If you continue to dumb down the game, you will lose half your player base

[BEATORICEEEEEEEEEEEEE]

Every class plays braindead 1-2-3 button smashing that literally dulls your brain as you play.

wow's pruning and ffxiv's pruning are completely different in nature and even goal (and both with good and bad sides). if you aren't capable of seeing that, you either havent played one or the other or your opinion is not worth taking seriously.

[IdowhatIwant]

Yoshi P said in a video that FFXIV wouldn't exist were it not for WoW. The game was a major inspirational source for this game. My question really is: Is the dev team willing to learn from the mistakes Blizzard made?

Blizzard literally went on a raging simplification spree. Notably pruning and removing tons of abilities from each class and specializations in the name of "accessibility". Shortly after the game went downhill big time. Skill expression is today completely gone in WoW. Every class plays braindead 1-2-3 button smashing that literally dulls your brain as you play.

I truly do not understand why the developers want to do the same thing to FFXIV. Heck, Blizzard even recently stated that pruning was a mistake. They're now trying to "undo" the damage, but that's likely going to take multiple expansions of work. Why on earth would you want to repeat this same mistake in FFXIV?

Having easy jobs is perfectly fine, but there needs to be jobs that offer also medium difficulty and high difficulty. Pruning and dumbing down existing jobs is not in any way acceptable, and is an insult to players who main those jobs. If you want to make something simple, then you need to create new jobs that are simple from the beginning - period. People are invested in their jobs and you're actively disrespecting their affection by making changes none of them asked for.

By all means, continue to remove abilities and make the game play itself. You will not gain more subs; but you will lose half your player base from your arrogance.

Hopefully half the player base will leave, as it will probably make them address the issues.

That being said WoW had a number of issues the led to it's decline over time. First and foremost is most people played WoW because it was a follow up of Warcraft 3, so WoTLK was its highest peak and it fell after that as the Lich King plot was completed and that is what most players likely played for. Cataclysm was in a way like HW where the content was way overtuned and very difficult so players began dropping from that. MoP was the great pruning where classes began feeling very similar much like SB and ShB, players began to drop off from that. WoD on a big issue over all was lack of content. The game spiked with Legion, but quickly fell off due to Blizzards artifact power grind they needlessly kept in expansions afterwards as well. When you look at the two games, they follow a similar flow, and really FFXIV has not learned from WoWs mistakes at all. They made the game based off of WoW and it is going to eventually fall apart for the same reasons as WoW.

We are at EW where I will guarantee a large number of players will likely not be returning as it's finished the story they started in 1.0 or 2.0, and it now picking up a new story which some people may have no interest in at all. We have also slowly been seeing the same problems that WoW has had with the same solutions WoW offered. We are seeing content cuts with dungeons but nothing in return for these cuts, we are seeing class pruning and homogenization. The only thing so far that has been different is this games consistent patch cycle, but for many people that have played this for over a decade that is becoming stale and redundant. I am waiting for when we suddenly get a daily grind fests as a last ditch effort to keep people subscribed.

wow's pruning and ffxiv's pruning are completely different in nature and even goal (and both with good and bad sides). if you aren't capable of seeing that, you either havent played one or the other or your opinion is not worth taking seriously.

They actually are not different in nature. They are to make classes more player friendly, and to homogenize the classes. This is the exact reason WoW did this as well, which they eventually fixed for tanks and healers but DPS for the most part is pretty terrible to play in WoW. Currently WoW has more fun gameplay if you want to tank or heal, FFXIV has more fun game play if you want to DPS. With the route FFXIV is going with classes though, WoW will just end up having better game play.

[Acece]

They actually are not different in nature. They are to make classes more player friendly, and to homogenize the classes. This is the exact reason WoW did this as well, which they eventually fixed for tanks and healers but DPS for the most part is pretty terrible to play in WoW. Currently WoW has more fun gameplay if you want to tank or heal, FFXIV has more fun game play if you want to DPS. With the route FFXIV is going with classes though, WoW will just end up having better game play.

Honestly some jobs are worse then some wow classes, smn, physical ranged dps in general, and now they're after melee dps. It's starting to feel like I should play a different game before they start butchering sam any farther. All healers in ffxiv are worse then any healer in wow which is hilarious, and can't really comment of tanks.

It honestly feels like if you want a valid raiding mmo the two options are bad or worse.

[Iedarus]

They actually are not different in nature. They are to make classes more player friendly, and to homogenize the classes. This is the exact reason WoW did this as well, which they eventually fixed for tanks and healers but DPS for the most part is pretty terrible to play in WoW. Currently WoW has more fun gameplay if you want to tank or heal, FFXIV has more fun game play if you want to DPS. With the route FFXIV is going with classes though, WoW will just end up having better game play.

And then there's Gw2 which actually has solid gameplay for both DPS and heal builds. As a healer, you're supplying your team with heals and boons on top of having an entire DPS rotation to fall back on. The game never felt like it insulted your intelligence and each class is unique.

[hagare]

Hopefully half the player base will leave, as it will probably make them address the issues.

they won't.
They'll just keep making threads like this xD