Yoshi-P on changes in next expansion: “I don’t want to take a conservative approach”

[BabyYoda]

We already see some of these streamers who cry when their job's having a hard time in high end content. Imagine if we went back to Stormblood or even Heavensward level of creative job design where a job's ability to shield puts it way above this other job in the same role? Yoship already saw the reaction to that reality, the high end community cries really hard, even harder than the casual community when things like that happens. He and developers in most mmos worry more about them than the casuals. Blizzard surely doesn't design jobs based on the casuals that's for sure haha.

We'll just have to see which side wins in 8.0; clearly the high end raiders won yet again in Dawntrail.



From a tank and healer perspective I want more OG aurum vale (pre shadowbringer aurum vale) where you have to plan your pulls and even talk to your party about what to do/not to do. I'd take an entire dungeon with no bosses and solely strategic and even 'gimmickly' placed mobs and puzzles

I hate how we call bad players "high-end"

Being a high-end is not performing 123 combo for 40% of the time

[Voidmage]

Cheap PR talk because of the criticism of the stale formula that has started to surface with DT.

It’s just another „wait till the next expansion“ from him.

Tbh I grow tired of his interviews.
To me it’s pretty clear that it’s all just damage control because the criticism is not just a fad that died down in a few weeks this time but has really dented the prestige the game had till now.

Yoshida is a PR man first and foremost.
I believe what he says after I see some good stuff in the patches instead of the old in new paint.

[Valence]

I think DDR is a good analogy for the current state of FFXIV, even as a player who doesn’t do savage. When I recently returned to the game after leaving around the end of ShB, I was a little apprehensive about doing EW/DT normal trials/raids after being away for so long. Because in the past, you often used to have to look up guides and/or coordinate who was doing what ahead of time. But then I discovered all I had to do on newer content was just follow the designated “danger dorito”or “safety square” through the scripted steps to clear most fights on the first try.

Then I got Snowcloak on a roulette and was surprised they took out the snowballs on the 2nd boss fight. I later discovered they had also simplified a lot of the other older dungeons in the same way to eliminate/reduce party mechanics/coordination and remolded them to fit the current one-way corridors design paradigm. Players used to pause and explain mechanics or give directions on which way to go when they saw that first time bonus notification, but that doesn’t happen anymore now that even dungeons are down to just “follow the leader.”

I can somehow feel the dev team’s intention to make the game more easily accessible to new players and returners like me, and I sure don’t miss the times of repeated party wipes because one person in a key role couldn’t do their part correctly. These days even healers or tanks going down isn’t necessarily an automatic party wipe like it used to be. And maybe this is just how “contemporary” MMO design is now and I need to just get on with it. But I can’t help but feel like FFXIV has lost some of the magic that makes playing a MMO special and different from other games.

While I certainly do not miss some instances like old Toto Rak or Praetorium and whatnot due to their extremely poor replayability (they were obviously designed with first time experience in mind, and not for dailies), there has definitely been a pattern of streamlining every older mechanic and content, especially the quirky ones, into the generic DDR lego bricks we have everywhere now, be it stack markers, etc. It's definitely good to prepare new players for it since that's basically everything they'll be eating until the endgame and beyond those days, hell even savage since EW has almost every one of its mechanics built around stacks, partners, light party stacks, or spreads. And point blank AoE (chariot) vs donut (dynamo). Over and over and over with the unique mechanics happening in between. Party wides or busters are almost always of the exact same type and formula, requiring the same generic and repetitive mitigation solutions.

Everything is designed to work like a fast food venture where people can get in, and where they can just not talk to other players where other players act like glorified AIs, and where predictability of everything is key. XIV has always been scripted, but when you compare the ARR/HW model where enemy damage could crit, where autos were threatening and the boss ddin't stop for 80% of the time because casting long ass mechanics, where the boss wasn't constantly recentering itself to make sure the patterns remain the exact same no matter the tank you have, where a lot of encounter mechanics actually TALKED to the jobs and the battle system through attrition (and other features), to what we have now, yes, I'd dare say the game has become a different game for sure.

They do have tried a couple of new things in the recent expert dungeons with varying degrees of success, and in M2S as well, but it's very shy at best, and it still doesnt TALK to the job system because there is nothing left of a job system that has to be designed around the same blue and red lego encounter bricks with no other metric than where you do stand to solve a mechanic and not die and how much you can keep uptime and your rotation at the same time over a single metric that is damage.

[lolnotacat]

Everything is designed to work like a fast food venture where people can get in, and where they can just not talk to other players where other players act like glorified AIs, and where predictability of everything is key.

I feel like this is the worst long term change the game has underwent. I remember how I got recruited to my first FC when I started playing in 2.5. I was in Brayflox's Longstop and playing WHM. I was partied up with 3 other players from the same FC and they were very chatty (something which rarely happens now). Back then, a lot of tanks wouldn't wall-to-wall pull like we do now and one of the DPS accidentally aggro'd another group. I managed to stop a few of the adds with Repose and fluid aura to give us enough time to burn down what we were already working on. The fact I used CC in a dungeon surprised them since I was still a sprout.

I rarely ever see interactions like this anymore. Partially it's because of how encounters are designed and partially because cross-server roulettes cut down on sociability. I feel Yoshi and team leaned to hard into the single player aspect of the game and that hurts everything except convenience.

[Kuroka]

I rarely ever see interactions like this anymore. Partially it's because of how encounters are designed and partially because cross-server roulettes cut down on sociability. I feel Yoshi and team leaned to hard into the single player aspect of the game and that hurts everything except convenience.

Too much single player and too wide servers, the more spread out we are, the more we distant we get, the less social the game becomes... Opening the servers like they did was a mistake...

[Eyrilona]

Opening the servers like they did was a mistake...

I agree. I was perfectly okay with my home server player base being all there was to work with. You'd see the same faces more often, etc.

And for that social cost, we got... what? I get that they thought making everything even more cross-world could help to keep the queues full, but now in the NA data centers we have the situation where Aether is in a state of permanent congestion because all the raiders go there to get decent queues, creating the self-fulfilling prophecy that all the other data centers have terrible queues.. because everyone who should be in them has DC traveled to 'the raid DC'. And because of the congested state, it is so hard to get through in those few less congested times of day that the system will allow it, that once there, people don't come back to their home servers out of fear they won't be able to get back to Aether before their next raid night. On Crystal, even getting into a normal daily roulette takes longer now than it did before DC travel became a thing, even though official subscriber numbers say overall there should be more players than this time in last expansion.

[Unyqua]

I feel like this is the worst long term change the game has underwent. I remember how I got recruited to my first FC when I started playing in 2.5. I was in Brayflox's Longstop and playing WHM. I was partied up with 3 other players from the same FC and they were very chatty (something which rarely happens now). Back then, a lot of tanks wouldn't wall-to-wall pull like we do now and one of the DPS accidentally aggro'd another group. I managed to stop a few of the adds with Repose and fluid aura to give us enough time to burn down what we were already working on. The fact I used CC in a dungeon surprised them since I was still a sprout.

I rarely ever see interactions like this anymore. Partially it's because of how encounters are designed and partially because cross-server roulettes cut down on sociability. I feel Yoshi and team leaned to hard into the single player aspect of the game and that hurts everything except convenience.

forcing sociability is never a good idea. The first time i started to play the game i queued for the Praetorium dungeons back in stormblood i think it was. At that time after 3 hours no group popped up and so i quit the game. I just wanted to continue the story and i had no interest to engage with people just to get into a group for "old" content at the time. so i think its not a bad idea from SE to make the MSQ content a more solo player experience when people want to.

[lolnotacat]

forcing sociability is never a good idea.

I disagree. It has to be done in a smart manner, but sociability is good from a player perspective and from a developer perspective as it helps with the longevity of a game. Many older games had friction introduced just to force sociability. This definitely cut back on convenience, but helped a lot with helping players make friends (and enemies which IMO is also good). We're at the point where the game is so convenient, its MMO identity is being chipped away.

That said, I also remember when MSQ roulette would take ages, even as a healer or tank. And yes, that's a bad design. But that means the design for certain queues should be smarter. Why not make certain queues (MSQ and Alliance for example) pull from the entire datacenter while the rest only pull from the server? Or even better, have all queues start at the server level fill parties with people from the same server, then after hitting a threshold (average wait time +2 minutes for example), the queue opens up to the entire data center? Hell, even just prioritizing putting players from the same server together into the same party without changing any of the other mechanics would be a HUGE change for sociability.

As far as making the MSQ content more solo-friendly. We already have that. Pretty much everything can be done with trusts. To be honest, I think that's a pretty bad experience too as its led to further encounter homogenization so the AI can handle mechanics. That's not to say it's all bad (I hated old Toto-Rak with a passion for example), but making the rest of the game suffer for the single player experience is partially to blame why the game is making so many people upset.

[CuteBucket]

I clearly had a very different experience in regards to socialization. Opening up the servers actively increased the amount of people I was meeting and befriending. I've met and now play routinely with many folks who I never would have had the chance to play with had they not opened the servers.

[Raikai]

They do have tried a couple of new things in the recent expert dungeons with varying degrees of success, and in M2S as well, but it's very shy at best, and it still doesnt TALK to the job system because there is nothing left of a job system that has to be designed around the same blue and red lego encounter bricks with no other metric than where you do stand to solve a mechanic and not die and how much you can keep uptime and your rotation at the same time over a single metric that is damage.

Which is why I'm so peeved about "Wait until 8.0 for jobs to be looked at". Their take is that having that in DT would suddenly be too much for players. I'm at peace with that, really, and for it I braced myself for really out of the box high end fight designs, but like you said... innovation was VERY shy, and I kept asking myself if that's what we didn't have job changes for?

I made another thread about this specific issue, that high end fights are good and satisfying to do, but it's a good in their own safe spectrum and nowhere near where they hyped them to be. I saw many replies of people kind of coping with the idea that those meaningful changes would be in patch content because at release it would overwhelm players.

I keep thinking... overwhelming? What difference does it makes, if it's 7.0, 7.1... if it's so groundbreaking that will overwhelm people, it will no matter when. If the concern is about new players, then the point is moot because is not like a new player landing in 7.2 will be forced to experience the more simple 7.1 beforehand. In fact, there's no reason to, since the game gives competitive crafted gear for the new tier.