#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Jojoya]

Honestly, they probably won't even say a thing about healers. They seem to be adopting the approach of "If we say nothing about it, they'll eventually stop talking about it" approach.

It's working out for them so far. Massive outcry over Kaiten? Eventually stopped. Massive outcry over BLM changes? Eventually stopped. Massive outcry over the DC travel restrictions? That'll stop eventually too.

Massive outcry over Kaiten stopped because most SAM players didn't really care (or were happy with its removal) and those who were upset either quit or learned to live without it.

Massive outcry over BLM changes stopped because most BLM players didn't really care (or were happy with the changes) and those who were upset either quit or learned to live with them.

I doubt the healer situation is any different overall. Most healers are at least content with the current situation. Those who are unhappy have options: quit, learn to live with healing in its current state or stop playing healer completely to play other jobs.

The problem with this "strike" is you had a lot of players jump on the bandwagon to join in the screaming but continued to play healer. You've got a few leaders standing firm but they look a lot less significant when almost all of the followers have disappeared back into the general population and random troublemakers keep using the excuse "healer strike" for their poor behavior in group content.

It's a battle that was lost before it ever began because not enough were willing to commit to it.

In the meanwhile, I'm definitely doing a lot of healing in dungeons thanks to His Royal Headness.

[Supersnow845]

Massive outcry over Kaiten stopped because most SAM players didn't really care (or were happy with its removal) and those who were upset either quit or learned to live without it.

Massive outcry over BLM changes stopped because most BLM players didn't really care (or were happy with the changes) and those who were upset either quit or learned to live with them.

I doubt the healer situation is any different overall. Most healers are at least content with the current situation. Those who are unhappy have options: quit, learn to live with healing in its current state or stop playing healer completely to play other jobs.

The problem with this "strike" is you had a lot of players jump on the bandwagon to join in the screaming but continued to play healer. You've got a few leaders standing firm but they look a lot less significant when almost all of the followers have disappeared back into the general population and random troublemakers keep using the excuse "healer strike" for their poor behavior in group content.

It's a battle that was lost before it ever began because not enough were willing to commit to it.

In the meanwhile, I'm definitely doing a lot of healing in dungeons thanks to His Royal Headness.

I can’t believe I have to explain that “enough people probably tolerate the decision that there is no point considering if it was bad” is not a viable way to run a live service game in the long term

By your own logic you could make literally every bad change imaginable and justify it with “people either don’t care enough or just grew to tolerate it”. Is it so bad that people want to actually enjoy the game they pay for, not learn to barely tolerate it

[Jojoya]

I can’t believe I have to explain that “enough people probably tolerate the decision that there is no point considering if it was bad” is not a viable way to run a live service game in the long term

By your own logic you could make literally every bad change imaginable and justify it with “people either don’t care enough or just grew to tolerate it”. Is it so bad that people want to actually enjoy the game they pay for, not learn to barely tolerate it

You're forgetting the third option: quit the game.

And that's what most players actually do when they feel bad decisions are getting made over and over. They quit. They don't hang around thinking that if they just keep screaming loud enough the developers will decide to make the changes they want.

Players quitting over bad development decisions have effectively killed MMORPGs (gone into true maintenance mode if not shutting down servers completely). It's only the major franchises that some companies rest their reputations on that try to hang on when players start abandoning their games because it takes a while for player attrition to put the games into the danger zone.

WoW has been there. Blizzard got extremely lucky that they had built up to 12 million active paid subscriptions at its height. It took a very long time but most of those players did disappear. Ironically what saved the game was Classic WoW. The popularity rammed home that players really did like some of the older systems more than the new systems added over time. Blizzard learned.

This game has been there. Look at 1.0. Players quit. The Meteor Survivor list in the 2.0 end credits may look impressive but that really is not that many names (32,000) compared to the number of copies sold in its first 2 months (over 600,000 - I couldn't find a number of total copies sold before the servers were shut down). SE took notice. They learned.

How many players are quitting right now? And specifically because of healing problems?

Doesn't seem to be a whole lot considering this Savage tier has already had the highest number of clears than has been seen in years. Only a tiny number of those clears have happened without healers.

Where are all the complaints from those healers about the state of healing? Shouldn't they have the best insight of all having cleared all the content?

You're trying to assert that every single one of them were just gritting their teeth and tolerating healing for the sake of their statics. Can you not accept that some of them truly are fine with it? It's possible to see problems with a system and still be satisfied or even happy overall.

PFs looking for healers? PFs have always been looking for healers. It's not new to this expansion. It's not specific to this game. My first character in WoW was a hunter. Why did I pick up a healer and become a healer main? Because my friends and I were having problems finding available healers. So I picked up healer so we'd have one and discovered I truly enjoyed healing.

I still enjoy healing. I can see the problems with the system here and wish that SE would address them but it does not stop me from enjoying healing.

I don't know what things are like on the JP side beyond the comments from the JP posters early on in this thread. Evidently, the healing design is what JP healers expect from a JP game. I may be used to something different because of my experience with western games but this isn't a western game. Where I and others have enjoyed the pressure that comes from western style healing, evidently JP players don't. I have to be flexible and learn to adapt to what's standard for JP games.

It's unrealistic to expect anything to change with healing design in this game. We can always hope but I wouldn't bet on it. It's not a western game. They're not going to make changes just to please the western audience at the expense of the JP audience.

Either adapt or stop healing completely. Don't cave to pressure from friends. If the group needs a healer, someone else can pick up the job just as I did for my WoW friends all those years ago. If they say they don't want to, you don't need to say anything other than "I don't want to, either. I've already done my share. It's someone else's turn". If they won't accept that, you just learned they were never really your friends in the first place.

Actual friends would understand. Actual friends would be happy to take turns filling the unpopular role so one person wasn't always left unhappy. That's what my WoW friends would do for me on those rare occasions when I didn't feel like healing and wanted to play my hunter again. One of them would switch to one of their alts that could heal.

[Aravell]

I don't know what things are like on the JP side beyond the comments from the JP posters early on in this thread. Evidently, the healing design is what JP healers expect from a JP game. I may be used to something different because of my experience with western games but this isn't a western game. Where I and others have enjoyed the pressure that comes from western style healing, evidently JP players don't. I have to be flexible and learn to adapt to what's standard for JP games.

It's unrealistic to expect anything to change with healing design in this game. We can always hope but I wouldn't bet on it. It's not a western game. They're not going to make changes just to please the western audience at the expense of the JP audience.

What information do you have to back up that this is just them designing a JP game for a JP audience? Are you claiming that anything pre-Shadowbringers is not a JP game?

We're not even asking them to design something specifically for non-JP audiences, we're asking them to return to a design that already existed at some point in this game's lifetime, so the argument that they shouldn't cater to non-JP players doesn't fly.

[Supersnow845]

snip

You cannot remotely compare this because legacy was just out and out a shit game with near no redeeming qualities. If you quit in legacy nobody wondered why because nobody actually enjoyed it. The 30,000 or so of us to made it to the final fall of dalamud basically did it out of a weird combo of self inflicted pain and seeing how they would actually end it. If you made it to 1.23b it certainly wasn’t because you were actually playing the game

Meanwhile modern 14 does have good qualities and a reason to play it. If you see mostly satisfied with a game but unhappy with one or two parts you don’t go nuclear and quit, you leave feedback. Don’t act like squares radio silence is the fault of the players not being nuclear enough. This is 100% squares fault because they won’t even take time to acknowledge our feedback

But for the record I have been trying to hit squares wallet. My second character who I raid on I’ve quit their subscription (a standard subscription) and I’ve stopped looking for new glams on the mogstation. So now all square is getting out of me is my piddly legacy subscription on my main. They’ve gone from getting close to 40 AUD out of me a month to getting like 11. I bought a lovely new speedo with the money difference this month so I could sit on the beach and not play 14

If I’ve given this much feedback and cut my spending that much it’s not my fault for not being nuclear enough for them

[PercibelTheren]

SNIP

I don't know why you think the Savage clear rate is indicative of how many players there are. This tier, compared to Endwalker raids, is much less of a pain to prog because there are a lot fewer bodychecks. If you mess up, you usually either just kill yourself or your stack partner. Healers can actually save bad pulls again. People who are messing up a lot can also get carried much more easily.

The healers who are healing in my static are generelly fine with playing the role but I don't think either of them particularly loves it. This makes me a little sad because being fine with playing a role and actively loving it (like some are loving the new jobs and like I'm loving Dancer) are two very different things.

I want everyone to have fun while playing the game. Not just feel meh about it.

[Aravell]

I don't know why you think the Savage clear rate is indicative of how many players there are.

I've been seeing a few people make this argument that more clears this tier means more healers exist, which really baffles me where the correlation is.

I personally would wager that this tier has about the same amount of healers, but more of them cleared because the tier isn't as strict as previous ones. Really only M4S has any sort of body check and it doesn't even have that many.

[Jojoya]

The healers who are healing in my static are generelly fine with playing the role but I don't think either of them particularly loves it. This makes me a little sad because being fine with playing a role and actively loving it (like some are loving the new jobs and like I'm loving Dancer) are two very different things.

So ask them instead of making assumptions about their feelings.

I've been seeing a few people make this argument that more clears this tier means more healers exist, which really baffles me where the correlation is.

I personally would wager that this tier has about the same amount of healers, but more of them cleared because the tier isn't as strict as previous ones. Really only M4S has any sort of body check and it doesn't even have that many.

It's not an argument that more healers exist. It's pointing out that for the most part, it looks like those who have healed in the past are continuing to heal. As much as some want the general community to think that healers are giving up healing, we've got nothing to substantiate that outside of some cherry picked screenshots and others have turned around to share their cherry picked screenshots that show different.

Healers have always been one of the hardest roles to fill in MMORPGs and that's not because of job design. Most players have no interest in the role. They want to be the damage dealers watching huge damage numbers flash across their screen and feeling like superhero because they're bringing down the big bad. Healers rarely get those superhero moments. It's a rare fight that's designed to put the healers front and center. I remember all my years of raiding in WoW and the only two fights like that I can think of were Dreamweaver (which DPS generally hated because they spent the fight killing trash) and Tsulong.

The healer voids in PF are getting noticed more this year because players are paying more attention after the strike publicity. In game, I've been hearing more comments about healers not healing in dungeons than I have heard comments about people having a hard time finding a healer to fill their PF. If it was that much of a problem in PF, I would think there would be a lot more players complaining.

since you have ALL the answers.... how would they know why people quit when.. THERE IS NO EXIT SURVEY?

oh right.. they know just because they always know and always make the right decisions regarding everything.

I don't have all the answers. I have my observations and experience from almost 2 decades of playing MMORPGs, and not just FFXIV. There are the things I've learned from reading developer blogs and interviews. And like everyone else here, I have my opinions about what is good, what is bad, and what simply is. I try to be practical and realistic in my comments, putting aside my personal feelings as appropriate to see the greater picture.

So far, I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary compared to prior expansions so I have no reason to believe that there are a lot of healers participating in the strike, whether by quitting the game or switching to play only tank/DPS jobs.

I also haven't said that the developers know everything and always make the right decisions. I've said multiple times that I do see problems with healing design and that I wish they would address them. But I'm not the only player of the game. What I see as a problem may not be seen as a problem by others.

Whether we like it or not, reaction within the JP players base is going to affect the developers a lot stronger than NA player reaction if for no other reason than they play with the JP players and not the NA/EU players. They're going to see what players are saying in the JP chat about the game. They're not going to see what NA and EU players are saying.

The best information we have about what JP players think is from those that came over from the JP forums to post in this thread. They said overall the JP player base is fine with healing design because it's what they're used to getting from JP games. If that's the case and in game comments in JP chat more or less support that, what do you think they're going to do?

[Aravell]

Healers have always been one of the hardest roles to fill in MMORPGs and that's not because of job design.

Why would job design not factor into this? Job design and content design has always been tightly linked because you experience the game content through your job, if either of the 2 components fail, it also sours the other side as well.

The healer role can be hard to fill because of the responsibilities that come with it AND the job design can be terrible, both can be true at the same time.

[PercibelTheren]

So ask them instead of making assumptions about their feelings.

Healers have always been one of the hardest roles to fill in MMORPGs and that's not because of job design. Most players have no interest in the role.

Let me rephrase what I said. I was trying to express things politely but I guess that made what I meant to say unclear. I KNOW they don't particularly love it. There is exactly one person I know of who actually loves healing and that person is a Sprout who just started Shadowbringers MSQ, so he's still in the "shiny new game" phase. Most healers I know also continue healing because that's what they're good at. It took me over two years to dare step into harder content on something that wasn't a healer because I have healed in every single MMO and it's what I'm fairly competent at. FFXIV is the only game that has made me more or less quit healing because it's in no way a fun or satisfying experience unless things are going horribly wrong.

Healers being unpopular absolutely is a job design problem. In fact, job design IS the problem making healers unpopular. Most people aren't excited at the prospect of dealing barely any damage, having very little rotation to speak of (if any) and just watching green bars go up. Because the jobs themselves are like this, the only people who stick with them are those who enjoy supporting the party. And there are very few of us to begin with - most people want to feel like the main character and, as a healer, you don't get to feel like you are.