Will any requested Kaiten feedback actually factor into future job updates?

[MellowMink]

I’m wondering if the continued silence implies a predetermined outcome regardless of any possible requested feedback, or at least has the appearance of it, because this is a lengthy situation that isn’t consistent with times where requested changes were quickly agreed with by developers, like with newer Black Mage nerfs for competitive content.

First of all, I don’t really buy the idea that people inherently need to wait a minimum of four entire months when an action is removed for it to potentially be added back, and I certainly don’t buy that people should have to wait a minimum of four entire months to see if such a reversion appearing on patch notes (or a live letter that happens shortly before a major patch release yet long after the last) is the earliest response that they’ll ever get as to whether their persistent criticism is even acknowledged; surely a very simple “We appreciate the feedback that we asked for and do plan to add this back; there are factors preventing an overnight change for reasons we’ll provide at the next live letter, but it will return” or a more unfortunate yet brutally honest “We already made the decision long ago to keep the change and are unable to consider any requested feedback asking for a reversion; it’s not solely because of button bloat, and we’ll provide business-related reasoning soon, but we’re breaking the news now so that we stop wasting the time of uncertain forum posters who we asked to share feedback” would work if they can not only provide an entire blog post for PvP Black Mage action feedback but also push out functional job updates (not just potency tweaks or action typo fixes) within weeks.

I’ve worked at jobs before where company-wide “surveys” were sometimes given out on pre-decided benefits or dramatic schedule changes that most employees weren’t happy with; everyone knew that the only reason those existed was to provide the illusion that they listened to major employee concerns, sometimes wording questions in such dishonest ways that they could be very selectively interpreted in a manner that was summarized to employees (without specifics) later as approval. It was blatantly obvious to many that no responses ever had a chance to stop planned changes (like worse health benefits) that were clearly already decided on long ago and done solely for company profits.

Getting back to Final Fantasy, the lack of any official response at this point makes me assume that they neither want nor plan to add Kaiten back, and at worst, asking for requested feedback that to this day hasn’t been met with any visible response (not even a forum reply from one developer) for months has the possible appearance of only being done for perpetuating the image that the team always (not only sometimes) listen to players when there’s a loud outcry, not to actually offer a realistic possibility of backpedaling; I sincerely hope the latter isn’t the intention, but it certainly can come across that way for situations with distrust between players and developers, such as with the Kaiten removal, the still-limited healer DPS variety, and more.

[Ruminous]

Unfortunately? No. Would be nice, but let's not kid ourselves, they wont make any attempt to fix samurai until 7.0.

[Hezhi]

It's hard to say. Historically they seem very selective regarding what they decide to listen to. You can have Hakagure removal reverted or BLM nerfed within a patch or entire jobs/roles stubbornly left in the dust for several expansion.

[MellowMink]

Unfortunately? No. Would be nice, but let's not kid ourselves, they wont make any attempt to fix samurai until 7.0.

Didn’t seem to stop them from trying to fix supposed button bloat months ago, a problem that Shoha II and Ogi Namikiri would have introduced, not Kaiten. If Kaiten genuinely wanted to be added back, I feel like it wouldn’t be that much later, and their continued silence makes me worry that it never is being planned for restoration.

One random thought I left out of my original post but want to comment somewhere: Some people theorize that Kaiten wanted to be removed by the developers because it was going to cause issues with future actions added next expansion… which would make me wonder why exactly the action needed to be taken out almost two years before the next expansion as opposed to just being part of the later 7.0 changes? I feel like there’s some other reason altogether.

[KurenXIV]

I think at this point they have the following "plan":

Step 1) Make jobs significantly worse for the rest of EW
Step 2) Bring a whole bunch of shiny new shit to 7.0
Step 3) Hope the player base forgets the misery you put them through for the past year and a half to two years while waiting for 7.0 to fix issues they caused

I am 100% convinced they will never bring Samurai back to it's glory days of 6.08.

[Ruminous]

Didn’t seem to stop them from trying to fix supposed button bloat months ago, a problem that Shoha II and Ogi Namikiri would have introduced, not Kaiten. If Kaiten genuinely wanted to be added back, I feel like it wouldn’t be that much later, and their continued silence makes me worry that it never is being planned for restoration.

One random thought I left out of my original post but want to comment somewhere: Some people theorize that Kaiten wanted to be removed by the developers because it was going to cause issues with future actions added next expansion… which would make me wonder why exactly the action needed to be taken out almost two years before the next expansion as opposed to just being part of the later 7.0 changes? I feel like there’s some other reason altogether.

They threw out a lot of excuses. Button bloat, dps variance, future design...Pick a day, pick an excuse, the next day will be something different. The reason I said they wont fix samurai is because they don't believe it's broken. If anything, the massive outcry slowed their progress on the ast/drg changes because of how pissed off people were at a class being changed so heavily. But until they say otherwise, the devs believe samurai is fine where it is. Otherwise they wouldn't have had to panic buff parts of its rotation later rather than just add kaiten back, or talk about how to make auto crit abilities scale better with buffs.

[Quor]

One random thought I left out of my original post but want to comment somewhere: Some people theorize that Kaiten wanted to be removed by the developers because it was going to cause issues with future actions added next expansion… which would make me wonder why exactly the action needed to be taken out almost two years before the next expansion as opposed to just being part of the later 7.0 changes? I feel like there’s some other reason altogether.

Not a theory, but an actual comment made by Yoshi P. He outright stated that Kaiten was creating difficulties for the job team to iterate on future SAM abilities, so after "much debate" they decided to just axe it. I made an entire post calling this - and the general direction of job design over the past three expansions - out as lazy.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ZY.-Here-s-why

There's lots of speculation on the true reason behind this. My own suspicion is that Yoshi P. currently has more of his attention focused on FF16 and he's left FF14 to his more junior staff. This means, essentially, that he trusts more or less whatever they come up with and doesn't look too closely at any proposed changes that won't be rocking the boat noticeably. I'm sure the job balance team spreadsheeted the dps difference with auto-crit vs. Kaiten and showed it to him and he went "yeah, looks about equal, go for it" without ever actually considering the larger meta game of Kenki management-as-fight-planning across an entire encounter. I have often said that SAM is the "BLM of melee" in that it is the melee job that needs the most forethought in order to perform at their highest potential. It's not as detail-specific as a BLM can be as there's a lot more need and room for ad hoc decision-making with SAM, but out of all the melee dps, SAM is the one that benefited the most from having an extensively planned-out approach to a fight. Of course, this is all gone now since Kaiten was removed, and SAM is now BY FAR the simplest melee dps. It's literally braindead now.

So here I sit, in my belief that Yoshi P. has not forgotten his roots, believing that it's not Yoshi P. himself but rather the lazy approach his developers have been taking that is responsible for the current state of SAM.

The alternative to this is that no, it's not *just* the lazy devs, but also Yoshi P. I don't believe this because it flies in the face of what Yoshi P. has gone on record discussing class skill usage choice. Notably, in the NoClip docu on youtube, he talks about how a problem he saw (and sought to fix) in the 1.0 version was that players would just use the most powerful version of whatever over and over again, with no thought to resource management or anything, because there was no point in using anything else. So a big part of what he did in 1.0 and later on for 2.0 is to introduce decision-making into the process via proper resource management. Of course, this belief flies in the face of what happened to SAM in 6.1, since the removal of Kaiten also removed any decision-making in regards to Kenki usage. Now we simply just spam Shinten when it lights up, maybe spending 4-5 GCD's prior to a burst window to "pool" Kenki (like that means a damn thing now) just so we can say we're doing something, anything, besides hitting the button when it lights up.

But if I'm wrong, then yes, it means that what Yoshi P. believed back then, and what served as part of why FF14 was saved, is no longer what he believes. Which means it's no longer the driving force behind job design and balancing, which would logically lead us to where we are now.

It could be either. Or maybe even both. Or something else entirely. Yoshi's confused response during the 6.1 LL reading, as he worriedly focused on the erupting player anger in the chat rooms, leads me to believe he was blind-sided by player reaction. In turn, this leads me to believe he really doesn't understand what makes SAM fun. This likely means he's completely out of touch with how players view and enjoy the job. Which doesn't bode well, since this is the head guy with the final say in all decisions we're talking about here.

Otherwise they wouldn't have had to panic buff parts of its rotation later rather than just add kaiten back, or talk about how to make auto crit abilities scale better with buffs.

This right here is a big part of why I think my earlier suspicions; green or otherwise ignorant developer, paint-by-numbers bean-counter type, the kind who worships the spreadsheet; was responsible for coming up with the ridiculously stupid idea to outright remove Kaiten. It just reeks of bad QA (or no QA) when it comes to the final result. For all of SE's faults with FF14, their QA has tended to be well above par. But to miss something as simple as the Yukikure rotation because of the ham-handed chop job they did in 6.1...it boggles the mind.

I find myself in the unenviable position of feeling the same way I did about two weeks into the 1.0 release. It's that same feeling of dread, like you know the bus is going to go over a cliff but the driver is absolutely certain that things will be just fine, but you know he's fucking lying, both to you and to himself. I'm sitting here, holding tight to my seat, waiting to go into freefall, praying that it's just my eyes playing tricks on me and that everything is going to be fine.

Of course, in 1.0, everything was *not* fine. I quit in disgust after only six weeks in retail, and this was after having helped in both betas. I remember exactly what tipped me over; I saw a post about how disgustingly lazy the map design was for the zones in the game. The poster had taken screenshots of each map and created a color-coded legend, which he used to encircle all terrain features that were the same featured just placed somewhere else and (maybe) rotated. The Shroud was the worst; he had maybe 18-20 colors, identifying both smaller terrain features and larger "sub zones" in the Shroud, and it was just disgusting how many copy-and-pasted things there were. This was supposed to be a rich, unique world for crying out loud! Instead, the world was filled with samey-looking areas that led you into other samey-looking areas through the same set of narrow connector "tunnels" such that sometimes you would leave one area only to pop out into another and feel like you had just walked into the area you just left. Like some kind of Lost Woods curse from the Legend of Zelda.

It was just....so....LAZY. And I find myself thinking the same damn thing here, all over again.

[MellowMink]

Not a theory, but an actual comment made by Yoshi P. He outright stated that Kaiten was creating difficulties for the job team to iterate on future SAM abilities, so after "much debate" they decided to just axe it.

That being official really perplexes me because if that’s the main reason, then wait until 7.0 to remove it while having other things to replace it with; it makes absolutely no sense to me to remove it for 6.1 since totally new actions likely won’t be added before the next expansion.

I would be really interested in seeing his explanation for the timing, as well as a reason why Ikishoten doesn’t just turn into Ogi Namikiri if “button bloat” is truly another concern of theirs. Anyway, I enjoyed reading the rest of your detailed comments, so thanks for leaving them!

[Quor]

That being official really perplexes me because if that’s the main reason, then wait until 7.0 to remove it while having other things to replace it with; it makes absolutely no sense to me to remove it for 6.1 since totally new actions likely won’t be added before the next expansion.

I would be really interested in seeing his explanation for the timing, as well as a reason why Ikishoten doesn’t just turn into Ogi Namikiri if “button bloat” is truly another concern of theirs. Anyway, I enjoyed reading the rest of your detailed comments, so thanks for leaving them!

Sure. Post 47/48 by Quyn:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-anymore/page5

Specifically:

...and on Kaiten getting removed we did that because we want to do away having to be restricted by that move

and

And then, I am also well aware of how the critical synergy works well with jobs...and I'm definitely aware, but this is also the overall problem of FFXIV itself, and there are discussions where we should have change that itself to begin with. But we can't be doing everything simultaneously at once so please understand that we want to tackle on that gradually. We do experience cases where it's hard to adjust when a skill with and without critical can cause such a huge disparity...and so we performed this adjustment precisely we care about that so I apologize but I'd like you to please give it a try first.

So in short, it seemed like the decision came about as a combination of them feeling "restricted" by Kaiten as well as wanting to roll out a larger critical hit system revamp over the course of the next few patches, of which SAM was simply the first job to be moved in that direction.

As for the action/button bloat reason, they abandoned that line of excuses within about 48 hours after the Live Letter came out. Ever since then, the stated reasons have been the restrictiveness of Kaiten along with smoothing out "damage spike variance" for the job. I haven't personally seen nor heard anything else regarding "action" or "button" bloat since then, and I'm guessing it's largely because the community crowd-sourced good, workable solutions that SE could have pursued in lieu of outright removing a button. Well, that and calling them out on the "action bloat" reasoning, since 6.1 SAM has a whole 1 less APM than 6.08 SAM did.

[Hezhi]

Not a theory, but an actual comment made by Yoshi P. He outright stated that Kaiten was creating difficulties for the job team to iterate on future SAM abilities, so after "much debate" they decided to just axe it.

I'm baffled they haven't even thought about waiting for 7.0 before replacing it if it was such a headache to balance. This is such a horrible decision on every level.