Public Discussion: Community Feedback - Is it being heard?

[Nizzi]

Healers have always been this way, unlike the problems I listed which started to exist at a certain time and were quickly pointed out as a problem.

From a guide of Stormblood Scholar, using The Balance's Opener



From The Balance's recommended Scholar opener (swiftcast opener)

There is no war in Ba Sing Se.

[Shougun]

Having been here a long time, I do feel like they listen to feedback that or I am really good at guessing potential new content. That said I also believe that you have to do a few things to see that.

1. Don't assume it'll be exactly how you wished for, either

Because they don't want to be seen as 'copying'.
The idea was inspiration but they had a better idea.
The idea wasn't reasonable.
They misunderstood.

2. Extend your timeline by like 3x. It seems clear to me that the FFXIV has a plan for a lot of things, and beyond that might need R&D / the right person for the right job. So like a 6 month minimum turn around, if not more, unless it is a catastrophic bug or something.

2 1/2. They do have a preference / the idea might be bad (or they're wrong, not saying if they don't do it the idea has to be bad).

For example besides the I'm sure insane R&D costs included, is the reason why we didn't instantly fix the housing issue(ssssss) we've had since release of the system. Particularly I imagine Yoshida appears to like this system because of some of his probably great memories of past games, long long time ago he said one of his favorites was Dark Age of Camelot and if you look at that game... the systems are almost identical lol. I will still hold fast that exceptionally powerful instanced housing, for everyone, with gradual growth from early on would have substantially been a more exciting and well loved system though (I am aware it might have been beyond their scope / cost a lot- but as a policy I try not to care about costs because that's for the accountants and producers to care about, who knows if they hire someone who is exceptional at such systems or not, who is passionate for it, what they're able to allocate, etc).

For healers they clearly wanted people to focus healing but not make the game too hard, imo, and so they have this issue where in the beginning it's fine but as everyone over gears content it messes things up. I feel if they don't want to do some weird things to gear progression (my suggestion was move into horizontal lite concepts, but that has a whole new huge bag of potential issues).. that then they add a lot more support skills to the jobs (and perhaps take away a few heals in the process). Because if you have 20 heal skills and no one needs a heal... you got two buttons lol. I feel they are making changes to give healers some more options but maybe not as strong as the really skilled healers want. With Sage being added that has a bit more combat focus being a more obvious, imo, answer that they're listening but also trying to not cause big issues like low to medium skilled players having substantial issues or content in those groups no longer being cleared as well. (Like I said I think just adding some more support skills, that might include support damage, would be a nice trade off). One way to balance support damage without having % issues you get from weird situations of composition / scale of party is capping support... like "enfire" causes the next 10 actions with potency to deal an additional 50 potency. Or increases target damage by 10% for 60 seconds, up to 600 potency.

Some might want loads and loads of ultimate contents for example but it appears to me that these content take a lot of effort to make (not only effort to make but effort to test lol), and they're honestly only completed by a fraction of the community and at this point it appears that fraction that does do it is fracturing itself due to addons XD... I think it's still good to have such hard content for those really hardcore people, but if someone was like YOU HAVE TO CUT A CONTENT TO DO THIS OTHER CONTENT and you can't choose to do neither, in a lot of situations I'd probably tag ultimate. I imagine the community would regularly choose to cut ultimate if it was put up against things like instanced housing, glamour logs, fuller open world content, etc. I imagine some of the devs might choose that too given that it's such a feat. to accomplish lol (I also imagine some devs literally live for this type of thing, like we know one of the major WoW devs just adores crazy hard content... and you can tell because WoW has made a bunch of awkward steps around everything but usually that stuff). Though again on my beliefs we shouldn't budget for SE, so I don't believe we should look at content like "if I cut this I get that"- and I do think for the people who do play the ultimates it is great fun for them and not a common content either (such that 'that' is the only thing that'll really tickle the itch for a while).

3-200. I've been here too long, posting so much, and might be hit with the coincidence stick too many times, so maybe some grain of salt is needed.

Like one that has me scratching my head wondering if coincidence or super late feedback was back in 2.0 beta I had suggested the idea of Tyrael like wings flowing out of the Paladin's back and preventing allies within the cone from having knockback / protecting them. When wings of passage came out I was like... Hmmm. Summoner I don't think was coincidence but people were telling me it breaks lore to have larger more impressive egi and so I suggested using battery building mechanics and bahamut aether. I mean if you go back a year or two you can also see people telling me that a dark theme'd void / necromancer inspired job was impossible and I was suggesting why not use wraith imagery, make it an inverse red mage, etc.

But like lottery, ui, jobs, job changes over time (for the most part), pvp systems, content (island sanctuary), music, new zones, etc, etc, /most/ things I can think of I can usually associate with some sort of feedback I've seen (or sometimes personally given). Also most of this stuff does take them multiple months, and so you ask for it- maybe visit the thread everyday for two weeks, but four more months to 3 years later it's in game lol.

Anyway, imo, yes they do.

[KizuyaKatogami]

With Sage being added that has a bit more combat focus

I’m not sure where people get this from. Sage has quite literally the same amount of dps abilities as ast. Just because they can heal at the same time they dps doesn’t mean they’re more combat focused. Otherwise i guess sch is more combat focused because of eos. They tell us every expansion healers will heal more and it’s never true. They said it in ShB, it wasn’t true. They said it in this expansion. and it wasn’t true in fact it was actually far worse because tanks now have way more mitigation, self healing, and almost every dps job now has either multiple mitigation tools and heals. Let me put it this way. How would all you dps and tank players feel if for 90% of a fight all you could do is press 1. Rdm you spam jolt. Blm you spam nothing but fire. Y’all would be in shambles. People are already shitting on the devs just for the removal of Kaiten. Meanwhile healers only have 1 button to press for 90% of a fight. And it’s been this way for 4+ years now.

[Gothicshark]

No.

With WoW on the decline the devs know that XIV is the only non f2p cashgrab MMO on the market so there is no motivation to deviate from their vision on anything.

WOW is technically on a Decline, and has been since 2010, so nothing new there. The fact a large public exodus happened over the combo of Bad End Game Grind, Terrible events made worse by terrible lore, and the Company being filled with misogynistic pigs, caused people to publicly leave, many of which are filtering back to WOW for the new raid content. Because 3 months is the maximum length for people to be angry and to publicly protest. Sure a large sample size came here, and even a fair percentage will stay around, this is however not the first time FFXIV has benefitted from WOW outrage, and it wont be the last.

I personally came over here on the "No Flying in WOD" announcement, and went back to WOW 5 months later. Of course I did both games until Shadowlands Prepatch, I refused to go from level 120 to level 50, F*** that. Odds are is Microsoft fires Ion Hazzikostas I will return to playing both games.

[MilkieTea]

I mean what topics are worth making mega-threads on? That's kind of the question that never gets answered. Otherwise it's like shooting blanks.

I'd argue the topics that repeatedly get formed into separate one off 5-10 page threads. We've got threads a-plenty on the sam kaiten removal issue, for example. Rather than everyone and their mother making one off threads that leave the front page after 2-4 business days, everyone who's got something to say about the kaiten removal could just... keep it in one thread, keep discussing in that thread, and keep that one thread on the front page or close to the front page.

A lot of topics have multiple threads, just take a glance.

[Gothicshark]

Healers have not always been this way, what are you on? Literally compare stuff like arr whm or sch to now. There is a very noticeable difference from how healers were to how they are now.

I would say you are both correct. Healers have played FFXIV a certain way, but mechanics have been changed to account for some of how Players want to play. Although WHT still needs work, mostly with how the low level heals don't get replaced with new ones, and just become useless button bloat. I also feel this to a smaller degree with BLM, although Endwalker has fixed some of it.

[Shougun]

I’m not sure where people get this from. Sage has quite literally the same amount of dps abilities as ast. Just because they can heal at the same time they dps doesn’t mean they’re more combat focused. Otherwise i guess sch is more combat focused because of eos. They tell us every expansion healers will heal more and it’s never true. They said it in ShB, it wasn’t true. They said it in this expansion. and it wasn’t true in fact it was actually far worse because tanks now have way more mitigation, self healing, and almost every dps job now has either multiple mitigation tools and heals. Let me put it this way. How would all you dps and tank players feel if for 90% of a fight all you could do is press 1. Rdm you spam jolt. Blm you spam nothing but fire. Y’all would be in shambles. People are already shitting on the devs just for the removal of Kaiten. Meanwhile healers only have 1 button to press for 90% of a fight. And it’s been this way for 4+ years now.

My impression of playing it at least. Also I do agree there is a weird problem with healers, that wasn't really fixed in EW. As I said in my post my thoughts were the first few weeks when everyone is under synced it's mostly fine but as everyone makes healer's role less relevant it's not a good situation. Especially since like if people get more damage or tank better they do their role better but all that directly impacts healer being less important. My suggestions ranged from new gearing systems (changing defense growth / etc), more support skills, making one of the healers more aggressive, etc.

For me, as someone who doesn't really live to play a healer role, I like being crazy simple white mage cause I feel it's easy to be good lol (no one dies, you deal damage easily).. but for those who live for the role and are also fairly skilled (bad healers in your group can still cause trouble in the game, they're not entirely pointless- just easily made pointless by someone who is half decent at being a healer), I /can/ see how they might not be feeling like they're not living in paradise.

Noted the sentiment enough I made a sort of eldritch blood mage healer that would ideally have mostly offensive moves (one of which was attacking the enemy to heal your ally.... so again another moment where they might have taken feedback). Of course in my mind most of the kit would have been offensive. I didn't count the sage skills so I apologize if it's technically not the case, but given the build of the job I did feel it was more offensive / interactive (only playing it slightly), than say WHM which is my go to "I can do that, whatever that was I can do that" (and low stress, because it feels really straight forward and lax).

[Rolder50]

Having been here a long time, I do feel like they listen to feedback that or I am really good at guessing potential new content.

You might think this because the content releases are extremely formulaic and predictable. Here I'll predict the main content of the rest of this expansion, ready?

6.2 New EX, New Savage raid, four bosses, extension of Pandaemonium
6.3 New EX, New 24 Man raid, extension of Aglaia (Spelling?) also purportedly a new ultimate but I'm betting this gets delayed.
6.4 New EX, New Savage raid, four bosses, extension part 2 of Pandaemonium.
6.5 New EX, New 24 Man raid, part 3 of Aglaia, lead up to new expansion
7.0 New expansion

Boom that's a couple years of content predicted out.

Now, good luck predicting things like job changes, because lord knows where they are getting ideas like "Remove Kaiten" from...

[Shougun]

You might think this because the content releases are extremely formulaic and predictable. Here I'll predict the main content of the rest of this expansion, ready?

6.2 New EX, New Savage raid, four bosses, extension of Pandaemonium
6.3 New EX, New 24 Man raid, extension of Aglaia (Spelling?) also purportedly a new ultimate but I'm betting this gets delayed.
6.4 New EX, New Savage raid, four bosses, extension part 2 of Pandaemonium.
6.5 New EX, New 24 Man raid, part 3 of Aglaia, lead up to new expansion
7.0 New expansion

Boom that's a couple years of content predicted out.

Now, good luck predicting things like job changes, because lord knows where they are getting ideas like "Remove Kaiten" from...

Actually I was speaking about job changes, new /content/, races, etc, not dungeons patch schedules lol. Like as I said, when SMN was new and I was hoping for a bigger egi people would say lore prevents it- such I said okay how about we have this battery like mechanic in the job where you build up energy and then you can summon bigger stuff, like for example we can use the recently released bahamut aether as part of it. Like... a trance... a dreadwyrm trance...

[Ralphe2449]

Raiders and high end players ALWAYS whine that their feedback isnt heard, even in WoW where the game literally caters to them and treats casuals as 4th class citizens they still whine.

That often happens because due to clearing high end content they feel their opinion has more value and get mad when the devs ignore them to focus on casual and solo content aka the people who are paying the bills.

WoW didnt fail because it didnt listen to its high end raiders, it failed cause it kept treating its casual player base worse and worse with Shadowlands being the epitome of treating casuals like 4th class citizens and giving them trash gear for reward and barely any casual and solo content, FF14 is thankfully not doing the same mistake and Yoshi P. even said he ll try focus more on solo casual players thankfully.

If you want a hardcore high end raiding game go play wow, dont try to ruin this game for casuals