Player and developer communication

[AnotherPerson]

If the devs are listening to player feedback so intently what exactly happened to healers? I don’t remember people asking for their entire playstyle to be reduced to literally a single button and they’ve never given any kind of explanation as to why we have insane amounts of healing output when every single piece of content outputs tiny damage amounts.

Yes, they have listened to feedback from the players. They heard SCH's clunky because of fairy delays. They fixed that in Endwalker by making the fairy more reactive to commands. They heard how Deployment tactics take over a GCD after using Adlo, so they made Adlo's shield go off before the cast finishes, allowing you to immediately deploy it without waiting. They heard WHM and SCH doesn't have good weave slots compared to AST, so they made all jobs 1.5 seconds on their nuke. They heard AST's card system sucked while others preferred the current version, so they tried to add something new to the AST system. They heard people saying they don't like healers with one button rotation, so they tried making SGE and to tell plays to give that job a shot. For Ninjas, they heard Raiju sucked because they cannot hold it and were forced to use the forced gap closer, so they created an extended duration and stacking buff, then later changed the skill to be 2 separate weaponskills - depending on whether you needed to gap close or if it was bad to gap close.

It's not that they haven't listened to ANY feedback at all, as changes still take time to implement while making changes to other jobs and new content. Whether the changes to the feedback worked as intended is a different story, but the devs are quite transparent in that regard.

From what I've seen in the forums and in other conversations, people disliked Bard for not being able to compete with DNC at the time during ShB, so they made Bard a bit more similar to DNC in raid buffing. That's not very surprising. The same thing happened to DRK. People complained about DRK being too similar to WAR... but in actuality, the reason why that happened is because originally, DRK players complained about how WAR was fun and DRK wasn't ... so the devs tried to make DRK similar to WAR in that regard. As you can see, that backfired, so DRK is becoming more mitigative in gameplay compared to WAR's self healing. You can't shove the problem all onto the devs as it's partly the fault of player feedback as well. Player feedback doesn't always communicate well either (memes can sometimes be part of the issue in that regard), nor does it always coincide with what the devs have in their vision. MNK suffered from player feedback from Heavensward to Shadowbringers - reverting changes left and right until they realize they need to scrap the concept since there's no vision or direction for that job to improve outside of more niche abilities.

[Nizzi]

Yes, they have listened to feedback from the players. They heard SCH's clunky because of fairy delays. They fixed that in Endwalker by making the fairy more reactive to commands. They heard how Deployment tactics take over a GCD after using Adlo, so they made Adlo's shield go off before the cast finishes, allowing you to immediately deploy it without waiting. They heard WHM and SCH doesn't have good weave slots compared to AST, so they made all jobs 1.5 seconds on their nuke. They heard AST's card system sucked while others preferred the current version, so they tried to add something new to the AST system. They heard people saying they don't like healers with one button rotation, so they tried making SGE and to tell plays to give that job a shot.

No disrespect meant to you, but most of these things are things they should've been aware of to begin with. This is where a lot of frustrations come from, these glaringly obvious issues that should be fixed or tweaked throughout the course of an expansion, and not touted as big expansion changes. Don't get me wrong, Scholar's fairy is better, Deployment Tactics feels better to use, and 1.5s cast times are nice to have, but none of these are "big expansion shakeups" and these are all issues that should've been addressed back in Shadowbringers. Sage also has no more DPS options than any other healer, and while Kardia is nice, it doesn't change the issue of spamming 1-1-1-1 over and over - Sage is not different from any of the other healers at all in terms of what it's doing for it's "DPS rotation" over a fight, so they've failed to address any of the issues facing the monotony of healer downtime.

It's things like this that would make some form of communication better, because we could at least understand what they're thinking. Was there a legitimate design reason back in Shadowbringers for why WHM and SCH had 2.5s cast times that made them have to sacrifice DPS to heal outside of their DoT refresh when AST didn't? Is there a legitimate design reason that WHM and SCH still lose DPS to heal with parts of their kit when AST and SGE don't, even with 1.5s cast times? Is there a legitimate design reason for why AST's GCD heals are less expensive MP wise than WHM's despite having the same potency and AST having way more oGCD heals than WHM? What is their view on WHM's place within the four healers, given that there are now TWO "selfish DPS" healers, with Sage able to do more damage than WHM, and of the two "pure/regen healers", Astrologian is able to heal more effectively without sacrificing personal DPS due to it's wide number of oGCD heals while providing raid buffs?

These aren't issues that they should be hearing about from players, these are issues that they should be seeing themselves as the ones who should be playing these jobs extensively to test and see how they feel. But it feels like they aren't and like they have nobody playing them to the point where they can recognize the problems they face. But if we had communication with say, a healer developer, maybe we could get some insight on why they think these design choices are good, vital, essential, etc to the jobs that they're developing, rather than having it feel like they just hastily look over some jobs so they can get back to designing cool stuff for the jobs they actually play.

[Jeeqbit]

If the devs are listening to player feedback so intently what exactly happened to healers? I don’t remember people asking for their entire playstyle to be reduced to literally a single button

The explanation we were given was there are a lot of healers that only want to heal. They also do not want to pressure healers to attack by giving them a combo and then have to choose between interrupting it or not healing, because they may choose not to heal. They don't want a rotation to distract them too much from healing.

and they’ve never given any kind of explanation as to why we have insane amounts of healing output when every single piece of content outputs tiny damage amounts.

This is true except for big pulls in leveling dungeons, which in shadowbringers forced me to burn through my entire healing kit on scholar. It was only in certain big pulls that I began to see that there actually is a healing rotation you can burn through but it is very rare to need it.

[ReynTime]

People are gonna argue there is a lot more communication going on here compared to other games. And it's true.

But the way they take player feedback now compared to 2011~2015...? It's far, far cry from how it used to be. Probably because the game hit it big and now they only respond when things get really really bad, and the Letters only exist exclusively to build hype for patches now. For better or for worse there was a level of "our players know what they want and we should try to deliver it" in the first years Yoshi-P was around. Now it's more like "we know you want X but we want to give you Y because we care more about the players less invested in the game".
They don't even pay much attention outside twitter anymore.

[Haventale]

I gotta wonder if they have anyone on the "Healer" development side of the team lol.

From what I’ve heard, they don’t. Their job design team is supposedly 4 people, which consists of 3 dps mains and a PLD main. They literally don’t have a person on their team who enjoys healing in mmos, and my god it shows.

[Maxilor]

From what I’ve heard, they don’t. Their job design team is supposedly 4 people, which consists of 3 dps mains and a PLD main. They literally don’t have a person on their team who enjoys healing in mmos, and my god it shows.

Citation needed.

[Sebazy]

Citation needed.

I went into depth on this a few years ago.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

As to how that stands today, I believe Sato has been promoted to a producer role below Yoshida whilst still effectively overseeing battle system design as a whole, whilst another team member was taken on in his place. I've not dug through the credits to be sure but I'm guessing team are currently at 4.5 to 5 members depending on what else Sato is managing now.

And yes, SE are generally pretty good at communicating feedback with players. They have historically been rather quiet on the healer front though, I suspect Yoshida's comments about WHM vs SCH healing early on and the bewilderment it produced kind of burned them on that topic. It's also worth keeping in mind that they do seemingly vet or at least reserve the right to veto interview questions. Whilst this is pretty much the norm, it does also highlight that they are hardly fielding 'Ask me anythings' here.

[Maxilor]

I went into depth on this a few years ago.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ealer-designer.

As to how that stands today, I believe Sato has been promoted to a producer role below Yoshida whilst still effectively overseeing battle system design as a whole, whilst another team member was taken on in his place. I've not dug through the credits to be sure but I'm guessing team are currently at 4.5 to 5 members depending on what else Sato is managing now.

And yes, SE are generally pretty good at communicating feedback with players. They have historically been rather quiet on the healer front though, I suspect Yoshida's comments about WHM vs SCH healing early on and the bewilderment it produced kind of burned them on that topic. It's also worth keeping in mind that they do seemingly vet or at least reserve the right to veto interview questions. Whilst this is pretty much the norm, it does also highlight that they are hardly fielding 'Ask me anythings' here.

Thanks for taking the time to provide evidence. That's actually wild.

[Tyjacon]

From what I’ve heard, they don’t. Their job design team is supposedly 4 people, which consists of 3 dps mains and a PLD main. They literally don’t have a person on their team who enjoys healing in mmos, and my god it shows.

And you heard it where?
Just asking.

Unless I missed something I don't ever remember SE mentioning their job design team composition.
Just a rumor unless proven otherwise.

[Tyjacon]

Saying the devs don't listen to the players while meaning they don't specifically listen to you.

If you ask 10 players what they want to have changed on a particular job, you'll get 6 different answers.
Some want it harder, some easier, some more utility, some more mobility while using skills, etc.
So, how are they supposed to make everyone happy?

The devs do communicate, they just say something you might not like.