Samurai just want their feedback to be aknowledged

[Reese_Clairdale]

I would say WoW discussion is somewhat relevant in this context, not in terms of "X expansion was my favorite" but "SE is repeating some of the primary mistakes that caused WoW to become a parody of its former self."

FFXIV's 2.0 reboot was a fairly strict WoWclone. It has long since taken on its own identity and developed even further polish on the formula, particularly in the design of boss fights, but if you strip out all of the FF flavor, the fast-paced WASD + tab target + hotbar MMO still remains, which is something that Blizzard took from slightly older MMOs at the time and then polished to a mirror finish itself.

The disruption and dumbing down of jobs which never needed adjustments beyond some obvious QoL touch ups needs to stop; This was one of Blizzard's mistakes as well. Not only do these QoL issues not get addressed, but each job seems to be treated with entirely different standards instead of being regarded as equally important elements that comprise a well-rounded selection of play styles.

The mystery is, why does SE seem intent on repeating these mistakes? Have they forgotten the absolutely ludicrous gamble that was required to salvage the FF franchise from FFXIV 1.0? Do they see the game as bulletproof now that they can rely entirely on the compelling MSQ, lore, visuals, and music?

I'm fairly certain Creative Business Unit III received the message from SAM mains in some capacity, but of course they have not answered yet for whatever reason. I can only wonder if there's something else preventing them from acting on any requests to restore some semblance of complexity and identity. One thing I can imagine is suits that are higher up are insistent on maximizing short term profits by drawing in as many new players as possible even at the expense of veteran players. But if that is the case, there's been further changes made outside of anything SAM related that don't align with that agenda, like restoring DRG's Jump / Mirage Dive split.

There's also the possibility of FFXVI's development being a drain on developer resources and attention for FFXIV as well. It's absolutely insane to me that a studio already tasked with scheduled updates to a live service game would also have the responsibility of creating the next main entry in the franchise. However, this doesn't explain why they would put in extra hours just to ruin SAM - Kaiten didn't remove itself and that circular Tenka Goken VFX didn't create itself.

It could also be as simple as new employees not familiar with job design suddenly having the authority to make changes like this and are now imposing their vision on us. If that is the case they need some kind of overseer that understands the flavor of every job, as defined by people who main those jobs.

In any case, SE has nearly 20 years of hindsight generated by Blizzard in order to make the right decisions for long term MMO maintenance, which makes this situation even more confusing and frustrating.

[Quor]

I'm fairly certain Creative Business Unit III received the message from SAM mains in some capacity, but of course they have not answered yet for whatever reason. I can only wonder if there's something else preventing them from acting on any requests to restore some semblance of complexity and identity. One thing I can imagine is suits that are higher up are insistent on maximizing short term profits by drawing in as many new players as possible even at the expense of veteran players. But if that is the case, there's been further changes made outside of anything SAM related that don't align with that agenda, like restoring DRG's Jump / Mirage Dive split.

There's also the possibility of FFXVI's development being a drain on developer resources and attention for FFXIV as well. It's absolutely insane to me that a studio already tasked with scheduled updates to a live service game would also have the responsibility of creating the next main entry in the franchise. However, this doesn't explain why they would put in extra hours just to ruin SAM - Kaiten didn't remove itself and that circular Tenka Goken VFX didn't create itself.

It could also be as simple as new employees not familiar with job design suddenly having the authority to make changes like this and are now imposing their vision on us. If that is the case they need some kind of overseer that understands the flavor of every job, as defined by people who main those jobs.

You summed a lot of it up for me, but these reasons in particular are what I've long suspected. A combination of Yoshi P. being more concerned with FF16, leaving the handling of some stuff to junior members who don't have the same level of experience, with his trust in them resulting in only a cursory glance of approval at what amounts to a paint-by-numbers, committee/spreadsheet-based set of changes that ultimately kill what makes a job fun. Yoshi's own surprise at the reaction to the 6.1 live letter chat is a major tell that, in this instance, the dev team did NOT have their thumb on the pulse of the player base.

How they could have fucked this up is beyond me. Why they have continued to double down is just as mind-boggling.

[Hezhi]

It could also be as simple as new employees not familiar with job design suddenly having the authority to make changes like this and are now imposing their vision on us. If that is the case they need some kind of overseer that understands the flavor of every job, as defined by people who main those jobs.

The popular theory is that the same 4 guys have been in charge of job design for a while, going by the credits of the game. So while I wish we could attribute all the asinine design decisions we've seen since 5.0 to the workload getting shoved onto inexperienced interns (because it feels that way), it looks like that isn't the case.

I don't know what's going on behind SE's doors but it just feels that they don't care about any of this anymore and don't even play the game, they just look at spreadsheets and aim to keep dps at 3% of variance within each role across all fights, and how different jobs play or feel isn't even on their radar anymore. And that's how you get tone deaf changes such as Kaiten getting removed, SMN getting "reworked" losing every shred of its old identity or Healers randomly getting gutted, just to make their own balancing work easier, because they'd rather have everything play the exact same way on a 2mins loop rather than actually try working with what they got.