The destruction of BLM

[Quuoooote]

I'm gonna be really honest, this overexagerrating of the rework from some Black Mage players kinda seems like a weird form of "I suffered, so you should too, we should never improve things", and I just don't vibe with that sort of mentality.

The flaw in this line of thinking is the assumption that Black Mage players are secretly some cabal of evil gatekeeping masochists, who only wanted to play it in order to lord some non-existent difficulty medal over everyone else's heads. In reality it's simply a matter of people choosing a job that spoke to them and engaged them properly. "Improving things" is entirely subjective; for some people Black Mage was never suffering at all, and the current devolution into WHM-lite gameplay is an affront to their preferred playstyle. If they wanted to play WHM-lite, they would've been playing White Mage. Black Mage players were never suffering, they played Black Mage because they wanted to. Framing it as if they were is intellectually dishonest.

To put it another way, I like doing Sudoku puzzles in my spare time. I typically go on Sudoku.com to do them. The website has six difficulties to choose from: Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert, Master, and Extreme. I typically pick Expert, because it's a good balance of challenging vs. winnable for me. I wouldn't expect someone who's not interested in learning Expert difficulty to "suffer" like I did learning more advanced strategies (which, I didn't suffer at all by the way, I chose to learn because I enjoy the game), but on the other side of the same coin it would be wildly inappropriate to rework Expert difficulty into "Easy Mode 4" because the people that only play Easy want a new flavor of Easy to choose from. I play Expert because I enjoy it and it's suited for the level of challenge that I prefer. If you don't like Expert, there are other options available to tailor your experience how you like. If I were stuck playing on Easy mode forever because it's all they offered, I would either find a different site to play on or stop playing entirely. And before anyone jumps at the opportunity to tell me, "Well Quote, looks like this game just isn't for you! Go unsub and play something else!" ...

By the same logic, what's the problem with finding a different job because Black Mage isn't for you? There were 20 other jobs/difficulties to choose from if Black Mage imposed too much "suffering" upon you! For what purpose do we pressingly NEED to flatten it out? It's not like it was rocket science either, so I have no idea where this idea that it was awful, miserable suffering came from. And if it was really so awful that you consider it suffering, then what's the problem with finding a different job that accommodates your desired level of difficulty? Why does every job need to be flattened out to the floor to leave more advanced players out in the cold? We're constantly reducing jobs, and the game is explicitly becoming narrower in scope to exclude players that enjoy being challenged by the gameplay. There's no way to look at it other than the game objectively becoming smaller. I consider that to be the opposite of an improvement.