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

[Lauront]

WoW's problems were content and a myriad of other things, not "simplification." Ya'll also severely overestimate the outlook of the game based on the forums which is a minority of the minority of the playerbase.

Then it'd be grand to get more information on what they're basing their decisions, to see what the general sentiment is, as Theodric requested here.

[WaxSw]

having to press 500 different buttons during combat does not make the game fun

Pressing 2 doesn't either and thats what healers have been getting for the last years no matter how much we ask for more
What is undeniable is that more buttons=more skills and more skills usually lead to a more involved gameplay with more depth in its learning and optimization

WoW's problems were content and a myriad of other things, not "simplification." Ya'll also severely overestimate the outlook of the game based on the forums which is a minority of the minority of the playerbase.

Precisely content is something that is problematic too, every patch bring less and less and jokingly the last expansion for many was called "shallowbringers", endgame rn is really lacking in content and stuff to do and unless you do ultimates it looks like this state will remain as such for the next 4 months. At this point the whole "The game respects my time" arguments and "Yoshi-P says its ok to unsub and do other stuff" looks more like an excuse than anything else, yes we may unsub but not because of burnout but because as much as we want to play there is nothing to do.

Also kinda funny how you all bring the "minority argument", ever heard of a tiny concept called "sample"? because thats what these forums are, they try to be the widest sample the devs have to know their audience second to the game data they have, ignoring it because "they are a minority" its a decision as stupid as not having forums in 1.0 and would go against their "a complaint is worth twice a compliment" and "the silent are always the first to leave" philosphy to create ARR. Besides its not only these forums, reddit, youtube and other social media are complaining too, at this point we have more voices complaining about this since I can remember

[Jkap_Goat]

having to press 500 different buttons during combat does not make the game fun

well yes it does, as a WHM/SCH I have alot... aton of spells including Barspells, protect/ shell spells from 1-5, offensive spells like Dia III, Regens 1-4, cures, curera, Curaga spells, holy, blind, bind, sleep, stone 1,2 Areo, 1,2, fire 1,2, water, 1,2, Esuna, En-spells



you see where I'm going with this right? and some spells I just don't use, it's nice though to have alot of spells and abilities I can use on my FFXI WHM if I need it

[MiaShino]

If you are in boring fight with complex job that shall keep you entertained.

If you are in complex fight with boring job the fight will keep you entertained.

If you are in boring fight with boring job welp..

Much much of the easier to keep jobs complex then it will be to make every fight complex and difficult so solution here should be most obvious. Also enough of the forum = minority blah blah it really chaffs my everything. We cannot poll the entire community, stop parroting this garbage as defense for how well or unwell game is doing.

Eat those words then and start asking everyone how they feel about FF14. You go collect the necessary data then whilst I use the only data accessible to me.

[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.

[Rilifane]

If you are in boring fight with complex job that shall keep you entertained.

If you are in complex fight with boring job the fight will keep you entertained.

If you are in boring fight with boring job welp..

Much much of the easier to keep jobs complex then it will be to make every fight complex and difficult so solution here should be most obvious. Also enough of the forum = minority blah blah it really chaffs my everything. We cannot poll the entire community, stop parroting this garbage as defense for how well or unwell game is doing.

Eat those words then and start asking everyone how they feel about FF14. You go collect the necessary data then whilst I use the only data accessible to me.

Not to mention that the same nonsense kept getting repeated ad nauseum in the WoW forums.
'You're just a minority.'
'The game is successful, you're making a big deal out of nothing.'
'The majority is happy.'
Look how well that turned out. Assuming that everyone that is silent is happy with how things are just because it suits the own argument is incredibly naive and ignorant. According to the forum, the healers that are unhappy with the role are a minority. Everyone else clearly loves healers. And yet the queue times for healers have been shorter than ever.

Brushing off legitimate concerns of passionate players is one of the things that led to WoW's downfall. Ignoring the people that care about something is never a good look - people wouldn't take the time to voice concerns, give feedback and offer suggestions if they didn't want to see the game succeed, if they didn't want to keep enjoying it.
But leave someone sitting on the subs' bench for too long and they'll stand up and leave.

[Lauront]

Eat those words then and start asking everyone how they feel about FF14. You go collect the necessary data then whilst I use the only data accessible to me.

That's the thing. I fully accept that this data might not be representative, but the fact of the matter is, no player has access to any better or more complete data, so dismissing forum feedback on this basis to me is the wrong way to go about it. And on this point, like Waxsw said, it's a complaint point that's echoed elsewhere in the community too, like Reddit (which is usually more of a positivity bubble as far as XIV is concerned.) I do think it'd be good if SE was more transparent with the data it is using to base its decisions, but I'm not too hopeful that they'll share that, so in the absence of that, what else do we have to rely on? We can caveat it etc. but to me it's as good as we have for now, and we're seeing a pattern in these complaints about content and difficulty.

[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.

[Bad_Luck]

It's always funny to hear from randos who think they know how to run MMOs. Shine on you crazy diamond, I admire your totally unearned confidence :B

Want something else? Go do something else.

[Shibi]

They've finished the FFXIV story. There will be a little extra padding for the die hards, but now they are clearly shifting focus to make the game more suitable for the many millions of solo FF players who skipped XI and XIV.

They could well lose 50% of MMO players, yes, but they will gain 10 times that number in solo-players who can then experience the story from ARR to EW.

There was one tiny hint to the wind down of the game in the last Japanese live letter, #70... Yoshi said "I hope we can still make it to live letter #100". Which goes against the "10 years more" and brings it to a much shorter period. Enough time to push the solo players through.