FF14 is a fast food MMO

[GaiusDrakon]

Everything is nice on the surface level.

But there is no depth.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...eb2x&context=3

I think the issues people have are comprehensive, and deal pretty equally with simplification of gameplay on a class-to-class level, and the smoothing over of certain teamplay-centered mechanics.

I've dropped the word here a couple times before without elaborating, but I would really call it the McDonaldization of the game, in the academic sense.

Nobody really "cooks" at McDonald's. The ingredients come from a central supplier, so that french fries are a uniform width, to the 1/32nd of an inch. The temperatures of the oil in the fryer are prescribed, down to the degree, and the cooking times are prescribed, down to the second. There is an exact, specific process for drawing a milkshake or ice cream cone, down to the angle at which you hold the cup. So nobody learns to cook by working at McDonald's - they only learn how to work at McDonald's. And if you already know how to cook, then that doesn't help you - or hurt you - because "working at McDonald's" is an entirely orthogonal skillset to "cooking."

The Wikipedia article linked above sums up the idea in a more comprehensive way based around four general ideas, but I'd sum it up this way: To McDonald's, the customer-facing goal of McDonaldization is to provide a consistent experience at every location: Whether you are in Chicago, Berlin, Yellowknife, or Sao Paulo, you are supposed to get the same Big Mac, the same fries. The employee-facing goal of McDonaldization is also consistency; by reducing employee agency to "how accurately can you reproduce the explicitly detailed instructions for operating our franchise equipment with our franchise ingredients?", the goal is to produce an environment where if you took eight employees from eight countries around the world who didn't have a common language between them, they could still operate a McDonald's just as consistently and efficiently as if they were all family.

If it's not clear how that relates to FFXIV, then consider the following fairly-uncontroversial statement: FFXIV is designed with "Japanese Party Finder culture" in mind.

The hallmarks of JP PF are pretty well-known: You join the party, maybe throw up a yoroshiku, someone posts the macro, you claim your T1/T2/D1/D2/etc role, and then the fight happens - usually pretty smoothly. And... It works! Every time there's a Lucky Bancho census or any other bit of data about clear rates, you see the same comments: "Wow, clear rates are so much higher on JP than NA/EU." Just as you absolutely cannot make the argument that McDonald's is not an objectively successful business, you absolutely cannot make the argument that FFXIV's current design, when paired with its intended server culture, produces an objectively high rate of successful raid clears.

And to bring that back to the OP: It's really both. McDonald's and FFXIV achieve their desired consistency by reducing the process, of "cooking" or "raiding in an MMO" respectively, to a small number of explicitly-prescribed inputs, such that an invididual's proficiency can be measured by how accurately they followed a standardized procedure.

That notion I described of "nobody learns to cook at McDonald's" is an established pattern that's been observed in a number of fields. When that happens in the workplace, it's called deskilling. And while I don't want to expand this post all the way out into an entire whole-ass essay, a lot of the same principles apply to FFXIV job design, both in terms of internal class gameplay, and cooperative mechanics within a party.

The purpose, in the sense that we're using here, is essentially to remove (or reduce as much as possible) the amount of human variability in the system. If you go to a regular restaurant, there are a lot of ways you can get served bad food. It can be undercooked, overcooked, unevenly cooked, improperly seasoned, the ingredients can be bad, or anything else you've seen on any given episode of Kitchen Nightmares. At a McDonald's, there's really not much room for the staff to mess up, and there's really only one possible mistake they can make: Not following instructions closely enough. In FFXIV, they've removed a lot of ways to mess up: Everything you listed in the OP, dropping Darkside/Greased Lightning/BotD/Enochian/etc, and so on. It's mostly been reduced to how well you can stand in the right place, keep your GCD rolling, and keep your cooldowns aligned. It wouldn't surprise me if 7.0 does something to reduce the reliance on Feint/Reprisal/Addle coordination.

The problem is, basically, that a lot of people just want the same Big Mac every time. Japanese PF groups aren't going to like changes that make their clears less reliable. Even here on r/ffxivdiscussion where people supposedly in love with the FFXIV of yesteryear, I've completely lost count of the number of times I've seen a suggestion about class or encounter mechanics met with the response of "That sounds like a nightmare in PF. No thanks."

To argue against that, you'd really have to go the whole-ass essay route and do a big Intro to Sociology spiel on formal vs substantive rationalization, the importance of considering second-order and third-order effects instead of focusing on immediate short-term metrics, and so on.

If you are of the opinion that there even is a problem, though: Again, it's both. It's a problem that systems and mechanics that produced natural, organic, varied party synergy and teamwork have been removed, and it's a problem that a huge number of this game's classes just don't have enough going on inside their internal kit to stay engaging.

[ZephyrMenodora]

At first seeing these lazy posts flood the forums annoyed me but they have become so trite I can’t even bring myself to yawn.

[Krotoan]

Oh look. The person with like 3 jobs leveled except ALL THEIR CRAFTING AND GATHERING is copy-pasting reddit takes. I wonder who that could be.

[Hurlstone]

[Silver-Strider]

Gaius is a troll but the post is a legitimate one since someone else is the one that wrote it.
It's actually a solid metaphor for what FFXIV has become today.

[Boblawblah]

momma Venat approves

[ZephyrMenodora]

momma Venat approves

Oh that’s a pretty one.

[Renalt]

Cast your votes here. Is FFXIV one of the following:

1. Taco Bell

2. Wendys

3. Arbys

4. Subway

5. Lions Choice

6. McDonalds

7. Panda Express

8. Charles

9. Carls Jr / Hardees

10. Rallys

11. Chipotle

Looking forward to the results.

[ZephyrMenodora]

Forgot Chik Fil A for the shock value.

[FudoMyoo]

Can someone give me a TLR?