Do the dev's actually play this game?

[Aegrus]

This is an honest question. When I ask this, I specifically want to know what classes they play.

I honestly believe, they do not play support classes. (i.e. tanks and heals).

For tanks this is due to the seemingly obvious problems in class design. DRK is put in a position where it has worse CD's than PLD (arguably also WAR's that use inner beast well).

However, this pales in comparison to AST, who straight up under performs compared to WHM and SCH. The shields are weaker, the heals are weaker, and I am not even going to touch utility or dps which is abysmal.

For DPS. I don't know, the BRD/MCH nonperformance was obvious from the get go as BRD got about 30% of their damage from auto-attacks from the old barrage/2.0 system, so a buff of 30% would be a reasonable start for keeping performance equal.

This is more a plea. In WoW they actually consult and deal with top raiding guilds for feedback. The test servers iron out alot of issues before live. The developers actively play the classes they enjoy and are open about it. They are also quite honest about the fact that players will always be better than them at the game. It is time to consider some realistic testing practices and feedback systems, as in-house testing leads to bias (playing classes in an intended manner) and results that cannot be replicated by 1000's of players in just a few days of testing.

[Tagihi]

Yes even Yoshida him self a director playing his own game.

And if you have something that can help game use support section!

[Croisciento]

Yes please, another comparison to WoW we all know how great this game turned out.

[Aegrus]

Playing a tank is not the same as playing a healer. Playing Monk is not the same as playing Black Mage. I ask this because having a diverse point of view is important, especially when tanks and healers are often lynchpins of good groups.

If you want another specific example, the aforementioned Monk still has obvious issues with greased lightning, and prolonged phase shifts such as Living Liquid in A3. The phase transitions are so long, that it is quite easy to drop greased lightning, and they are designed around a ramp up to 3 stacks. Just the extra ~2sec of cast delay in it being applied at the start instead of the end of the animation alone makes a huge QoL difference in the class. This is something you wouldn't know unless you play or work with players who play monk often.

The bigger point of the OP was also that Dev experience is also not the end all, player feedback is really important.

Yes please, another comparison to WoW we all know how great this[that?] game turned out.

Other MMO's exist, and set standards and expectations, you would be a fool to not acknowledge what works well for others.

[Lantia]

Other MMO's exist, and set standards and expectations, you would be a fool to not acknowledge what works well for others.

Yeah lost 5 Million users from autum to summer (expansion release 12 mio and may 7,1) is really something to look at ;D

[Belhi]

Playing a tank is not the same as playing a healer. Playing Monk is not the same as playing Black Mage. I ask this because having a diverse point of view is important, especially when tanks and healers are often lynchpins of good groups.

If you want another specific example, the aforementioned Monk still has obvious issues with greased lightning, and prolonged phase shifts such as Living Liquid in A3. The phase transitions are so long, that it is quite easy to drop greased lightning, and they are designed around a ramp up to 3 stacks. Just the extra ~2sec of cast delay in it being applied at the start instead of the end of the animation alone makes a huge QoL difference in the class. This is something you wouldn't know unless you play or work with players who play monk often.

The bigger point of the OP was also that Dev experience is also not the end all, player feedback is really important.

They do respond to player feedback quite often. The WM/Gauss thing is a perfect example and acted upon quite quickly. The Dragoon positional tweeks too. As for the MNK, didn't the whole new meditation thing resolve much of the issues with phase transitions and GL? I haven't levelled my MNK to 60 yet so I don't know the mechanic.

As for the design thing, its likely a number of the devs do play support roles. More than that, any class will go through a lot of peer review by devs and rigorous testing by the QA constantly provide feedback. All the class changes have probably gone through many iterations before going live. Player feedback is valuable but often one set of feedback will contradict another and in some cases its an issue of people still adapting to new systems and encounters.

WoW is a really bad example. Hell we even had one of their devs say recently in an interview that it was a particular specs turn to be underpowered. There balance has often been a mess, let alone most of their class design.

[Remus]

Yeah lost 5 Million users from autum to summer (expansion release 12 mio and may 7,1) is really something to look at ;D

They will come back when the expansion comes out it always happens lol

[Krylo]

If you want another specific example, the aforementioned Monk still has obvious issues with greased lightning, and prolonged phase shifts such as Living Liquid in A3. The phase transitions are so long, that it is quite easy to drop greased lightning

If you're on opo-opo when the transition starts, form shift to Couerl and you'll be fine. If you're on Couerl or Raptor, drop a tornado kick just before, then form shift. You can also use the transitions to meditate your chakra back up to perform multiple Forbidden Chakras during the fight.

Untargetable phases aren't really a huge issue for monks anymore, so long as you can see them coming and don't have to do anything else during them that prevents meditation/form shift (glaring at YOU second boss of Neverreap making me lug totems around).

[Hyrist]

I'm just going to make a short snipe at this point.

The developers have better track of this game than you do. People who are saying that Bard and MCH under-preform are not paying attention to the 'Top FCs' who were actually outputting good damage with them. At 60, MCH and BRD's rotation and strenght were not lacking, as they were pulling as high as 800-900 parses on Ravana Ex when utilized right.

The complaints came from a lack of adaptation of the players at early levels and bugs that were not presented on Dev builds. The development team listened to feedback and adjusted the skills for better ease of use - and will likely continue to fine tune things for these classes, and others down the line.

Class Balancing on this game has been better than most other MMOs - and yes, that includes WoW. Pay attention: We are JUST now starting to see early adapters into the Endgame Phases - meaning strategies have not manifested themselves and the Jobs are unfamiliar as how to use what skills and rotations when - there's no point in rushing changes on player feedback when the players themselves don't know what they're doing yet.

Lets leave the actual feedback to the real top raiding FCs in this game, as well as the developers who have access to far more information than we do. In the meantime, your focus should be to learn to adapt your strategies to compensate for weak points in your fight. (IE, be sure to Tornado kick BEFORE the phase that has you losing GL stacks, and save your Chakra and Perfect balance to help spike yourself back up to par quickly.)

Leave the assumption that the Devs are not listening behind you - it's blatantly false.

They will come back when the expansion comes out it always happens lol

Except it hasn't. WoW's been getting a net loss on subscriptions more and more with each expansion, spiking lower each time, and then having a larger fallout than the expansion before them. The attrition is real. WoW is the Wowkiller.

[Aegrus]

WoW is a really bad example. Hell we even had one of their devs say recently in an interview that it was a particular specs turn to be underpowered. There balance has often been a mess, let alone most of their class design.

I'm turned off of WoW. But if they do anything right, they balance out all their classes. Keep in mind this "under-performance"is usually a 5% difference in damage. That is a pretty tight margin. If you want to see imbalance on the extreme side, look at ffxi, aion, EQ, even newer games.

Balance is always a struggle in an mmo, but to think that you can do it inhouse, and force a live server to function as your initial open beta for every major patch is very shortsighted, and turns off alot of players. Hotfixes are one thing, implementing new zones, content, and game systems are a huge undertaking to troubleshoot and test. Unloading those on a live server constantly is not a good or efficient system as you open up the possibilities of rollbacks, or game breaking bugs that cannot be contained. At the very least, you leave certain classes sitting out content due to unforeseen shortcomings.

I'm just going to make a short snipe at this point.

The developers have better track of this game than you do. People who are saying that Bard and MCH under-preform are not paying attention to the 'Top FCs' who were actually outputting good damage with them. At 60, MCH and BRD's rotation and strenght were not lacking, as they were pulling as high as 800-900 parses on Ravana Ex when utilized right.

This is also the same damage that a WAR dps could output, roughly 85% of what other dps classes were outputting (1k~1.1k). This was acknowledged by the drastic buff to Wanderer's Minuet