Healer Survey:

[Sebazy]

I also don't think Happy frequents the Official Forums (given his every month or so visit to general to read one thread/comments he thinks is worth laughs) much at all, and I have no idea if he touches Reddit. So it's quite possible he wasn't aware (or was much less aware) of the controversy. I think he generally mains DPS Jobs, too, making him probably less aware, too.

He was 100% aware of the discourse over it. Again to confirm, he said himself that he didn't ask the question because he wouldn't get an answer out of Yoshida on it. However yes, he isn't a regular healer and as such, he didn't appear to see the extent of the problem beyond 'it's there'.

Of course, we could turn to an FFXIV influencer that's a long time healer main, except of course we don't have one because SE knows precisely how badly that would go despite there being a number of actually pretty good candidates like Momo.

[fulminating]

I don’t really understand how the current state of healers benefits SE. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes.

[Sebazy]

It makes sense, but only from the perspective of their financing department.

Right now the bulk of the game is exceptionally newbie and casual friendly for healers. Someone completely new to MMOs can come in and competently keep people alive through even Extreme content pretty much from the moment they can do the mechanics or follow the donut. This fits in with Shadowbringer's approach of 'we've got enough new players coming in that we don't need to care about long term retention at the top end'.

The other side of the coin is that to actually 'fix' high end play without crushing the approachability of healing is likely to be a pretty serious task at this point and it only gets worse as time goes on. FFXIV's job design team is tiny and has remained largely consistent from ARR despite how much the game has grown. Thus the move to homogenisation to make balancing more feasible at the expense of diversity. Turning this around would need significant hiring and time, two things that CBU3 have been pretty unwilling to commit to.

I made a thread examining FFXIV's job design team over the years here:

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

[ForsakenRoe]

The other side of the coin is that to actually 'fix' high end play without crushing the approachability of healing is likely to be a pretty serious task at this point and it only gets worse as time goes on. FFXIV's job design team is tiny and has remained largely consistent from ARR despite how much the game has grown. Thus the move to homogenisation to make balancing more feasible at the expense of diversity. Turning this around would need significant hiring and time, two things that CBU3 have been pretty unwilling to commit to.

Part of me has wondered for a while: what if SE of America was the team in charge of FFXIV development, how different would the game's 'feel' be, would it be more or less similar to certain other MMOs, etc. It'd undoubtedly be easier for them to solve their main issue with hiring new devs (that they have to be competent at programming games AND be fluent in japanese), because the second condition wouldn't be a factor. Though I'm not sure if SE of America actually makes games at all, or if they just do localization, or what

[Faidid]

Just a bunch of marketing guys and translators is my guess. Western Markets are an after-thought to SE I think. They've all but ignored our protests about 1-button spam /w healers for years now. Considering how they talk at us, not with us as a community I'd be surprised if there was any coding going on at SE America beyond setting up payment systems and handling backend server management.

[Sebazy]

They certainly used to have a full US development studio back in the day but I have a feeling that it got closed down after Secret of Evermore?

[IDontPetLalas]

They certainly used to have a full US development studio back in the day but I have a feeling that it got closed down after Secret of Evermore?

SE closed all its Western studios both in the US and Canada - https://www.vg247.com/square-enix-explains-studios-sale

[Sebazy]

SE closed all its Western studios both in the US and Canada - https://www.vg247.com/square-enix-explains-studios-sale

They used to have their own in house studio quite some time before the Eidos acquisition or even the Enix merger. I'm thinking it got shuttered around 1995-1996 after Evermore's US release but I could be wrong on that, it wasn't the most amicable arrangement and as such, details are pretty thin on the ground over what actually happened.