Simplicity over complexity, time to change.

[Theresa]

I hope the OP isn't one of those people that complain about the atma.

[Fawkes]

Didn't they already say they won't and that the expansion is going to be more of the same?

Well, I guess the question I'm thinking of was about making new job types rather than just tank/healer/dps, and they said they wanted to keep it simple for any new players that might pick up the game at the expansion. But you could likely extend that answer out to everything else. If a fourth job type is too complex for new people to grasp then pretty much everything is off the table.

[ErBear]

Back in 1.0 I was trying to be an advicate of complexity BUUUTT. You have to understand where yoshi wants to go with this game, he doesn't want to hinder the player in any way shape or form. I mean, really there isn't even an elemental wheel on this game.

[Zantetsuken]

Perhaps they shouldn't have tried to make [FFXI] easier casual friendly then.

^^This.^^

ffxiv 1.0 was designed to be a more realistic, challenging and complex game.

During this time, SE decided to transform FFXI into a more casual game in order to market each game to different groups.

So many left XI and migrated to 1.0 -- we were disappointed with its flaws but we stuck with it and began to see the game we were looking for in 1.23.

Then ARR happened and SE pulled the rug out from under us a second time.

I'm sure many of us would have been happy to stick with ffxi if they hadn't ruined it, but here we are now... Or here we were...

I personally recruited 7 other FFXI friends to play ARR at launch, but they have all since quit... As have many of those in my 1.23 and ARR early access friends list.

I tried holding out for good news about the future, but I haven't seen any. As a result, I have cancelled my sub as well.


SE has made a beautiful game in ARR, but it is so shallow and lacking in depth that it insults a person of even average intelligence if they should ever ask themselves: "Why should I bother trying to accomplish anything in this game?"

[Eissels]

Certain things I would like to be more complex, certain things I wouldn't.

Among what you listed, I personally don't want a super dangerous open world. It's not exciting, it's tedious. "Oh, I have to walk to coerthas? It's a five minute walk, but now it's going to take twenty minutes because I have to skirt around all the lvl 90 one-shot monsters." That's not fun, it's boring.

And, Hybrids really don't work in MMOs like this. You can't be a "jack of all trades" - because no matter what you're doing, you're going to be supplanted by someone better, and no one will take you. If you have a DPS/healer hybrid, it's just going to be replaced with a regular DPS that deals more damage, unless you tune fights around it, in which case it becomes absolutely mandatory and starts shunting other people out of the way.

[Fendred]

Just to clarify, FFXIV 1.0 was not shafted due to its complexity or difficulty. It was shafted because the game was released in an early beta/late alpha state instead of as a finished product.

[skaterger]

Well it gives more balance work to the dev team, but this is not for us to worry about, limiting the game because it could lead to more balancing work doesn't seems logic for me, we should worry about having fun, it's their job making it possible.

I think we agree about having specialized stats w/o making them mandatory and everlasting, they just have to find the perfect balance, and that's their job.

About the other topic, well this is more about personal opinions and experiences than feedback, just wanted to say that even if the player-base is still growing, it could be even bigger by retaining more players.

The fact is that the more complex a stat/gear system, the harder it is to balance. Warcraft, when first released was an incredibly complex game that had many class imbalances. This led to some classes like ret paladins and shadow priests having as much as 20% lower dps than other classes and no guild would take them into a raid. if you realize, the classes in ffxiv are mostly well balanced (aside from blm which was fixed). Wow struggled with this problem all the way up to patch 4.0 where they homogenized the classes. Not saying it cannot be done, but its really much harder than it sounds, especially if you have to balance pvp around it as well.

Just to clarify, FFXIV 1.0 was not shafted due to its complexity or difficulty. It was shafted because the game was released in an early beta/late alpha state instead of as a finished product.

Not entirely true. All we can say for certain that the game was discontinued because of its inability to attract enough players to stay afloat. The cause of why there was a lack of players/players left cannot be ascertained.

Case in point: If the game was still in beta but somehow manage to retain the subscription rate of ARR, we would still be playing 1.0 today.

[Dree-Elle]

History has shown, again and again, that PC games generally do not fare well on consoles. Adding more "complexity" to the game is fine, well and good, but where do you draw the line so as not to lose those playing on a console (and perhaps, a fair portion of the PC crowd as well)?

In my experience with MMOs, large and small, well-known and obscure, PC-based and console based, I have observed the following trend: Hardcore players are more vocal about their desires, but the vast majority of players are neither hardcore nor vocal. In a subscription-based game such as this one, how do you keep things balanced so as to cater to both the vocal minority and the (mostly) silent majority?

How do you not lose the subscription money that is helping to develop the game and keep it afloat?

[Velox]

Final fantasy has a lot of fans with very different tastes, and they should cater to every fan, even if it sounds unrealistic

Talking with experience from working in the game industry, trying to please everyone is impossible and the WORST kind of business model. If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. It's sad, but a part of reality, and every developer has to make the difficult choice of "we have to screw people over here, how can we minimize the impact?" every single day.

[Renik]

Talking with experience from working in the game industry, trying to please everyone is impossible and the WORST kind of business model. If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. It's sad, but a part of reality, and every developer has to make the difficult choice of "we have to screw people over here, how can we minimize the impact?" every single day.

I know, that's because i'm not asking for impossibles, some of the things i want to see have been mentioned by Yoshi, and i want to discuss the others to see if they would have a negative impact in the game, and if this is the case, how can we minimize it.

They can make the sacrifices needed but i don't think the majority of the player-base is actually happy with the current state of the game, as some say only the unhappy players come here to complain, the rest just play, but i have seen the opposite in-game, ppl that is not fully happy and don't care about the forums, some left, others keep waiting, we don't know the real numbers, and anything said here is just opinion until the dev team says something.

As i said before, don't think the current state of the game i what the majority wants, it's just the result of what they could do in 2 years, for me the simplicity of this game is just a consequence of launching an unfinished product due to the little time invested.

Don't forget some ppl will just blindly defend the game no matter what we say, and i know it because i have been in the other side defending this game from ppl who have been trying to improve it.