Breaking the Majority’s Silence: A Job Criticism Thread

[Gralna]

(snip).

you're not the voice of the majority. Coming here also won't reach the majority. Most online survey's that have been done in regard to gaming and online engagement, have shown that only 20-30% of a game's playerbase seeks additional information about the game outside of the game itself. Then only a small niche of that percentage engage in online discussions. There are maybe a hundred or so regulars here on the forums, maybe 2x to 3x that that lurk, several thousands on reddit/twitter, with tens of thousands lurking on the discussions. This is for a game with an estimate of around 500k-1.5M people playing regularly, which even the low end of that scale, online discussion breaks maybe 1-3% of playerbase, with about 5-10% lurking on it.

In general, SE and to be fair, pretty much most companies, they view the opinion of the silent majority as numbers go up, people agree with them. A more nuanced approach would be login surveys, though those can have their own issues with accuracy and from what I've seen in other games, are more used to make players think the company cares, and no meaningful changes from them.

[Stanelis]

I actually like the current iteration of summoner.

[Cynric]

There are things they could do better like add a couple of situational interesting skills I guess. Though in the past those skills were often under utilized due to being situational. The community also wanted all of the cooldowns to line up with trick attack forever.

Overall though the game is fine to me. Maybe some more fun group content would be nice. Job design in pve is ok. The game has always had some level of homogenization to it ever since ARR so it's not like things were super unique back in the day either. The first thing the dev team did when they changed Warrior was to make it be more like Paladin and that was like 10 years ago. I think it's always been their balance philosophy.

Also if you're scared of retribution for your opinion the in game support has a feedback option. I personally use it all the time.

[Payadopa]

So you agree current as is fine then? Great! lol

There is no high and low with current AST. Just bland uniformity.

[Jeeqbit]

The issue with complaining about homogenization is that people also complain when it's not homogenized ie. when Paladin did not have a gap closer like DRK, people complained and when Warrior's gap closer used gauge unlike other jobs, people complained. Now their gap closers are all the same. When Paladin blocked physical attacks and Dark Knight was good against magic, people complained so now it blocks both. There are plenty more examples like that.

The game has always had some level of homogenization to it ever since ARR so it's not like things were super unique back in the day either.

This is so true. Everyone wants to pretend tanks in ARR did not both have: an enmity combo, a stun, a ranged enmity attack, a short cooldown like Rampart/Inner Beast, job identity cooldowns like Bulwark/Thrill, a long cooldown like Sentinel/Vengeance, an invuln like Hallowed Ground/Holm Gang.

What worries me is that there’s never any definitive way to prove that the silent majority isn’t the one saying ‘everything in FFXIV is fine’.

I agree. That is the problem with the OP's claim. If they are part of this "silent majority", there is no evidence to support that they are, especially when the "silent majority" usually don't come to the forums to complain.

What SE has said before is that they listen to their veteran players "too much", which was around the time they stopped listening to them as much. Because we have to be honest that it is normally veteran players that come here to complain.

It's a feedback forum. It doesn't matter what anyone is assuming. Say your think and leave.

That is what I think though.

[Zarkovitch]

The problem is they re like 4 guys for all classes. If we want more new fresh interesting classes they need more peeps inside that departement. Expect the new job to be easy to learn.

[Jeeqbit]

The problem is they re like 4 guys for all classes. If we want more new fresh interesting classes they need more peeps inside that departement. Expect the new job to be easy to learn.

There are 19 jobs. But let's be generous and include Blue Mage (20 jobs), the new jobs (22) and the new limited job (23).

Let's divide 2 years and 7 months or 929 days (the time between Endwalker relase and Dawntrail release) by 23. The result is 40.39 days spent designing each class/job, which is a lot.

Let's assume this task is split between 2 people doing 11.5 jobs each. The result is 80.78 days spent designing each job.

The point is, unless they are doing a lot else with their time, they would have plenty of time to do this task.

[MsMisato]

As long this game it's meant to be played in consoles you won't have more skills or complex rotations.

I won't be surprised if in the next expansion jobs only gain new visuals/ traits and probably 1 or 2 new skills max.

kind of funny how FFXI online had way more weaponskills, buffs, debuffs, spells than this game and it was originally console only and it did just fine. Its not console its the playerbase that is making FFXIV a simpleton game.

[Bonoki]

Job balance is numbers. Job identity is how the job produces the numbers and actually affects the gameplay. You can always tweak numbers, you can't change freely how a job fundamentally operates.

For simplicity's sake, look at healers - for pressing between 2-3 different damage buttons really well while dealing with mechanics, they can produce a surprising amount of damage rivalling tanks on occasion. That damage could ALSO be high if their damage kit was more nuanced and had more thought than pressing a DOT every 30s, fill the rest with filler or conditional damage button thats lighting up.

On the other hand, Red Mage while simple actually has a fair bit of nuance of how to optimize its gameplay and the melee-caster niche is a nice touch that resonates with many - but the numbers it produces is borderline insulting for the effort it takes even if we compare it only to Summoner.

Then we have jobs that HAVE nuance AND damage like Black Mage and Monk, where you clearly can have both balance and identity. So I am sorry, your hot take is kinda bad.

And Im sorry but your take didn't prove me wrong but good attempt though. You are free to disagree but that here is all you proved was that you disagreed. You failed to prove why I was wrong.

[Shikiseki]

I love how everyone claims that the opinons voiced here are "a loud minority" and the major silent majority in game always thinks the game is a-ok.
Guess what, it's not. Almost everyone in my fc agrees that the PvE treadmill has gotten stale to the point them just not logging in anymore instead of ranting about it on the forums to change things.
They have to get their butts out of their comfort zone and take risks again to make the core pve gameplay engaging again, otherwise this game will just turn into a "sub for 30days every 2 years to clear msq then quit" mmo at this rate...