Healer Survey:

[ForsakenRoe]

The other side of the coin is that to actually 'fix' high end play without crushing the approachability of healing is likely to be a pretty serious task at this point and it only gets worse as time goes on. FFXIV's job design team is tiny and has remained largely consistent from ARR despite how much the game has grown. Thus the move to homogenisation to make balancing more feasible at the expense of diversity. Turning this around would need significant hiring and time, two things that CBU3 have been pretty unwilling to commit to.

Part of me has wondered for a while: what if SE of America was the team in charge of FFXIV development, how different would the game's 'feel' be, would it be more or less similar to certain other MMOs, etc. It'd undoubtedly be easier for them to solve their main issue with hiring new devs (that they have to be competent at programming games AND be fluent in japanese), because the second condition wouldn't be a factor. Though I'm not sure if SE of America actually makes games at all, or if they just do localization, or what

[Faidid]

Just a bunch of marketing guys and translators is my guess. Western Markets are an after-thought to SE I think. They've all but ignored our protests about 1-button spam /w healers for years now. Considering how they talk at us, not with us as a community I'd be surprised if there was any coding going on at SE America beyond setting up payment systems and handling backend server management.

[Sebazy]

They certainly used to have a full US development studio back in the day but I have a feeling that it got closed down after Secret of Evermore?

[IDontPetLalas]

They certainly used to have a full US development studio back in the day but I have a feeling that it got closed down after Secret of Evermore?

SE closed all its Western studios both in the US and Canada - https://www.vg247.com/square-enix-explains-studios-sale

[Sebazy]

SE closed all its Western studios both in the US and Canada - https://www.vg247.com/square-enix-explains-studios-sale

They used to have their own in house studio quite some time before the Eidos acquisition or even the Enix merger. I'm thinking it got shuttered around 1995-1996 after Evermore's US release but I could be wrong on that, it wasn't the most amicable arrangement and as such, details are pretty thin on the ground over what actually happened.