Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
And that's fine...until you get to asking the question "What is clunk?".
There is no "right answer" in game design for how much is too much or too little for the player. But one way to look at things is to compare game design to your nails. Nail length is comparable to overall complexity in this example. The more complex a job is, the longer that nail is. How long or short anyone wants their nails is subjective, but there's also undeniably a state in which your nails can be too long or too short. In other words, there's a goldilocks zone that each job needs to hit in order to feel appropriate.

It's important to take care of your nails. Trim them before they get too long, remove hangnails, etc. This is comparable to pruning outdated or clunky mechanics from each job, but the problem that ShB and EW have is it feels like, for many jobs, the designers are aggressively filing away at the nail down to the flesh. They aren't just pruning clunk, they're eroding the healthy parts of the nail as well.

We are below the goldilocks zone in many ways, which is why there's so much unrest, and I don't even mean these forums. Everywhere you look, there's tension about SMN, about MNK, about the healers, about Kaiten... When you file the nail down past the skin, in hurts. There are too many people who feel an ache and soreness from the aggressive simplification many of the jobs are experiencing. It's like an unhealthy condition of OGCD, where someone is so aggressively cleaning the counter that they're causing damage to the wood, filing their nail down to the skin, washing their hair so excessively that they're drying the scalp. That is what EW feels like. There's not a right answer for where that line is. It's something you have to get a feel for, and that line may be in different spots for different people, but it's clear that we are below the goldilocks zone and have been for the last several years now.