How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[Post]

I think it's worth trying to understand why 'wrong choices' as we refer to them even exist, and to what degree they're wrong (e.g. will the choice make me sub-optimal, will they make me die, will they make someone else die, will they make the group lose the game).

What you think of when you say meaningful choice fits into where the developers have set the parameters of what can work and not 'make the group lose the game'. After we're all operating in that developer designed space, and we're repeating things until the next thing comes out which is natural because the game rewards repeating and we've subscribed for at least a month, we tend to shift the bar of what is wrong to include less and less optimal things. Optimal here meaning 'less than the maximum damage dealt/lethal incoming damage reduced and minimum healing that detracts from that damage' because ultimately that makes the repeat go faster.

We like to go faster because we're not just on our own time when playing with others, especially when so many game systems exist purely to make grouping convenient and easy. It's thus a social faux pax to make things take longer and be more challenging than they could be.

It's not just players that do this either; the way we play and our experiences in this environment informs how they develop. The man himself said he wanted the game to be easy to pick up and put down because everyone's so busy nowadays.
There's always going to be players that feel the 'space' they created is too wide or too narrow, especially when players are more interested in venturing into the space for the rewards than the experience itself (which, again, they add the rewards and repeat rewards).

So, using WoW as it's foundation, a subscription model, and allowing players to play whatever they choose to a degree, of course there's going to be a dearth of 'correct choices' when the only way they can create classes is to make their execution be the level on which you engage with them. There's quite possibly no other place for them to be creative with the jobs other than how the player executes them (1 2 3 instead of 1 1 1), especially when the encounters they're designing for and mechanics they're designing for continually get pared down because some jobs do better at it than others (multiple targets; long range vs small hitboxes), some roles have more likelihood to waste other players' time as they have different responsibilities (tanks getting infinite aggro, tanks and healers getting simpler to use mitigation and healing, bosses positioning themselves instead of relying on players to do it) and some mechanics feel impossible to players to solve on the first go or a loss of DPS to handle (hence them being relegated to either the final savage floors or Ultimates nowadays, instead of like, Leviathan/Oppressor/Ratfinx/Refurbisher normal mode wiping parties that didn't have someone do the thing).

[vetch]

It's not just players that do this either; the way we play and our experiences in this environment informs how they develop. The man himself said he wanted the game to be easy to pick up and put down because everyone's so busy nowadays.

Yoshi says all kinds of things. He's a public face, it's part of his job to spin.

Ironically it was much easier for me to pick up and put down jobs in a game like WoW, where kits were distinct and memorable and full of choices that depended on the situation, than one like FF14 where all the barely-differentiated skill slop runs together.

I couldn't tell you what the MCH skill order is anymore after not playing MCH for 8 months but I could tell you what the Warlock pets in vanilla WoW did and when to use each one despite having played it as an alt job over 16 years ago. Not even as a main job.

I think this is because when skills are creative, they're more memorable, and when choices are meaningful and impactful it feels good to make the choice, and good feelings are more memorable.

A Warlock's Healthstones don't use your potion cooldown btw, so passing them out before a tough pull is a great way to relieve some pressure on your healers. :-)

[Post]

Yoshi says all kinds of things. He's a public face, it's part of his job to spin.

Ironically it was much easier for me to pick up and put down jobs in a game like WoW, where kits were distinct and memorable and full of choices that depended on the situation, than one like FF14 where all the barely-differentiated skill slop runs together.

I couldn't tell you what the MCH skill order is anymore after not playing MCH for 8 months but I could tell you what the Warlock pets in vanilla WoW did and when to use each one despite having played it as an alt job over 16 years ago. Not even as a main job.

I think this is because when skills are creative, they're more memorable, and when choices are meaningful and impactful it feels good to make the choice, and good feelings are more memorable.

A Warlock's Healthstones don't use your potion cooldown btw, so passing them out before a tough pull is a great way to relieve some pressure on your healers. :-)

I dunno man, it's pretty easy to figure out the best way to play most of the jobs in FFXIV just from reading the tooltips if you're already familiar with the game. I haven't played WoW since 2010, but even just going from one patch or item level to the next, your stat priority, talents and rotations could all change pretty significantly to play 'optimally' to avoid 'wasting the group's time'.

I get what you're trying to say about a job's identity (and I don't disagree), but I think when it comes to just playing the jobs, our different experiences might mean that this point is more subjective than it seems.

I tried making that comment from a more generalized perspective, anyways. I was trying to mean more like 'they design the game as a whole to limit the amount of player friction from interaction as possible.' I believe this has always been the case, and it's why Duty Finder is a core tenant if the game (and not Duty Support, but now that they can do Duty Support that's where they're heading, even with encounter design). It's why players could skip cutscenes in Prae originally, and why we had to complain to get them to put in an ilvl sync on Endsinger and a rolling min ilvl on Alliance Raid Roulette.

I believe they basically don't want players to have to interact because some aren't comfortable doing it, and while that's a noble goal, I think it's gone on to affect things like job design so that there's less of a chance your healer or tank aren't up to snuff and need some help or interaction.

As it is now, either one can carry most of the MSQ content alone, and it's not too difficult to do so.

As it is now, deep, meaningful choice is too dangerous to exist in the players hands because so many avenues of choice could lead to player friction, and the simpler road avoids this.

[vetch]

I dunno man, it's pretty easy to figure out the best way to play most of the jobs in FFXIV just from reading the tooltips if you're already familiar with the game. I haven't played WoW since 2010, but even just going from one patch or item level to the next, your stat priority, talents and rotations could all change pretty significantly to play 'optimally' to avoid 'wasting the group's time'.

Certainly. It's not hard to determine the rotation by reading the skills. What's hard is finding the desire to do so more than once when the skills themselves are as interesting as a bowl of rice gruel.

I tried making that comment from a more generalized perspective, anyways. I was trying to mean more like 'they design the game as a whole to limit the amount of player friction from interaction as possible.' I believe this has always been the case, and it's why Duty Finder is a core tenant if the game (and not Duty Support, but now that they can do Duty Support that's where they're heading, even with encounter design). It's why players could skip cutscenes in Prae originally, and why we had to complain to get them to put in an ilvl sync on Endsinger and a rolling min ilvl on Alliance Raid Roulette.

I believe they basically don't want players to have to interact because some aren't comfortable doing it, and while that's a noble goal, I think it's gone on to affect things like job design so that there's less of a chance your healer or tank aren't up to snuff and need some help or interaction.

'Designing to reduce friction from interaction' is giving them too much credit. They straight-up design the game to reduce player interactions, period. Even should I want to talk to people it's more efficient to use a third-party chat program because of crap like not being able to whisper someone if one of us is in an instance -- a technology that has existed since at least 2005. That's a HUGE bootstrapping issue to ever making friends. And it's not a noble goal, because of the following:

As it is now, deep, meaningful choice is too dangerous to exist in the players hands because so many avenues of choice could lead to player friction, and the simpler road avoids this.

People literally crave agency! When they don't have any agency over their lives they get violent and irascible. It's why people trash public restrooms. How shameful for a multiplayer game that promotes itself as a recreational activity to remove the fun elements people crave because some players might be rude to others, instead of just keeping the fun and having more GMs to deal with the rude players! You can literally have both if you choose them, except that Square is the EA of Japan and won't tolerate making 1% less profit in exchange for an immensely richer game experience.

To tie it to your examples, Prae might be unskippable, but you can still skip the incredibly long MSQ cutscenes in Bowl of Embers, Toto-Rak, ARF, etc., and yet the players stopped bugging sprouts to skip them because the company made it a point to protect that aspect of fun with enforcement instead of amputating it.