Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[Deceptus]

From what I heard from the BLM mentors the paradox rotation is harder than more standard rotations while providing less damage overall and I think the dragon kick rotation is also pretty hard to do correctly. If you actually just spam dragon kick your dps output is going to be bad. These meme rotations are not a problem.

Both take a little skill but they take a LOT less skill for a little less dps.

That's the point.

Neither should be anywhere comparable to a good player.

[Turtledeluxe]

We do have a term for these people, meta slaves. Fun is not their primary concern, they only care about rewards, the easier they get their rewards, the happier they are (whatever rewards they're looking for, could be easier clears of content, getting good logs easier, etc.). It's these people who lock jobs out of their PF for a 100-200 dps difference. If another job has an edge over theirs, they will ask for their job to get the same tool without a care that this causes homogenisation. These are the type of people that the dev team shouldn't listen to, they'd suck any fun out of the game if it meant they get their reward easier.

I was thinking after I posted what really defines this type of player is someone who wants the meta of any given aspect of the game to be the default experience for everyone. Hence, the state of jobs and the meta. Makes sense. But these are players who are inevitably min maxers imo because your casual joe player who wants rewards quickly doesn't necessarily understand the two minute meta or rotation theory to begin with. It's worth denoting the difference though because of the way they're applying their findings.

And the reason I say this is because some of the two minute metas biggest defenders are people who have played since 2.0 and do understand job evolution over time etc., they're not just people who are beholden to whatever a given meta is at the time. It can potentially take away their agency to reduce them all to people who wantonly submit feedback with a singular goal-- I think a lot of them know exactly what they're doing and simply want the game to be this way.

[Colt47]

I was thinking after I posted what really defines this type of player is someone who wants the meta of any given aspect of the game to be the default experience for everyone. Hence, the state of jobs and the meta. Makes sense. But these are players who are inevitably min maxers imo because your casual joe player who wants rewards quickly doesn't necessarily understand the two minute meta or rotation theory to begin with. It's worth denoting the difference though because of the way they're applying their findings.

And the reason I say this is because some of the two minute metas biggest defenders are people who have played since 2.0 and do understand job evolution over time etc., they're not just people who are beholden to whatever a given meta is at the time. It can potentially take away their agency to reduce them all to people who wantonly submit feedback with a singular goal-- I think a lot of them know exactly what they're doing and simply want the game to be this way.

Discrimination is two ways. In truth, everyone has a goals they want to achieve, and hypothetically those goals should be achievable when they are made available to people who play within a reasonable amount of time. Savage is never going to be accessible to every single individual, and neither is the zodiac weapons grind or even the bozja armor, because as individuals we are all different people, stubbornly living within a world full of black boxes and unknowns. But when someone who normally does content successfully has trouble with the given content because of changes made to the game, that feedback has meaning and should be taken into consideration. I never completed a zodiac relic, and probably never will because it isn't content that I partake in, but I do partake in savage and have successfully completed multiple tiers since shadowbringers. It has been a downward spiral of frustration and a feeling of the rewards not being worth the effort. Again, we have to be able to live through something to learn from it both in real life and in game. If fights are built where a single person can wipe everyone because they are not at the same point as the rest of the group, they will hold the group back under this system.

Do people really want to live in a game that rewards discarding others, simply because they are not quite at the same point? In Ultimate, it is the expectation that this is how it should work, but savage should not be a place where this occurs. There are better ways to punish getting hit then to instantly wipe the entire group and they already have these methods in the fight, such as damage downs preventing clearing the boss fight.

[ForteNightshade]

Yes but as I said in my previous post-- who are the people calling out for the changes to the jobs and the two minute meta? These are not people who want the game to be more fun-- they want job viability to an extreme degree and easy access to optimal damage output. This is the number one reaction anyone gives when people talk about jobs having more unique identity-- "well in 2.0 no one wanted warrior" etc. Obviously every game needs balance, but I'd argue XIV will not tolerate an ounce of risk out of fear of the 2.0 era or whatever.

No offense but... you clearly haven't been around those circles. Even min maxers have been complaining about the boring job design and especially the two minute meta. In fact, it's downright reviled because now everything boils down to crit RNG. Didn't Crit, Direct Hit your blade combo? Whelp, sucks for your parse even though it's quite literally identical to your previous runs.

Very few higher end players, be they speed runners, parsers or simply hardcore players who raid log want "job viability to an extreme degree". That is a very common misconception. Do they have their preferences? Naturally. But they'll either play whatever's good or are good enough to overcome job deficiencies, provided they aren't too absurd ala tank balance for early Abyssos or 6.3 TOP in general. The issue is how the dev team has approached balance. You can have job design with healthy amounts of similarity yet still manage to differentiate themselves enough. Melee, for instance, mostly accomplish this. Ninja doesn't play at all like Dragoon nor do either play like Monk. Their far bigger issue is a lack of engaging gameplay outside the two minute window. Which is why you weren't seeing nearly as much criticism towards job homogenization in Shadowbringers despite it existing there too.

So why is the dev team balancing this way? If I were to hazard a guess. It's significantly easier when everything is largely similar, And with soon to be 21 jobs, the already understaffed design department simply has reached capacity. Sebazy has talked about it at length but for cliffnotes sake, we've essentially have the save 5-6 people working on job design since ARR. Couple that with the overemphasis on accessibility the last two expansions and you start to see why jobs have been dumbed down. They're easier to balance and more casual players can pick them up without much thought.

The reality is a game that wants every job to be viable at the highest level will always have some degree of homogeny. It's unavoidable. What is frustrating this expansion is despite placing so much emphasis on making jobs easier, we've seen some of the worst balancing decisions since Heavensward. Which leads me to believe it's a lack of creativity being the biggest culprit.

[Turtledeluxe]

Even min maxers have been complaining about the boring job design and especially the two minute meta.

Minmaxers aren't a monolith, but that rule applies to all posts on the subject. I've already explained in another post that you cannot make the assumption these "meta slaves" (I've also heard of them being called "s***tters") are all casual joes who just want easy access to big rewards at any cost. When we talk about this group, certainly a portion of them (if not a majority of them) have the wherewithal to discuss rotations, aDPS/rDPS, build crafting, etc. Yes, some of them are probably more casual players in the mix as well. There can be range of motivations for someone to prefer the two minute meta-- acting like some of those people aren't minmaxers because you have noble perception of minmaxing in RPGs is your preference. I don't agree and I do not need to know an alleged group of them to say that.

The reality is a game that wants every job to be viable at the highest level will always have some degree of homogeny. It's unavoidable. What is frustrating this expansion is despite placing so much emphasis on making jobs easier, we've seen some of the worst balancing decisions since Heavensward. Which leads me to believe it's a lack of creativity being the biggest culprit.

You could say every MMORPG wants this. I'd argue it's a waste of time because metas can and do form anyway based on highly contextual variables, in XIV and in most games. Yoshi P is on record as saying "we could do" , "we would like to do", etc., but they don't because of "players". I have already covered that it could be a creative issue or a resource constraint, but a. That's not my problem and b. They can fix it and they should.

Also it is avoidable, it's called listening to players and saying "I am sorry that does not align with our vision for the job, no". Circling back to the issue of "minmaxers", devs wouldn't be listening to the feedback about raid buff metas from casuals who likely aren't even aware of the two minute meta as a concept. Does that mean every single person giving feedback is a minmaxer? No, it does not. My original post about stepping on the toes of minxmaxers doesn't make this clear, but in that case yes I was using minmaxer because I was thinking about players whose feedback actually has the context and detail necessary to really be considered by the game designers. Not just people saying "I wannna win more".

[Aravell]

I was thinking after I posted what really defines this type of player is someone who wants the meta of any given aspect of the game to be the default experience for everyone. Hence, the state of jobs and the meta. Makes sense. But these are players who are inevitably min maxers imo because your casual joe player who wants rewards quickly doesn't necessarily understand the two minute meta or rotation theory to begin with. It's worth denoting the difference though because of the way they're applying their findings.

And the reason I say this is because some of the two minute metas biggest defenders are people who have played since 2.0 and do understand job evolution over time etc., they're not just people who are beholden to whatever a given meta is at the time. It can potentially take away their agency to reduce them all to people who wantonly submit feedback with a singular goal-- I think a lot of them know exactly what they're doing and simply want the game to be this way.

You misunderstand, I didn't say meta slaves are all casuals. I said that they're people who aren't good enough to hit the peak or they can't be bothered to optimise to that point, the simplifications and homogenisation benefits them and only them. Even the casuals hate the loss of identity and flavour in between jobs.

The people I'm describing are at the level of around 50-90% performance, they're on the entire spectrum of average to above average. They do understand the basics of combat and some do enter into discussions of optimisation mechanics. The key difference between them and the min-maxers is that the meta slaves want things to be easier for them, the min-maxers work around the weaknesses of their job, the meta slaves pick the path of least resistance and they get annoyed when other jobs have advantages over theirs.

[ty_taurus]

You misunderstand, I didn't say meta slaves are all casuals. I said that they're people who aren't good enough to hit the peak or they can't be bothered to optimise to that point, the simplifications and homogenisation benefits them and only them. Even the casuals hate the loss of identity and flavour in between jobs.

The people I'm describing are at the level of around 50-90% performance, they're on the entire spectrum of average to above average. They do understand the basics of combat and some do enter into discussions of optimisation mechanics. The key difference between them and the min-maxers is that the meta slaves want things to be easier for them, the min-maxers work around the weaknesses of their job, the meta slaves pick the path of least resistance and they get annoyed when other jobs have advantages over theirs.

Misshapen Chair kind of went off on this archetype of player in the last FFXIV video he did not long ago. Someone who feels the need to be the best, to always win, and that anything shy of that is anti-fun and unacceptable, and yet at the same time, sees any effort into reaching that status as work and cannot be asked to put in any additional effort to better their performance. They don't want to learn the game, they just want to jump in and win.

[Absurdity]

Misshapen Chair kind of went off on this archetype of player in the last FFXIV video he did not long ago. Someone who feels the need to be the best, to always win, and that anything shy of that is anti-fun and unacceptable, and yet at the same time, sees any effort into reaching that status as work and cannot be asked to put in any additional effort to better their performance. They don't want to learn the game, they just want to jump in and win.

I usually just called them tryhard-wannabes. People who only pick whatever is the current meta, without even understanding why it is the way it is, and just expect that to solve all their problems, who throw a fit when they wipe and their immediate assumption is that it's because someone isn't playing whatever job is the theoretical best, the kind of people that were still kicking Samurais from their party finder groups in 4.3 because they read on The Balance that it's not very good at some point.

Who think of themselves as a 99th percentile player when they're actually only ~50th percentile but of course they could totally be the best if it weren't for this system or that job mechanic and of course it's not because of them, it's the game holding them back.

[ty_taurus]

I usually just called them tryhard-wannabes. People who only pick whatever is the current meta, without understanding why it's the meta, and just expect that to solve all their problems, who throw a fit when they wipe and their immediate assumption is that it's because someone isn't playing whatever job is the theoretical best, the kind of people that were still kicking Samurais from their party finder groups in 4.3.

Who think of themselves as a 99th percentile player when they're actually only ~50th percentile but of course they could totally be the best if it weren't for this system or that job mechanic and of course it's not because of them, it's the game's fault.

It's nicer than Chair's name for them. "Shitters"

[Turtledeluxe]

You misunderstand, I didn't say meta slaves are all casuals. I said that they're people who aren't good enough to hit the peak or they can't be bothered to optimise to that point, the simplifications and homogenisation benefits them and only them. Even the casuals hate the loss of identity and flavour in between jobs.

The people I'm describing are at the level of around 50-90% performance, they're on the entire spectrum of average to above average. They do understand the basics of combat and some do enter into discussions of optimisation mechanics. The key difference between them and the min-maxers is that the meta slaves want things to be easier for them, the min-maxers work around the weaknesses of their job, the meta slaves pick the path of least resistance and they get annoyed when other jobs have advantages over theirs.

Yes, I totally agree that their motivations and inclinations are different and that minmaxer wasn't the ideal word to use in my original post. It's hard to convey over a forum-- maybe "optimizers with an /s" is really what I'm trying to convey here. Regarding the meta they are interchangeable effectively however I am indeed referring to people who strictly have it out to make jobs/combat as streamlined as possible which is taking us down a road of homogeny

You mentioned these people don't want fun and again that is who I am speaking to but I wouldn't say they don't want fun. I'd say there are two sides of the player base like left brain and right brain. Some people have a balance so many it's three sides. In any case the side that is over optimizing everything regardless of their play style or intentions are making the game their own idea of fun. Players that want more creativity find it boring. Etc.