So Yoshi-P just confirmed jobs won't get a big rework in 8.0.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I would play FFXI in a heartbeat if it weren't for their absolutely horrendous sign up process, and if they provide us 'double sub'-package to let us access both XI and XIV from a single sub.

Wishful thinking, aye.

[Absurdity]

this is probably untrue simply for the fact that it's highly likely that a large number of PC players use the official launcher and not the one through steam, especially for those using Reshade and the like.

No, it still absolutely shows a player trend, steam client users don't magically behave completely differently from every other client user.

And besides, the steam version is the same thing, just with an extra middle man in-between. If you launch the game on steam it just opens the normal XIV launcher and things like ReShade run just fine on either.

Let me just say that numbers without context are meaningless. Is the period equivalent or equal in some manner in terms of releases, content?

Both are at the end of their respective patch.
The November census was on the 4th, a week before patch 7.1 and the July census was on the 27th, roughly a week before patch 7.3.

[Edweirdo]

Well its SE, if they make an announcement about something , we will probably see it in about 5 years.

[Ephremjlm]

im honestly tempted to play it myself, especially with rumors circulating that they are considering making a new expansion for the game because it is so popular and its population continues to rise.

Its funny because without incriminating myself, I sub to FFXI because I want to support it, but I may or may not actually be playing on another server that more closely aligns with a classic style that I feel like is more fun. One with a great horizon...............................*cough*. 4k texture packs are fun too if you were to do that, js. Its interesting too because the games are structured in that classic works as, well classic, retail works as a middle ground MMO and is a more sandparkish game these days, and FFXIV plays more like a casual theme park game.

It's too bad they don't recognize the possibility for investment there. SE, if they REALLY wanted to, could make a real effort and potentially take over the MMO industry by providing all of these experiences at a higher level. I mean ffs they even have the mobile game now. If they really wanted to see the MMO division skyrocket it's not like they don't have plenty of options. (this is just my ignorant opinion though lol)

[Drimn]

I expected them to be really conservative this expac with how poorly DT went over but I don't know how well I can handle another expac with Shadowbringer's skill lineup

[Rithy255]

This makes me think the current jobs will stay in some form and maybe we get specs like in other games, so you could choose between two versions of each job for instance? It could be interesting to see the jobs get specialisations to choose between different flavours of gameplay.

I think having like three versions of each job would make things interesting, though I wonder how this would be Implemented. I personally would like different ways to play jobs, I don't really care about "Meta" or illusion of choice, because I rather have that choice even if it's not the meta, some people may see it that way that something needs to be meta or anything else is a incorrect choice, I'd disagree I play for fun personally.

Some Jobs like Red Mage & Paladin could even play into a Healer spec, Healers like white mage could have a "stone/areo" DPS spec, or we could even have something like a Samurai tank (which has even been done in trust dungeons).

Though they would need to fix the baseline problems with Healer and Tank, they'd also need to fix these roles in content, although having scaling content like they've said could actually mean in more "midcore" content healers get to heal ect.

[SushiDog]

I think having like three versions of each job would make things interesting, though I wonder how this would be Implemented. I personally would like different ways to play jobs, I don't really care about "Meta" or illusion of choice, because I rather have that choice even if it's not the meta, some people may see it that way that something needs to be meta or anything else is a incorrect choice, I'd disagree I play for fun personally.

The idea is good but Square could never meaningfully balance it to the degree that the community at large would accept it. Square has struggled to balance three different healers and three different tanks, let alone fourth, let alone the DPS. This led to extremes such as HW nearly perma-banning PLD from PF and SB heavily excluding WHM/MNK. How could we possibly expect things to be different with 3x the job diversity? The community would never mesh well with it.

[echo78]

The idea is good but Square could never meaningfully balance it to the degree that the community at large would accept it. Square has struggled to balance three different healers and three different tanks, let alone fourth, let alone the DPS. This led to extremes such as HW nearly perma-banning PLD from PF and SB heavily excluding WHM/MNK. How could we possibly expect things to be different with 3x the job diversity? The community would never mesh well with it.

Stop spreading lies. No jobs were banned from clear/farm parties in HW or SB. Every job was viable. I cleared all of HW and SB playing monk (while hard carrying the DPS in many parties) despite it being so horrifically bad that apparently it should have been deleted. Because you know, it really wasn't that bad. It was just slightly worse than DRG and NIN. Monk was even in the optimal DPS comp in HW from 3.0-3.2. WHM was considered the optimal healer until they gave AST a 20% balance card in 3.4 and that didn't suddenly make WHM unplayable. PLD reputation recovered by midas and the only fight it was "bad" on was A12S but it could still clear that fight. Its not like A12S was a hard fight lol, the tier was so easy it got people raiding again and the devs have never dared make a difficult raid tier since.

The only parties that may have blocked jobs were speedrun/parse PFs in SB.

[ty_taurus]

The idea is good but Square could never meaningfully balance it to the degree that the community at large would accept it. Square has struggled to balance three different healers and three different tanks, let alone fourth, let alone the DPS. This led to extremes such as HW nearly perma-banning PLD from PF and SB heavily excluding WHM/MNK. How could we possibly expect things to be different with 3x the job diversity? The community would never mesh well with it.

In addition to what echo78 said, they can’t even meaningfully balance the jobs now despite how much they’ve been stripped down. So what’s even the point? If job balance is going to be a hot mess anyway, may as well let the jobs be fun to play. Their current design paradigm just makes them shallow, tacky, and still unbalanced anyway.

[Rithy255]

The idea is good but Square could never meaningfully balance it to the degree that the community at large would accept it. Square has struggled to balance three different healers and three different tanks, let alone fourth, let alone the DPS. This led to extremes such as HW nearly perma-banning PLD from PF and SB heavily excluding WHM/MNK. How could we possibly expect things to be different with 3x the job diversity? The community would never mesh well with it.

I'm going to be frank this fear of no job left behind has constantly been undermining uniqueness and pushing job design to become worse and worse degrading slowly, while they try to hyper focus on mechs to compensate it becomes this game where once you've done a fight on one job, you might as well have done it on all jobs, Everyone loses when jobs are so boring and samey, instead of playing the "warrior" you are now generic tank number 4. Because the devs are so scared to even try to give jobs more unique niches.

The "community" your talking about is a subset of raiders who play at the highest level 90% of people doing savage content isn't going to lock out a Job due to it being less strong, as long as the clear is reasonable then people will usually accept it.

Casual and midcore players shouldn't suffer because the top 1% of players will always follow what's meta, they do it still now despite the differences in jobs being so small and meaningless (outside of picto early expansion). We deserve stuff to actually enjoy, a more diverse job system that can cater to different playstyles is needed for the future of the games health, accepting our current system for jobs being so one note and generic has been one of the big reasons why people are losing interest.

I also don't get a "spec" system fixes everything I think job design in a baseline needs to be fixed... Though It can open a lot more of complexity to people who want/seek that out in the job system.

Most games with a multi job system realise that class/job design is just as important as encounter, when you only focus encounters you only got half of a system.