Why refusing customization is a fallacy

[Khalithar]

I'm personally not against skill trees, but the devs would have to very carefully implement it. The best way to do skill trees in my opinion, would be to balance them in such a way where the choices are legitimately competitive with one another and that there is no "best" or optimal way.

Now I've seen the sentiment thrown around of "who cares what's optimal?" and I certainly appreciate the thought, but what happens? Eventually some theorycrafter does the math and figures out what's optimal in a raid/group scenario and soon people begin to post about it. Someone asks in the game, "what should I spec?" and they are told to look it up online and they find the evidence of the optimal spec in that same thread.

Soon when someone asks them what's optimal they tell them what to spec and soon the whole thing snowballs until it reaches the point where everyone (whether they group or not) must be that spec or they are considered a bad player for not knowing how to spec their own class. This happens in every game and those in higher end group content will often do whatever it takes to max out their dps/hps even for something as paltry as a theoretical 1% gain.

So how can we do customization without that happening? I have to go by the suggestion of someone in another thread (I can't remember who you are but I applaud your idea) about making the customization purely aesthetic. Using BLM as an example, give them a talent tree to change the color of their fire, no changes to mechanics but let them have a choice of blue fire, purple fire, or green fire. That way there is customization but by keeping it purely aesthetic, the debate about "optimal" won't work.

[Reynhart]

Soon when someone asks them what's optimal they tell them what to spec and soon the whole thing snowballs until it reaches the point where everyone (whether they group or not) must be that spec or they are considered a bad player for not knowing how to spec their own class. This happens in every game and those in higher end group content will often do whatever it takes to max out their dps/hps even for something as paltry as a theoretical 1% gain.

Look at the numerous thread either here or on reddit where people ask "What is the best <insert_role_here> to play ?" or "How do I spec my Zeta ?", etc...
The answers are always the same "For endgame raiding, chose THIS (And then people start to insult each other because THIS is "bulls*t" or whatever) but for other content, play what you like because everything is fine"
And then realize that "endgame raiding" is the goal of, again, only 5 to 10% percent of the community.

People on this thread reacts like one spec will give uber-ultra-DPS-Turbo-Edition and the other will be only useful on killing critters...
For the BLM, what if only "Ice Mage" get the higher tiers of Umbral Ice, or a proc where after casting Blizzard, the next Blizzard III or Freeze spell has a chance to put a "Frozen" debuff for a set duration, and that a Frozen enemy receive additionnal damage when physically hit ?

Which one is better ? Well, one is a better pure self DPS, but the other can be better as a whole depending on the party DPS. You could easily create traits and alter spells to make specs different, and you'll create the same flame wars as now between different jobs...

The problem is most people don't see the forest for the trees. They see one or two systems and say, "Well that doesn't ever work."

And those purposely forgot that the meta changes several times through the lifespan of an online game. Isn't League Of Legends famous for switching back and forth what is the "best champion" because people still found new ways of playing them ?

And no MMOs have become bland because no developer wants to try to innovate. They want to 'play it safe' and use the same design concepts that have been employed for the last two decades.

They want to play it safe because players complain as soon as they have to "think".
Diablo 2 ? Let's imagine some buils and try lots of skills. Diablo 3 ? Let's have all the skills available because we don't want the "burden" of creating our own character.

FFXIV v1 ? Plz, remove the physical level, it's sooooo complicated to spend our stat points wisely if we wan't to create either a specialist or a jack-of-all-trades.
And yes, I realize the the physical level had flaws in v1, but instead of adjusting it, they decided to scrap it completely because people cried over and over. So, in v2, they gave stat point distribution back, yeah ! But it's useless, since almost every job use only one stat.

And they even remove the effect of STR and DEX on something else than attack power. Technically, they could fuse the two under "physical attack" and it would be the same, since gear are restricted, already.