SE: Holding back information won't stop criticism, it will only delay it and is bad.

[Deceptus]

TL : DR We as players need MORE information from a company that supposedly already learned this lesson, not LESS.

In the recent Live Letter, Yoshi stated:

Special Note

Regarding Job Balances and Adjustments

YoshiP, in his previous Patch 5.1 Note Reading segment has confirmed that he will no longer detail the job balances and its adjustments in preliminary notes and maybe/likely during PLL as well because he does not want players to be overly concerned about how their job will end up getting nerfed or buffed just by looking at the paper, or the numbers itself. As pre-announcing it will just make people work up on details that shouldn't worry them until they play the actual job on release, they've decided to omit all job balance details until they patch day itself.

Therefore, while the translation staff, will put in as many details as we can from the PLL, don't be surprised if you see no job balance details (like what skill or ability will receive adjustments) more than maybe "this job and that job will be buffed", et cetera. If there is information to be had, the translation team will be sure to relay it to you. Otherwise, don't be surprised because YoshiP decided to keep things a little bit private for the sake of the playerbase.

This is an extremely bad decision for the SE development team to make. There have been multiple instances where they released pre-patch notes and the player base largely said they don't like what they see.

"But wait until it's live!" The white knights always claim.

And then it becomes live and the player base who was concerned is largely proven right.

Remember when SE thought it was a great idea to implement a GREED ONLY rule in all of the 24 mans? Yeah that was announced pre-patch and it was thoroughly lambasted and SE rightly had to reverse course shortly after implementation.

2.0 Warriors we were "playing wrong"
3.0 Bard Bow-Mage / AST were a mess along with Ninja. Remember when we were "doing it wrong then" as well?
4.0 WHM (useless Lilies) / MCH / DRK (and monk a bit).
5.0 SCH was a complete mess. Healers in general were extremely disappointed, RDM's had extreme mana issues.

I know I'm missing some situations.

What was the overwhelming majority of the problems in almost EVERY case of the above? Numbers. Tuning. There were some overall job gameplay issues at hand but it was largely numbers.

For example, this happened in 6.1:


Pay 200 extra MP for diff VFX :3c

Credit: Rein_eon_Osborne

Which is exactly what SE wants us to have less information regarding.

So much of this can be attributed to SE's absolute defiance for a public test realm. They can't possibly predict how millions of people will react to their product but only having less than 25 people (being extremely generous) play test it, and only four job designers for 18 battle jobs, something is bound to fall through the cracks.