IGN Brazil Asked Yoshida about 2 min meta

[Turtledeluxe]

So you're saying that because you feel it's dying, then it's dying. Like what metric are you trying to use? I don't play on Steam, and twitch doesn't feel like a good metric to see if people are playing or not. Like I agree that this expansion feels less engaging the ShB and SB, but I don't see the evidence of it dying.

Yes because revenue being down and player activity being down are my feelings. Also I wasn't saying it's dying. I'm saying the state of jobs and combat are a contributing factor to disengaged and unsubbed players. If combat was actually satisfying, if leveling jobs wasn't mostly pointless, perhaps retention and interest could be higher despite EW mostly being solo and small party content for the majority of players. High end content players are never gonna leave because the game is what it is due to them and they're blind to casual content being dull. And what I mean is there is a certain player who will never enjoy casual content so they don't care what it feels like to play it.

[ZavosEsperian]

So you're saying that because you feel it's dying, then it's dying. Like what metric are you trying to use? I don't play on Steam, and twitch doesn't feel like a good metric to see if people are playing or not. Like I agree that this expansion feels less engaging the ShB and SB, but I don't see the evidence of it dying.

If you are trying to find an exact metric for something like this, it is near impossible to find data that is not without significant error as SE does not provide numbers related to active players, and even this can be a difficult metric to parse without error.

I would argue the game will likely not die come 7.0, it is just unlikely for this to happen then. That being said, the patch content in DT, based on what we are seeing from fanfests, would suggest it will be in a similar state as EW, and will result in a severe reduction of players should there not be anything worth engaging with other than Player-Generated Content. This argument will also be true during the lull in content that will span up until release, outside of crossover events that you can do in a short period of time.

For reference, Player-Generated Content is content where players are creating the content more than the devs, who basically lay a framework for the content. Things like RP (and its more adult variety), PvP content, and decorating housing and other, creative endeavors by the player. Someone who engages primarily with RP (particularly ERP) likely will say the game is not dying as they always have new content. Players who interact mainly with raid content will probably say the game is dying as the number of people raiding will go down over time, particularly since DTs release date is going to have the most recent raid content be stretching a length of time comparable to, and likely exceeding, the length SoO was in WoW.

Thus comes the current and future problem post-7.0, the game getting content like it has been will cause the game to slowly die over time. The only players left will likely be players who interact with other players for RP related reasons and not much else. Most players who want the other content will likely sub for a month and be able to do everything they want to do and then unsub for the remainder of the time.

[AnnRam]

And he gave pretty solid answer.
'' But the reason it's like this today is that we've received, in the past, feedback from all over the world saying that the timing of fights were difficult, it was difficult to align skills between classes, we were asked to unify everything, and precisely because we received these requests to homogenize this, we homogenized it"

He is right. You asked for this. Now enjoy.

Agree, SE kinda listen I remember back in ARR/HS era when healers complained and cried so had because " Why I'm DPSING? I'm suppose to be a heal bot and not spam dots/aoes wtf anxiety" , Tanks the same " Too many skills! I'm struggling really hard with Anxiety right now", Relics arent fun! nerf them! too much work! not fun!

[Asari5]

why do people who dont like optimizing and arent interested in doing as much dmg as possible even care about theburst window?
wouldnt it therefore make more sense to listen to the people who actually care about the topic?

similar to jobdesign where it shouldnt matter what a redmage player thinks how a paladin plays.

[Volgia]

If you are trying to find an exact metric for something like this, it is near impossible to find data that is not without significant error as SE does not provide numbers related to active players, and even this can be a difficult metric to parse without error.

I would argue the game will likely not die come 7.0, it is just unlikely for this to happen then. That being said, the patch content in DT, based on what we are seeing from fanfests, would suggest it will be in a similar state as EW, and will result in a severe reduction of players should there not be anything worth engaging with other than Player-Generated Content. This argument will also be true during the lull in content that will span up until release, outside of crossover events that you can do in a short period of time.

For reference, Player-Generated Content is content where players are creating the content more than the devs, who basically lay a framework for the content. Things like RP (and its more adult variety), PvP content, and decorating housing and other, creative endeavors by the player. Someone who engages primarily with RP (particularly ERP) likely will say the game is not dying as they always have new content. Players who interact mainly with raid content will probably say the game is dying as the number of people raiding will go down over time, particularly since DTs release date is going to have the most recent raid content be stretching a length of time comparable to, and likely exceeding, the length SoO was in WoW.

Thus comes the current and future problem post-7.0, the game getting content like it has been will cause the game to slowly die over time. The only players left will likely be players who interact with other players for RP related reasons and not much else. Most players who want the other content will likely sub for a month and be able to do everything they want to do and then unsub for the remainder of the time.

So I agree with you that the game would die for me because if it's the same it wouldn't be engaging (I love the end-game raiding), but I haven't seen this massive drop in the playerbase. I've expressed my disappointment in whatever cut corners EW did and I got a LOT of pushback from people who are saying that actually these changes have been the best they've seen in their FF14 lives.

[TomsYoungerBro]

And he gave pretty solid answer.
'' But the reason it's like this today is that we've received, in the past, feedback from all over the world saying that the timing of fights were difficult, it was difficult to align skills between classes, we were asked to unify everything, and precisely because we received these requests to homogenize this, we homogenized it"

He is right. You asked for this. Now enjoy.

This statement from Yoshi P is really bad for multiple reasons. I was actually thinking about making a post about this in the near future, but i'll state some quick things here:

First off, there is zero accountability on the change itself. At the end of the day, it is the developers who have the final say on the product. If they decided to take that feedback, and said feedback was bad, then they share a good part of the blame. Second, why was this feedback taken into such consideration? Where is the paper trail that shows how wanted this change was across the world? The feedback avenues this game has are good for suggestions, and not for getting a consensus for what most of the playerbase wants. If we are just gonna take feedback at face value, their gonna have to start polling things so they at least have evidence. For now, the blame falls mostly on CBU3 and Yoshi P.

[SeverianLyonesse]

1. Players are a terrible source of wisdom when it comes to "balancing". Every game that has ever listened to player feedback about how "unplayable" or "broken" things are and reached for total parity ended up severely diluting meaningful choices and agency in favor of homogenization. Devs should maintain healthy disregard for players' opinions on that front, and always seek to introduce non-equivalent solutions to balancing rather than cutting unique features or redistributing them to everyone else.

2. The only real problem with FFXIV, which is the same problem with GW2 and I imagine with a lot of games, are group-wide damage buffs. These are always going to be tyrannical no matter how you implement them. In GW2 because 100% buff uptime is possible, alacrity and quickness are now mandatory, forcing the game into the terrible decision of either designing dedicated boonslaves, or just allowing both buffs to be inconsequentially generated with a passive trait that does nothing to change up playstyle. In FFXIV, having limited buff windows just forces players to dump all their skills during someone else's golden hour, which in turn forces the designs and playstyles to all converge on this weird in-step DDR Rockettes routine. PARTY DAMAGE BUFFS RUIN INDIVIDUAL SKILL, REACTIVE GAMEPLAY, AND SPONTANEOUS CHOICE. If the devs would simply cut that very small category of skills, no class would be locked into a two-minute rotation and could be redesigned with new cadence and contours, the game would still have plenty of room for complexity and cooperation in other dimensions of combat, and players would be able to optimize DPS in their own ways without the feel-bad of needing to blind-sync with other people's buffs.

[Aldath]

Agree, SE kinda listen I remember back in ARR/HS era when healers complained and cried so had because " Why I'm DPSING? I'm suppose to be a heal bot and not spam dots/aoes wtf anxiety" , Tanks the same " Too many skills! I'm struggling really hard with Anxiety right now", Relics arent fun! nerf them! too much work! not fun!

Honestly the more I dig into this issue and read older stuff the more I realize why people think Margrat is a stand-in for the devs.
I don't like the direction the game takes in regards of just releasing and dumping content without making it accessible to newer players, but heck, I'm sure if they removed stuff like the 2 minute meta you'd have people moaning about whatever solution was implemented and try to squeeze the fun out of it for the sake of DPS performance.

2. The only real problem with FFXIV, which is the same problem with GW2 and I imagine with a lot of games, are group-wide damage buffs. These are always going to be tyrannical no matter how you implement them. In GW2 because 100% buff uptime is possible, alacrity and quickness are now mandatory, forcing the game into the terrible decision of either designing dedicated boonslaves, or just allowing both buffs to be inconsequentially generated with a passive trait that does nothing to change up playstyle. In FFXIV, having limited buff windows just forces players to dump all their skills during someone else's golden hour, which in turn forces the designs and playstyles to all converge on this weird in-step DDR Rockettes routine. PARTY DAMAGE BUFFS RUIN INDIVIDUAL SKILL, REACTIVE GAMEPLAY, AND SPONTANEOUS CHOICE. If the devs would simply cut that very small category of skills, no class would be locked into a two-minute rotation and could be redesigned with new cadence and contours, the game would still have plenty of room for complexity and cooperation in other dimensions of combat, and players would be able to optimize DPS in their own ways without the feel-bad of needing to blind-sync with other people's buffs.

Although I agree with you, people would then proceed to gatekeep whatever classes have the best individual performance, which happened before in GW2. I don't know if you were there when you couldn't play a Necromancer in Fractals with random people because of the class performance despite content being completely clearable with all sorts of class combinations. There's no real solution to the meta mindset.

[Kaurhz]

I mean this is just one of those things where:

- People don't understand what exactly they're asking for, or the greater implication of what they're asking for.

- What the developers think the players mean, and what the players actually mean are 2 entirely different things.

I will say 1 thing though... You're never, ever going to get a census with the community, simply because the community is so large and different people will have different preferences depending on the type of player that you conform to.

Seeing some of the changes they've made it is difficult to convince that it has been done exclusively because people have complained that something was too difficult. Granted, it is the case with many changes - But there are many more changes that they have made which IMO isn't because people complained it was too difficult, but because some people just won't take that step to learn - and IMO when you try and factor in designing systems around people that don't want to learn, is when you start to tread into dangerous territory.

[Auryan]

-snip-

I suggest reading more articles to get a better view of the coming DT content. Coincidentally, I have this Famitsu article from a few months back where they were mentioning adding a new type of battle content and/or more exploratory content like Eureka and Bozja. It's in Japanese and the Google English translation is...rough, to say the least. Link: https://www.famitsu.com/news/202307/30311422.html

That alone is a huge and welcome change for the lack of exploratory content, 'cause in all seriousness, they are my favorite type of content in XIV and the absence this expansion is sorely felt. I'd trade all of the deep dungeons for more exploratory content.

Although nothing is confirmed yet and plans can change, but I'm optimistic and hopeful of the thought of more of these quirky and more experimental content (even if they don't land gracefully out of the gate).

And I see they're taking another stab at the island sanctuary-like content, but geared towards group play. This also feeds in to your comment about player-generated content. That sounds like a positive for this type content as I don't think they nailed what they were aiming for and hopefully this new direction can expand on the Island Sanctuary concept.

So, that's what has me really excited. On top of all the high quality core content of course.