"Players who already like the way things are can feel at ease..."

[CapaxInfiniti]

At least he came out and said that this game isn't going to be getting any better.
It makes it much easier to come to terms with the fact that the game likely only has at best two years of life left in it.
Long enough for everyone to finish 8.0, realize they changed nothing that needed to be changed, and finally quit.

This is honestly the single most incompetent team I've ever seen.
It somehow makes shadowlands and the concepts around it look like a masterpiece of absolute brilliance when you compare it side by side.

[kentribal]

There’s only one fix that will make them listen, and that’s voting with your wallets. I’ve already unsubscribed. I strongly suggest you do the same. Cut off their revenue, deprive them of the money they take for granted, and sooner or later they will have no choice but to cave in and listen.

As I wrote in another post.
All SE will do is simply shut down everything and end the game. They are a game production company and not a company that simply has a single project and lives off of it.

[kentribal]

In no way would they even bother. That's too much work, doubly so if you're trying to make both viable and not add RNG for the sake of RNG.

Oh sure. "You now have a choice between RNG cards vs consistent ones". Why would anyone choose the RNG path when you can get the same results without it? Adding on to that, lets assume to make the RNG cards more worth it (because picking RNG just for RNG isn't good enough there has to be some advantage/job related reason for it) they split the deck so to speak. Current AST set up has consistency but weaker cards vs RNG's stronger but obviously random cards. You really think the player base is going to accept that and not whine and complain and get us back to where we are now?

Plus, it still does not address that the cards have been an issue since Shadowbringers. AST mains didn't want the seals system then and want their OG cards back. Something the devs have been extremely reluctant to do as you can see.

I'll even add that talent trees don't fix my other issues with AST and other classes as a whole for one fact: talent trees or added skills should not fix fundemental flaws with a class.

SCH/SGE, AST/WHM and I'll even argue WAR/DRK at their core pretty much play the same. All my healers and tanks actually have the exact same set up with barely any differences and talent trees are supposed to fix that by changing how skills work? How bout they actually fix the classes themselves before talent trees get added instead, like they should be.

Talent trees should enhance a class and help define a class' playstyle (see: Disc/Holy/Shadow Priest for a WoW example), not fix the base class by adding in back things core to the class. WoW did this exact thing and no one liked it.

I will agree, and I will say that if FF becomes like WoW in terms of classes, then it's over for me. I joined FF about 5 years ago and what I liked besides MSQ and the favorite side quest Manderville Adventures was that in my job I always had something to do in terms of rotation, dung raids, etc. Imagine that it's the first mmo game I played as a tank and healer and I enjoyed every moment.I like the complexity in the jobs and also the gcds that the skills have. Now if they make the game like wow you just press 3-5 buttons and get dps then bye FF.

[seolhyun]

They can't. The 2-min meta is like a malignant cancer that has metastasize and infected all parts of this game for the worse.

Job design, skill and ability design, character stats, and boss fights are all designed and/or severely limited by the 2-minute combat system.

The devs struggled with this expansion to add any meaningful skills or abilities because most jobs GCD rotations are extremely rigid and already don't have any room to add an additional GCD during fillers without under/overcapping resources, nor do they have any room to add another GCD during their 2-min burst cycle.

Which is why most jobs got boring af oGCDs or some useless ability that doesn't even work in any content.

There is zero room left for job growth with this combat system. If this supposed "big job update" still has 2-min buffs on every job, it just shows how lazy and incompetent these Devs are.

its hard to explain to ppl that didnt play early on, but playing scripted bosses with kinda disorganized jobs felt so much better than now. now you are just playing a scripted 2 min job with scripted bosses and it's so boring. it also killed a lot of variety you used to get by trying bosses on diff jobs.

[Moqi]

It's crazy just how much the 2-min buff window idea was pushed so hard a few expansions ago as a solution to a problem that really wasn't a problem. Seeing that rare time everyone had their buffs align and getting the biggest, thickest, nastiest numbers was too hard a drug to resist, and now job feel is reduced to what color the attack is because the buffs and skills and fights are all built around 2 minute timers.

Not only that, but they've worked really hard at deleting any kind of variance within those 2 minutes. No more long cast times, no more dots, no more procs, no more timers... There's no way they spent 3 expansions reworking all skills just to turn them back to what they were. Whatever they are doing in 8.0, not only won't change the 2 min meta, it also won't bring back all the different playstyles jobs used to have.

[Carin-Eri]

As I wrote in another post.
All SE will do is simply shut down everything and end the game. They are a game production company and not a company that simply has a single project and lives off of it.

Somewhat true - but by the same token that 'single project' is, in this case, their biggest cash-cow. And said cash cow doesn't seem to receive the investment that a 'project' that is, for all intents and purposes keeping the company afloat, deserves.

[DPZ2]

Somewhat true - but by the same token that 'single project' is, in this case, their biggest cash-cow. And said cash cow doesn't seem to receive the investment that a 'project' that is, for all intents and purposes keeping the company afloat, deserves.

In FY2026/Q1 the entire MMORPG division pulled in less than 30% of net profits for Square Enix. Cash cow it may be, but don't ever take the point that Square Enix depends on that income to survive, because it isn't true anymore.

[Ephremjlm]

The answer to your questions are fairly simple: they don't care.

They don't care about the playerbase they fostered with original class designs and then shunned expansion after expanion.
They don't care, specifically Yoshi P, that you strang so many people along hoping for a REWORK of jobs and not "the same, but with".

Not to be a doomer about it all but like what actually black pilled me was after I started noticing the negative trends big time in EW, that have now built to a boiling point. I then went back and started researching what was really going on back in the 1.0-2.0-3.0 shift. What were people saying back then and how did the dev team handle it differently, while completely uprooting the system, and while making the player base seemingly so happy? What I found was that the NoClip Documentary is more of a marketing piece than a recount of what really happened. If you read those forums there were A LOT of people who were pissed and quit.

I implore anyone to go back to the old official forums and external forums and read the sentiment. There were A LOT of people that stuck around and supported the game who DID NOT want it to become a WOW clone. They just wanted the combat to be better than FFXI's but with the same RPG options. SE completely abandoned those people for a larger playerbase. Like we joke about it now, but the reality is that you really don't see a ton of 1.0 players anymore. What makes us think that we're any different? That if the data doesn't support it, that SE is going to make any significant changes to the combat and content associated if they can simultaneously feed slop to hardcore raiders and casuals who love it, if they outnumber the more normal MMO players/midcore players who some of which will stick around anyways? I mean what we're seeing now is simply a lack of content for everyone, but if they solve the casual and hardcore issue again, the people in the middle are still in the same boat and outnumbered.

And before anyone comes at my throat, yes there was crossover with wow players even in FFXI days so of course some people were stoked to get FFXI WOW, and to be fair 1.0's battle system was literally worse than their previous MMO FFXI. That said, people in those old forums stated (you can read it yourself or ask around, I asked on reddit and FB groups too) the combat by either 1.19-1.23b had improved significantly and they thought they were on the right track. I think I can agree that it wouldn't have made the game as "popular" as it is now but that's not the point im trying to make, just wanted to clarify my thoughts on this for the point I was making.

[Valence]

its hard to explain to ppl that didnt play early on, but playing scripted bosses with kinda disorganized jobs felt so much better than now. now you are just playing a scripted 2 min job with scripted bosses and it's so boring. it also killed a lot of variety you used to get by trying bosses on diff jobs.

And not all bosses were completely scripted either, cf Melusine. I'd like more fights with modular smaller gameplay segments that can overlap or just happen in random order.

[ovIm]

And not all bosses were completely scripted either, cf Melusine. I'd like more fights with modular smaller gameplay segments that can overlap or just happen in random order.

But that would mean our damage numbers cannot be properly compared to one another and we cannot have that, that would make some people very very sad.
:^)