Revisiting the 10 year roadmap

[Deo14]

When I was looking into the Kaiten clown fiesta, I saw what Yoshi said about Kaiten in translation of patch notes reading stream. It seems like single dev suggested it, and then Yoshi agreed with it. So yes, this seems to be their workflow. One dev gets an idea, Yoshi (who has been half working of FFXVI) agrees or denies it, and then it goes live. So whole 1.5 devs do these decisions. This is just speculation (it was unofficial translations tbf) and seems pretty far fetched, but when you hear that game has just 4 job designers, it all starts to make sense.

I saw comments asking for the person responsible to come out and explain themselves, but even if they come out I doubt that they will say anything different than what I did. By the way, the adjustments you see here are the result of me debating with the person who worked on it, along with discussing the risks it come with, and in the end, decided and then signed on it after knowing and acknowledging that performing such changes are for the sake of the playerbase. So this is definitely my responsibility...so probably no matter how much I say here it will just be some speech where people either be convinced or not so...

[Iscah]

It seems like single dev suggested it, and then Yoshi agreed with it.

You make it sound like the whole conversation is just A: "Let's delete Kaiten!" B: "Okay, do it."

That's not what the quote you provided actually says.

[Deo14]

You make it sound like the whole conversation is just A: "Let's delete Kaiten!" B: "Okay, do it."

That's not what the quote you provided actually says.

It's still discussion between mere 2 devs, and even then, no one can say if it's sincere or another PR talk, because few sentence later, he says that it was necessary so they're not restricted by it:

Of course there are times where I thought of just flip the table and not change anything...but still...yeah on SAM's guaranteed critical, having that will make SAM's performance jump really high but there are also parts where SAM doesn't see drastic jump as they should...and on Kaiten getting removed we did that because we want to do away having to be restricted by that move, and as for its sub stats, the influence of those stats as the patch moves on will become bigger and bigger and it'll jump the job's performance really high, more so than expected and in reverse the numbers on lesser patch will see the job not jumping as high as the job should....hmmmm...Indeed, it is true that the job's strength and weakness will depend on whether the job's amount of critical dealt and I agree the job relied on that aspect too much, and as for the strength and weakness...yeah that's what it is. I of course do understand that this is part of the fun for the job....and, as for this time, we saw specific actions determined the the composition of DPS and perhaps it leaned way too much so we let some of the weapon skill value loose and we know that if we just increase the potency of weapon skill it'll result in those skills at lower level being too strong, so we adjusted on those values as well by... please refer to the new traits added to SAM located below. So...yeah, this is the adjustments for the job we made for this patch.

... just to contradict it later, by saying that it was actually for "player's enjoyment":

Well, of course I am very well aware and understand that players will feel lonely and their displeasure will get really big when certain elements of the job they played and got used to for quite a long while now gets changed or removed, so it's not like we're purposely looking away these comments with disapproval or something, but it'll definitely be much appreciated if you can tell us which part you want us to retain or tell us more on which aspects are more favorable to you after touching on the adjustments so that we can take your comment as reference, and from there we'll know where to draw the line. I'll repeat myself that we really did all these adjustments for the sake of player's enjoyment here so I'll be thankful if you all can understand this. (The rest omitted)

Last but not least, one of many "please gib feedback", even though they completely ignore it.

Still, I of course do acknowledge that there are parts where people did not ask for, like Ninja or Samurai..and regarding Samurai's guaranteed Critical, we indeed struggled a lot on the balance adjustments due to the strong ratio fluctuation here, and we really attempted to close the variance gap for as much as we could, and we know this is done for the sake of job balance so I really appreciate if you can understand what we're trying to achieve here. You can send us feedback from there and if the voices of how a job's identity has been taken away too much then these comments will act as a reference to the direction of job balance and improvements we'll be performing in the future. So please, if you do think it matters to you, do send us a feedback regarding the matter.

I assure you that it is extraordinarily normal for one designer to handle an entire class from the top-down, and for that designer to be responsible for multiple classes.

Which would be fine if that dev actually played that job.

[Iscah]

It's still discussion between mere 2 devs, and even then, no one can say if it's sincere or another PR talk, because few sentence later, he says that it was necessary so they're not restricted by it ... just to contradict it later, by saying that it was actually for "player's enjoyment":

Last but not least, one of many "please gib feedback", even though they completely ignore it.

The things aren't mutually exclusive. They might have decided that it was both restrictive to them and negative or neutral to player enjoyment, so they decided to get rid of it, whereas they might not choose to change a restrictive but popular thing.

And listening to feedback doesn't mean they have to change it just because some people don't like it, because maybe they got positive feedback too. As a casual SAM player I can't even see the attachment to it and I don't miss it at all. It was just an extra button to press every time before using a second button, which seemed pointless, and I don't get why it's held up as some epitome of bad changes to the game.

[Deo14]

The things aren't mutually exclusive. They might have decided that it was both restrictive to them and negative or neutral to player enjoyment, so they decided to get rid of it, whereas they might not choose to change a restrictive but popular thing.

And listening to feedback doesn't mean they have to change it just because some people don't like it, because maybe they got positive feedback too. As a casual SAM player I can't even see the attachment to it and I don't miss it at all. It was just an extra button to press every time before using a second button, which seemed pointless, and I don't get why it's held up as some epitome of bad changes to the game.

Which is why discussions between 2 devs are clearly not enough - if they had more points of view (maybe even from someone who actually does play SAM), they would conclude that it was bad decision. You really don't need to be parsing golds to realize why those changes are terrible even in theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIHj-1_Yn1U

You can check Celesti's thread of Kaiten feedback compilation. It really wasn't just "some people" who didn't like it, it was pretty one sided.

And no, 6.08 SAM was much better designed than current SAM, since you spend 20-22% of all your actions on Shinten. You won't convince me that is better design than using Kaiten before every Iaijutsu.

[Sindele]

I assure you that it is extraordinarily normal for one designer to handle an entire class from the top-down, and for that designer to be responsible for multiple classes.

[Sindele]

To put it as gently as possible, you have no idea what went into that decision and have no grounds to justify that statement other than being mad. You're perfectly allowed to not like it and want it to go back - I'm still bitter about Kaiten and will probably die mad about it - but it's very likely there's telemetry data driving this decision that none of us are privy to.

[Dzian]

Good balance means classes have different strengths, not that one is designated the designers' favored child and it gets the best of everything. That's been the story pretty consistently since ARR.

Good balance revolves around good content design. XIVs problems. Is the content design is so strict and linear...

For want of an analogy you have 3 cars.

Car A has let's say 9/10 acceleration, 6/10 top speed. 4/10 handling.

Car B has 4/10 acceleration, 8/10 top speed. 8/10 handling.

Car C has 5/10 acceleration, 10,10 top speed, 4/10 handling.

In the final fantasy race course where everything is strictly linear that track is basically just a super boring long straight line... in which case Car C is massively OP and broken. There is no balance..

However if they through some corners and hills on that race course then suddenly not only do all 3 cars become a lot more balanced despite having completely different stats and abilites but that track also. becomes a lot more fun..any of those 3 cars could win the race thus balance Is achieved.

[Semirhage]

Good balance revolves around good content design. XIVs problems. Is the content design is so strict and linear...

For want of an analogy you have 3 cars.

Car A has let's say 9/10 acceleration, 6/10 top speed. 4/10 handling.

Car B has 4/10 acceleration, 8/10 top speed. 8/10 handling.

Car C has 5/10 acceleration, 10,10 top speed, 4/10 handling.

In the final fantasy race course where everything is strictly linear that track is basically just a super boring long straight line... in which case Car C is massively OP and broken. There is no balance..

However if they through some corners and hills on that race course then suddenly not only do all 3 cars become a lot more balanced despite having completely different stats and abilites but that track also. becomes a lot more fun..any of those 3 cars could win the race thus balance Is achieved.

It's much worse than that; the jobs aren't balanced where A is good at X, B is good at Y, etc. Look at current Warrior. It's typical to see one or two of those every expansion. Best self-sustain, best damage, easiest to play, best at everything. Even if we had a track with dips and curves, you'd be hard-pressed to find one that WAR wasn't either best or second-best on. The fact that FFXIV's combat system only ever looks at one of those variables exacerbates the problem (homogenization magnifies it too), but it's not the root cause. In what way does RDM truly outshine SMN? Where's WHM's truly unique niche other than "it's popular"? What curve in the road would give BRD limelight when DNC is just more mobile, easier to play, has stronger buffs, and is frequently better at everything?

[Rufalus]

Lmao fire the balancing team? More like firing everyone in SE starting from the NFT acolytes

They are still special for non-gameplay things like art and music. I think it's mostly a leadership problem at S-E. The game assets are a lot better than the gameplay.