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

[Eisi]

Regarding homogenization, I heard people still love Black Mage so I think it's more an issue of class design as a whole rather than buff alignments. Those just shift jobs further away from sustained damage to burst, but didn't all jobs always have burst windows anyway? I doubt the available design space under the current paradigm is so small that you just can't have interesting job design anymore even if it's more restrictive than in the alternative scenario.

It's like people complaining about the dungeon formula. You can do so much more even within the more narrowly confined dungeon formula as it exists now, it's just not being done.

I think removing the two minute buff alignment would under guarantee not improve job diversity.

[Lyth]

"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."

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.

...

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'm confused by this thread's premise.

Buff timings on jobs can be either syncronous or asyncronous with each other. That's a property of the game as a whole, not of an individual player's experience. The game cannot exist in both states at the same time. There has to be a consensus decision.

It's always good to take differences in individual preferences into account where possible, but it's irrelevant to this specific issue. We're talking about a mechanic that impacts the game as a whole. You cannot individually choose whether you want to play a game with syncronous or asyncronous buffs.

Incidently, the reason why the game design moved towards a sycronous pattern of raid buffs was to make the importance of raid buff alignment more obvious to the average player. This was always apparent at higher levels of play because people have figured out ways to coordinate and match up asyncronous buffs since ARR. In fact, most of the preset openers that you've memorized since Heavensward are designed entirely off ideal buff timings.

It also means that jobs that have buffs with more straightforward timings and short high potency windows don't perpetually dominate over ones that bring more awkward timings and lower potency windows.

[sindriiisgaming]

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...':



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.

there isnt really an altervitive here. he cant cater to one and the other at the same time. rotations are fixed and untill we reach an entire 100% consensus itl allways be devisive.
perhaps a good solution would be osrs's polling system. honestly. i think people latch onto this "2minutemeta" thing because its a 1 size fits all for grievences. but the reality is the combat itself is the issue.

[SailorCeti]

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...':



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.

I agree. I, for instance, an older and have had several strokes. My reaction time is way down, though just playing is helping. I'm definately not one of the two types mentioned, and some consideration should be given to keeping their older players as much as gaining younger ones. If something is too complex or lengthy, it's hard for people like me to remember everything, and with reduced dexterity, it's sometimes difficult to get a whole rotation out. I'm currently leveling MCH with no problems, but NIN gave me issues remembering all the combos in the heat of battle (yes, I know it's whatever you end on), and with RPR and SAM, it was difficult jumping from place to place to utilize positionals (yes, even with True North).

[kaynide]

The question is what feedback were the developers getting in Stormblood and Shadowbringers that prompted them to create the 2 minute meta for Endwalker.

I’m a casual player so I’m speaking from ignorance, but my guess is:

1) having different jobs line up differently makes certain jobs desirable over others making it less “play any job you like”.

Eg assume job A had a 2 minute cycle, and job B had a 90 sec cycle. If they do the same DPS overall, they”re basically equal in a 12 minute fight.

if a fight is 10 minutes however, you would get 5 complete cycles on A, 6 on B plus the first minute of B’s meta..which could be more or less dps making them more or less desirable. Something like old DRG would waste that minute building up their eye and never get to their Gerkinsmorglflukin phase.

Or…

2) it’s just easier for NPC automation to future proof solo play for the NPCs and bosses to “dance” a 2 minute beat.

[Colt47]

FFXIV is a bit of a mess from the cross DC travel issue and instancing. I also am going to say that the feedback Yoshi P. and team got didn't come from solely the end game community but from varying parties across the community. When this was coming out people were dealing with Summoner pre-EW and before that there was a massive dark knight rework that some felt killed the job and others felt saved it, and jobs went through a confluence of changes going from heavensward into now. Even with a smaller elapsed period of time, people would come back to the game after a few months and sometimes have trouble understanding how to play the jobs they already leveled, and due to the deprecation of old content new players don't encounter the same challenges that led to the need to learn how to do certain things.

Savage and ultimates are limited and generally require a rather massive time commitment that can be like a second job, so any issues with learning how to play jobs is going to definitely show up in the hardest content the game offers. However, each fight in savage and ultimate are like learning a new job in themselves that also have a dependency on seven other people to be self aware and honest about where they are on learning the fights. Most people are not self aware and can tell where they are on learning a fight, because it isn't like the fights are helping the player learn the mechanics (EX and normal content does this). So they basically streamlined the jobs to try to fix the problems tied to new players, returning players, and basic construction of new jobs within the limits of the development team.

The reason that savage and ultimate are coming up so much in this expansion is how much they have been pushing them as the focus of the patches. The FFXIV media was blasting and going on about the alternate timeline for Heavensward and the finale for Omega. It also influenced them on making criterion savage a thing most likely. Island sanctuary and even the new deep dungeon took a back seat and didn't even last that long in the public eye. This also happened among probably the largest resignation I've seen in this game of people from savage endgame.

My tinfoil hat theory is that a skeleton crew was left to contend with endwalker while the majority of work was focused on the graphic update and what is now called Dawn Trail.

[Kaurhz]

I would say... It is a problem that any given feedback they have, and when they elect to implement it, is always done in extremes, regardless of what subset of the community is the recipient.

It's probably their biggest fault

[Colt47]

I would say... It is a problem that any given feedback they have, and when they elect to implement it, is always done in extremes, regardless of what subset of the community is the recipient.

It's probably their biggest fault

That's true.

Kind of worried about what they are going to do after the cross DC problems, though. A lot of these issues with cross DC travel and the game definitely felt like it came from left field. It was sort of expected people who had activities that required a lot of coordination would gather in one place, but seeing so many people migrate just to do duty roulette and 24 man raids was not. It even impacted the in-game markets massively since we could buy from anywhere, but only sell on our home world. So you'd have this massive migration of people all going to Aether and giving the servers there a huge boost of customers, while at the same time reducing the number of buyers massively on the other DCs, which ironically caused prices to rise as crafters were basically screwed. It's hard to sell items to people when they are spending most of their time on another server. Like the markets still kind of exist on Balmung for example, but it's a shadow of what it was in Shadowbringers.

[Kes13a]

I would say... It is a problem that any given feedback they have, and when they elect to implement it, is always done in extremes, regardless of what subset of the community is the recipient.

It's probably their biggest fault

its not just SE. most mmos I have played have suffered from this kind of "fix". its an endless cycle of buff and nerf as they respond to player demands/"feedback"

you cannot call out SE for this, its the industry response... almost every single time. the driving force is us, the players... the ones screaming for "balance"

[Colt47]

The problem with the direction they took with this expansion is that instead of using the effort to tune the main content and make it challenging enough to satisfy people, the content was largely left in this state of being under-tuned on the back end. The game really doesn't need a savage or ultimate as much as a focus on creating content that scales well to the majority of experienced players. That's something that has been lacking for a while and I'd gladly see something less intense replace the hard content. There's just too much variance from who you play with to enjoy savage or ultimate, and it only satisfies a very low portion of the people playing. No one wants to say they the reason they are participating in content is to fulfill a social obligation to a static rather than enjoying the experience, and it seems pretty unlikely the majority of people engaging in this content enjoy it. Half of the time it sounds more like people are begging for it to be over.

Last expansion sunset it was all Bozja and people having trouble completing the instanced areas. This expansion all we can talk about is how there is nothing here to do at all except tomestone grind.