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

[Kolsykol]

As always, there is a huge bias among the people likely to post on forums compared to the total population of people who play the game. People here play more often, do new content sooner, and are way more likely to do more difficult content in the game than the average player. It's natural for those types of players, for whom a single game is a big part of their lives, to feel like the game is second nature and thus quite simple to execute. Then any decrease in complexity for those people is going from "easy" to "even easier."

But this is simply not the case for a huge percentage of players. They don't level up 17 jobs to the max, they don't cap tomestones every week, and they definitely don't do every raid and extreme and ultimate every time they're added. They play the game for a little bit when new story is added, and it takes up only as much time as the other 30 games they played that year (or they actually have "a life" and don't do that either, but you get the idea). There are way more people who are closer to this style than "half" of the people who play the game, and there are of course even more of them who don't play the game at all because MMOs tend to be inscrutable to newcomers with only really WoW and FFXIV ever breaking out into the mainstream of gaming. I've had a handful of friends who have tried FFXIV out at various points and they are completely overwhelmed by how many actions they have to learn when to use, as well as the thousands of UI settings and various menus that mean nothing until you've played the game for 50 hours.

I don't mean to say that either of these is more valid than the other, just to point out that a company like Square Enix providing a subscription service game is going to go with doing the thing that they think is good for a majority of people and not a minority. It might seem like the forums or "everyone I know" agrees that the game is too simple or too easy, but that sampling is heavily skewed and not likely to be representative of the real majority.

I just don't think that the game should be designed for those people.
Those people will manage by playing suboptimally just fine I don't think that you need to lower the skill ceiling or even floor for them.
I see people in dungeons that don't even have their Job crystal yet at lvl 50 and SAM players who are spamming AoE on bosses and doing the backstep, ranged and charge combo over and over again and somehow they still manage to get by in the content they do.
Those people aren't suddenly going to learn because Kaiten gets removed or whatever.

You also learn the actions gradually, you have time to get used to each one of them.
Also if you're a new player you're going to have to learn...
Part of the learning process is not knowing and not being used to things, I just really dislike this mentality that instead of people learning we need to dumb things down.
I see this every time in a game when people run into a challenge and I just kinda find it a bit sad tbh.
And I don't think it should negatively affect the rest of us.

Like is '' beginners aren't playing well '' really an actual argument here?
I see this in fighting games too with people asking for them to be dumbed down because beginners are jumping in and can't do complex combos.
Being able to do complex combos doesn't make you a better player either you can do all the combos in the world and still get your ass kicked.
It's the same in FFXIV, even if they turned the Jobs all into 1 button spam the people these changes are supposedly aimed at would still not clear content where DPS even matters.

Plus the game is more popular than it's ever been. Claiming that half the playerbase is going to vanish just because they're fixing button bloat is just the worst kind of hyperbole. It won't have a negative effect at all.

If this was really about fixing '' button bloat '' then why is Kaiten being removed and why isn't Ikishoten turning into Ogi Namikiri or Shoha 1 and 2 being merged?
That'd do more too and actually be more understandable.

If you actually talk to players who play these Jobs I have a very hard time believing that they'd mention Kaiten as button bloat if you asked them.