Challenging Jobs + Easier content > Easy Jobs + Harder Content.

[HikariKurosawa]

If you have a simple rotation, lets say bare minimum such as a 1-2-3 combo forever until your target dies, or an intricate, god forbid, 30 button rotation with several different procs, DoTs, and gauges to keep track of. Both can be automated. Saying or implying that jobs have gotten more simple because of cheaters is ridiculous. In fact, it'd be easier to automate a simple rotation as opposed to a complex one.

Neither are difficult to automate, there is just far more incentive to automate a complex rotation in a game where a majority of the playerbase parses despite it being against tos. People love flexing their parses and automated rotations helps that.

I think square enix just caught onto how prevalent cheating is and stopped designing jobs to be so complex because it encourages cheating.

Nobody is going to bother with cheating and breaking tos if the rotation isn't overly complicated. It's not worth the risk. If you can't wrap your head around the rotation and have to cheat to get by, of course there are going to be more people willing to take the risk. Especially when the game has no anti-cheat system in place.

Honestly at this point, we really just should have an anti-cheat. Soon there will be one, it's only a matter of time until it becomes optimized enough to have a negligible impact on performance.

[Zairava]

Neither are difficult to automate, there is just far more incentive to automate a complex rotation in a game where a majority of the playerbase parses despite it being against tos. People love flexing their parses and automated rotations helps that.

I think square enix just caught onto how prevalent cheating is and stopped designing jobs to be so complex because it encourages cheating.

Nobody is going to bother with cheating and breaking tos if the rotation isn't overly complicated. It's not worth the risk. If you can't wrap your head around the rotation and have to cheat to get by, of course there are going to be more people willing to take the risk. Especially when the game has no anti-cheat system in place.

Honestly at this point, we really just should have an anti-cheat. Soon there will be one, it's only a matter of time until it becomes optimized enough to have a negligible impact on performance.

"there's people that cheat so jobs should just be as easy as possible and make a majority of the playerbase unhappy"

It does not matter how hard you dumb down a job. There's going to be cheating. You will absolutely never please every single person even at the lower end of the skill curve.

You know what other MMO streamlined jobs too hard? WoW, and it didn't go so well. They received mass complaints about it and were forced to start designing them better again.

Now for the reverse.

You know what other MMO started designing the game around 3rd party add-ons and started designing raids around actually needing them to know what the hell to do? Also Wow, also didn't go so well.

You're saying that they're designing jobs to be so simple because people cheat and that just simply isn't true; and people using cheats because they can't wrap their head around the rotation is a logical fallacy because they would actually still need to know how the job works to begin with, they would sooner just not play the job or play another game. There's no situation in normal mode content that requires anyone to have a perfect understanding of their job works to clear it because it's made to be a faceroll.

That being said, designing your core gameplay to be as simple as humanly possible bordering on mindless for no other reason than people cheat is not a good mindset. Not including graphical mods or other UI/system mods, you're satisfying a smaller portion of the playerbase and making everyone else bored as hell while running most content in the game. There's people that straight up do not care what they are supposed to do when playing their job or role and just play the content pressing whatever button they wish even without mods, and ones on the bottom of the barrel that play horrifically incompetent like not using aoe in dungeon content even at level cap.

There's a medium to be had, and the last time we had that was in Stormblood.

This is all without even saying they will never implement anti-cheat. There's far too many people that use mods and for some it's the only thing that keeps them playing the game at all, it is not in their best interest to essentially erase that portion of the playerbase due to loss of profit. To top it off, there will always be people that find a way around things. Always.

[KenZentra]

Neither are difficult to automate, there is just far more incentive to automate a complex rotation in a game where a majority of the playerbase parses despite it being against tos. People love flexing their parses and automated rotations helps that.

I think square enix just caught onto how prevalent cheating is and stopped designing jobs to be so complex because it encourages cheating.

Nobody is going to bother with cheating and breaking tos if the rotation isn't overly complicated. It's not worth the risk. If you can't wrap your head around the rotation and have to cheat to get by, of course there are going to be more people willing to take the risk. Especially when the game has no anti-cheat system in place.

Honestly at this point, we really just should have an anti-cheat. Soon there will be one, it's only a matter of time until it becomes optimized enough to have a negligible impact on performance.

I disagree. Just like with pirating, "Making games more difficult to pirate does not mean that those who would pirate the game are going to purchase it instead. They had no intention of buying it in the first place.", people who cheat to do their rotation, achieve a high parse, etc, had no intention of learning the job to begin with.

In terms of things being simplified, SE has made it a conscious effort to peel away complexity in the game ever since ARR, LONG before rotation bots came into play.

[Absurdity]

SE has made it a conscious effort to peel away complexity in the game ever since ARR, LONG before rotation bots came into play.

That really only started with Stormblood. Heavensward did the opposite and went too far into the direction of making jobs complex. Stormblood was the first time they made jobs easier to pick up and perform on at least a basic level, but since then they've continually made not only the skill floor lower but collapsed the ceiling along with it, to the point where we now have the opposite problem of Heavensward.

[KenZentra]

That really only started with Stormblood. Heavensward did the opposite and went too far into the direction of making jobs complex. Stormblood was the first time they made jobs easier to pick up and perform on at least a basic level, but since then they've continually made not only the skill floor lower but collapsed the ceiling along with it, to the point where we now have the opposite problem of Heavensward.

I think both can be true, I guess my mind was drifting off towards the whole of the game. I do remember rotations getting more complex in HW, so you are 100% right with that.

[Colt47]

I think both can be true, I guess my mind was drifting off towards the whole of the game. I do remember rotations getting more complex in HW, so you are 100% right with that.

It's not strictly FFXIV that was doing this. A lot of the newer games that have seen massive success are using vastly simplified controls (Genshin Impact being one of them). FFXIV might also have a bit of a development team size issue on making a more complex solution viable. All jobs really just have at max four things that they do, and of the jobs the only one that really does all of them is probably the healer (Cut damage through mitigation, create a temporary HP pool, inflict damage, or heal). The only thing that still sort of exists from the old game in some form is movement speed boosting, but snaring, slowing, and stunning are all removed or rendered redundant in most content. They also boosted the speed of monsters to make them easier to group together, removed cone AOEs, and also kind of killed kiting monsters around as a viable strategy.

The impact of the simplified design can be felt in the life cycle of the game as well. Part of the reason I was even going on about the need for echo in savage sooner is that people are growing bored of playing because of stalling out, and due to the pandemic patch cycle this is the longest wait we will have for an expansion ever so people are going to be quitting FFXIV out of boredom from lack of content.

[Aravell]

I disagree. Just like with pirating, "Making games more difficult to pirate does not mean that those who would pirate the game are going to purchase it instead. They had no intention of buying it in the first place.", people who cheat to do their rotation, achieve a high parse, etc, had no intention of learning the job to begin with.

In terms of things being simplified, SE has made it a conscious effort to peel away complexity in the game ever since ARR, LONG before rotation bots came into play.

The notion that "people would stop cheating if the game was easier" is a weird one. If people are already cheating, why would they stop? They're already doing it, nothing is stopping them from continuing to do it, and they gain no benefit from stopping, so why would they stop?

Honestly, simplifying everything just hurts people who want something more complex, it doesn't really help anyone in the long run. People who want to do the bare minimum would continue to do so, no change to the game would change their mentality, it just ends up blocking off the ceiling for the people who want to improve.