If you continue to dumb down the game, you will lose half your player base

[Genz]

Well, they just dumbed down PvP and it's considered a success, with lot of players, etc.

We were already worried about the direction, dumbing down everything, predictable and short-lived content, etc. with ARR and HW. But they proved us wrong, all they need is the brand and marketing.

[IdowhatIwant]

40% is still not a majority, and it can be very difficult to predict trends like savage participation based on sudden bursts of interest.

40% doesn't make it 1% either like many people claim.

Well, they just dumbed down PvP and it's considered a success, with lot of players, etc.

We were already worried about the direction, dumbing down everything, predictable and short-lived content, etc. with ARR and HW. But they proved us wrong, all they need is the brand and marketing.

PvP was already a dumbed down version of your class, now it is a slightly dumber downed version but the intelligent thing they did was make everyone there own healer. Healers made PvP miserable.

[TaleraRistain]

But i think some DPS abilities should be tied towards the HP of teammates. If their HP is lower, your dps also will.

That's certainly an interesting idea and could have merit, but I see a couple of issues.

If someone has a "healer adjust" mentality, the healer will not just have to try to keep them alive when they're increasing the burden on the healer but now they'll be punished if they can't keep that person's HP high.

It also doesn't allow the flexibility to let the team stay at what is still a safe level and push out dps when you know damage isn't coming soon.

I think the biggest issue is that even that idea won't fix the issue of healing not being necessary. It would need a further corollary that party dps overall goes down if HP goes down. But then you run the risk of the rest of the group having to take on the burden of a weaker healer or a healer who is utilizing those instances of low damage to push out dps.

I think the flexibility issue could be fixed by not having the dps loss trigger until a certain percentage of HP is lost. So that would still not require healers to heal every little bit of health. But I'm not sure how to implement something fairly where anyone's dps is based on whether others stay alive or not.

[SieyaM]

40% doesn't make it 1% either like many people claim.



PvP was already a dumbed down version of your class, now it is a slightly dumber downed version but the intelligent thing they did was make everyone there own healer. Healers made PvP miserable.

So I have tried to get numbers for savage clears but can't seem to actually find any, can you tell me where you are getting this? Also the means that we are speculating on the number of people participating, which means it could be well over 50%, could be as low as 41%.

[rewd]

So I have tried to get numbers for savage clears but can't seem to actually find any, can you tell me where you are getting this? Also the means that we are speculating on the number of people participating, which means it could be well over 50%, could be as low as 41%.

We were discussing about how many people stick to hard content.

If we assume a 41% participation rate, then the answer is pretty much everyone. You can slowly increase this percentage and the answer will always be "pretty much everyone", until you reach 51%. At this point, the majority of the JP playerbase tries harder content. The participion rate could also be 80% and then "only" 50% of them actually end up completing said content.

None of this actually matters because regardless of the exact percentages we already know that a significant portion of the playerbase completes hard content and this is enough to say that dumbing down the game and removing complexity is unhealthy for the game and the playerbase. The "hard content is just a small niche" argument doesn't make sense and it's even dumber because as someone already said you can increase the skill ceiling without impacting the floor.

Cure lovers can keep sniffing glue in Smileton while WHM raiders can play the job they want to love without feeling like they were lobotomized against their will. It's not mutually exclusive.

[Avoidy]

It's funny that a lot of the healer simplification occurred because "We're worried people won't play healers" or "we want to make the healer wait times not as bad."

In Tera, another MMO, healing was actually enjoyable and it had quite a few spinning plates. You needed to regularly debuff the boss, regularly buff your allies, manage your allies' mana, and you even had a burst phase dps style rotation to do when it came off cd along with long CD skills to remember. Harder bosses had buffs that needed to be purged or your party would wipe immediately. You could heal party members through the bad so they could keep their uptime. Our version of Rescue was actually good, so you could grab someone at the last possible second and genuinely rescue them from death unlike here where people get snapshotted. You could use your cleanse (think "Esuna") and time it so well that the debuff wouldn't even appear on their end; it'd disappear as soon as it started. So unlike XIV, where you can esuna a Slow but still have the party member stuck dealing with it for a tick, in tera your party members actually benefited from your hair trigger reaction time. This also meant there was pressure. Pressure to do well. Room to grow. An absurd ability to carry groups through sheer force of will. It was a lot to take in. It was easy to perform poorly. And it was fun. I knew loads of other healers. I often had to change to a DPS role so we could fit a healer in our party. We had a surplus of them at one point. The game's shutting down now due to mismanagement, and there's a private server running. Healers have the longest queue of any other job. People are healing on a private server in droves, that's literally how fun the role could be if the devs just stopped being afraid of giving healer mains an involved kit with a learning curve, and content that demanded the full use of it (I mean more than the 5% of content that constitutes savage/ultimate; it's so gross that the vast majority of this game's content straight up doesn't require a healer present at all depending on your comp. In that other game, not having a healer led to a noticeable difference because the team ran out of mana and couldn't do anything, bosses wouldn't get debuffed so they'd take longer to kill, cooldown reduction buffs weren't going out so your whole rotation felt scuffed, it felt awful. Across all difficulties. I wish we'd experience that here. Not everyone's trying to get gaped by Ultimates, but we'd still like to not fall asleep while playing the game.

[IdowhatIwant]

So I have tried to get numbers for savage clears but can't seem to actually find any, can you tell me where you are getting this? Also the means that we are speculating on the number of people participating, which means it could be well over 50%, could be as low as 41%.

It's from the last census which is based on players that have the savage mount, and the pet from normal raids. JP servers highest completion was 46% NA server was 22%. JPs lowest completion server was 22% NAs lowest was 1%. So yes depending on server it can be 1% but this is all on RP servers. Gilgamesh is the highest server at the 22%. These numbers don't include people that have not gotten the mount or have not completed all 4 sections, it's soley the number of players that have completed all 4 sections and won the roll on the mount. So the actual number of people that completed savage would be higher, and the number that participated would be even higher. So at least for some JP servers you can easily say a majority of players participated in savage raiding. NA/EU is another story, I guess theres a higher % of players that are into doing nothing in the game.

[DPZ2]

In Tera, another MMO, healing was actually enjoyable and it had quite a few spinning plates.

Your argument says a lot more about what you like to do as a healer than anything about FFXIV in general. Having to play whack-a-mole with an addon in WoW, I wasn't enamored with healing in general but find it to be fine in this game. That says a lot more about what I like to do as a healer, by the way.

Considering that Tera currently has an average of about 20 players a day this month after Gameforge announced the shutdown of servers at the end of June 2022, one cannot say that the game was super successful in drawing players with its gameplay. Still, #32 out of the top 134 MMOs isn't bad for the genre.

Blaming Gameforge for mismanagement, rather than lack of profitability for this free to play game is a bit much ... it was already beginning to show its age.

If anyone is interested in looking at Tera on console (Gameforge doesn't handle the console version), you can look this up to see what you think: https://bluntlyhonestreviews.com/mmo...aying-in-2022/

[Vav2021]

One reason people play MMOs is for customization. Dressing the characters, races, even motivating people to RP. Having a "large amount" of buttons or skills may seem encumbering, but truth be told, it helps players avoid a Cookie Cutter build. In wow, before I left, that's all there was. Simplifying builds and skills may make it lose its flavor.

[Sebazy]

Considering that Tera currently has an average of about 20 players a day this month after Gameforge announced the shutdown of servers at the end of June 2022, one cannot say that the game was super successful in drawing players with its gameplay. Still, #32 out of the top 134 MMOs isn't bad for the genre.

The long term success and health of MMOs is a complex beast and there's far more to than simply 'is the gameplay good'.

Two great examples of this would be Everquest and Warhammer Online:

Everquest is what you would call a Horizontal Progression MMO. Old content and equipment generally isn't automatically rendered obsolete with a new content drop or expansion and as such, these games can survive mass player exoduses on a comparative shoestring budget. As long as the publisher is willing to keep a skeleton development team there to keep things ticking over, these types of MMOs will generally endure irrespective of how good or bad they are comparitively. UO, EQ1, FFXI, even KR Lineage are a testament to this.

Warhammer Online is a Vertical Progress or Theme Park MMO as popularised by World of Warcraft. These kinds of MMOs will typically render old content and equipment obsolete in a hurry. Old content tends to be trivialised and/or simply worthless outside of achievements, titles and glamours. Thus a much faster pace of development post launch is absolutely required. Where FFXIV and WoW are examples of where this has been done well, Warhammer Online was the poster child for a game with amazing potential, great gameplay and truly unique PvP that floundered post launch and promptly died out due to not getting nearly enough new content post launch.

Korean potion guzzlers are no exception, who the blame lays with is irrelevant really. The game wasn't getting fresh content. Large swathes of prior content was worthless. The end result is a dead game.