Yoshi P in a nutshell

[LilimoLimomo]

But the question is why? There is 19 jobs already, wouldn't it be better to make jobs as distinct as possible, both in sense of job fantasy, gameplay and difficulty?

Personally I think both are good. Make things accessible, but also make a variety of jobs that are distinct. I do like the idea of having easier jobs and more difficult jobs; SMN for those who want something easier, BLM for those who want something more challenging, etc. But Yoshi-P might think differently. There's no one right way to do it, it really depends on what Yoshi-P's specific goals are and what resources he has access to in order to best approach those goals.

Low skill ceiling is objectively bad. Easy to learn, hard to master, that is pillar of skill expression. Plenty of gamers want that.

But plenty of gamers don't want that, which is why it's not actually objectively bad. Some people want their game time to be chill and easy; Yoshi-P recognizes that and is trying to make a game that all these different kinds of players can enjoy.

Why couldn't I? Existence is subjective, yes, but whether changes actually changed something, that is factual. Rotations are static...Then you have lower APM outside of your burst, but that's close to irrelevant...

I get the impression that you and I may be talking about different things when we talk about "action bloat", because actions-per-minute doesn't need to come into it. The controller and UI have a limited amount of space with which to contain all the actions a job has access to. The more actions there are, the less comfortably they fit in that limited space. It sounds like you play with keyboard and mouse, and if that's the case it makes sense that you wouldn't experience this problem in the same way as controller users. There are band-aids like macros and bar-swapping that can technically give players access to all of these actions, but these solutions are generally either clunky or less accessible. There's an argument to be made that the design of the game's interface would be improved with fewer action buttons so that they could more comfortably fit on the crosshotbar. And I say "arguably" because like most game design, this is subjective.

It's devs job to extrapolate data out of small subset of players. And what happens, if players start to feel like their feedback is being ignored?....0.4% expressing feedback doesn't mean only 0.4% disagree with it

I think you may be getting something confused, because when it comes to extrapolating data, that is exactly what it means. You get a large enough sample of users, get their data, and then provided that there aren't any confounding variables, you can safely assume that the data you found proportionately generalizes to the overall population. That's how researchers get statistical data for everything.

And in this case, we have a really great sample size of over 100,000 players. The call to action is put out, and of those players, less than 400 care enough to express negative feedback. If we generalize this data to the overall player population, those 400 players represent more than just 400 players. But the same is true for the 999,600+ players who weren't bothered enough to provide negative feedback; they too represent more players. Which is why the percentage of 0.4% generalizes to the rest of the player population.

Then you also want to account for the fact that SAM is just one job out of 19, only fraction of those 100 000 viewers play or care about SAM.

Oh of course. I had been hoping that the estimates would be enough to showcase that the amount of negative response was small, but if we want to we can try to get more accurate numbers. So let's dive in!

The 6.1 patch stream had 364k views on YouTube. The Twitch stream is too old so I can't see it anymore, but we can get an estimate of its views by looking at the 6.4 patch stream, which had 197k on YouTube and 34k on Twitch. 34/197= 0.173, so 364k x 1.173 = an estimated 426k total viewers for the stream.

Now there are 19 classes in the game, and while most people do use multiple classes, let's be overly generous and assume that the only people who care about Samurai are people who main them. So let's divide the total viewership of 426k by 19 to get the number of viewers who care about Samurai: 22,000.

So, of the people 22,000 Samurai watching that stream, let's again be generous and say that 400 took Yoshi-P up on his offer to write negative feedback. That's 1.8% of Samurai.

I imagine you could probably find some other reasons to adjust this number in some way. But I would be incredibly, incredibly surprised if there were any other meaningful operations that would transform a number as low as 1.8% of Samurai to a number high enough to be worth the developers rolling back. You would need to find some way to multiply that by around 30 to get a soft majority, or around 20 to get a minority that was still large enough to have weight. I don't think there are additional factors that will lead to multipliers of that magnitude.

The long and short of it is that not many people have cared enough to do so much as make a post or give a like. And while I'm sad that those people have lost something they care about, from a business perspective it makes sense for the devs to interpret their change as having very minimal opposition and move on.

Then also account for the fact that community is pretty split into people playing the game, and into people "playing" the game.

With respect, it seems dishonest to pretend that the players who RP and play dress-up aren't also doing content. MSQ gates everything and it contains mandatory combat. The fact that they have different preferences than you does not make them any less players who do combat in FF14.

After 6.1, I started playing more PLD. Then 6.3 PLD rework happened, and I rather went back to maining SAM.

I'm surprised that even without Kaiten you still enjoy SAM. What is it that you enjoy about the class? I've got it leveled to 80 and while I enjoy some of what it has to offer, I think the 3 different combos to gain "stickers" just wasn't my style.