Change Is Scary

[SpookyGhost]

Please roll back to 3.0, as I am afraid of change and do not like adapting to new creative ideas and streamlined features of 4.0.

A creative idea and a good idea are not necessarily one in the same (and just because something is different doesn't mean it's creative, either). As an example, they've completely changed the focus on what Warrior is in this expansion and, because of this, a lot of Warrior players are displeased. Should they then be like "well, I may not like this new Warrior, but I should play it anyway because maybe this new change is just way over my head and actually I love it"? No, surely not. You could argue that "just because X doesn't like it, doesn't mean that Y won't" - but then you run into the problem of there being more of X players than there are Y, which means less people playing the job. Ideally, if you are going to add on to a job in any way you want to increase what people enjoy about it - a good example of this is the Guilty Gear fighting game franchise, wherein players find new unforeseen ways to play characters and instead of fighting that current the devs nourish it.

An example of SE understanding that this makes sense is 3.0 BRD. They changed it to be fundamentally different from 2.0, a lot of people didn't like it, so they went back to what people liked about 2.0 BRD. You could say that 3.0 BRD was some creative new thing that was somehow good, but the playerbase that actually enjoyed 2.0 BRD didn't and that lead to the change we have now.

As someone who actually does have knowledge of game design and business, I can tell you that turning people off from a job they want to play is going to lead to loss of motivation and loss of willingness to stay subscribed. You, as a dev, want your players to be happy. Players feeling like the devs actually hear them is a huge thing in any MMO, most notably WoW (except for Vanilla servers which they don't want to touch because something something no projected profit).

It is perfectly fine to do some experimenting when you initially launch a game or when you introduce a new job (though you do run into some barbed wire around the role that job is filling when other jobs already populate it, but that's a digression so anyway), it's not nearly as fine to be experimental when people are playing and enjoying a job but you've decided that you want the job to play like something completely different.

There's also smaller scale changes which are actually fine and people complaining are generally in the minority, such as the BRDs who enjoyed the playstyle of 3.0 BRD more than 2.0 BRD. And then there's also changes which are fundamentally just not good because, as an example, you do significantly less damage than all the other damage dealers. Those changes are usually oversights though and are typically addressed quickly, though sometimes they're not like 3.0 PLD.

Anyway, point is, change isn't inherently good nor is it inherently bad but people are free to complain all they want and if enough people are complaining they'll change it.