Dear SE, Stop Treating Us Like We Are A Single Community

[yoshinoharu]

EDIT: For clarity, I am referring to the interview with Yoshi P with IGN Brazil where they asked him about the 2 minute meta and Yoshi P's stance on designing the game. For posterity I will post what was said here, I am mainly reacting to the last line starting from 'going forward...':

"That's a difficult question," begins Yoshi-P. "We have skill rotations varying between 60 and 120 seconds for the most intense phases and that's how it works currently. 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".

"We're okay with making things a little crazy and having different timings between all the classes, but again, we made these changes because we got feedback that it was too difficult before. We understand that there are two types of players, so going forward, Regardless of whether we change this or not, the community needs to reach a consensus: what is better? Before changing something we need to get feedback from everyone"

I've been doing a lot of thinking based on Yoshi P's words about us, as a community, needing to come to a consensus on what we want out of the game.

In no way is it reasonable to demand that the 1 and a half million players that have reached endgame (courtesy of ffxivcensus.com) all come to a unanimous decision.

At the end of the day there are many sub-communities within the Final Fantasy XIV community as a whole that all have different needs, and that is okay. That is just how it works when a community gets bigger.

There is no type of universal compromise that will appease casual, midcore, and hardcore players all at once. There is no single design philosophy that will appease everyone.

So Square, if you ever read these forums and ever stumble upon this post: Please Stop. Realize that you must design casual, midcore, AND hardcore content and it is up to the individual themselves to decide what content is for them and not.

I legitimately used to tell people "Hey man, Savage raiding isn't for everyone and that's okay. Just do what you have fun doing."

Ignore all the people that want things that are not designed for their demographic. It's not up to you to make one big homogenized subpar product to try to appeal for everyone. Instead focus on putting out the best content for specific demographics and try to ensure that everyone has something to do, but let them pick a lane.

[Rekh]

I'd like super homogenized rotations for ultimate/savage and unbalanced, creative, and incredibly fun rotations for non-competitive content. They already do this for pvp, they created their own battle/fight system for it, why not do the same for ultimate and savage content? This way the majority of players don't have to suffer from copy paste roles; like all healers being a carbon copy of each other most of the time.

[Tehmon]

Easier said than done.

[strawberrycake]

It's funny because when you look at other MMOs, they acknowledge this and keep in mind teir community is multifaceted. XIV is the only one who seems to not realize that.

[CidHeiral]

His statement was referring to the two minute meta. He was basically saying "we did this because you asked for it and we're not going to flip flop back and forth on it every expansion so make up your minds." You can't have a different set of job abilities for every type of player so your post doesn't make any sense in the context of what he was talking about.

[strawberrycake]

His statement was referring to the two minute meta. He was basically saying "we did this because you asked for it and we're not going to flip flop back and forth on it every expansion so make up your minds." You can't have a different set of job abilities for every type of player so your post doesn't make any sense in the context of what he was talking about.

The issue is he never confirmed this with the community and the Synergy meta was fine, iirc they changed a lot of the game, including how we do dammage due to the servers being ass cheeks, it's also why we lost enmity. Like a lot of these issues could be solved if he didn;t always take all the fluff questions about housing and emotes and other stuff....... like let's be fr.

[yoshinoharu]

His statement was referring to the two minute meta. He was basically saying "we did this because you asked for it and we're not going to flip flop back and forth on it every expansion so make up your minds." You can't have a different set of job abilities for every type of player so your post doesn't make any sense in the context of what he was talking about.

The 2 minute meta is actually a result of them trying to make everything for everyone.

The 2 minute meta is a result of a loud chunk of the community complaining that the game's too hard and it's difficult to align everything. There were people complaining that 90 second jobs were a giant pain. Ultimately, rather than identifying that the issue was with players trying to get involved in content that was specifically not designed for them, they caved and made everything easier in the name of accessibility. Adhering to buff alignment was never an issue for midcore or casual content and it only really mattered once you hit Savage. The 2 minute meta was just the start of a concerted effort to do the exact opposite of what I said, and trying to cater to everyone rather than just saying 'Hey, it's okay that you're not good at buff alignment, you don't really need it for the type of content that you are doing anyway and it's something you can just work on getting better at.'

[strawberrycake]

The 2 minute meta is actually a result of them trying to make everything for everyone.

The 2 minute meta is a result of a loud chunk of the community complaining that the game's too hard and it's difficult to align everything. There were people complaining that 90 second jobs were a giant pain. Ultimately, rather than identifying that the issue was with players trying to get involved in content that was specifically not designed for them, they caved and made everything easier in the name of accessibility. Adhering to buff alignment was never an issue for midcore or casual content and it only really mattered once you hit Savage. The 2 minute meta was just the start of a concerted effort to do the exact opposite of what I said, and trying to cater to everyone rather than just saying 'Hey, it's okay that you're not good at buff alignment, you don't really need it for the type of content that you are doing anyway and it's something you can just work on getting better at.'

I remember when MCH got changed, when it literally just needed the main combo to not be RNG and wildfire only needed like 3 more seconds added onto it. But no we get an entire re-work.

[CidHeiral]

The 2 minute meta was just the start of a concerted effort to do the exact opposite of what I said, and trying to cater to everyone rather than just saying 'Hey, it's okay that you're not good at buff alignment, you don't really need it for the type of content that you are doing anyway and it's something you can just work on getting better at.'

lolwut? The two minute meta was the result of feedback from hardcore raiding parse goblins. It wasn't casuals complaining about raid buff timings.

[DisasterGayofCrisis]

It's funny because when you look at other MMOs, they acknowledge this and keep in mind teir community is multifaceted. XIV is the only one who seems to not realize that.

While this is true often times they also massively mess stuff up keeping this balance, ESO has regularly made hard to get gear almost entirely useless in a patch as opposed to this other gear that's easier to get and vice versa solely because one became broken in PVP or PVE. They continously do this with every patch cycle when they try to rework stuff. Other MMOs aren't free of this curse. Add in sometimes even trying to have builds good for both PVP and PVE content is a stressful balance and takes way more management.

I'm not saying you're wrong but you absolutely are not but the multifaceted stuff tends to be constantly reworks and breaking stuff so the players have to entirely rebuild their builds.