Revisiting the 10 year roadmap

[Sindele]

I dun care if they don't like me. And they don't read these forums anyways.

Just tired of people squawking about "buh hard to balance buh" and "you don't know what they are thinking uwu they got so much data" when we ALSO have data through FFLogs and Lucky Bancho. Players aren't stupid. We're not in the dark.

Also Kaiten change was very stupid because it didn't solve any the issues they claimed to want to change, but altered the playstyle to Shinten spam. SAM still has button bloat and still has incredibly wide damage variance. And like... every job presses buttons... before other buttons... That's how rotations work. If they wanted to get rid of "buttons we always pressed before skills" they should remove the 12 from every 123. Remove Life Surge. Remove Reassemble. Remove Requiescat. Remove Blood Weapon. ETC ETC

Truly genius.

The problem is that our data is in the dark compared to their data.

Can you slice your data to break down the Kaiten usage of players that leveled SAM from at least 52 to 55 but no more than 89 in the past 30 days? What about those who did that in the last 60 and then haven't played SAM in the last 30 days? How about the Kaiten usage rates of players that attempted content above Extreme difficulty as SAM and then went on to not play it for over 30 days?

No. You can't. It's literally not possible to do with any kind of useful accuracy, FFLogs is a fraction of a fraction of the relevant data to a business. Player data sources simply are not complete enough. You and I cannot know what went into that decision unless they tell us. It is truly a completely different level of ability to peer into the practicality of what players do.

You can certainly argue that the result is silly, heaven knows I have. You can certainly argue with the lack of transparency and obfuscatory responses. But "hur dur they clearly don't play the job" is just useless clownshoes nerd emoji behavior. Gotta be willing to put yourself in the mindset of "why would they think this was a good decision?", even for the decisions you hate, if you want to understand them and how to avoid them in the future.

[AwesomeJr44]

Firing people isn’t the solution.

Sometimes it is.

These sorts of comments create a lot of animosity between devs and the player base because they read these things sometimes.

Good for them.

This is a slap in the face to their current customers because they are ignoring us to chase the people who haven’t wanted to play the game.

This is why I don't care.

Remove Blood Weapon.

You can take away Blood Weapon over my dead body.

[Tsumdere]

You can take away Blood Weapon over my dead body.

They removed my Dark Arts and the rage still consumes me to this day.

[Ath192]

Sometimes it is.

Not when the game isn't failing commercially. This would be like them saying banning negative players would be the solution. They would still get by just fine without us. Unfortunately....

[Jojoya]

Have to admit this discussion didn't go the way I anticipated. I was expecting there would be more talk about the ramifications of removing the MMO tag from the game and how that might impact game design and the player base.

My own thoughts and questions:

Moving this to a single player game removes the need for job balance. That could open the door to adding in job customization that would make them more fun to play and allow them to be overpowered in some content.

Does this explain the apparent lack of interest in healer design? A dedicated healing job wouldn't be needed in a single player game unless they are designing encounters where a main goal is to restore health to a NPC instead of remove it (think Valithria Dreamwalker and Tsulong from WoW). Trust NPCs will exist for those occasions outside healing is required.

Is there still a place for quality high end raiding such as Ultimate and Savage in a game that's meant for single players with the option to play with friends? As a single player game, there should be difficult challenges for the single player. The game currently lacks those outside of players soloing what is supposed to be group content so development time would need to be allocated toward making them.

What happens to end game content and gear progression? Is there no longer an end game, just a wait for the next content patch with an increase to level cap?

What happens to the open world? Do we end up in isolated instances such as those we experienced at the start of 5.0 and end of 6.0? Are we still isolated even if we're trying to play with friends like we currently experience in such areas? Will hunts and FATEs be restricted to solo play? Power creep over time would nerf hunts for solo players but the major FATEs like Chi and Ixion that can't be done solo would have to be reworked if level sync isn't removed.

Will housing be changed? Neighborhoods are pointless in a single player game, not that the wards have felt like neighborhoods in the first place considering they're usually empty of players.

What will the game look like once the MMO is officially dropped and it takes on the single player identity?

This is a slap in the face to their current customers because they are ignoring us to chase the people who haven’t wanted to play the game.

Considering the way many of their current customers keep slapping the devs in the face (when they're not sending death threats) over changes to the game, perhaps that's part of the reason they want to go back to a single player game. I suspect they didn't experience the same degree of outright hostility as they have over the MMO.

I wouldn't blame them for preferring to make games that appeal to their old customers who didn't harass them instead of making games for their current customers that do. Look at all the calls for the developers to be fired in this thread alone.

Sounds like some people aren't getting the message that workers are now sending regarding better workplaces and work/life balance. Customers frequently play just as big a role in quiet quitting as employers do. No one wants to be paid bottom tier wages while getting verbally abused on a regular basis when they can take their skillset to other jobs that pay more and have a more pleasant work environment.

[Striker44]

Have to admit this discussion didn't go the way I anticipated. I was expecting there would be more talk about the ramifications of removing the MMO tag from the game and how that might impact game design and the player base.

Where did you see anything about "removing the MMO tag" from the game? I think the discussion has gone differently than you anticipated because you were looking for talk about something that just isn't happening. I watched the video and Yoshi-P straight up said the game is an MMO. It's not becoming a "single player game." The talk in there was about adding more options for people who prefer playing solo to access MSQ dungeons and trials by expanding the Trust system; there's no talk whatsoever about the game becoming single-player (he even explicitly says that none of the grouping options for doing content with other people would be changing). So most of your questions about what happens to the open world, housing, etc. are simply irrelevant because nothing about the core of the game being an MMO is changing.

Considering the way many of their current customers keep slapping the devs in the face (when they're not sending death threats) over changes to the game, perhaps that's part of the reason they want to go back to a single player game. I suspect they didn't experience the same degree of outright hostility as they have over the MMO.

I wouldn't blame them for preferring to make games that appeal to their old customers who didn't harass them instead of making games for their current customers that do. Look at all the calls for the developers to be fired in this thread alone.

This is an excellent point. I get the sense that it's a maturity issue, with people not yet mature enough to realize that going on endless, bitter rants doesn't do anything to have your voice heard.

[Aravell]

Considering the way many of their current customers keep slapping the devs in the face (when they're not sending death threats) over changes to the game, perhaps that's part of the reason they want to go back to a single player game. I suspect they didn't experience the same degree of outright hostility as they have over the MMO.

I wouldn't blame them for preferring to make games that appeal to their old customers who didn't harass them instead of making games for their current customers that do. Look at all the calls for the developers to be fired in this thread alone.

Sounds like some people aren't getting the message that workers are now sending regarding better workplaces and work/life balance. Customers frequently play just as big a role in quiet quitting as employers do. No one wants to be paid bottom tier wages while getting verbally abused on a regular basis when they can take their skillset to other jobs that pay more and have a more pleasant work environment.

I want to point out that the negative feedback only started rising when they started pushing Trusts, very easy solo instances and job simplifications in ShB. It basically looks like they got negative feedback, they got mad that they got negative feedback, they double down on the changes that people are voicing their discontent towards, then they get more negative feedback and then it continues onwards.

It sounds like you're trying to say that the issue was that the players gave negative feedback in the first place. If the developers want less negative feedback, maybe they should communicate with their players more, actually show that they're listening rather than give us nothing but radio silence. It's understandable for the players to get agitated when the dev team has not shown that they even care about our feedback, or that they even hear about it at all, and they asked us for our feedback.

[Absurdity]

This is one and only area of CBU3 that I genuinely hope they just flat out fire everyone (job team) because they are incredibly incompetent.

I wouldn't fire experienced developers but they absolutely need new blood in the job team.
It has been the same 4 people since at least 6 years, they are understaffed and completely out of fresh ideas, and it shows.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I wouldn't fire experienced developers but they absolutely need new blood in the job team.
It has been the same 4 people since at least 6 years, they are understaffed and completely out of fresh ideas, and it shows.

I want them to re-instate the guy playtesting Healers who was supposedly getting "too good" so we can have CBU3-internal feedback why current Heal design sucks instead of this 2-button rotation BS.

[Kozh]

I want them to re-instate the guy playtesting Healers who was supposedly getting "too good" so we can have CBU3-internal feedback why current Heal design sucks instead of this 2-button rotation BS.

Too bad that even with internal feedback, yoshi-p most likely won't change healer design. He's dead set on catering to those heal bots who spam Cure1 (which is weird excuse anyway since those people will still spam 1 healing spell even if healer had 123 rotations).