Revisiting the 10 year roadmap

[Absurdity]

This is one and only area of CBU3 that I genuinely hope they just flat out fire everyone (job team) because they are incredibly incompetent.

I wouldn't fire experienced developers but they absolutely need new blood in the job team.
It has been the same 4 people since at least 6 years, they are understaffed and completely out of fresh ideas, and it shows.

[Eorzean_username]

The reason why Kaiten was different, which is likely why they did the change they did, is because other than pre Lv52 and pre 62 on AOE, there was never a single instance where you DIDN'T press Kaiten -> Iaijutsu, you did always and without question as any of the Iaijutsu's charged with Kaiten was a complete gain over using Shinten/Kyuten and/or using Kaiten on non-Iaijutsu combo finishers. It was so baseline you always did, which they saw as "well if you always do it, why do we even have the option to use it without?" and decided to get rid of it.

Which is why this is a perfect example of SE's tendency to "overcorrect" on potentially-legitimate criticisms — outright-obliterating things, rather than first refining them.

Oftentimes, SE sees "A" is a problem, and then decides to Plunge straight from "A" to "Z" in one go.

Rather than something like:

A — Manually press a separate Kaiten key before every Iaijutsu.

M — Each Iaijutsu now automatically consumes up to 20 Kenki per use to increase its damage by up to 50%.

Z — Completely remove Kaiten, bake its potency into Iaijutsu baseline, and push all Kenki management onto Shinten.

...where "M" would accomplish everything that removing Kaiten supposedly did, while also still retaining an extra layer of Kenki reward and management, as well as the possibility of automatically performing the Kaiten animation that people are attached to.

—————————————————

This "A to Z" habit is a very strange, impatient design style, and probably a manifestation of too few designers having too many tasks under too much pressure... so there's a tendency to not want to keep too many long-term "plates spinning" in terms of wait-and-see observations.

Also, it's probably seen as more efficient for an overworked/understaffed team to rebalance the Potencies of a Job fewer times total — which may also contribute to not wanting to make incremental changes, and rather try to just "get to the point" that they imagine is the ultimate endpoint anyway (something that we see in a lot of other FFXIV design, where Yoshida frequently justifies it as "Oh, that would have happened anyway" or "Oh, everyone would have done that anyway" — eg, turning Dungeons into rigid hallways, etc).

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I wouldn't fire experienced developers but they absolutely need new blood in the job team.
It has been the same 4 people since at least 6 years, they are understaffed and completely out of fresh ideas, and it shows.

I want them to re-instate the guy playtesting Healers who was supposedly getting "too good" so we can have CBU3-internal feedback why current Heal design sucks instead of this 2-button rotation BS.

[Kozh]

I want them to re-instate the guy playtesting Healers who was supposedly getting "too good" so we can have CBU3-internal feedback why current Heal design sucks instead of this 2-button rotation BS.

Too bad that even with internal feedback, yoshi-p most likely won't change healer design. He's dead set on catering to those heal bots who spam Cure1 (which is weird excuse anyway since those people will still spam 1 healing spell even if healer had 123 rotations).

[Eorzean_username]

He's dead set on catering to those heal bots who spam Cure1 (which is weird excuse anyway since those people will still spam 1 healing spell even if healer had 123 rotations).

To be honest "he's" not even doing that, because Cure 1 is basically useless in most situations, and has nothing actually propping it up.

The irony is that most Healer development since Stormblood has been to keep piling on excess tools that the supposed target audience probably isn't even using, because they're overwhelmed by a saturation of choices that don't really feel like they matter.

[Rufalus]

Lmao fire the balancing team? More like firing everyone in SE starting from the NFT acolytes

They are still special for non-gameplay things like art and music. I think it's mostly a leadership problem at S-E. The game assets are a lot better than the gameplay.

[Jojoya]

Have to admit this discussion didn't go the way I anticipated. I was expecting there would be more talk about the ramifications of removing the MMO tag from the game and how that might impact game design and the player base.

My own thoughts and questions:

Moving this to a single player game removes the need for job balance. That could open the door to adding in job customization that would make them more fun to play and allow them to be overpowered in some content.

Does this explain the apparent lack of interest in healer design? A dedicated healing job wouldn't be needed in a single player game unless they are designing encounters where a main goal is to restore health to a NPC instead of remove it (think Valithria Dreamwalker and Tsulong from WoW). Trust NPCs will exist for those occasions outside healing is required.

Is there still a place for quality high end raiding such as Ultimate and Savage in a game that's meant for single players with the option to play with friends? As a single player game, there should be difficult challenges for the single player. The game currently lacks those outside of players soloing what is supposed to be group content so development time would need to be allocated toward making them.

What happens to end game content and gear progression? Is there no longer an end game, just a wait for the next content patch with an increase to level cap?

What happens to the open world? Do we end up in isolated instances such as those we experienced at the start of 5.0 and end of 6.0? Are we still isolated even if we're trying to play with friends like we currently experience in such areas? Will hunts and FATEs be restricted to solo play? Power creep over time would nerf hunts for solo players but the major FATEs like Chi and Ixion that can't be done solo would have to be reworked if level sync isn't removed.

Will housing be changed? Neighborhoods are pointless in a single player game, not that the wards have felt like neighborhoods in the first place considering they're usually empty of players.

What will the game look like once the MMO is officially dropped and it takes on the single player identity?

This is a slap in the face to their current customers because they are ignoring us to chase the people who haven’t wanted to play the game.

Considering the way many of their current customers keep slapping the devs in the face (when they're not sending death threats) over changes to the game, perhaps that's part of the reason they want to go back to a single player game. I suspect they didn't experience the same degree of outright hostility as they have over the MMO.

I wouldn't blame them for preferring to make games that appeal to their old customers who didn't harass them instead of making games for their current customers that do. Look at all the calls for the developers to be fired in this thread alone.

Sounds like some people aren't getting the message that workers are now sending regarding better workplaces and work/life balance. Customers frequently play just as big a role in quiet quitting as employers do. No one wants to be paid bottom tier wages while getting verbally abused on a regular basis when they can take their skillset to other jobs that pay more and have a more pleasant work environment.

[Semirhage]

Good balance revolves around good content design. XIVs problems. Is the content design is so strict and linear...

For want of an analogy you have 3 cars.

Car A has let's say 9/10 acceleration, 6/10 top speed. 4/10 handling.

Car B has 4/10 acceleration, 8/10 top speed. 8/10 handling.

Car C has 5/10 acceleration, 10,10 top speed, 4/10 handling.

In the final fantasy race course where everything is strictly linear that track is basically just a super boring long straight line... in which case Car C is massively OP and broken. There is no balance..

However if they through some corners and hills on that race course then suddenly not only do all 3 cars become a lot more balanced despite having completely different stats and abilites but that track also. becomes a lot more fun..any of those 3 cars could win the race thus balance Is achieved.

It's much worse than that; the jobs aren't balanced where A is good at X, B is good at Y, etc. Look at current Warrior. It's typical to see one or two of those every expansion. Best self-sustain, best damage, easiest to play, best at everything. Even if we had a track with dips and curves, you'd be hard-pressed to find one that WAR wasn't either best or second-best on. The fact that FFXIV's combat system only ever looks at one of those variables exacerbates the problem (homogenization magnifies it too), but it's not the root cause. In what way does RDM truly outshine SMN? Where's WHM's truly unique niche other than "it's popular"? What curve in the road would give BRD limelight when DNC is just more mobile, easier to play, has stronger buffs, and is frequently better at everything?

[Striker44]

Have to admit this discussion didn't go the way I anticipated. I was expecting there would be more talk about the ramifications of removing the MMO tag from the game and how that might impact game design and the player base.

Where did you see anything about "removing the MMO tag" from the game? I think the discussion has gone differently than you anticipated because you were looking for talk about something that just isn't happening. I watched the video and Yoshi-P straight up said the game is an MMO. It's not becoming a "single player game." The talk in there was about adding more options for people who prefer playing solo to access MSQ dungeons and trials by expanding the Trust system; there's no talk whatsoever about the game becoming single-player (he even explicitly says that none of the grouping options for doing content with other people would be changing). So most of your questions about what happens to the open world, housing, etc. are simply irrelevant because nothing about the core of the game being an MMO is changing.

Considering the way many of their current customers keep slapping the devs in the face (when they're not sending death threats) over changes to the game, perhaps that's part of the reason they want to go back to a single player game. I suspect they didn't experience the same degree of outright hostility as they have over the MMO.

I wouldn't blame them for preferring to make games that appeal to their old customers who didn't harass them instead of making games for their current customers that do. Look at all the calls for the developers to be fired in this thread alone.

This is an excellent point. I get the sense that it's a maturity issue, with people not yet mature enough to realize that going on endless, bitter rants doesn't do anything to have your voice heard.

[Aravell]

Considering the way many of their current customers keep slapping the devs in the face (when they're not sending death threats) over changes to the game, perhaps that's part of the reason they want to go back to a single player game. I suspect they didn't experience the same degree of outright hostility as they have over the MMO.

I wouldn't blame them for preferring to make games that appeal to their old customers who didn't harass them instead of making games for their current customers that do. Look at all the calls for the developers to be fired in this thread alone.

Sounds like some people aren't getting the message that workers are now sending regarding better workplaces and work/life balance. Customers frequently play just as big a role in quiet quitting as employers do. No one wants to be paid bottom tier wages while getting verbally abused on a regular basis when they can take their skillset to other jobs that pay more and have a more pleasant work environment.

I want to point out that the negative feedback only started rising when they started pushing Trusts, very easy solo instances and job simplifications in ShB. It basically looks like they got negative feedback, they got mad that they got negative feedback, they double down on the changes that people are voicing their discontent towards, then they get more negative feedback and then it continues onwards.

It sounds like you're trying to say that the issue was that the players gave negative feedback in the first place. If the developers want less negative feedback, maybe they should communicate with their players more, actually show that they're listening rather than give us nothing but radio silence. It's understandable for the players to get agitated when the dev team has not shown that they even care about our feedback, or that they even hear about it at all, and they asked us for our feedback.