Revisiting the 10 year roadmap

[Sindele]

I dun care if they don't like me. And they don't read these forums anyways.

Just tired of people squawking about "buh hard to balance buh" and "you don't know what they are thinking uwu they got so much data" when we ALSO have data through FFLogs and Lucky Bancho. Players aren't stupid. We're not in the dark.

Also Kaiten change was very stupid because it didn't solve any the issues they claimed to want to change, but altered the playstyle to Shinten spam. SAM still has button bloat and still has incredibly wide damage variance. And like... every job presses buttons... before other buttons... That's how rotations work. If they wanted to get rid of "buttons we always pressed before skills" they should remove the 12 from every 123. Remove Life Surge. Remove Reassemble. Remove Requiescat. Remove Blood Weapon. ETC ETC

Truly genius.

The problem is that our data is in the dark compared to their data.

Can you slice your data to break down the Kaiten usage of players that leveled SAM from at least 52 to 55 but no more than 89 in the past 30 days? What about those who did that in the last 60 and then haven't played SAM in the last 30 days? How about the Kaiten usage rates of players that attempted content above Extreme difficulty as SAM and then went on to not play it for over 30 days?

No. You can't. It's literally not possible to do with any kind of useful accuracy, FFLogs is a fraction of a fraction of the relevant data to a business. Player data sources simply are not complete enough. You and I cannot know what went into that decision unless they tell us. It is truly a completely different level of ability to peer into the practicality of what players do.

You can certainly argue that the result is silly, heaven knows I have. You can certainly argue with the lack of transparency and obfuscatory responses. But "hur dur they clearly don't play the job" is just useless clownshoes nerd emoji behavior. Gotta be willing to put yourself in the mindset of "why would they think this was a good decision?", even for the decisions you hate, if you want to understand them and how to avoid them in the future.

[Aravell]

You can certainly argue that the result is silly, heaven knows I have. You can certainly argue with the lack of transparency and obfuscatory responses. But "hur dur they clearly don't play the job" is just useless clownshoes nerd emoji behavior. Gotta be willing to put yourself in the mindset of "why would they think this was a good decision?", even for the decisions you hate, if you want to understand them and how to avoid them in the future.

I would agree that "They clearly don't play the job" is a useless argument most of the time, especially in regards to Kaiten, since removing Kaiten does not significantly break the job in any way. It changes the flow and makes some aspects unsatisfying, sure, but it really doesn't completely break the job and stop it from functioning. However, they have broken jobs before and made them unable to function properly, like when they briefly removed Hagakure from SAM and Energy Drain from SCH, it's fair to say "They clearly didn't test this" in those cases, because you'd clearly notice a job was unable to function properly if you actually tested it.

[Deo14]

I would agree that "They clearly don't play the job" is a useless argument most of the time, especially in regards to Kaiten, since removing Kaiten does not significantly break the job in any way. It changes the flow and makes some aspects unsatisfying, sure, but it really doesn't completely break the job and stop it from functioning. However, they have broken jobs before and made them unable to function properly, like when they briefly removed Hagakure from SAM and Energy Drain from SCH, it's fair to say "They clearly didn't test this" in those cases, because you'd clearly notice a job was unable to function properly if you actually tested it.

Argument is usually not about functionality, it's more about "if they actually were in touch with said job, they would have immediately realized why this change is stupid, and why would majority of players hate it". Are people's standards so low they're fine with "at least it's functional"?

I really doubt if whoever is behind Kaiten changes actually played SAM, he would conclude that removing it is a solution. When it comes to action bloat, you could reduce Kenki generation or increase cost of Shinten/Kaiten, when it comes to button bloat, you could finally merge Iki with Ogi, and possibly merge some ST/AoE skill pairs. Future proofing also makes no sense, since we still have no replacement for it. It was simply dumb change, which didn't solve anything.

I wouldn't say that it's about testing either, because they clearly didn't fully test SAM, since now you spend a whooping 20-23% of all actions on pressing Shinten. If they actually tested it and concluded that it is fine that you have 30+ skills, but spend more than 20% of your time pressing single one of them (especially since it's just an oGCD), then I think it's safe to say that job design is at the bottom of Mariana Trench, and they're just digging a hole to get even lower.