Why does this game hide essential character info?

[EaMett]

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

This is also what I remember. Also it's not like you have plenty of gear options. You're mostly picking between two sets at cap level, while leveling higher ilvl is pretty much the way to go, always, since stat impacts aren't meaningful in rainbow gear.

Min/maxing is also something that should take a bit of effort and distribute players across skill tiers. Obfuscating stat weights in a really simple gearing environment (2 to 4 sets at most, often times only one viable build, on rare occasion two viable builds) is a way of creating this distribution.
I really don't mind. It just means you have an opportunity to create a bit of a gap in optimizing between you and others by taking 30mn to read up on third party theorycrafting.

[Machi_Machiavelli]

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

They also do it because they want to limit game-breaking things being discovered. FFXI for example, the great TP nerf dealing with asuran fists with relic knuckles. Due to how h2h damage was calculated, this was a 34 damage weapon that gave 20 tp per fist, with 2 attacks per round. After getting tp (2-3 attack rounds, or an icarus wing), they would need to land 5/8 hits (62.5% accuracy) to get 100% tp. Since it was a 34 damage weapon, mnks could still do ~800 dmg with asuran fists, and then have tp to do it again, and again, and again, without ever stopping.

Now imagine if people had stats to crunch together. It could result in some unintended OPness. People mentioned that WoW shows such stats and I remember a fuss over Hunters stacking shaman gear/stats (?) and having a ridiculous arcane arrow.

[Genz]

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

No.
It would be meaningless in FFXI because, like a lot of other RPG, calculations involve enemy stats and enemies have a lot of special characteristics and traits.
Estimation is possible, but the variety of enemies makes it limited (for example the game can tell the player character has around 90% hit rate on most enemies with his current equipment, but it no longer work against an evasive enemy)
Giving accurate number like the OP is suggesting is only possible in shallow games like "modern" MMO.

[NessaWyvern]

It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.

FFXIV Devs: "Figure it out as a community" "Don't use parsers/talk about using parsers"

Community: "BAN ALL PARSERS" "RAIDERS ARE TOXIC" "STOP LOOKING AT MY GEAR AND MELDS"

... They really need to put additional info on secondary stats.

[Hasrat]

Harder to trap players in the Skinner Box if they understand that the bigger number doesn't actually mean anything.

[Dzian]

It's generally because the numbers don't actually do anything anyway. They get higher as you level sure but they don't actually do anything..

A level 50 blm with 350 spell speed has pretty much the exact same cast time as a level 60 with 800 or a level 70 with 1100 or a level 80 with whatever a level 80 blm has.

It's been the same forever even things like crit. The number keeps on going up and up and up but the crit rates essentially stay the same....

Its just some number that arbitrarily gets bigger but doesn't actually do anything

that's why you never feel or see any increases because there generally aren't any. which I would say is one of the reasons so many players are so sick and tired of the treadmill.

In FFXI they did also hide the effects of stats, but the difference was in FFXI people knew exactly what stats did. They knew exactly how much stronger Stoneskin would be with 1 extra point of mind. Or exactly how much 1 vit would increase chakra. Or that 5 accuraracy would increase there hit rate by exactly 2.5%

[Haprimac]

Besides what OP already mentioned, I'm annoyed that skills like Peloton don't tell me how much faster I'm moving. Would be nice to know how different the speed is on monk's Fists of wind vs ninja's passive runspeed trait vs Peloton etc. And all the other skills that just say "increases damage" or "increases healing". Why do they have to be so vague? Is it really that hard to say "Peloton, increases runspeed by x%"?

[LineageRazor]

Because dealing damage in this game has become so vastly simplified, and there are no "conditional" situations to worry about (like, this mob is vulnerable to fire, or that mob has extremely high evasion), if the exact results of the handful of stats that remain were spelled out so clearly, there'd be little or no reason to go after other pieces of gear. If the game did the math for you, and it became obvious that upgraded tomestone hat increases your damage by 2.526 DPS, while raid hat increases your damage by 2.521 DPS, there'd be no reason to go after the raid hat (except possibly for glamour).

But they want you to chase the raid hat. They want you to chase ALL the hats. So, they do their best to obfuscate which hat is BEST hat - and because there's no conditional situations, one hat will always BE Best Hat. Sure, folks will crunch the numbers and figure out the details - but it's a relatively small number of players who actually scour the Internet for that kind of thing. The bulk of players will have no idea, and just chase the stats they THINK are best. ("Oh, boy, with all this skill speed my MNK's gonna punch like E. Honda!")

It's a fundamental flaw in the design of the game. They want folks to keep playing, to stay subscribed, and to participate in as much of the content as possible. However, they've removed most of the REASON to participate in all of the content. Why were folks still farming Sky Gods in FFXI a decade after the content was added? Because in certain situations, gear from there was STILL the best to have.

[Gurney]

Why were folks still farming Sky Gods in FFXI a decade after the content was added?

They are still trying to get a Diorite to drop to pop Ullikummi, to finish off that Byakko pop set.

[Allooutrick]

Its one of those weird equations that takes your level into consideration. Higher level means you need more of that stat to get the same effect. You can see this happen in Diablo 3 as well, though they go on depth and tell you what you get out of your current stat values.