Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[Driavna]

I don't think you are totally wrong but IMO the main reasons are two:

- The number of slots for normal content is just 4 and for raids are 8. I know we have 24m raids but you can't use most of your spells on people outside your party. That's an incredibly low number to afford extremely specialised classes and also an incredibly low number to support the current number of classes that FFXIV has without overlapping.

- FFXIV heavily revolved around duty finder and in order to be successful at this, all roles are in need to cover the basics, simple at that. This alone prevents the game for design the classes to work around others and "forcing" certain compositions to, for example, have 4 healers: 2 specialised on single target healing (without any AoE healing skill) and two specialised on AoE healing (without any big single target heal).

About the bosses being so heavily scripted has more to do to be viable with almost 0 communication during the fights. Randomize the flares from Eden's Gate: Descent Savage and that fight will become almost impossible to beat for randoms without using voice chats. You could say the same for Titania Extreme Chain of Brambles if that skill was randomized.

In short: current design is the way it is to suits the "I play an MMO game but I don't want to be social" mentality.

[linay]

Will we ever reach the desired “perfect and purely balanced” world, where in return it doesn’t matter at all which job you choose to play?

That's up to the players. From the game's perspective, it already doesn't matter now except in certain situations, like needing caster LB in a fight. As long as people feels the need to dictate what others play instead of accepting the diversity in choice that people have, what job you play will always be an issue. Balance is only needed as far as making sure all jobs are viable and nothing more.

[Edax]

I think it isn't that binary at all. There is multiple layer of difficulty.

Dungeon are rollface easy, Primal are a bit toughter but still pretty easy, raid and raid 24 starting to be less forgivable but still safe, then you start on extreme who require to succeed at every mecanism to beat it, then you go savage where you really need to take your finger out of your ass and start git gud and then you get Ultimate where you get your ass handed to yourself evey single minute.

There is quite a spectrum of difficulty, there is not many of each maybe, but its not binary.

Well the Shadowbringer Raid is effectively a primal fight. Sure we'll probably get an Alliance raid eventually but that's not out yet for Shadowbringers, so it's normal Eden / Savage Eden at the moment.

[RyuDragnier]

FF12, with no job distinction among characters whatsoever, the game becomes ridiculously bland. No thinking required, reward for being strategic is non-existent. This has to be fixed by Zodiac Edition.

You still needed strategy to get through vanilla FF12, you couldn't just auto-attack through the game and expect everything to turn out fine. You needed to buff, debuff, adjust strategies on the go. The only homogenization with it was that all the characters could do everything and had very little stat differences, so there wasn't a need to use everybody. You could use just one team the entire game with no problems. Luckily, Zodiac Job fixed that nonsense.

FF13 is where the linearity for casual friendly taken to an extreme. You can basically just spam the same ability over and over and walk....straight to clear the game. lol
It was the worst FF series no argument among FF fan community. All RPG dies because of it. FF14 won't be any different.

Except just like with FF12, you didn't spam the same ability over and over again. Doing so led to death really fast. Again, like FF12, you had to buff, debuff, adjust strategies on the fly, you couldn't just use COM/RAV/RAV the entire game. FF13 was not homogenization, characters could only use certain roles in the game until a specific point, and excelled at certain ones more than others (which is more than we could say about vanilla FF12).

[Dzian]

Except just like with FF12, you didn't spam the same ability over and over again. Doing so led to death really fast. Again, like FF12, you had to buff, debuff, adjust strategies on the fly, you couldn't just use COM/RAV/RAV the entire game. FF13 was not homogenization, characters could only use certain roles in the game until a specific point, and excelled at certain ones more than others (which is more than we could say about vanilla FF12).

Not really. Outside of a few paradigm shifts here and there on some of the hunts or side bosses you could pretty much clear the entire game running down that long linear corridor just pressing auto battle over and over again. while it might not be the same skills it pretty much is the exact same button. So it's not like he's wrong. you can spam auto battle endless and have an incredibly high success rate going through the game.

[Stanelis]

You re bound to have homogeneization when the hardest encounters are designed to be played with merely 8 players and there are far more classes per group spot in any given role.

For the content to be completed with any class, then the jobs/encounters must be homogeneized.

That s why MMORPGs have been at a stalemate since blizzard invented the "bring the player not the class" of wow 3.0. It basically killed the depth of group play in MMORPGs.

TL;DR: Homogenisation may seem the answer to balance problems, but instead it’s the indicator of a much bigger problem: the lack of variety and nuances in encounter and activity design.

You are like 10 years too late for this debate because since then it is the standard of MMORPGs.

[ForteNightshade]

That's up to the players. From the game's perspective, it already doesn't matter now except in certain situations, like needing caster LB in a fight. As long as people feels the need to dictate what others play instead of accepting the diversity in choice that people have, what job you play will always be an issue. Balance is only needed as far as making sure all jobs are viable and nothing more.

This is a very flawed approach. If one job is vastly outperforming another, why should be accept taking the weaker one simply for diversity sake? Case in point, Ninja. There is simply no reason to bring it outside of someone wanting to play it and your group being cool with it. If that happens to be the case, cool. But I'm not going to fault someone for passing when the remaining three melee are vastly superior.

[linay]

This is a very flawed approach. If one job is vastly outperforming another, why should be accept taking the weaker one simply for diversity sake? Case in point, Ninja. There is simply no reason to bring it outside of someone wanting to play it and your group being cool with it. If that happens to be the case, cool. But I'm not going to fault someone for passing when the remaining three melee are vastly superior.

I'm not going to fault people either. It is what it is, but that's the main reason why what jobs you play matter: the players. If all jobs are viable, then it doesn't matter except for player decision to make it matter.

[CapricaLangley]

You are like 10 years too late for this debate because since then it is the standard of MMORPGs.

Maybe you are right. To me, it seemed the right time for this debate because in three days the MMO which arguably is the most popular of all time will relaunch its 1.12 version, a project run by a company that recently went full "shareholders revenue". An hypothetical success of the product could completely redesign the balances of the MMO market and influence future design choices.

[Nariel]

Maybe you are right. To me, it seemed the right time for this debate because in three days the MMO which arguably is the most popular of all time will relaunch its 1.12 version, a project run by a company that recently went full "shareholders revenue". An hypothetical success of the product could completely redesign the balances of the MMO market and influence future design choices.

Hahahahahahaha

Nope.

Nostalgia trip aren't new in the business, its been years remake/HD remix are a thing, do you really think new games are back 20 years in the past ? Because they are not. Blizzard is just jumping in the bandwagon to milk cash just like every game company those 5 last years. They aren't even the first to do it in a MMO.

The best you can expect is a legacy FFXI vanilla server and its if a miracle happen.

SE are even the most prolific with re-edition of older game. Even that vanilla wow experience got a little coat of fresh paint to not be too harsh.