Developers Poor Attitude to Summoner

[Claviusnex]

The second comment is literally Yoshida's equivalent of facepalming. It's not the "poor attitude toward summoner" so much as "guys, come on, this really doesn't make sense for how we want the job to work." For some reason, people want all the classes to be able to do all the same things and that's the developer [politely] saying they are silly.

No it shows Yoshida doesn't really understand one of the problems. His responses show this lack of understanding over and over but instead of trying to understand the job and its problems he pushes back on the players as the issue.

With Exhibit B Yoshida is getting hung up on discussions of ways to resolve the lack of pet healing and confusing that with other types of healing. Sustain was the pet heal and was removed as near as I can tell based on someone's gut feeling. We were left with the useless heal of Physick. We have been saying we need a method to heal our pets. One option is the return of Sustain. Another is for Summoners to base Physick on INT so it has sufficient power to heal the pet. Yet another suggested a two level Physick where it is only more powerful for pets and stays its anemic self for players. Personally Summoners don't need a player heal. All we need is a way to maintain our pet. To me the simplest and most straight forward way to do this is replace Physick with Sustain at level 30. But given how SE frequently does things in a convoluted manner some type of Summoner buff to Physick would also resolve the immediate issue with dead pets.

I had many years where I worked with my company's labs and programming centers in Japan. From that I found it was very important to be concise with problem definition and resolutions. Using the American form of scattershot brain storming frequently led to misunderstandings and tangents being taken. It had nothing to do with the technical competence but the way language translation is processed and understood. While I think SE has a definite lack of understanding of how the Summoner works I also feel some of the problem is the language differences resulting in a lack of understanding of what is being said in the forums. I don't know SE's support structure but I think some of this would work better if they had some highly technical native English speakers distill the conversations into product requirements.

[Chalbee]

I am increasingly convinced that none of the devs play SMN. I have heard nothing good about 4.x summoner and it's so disappointing! 3.x Summoner was my darling, my favorite job! I did everything as that job and now it's not even fun to play. I expected to have to learn a few new tricks, but they made it so I need to unlearn everything and start over. But hey, Bahamut right?!

[Lycieus]

I am increasingly convinced that none of the devs play SMN. I have heard nothing good about 4.x summoner and it's so disappointing! 3.x Summoner was my darling, my favorite job! I did everything as that job and now it's not even fun to play. I expected to have to learn a few new tricks, but they made it so I need to unlearn everything and start over. But hey, Bahamut right?!

Clearly, none of the devs play the game at all. Or any other MMO for that matter. Their balance choices and a slew of other design decisions would never occur if they did.

[DaikiKiyoshi]

To be honest if I was in Yoshida's position, with the amount of back and forth whining that happens, I'd be tempted to ignore requests for certain jobs if not flat out make them worse just to piss people off.

That said I do think that the current state summoner is in is just stupid. At the very least give sustain back.

[loaded-god-complex]

To be honest if I was in Yoshida's position, with the amount of back and forth whining that happens, I'd be tempted to ignore requests for certain jobs if not flat out make them worse just to piss people off.

That's what Yoshida would do if he was a child. But he is a developer for a commercial game in a competitive MMO environment.

[DaikiKiyoshi]

That's what Yoshida would do if he was a child. But he is a developer for a commercial game in a competitive MMO environment.

And? The customer is not always right. There are times when they need to be told "Either do it our way or get lost."

[Wolf_Gang]

They should just delete the SMN job and give everyone level potions.

I mean this class single handedly destroyed the class/job system. It's clear from it's own inception that the devs don't really know where they want to go with it. Lock the job and start over from scratch.

[Tsukino]

The main problem here is that everything everyone talks about here is lost in translation. Not just from English to Japanese and back, though that is part of it, but more because the questions that get asked are not what people are actually getting at.

I don't think there are very many Summoner players out there at all who care about Physick - in fact I think a lot would agree that we want to be good damage dealers and not healers or jacks of all trades like Red Mage. Unfortunately, because we share some utility with them, and they're two of only three magical damage jobs, of course Physick and Vercure come up in the discussion of the larger issues of SMN being competitive with RDM and other jobs. More unofortunately, the only question that seems to have been taken from that and over to being asked in the Live Letter is "can Physick use INT like Vercure does?" Something that doesn't solve the problem, hardly anyone wants, and of course Yoshida doesn't agree with because Summoner isn't about curing people.

It doesn't look like there's some big consipiracy or lack of care for the job, it's just that the concerns raised by people here are not being conveyed properly to the development team or to the man in charge.

[JunseiKei]

It doesn't look like there's some big consipiracy or lack of care for the job, it's just that the concerns raised by people here are not being conveyed properly to the development team or to the man in charge.

That is probably a huge culprit of the situation. I do recall a question at a Live Letter to something along the lines of "can we wear other races' underwear?" The person was asking about the hempen set that changes according to what race wears it and making it available to every race instead. I think it got translated to the underwear that is stuck on the model when you remove all clothing as Yoshida mentioned that this layer is layer 0 and cannot be changed easily because it has skin. Something like that. For what the person was asking, the answer he gave really made no sense.

Unless he was trying to say that the hempen set was tailored to each individual model and would need to go in and make a separate set for each one. Either way, the question and/or answer conveyed was confusing and probably made no sense for anyone who has no clue how things like clothing is made on these games.

[Catwho]

The question would have been better if it asked if Physic could have been changed back to Sustain for summoner.

That'd solve all the problems at once, wouldn't it? Physick on SMN is so weak as to be useless. Sustain was removed because of ability bloat. Replace SMN's Physick with Sustain at level 30 when the job is unlocked. Boom, SMN's useless heal is removed, replaced with very useful pet regen, and no ability bloat. (Sorry SCH, but at least the fairies default to self curing in a pinch.)