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

[Minarisweet]

Seems like there's a trend of calling out xiv for getting too simple yet I feel its too little too late, shb already felt like this and the game was indeed losing playerbase back then because people hated these changes and now a lot of wow players that are still on honeymoon and people that come from other media too are saying that this is what's making the game grow but its not, even the shittiest products get by with a lot of advertisement and at some point the playerbase is gonna have enough of the same stale xiv.

[AngeliouxRein]

Might be concerns about button bloat after an entire 90 levels, especially for controller players, but there are also ways to address that without stripping away abilities; for instance, Gunbreaker got a useful change that makes one of their three-part combos that connects with another action limited to a single button that now changes over time. Why not do something like that for more 1-2-3 combos instead of deleting stuff?

I honestly don't get why us playstation players be used as an excuse to dumb things down. The real issue will always be people are too lazy to use all the different hot bar and control set ups to make their life easy. There's always be entire controller setup tutorials all across YouTube to get people started but big nope I guess. This is probably precisely why Yoshi has been working on a new hot bar format for controllers or at least that's the understanding that players have of the update across the board.

Towards the thread, yeah... I was burned first by the massive healer changes and then burned again by SMN changes. It's like, why couldn't they just create new easy to play jobs so the people struggling could go play those and leave the other jobs as they were? Other MMORPGS even made two different versions of the same job where the effects and gameplay of it would be different. If one was too much, play the other version. Other two boring? Play the more difficult version of it. Nevermind other games (even some mobile games have this) where they have a rank system that tells players as they're creating their characters, how hard each job is to play from the start. At least in these games, we can maintain our trust in developers that they will not strip our play style from us and instead just introduce new classes based on people who couldn't handle the current classes/jobs available.

Any option like those would've worked so much better then taking away what people prefer then to cater to a different side that didn't even care for the job before.

[IdowhatIwant]

It sounds like the Japanese player base it not very thrilled with some of the changes, and direction as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/tufpqp/patch_61_initial_japanese_responses_and_reactions/

Note: read the whole thing as the later half shows where a lot more discontent comes into play.

[Loonies]

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.

The developers should have the information what skills are used or just ignored because of way to much button bloat. So its normal to remove the button bloat to make the game play more fun, so we will still see more new players in FF14.

[IdowhatIwant]

The developers should have the information what skills are used or just ignored because of way to much button bloat. So its normal to remove the button bloat to make the game play more fun, so we will still see more new players in FF14.

I highly doubt, a player thinking about buying FFXIV is going to look at reviews or the classes or anything and think, I don't know if I want to buy this, that button bloat.

[Loonies]

New players usually will play the free trial version, find the job what they like and then buy the game. Not every job has to much buttons, but some do have, that's why the developer change this. Developers do these changes not for fun, they do changes because better for the large part of the players.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

Ye I think the same as you. Thing is yoshi stated he is now going after the solo players that "fear"the mmo part of 14. That why they do all the things more and more simple and easy. So far they did not do it to the raids but we see by 7.0 . Problem now is the game is boring out side the 1 day you do raids,that if you even do them. I for now don't so it's super hard to even force my self to do the weakly tomes. Hope they stop it and star to add more mid core content but 8 don't think yoshi want to.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

Because it's not the reason. They take out the skills that differentiate the good from the bad players. The ones that you need to know when to use to maximize the DPS.

[ThivraK]

Summoner's situation was given up on by enough people in 5.0

Unless I'm misremembering, SMN pre-rework was one of the top 5 played jobs on the log website. Pretty sure someone made various posts about that in one of the SMN threads after the rework

[MsQi]

Honestly I'm getting tired of fighting this battle. Understand that Blizzard had little RPG experience prior to WoW. They had Diablo, which was derivative and more focused on action than RPG elements. Weird for someone in a company (SE) that has a much longer history in RPGs to put WoW on such a pedestal

Wow was a great game, however much of what was great was borrowed from other games, and much of that has been removed. There's nothing wrong with using certain ideas from other games, but it was clear they didn't really understand why they even copied those ideas. Why those ideas helped develop the world and the community was apparently lost on them.

The worst thing was when they started talking about fun. Fun is important, but fun is not hard. In any genre you need to have goals that are bigger than just raw fun. And when WoW devs started talking fun, it meant something that that many people found fun was going away.