FFXVI has now officially proven to have taken over Yoshi's time

[IkaraGreydancer]

It’s why the whole GCBTW meme is so prevalent. There’s a lot of people who will vigorously defend yoshi p like he is some sort of god and defend this game like it’s infallible, it’s insufferable to read people bend over backwards to try and defend bad decisions made by yoship/CBU3/SE

Holding them accountable is really what got us ARR and it’s what the playerbase needs to continue to do.

I’ve said it before but a lot of the players who are critical of this game are also very passionate about it, we really enjoy this game and want to see improvements made so that this game can be the best it possibly can.

Pretending the room isn’t partially on fire when it is undos all of it.

Thing about that is who can really say some of this stuff is actually an issue in all fairness? Being passionate doesn't make you automatically correct and that goes for both ends of the spectrum. In fact that could lead you to being blind to things (Also ofc on both sides). It's a complicated situation.

Some folks don't like when anyone defends the game at all. Judging from what's gone down here over the years you're treated worse here if you defend the game and have more support if you criticize it at every turn. Yes holding them accountable is what got us ARR but XIV is nowhere near the state of 1.0. Folks would have you believe the game is dead/dying but nothing outside of opinions supports this.

Like I said before it's a tricky situation. Many folks aren't for the game to be the best it can be, many want the game to be the best it can for them. Other folks be damned (again on both sides). So there will always be a constant battle in this space due to this. All I can says is you'd think XIV was the worst MMO on the market if you came here for the first time. Its such a stark contrast to how the community is basically anywhere else and myself n many others notice this. I personally believe sadly many folks here wouldn't be happy if they did get what they want/the playerbase would see a drop if some of what they want was implemented.

Long read sorry lol

[Zebraoracle]

Thing about that is who can really say some of this stuff is actually an issue in all fairness? Being passionate doesn't make you automatically correct and that goes for both ends of the spectrum. In fact that could lead you to being blind to things (Also ofc on both sides). It's a complicated situation.

Some folks don't like when anyone defends the game at all. Judging from what's gone down here over the years you're treated worse here if you defend the game and have more support if you criticize it at every turn. Yes holding them accountable is what got us ARR but XIV is nowhere near the state of 1.0. Folks would have you believe the game is dead/dying but nothing outside of opinions supports this.

Like I said before it's a tricky situation. Many folks aren't for the game to be the best it can be, many want the game to be the best it can for them. Other folks be damned (again on both sides). So there will always be a constant battle in this space due to this. All I can says is you'd think XIV was the worst MMO on the market if you came here for the first time. Its such a stark contrast to how the community is basically anywhere else and myself n many others notice this. I personally believe sadly many folks here wouldn't be happy if they did get what they want/the playerbase would see a drop if some of what they want was implemented.

Long read sorry lol

Healers are a problem
Viera are a problem
Hrothgar are a problem
Au ra and miqo'te are slowly becoming problems
Housing is a problem
The 2 minute buff window is a problem

There are a lot of glaring issues with the game and anyone saying "there aren't problems" or "there are no problems for me" or "muh majority" or any other inane line does not have this game's best interest in mind. It's not that complicated. Sure, you can bring up "well some people never have anything nice to say" but that doesn't automatically make the issues go away. I'm honestly tired of this whole "there are too many white knights defending the game/there are too many doomers complaining about the game" dialogue. People need to get over it. Let it go, it's always going to happen, if it bothers you (you in general, not you specifically) then ignore them. Fussing and fighting with them's not going to change anything or do anyone any good.

[Ivtrix]

This is a great point. You hear all the time how the 2min meta is bad but nobody goes into great detail about why it is bad and why the previous systems were better. When people don't give explanations, it just feels like the hip thing to do is to be against the 2min meta cause all the popular people dislike it. I have heard about the explanations on the stat variances like with crit but then I have to ask myself, is it the 2min meta that's the problem or Crit/DH? My experience from previous expansions is that while a 2min meta did not exist, most statics artificially created a meta by holding buffs and stacking them together when possible. Like I agree the 2min meta doesn't feel great, but it's always been one of those things where I feel like the community doesn't explain the why very well nor offer a solid solution to the problem. Another thing the community often fails to bring up with the 2min meta is why we should care. We can discuss why the 2min meta is bad, but we also need to discuss why someone should care about it.

Second bit is hard to sell a lot of people on. My personal opinion is that balance doesnt mean anything until in the presence of an enrage timer. Most players simply wont touch content above and including ex trials. In content where your enrage timer is the instance timer, your dps is nearly irrelevant. Most of the discussion is from play on a higher level which frankly, most casual players dont care too too much about. Optimization of your job for a casual player is optional content.

But for higher level players, which dps balance is based around, it matters a hell of a lot more. So while I sit there and bemoan how SMN is a disaster, the issues arnt relevant to a majority of the playerbase. But for those who it does effect, it matters a damn lot.

[IkaraGreydancer]

Second bit is hard to sell a lot of people on. My personal opinion is that balance doesnt mean anything until in the presence of an enrage timer. Most players simply wont touch content above and including ex trials. In content where your enrage timer is the instance timer, your dps is nearly irrelevant. Most of the discussion is from play on a higher level which frankly, most casual players dont care too too much about. Optimization of your job for a casual player is optional content.

But for higher level players, which dps balance is based around, it matters a hell of a lot more. So while I sit there and bemoan how SMN is a disaster, the issues arnt relevant to a majority of the playerbase. But for those who it does effect, it matters a damn lot.

That's where alot of the tension stems from. That last part. Things that are fine for the majority of the playerbase arent for certain sects and they but heads here. So both sides are just as valid to say there's an issue. It is clear SE focus is on the majority amd alot of their decisions reflect that, good and bad. I just don't like the mentality that casual players are "ruining" what has always generally been a casual game. SE has made decisions that have only made the game more successful so even if I myself would like to see changes (I do) I can't sit n say they're wrong for going this route ya know?

[TheDecay]

SE has made decisions that have only made the game more successful so even if I myself would like to see changes (I do) I can't sit n say they're wrong for going this route ya know?

Half of FF14's success is from WoW's failure. The other half: the FF fanbase's propensity to accept anything SE puts out.

These dumbed down jobs did not make the game more successful. No new player comes to the game because of the SMN rework. It wasn't advertised, it wasn't marketed, and only a fraction of new players actually will play SMN at all.

This game has an attrition rate of 20-30% per patch. New players join because of SE's aggressive advertisement and marketing strategy, and word of mouth based off of how the story is good. These are the primary factors. If job design stuck to Stormblood's design while everything else stayed the same (ShB/EW story, same level of marketing etc.), I highly doubt there will be any difference in this game's financial success.

In other words, this game's success is not attributable to every single decision CBU3 made. By percentage growth in player count, HW was also a major success. SB was also a major success. This tells you that the growth in players is likely independent of many of the decisions they make for the game.

[IkaraGreydancer]

Half of FF14's success is from WoW's failure. The other half: the FF fanbase's propensity to accept anything SE puts out.

These dumbed down jobs did not make the game more successful. No new player comes to the game because of the SMN rework. It wasn't advertised, it wasn't marketed, and only a fraction of new players actually will play SMN at all.

This game has an attrition rate of 20-30% per patch. New players join because of SE's aggressive advertisement and marketing strategy, and word of mouth based off of how the story is good. These are the primary factors. If job design stuck to Stormblood's design while everything else stayed the same (ShB/EW story, same level of marketing etc.), I highly doubt there will be any difference in this game's financial success.

In other words, this game's success is not attributable to every single decision CBU3 made. By percentage growth in player count, HW was also a major success. SB was also a major success. This tells you that the growth in players is likely independent of many of the decisions they make for the game.

Really...? So the game isn't successful for anything it has done. It's because ff fans are apparently idiots and WoW is bad...yet many FF games have flopped in the past and many xiv fans aren't FF fans. So that logic dies right there.

Can you prove to me that more accessible jobs didn't contribute? Is there some data you have to share for this? How do you know no new players joined due to a class rework? You don't. You don't THINK so. But you dont KNOW so. Let's be more accurate there. In fact much of what you're saying is backed by nothing but sheer opinion there. If you truly think more accessible classes don't/can't bring is new players you don't understand business in that regard.

To say the games growth has nothing or little to do with CBU3 is beyond off. The game has to be good enough for folks to stay/come back to play. Yes HW, SB, ShB and EW are indeed major successes. (ShB onwards being the bigger ones desipte the game "according to these forums" ruining the game). And that is attributed to (for the most part) CBU3 doing an overall good job expac after expac.

But I forget you operate on the logic that CBU3 has done nothing right...yet you still pay monthly for the game. By your own logic you're either here because of bad WoW or you're one of those so called sheeple SE fans.

Lastly that last part is funny. Number 1 sure I'll give you. Number 2 makes no sense. Since when was asking for evidence a bad faith move? If you make a claim n folks ask for it that's perfectly normal. If one person hasnt provided evidence n they werent asked to its not bad faith if they turn around and ask. Number 3 is just more "hate big corporate jargon. And number 4 is also weird. If the fact is that your view is the minority you can call that bad faith. Now if you went further n said folks who say that and then proclaim your view is less valid THEN I'd agree.

[TheDecay]

Lastly that last part is funny. Number 1 sure I'll give you. Number 2 makes no sense. Since when was asking for evidence a bad faith move? If you make a claim n folks ask for it that's perfectly normal. If one person hasnt provided evidence n they werent asked to its not bad faith if they turn around and ask. Number 3 is just more "hate big corporate jargon. And number 4 is also weird. If the fact is that your view is the minority you can call that bad faith. Now if you went further n said folks who say that and then proclaim your view is less valid THEN I'd agree.

Why did you feel the need to attack the signature? Is it because you feel uncomfortable?

As for the rest of your post: NO ONE has any data on how job changes affected the game's popularity. In fact, this is data not even SE can collect, because the job changes happen simultaneously along with multiple other confounders (such as better storyline) so that a robust statistical causal analysis is basically impossible to conduct. This is why this argument is bad-faith: because no one can actually use data to prove anything here. Not even Square Enix. They have no control group or any causal instrument to tease out the effect.

So as any reasonable and sane person would do next, I inferred the most likely scenario based on what we can actually observe and made educated deductions. First, new players are most likely to try out a game based on advertisements and word of mouth. Second, SE has not talked about the job changes at all in their ads. Third, most people's discussion of FF14 outside of FF14 communities center on factors other than job design when they talk about why they like the game, including: the story, the positive community, the impression that Yoshi P cares more about the players than other devs... From this it's rather straightforward to conclude that job changes are very unlikely to have changed a potential player's decision on whether or not to try this game out and purchase it. Those job changes are announced only within the community, through live letters and patch notes. New players largely do not decide to start playing a game because of a 3-hour live letter discussing things they know nothing about.

Then of course more bad faith arguments followed but I don't have the time to explain why for every point. It's a variant of gish galloping after all. Instead of clearly communicating one single idea or argument, gish gallopers make many, all of which takes time to correct.

Oh, and cute "gotcha" attempts like "why are you paying for the sub" are basically variants of point number 1 in my signature. Asking why someone is still subbing when they have criticisms is practically identical from telling someone to unsub. The only difference is that one is passive aggressive. It's highly confusing why you would agree that that is a bad faith argument then write a passive aggressive variant of it.

[Fawkes]

Half of FF14's success is from WoW's failure.

Game was plenty popular before The Great WoW Exodus™, chief.

The other half: the FF fanbase's propensity to accept anything SE puts out.

Which is why version 1.0 was a huge success and the game was never completely remade from the ground up!
...Oh wait

[Kosachi]

snip

Ill take a crack at it then. The problem with the 2min meta is threefold.

A) While trying to make the game easier for people by having everyone buff at the same time, you're inadvertently making it harder by requiring pretty close to perfect play during those burst windows. With how rigid and linear rotations are in the game right now, you have literally zero chance of realigning yourself with the universal buff window without dropping a full usage of said raidbuff which feels like poo and is overall a bigger loss. So Option 1: Be late compared to everyone and feel bad or Option 2: Lose a usage and feel bad. Let's now talk about deaths. In a game that allegedly targets the casual players, they sure do penalize you to hell and back for dying. No only do you lose all your resources, buffs etc, your buff alignment is now FUBAR for the rest of the fight and there's not much you can do about that; which leads me to point number 2.

B) Back when we had staggered buff timers, there was ample opportunity for recovery in the event you screw up or die. "Oh, did I die just before my 2 minute burst? Oh well. I can pump during brotherhood (Was 90)" "Oh, did I screw something up and lose my Littany/Battle Voice window? I can send it during the next trick (was 60)". So for something that was supposed to be "too confusing" for people, it gave ample room to make the most value out of a bad situation whereas now, See point A.

C)Like you guys mentioned, concentration of damage. As it is now, damage is very heavily centered on your two minute windows with everyone's heavy hitting skills whizzing around. This does two things. 1) It overemphasizes the need to crit/dhit during those windows because of the multiplicative nature of raid buffs. Your run can live or die based on how your crit rng pans out during a buff window if optimization is your game. 2) It hampers fight design pretty heavily as to accommodate everyone in a party using their (generally pretty high apm) bursts. This leads to two general outcomes. Either the boss is sitting there twiddling its thumbs while eight people are running around punching it in the face or you have to do mechanics while playing the piano on your keyboard. Option 1 is really boring and puts me to sleep. Option 2 is really fun for me, but I also understand how it can be overwhelming for newer players so I would bet a small fortune that one of the main reasons SE has been dumbing all the jobs down to the point it's essentially smacking two rocks together is to allow people to do mechanics while pushing their buttons. This is also obviously undesirable. When we had the staggered buff windows, Losing out on a few buttons during a heavy mechanic window wasn't that big a deal because you could either hold until the next buff window which seldom was more than a minute away or you can lose whatever you lose and make up for it later since the damage profile was much flatter than it is now.

[Semirhage]

Isnip

Adding to this, the two minute meta is both a problem and a symptom of wider problems with job design. Jobs are becoming more samey for several reasons, one of which is making them fit this unified damage profile: A minute and a half of filler, followed by 30 seconds of dumping everything. Another culprit is inflating potencies on finisher moves. It moves more and more damage into that two minute window, and the multiplicative effect of crits, buffs, potions, etc moves more of your total damage contributions onto those big spiky hits. If you don't crit, whatever you did skillfully outside that two minute burst has a lot less importance. Ironically, in the name of making things more consistent to manage, it's transferred more of everyone's damage profile over to an RNG stat.

The 2 minute meta gets a lot of well-deserved flak, but it's not the source of its own problems. It's a downstream effect from CBU3's sledgehammer approach to stupidifying and homogenizing jobs. Lord knows Heavensward was janky, but instead of pursuing the interesting bits and working on the jank, they worked on deleting jank and smoothbraining the interesting bits. Stripping out RPG elements so everything is just DPS or DPS cost opportunity. "Refining" the hard content recipe down to a lot of stacking and spreading with occasional one-off interesting mechanics. Randomly throwing massive number buffs at jobs to get their play rates up. Every job they've put their "rework" fingers on since then has pushed it hard toward "press the buttons as they light up" pancaked skill ceiling design. I don't specifically want Heavensward combat back; I wish they had leaned in an entirely different design direction than they did after Gordias. It seems like CBU3 decided "welp, our playerbase is too stupid to have interestingly designed classes or content, so anytime we tinker with things after this you'll get back a job that could be macroed to one button".