Will any requested Kaiten feedback actually factor into future job updates?

[Quor]

One random thought I left out of my original post but want to comment somewhere: Some people theorize that Kaiten wanted to be removed by the developers because it was going to cause issues with future actions added next expansion… which would make me wonder why exactly the action needed to be taken out almost two years before the next expansion as opposed to just being part of the later 7.0 changes? I feel like there’s some other reason altogether.

Not a theory, but an actual comment made by Yoshi P. He outright stated that Kaiten was creating difficulties for the job team to iterate on future SAM abilities, so after "much debate" they decided to just axe it. I made an entire post calling this - and the general direction of job design over the past three expansions - out as lazy.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ZY.-Here-s-why

There's lots of speculation on the true reason behind this. My own suspicion is that Yoshi P. currently has more of his attention focused on FF16 and he's left FF14 to his more junior staff. This means, essentially, that he trusts more or less whatever they come up with and doesn't look too closely at any proposed changes that won't be rocking the boat noticeably. I'm sure the job balance team spreadsheeted the dps difference with auto-crit vs. Kaiten and showed it to him and he went "yeah, looks about equal, go for it" without ever actually considering the larger meta game of Kenki management-as-fight-planning across an entire encounter. I have often said that SAM is the "BLM of melee" in that it is the melee job that needs the most forethought in order to perform at their highest potential. It's not as detail-specific as a BLM can be as there's a lot more need and room for ad hoc decision-making with SAM, but out of all the melee dps, SAM is the one that benefited the most from having an extensively planned-out approach to a fight. Of course, this is all gone now since Kaiten was removed, and SAM is now BY FAR the simplest melee dps. It's literally braindead now.

So here I sit, in my belief that Yoshi P. has not forgotten his roots, believing that it's not Yoshi P. himself but rather the lazy approach his developers have been taking that is responsible for the current state of SAM.

The alternative to this is that no, it's not *just* the lazy devs, but also Yoshi P. I don't believe this because it flies in the face of what Yoshi P. has gone on record discussing class skill usage choice. Notably, in the NoClip docu on youtube, he talks about how a problem he saw (and sought to fix) in the 1.0 version was that players would just use the most powerful version of whatever over and over again, with no thought to resource management or anything, because there was no point in using anything else. So a big part of what he did in 1.0 and later on for 2.0 is to introduce decision-making into the process via proper resource management. Of course, this belief flies in the face of what happened to SAM in 6.1, since the removal of Kaiten also removed any decision-making in regards to Kenki usage. Now we simply just spam Shinten when it lights up, maybe spending 4-5 GCD's prior to a burst window to "pool" Kenki (like that means a damn thing now) just so we can say we're doing something, anything, besides hitting the button when it lights up.

But if I'm wrong, then yes, it means that what Yoshi P. believed back then, and what served as part of why FF14 was saved, is no longer what he believes. Which means it's no longer the driving force behind job design and balancing, which would logically lead us to where we are now.

It could be either. Or maybe even both. Or something else entirely. Yoshi's confused response during the 6.1 LL reading, as he worriedly focused on the erupting player anger in the chat rooms, leads me to believe he was blind-sided by player reaction. In turn, this leads me to believe he really doesn't understand what makes SAM fun. This likely means he's completely out of touch with how players view and enjoy the job. Which doesn't bode well, since this is the head guy with the final say in all decisions we're talking about here.

Otherwise they wouldn't have had to panic buff parts of its rotation later rather than just add kaiten back, or talk about how to make auto crit abilities scale better with buffs.

This right here is a big part of why I think my earlier suspicions; green or otherwise ignorant developer, paint-by-numbers bean-counter type, the kind who worships the spreadsheet; was responsible for coming up with the ridiculously stupid idea to outright remove Kaiten. It just reeks of bad QA (or no QA) when it comes to the final result. For all of SE's faults with FF14, their QA has tended to be well above par. But to miss something as simple as the Yukikure rotation because of the ham-handed chop job they did in 6.1...it boggles the mind.

I find myself in the unenviable position of feeling the same way I did about two weeks into the 1.0 release. It's that same feeling of dread, like you know the bus is going to go over a cliff but the driver is absolutely certain that things will be just fine, but you know he's fucking lying, both to you and to himself. I'm sitting here, holding tight to my seat, waiting to go into freefall, praying that it's just my eyes playing tricks on me and that everything is going to be fine.

Of course, in 1.0, everything was *not* fine. I quit in disgust after only six weeks in retail, and this was after having helped in both betas. I remember exactly what tipped me over; I saw a post about how disgustingly lazy the map design was for the zones in the game. The poster had taken screenshots of each map and created a color-coded legend, which he used to encircle all terrain features that were the same featured just placed somewhere else and (maybe) rotated. The Shroud was the worst; he had maybe 18-20 colors, identifying both smaller terrain features and larger "sub zones" in the Shroud, and it was just disgusting how many copy-and-pasted things there were. This was supposed to be a rich, unique world for crying out loud! Instead, the world was filled with samey-looking areas that led you into other samey-looking areas through the same set of narrow connector "tunnels" such that sometimes you would leave one area only to pop out into another and feel like you had just walked into the area you just left. Like some kind of Lost Woods curse from the Legend of Zelda.

It was just....so....LAZY. And I find myself thinking the same damn thing here, all over again.