Thread: 5.2 Liveletter

Is it really too much to ask for some feedback from the devs?
Something like,
"We acknowledge that healers are in a bad spot, but we would rather spend the patches buffing DPS since we hate healers and wish we could replace them all with trusts."

I totally get Yoshi's decision to try and avoid details, especially specific ones about stats, because particularly when it comes to balance and how certain changes work in content, it doesn't always get an informed response and something people can get worked up over. What's the point getting forums of people worked up it, also as developers, I can also imagine it's disheartening to see people complaining about your work before anybody has a chance to actually try it.

I do understand that are also people who're more informed and can determine what certain changes will mean, as demonstrated over the ShB media tour where healers who complained then are still complaining about the same problems having played the game considerably since.

So I am kinda in the middle there, on the one hand, there is some merit to "wait and see" because there may be something you're not considering -- heck this was something I did during the media tour, where my problems were conditional on how the game played at the time, because we can only assume it'd continue the trend in encounter design...and it did.

But people can overreact and trying to curb overreactions is no bad thing, particularly as there's not usually a lot of difference in time between talking about the changes and releasing them. On the other hand, I don't think all feedback given is without merit prior to people "giving it it a go and seeing what it's like" and I think is good feedback if there were a slither of chance for tweaks even if small, before the release goes ahead. Especially if it's a bad decision they've made, which is something the 1.0 team did take heed of back when everybody was complaining during 1.0 beta. I was in the XI community when this happened and saw a lot over them over the forums and a lot of 'wait and see' to find that on release that it was not in a fit state, just like the beta. YoshiP has a better track record than that, so I am not going to be mean and say there's a direct comparison here, but obviously, sometimes feedback prior to release when there is still time is good as bad decisions can be made more apparent.

But I think there are cases where actually it makes sense for them to communicate and healers I feel is one that needs communication and I believe MNK and possibly some other jobs might be in the same boat need it too. They said they're not make big changes in this patch, so if there are healer changes, I expect they're minor because they pointed out only 3 jobs that were in need of the changes they brought up. But I think people would have accepted a "we are aware of the complaints, we will look into them due course, but have not made any decisions on this, but we appreciate your patience".
And they are usually good at doing that sort of thing, which is why I suspect that healers aren't something they're paying attention to. Because even if they did not consider there to be issues, it's something they've historically communicated (as per MCH, then the job got an entire rework). But complaints must have been communicated to them by now, given in their Q&A sessions there's been an abundance of healer questions that have been upvoted more than some of the questions they addressed and we know the community team read the forums.

The live letter is a hype building marketing tool and talking about unpopular mechanical changes doesn't build hype. Makes sense they'd try to get away from that.

Originally Posted by Corbeau

The live letter is a hype building marketing tool and talking about unpopular mechanical changes doesn't build hype. Makes sense they'd try to get away from that.

Hit the nail on the head with a tinkering hammer. And I would actually say that what usually takes place after the prelims outright kills that hype. I see no reason to make that happen even sooner.

People are going to overact regardless of the time they release balance info (90% of the time these people have no clue how the thing they are whining about fully functions) the issue is this is another sign they can't take constructive criticism. We have multiple people in the community that crunch the numbers and perform sims better than the dev team ever could. With that said welcome to 3-12 months of waiting for them to "balance" your favorite job cause its here to stay.

It's a double edged sword for sure but it's not like they have ever acted on feedback before the content gets released as far as I can remember so they might as well just deal with it after it comes out instead of having months of people complaining regardles if they understand what they are complaining about or not.

It's an annoying decision for sure but I can see where it comes from.

I guess we're all Heavensward MCH and DRK now (it'll take years until our jobs get fixed)

What's wrong with healers?

I just stopped having expectations entirely. Maybe the new relics will make me want to log in a little more but I just bounce around GNB, SCH, DNC and RDM (DPS usually in 24 mans).

I'm just playing the waiting game until 6.0. The alternative is art of war spam with occasional oGCD.