessarily mean that healers *need* to be DPS. They could *in theory* take on a buffer/debuffer role, and perhaps there may be room for that in an action-oriented game. But I think just looking at the game's design sensibilities generally it just seems that every job wants to be DPS-y, based on the meta evolving toward kill speed and DPS-checks, and the aesthetic increasingly favoring very flashy weapons, even for healers. And either way, DPS or buffer/debuffer, healers are long past the point where they can sit on their hands and wait for heals--they need to be doing more and be allowed to do more than healing in order to justify themselves at all. I think calling them "healers" and not "support" has subconsciously pigeonholed their design into a place that is becoming quite incompatible with FFXIV's overall combat design.

[IDontPetLalas]

JP Forums get more looked at than NA ones for sure. Partly because it's a JP game whose main target are JP players, and another part that the JP forums are usually not as, lack of a better word, emotional than NA ones. A lot of JP posts are very concise, to the point, with reasoning and examples, pros and cons, etc, etc. The word of mouth I have heard is the community managers scrape the forums, consolidate the information, then feed it back to Dev HQ for them to mull over. There definitely used to be way more interaction on the forums from the community managers, unsure what started the decline, most likely it just turned into attacks and name calling. Especially with how hostile the forums have become lately, I'm not surprised they aren't sticking their neck out to the community chopping block.

So let me get this straight, you're saying that you think that the lack of attention of the NA forums is due to the main target of the game being JP players? Interesting, because while it is popular in Japan, if the metrics that i can call up in just a 5 minute search are correct, JP players only account for less than 25% of the characters, with about 75% being EU and NA. NOTE- that's on "all' characters - not just 'active'.

Do you really think that SE marketing doesn't know this (if it is in fact true), and that input from these forums is completely ignored?

I mean, that doesn't mean i don't think it shouldn't be improved- I definitely do- but i would be surprised if there isn't some reporting back to SE.

[Deceptus]

Partly because it's a JP game whose main target are JP players,

As respectfully as possible, I hear this a lot and it's a BS excuse especially if it's true of the Devs.

FFXIV is a global game and they need to think about considerations outside of Japan.

[Minarisweet]

So let me get this straight, you're saying that you think that the lack of attention of the NA forums is due to the main target of the game being JP players? Interesting, because while it is popular in Japan, if the metrics that i can call up in just a 5 minute search are correct, JP players only account for less than 25% of the characters, with about 75% being EU and NA. NOTE- that's on "all' characters - not just 'active'.

Do you really think that SE marketing doesn't know this (if it is in fact true), and that input from these forums is completely ignored?

I mean, that doesn't mean i don't think it shouldn't be improved- I definitely do- but i would be surprised if there isn't some reporting back to SE.

Devs can be biased, and japan having 3 dcs all for itself (a 4th one coming) and all of them have more worlds than any other dcs kinda proves that atleast imo.

[SeverianLyonesse]

Devs can be biased, and japan having 3 dcs all for itself (a 4th one coming) and all of them have more worlds than any other dcs kinda proves that atleast imo.

They also opened an Oceania data center and are planning to add a fourth DC to both NA and Europe, so using DCs as a basis of making this judgment is--aside from involving huge leaps in logic-- quite blatant cherry-picking.

I agree with IDontPetLalas that this is taking a bit of an absolutist stance.

I would believe that they don't pay *as much* attention to English forums, but I think it would be difficult for a game to grow this big without at least the self-awareness to realize that they probably should keep tabs on forum activity.

[Ixon]

Tin foil hat or not, the game would be vastly different if it focused more on what the NA community prioritizes. Of course it would be foolish of them to never listen to any non-JP forums, but some changes that make their way into FF across the board that I have never heard of come from the JP forums, while on the flip-side, some issue that are only seen in NA forums never make their way in game because it's an issue only to NA. Remember that one time they made ALL 24-man loot available to ANYONE that wanted to roll on it? That's because in JP, they NORMALLY don't roll on something unless they actually need it, so having it all available to everyone was not seen as a negative thing(at least this is what I read when people were explaining the change). Look how that worked in NA. It didn't. And was quickly reverted once they figured out the rest of the player base wasn't like that. Same could be said about Baldesion Arsenal. In JP it was far more likely for random players to organically make groups in the instance, in NA it was a somewhat of a disaster, resulting in third parties micro-managing them through discord. Hence why in Bozja the BA equivalent wasn't tied to the instance, but was a queue in system.

Wasn't Yoshi-P's response to why Blood Weapon did NOT receive the same rework as Delirium(to be charged based instead of on a timer) was because he said he didn't see it mentioned on the forums?

[CrimsonGunner]

So let me get this straight, you're saying that you think that the lack of attention of the NA forums is due to the main target of the game being JP players? Interesting, because while it is popular in Japan, if the metrics that i can call up in just a 5 minute search are correct, JP players only account for less than 25% of the characters, with about 75% being EU and NA. NOTE- that's on "all' characters - not just 'active'.

Do you really think that SE marketing doesn't know this (if it is in fact true), and that input from these forums is completely ignored?

I mean, that doesn't mean i don't think it shouldn't be improved- I definitely do- but i would be surprised if there isn't some reporting back to SE.

to be fair yoshi - p said in a live letter that they read the healers feedback and ignored it before EW so..., i pretty much lost fate in them.

at this point, at april 1 i can see the whm summery going in 2 ways:

1) it will last less then 1 min where he just says whm will have mp cost adjusted which basically be will be a slap in the face for whm mains along side an evil maniacal laugh to accompany it cause whm issues are too big that a small fix that could have been done at 6.01 to be put at 6.1 is that symbolic to a slap.

2) he will make a big speech how they will make whm great, improve cost ,change abilities and in the end it will turn out as liturgy of the bell was implemented for "healers" and the "excited upgrades" healers got to previous skills. basically one big cruel April fools joke with yoshi laughing and saying "i cant believe they bought it".

i will be more surprised if they actually will offer more then option 1 and actually give whm the treatment he deserved before EW actually released

[HyoMinPark]

Wasn't Yoshi-P's response to why Blood Weapon did NOT receive the same rework as Delirium(to be charged based instead of on a timer) was because he said he didn't see it mentioned on the forums?

If I recall correctly, he also received a lot of backlash about this because it had been mentioned on the JP forums. From what I’ve gathered, the JP forums has been in an uproar over DRK—Blood Weapon issues being one, and Living Dead being another.

[Lyth]

FFXIV, with every expansion, is moving closer and closer toward an action RPG combat model. By that I mean it is more about attacking and dodging than it is about strategic ability selection on the level of FFXI's elemental weaknesses or GW2's condis/boons.

The inherent structure of action-oriented gameplay makes healing an ancillary feature, not a necessary one. In action games, dodging (and to a lesser extent shielding) serve as the primary means of defensive/reactionary gameplay that healing serves in other types of games like turn-based RPGs (and, if we wanted to dig even deeper, even in a lot of turn-based RPGs healing can be a fairly optional role with sufficient strategy and pure healers are typically shunned for jobs with more versatility and damage options).

I don't think that this is true. Fights are still designed around unavoidable damage, primarily in the form of raidwides. There's just a lot of downtime because of bosses sitting animation locked with castbars coupled with an increasingly inflated defensive toolkit. If anything, tanks should be the most affected by adopting an action game format, since it becomes less about soaking hits and more about using dodge iframes to avoid them.

I always find that healing is at its most enjoyable in PvP games where there is continuous pressure on you to keep players from being focused down while simultaneously being the highest priority target. You're continuously forced to make decisions on who to prioritize, and how to allocate your resources to avoid bottoming out at the wrong time. You're not given enough breathing room to be bored.

The other point is that most other games seem to recognize that healers don't have to be obligate casters. If you were a melee based healer, you'd be juggling auras and generating buffs by hitting things. If you were a non-magic ranged healer, you'd probably have some sort of an ammo/reload system placing a cap on your burst healing output. Healer design in this game is pretty stagnant and in dire need of fresh inspiration.