Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

[WaxSw]

Found it god damn that took a while:



Had to cut a bit off where they took a potshot at something I'd said (because you can't put a quote inside a quote), but yeh, numbers. They came to a conclusion of some sort, I half-jokingly point out that SB was the sudden downturn and therefore the conclusion is that 'removing Old Cleric Stance Dance was actually the thing that lost so many healer players' (i don't actually believe that), but if the numbers are to be believed, then SB was the point where a lot of players stopped doing healer stuff. If I had to propose an actual hypothesis on why this was the case, I'd go with:

'WHM is the most popular healer by far, and it was not good in SB cos the lilies sucked. Coincidentally, the two DPS classes added in that expansion were fan favorites from past games, RDM and SAM. Therefore I believe that many WHMs who were disenfranchised by how bleh the WHM design was jumped to one of the two new classes, instead of swapping to SCH or AST'

...something like that. Or maybe the numbers are actually just a bunch of rubbish because WaybackMachine is not a reliable source. But we've not exactly got anything else to go off of

That's actually pretty interesting to read, there are many variables that are not taken into consideration ofc like the weapon data which is important to differentiate people who really play a job vs the ones that simply lv it up to max level and forget about it, but as expected ShB (2019-2022) was the worst expansion in terms of healer engament and even with the introduction of a brand new job we haven't reached the numbers of the SB era, let alone HW.

[Mewthredel]

none of the classes even feel unique anymore except for BLM.

[RyuDragnier]

none of the classes even feel unique anymore except for BLM.

[Shurrikhan]

none of the classes even feel unique anymore except for BLM.

This seems a pretty ambiguous statement, ngl. What would even be the threshold by which a RDM seemingly plays like a BRD, which plays like a MNK, which plays like a SMN, which plays like a DRG, etc.?

I'll agree some aspects are overly shared or insufficiently differentiated, for sure, but... we'd need to know what qualifies as "unique" to you for this to actually mean anything.

[drtasteyummy]

none of the classes even feel unique anymore except for BLM.

That's like calling a human in a wheelchair a unique race.

[MatchaokaCha]

It's wild how people think it's "gatekeeping" when the suggestion is raising the skill ceiling without compromising the skill floor. Did they even READ the comment before replying? This really irritates me.

Your explanation is what I actually thought on why some WHM mains switched to other jobs in SB.

HEALER %
2017: 0.25047
2018: 0.215359
2019: 0.191224
2020: 0.172927
2022: 0.19941
2023: 0.205038

Data like this is unable to capture every nuance and reason on why people start/quit on healers. This is unreliable EVEN if the numbers are accurate (they're probably not). Idk why they thought this data could actually prove anything. A better way to collect this type of information for this purpose would've been through extensive survey campaigns/polls with a comment box explaining your decisions, but that's just wishful thinking on my part. Also, the player population drastically increased during ShB. It makes no sense to compare current expansions to older ones like that without having a good amount of qualitative information. I'm so confused as to why this was used -oh they disavowed the legitimacy of the data themselves.



. . . then. . . why. . . ?

[ForsakenRoe]

. . . then. . . why. . . ?

Honestly? I think they brought the numbers up to try and prove that 'healers haven't been quitting, the population is stable' or something. Problem being, A: the data scrapes listed are once per year, and the issue we were talking about mainly pertained to Abyssos and it's drastic acceleration of the 'brain drain' from the healer role. It's climbed a bit in EW, sure, but that could be argued to be because they gave us SGE. New shiny class draw factor and all that. And more relevant, B: They didn't actually realize they'd left the maybe-HW number on the top there (maybe the 2017 number is HW, maybe it's SB, who knows, SB launched halfway through 2017 so I'd assume it's from HW personally)

If that is the case, it makes sense why they quietly dropped using the numbers to prove anything: it'd disprove a lot of their points. If the 2017 number is from HW, it shows that Cleric Stance Clunky era was the most popular era we have data for. If it was a scrape taken from, say, Aug 2017 instead of Mar 2017, that'd mean it's from SB, in which case it shows people were interested in the healers to an extent (which we can extrapolate from the incomplete data to a conclusion that 'the healer population at the end of HW was somewhere within the ballpark of 0.20 to 0.25), which would mean a combination of two things. One, people did not 'hate' Cleric Stance Clunk so much as 'they kinda just put up with it', accepting it's existence and moving on. And two, that people were VERY enthusiastic (to the point where the value is 25% larger than the most recent value listed) about the healers for the launch of SB specifically. IDK why that'd be the case, but it sure as hell isn't a case of 'the WHM had too many DOTs and it scared people away', so IDK why certain people are against bringing Aero 3 back.

After a while, you start to notice certain 'moments' when you can see the argument's over, but they keep coming back for more. Often with very easily disprovable claims/evidences, picking arguments about 'how it was back then (their experiences)' and dismissing anyone saying 'how it was back then (multiple people saying the same thing to the contrary)', and in some cases, having almost photographic memory for certain details about the game, yet simultaneously getting basic things about that time of the game wrong. Or my personal favorite, the dual-attack of 'making weird comparison' eg describing how hard each healer should be, using FPS games, and 'completely misunderstanding other people's comparisons' when they try to use them to illustrate a point. I've drawn graphs to try and explain stuff to them before. They ignored 2/3 of what the graph was trying to say and only focused on the part they wanted to get angry about, and that seems to be the rule not the exception

[ty_taurus]

Honestly? I think they brought the numbers up to try and prove that 'healers haven't been quitting, the population is stable' or something. Problem being, A: the data scrapes listed are once per year, and the issue we were talking about mainly pertained to Abyssos and it's drastic acceleration of the 'brain drain' from the healer role. It's climbed a bit in EW, sure, but that could be argued to be because they gave us SGE. New shiny class draw factor and all that. And more relevant, B: They didn't actually realize they'd left the maybe-HW number on the top there (maybe the 2017 number is HW, maybe it's SB, who knows, SB launched halfway through 2017 so I'd assume it's from HW personally)

If it's from SB, then the boom of healers could also come from the removal of Cleric Stance as well, though without knowing the numbers prior to that it's hard to say. But while Cleric Stance was something most people were fine putting up with, it was also very heavily argued back and forth because it's such a punishing concept. Heal and be unable to do any damage, or do damage but be incapable of putting out any healing. It was a wall for many players, so when that wall came down, it's possible more people were willing to commit to healing.

[ForsakenRoe]

It's possible. But the numbers would also imply that, since the values are 'relatively stable', ranging from 17-20% (except the one outlier), the whole SHB thing of 'we need to make healers have less damage buttons to worry about, so more people will try healer without feeling stressed' doesn't exactly ring true. If it were, the numbers from {SHB release date} onwards would be higher by a significant margin. Instead, if anything they're actually lower by a margin, though not necessarily one I'd call 'significant' per se. Either way, the numbers can be seen to imply several different conclusions, most of which directly contradict the picture the original user would have everyone believe.

[ty_taurus]

It's possible. But the numbers would also imply that, since the values are 'relatively stable', ranging from 17-20% (except the one outlier), the whole SHB thing of 'we need to make healers have less damage buttons to worry about, so more people will try healer without feeling stressed' doesn't exactly ring true. If it were, the numbers from {SHB release date} onwards would be higher by a significant margin. Instead, if anything they're actually lower by a margin, though not necessarily one I'd call 'significant' per se. Either way, the numbers can be seen to imply several different conclusions, most of which directly contradict the picture the original user would have everyone believe.

For ShB, I mentioned this before, but I feel like it's related to this Sword in the Stone scene.

Sugar, in this example, is simplicity or ease-of-use. The "tea" that we call healers had, for the purpose of this analogy, no sugar in it for ARR and HW. Some are fine with the tea without sugar, and it's not a particularly bitter tea so most can drink it even if they'd prefer with sugar. The people who like the tea without sugar also would be fine with a little bit of sugar, and so SB was the compromise. We got Arthur's cup of tea, maybe a spoonful too sweet for some, but otherwise palatable by most anyone. But ShB and EW are the sugar bowl serving Merlin's cup, constantly piling on spoonful of sugar over and over again as if the devs are thinking "they like sweet, yes? More sugar! More!" meanwhile many of us are standing by the cup yelling "when! when!" trying to get them to stop shoveling the pile of sugar that has now buried the tea cup.

In other words, much like tea where some sugar is nice, there is a point at which you can have too much sugar. Just because sugar is "good" at first does not mean an infinite amount of sugar will always be good. It has diminishing returns and eventually reverses into becoming a bad thing. That is how I feel SE is handling this war on complexity--we've gone far beyond the point of making things approachable and accessible for the common player and are just injecting raw corn syrup into our veins whether we like it or not. Or as another comparison, trying to create a wooden sphere and have gone beyond the point of filing away the roughness and are now sanding the sphere into nothingness in pursuit of this "perfect" frictionless sphere.