Healer Survey:

[WaxSw]

Yes, but a lot are saying what I'm saying:

- They're satisfied with Healers THEMSELVES (or some of the Jobs, if not all), the issue is encounter design.

How can you say that when some of the top comments are stuff like or ?

Those aren't battle design complaints but complaints about how the jobs are a boring homogenized mess and quite the same thing goes for the rest of your "conclusions"

-The vast majority say they would like to have extra DPS actions and are from neutral to very positive about it, a lot of coments saying that they would be thrilled or they would play healers more if they recive that, they only said that it would not be realistic to have it to the same extent of dps, which is a trivial observation to anyone with minimal healing knowledge

-The majority of people who want change is in fact regarding their damage look at the same 2 images and using the most voted comment in ffxivdiscussion: and the majority are on the same line, in fact those who only want healing changes are the minority

-As said previously, JOB design seems to be the most problematic thing right now among those who are dissatisfied with the role.

There is no point to do a survey if all you're going to do is try to confirm an uneducated bias. There are issues with the encounters, I'm not denying that, but if the same problems are present from the most casual to the most hardcore of contents that encounter design is neither the only cause nor the main cause of those problems, that is job design which is the only constant.

[Renathras]

...

Because "anecdote is not data".

Top comment is irrelevant since it could just mean people dissatisfied are all upvoting each other while people satisfied are not. So votes aren't what count. What counts our the individual people responding.

If 5 people say they're dissatisfied, 10 people say they're satisfied, but each of those 5 dissatisfied posts has 5 upvote and each of the other 10 has only 1-2, that doesn't mean there are more dissatisfied people. It just means the dissatisfied people are more willing to promote their own view when they see it expressed by others. Right now, on the FFXIV (not the FFXIVDiscussion) thread, which I just finished getting through on Q1 (been busy with some irl stuff, so just doing it a bit here and there), the tally is:

Dissatisfied (Includes Very) 13
Very Dissatisfied 5
Satisfied (Includes Very) 19
Very Satisfied 5
Neutral Satisfaction 6
Total Responses: 38
[Note: This is just the FFXIV main subreddit, not the FFXIVDiscussion one, which seems to have more responses. Getting to that one...]

WHM is the most liked (9) with SGE second most (7), AST is a surprising third (6), and SCH is dead last (2)

I'm working through the other parsing stuff that I'm coming up with based on responses, but so far:

(8) want more DPS spells, but (2) want only situational ones, and (1) wanted ONLY one more per healer.
(1) wanted more healing spells, (2) wanted less, (2) wanted less oGCDs/healing plan focus
(2) wanted more Support spells
(2) dislike Energy Drain
(2) want more random healing (e.g. mini-tankbusters on DPS, unavoidable consistent raid damage)

These ARE NOT final numbers, as some others that I read said similar things before I got the categories written out (I'm developing sub-categories based on what I see a lot of people saying or when people say very specific things that make good data points, such as people saying they want more OR less healing abilities or more damage ones, etc), so I'm trying to work out a good way to capture all those views, then I'll go through the posts again and see if any were missed on the initial pass that fall into them.

The FFXIVDiscussion side of the house might be more negative, but a lot of them are very nuanced as well, and there are more of them. But I think I have the basic system down I'm going to use to score these going forward.

.

EDIT:

There is no point to do a survey if all you're going to do is try to confirm an uneducated bias. There are issues with the encounters, I'm not denying that, but if the same problems are present from the most casual to the most hardcore of contents that encounter design is neither the only cause nor the main cause of those problems, that is job design which is the only constant.

Also:

THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

I'm trying to be fair. You're using "well, the most upvoted post agrees with me, therefore it's what the majority wants!"

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Upvotes/downvotes ON THE INTERNET are the least useful, least trustworthy, least scientific method for determining what people actually think. People who have a strong opinion, especially strong dislike, are HIGHLY motivated to vote for responses similar to their own to get them more visibility.

But there's no way to tell of that upvote is from a person who posted further down if they're dissatisfied or not. If I count the upvote AND their post, I'd be counting them TWICE. There's no way to know if people are upvoting and posting, just upvoting, or just posting (which gives your own post one upvote automatically), so the vote system is completely useless to get a scientifically/statistically accurate measurement.

That's why I'm going post by post.

THAT is how you AVOID "try to confirm an uneducated bias".

The way to see what everyone thinks is to tabulate all the results, not to let dozens of people speak and then only listen to the two or three posts that are upvoted to the top.

[WaxSw]

snip

And I call bullshit on those numbers, just doing a quick review of the mainsub there are people who simply post long reviews about how they are dissatisfied without directly saying they are dissatisfied, a lot of them speaking for a purely casual perspective, there are also some answers that depending on how you take it can mean one thing or another as are very prone to bias. i.e:

or

or

(These two for example of people that seem dissatisfied without saying it directly)

Not only that but the amount of dissatisfied seem... odd considering I'm counting already 15 and according to you there are only 13 people, here's a short list that go well past the 13: NevermoreAK,Icecylee,Truen_,GamingNightRun,Cryo889,Nasgate,Adriebow(neutral about ast, positive whm, negative Sch/Sge), Kindonlinefriend,Aeee98,Trunks111,Rolder,SurprisedCabbage,RedmageCody,notColdReactive,TheBananaHamook

And this in the mainsub which is much more positive and casual about the game when those problems healers have are present for more experienced people, so we are talking about a population that in large may not be as relevant to the study as the one in xiv discussion which not only is a bigger sample of a population but actually may hold a higher statistical value as the % of people exposed to the role problems is higher there

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Upvotes/downvotes ON THE INTERNET are the least useful, least trustworthy, least scientific method for determining what people actually think. People who have a strong opinion, especially strong dislike, are HIGHLY motivated to vote for responses similar to their own to get them more visibility.

This is not true in the mainsub at least, its a place where usually negative opinions get downvoted or moderated to oblivion (hence why xivdiscussion, the shitpost sub or talesfromdf were created), for a negative opinion to be upvoted there more and not only that but having more upvotes than your value of dissatisfied people means that there is a higher population than the one that commented that is dissatisfied with the role (we have to take into consideration that downvotes are a thing too), its important to note also the difference between the most voted positive and negative because the most negative one is 15-18 while the most voted positive one is 4, which is a significative diference especially when the mainsub is taken into acount.

[Renathras]

...

I believe all three of the ones you posted I classified as "dissatisfied". Though it's possible some you are counting as dissatisfied I put in the neutral camp (I also did this with someone who said something that seemed to be marginally satisfied but with reservations enough to be neutral). I'm also going to do a second pass to see if my initial assignments seem accurate or not.

As to the populations - I'm sorry, why is it that we may only take the advice of people who are not positive and not casual? Are casual and positive people not part of the playerbase? Since the point of this exercise is to see what the PLAYERBASE feels, not what only hardcore and upset people feel.

Recall Ty issued this challenge to me to determine if the playerbase agrees with me or disagrees, and he even set out the initial questions with my only changes being to remove the coaching (by asking, for example, if players were dissatisfied/satisfied where his questions only asked one, which could taint the responses) and adding the fourth question so we could see how far people want to go on that metric. It wasn't just to see what high end raiders thought or only what people upset with the game thought; it was to see what the playerbase as a whole might be feeling.

I'm trying to do the very thing opposite of what you are - get a fair appraisal of what the playerbase feels, not only listen to people who think like me.

I'm also not doing only the mainsub. I said my first pass had been of the mainsub, since that was the one I posted first and the one I started with to work on my spreadsheet. You're trying to poison the well before I even say what the result is. Very interesting...

Also, it's kinda laughable you think negative options always get downvoted and moderated "to oblivion"; people tend not to post serious discussions there. Not only that, in Discussion, negative opinions TEND to get very upvoted quite a lot while positive ones tend to get downvoted. There's a slow trend away from that as people are getting tired of the hyperbole, but for a while it's been that way.

Regardless, it's irrelevant:

For people to get a vote to count, they need to make a post. There's no way to check if an upvote has come from someone that made a post or not, and counting the upvote AND post (if they did both) would double count them and taint the results. I get some people don't like posting, but if they aren't posting, we can't be sure what THEIR view is since they aren't stating it. And no, an upvote isn't a statement of a position. Many people can agree with broad strokes but not specifics, and people who actually make posts are invested enough to do so. Until you can show me a way to tell if a person who posts ALSO upvoted something so I can only count them once, that's a bad metric to use.

And it's STILL the least trustworthy, least scientific method available to determine what people think.

.

Man, it's almost like you're afraid the outcome won't support your view or something and trying to tilt the scale and incite doubt in advance...very interesting, but irrelevant.

[ForsakenRoe]

I guess if you make enough threads eventually you'll find at least one other player that agrees with you that WHM should have zero skill ceiling, and then you can lord over all of us unenlightened 'dirty elitists' that you were right all along

As true as ever it seems. Also, why on earth didn't you have like, any system behind this 'project' at all? Why not have a google forms survey or whatever, where you could ask questions with a 1-10 rating like:

How satisfied are you with WHM's gameplay right now?
How satisfied are you with SCH's gameplay right now?
How satisfied are you with AST's gameplay right now?
How satisfied are you with SGE's gameplay right now?
How satisfied are you with the gameplay of how damage is dealt to the players in FFXIV right now?
How satisfied are you with the gameplay of how we heal that damage in FFXIV right now?
How satisfied are you with the gameplay of how we mitigate (shields, Soil, Kerachole, etc) damage in FFXIV right now?

On a scale of 1-10, how much would you be willing to try 'more healing required' as a solution SE explores to address healer engagement?
On a scale of 1-10, how much would you be willing to try 'more damage moves' (rotational complexity would become on par with tanks) as a solution SE explores to address healer engagement?
On a scale of 1-10, how much would you be willing to try 'more utilities and focus on their application' (ie, using CC to control adds, using a Dispel roleaction to remove a boss's buffs, etc) as a solution SE explores to address healer engagement?

And a final page saying 'If you like, please use this blank page to go into detail about anything else you might want to emphasize, or feel the 1-10 ratings do not accurately represent', so that someone can say 6/10 for AST, and then specify that 'I gave 6/10 because I really like the delayed healing aesthetic and enjoy playing around it, but subtracted some rating because I find the new cards being 'oops all balances' really boring and flat, if we had the old cards I'd put it closer to 8/10, maybe even a 9'

Instead we've got just the 'go into more detail' part, and it's open to interpretation biases. If someone says 'yeh AST is okay, I like the healing but the cards are kinda bland and spamming Malefic isn't very interesting, gets the job done though', one person might read that as 'AST is okay, neutral rating' and another might read it as 'AST is fun when healing, but dog when you know the fight, overall that means dissatisfied cos we spend a lot more time knowing a fight than we do learning it'.

Man, it's almost like you're afraid the outcome won't support your view or something and trying to tilt the scale and incite doubt in advance...very interesting, but irrelevant.

Man you're the one making all these threads, surveys, whatevers, to try and find 'support for your view'. Even in those threads, we can see you are asking for clarification from people when they give their views. And often, when they do, you ask for clarification on that clarification too. To the point where often, you're the final comment in the chain. This says to me 'the person who asked the question is not satisfied with the answer given, and is trying to get a specific response'. And you can't be asking 'X Y Z, have I understood that right' as that creates opportunities for the surveryor's biases to creep in, I don't see why a solid 'could you clarify what you meant by 'X (direct copy paste quote)' point?' wasn't used. Then again, I don't see why a lot of things about this were/weren't done, like why it was done in the first place, or why it wasn't collected in a more easily tabulated format

[ty_taurus]

As true as ever it seems. Also, why on earth didn't you have like, any system behind this 'project' at all? Why not have a google forms survey or whatever, where you could ask questions with a 1-10 rating like:

How satisfied are you with WHM's gameplay right now?
How satisfied are you with SCH's gameplay right now?
How satisfied are you with AST's gameplay right now?
How satisfied are you with SGE's gameplay right now?
How satisfied are you with the gameplay of how damage is dealt to the players in FFXIV right now?
How satisfied are you with the gameplay of how we heal that damage in FFXIV right now?
How satisfied are you with the gameplay of how we mitigate (shields, Soil, Kerachole, etc) damage in FFXIV right now?

On a scale of 1-10, how much would you be willing to try 'more healing required' as a solution SE explores to address healer engagement?
On a scale of 1-10, how much would you be willing to try 'more damage moves' (rotational complexity would become on par with tanks) as a solution SE explores to address healer engagement?
On a scale of 1-10, how much would you be willing to try 'more utilities and focus on their application' (ie, using CC to control adds, using a Dispel roleaction to remove a boss's buffs, etc) as a solution SE explores to address healer engagement?

I actually set these up for...

WHM
SCH
AST
SGE

But I haven't posted them anywhere except in this post yet. Figure it'd be too redundant to have both this and Ren's running at the same time.

[Amenara]

I actually set these up for...

WHM
SCH
AST
SGE

But I haven't posted them anywhere except in this post yet. Figure it'd be too redundant to have both this and Ren's running at the same time.

I think this is a more effective way of both quantitatively and qualitatively coming up with feelings on how healers play and opinions on them. That being said I did reply to the reddit thread too.

[ForsakenRoe]

I actually set these up for...

WHM
SCH
AST
SGE

But I haven't posted them anywhere except in this post yet. Figure it'd be too redundant to have both this and Ren's running at the same time.

Damn, shame cos I think the data you could get from these would be a lot more precise and a much more easily tabulated format. And if both were run (or yours were done after Ren's) I assume a lot of people would just not bother with it, because 'didnt we already just get asked this', so it'd cause the data to be skewed towards 'people who feel so strongly about the subject they're willing to reiterate their stance over and over', aka people like us

[Allegor]

I actually set these up for...

WHM
SCH
AST
SGE

But I haven't posted them anywhere except in this post yet. Figure it'd be too redundant to have both this and Ren's running at the same time.

There's a rather fatal flaw on your polls Ty. There's an * on the question about challenging content, meaning casuals like myself are forced to lie to even submit the form. I put a 1 because I loathe high end content either way, but that has little to do with the current state of healers.

[WaxSw]

As to the populations - I'm sorry, why is it that we may only take the advice of people who are not positive and not casual? Are casual and positive people not part of the playerbase? Since the point of this exercise is to see what the PLAYERBASE feels, not what only hardcore and upset people feel.

Because the problems appear when you get a certain degree of mastery of the job, those who still panic in normal dungeons or just barely play the job are much less likely to be exposed to those and because of that don't feel anything about the role, its like asking about the opinion of the US elections to the population of Nicaragua, they'll simply say its ok and move on which leads to one of the problems of your survey, which is how its worded and the conclusions you draw from it and let me elaborate.

Your first question is "Are you satisfied/dissatisfied with the healers currently? What do you like/dislike about them?" while on paper it seems nice there is the problem of how there is no neutral option like the 1-10 ratings have, and thus most if not all of neutral people will simply say they're satisfied. In your discussion with ty I believe it was mentioned how the majority of people simply are neutral which is true for almost any statistical analysis, however in your own data the number of neutral people is the minority. This disparity from the expected model should have been further studied because indicates problems in the data acquisition process, but that study didn't happen which leads me to believe of the malicious intent of the pollster.

The second question "Do you believe the healers could be better/worse? If so, what would make them better/worse?" barely gives any valuable data, of course everyone will think that things can be better/worse

The third question "Would you stop playing healer if the healers received a few more offensive spells?" already puts a negative focus on recieving new damage options, the question itself is not neutral and assumes that getting damage options would lead to people dropping the job which suggest the intention of the pollster to make the neutral people see this as something harmful for the job design

The last question "Would you stop playing healer if the healers received a DPS rotation on par with a DPS Job (you will still be expected to attend to all your healing duties while also juggling that rotation)?" It's already another malicious one as you're presenting an obvious impossible case and when told that no you're drawing the conclusion of people not wanting a rotation instead of the simple rejection of an absurd case.


If you were trying to get a fair appraisal of the playerbase feels then a lot of the questioning should be reworded/changed with numerical values and more neutral questions, I'm calling you out because of that and because we all know you and how much you tend to twist the things to support a view that does not represent the reality like how you said:

Encounter design, encounter design, encounter design - this seems to actually be the biggest complaint.

however a few posts later

I'm working through the other parsing stuff that I'm coming up with based on responses, but so far:

(8) want more DPS spells, but (2) want only situational ones, and (1) wanted ONLY one more per healer.
(1) wanted more healing spells, (2) wanted less, (2) wanted less oGCDs/healing plan focus
(2) wanted more Support spells
(2) dislike Energy Drain
(2) want more random healing (e.g. mini-tankbusters on DPS, unavoidable consistent raid damage)

Weird that the biggest complain is the least represented.

Mainsub discussion

You said it yourself, people tend to not put serious discussion yet for you the smaller sample of people not used to have a deep evaluation of the game state seem to have more statistical value than people who do, it's true that in discussion opinions tend to be more negative (not always in fact, a lot of good analysis get upvoted) but also begs the question of "how is that people that do actually reflect on the game have such a negative opinion" especially when it comes to healers.

And for the whole upvotes thing if anything it would show how the survey is not well made, when you do something like that you want to use outside resources to make the opinions quick and anonymous to make sure no one can influence others and/or act as a representative of a group otherwise you're missing votes this is why there is a problem cause the fact that the upvotes of comments are higher than value of the people with the same opinion shows that said person is acting as representation of not only themselves and that makes the data corrupt.

Man, it's almost like you're afraid the outcome won't support your view or something and trying to tilt the scale and incite doubt in advance

That is funny coming from someone who has made several threads trying to get people to support their opinion