Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
Again, exactly what SE is doing. The game continues to have fan-service galore, and they recognize that their primary audience is casual players who don't want overly complicated systems, but rather something engaging that they can still just have fun with and not feel the need to be perfect or making the game their "job". (See Destiny 2 for a good example of what happens when a dev team listens to the loudest voices rather than the bulk of their playerbase.)
Except no one has necessarily been asking for more simplification, nor are we suffering from an epidemic of casual players being walled by normal content because of job design. I see no reason to believe that the game would be any less loved by casual players if the level of complexity did not change from even Heavensward, which for the record is not what most people unhappy with job design are asking for anyway. Stormblood is. They never needed to be perfect or make this game their "job" to enjoy 95% of the game, and the 5% where they do, they still need to be good enough to clear anyway. What problem has this aggressive simplification solved? Were people leaving because the combat system was too complicated? Were players expressing disinterest in trying FFXIV because of the job design complexity of a past expansion specifically?

Show me receipts that this simplification has either prevented loss or generated gain--either of which must be entirely because of the simplification and not because of any other factor. You can't say "Endwalker has more players" because that is not why more people joined FFXIV, unless you can provide evidence to suggest otherwise.

Meanwhile the threshold of simplicity the players invested in this game's combat system are willing to accept has been crossed for a lot of people, and we have receipts of people over the years who have stopped playing FFXIV because of this simplification. This will only continue to bleed players as the simplification intensifies, and while that may not be a significant enough hemorrhage of players to actually hurt FFXIV, what value is it bringing to the game otherwise? Satisfying players who were already satisfied? Why is a happy medium too much to ask for?