Revisiting the 10 year roadmap

[Aravell]

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.

I would agree that "They clearly don't play the job" is a useless argument most of the time, especially in regards to Kaiten, since removing Kaiten does not significantly break the job in any way. It changes the flow and makes some aspects unsatisfying, sure, but it really doesn't completely break the job and stop it from functioning. However, they have broken jobs before and made them unable to function properly, like when they briefly removed Hagakure from SAM and Energy Drain from SCH, it's fair to say "They clearly didn't test this" in those cases, because you'd clearly notice a job was unable to function properly if you actually tested it.

[Deo14]

I would agree that "They clearly don't play the job" is a useless argument most of the time, especially in regards to Kaiten, since removing Kaiten does not significantly break the job in any way. It changes the flow and makes some aspects unsatisfying, sure, but it really doesn't completely break the job and stop it from functioning. However, they have broken jobs before and made them unable to function properly, like when they briefly removed Hagakure from SAM and Energy Drain from SCH, it's fair to say "They clearly didn't test this" in those cases, because you'd clearly notice a job was unable to function properly if you actually tested it.

Argument is usually not about functionality, it's more about "if they actually were in touch with said job, they would have immediately realized why this change is stupid, and why would majority of players hate it". Are people's standards so low they're fine with "at least it's functional"?

I really doubt if whoever is behind Kaiten changes actually played SAM, he would conclude that removing it is a solution. When it comes to action bloat, you could reduce Kenki generation or increase cost of Shinten/Kaiten, when it comes to button bloat, you could finally merge Iki with Ogi, and possibly merge some ST/AoE skill pairs. Future proofing also makes no sense, since we still have no replacement for it. It was simply dumb change, which didn't solve anything.

I wouldn't say that it's about testing either, because they clearly didn't fully test SAM, since now you spend a whooping 20-23% of all actions on pressing Shinten. If they actually tested it and concluded that it is fine that you have 30+ skills, but spend more than 20% of your time pressing single one of them (especially since it's just an oGCD), then I think it's safe to say that job design is at the bottom of Mariana Trench, and they're just digging a hole to get even lower.

[Post]

But here's the catch: your friend might be bored but many are not bored because they play this game one hour a month while ERPing full time. This is the demographic SE is catering to now.

I think this is an important point (no, really) because battle content is not all of the game, but a smaller aspect of the game that certain players gravitate towards. It's technically different than housing and ERP in that it's not entirely skippable; the MSQ locks a lot of content behind a good chunk of it.

But, following Jojoya's sentiment a bit, if it's not so difficult that one player in a group of 8 or your patient duty support NPCs or your solo duty echo buff can't get you through the mandatory bits, what type of player do the battles and jobs feel designed for? The ones that enjoy that stuff and like to spend their time doing more or redoing it, or ones that just want to get past the gates to get the rewards they actually enjoy?

And granted there's a lot of overlap between these types of players, but damn if there weren't at least more dungeons added every patch until ShB, and more diversity among the jobs within a single role until then too.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm glad that those other playstyles are catered to, but this battle/job area has been feeling neglected for what was once a more core focus. Maybe the mandatory MSQ progression overlap has been affecting much more than even the mandatory content itself

[ForteNightshade]

Regardless, he clearly stated that he wants FFXIV to be categorized as a RPG and not a MMORPG.

I wonder how much this stance still persists given one of the majority criticisms towards FFXVI were how weak the RPG aspects are. Even people praising the game acknowledged it's essentially an action game that could barely be counted as a RPG.

The unfortunate issue with this direction that we've seen happen in Endwalker is subscription based game needs a way to retain players. FFXIV is fundamentally lacking in long term content and wholly dependent on a constant stream of new players caught in the MSQ loop. At what point does that break and what were newer players start reaching the endgame only to find out little new content releases in the now nearly five month patch cycles?

On the whole, I don't think the game could turn into a fully fledged single player game. Games like the aforementioned FFXVI benefit from being a one and done experience. It doesn't need to retain you nor is the expectation. FFXIV does. That becomes much harder if they continuously remove the multiplayer elements and down everything down to the barebones.

[Eorzean_username]

At what point does that break and what were newer players start reaching the endgame only to find out little new content releases in the now nearly five month patch cycles?

That's why you keep letting them wander off, and focus on cannibalising the next available demographic that you think is still "untapped" — seeking a constant churn of fresh eyes that will gain maximal value from what you've already invested, produced, and accumulated.

On the whole, I don't think the game could turn into a fully fledged single player game. Games like the aforementioned FFXVI benefit from being a one and done experience. It doesn't need to retain you nor is the expectation. FFXIV does. That becomes much harder if they continuously remove the multiplayer elements and down everything down to the barebones.

That's when you start cranking up the investment in cash-shop mechanics, season passes, and other psychologically-predatory mechanics, in order to gain more value from each remaining unit, and keep them "around" via reinforcement and comfort — rather than the much costlier investment of broadly-creating content (which is something of a haphazard, blindfolded, dart-board process), that will "hopefully" appeal to enough people to keep them around and "subscribed".

ie: Creating "quality content" that "satisfies" a broad selection of preexisting players is a much more risky, costly, time-consuming, and uncertain process than much-better established and optimised systems for propping up a live-service product, such as micro/macro transactions and FOMO loops.

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Sorry for the excess cynicism, but my guess is that you can expect XIV to angle more in those directions over time, because it's ultimately a corporate product, and what they want to see is Growth™, rather than a more modest steady-state of long-term, dedicated players that are "happy", but also aren't really expanding or adding much YOY (especially with fixed subscription fees and expansion cadence).

Yoshida will play along with this because a) corporate obligations and b) as he's said before, doing this (eg, cash-shop stuff, etc) is necessary to allow him/the team to "do what they want to do" with XIV beyond what a mere subscription fee can allow them (which, actually, is also the justification that's been given for the sub fee vs. F2P / B2P).