XIV EW Job-Gameplay is Terrible... Why?

[DrWho2010]

unfortunately you cannot "force" people to play better. you can punish them with vulns/damage downs/deaths, etc, but ultimately the biggest punishment is time spent.

[ty_taurus]

unfortunately you cannot "force" people to play better. you can punish them with vulns/damage downs/deaths, etc, but ultimately the biggest punishment is time spent.

It's not necessarily about trying to force people to play better, but rather more about making it so that the logic behind how various mechanics actually work isn't as big of a culture shock. In general, this game has done an attrociously bad job at actually communicating how its gameplay mechanics actually work to the point where the only way to know things that are very rudimentary is to actively seek out education about them. The difference between a GCD action and an OGCD action, for example, is not explained anywhere in the game's budget tutorial system, and there's no active tutorials that let you test that other than just telling someone to smack a training dummy until they get it.

In many other games, you might instead see something like a fixed combat scenario that tells you to act out a specific order of actions in a small window--one that requires you understand how to weave in order to clear it. Weaving is not hard. maximizing your weave windows might be, but the actual act of pressing a button while your GCD cooldown rolls is not, and having an introduction that would get players introduced to that concept and make them go through the motions can actually do a lot in terms of at least familiarizing the player base with a concept. Perhaps the biggest mistake was not giving every job an OGCD at level 1 or level 2 to begin that process.

[Mithron]

Day 1 Dun Scaith and Orbonne were some of the most fun this game ever had

[Supersnow845]

unfortunately you cannot "force" people to play better. you can punish them with vulns/damage downs/deaths, etc, but ultimately the biggest punishment is time spent.

That’s true but you can give people who want to go above and beyond more to do

Take healers for example, I can’t force my cohealer to not be a medica 2 bot, but I can ask that if they want to be a medica 2 bot and heal enough for 5 alliances that I be allowed to contribute to damage in a more interesting way than 1111111111111111112111111111

The current design philosophy of pushing all the difficulty of design onto the content has the fatal flaw that it makes jobs only interesting in content that’s actually designed with this philosophy in mind (ie savage) so jobs have decent floors and terribly low ceilings because the ceiling is designed to be “do your job in the midst of complex mechanics”, but when you take said job into casual content you only get the floors, because complex mechanics don’t exist

Jobs should strike a balance where part of the jobs rewards come from simply playing the job correctly (like modern BLM), because otherwise you end up in the current situation. Where jobs are only interesting in content that’s hard enough that you forget your job is boring

[ty_taurus]

This idea that giving healers more DPS actions, adding more agency in MP usage, having more dynamic combo branches, more balanced choices to spend gauges on, use of positionals, and other discussed elements of gameplay will make all of FFXIV unplayable to the common player, or even just the casual player, is absolutely ridiculous. And we know this because Black Mage exists. If having a higher ceiling was the death sentence that a select few claim it to be, then Black Mage would be ostracized from so much content because of the fear that the Black Mage player a particular party got wouldn't have the skills to clear the dungeon roulette, the alliance raid, the whatever. But that isn't the case, because even if someone isn't a great Black Mage, they are still doing what 95% of the game asks them to do, and might still very well be capable of getting through savage anyway. Savage DPS requirements are not that tight, particularly after weekly gear is being collected, and the majority of people who do savage are not week 1 raiders--the only players who do need to step up to meet the very tight DPS requirements of a week 1 savage tier. These are also the players who have the skills to meet those requirements, and generally are fine with having more complex jobs.

[DrWho2010]

In some way you have to design based on the lowest common denominator.

Also in an MMO, how much should the game hold your hand to tell you how to play the game in the game itself vs letting the community figure it out among themselves and setup third party out of game resources for people to research instead?

Should everything 100% be told to you in game? IMO, no.

[Aravell]

In some way you have to design based on the lowest common denominator.

I don't think I've seen anyone disagree with the main story being designed that way, so people do agree with this.

The main problem is that the jobs (the medium through which you experience all of the game) is largely being designed for the lowest level now, which leaves people above the skill floor with nothing to strive for and enjoy.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with catering content towards specific levels of play. There are a lot of problems with continuously catering all jobs towards the absolute floor.

[ty_taurus]

Also in an MMO, how much should the game hold your hand to tell you how to play the game in the game itself vs letting the community figure it out among themselves and setup third party out of game resources for people to research instead?

Well considering the gap between what is and isn't told to you in FFXIV is about as massive as the distance between Earth and Jupiter... Somewhere in the middle of that would be nice.

I can't believe when talking about how awful FFXIV's onboarding experience is, there is a person who's counterargument is "but what about the hand holding!?"

[Sani2341]

This idea that giving healers more DPS actions, adding more agency in MP usage, having more dynamic combo branches, more balanced choices to spend gauges on, use of positionals, and other discussed elements of gameplay will make all of FFXIV unplayable to the common player, or even just the casual player, is absolutely ridiculous.

Esp. As we had all of that on healers just a handfull of years ago. And things were going fine, despite tanks also having more plates to Spin. And Ivalice being the on-content alliance raid.

Now we got No downtime plates for healers to Spin.
No aggro or positioning plates to speak of for Tanks.

And snooze fest alliance raid Bosses.

[Mithron]

This game needs a proper Hall of the Novice that's equivalently maintained to keep up with current relevant mechanics but also each job's rotation and basic optimization techniques for each current patch.