"I don't want to think while I play, so no one should be allowed to."

[Kuritzkale]

Great thread, very entertaining. I remember getting shit on constantly for complaining about the simplification of jobs and dumbing down of gameplay back in shadowbringers in other places, and look where we are now. I'm glad people who are upset about the state the game is in and is headed towards are speaking up about this stuff. To be honest I doubt we'll see change but... idk, maybe yoshi-p will step down as game director or something? Or they'll replace whoever is in charge of job design with someone that has their head screwed on correctly?

[anhaato]

Oh hey, Zepla called out my thread! I haven't had the time to watch it, but considering she recently accused the msq criticism thread as being a bunch of trolling and hating, I don't assume she had anything good to say about this one. If any of her viewers are coming in, try me I dare you.

[george357]

no one pays my sub for me so i will learn to do my jobs on my own.

[Raoabolic]

Stay strong. Keep the faith. At duty's end, we will meet again. We will. We will.

;_;

I would like to think so but this seems to be the cycle of death every MMO has gone through, it either breaks it's balance or goes full scorched earth on it's classes. Personally, XIV isn't even the worst offender when it comes to this sort of thing. Sony online Entertainment has a special place in hell for how they made EQ and EQ2 into a pay for power MMO while EQoA was taken to the back of the shed and "dealt with" when Frontiers came out. No Smedly, i'm not going to farm 120 CMs for my SK's pet that dies to a sneezed AoE before it gives me my hot 25+ CR and DR while War gets 100 resistances across the board for the same amount of CMs while at the same time new raids became nothing more than a test to see how many resistances your tank needs to roll to not die to a single quad hit. No, i'm not bitter or anything SoE. By the way, how is your "daybreak" coming along SoE? ;^)

[Soge01]

"Hear, Feel, Think."

No, Mama Crystal-sama. No thinking; only hear and feeling. And maybe some sleep when playing healer. xD

[Kuritzkale]

Oh hey, Zepla called out my thread! I haven't had the time to watch it, but considering she recently accused the msq criticism thread as being a bunch of trolling and hating, I don't assume she had anything good to say about this one. If any of her viewers are coming in, try me I dare you.

nothing against her, but from what I've seen of her she seems more in sync with the "reddit yoshi-p worship uwu bunnyboy catgirl kawaii" crowd than anything else. I don't really expect her to have a very intelligent take about any of this, but I don't think she's stupid so... could surprise me? It does feel weird to have youtubers make mention to forum threads though... people actually use this website?!

[Raoabolic]

nothing against her, but from what I've seen of her she seems more in sync with the "reddit yoshi-p worship uwu bunnyboy catgirl kawaii" crowd than anything else. I don't really expect her to have a very intelligent take about any of this, but I don't think she's stupid so... could surprise me? It does feel weird to have youtubers make mention to forum threads though... people actually use this website?!

Personally, I like it when "e-clebs"(lol) make a stink about something. It lets me know that the problem is usually the opposite of what they are talking about, and when it isn't then the problem is a real bad one, lol.

[Soge01]

nothing against her, but from what I've seen of her she seems more in sync with the "reddit yoshi-p worship uwu bunnyboy catgirl kawaii" crowd than anything else. I don't really expect her to have a very intelligent take about any of this, but I don't think she's stupid so... could surprise me? It does feel weird to have youtubers make mention to forum threads though... people actually use this website?!

In one of her recent videos' she said how she hopes criterion dungeons are actually something midcore content level to finally bridge the gap between casual and hardcore content.

[anhaato]

Eh, it was mundane. Not sure how much she agreed, but she wasn't purely negative about it so whatever. Just hope her fans don't start flooding here.

[Shurrikhan]

There's certain things I think some people view as '' QoL '' that aren't, especially when it comes to merging combos and stuff like that which is more gameplay oriented.
The reality is that people would feel compelled to use it because not using it would handicap yourself, if something is borderline mandatory because it's just so much more efficient then it's no longer a QoL feature really it's just a design revamp.

I want to touch on this particular example.

Combo consolidation is not a pure benefit to the user, in that it also removes tactile cues from the user, which can be rather vital to many for tracking the timing of a given fight (both in terms of hitting button A at moment X and just not falling asleep from boredom).

However, yes, it does remove a very, very mild fail condition -- the ability to do something other than resetting, switching, or progressing one's combos -- which would otherwise waste combo progress for potentially pretty massive potency loss and desync.

Consider, though: What if you simply made it impossible to do anything with pure combo skills outside of the only three options that are actually viable -- to reset, switch, or progress a combo?

There'd be no advantage to combo consolidation outside of addressing repetitive motion injury or moving the saved button space to more comfortable bindings, which would be worth the cost of tactile cues only to those who most need that reduced movement.

And yet there wouldn't be a single bit of actual depth lost. One could still hit the non-option buttons, just to (if there would be zero use case for the given key) no effect (outside of GCD drift as you note the mis-press and correct it), instead of a destructive one. One could still make the wrong choice, such as by resetting or switching to another combo, but only from among actual potential use cases (no matter how rare those use cases might be).

I feel like that's what's so often lost in the conversation. We feign that there could be no change in context when looking at choices A and B (e.g., an advantaged combo consolidation or the existing system) in isolation, never mind that the present context provides no advantage in actual depth or complexity (as the number of actual, viable options remain exactly the same as per consolidation), only an increase potential punishment that disproportionately affect a small portion of players (e.g., those with RMI or impaired dexterity).

___________________


Lest this appear as cherry-picking, let me bring this back to the more general note:

Yes, QoL changes do tend to end up as design revamps to some degree, but we have a habit of treating them differently -- less imaginatively of surrounding warrants and prospects of design -- than we would other considerations of/around design revamps. But we shouldn't treat them separately, nor any less imaginatively. The choices at play aren't merely X feature in the existing context or nothing at all; most already encourage an examination of the present context and what parts of it are actually responsible for what we like, and what parts of what we dislike are not thus conjoined.

This ends up all the more strange and salient when compared against the QoL the devs themselves levy on us. CDs being reduced almost entirely to whatever easily matches to 120s cycles has mostly ended up considered as just wholly warranted QoL, regardless of however it may actually degrade the in-game experience... even while those same players will insist until hoarse that we should never have X, Y, or Z, even when those features have been much more carefully checked for negative implications upon the actual experience.

That's not to say that all mod ideas are good for the game. I'd agree, for instance, that boss mods would be bad for the game. I want to look at the screen, the actual audiovisual cues that give the fight more theme and flavor, not some new UI element that degrades all that. But by the same token I'd rather not have such skills as Arm's Length or Surecast even now, since those skills take up button space just to undo mechanics. Can we not apply the same criticality, the same warrants by which we might dislike a given mod idea, to the existing game, too? Can we not let each idea better polish our own understanding of what all we may like or dislike, and why, rather than just polarizing it all into oversimplifications (to mod or not to mod, should X be permissible or no)?