Late to the BLU Party

[TaiyoShikasu]

The argument: Solo experiences go against the philosophy of an MMORPG.
My point: There are existing solo experiences in the game that do not harm the integrity of an MMORPG.

I completely understand why people are upset at how BLU is being implemented. They want it to be a DoM, I get it. I, personally, think the way its being implemented is fine and makes sense in the context of the job. If you don't like how I framed my argument, maybe the argument I'm responding to isn't framed well itself?

How many of those solo experiences are still part of the multiplayer aspect of the game? For crafting/gathering, unless you're exclusively doing that stuff for yourself and that is without buying things or running group content to get mats, you're still doing multi-player things.

Even buying something off the MB is interacting with others.

[Andevom]

No? You're picking a single sentence out of what I said in regards to your post and only focusing on that is pretty disingenuous, and makes it seem like you don't really have anything to say on my other points, but I'll humor you.

I don't think most people consider it a "huge misstep". I don't think that many people considered RDM or SMN a "huge misstep", you made that claim, not me. The thing is, people that love FFXIV are probably going to play FFXIV anyway. People that love Blue Mage are probably going to play Blue Mage anyway. However, that doesn't change that they feel like the limitations placed on Blue Mage are unacceptable, or that they're not a missed opportunity. Also, unlike RDM or SMN or any other job, the limitations placed on Blue Mage will continue to affect its development and relationship with the content in the game moving forward, so I doubt it will ever "die down" completely.

I could make an equally (pointless) question to you in return, even though it's just as disingenuous. If Blue Mage comes out and its shown not to increase the playerbase over a normal content patch, or retain the playerbase longterm, would you concede that Blue Mage was a failure? If this solo design proves no more valuable to the game that a normal job? See, it's not really a meaningful metric, but you're the only who honed in on missteps as a metric of value.

Sorry if you found my response disingenuous, but I didn't reply because I feel the points made against them have already been made here, and you have already voiced that you do not accept those arguments. Giving them again felt redundant (such as how I feel, in an endgame party setting, the job doesn't work well and the result is either a heavily watered down/locked-in Blue Mage, or one with a ton of useless abilities). I found that particular statement intriguing, so I responded to it.

If Blue Mage comes out and its shown not to increase the playerbase over a normal content patch, or retain the playerbase longterm, would you concede that Blue Mage was a failure? If this solo design proves no more valuable to the game that a normal job? See, it's not really a meaningful metric, but you're the only who honed in on missteps as a metric of value.

I honed in on it because the claim seemed to be "there are still a lot of people playing, so it seems the jobs are fine". If I misunderstood what you were getting at there, then I apologize for that as well, but that's what the argument seemed to be. In terms of your question, if a lot of people started leaving the game over BLU, then yes, obviously I would concede.

[Andevom]

How many of those solo experiences are still part of the multiplayer aspect of the game? For crafting/gathering, unless you're exclusively doing that stuff for yourself and that is without buying things or running group content to get mats, you're still doing multi-player things.

Even buying something off the MB is interacting with others.

Playing as a Blue Mage wouldn't automatically prevent you from interacting with other people. You and other Blue Mages can go out and hunt for abilities in the open world, and nothing is stopping you from doing that. It just wouldn't be required.

[Mibgestalt]

I honed in on it because the claim seemed to be "there are still a lot of people playing, so it seems the jobs are fine". If I misunderstood what you were getting at there, then I apologize for that as well, but that's what the argument seemed to be. In terms of your question, if a lot of people started leaving the game over BLU, then yes, obviously I would concede.

Gotcha, gotcha. Fair enough, I don't like repeating myself either. More clearly, I was saying that FFXIV's traditional implementation of jobs, despite being a common point people bring up as a reason Blue Mage has to be limited, isn't so unpopular that its having any meaningful impact on the game or people playing it. Even if Blue Mage doesn't turn out to be a "big misstep", it's not really proving that wrong unless it drastically increases the player-base singlehandedly, which I don't see happening (but could). I don't think you can equate Blue Mage to other jobs in this regard, though, because it is being implemented as separate content.

It mostly tied back into my major concern with the argument against a "watered-down" Blue Mage. If BLU were implemented in say... Heavensward or Stormblood "watered-down", it would largely have been accepted by now as part of the game. Then, I think if any job with as much character and uniqueness as Blue Mage were being implemented as a Limited Job right now instead, say Red Mage or Puppetmaster, people would be defending Limited Jobs the same way, even though it's not really a problem with Blue Mage's traditional design which a lot of people seem to point at.

It's a problem with how burnt-out people are on traditional FFXIV class design and systems. As someone who was really excited to play BLU in all of FFXIV, it feels like it's being "experimented on/sacrificed" more due to timing than to anything intrinsic about the classic job, and when FFXIV devs finally do start being more creative with full job design (which I believe they will have to soon), I'm gonna be stuck here with my favorite job still Limited.

[TaiyoShikasu]

Playing as a Blue Mage wouldn't automatically prevent you from interacting with other people. You and other Blue Mages can go out and hunt for abilities in the open world, and nothing is stopping you from doing that. It just wouldn't be required.

But playing as BLU does prevent one from accessing most content unless they want to sit in PF to access some seven year old content.

You wonder how the primal abilities are going to be learned? You think BLU will have their own toned down version of those trials as part of the carnival or they going to have to hope seven other people will stick around for a million runs of whatever Shiva instance is required?

[Wiccan026]

Stop quoting Yoshi. His answers are always super misleading and are what got us into this mess in the first place. Remember his stance on 3 new jobs in a short space of time? Remember how almost everyone was adamant we would never see another job outside of an expansion?

At this point, taking Yoshida's word on anything is frankly, foolish.

Sometimes people interpret what people say differently.


When Yoshida said he would never do jobs like heavensward again, they were technically doing four not three. Ninja was released (just like blue is going to be) right before an expansion, while they were working on three other jobs.

[Mitracia]

I don't understand how people can defend this pile of garbage that is blue mage.

It's not a job, it's side content. It'll be forgotten like every piece of side-content we have that does nothing to further advance the game.

Yoshi gave some of the most idiotic arguments to justify why it's not a fleshed out job, meanwhile we look at Red Mages and Dark Knights that are completely different from their original style and they still work.

Laziness, pure and simple. They don't want to bother to make it work, and people who call it ''genius'' will still be white knighting mindlessly.

[Nihility]

FFXI says hello. It works perfectly fine there. Yes it two different MMOs but saying it can't fit in XIV is a bullshit excuse tbf. Yoshida simply decided it wasn't good enough for his game. Of course they can adjust it to make it fit and balance, they just didn't want to.

FFXI is a very open game that doesn't take balance into account much at all. Even in that game Blue Mage was kind of crap for parties

FFXIV is very tightly balanced and every job is tweaked constantly to try and fit it into balance for one type of content. How do you balance a job that has no real rotations or combos or underlying mechanics or anything while also having a boatload of interchangeable skills and no real baseline to work off of aside from role actions? It's pretty much just get blue magic and use it
If they wanted to balance blue mage it would get it's skills like every other job while just having a blue mage story line behind it so that it had a singular skill set that could be weighed and balanced and could have functional class mechanics other than simply learn blue magic and use it

There's a big difference between making excuses and understanding the way a game works

[Zareshi]

FFXI is a very open game that doesn't take balance into account much at all. Even in that game Blue Mage was kind of crap for parties

FFXIV is very tightly balanced and every job is tweaked constantly to try and fit it into balance for one type of content. How do you balance a job that has no real rotations or combos or underlying mechanics or anything while also having a boatload of interchangeable skills and no real baseline to work off of aside from role actions? It's pretty much just get blue magic and use it
If they wanted to balance blue mage it would get it's skills like every other job while just having a blue mage story line behind it so that it had a singular skill set that could be weighed and balanced and could have functional class mechanics other than simply learn blue magic and use it

There's a big difference between making excuses and understanding the way a game works

Except there are ways it could have been created to allow for that balance. Something in line with the set up the game currently has, instead of throwing their hands up "this is too hard and won't work" and letting it go as is. There are countless examples for how that could have worked, from my own OP to others in other threads both here and across the internet. It isn't a matter of if they "wanted" to, it's that they decided it was "too hard" and told the player base as such and gave excuses that were widely received as weak by the player base.

[Inoch]

FFXI is a very open game that doesn't take balance into account much at all. Even in that game Blue Mage was kind of crap for parties

That's why I mentioned it two different kind of games, thanks for repeating my point.
Also I guess we have very different memories of that game, BLU was never bad for parties, granted it was slighly gated until you could combine a auto-refresh but that was possible around Lv40 iirc

It was never bad, many people just wanted the "META" just like people hated to bring DRGs or DRK to parties.

In terms of XIV, they can easily balance BLU, they just don't want to. It's a obvious the playerbase have lot of suggestions how to make it work - if they just listen to the feedback.