The Healers should be reworked? New player perspective.

[Renathras]

Forums doesn't need a dislike button in this case for something like this to work -- If someone does not favor OP's post, a following post countering OP's argument in the same thread will be made and people will upvote that like crazy if the majority disagrees with the OP.

Can you show me a single case on this forum where this has ever happened?

Follow-up posts are often not voted on much, and if they're passed the 3rd page or so, often get entirely overlooked. YES, you have to have a dislike button for the like count to have any meaning since you have no way to judge those who approve vs those who do not. It doesn't happen often. Even in the General Discussion threads, if a post is passed the second or third page, it tends not to get voted on nearly as much as the OP of a thread does. Moreover, it's horribly inconsistent. Several posts may disagree with the OP, but they all get different amounts of likes. Which number is the one we use? You can see that with the Rescue thread and how all these different posts both supporting and opposing the OP are getting wildly different amounts of likes. And again, that's ignoring the self-selection bias.

And that's just a start, as it doesn't solve the other issues such as selection bias (the people who frequent forums vs the community at large) and so on.

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As to the polls, they were posted here. And I think cross posted on Reddit, unless Ty posted them in other places. Neither are likely representative of the game's playerbase overall. And even with such a negative bias, Healers still got an "average" rating of around 5. Getting a resounding "average" from a hostile demographic isn't "pretty damning".

The only Job that got a SUPER positive result was Black Mage...which is among the least played (and presumably least enjoyed) by the playerbase at large. THAT is what is pretty damning as far as the poll results go. If the Job that is among, if not THE, least played, LIKELY due to being the least enjoyed by the playerbase at large, is also the highest rated here, that kind of indicates a disjoint with the poll results vs the playerbase as a whole. The Jobs that got high marks - let's say above a 7 - are:

WAR, GNB, NIN, DRG, RPR, DNC, BLM (the ONLY Job to get above an 8), RDM.

Of those, three are generally among the higher played Jobs (WAR, DNC, and RDM), and the highest rated by far in the poll, is also among the least played. Something I even noted in the thread itself about BLM, specifically, is that the only people voting on it seemed to be BLM mains or something.

PLD, DRK, MNK, SAM, BRD, MCH, SMN, and all the Healers are rated below this level.

Including the other most played Jobs in the game, WHM and SMN, which are ranked super low. WHM is ranked lower than most of the other Healers (aside from AST) despite being the most played by far (it's somewhat strange to think people who hate the Job and like the others better somehow all choose to play the one they hate, especially since WHM isn't meta by any stretch), and SMN lower than the other Casters (and, indeed, ALL Jobs), despite being widely regarded positively by the non-forum community and being the most played of the Casters. While some people do play it who hate it (because unlike WHM, it IS meta), there are a lot of people around the community that seem to really like it.

Indeed, the SMN/BLM disconnect in the poll vs what all we know about the community at large is pretty stark.

I dunno, strikes me as a really odd result that's pretty disjointed from everything we know about how the playerbase at large feels about the Job, which has me wondering about how well the rest of the poll does or doesn't capture the sentiment of the majority.

Whether this is true or not is hard to say, but I find it VERY strange to believe that most players love BLM, much less love it so much more than every other Job, when it's still the least played, despite it ARGUABLY being meta AND being the only viable 2 Caster comp member.

Believe what you wish, but I do not believe this poll is solidly representative of the playerbase as a whole. /shrug

I'm not really sure how to get the poll to a wider audience, though. And, as I noted before, having players pick and choose which ones to respond to (instead of having it as a full poll of all Jobs where players rate them all) leads to some strange artifacts in the data. BLM is probably the biggest example of this.

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EDIT: However, I don't think that makes it useless.

The long form answers and feed back about what specific systems people dislike are probably more useful - again, players are good at spotting problems.

But the rating system is already weird (1-10 not 0-10, among other things), and seems to in some cases mesh with what we suspect of the community as a whole, but in other cases, completely conflict with it.