This needs to be said

[Shibi]

Insinuating that your development team has more skill than many people out there that have devoted multiple years successfully clearing savage content on the first week is an affront to their time and dedication.

I am curious, as you are a top tier player, do you find your performance in any one fight improves with practice? Without changing the composition of your static, that a brand-new DPS check might well be be 1% faster the 20th time your static does it?
(I haven't seen this fight first hand, of course, and my question is sincere - So please forgive me if I misspeak)

I do accept the claim that there is no way that they tested all permutations, so that's not my question. But that "could your static improve 1% in 20 tries" question comes to the heart of my query.


"However, as extra time was dedicated to testing this battle, the team's overall performance proved to be higher than usual".

[LittleImp]

This tier was completed with less oversight than usual; Yoshida stated in an interview that he didn't actually finish his typical checks of the raids.

I sympathize with YoshiP, as he's in a position where he's viewed as the 'savior' of Final Fantasy, and as a result his entire career is essentially staked on the success of FF16. Thus, he's been spending a lot of focus on that game, as well as moving the attention of trusted talent to it as well. This is pure speculation, but I think this raid tier is another 'b-team' tier like Edens Verse, where the lack of experience of the developers working on it is apparent.

The notion that the balance team got 'too good' at the fights is pretty funny, as there is no amount of 'too good' that could feasibly make certain team compositions clear doorboss consistently/easily in 610 gear. All that statement has done is give more ammunition to the weird non-raiders that have been going around mocking people who are struggling with p8s. I can't even count the amount of times someone tried to imply I was simply bad at the game over the last two weeks, and it's really demoralizing on top of the state of my job.

[Ath192]

"The team's overall performance proved to be higher than usual."

This statement right here was the biggest gut punch, so I'm going to go ahead and call it out: There is no world where your balance team tested and tuned this fight to be clearable with every comp at full 610 iLvl. Whatever the reason, your balance and dev team failed, and rather than taking it on the chin and just admitting it, you came up with the bitter excuse of a sore loser that your testing team was just 'too good' and out-skilled the player base.

It is insulting that you would make the implication that your testing team is better at the game than people who have spent years attempting to perfect their play. I can forgive being lied to about the fight not being tuned to the week of extra gear, I can forgive not balancing out underperforming jobs outside of Paladin and Warrior just yet and applying the band-aid fix of adjusting the boss rather than the jobs.

Insinuating that your development team has more skill than many people out there that have devoted multiple years successfully clearing savage content on the first week is an affront to their time and dedication.

I can't speak for every person out there that has dedicated time into becoming a strong player, but I personally am appalled at the poor excuses that Square Enix has given regarding this matter. I feel that Square Enix is going in the direction of Blizzard with how horrendous the balance and PR has been, and rather than just sweeping it under the rug, something needed to be said about it.

Fix your game, Square.

Honestly this didn’t need to be said. At all. I don’t think the post was trying to be disrespectful and you are offended because someone said things in a way you found hurtful to your pride. SE apologized in their post and is making corrections. This is just Karen behavior.

You do have a point about job balance but the way you delivered your message on this forum is way more toxic than the post SE did. You are not going to gain anything by being offended and using accusatory language other than disdain and animosity.

[Liam_Harper]

"The team's overall performance proved to be higher than usual."

It's a straight up lie and considering this explanation is aimed at the high end raiders, who pretty much all use fflogs, meters and analyze numbers very thoroughly, I don't understand how they expected us to believe it. I can only assume they don't care if we believe it and hope the casual players will latch onto the excuse and drown our voices out.

Mathematically, a non-meta comp at min ilv with no deaths, no damage downs and near perfect uptime and rotation was short on the enrage by at least 500 dps or so. It was logged, proven, it's just fact. There's no room to "git good" or practice it, the comp literally cannot produce more dps. Their secret god-tier dev team is a fabrication.

The dev team is sadly going the way of Blizzard. Arrogance, dislike for the players, "we know best", lies, excuses and sweeping things under the rug. All they had to say was "we screwed up job balance, our fault, we'll fix it, sorry". That's it.

[Jeeqbit]

I sympathize with YoshiP, as he's in a position where he's viewed as the 'savior' of Final Fantasy, and as a result his entire career is essentially staked on the success of FF16. Thus, he's been spending a lot of focus on that game, as well as moving the attention of trusted talent to it as well. This is pure speculation, but I think this raid tier is another 'b-team' tier like Edens Verse, where the lack of experience of the developers working on it is apparent.

Yoshi-P did answer that directly in one of the FF16 interviews, where he explained that people from his team have been working on FF16 since the beginning of Stormblood, so you would have to judge the quality difference since that long ago.

He said he is confident there isn't a situation where people are stressed juggling both jobs except Soken. He's letting someone else do most of the management of FF16 and they just report to him and come to him for advice.

He did confirm some people have fully left the FF14 team for the FF16 one but obviously they have employed new staff and trained them for years since the beginning of Stormblood.

[Mika_Zahard]

This statement right here was the biggest gut punch

Nah, even the devs know. Players bad devs good. hehe

[Shibi]

Mathematically, a non-meta comp at min ilv with no deaths, no damage downs and near perfect uptime and rotation was short on the enrage by at least 500 dps or so. It was logged, proven, it's just fact. There's no room to "git good" or practice it, the comp literally cannot produce more dps.

Thanks I will take that as a fair and good answer to my naïve question!

[Boblawblah]

It's a straight up lie and considering this explanation is aimed at the high end raiders, who pretty much all use fflogs, meters and analyze numbers very thoroughly, I don't understand how they expected us to believe it. I can only assume they don't care if we believe it and hope the casual players will latch onto the excuse and drown our voices out.

Mathematically, a non-meta comp at min ilv with no deaths, no damage downs and near perfect uptime and rotation was short on the enrage by at least 500 dps or so. It was logged, proven, it's just fact. There's no room to "git good" or practice it, the comp literally cannot produce more dps. Their secret god-tier dev team is a fabrication.

The dev team is sadly going the way of Blizzard. Arrogance, dislike for the players, "we know best", lies, excuses and sweeping things under the rug. All they had to say was "we screwed up job balance, our fault, we'll fix it, sorry". That's it.

Is this common with FFXIV? To basically just have imbalanced jobs and then hide it by slowly increasing the ilvl so eventually all comps can do it by essentially brute-forcing it? that seems pretty nasty for those that really enjoy the harder content in the game.

I'm about as casual as you can get, but I think you guys/girls/people deserve better.

[yoshinoharu]

The short answer to your question is yes, over time anyone is going to improve with practice to a certain degree. To me difference in skill is not difference in skill ceiling, it's rate of improvement.

Ultimately that's not the point here, though. The point is that the team is trying to use their testing team's 'higher than usual performance' to sweep a much bigger issue under the rug. The bigger issue is that certain team compositions have zero leeway. I wouldn't mind if the DPS check was so tight that you couldn't afford a mistake on ANY job, in fact I'd enjoy that to no end, it's just a bigger challenge to overcome. The problem is that with specific compositions, you cannot afford a single mistake or damage down and even then you are at the mercy of damage variance, and with others you have much more leeway for mistakes.

As a quick aside, damage variance in this game is about 5% in either direction. After all the weirdness of crit and direct hit that compounds to about 12% in either direction. In a perfect world if they wanted to tightly tune a fight they would make it so that no matter your composition, you would have to make about the median of this variance in order to clear. The problem is that there are compositions that can ignore variance entirely, and other compositions that can only clear if they're on the upper end of this variance. Baring in mind that this is all for penta-melded crafted with no tome or EX weapon.

Depending on party composition, you could either afford to take a few damage downs or you were forced into a position that you absolutely had to play perfectly. The reasoning that 'our testing team was just too good' or 'performing higher than usual' doesn't hold water because there were teams that were performing perfectly and still struggling due to their party composition, as I believe someone earlier pointed out: No damage downs, consistently performing the mechanics with no deaths, on top of only negligible rotation errors.

Rather than job-balance being acknowledged as a legitimate problem, however, they chose to say that it was just their testing team's performance being higher than usual. One of the reasons that I'm so heated about this is that it's because either they're oblivious to job balance being out of whack or ignorant and at this point I'm not sure which one is worse.

[Shibi]

Thank you for that explanation too I appreciate understanding the problem the top-teir players are facing.