#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[ForteNightshade]

snip

Couple things. According to all the census data available to us, albeit unofficially, NA outnumbers JP quite handedly by slightly over 150,000. Once you factor in EU, which is predominantly English speaking, you'll quickly find that no, Japanese players, are not the majority. They haven't been for years now. In fact, the console and AAA gaming industry as a whole, including JRPG titles, typically do significantly better in North American than Japan due to the latter's higher interest in mobile gaming.

Furthermore, you, anecdotally, showing this thread off to a couple discord friends and all having a giggle isn't any different than people laughing on TalesofDF. You're welcome to find this whole thing absurd just as other, paying customers, are welcome to criticise a design approach they dislike. And before you cry foul about "organizing a strike!" How people voice their criticism isn't for you to decide so long as they follow the rules. To be blunt though, we've all tried to have discussions. There are threads on this very forums several hundred pages long--one in particular even got brought up in a Q&A... where it was poorly translated and healers were told to "just do Ultimate." Bit ironic how the sustain has gotten so out of hand, players were able to beat said Ultimate (TOP, specifically) without healers.

With all that said, I suggest you take your own advice and kindly "know your place" by allowing others to voice their criticism.

[Telkira]

Couple things. According to all the census data available to us, albeit unofficially, NA outnumbers JP quite handedly by slightly over 150,000. Once you factor in EU, which is predominantly English speaking, you'll quickly find that no, Japanese players, are not the majority.

This is just wrong. If you look at the datacenters, you'll find that there are more congested servers in JP, in addition to more servers overall than in the NA datacenter. That conveys more need, more necessity.
Also, that website you cited is from 2023, and is not official. It's interesting, but in no way, shape, or form conclusive enough for you to sit there and think you can discredit my point about the game being primarily for a Japanese majority audience, because it is.

In fact, the console and AAA gaming industry as a whole, including JRPG titles, typically do significantly better in North American than Japan due to the latter's higher interest in mobile gaming.

This is just not true at all. Mobile gaming is definitely more popular in Japan, but that isn't to say that console or traditional video game platforms (consoles, PC) are struggling there.

Also, to argue that JRPGs do better in foreign markets than they do in their home one is just conjecture on your part. That's like arguing Fallout New Vegas is more popular than SMT or Persona in Japan, or vice versa. There are exceptions, like FFXVI which did very poorly in Japan but better in the West, but that isn't saying much given that it sold poorly overall due to being an exclusive to the PS5 when more people are still playing on their PS4s or have PCs.

[Supersnow845]

This is just wrong. If you look at the datacenters, you'll find that there are more congested servers in JP, in addition to more servers overall than in the NA datacenter. That conveys more need, more necessity.
Also, that website you cited is from 2023, and is not official. It's interesting, but in no way, shape, or form conclusive enough for you to sit there and think you can discredit my point about the game being primarily for a Japanese majority audience, because it is.


This is just not true at all. Mobile gaming is definitely more popular in Japan, but that isn't to say that console or traditional video game platforms (consoles, PC) are struggling there.

Also, to argue that JRPGs do better in foreign markets than they do in their home one is just conjecture on your part. That's like arguing Fallout New Vegas is more popular than SMT or Persona in Japan, or vice versa. There are exceptions, like FFXVI which did very poorly in Japan but better in the West, but that isn't saying much given that it sold poorly overall due to being an exclusive to the PS5 when more people are still playing on their PS4s or have PCs.

I’m not arguing for or against your point that the strike would be better with a little more organisation and some kind of “manifesto” but your point that there are more JP players than English speaking players is wrong

This is the official census
https://ffxivcensus.com/

And NA outnumbers JP alone in both total and endgame characters even ignoring OCE and EU

If you add all non JP servers together (I’m ignoring China) JP is outnumbered 2 to 1

[Telkira]

I’m not arguing for or against your point that the strike would be better with a little more organisation and some kind of “manifesto” but your point that there are more JP players than English speaking players is wrong

This is the official census
https://ffxivcensus.com/

And NA outnumbers JP alone in both total and endgame characters even ignoring OCE and EU

If you add all non JP servers together (I’m ignoring China) JP is outnumbered 2 to 1

That's not official at all. That's someone's Github project. I'm basing my information on what SE is willing to give out, not what some crawlers or botnet is willing to do via scraping Lodestone with inconsistent/inaccurate criteria.

The fact that Japanese datacenters are prioritized in terms of physical capacity and quantity, along with the way the game is received there overall compared to the West, is enough. It also makes sense, it is their native market after all, and that there are more JP datacenters that are at full capacity (meaning even new characters cannot be made there) is all I need to see.

[Saraide]

In case anyone needs to read this: you dont need to be perfect and without any flaws to criticize healer design. I'd rather have people do something than be bogged down by unrealistic standards and comparisons to IRL unions which have existed for decades or by people allegedally concerned about optics.

[Lyth]

There's been a summary of the main frustrations facing healers on the OP for a while now, although I'm not sure if Gemina formally mentioned having updated it in here.

The primary issue comes down to providing value for effort. If your chosen role doesn't provide impact, you aren't going to want to play it.

Role Erosion
We've seen a progressive erosion of 'support roles' over several expansions now. These roles provide value through player interdependence. FFXIV has had a deliberate design shift to try and eliminate those interdependencies and to turn team-based encounters into eight disconnected but parallel single player experiences.

Tanks have been affected by this in part, simply because self-positioning bosses were introduced to eliminate the dependence that DPS, especially melee, have on tanks (in fairness, I don't trust the average PF tank to be able to position a boss efficiently either). But healers have been hit the hardest, because their role has been eroded entirely. And with the healerless clears posted from the Media Tour, there's a growing perception that healers are not entirely necessary in Dawntrail content. That's an incredibly bad precedent to set at the start of an expansion.

The first point listed in the OP speaks directly to this. You need clear boundaries set on what a non-healer job is capable of doing to keep themselves and their teammates alive. Ideally, party-wide sustain effects should be the exclusive purview of healers. Self-sustain effects should be limited and insufficient to keep you up indefinitely.

You shouldn't ever see a twenty minute 'clutch save' where the party dies and the tank clumsily heals themself through two vuln stacks to solo the boss on current content. You shouldn't ever see healerless runs on current content. I think the instant that you allow a role to become redundant in current content, then you've failed as a designer. They should be falling over themselves to stop this.

In my mind, this is probably the most immediately achievable goal, simply because it's a numbers balance. None of the tank heals are traited in Dawntrail, unlike the heals on other roles, so you can easily design content such that it completely outscales the self-sustain that they provide in later dungeons. Bloodwhetting also should apply per weaponskill rather than per hit as per its skill description. All these things are easy to change, the dev team just need to stop worrying about pushback and fix it.

Content Design
The fifth point relates to content design. I think healers are probably the hardest role to design content for, because your engagement level drops off rapidly as players' familiarity with content increases. If nobody knows a fight and players are making mistakes, then you potentially have more room to make an impact through clutch saves. That same fight a week later may be completely boring simply because you have nothing to do.

This partially comes down to how predictable and scripted fight design is. It also comes down to the fact that many fights aren't that threatening from an outgoing damage perspective. Your primary worry are mechanic checks which tend to be all or nothing, to which it's more about individual responsibility than it is about role responsibility.

Part of the problem is that most fights are designed from the perspective of someone who plays DPS, which is why DPS jobs are so much fun to optimize in raid content. You really need someone who is passionate about healing to oversee fight design and ask critical questions of each encounter design on how to make the fights more interesting and engaging for healers both during progression and during farm.

I don't think that we'll see this sort of change immediately, but this is the sort of thing that the dev team needs to come out and make a clear and definite statement committing to improving fight design for support jobs over the 7.x patch cycle.

Job Design
Some of the limitations in encounter design stem from job design. It's hard to keep farm content interesting on a job that uses a single button rotation. Likewise, part of the reason why support 'role mechanics' have fallen out of favor is because we have an increasing armament of defensive tools that negate a lot of challenging mechanics.

This isn't just a healer issue either. Invulns can let you delete entire mechanics from the fight, and they have absurdly short recasts (four minutes on Holmgang!) Tank defensives get stronger with every expansion, with multiple burst heals and rolling regens on every action. And in the event that they don't press those buttons, you have instant on-demand counterparts on healer to erase the damage.

There's just a general lack of direction with the job team when it comes to these designs. There's a global power creep when it comes to defensive job actions, combined with progressive homogenization to keep everyone equally competitive. The growing list of defensives leaves less room for interesting and unique rotations. And healer jobs end up feeling less and less distinct from each other over time, outside of each expansion's marginally upgraded sparkle count on the new actions.

Job design is a more fundamental problem with healers. Everyone knows it's an issue, but it keeps getting kicked down the road. They probably need to hire someone to oversee healer design, for one. But they also need to make a conscious effort to make each support job's gameplay feel unique and interesting to play. The next expansion's actions are set, and we're not going to see the changes needed on this front immediately in 7.0, but again, the dev team need to come out and make a statement committing to reworking healer designs and developing their individual gameplay identities, as soon as they are able to.

That's what I think when I read through Gemina's manifesto as a non-healer. I'm sure that someone more closely connected to the healer experience could elaborate more specifically.

Thread Concept
I suppose one more point worth mentioning - it really doesn't matter whether this thread/hashtag is representative of real life industrial action. Healers have been expressing their frustration with the game design direction for several expansions now.

I'd actually go a step further and say that support gameplay across the board has been progressively less satisfying from Stormblood onwards. Tanks have been less impacted because they have eroded into healer functionality in exchange for losing control over fight movement and positioning, but it's still deeply unsatisfying to see the role essentially amount to being a melee dps on training wheels. What I've wanted to see is the dev team make some statements about their vision for these 'support roles', and commit to making them more interesting. But I've given up for a few years now.

I think regardless of framing or actual 'strike action', what matters is that this gets the discussion out there and gets people openly talking about it before the expansion launch. For whatever reason, the dev team seem to be averse to running into direct confrontation and controversy with the playerbase. But this wound has festered and must be let. The developers just need to have it out, be honest about what they are willing (or not willing) to fix, and let players decide for themselves if they still want to invest in the development team's vision for their chosen roles going forward.

[Gemina]

Well then, come up with a plan of action that is actually conducive to that goal, rather than just pasting into your discord profiles and search info boxes some vague and nonsensical call to action that doesn't even resonate with your own demographic, that being other healers.

Maybe look at the social and political psychology of unions and why some work, while others fail. But also keep in mind that this is still a Japanese MMORPG.
Appeal to not just your own group of players, but others too. Make a compelling, thoughtful, well-resourced and grounded argument and start an actual grassroots movement that is equal parts inviting and compelling, and not purely disruptive, because that's what players will see first and foremost.

What are you talking about? This protest is stupid, and will accomplish nothing. Remember? Your Discord is laughing hysterically, remember?

Now it is disruptive and what players will see first? If you're going to be conflictive and belligerent, at least be consistent.

BTW...

This is just wrong. If you look at the datacenters, you'll find that there are more congested servers in JP, in addition to more servers overall than in the NA datacenter. That conveys more need, more necessity.
Also, that website you cited is from 2023, and is not official. It's interesting, but in no way, shape, or form conclusive enough for you to sit there and think you can discredit my point about the game being primarily for a Japanese majority audience, because it is.

You understand that which regions house more players is irrelevant, correct? You understand this because you are fully aware that a serious portion of their revenue is generated by the western playerbase. Of course you do. And if it seems like I am being patronizing. It's because I am.

[Telkira]

What are you talking about? This protest is stupid, and will accomplish nothing. Remember? Your Discord is laughing hysterically, remember?

Now it is disruptive and what players will see first? If you're going to be conflictive and belligerent, at least be consistent.

I don't see how me trying to explain to you guys how you could effectively achieve the change you all claim to want to see is me being 'inconsistent'. I dare express some good faith and you swat it away, oh how dare I, the loathsome troll think I could ever be capable of being constructive... I poke flaws in your very approach and outline specifically why I think it jumps from pathetic to knee-slappingly hilarious so that way those who organized this meme could maybe learn a thing or two, and understand that feedback from a consumerbase is far more nuanced and complex than people complaining about something.

But you said it yourself, it's not going to accomplish anything.

You understand that which regions house more players is irrelevant, correct? You understand this because you are fully aware that a serious portion of their revenue is generated by the western playerbase. Of course you do. And if it seems like I am being patronizing. It's because I am.

I mean.. you're the ones showing me two different sources with wildly different numbers and metrics, and both sources were both unofficial and methodologically flawed. I'm not saying they're worthless, I'm just not willing to overlook what can be gleamed from the official sources.

Also I'm pretty sure that congestion also means activity, like if a server has a lot of travelers/wanderers/voyagers (Balmung on Crystal, for example) then that affects it. Until we have accurate sources/statistics from SE themselves, then it would be best to trust their indicators, and not some unofficial 'census' that probably doesn't even account for character name/server changes.

[ForteNightshade]

This is just wrong. If you look at the datacenters, you'll find that there are more congested servers in JP, in addition to more servers overall than in the NA datacenter. That conveys more need, more necessity.
Also, that website you cited is from 2023, and is not official. It's interesting, but in no way, shape, or form conclusive enough for you to sit there and think you can discredit my point about the game being primarily for a Japanese majority audience, because it is.

If you're going to claim sources are wrong, you ought to bring a shred of evidence as a rebuttal. And no, your word isn't good enough.

Server congestion and sever capacity are two different things. JP started with more worlds under the assumption a JRPG MMO would be more popular in Japan. Turns out, it wasn't. Furthermore, Japan has always preferred a smaller population demographic. Having more doesn't convey a need. It's simply a relic of old perceptions. They aren't going to abruptly close a whole data center. Hence why they try to balance out the population.

It being from 2023 is irrelevant. JP isn't going to see a near 50% population boon in ten months. Lucky Bancho has been doing census updates for over half a decade now using minions, mounts and achievement to come to a reasonably thorough estimation. Keep mind, minions and mounts are always public. It's not perfect but is fairly accurate; certainly more so than what you've provided. Which is absolutely nothing.

This is just not true at all. Mobile gaming is definitely more popular in Japan, but that isn't to say that console or traditional video game platforms (consoles, PC) are struggling there.

I didn't say they were struggling. I said consoles sell significant better in North America than Japan due to the latter having a much higher interest in mobile game. Which is, indeed, the case. The PS5 sold nearly double the amount in North American than in Japan. In fact, the only "console" where both regions were remotely close was the Nintendo DS--a handheld device.

Also, to argue that JRPGs do better in foreign markets than they do in their home one is just conjecture on your part. That's like arguing Fallout New Vegas is more popular than SMT or Persona in Japan, or vice versa. There are exceptions, like FFXVI which did very poorly in Japan but better in the West, but that isn't saying much given that it sold poorly overall due to being an exclusive to the PS5 when more people are still playing on their PS4s or have PCs.

I'm primarily referring to the major titles like Final Fantasy. The larger install base in North America tends to result in higher sales for those specific titles. It's a bit harder to find exact specifics since a lot of games lump everything outside their specific region as "worldwide" but the foreign market for even games like Persona 5 is substantially higher. Regardless, you're once again trying to equate two different things as though they are one and the same. JRPGs doing well or better outside their home market doesn't necessarily mean WRPG will.

[Telkira]

If you're going to claim sources are wrong, you ought to bring a shred of evidence as a rebuttal. And no, your word isn't good enough.

It is when it's based around information that's given from an official source. These projects are not official, and both give radically different numbers/metrics.

Server congestion and sever capacity are two different things. JP started with more worlds under the assumption a JRPG MMO would be more popular in Japan. Turns out, it wasn't.

It is, and that assumption was correct. The game is more popular in Japan than it is in the West, which was based on the fact that they implemented another set of servers in the JP datacenter, with the addition of Meteor and with Dynamis for NA. Dynamis had only 4 servers until today, which are being spun up.

As for Lucky Bancho's works and methodology, I have no doubt that it's good for something, but I'm certainly not going to base anything on his metrics alone, especially when the discrepancy between at-capacity and congested servers in Japan was always higher than in NA or EU respectively. That literally conveys to me that the game is more popular there. I'd like some official statistics from SE, maybe some live numbers, but until they decide to roll that out, we're stuck with this.

I didn't say they were struggling. I said consoles sell significant better in North America than Japan due to the latter having a much higher interest in mobile game. Which is, indeed, the case. The PS5 sold nearly double the amount in North American than in Japan. In fact, the only "console" where both regions were remotely close was the Nintendo DS--a handheld device.

Well you also have to understand that Japan has a significantly smaller population compared to the North America and Europe (the continents, not USA and any specific EU nation).

If we factor in the populations of each of these countries during the respective haydays of these consoles relative to population, you'll see a ratio that's more consistent and similar, with mobile platforms outperforming home consoles compared to the west of course.

JRPGs doing well or better outside their home market doesn't necessarily mean WRPG will.

JRPGs have always done better in their home market than in any specific foreign market, just like how WRPGs do better in Western markets than in east Asian or Japanese markets. I'm not saying everything abides by this rule, as I had already pointed out an exception, but the status quo has not and likely will never change unless demographics in Japanese gaming shift so far away.

This idea that Japanese products need to appeal to a global audience before their own is a pervasive and disgusting presumption that I've always found particularly annoying, which is why in my original post I told people to 'know their place' and 'this isn't their game'.