Results of a reddit job satisfaction poll

[Recon1o6]

Hey folks, was browsing ff14 reddit and came across this poll that was done on it a couple of days ago that got a hell of a lot of responses

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...urvey_results/

It threw up some interesting results that absically confirm a lot of what's being said on the forums for ages now. Even taking into account this was just reddit, its still useful to look at (hell the devs seem to take that into account more than the official forums)


1. The changes and gutting to old abilities and jobs this expansion have not been enjoyed by the playerbase.
More skills than ever seem to have been lost, but the ones replacing them this expansion have mainly been passive upgrades.

The creep of CC removal, enmity being a party wide thing, support actions like goad and mana transer, unique if similar abilities being changed to a single one... all these extra functions being removed are taking their toll

2. The entirety of the healers have suffered immensely from excessive homogenisation, trampling of lore and previous gameplay styles (fairy, synergised tools and dots for sch, procs and druid elements for whm, ast cards and time magic) and removal of downtime abilities. Sch is number 2 most dissatisfied in casual and overall (3rd in hc) and Ast is 3rd most disliked in casual and 4th overall (4th in hc)

White mage by contrast is generally more liked due to the lily system being usable now. But even then its towards the middle of the jobs alongside those that had base breaking reworks like mch and drk because of its other issues.

3. Monk, Bard, Drk and Warrior are desperate for some love.
Warrior hasn't really had anything new for a while that's not been generic tank additions or removed
Monk has been suffering since ARR days with no new skills, only removed ones replaced at higher levels (nin is also notable for this)
Drk being turned into a clone of Warrior has been more favourably received than SB but its likely it would have been placed lower were other jobs changes not disliked so bitterly
Bard is currently in a dire state despite its bandage in 5.1 to make it resemble a bard again

4. Its notable that the support focused jobs are disliked a lot this expansion. The support playstyle jobs (bard, ast, rdm, nin, dnc) are all towards the lower end of hte satisfaction with the exception of Rdm.
Rdm is notable as an outlier as its support is mainly when things go wrong (cure/raise) and it was the job that lost the least during the transition to 5.0. even then though it has very poor damage and its support when groups are performing as intended is dependant on group make up

What this could show is that the devs focus on rDPS and balance has been a bit too much as opposed to fun factor. Support for these jobs is for the most part single digit (bard 1% buff song? Ast 6% card/divination? Ninja trick 5%?) and a lot of players have expressed sentiments that these buffs don't feel like they are doing anything compared ot say Shield Samba at 15% block.

Especially without a parser

5. Shb has introduced some QoL into a lot of jobs, but at the same time it has brought with it other issues that need fixing.

6. The reception of overhauled jobs this expansion has been mixed. Mch and Drk got the most radical ones and they are in the middle of the pack with some that like the changes and others that feel they are completely off from what they are supposed to be.
Summoner and ninja both got some quick fixes and they are middle of the road as well depending on category.

[SamRF]

Would be great if we could get a response from developers letting us know they are at least acknowledging the problems people have. Pretty statistically significant poll.

[Recon1o6]

Aye
a full in depth official poll would be nice, but this one alone is pretty significant

[TheRealQuah]

I think what's interesting is how you can use a set of statistics to make any point that you want. If something is towards the lower end of the satisfaction, that doesn't mean it's disliked. I'm not disagreeing with any point you make, but you could easily turn round and say the following things and they are technically true:

"Monk is the only job in the game where the majority of its player base are unsatisfied"
People were asked to rate out of 5, every job other than monk has an average rating of over 2.5, which means the majority of the people who play those jobs are happy.

"Only 16.1% of players are dissatisfied with the state of their main job right now"
That's a very small amount, why change what isn't broken?

"The main issue players have is their current jobs position in the meta"
Meta doesn't matter outside of speed runs so the main issue people have right now is a moot point.

"67.2% of the player base class themselves as hardcore players and are active in high end content (EX and above)"
Okay so in that case, we should put a lot more effort into making more end game raids and really hard content.

The survey was completed by an absolutely minuscule amount of the player base (2700 or something), was completed on reddit (r/ffxiv is an absolute cesspit), and the main thing you get out of it is "SE are doing a fantastic job, make monk better, and develop less casual and more endgame content"

(oh and some of the responses in the spreadsheet actually had me in stitches)

[RitsukoSonoda]

Why are we taking any opinion poll on reddit seriously?

[SamRF]

The survey was completed by an absolutely minuscule amount of the player base (2700 or something)

2700 entries is more than enough. You'd only need about 400 entries to have a 95% confidence level considering active FFXIV population (using 600 000)

With 2700 entries you have a marginal error of about 2%, meaning the real result will be within +- 2% of the survey's result.

This is of course only truly the case when you have a random sample, but having a truly random sample is usually impossible.

I'm assuming those on reddit will be more of the high end FFXIV players and less casuals than in the actual game (as you can see by the results). From statistics point of view it still looks like a very decent survey you can get great information from imo.

Also the fact that I think nobody is surprised by those results if you've been on these forums for some time, I feel like kind of seals the deal on its credibility.

[Silverquick]

Well the reason I don't play Red Mage much any more is because I never get to use the full spectrum of abilities anymore.

Its boring just pressing two or three buttons all the time.

Hell almost ALL 8-Man content is like that. Which makes it boring as hell for most jobs because it cuts out almost all of the abilities of a job with the exception of a few. At least with alliance raids or 24 Man content I got to use my Raise a lot more, like ressing a good 5 players extremely fast to get them back up.

Or in Dungeons where I actually use AoE abilities and even use my healing on the Tank when the Healer is not keeping things up.

8-Man Content (Raids/Trials) are boring as hell with most of the jobs because of that.

You never get to use half the abilities of the jobs.

[Amnmaat]

Monk is in a real need to get greased lightning revamp, let GL fill up with one demolish and give tornado kick a high CD. Greased lightning just isn't fun outside of A Realm Reborn where it worked because of how few skills jobs had at level 50. Moreover, I still enjoy and do pretty great damage on Monk, but GL really bogs down the job more than the devs realize.

[Esmoire]

Keep in mind the results are slanted: about two-thirds of the people responding do extreme+ content. Meanwhile, according to LuckyBancho's results, raiders are a minority, with about a third of JP players being raiders, while on NA if you look at Crystal the percentage is sub 10% at the lowest end, with much more on Aether but still small. Both results are imperfect and limited, and are going to be skewed both in terms of framing and specifics. For example, some people will do ex, but not raids. I do think almost all players will be plugged into social media, though the vast, vast, vast majority of players are not frequenting Reddit or the FFXIV forums or anything, and they are going to have their own audiences and demographics and all that.

Not to say these results are insignificant, just something to keep in mind as you examine the information. Even abstracted to the furthest degree the results are meaningful; I think they will have enough similarities to how players feel at large to be worth looking at as a community and as a developer. Just trying to encourage a healthy lens to how you assess this information.

[E4EO]

I’m not 100% sold on a job satisfaction poll from Reddit of all places given some of the scum you’ll meet there, but it’s a step in the right direction and aligns with some of posts on this forum, DRK and WAR feeling lackluster, aggro being stupid easy, and healers feeling awful overall.

What we would really need is a JP poll, JP devs like to listen to JP players more than western players (even when western players bloody outnumber them), so if we had this type of poll on the JP forums here, SE might be willing to listen if both JP and the west voice their concerns.