Most Important Dawntrail Change to Keep me in FFXIV

[ty_taurus]

I feel like we're now witnessing both sides of the playerbase swapping places, with the previously unhappy part be content with the state of the game, while the ones who were happy with HW/SB job design are now speaking up.

Change takes time in this game because major revamps pretty much only come alongside expansion releases, and because the feedback SE received also evolved progressively over time, they now have to pull the brakes on 4 expansions worth of momentum in their job design philosophy. I think we can progressively go back to how things were but it will definitely take some time on SE's part to ease the entire playerbase into more complex job design.

There is also one last thing copium huffers like me can still latch onto, and that's Yoshi-P's interview with IGN Brazil which you can read about here : https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...sil_game_show/
Yoshi-P is definitely aware that a good chunk of the playerbase is unhappy with the current job design, and to me that's proof enough that they read what we say over here and are open to change. The outcome depends entirely on us and how much noise we make as a community to see the changes we want to see come true.

And for what it's worth, I haven't seen many threads about keeping the current job design the way it is, so the stage is all ours.

Hence why I'm here now, stating that I need to see change, or I'm leaving. (The bold is for any lurking community management folk out there). I'm okay with gradual change, but I need to see real improvement and possibly a roadmap to the future, either literal or implied based on the changes we see.

But here's the thing, I don't believe the current changes have had any effect on the success of FFXIV. The game's popularity has not increased because the game was becoming more and more simple. No one was out there saying "dang, I wish I could play FFXIV, but the game is just too complicated," nor is there anyone who was saying that suddenly here now when they weren't' otherwise. Just because the game has the highest player population now doesn't mean it's the result of those decisions to aggressively simplify anything that even looks marginally complex; it's because the game's marketing budget increased with each expansion, and the story gained reputation. No one who wasn't playing FFXIV before cared that healers now only have 1 main damage button. They cared that Tom Holland was bench pressing a couch and talking about Shadowbringers, or that their friends told them the story was amazing.

I do not think Heavensward's job design was perfect, nor is that complexity something I'm specifically advocating for, but I strongly believe if the game maintained that level of complexity, but everything else stayed consistent, the player community would large be the same, if not very slightly higher because the people who left because of the loss of complexity would not have. And again, I'm not saying "go back to Heavensward," but I do not believe simplification has actually done anything to pull in new players or keep existing players. The people who aren't interested in complexity didn't care then, and they wouldn't care now. They'd do the same thing they've always done.