How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[Connor]

I mean, given Yoshi-P’s recent interview it certainly seems like the current design is only going to get ever more pronounced going forward. That includes removing decision making, because apparently having to think is too hard or something. I imagine it also makes it extremely unlikely healers will have any kind of additional complexity whatsoever relative to now. Whether it’s dps, support, or even just plain healing.

Oh but don’t forget, we asked for this in Stormblood . Apparently. I must have missed that.

Yes I am salty lol, making everything practically auto-activate at 120s is so boring to me…it’s not like we have anything to heal to distract us from spamming a single button. I want to have to plan out things like buffs based on the party composition and/or situation, not when the timer tells me to lol.

[Shurrikhan]

I mean, given Yoshi-P’s recent interview...
<snip>
Oh but don’t forget, we asked for this in Stormblood . Apparently. I must have missed that.

Well... we did. Not loudly, nor across what would necessarily appear to be a majority, but yes, we did.

People said they were tired of having their mains locked out of a given party just because it already had a <job or two with whom their job is less synergetic> was already in said party. And many did not feel like having to remember whether to do a 4th GCD, 5th GCD, or 6th GCD opener because of which composition they had to be in.

To that, many in turn said then, too, that it such wouldn't matter even as much as their Crit RNG in a given run, but alas...

[Connor]

Well... we did. Not loudly, nor across what would necessarily appear to be a majority, but yes, we did.

People said they were tired of having their mains locked out of a given party just because it already had a <job or two with whom their job is less synergetic> was already in said party. And many did not feel like having to remember whether to do a 4th GCD, 5th GCD, or 6th GCD opener because of which composition they had to be in.

To that, many in turn said then, too, that it such wouldn't matter even as much as their Crit RNG in a given run, but alas...

The job synergy thing was definitely an issue, don’t get me wrong. But I feel like if what they took from that was ‘we don’t like varied buff timers or control over usage’, they’ve kinda missed the point a little. As you say, the point (as I understood it) was that players didn’t want their overall performance to be heavily contingent on what they happened to have in the party. I.e Bard needing DRG, several jobs needing whoever gave the slashing debuff, I think Ninja or Warrior, etc.
Feels like a bit of a jump to go from ‘make our performance not be based on which jobs we take/exclude’ to ‘2-min meta everything, even the defensive’ lol

[ty_taurus]

The job synergy thing was definitely an issue, don’t get me wrong. But I feel like if what they took from that was ‘we don’t like varied buff timers or control over usage’, they’ve kinda missed the point a little. As you say, the point (as I understood it) was that players didn’t want their overall performance to be heavily contingent on what they happened to have in the party. I.e Bard needing DRG, several jobs needing whoever gave the slashing debuff, I think Ninja or Warrior, etc.
Feels like a bit of a jump to go from ‘make our performance not be based on which jobs we take/exclude’ to ‘2-min meta everything, even the defensive’ lol

It wasn't just concerns about synergy elements during Stormblood. There was still talk about wanting buff alignment during Shadowbringers as well.

Sometimes, as players, there are things we see that sound good in concept, but once we experience that thing in execution, we recognize flaws in that concept. That's not to say everyone looks at the 2 minute meta negatively, but there have been people who have talked about wanting buff alignment in the past who have since swapped positions. MrHappy, for example. I can even give an example myself. Long before EW, I had wanted some sort of way to generate damage positive resources on Scholar though Adloquium breaking and have discussed that on the forums before. I'm not sure specifically where since it's been so long, but that is something I've brought up before. Now that we have Sage, I realize what a terrible idea that was, and it was something I wanted that I no longer do.

Based on Yoshi P's Brazil interview, though, it doesn't seem like they're unwilling to move away from the 2 minute meta, but it depends on the community.

[Renathras]

So, the same as... another non-choice?

Let's not mistake finger-traps with actual choices. If there is no use case, ever, for the given action, it literally cannot be a choice, only a mistake. The ability to make more mistakes does not inherently mean more choice.

I...

...I think...

...I think this is what I've been saying all along?

We agree?

Well... we did. Not loudly, nor across what would necessarily appear to be a majority, but yes, we did.

Something I once saw a person say was (paraphrasing) that the reason we have homogenization and simplification and all the other stuff people now complain about is because of people asking for it. It may not have been all at once, it may not have been a majority, it may have been without realizing the now-obvious outcome...but people asked for things. And what we have now is the result of SE trying to give people what they asked for or come up with solutions to what people said were problems.

The "law of unintended consequences"/"be careful what you wish for"/"corrupt a wish".

It wasn't just concerns about synergy elements during Stormblood. There was still talk about wanting buff alignment during Shadowbringers as well.

Sometimes, as players, there are things we see that sound good in concept, but once we experience that thing in execution, we recognize flaws in that concept. That's not to say everyone looks at the 2 minute meta negatively, but there have been people who have talked about wanting buff alignment in the past who have since swapped positions. MrHappy, for example. I can even give an example myself. Long before EW, I had wanted some sort of way to generate damage positive resources on Scholar though Adloquium breaking and have discussed that on the forums before. I'm not sure specifically where since it's been so long, but that is something I've brought up before. Now that we have Sage, I realize what a terrible idea that was, and it was something I wanted that I no longer do.

Based on Yoshi P's Brazil interview, though, it doesn't seem like they're unwilling to move away from the 2 minute meta, but it depends on the community.

I think this is the problem, but it's super hard to fix. If we give people SB AST cards, how can we be sure there won't be people advocating for Balance fishing? We can't. And there almost certainly will be such people. The question is how to deal with it.

As you point out, buff alignment was a thing people tried at the time. And even now, there are people who argue the 2 min meta is a great concept that's worked out and is good for players and the game. I've seen it before when posting threads asking about it - and I was kinda shocked, to be honest, considering even I thought the opposition to it was universal. It...actually isn't, though people liking it does seem to be a minority position.

I do appreciate your SGE example, and...I'm going to have to find this Yoshi P interview everyone's talking about, but if they are open to the community...that might be a good thing (if we've learned our lesson...though I doubt that the collective we actually have, but who knows?)

[Shurrikhan]

I think this is the problem, but it's super hard to fix. If we give people SB AST cards, how can we be sure there won't be people advocating for Balance fishing? We can't. And there almost certainly will be such people. The question is how to deal with it.

We don't have to be sure there won't be. And, if like the previous case where Balance fishing 24/7 was generally non-optimal and therefore a position held only by the less informed... just ignoring them is generally fine.

Heck, instead of leaving the Card system in a tuning state worse than in pre-HW (Stormblood's), we might actually even *gasp* give it a semblance of balance, and if the myth persists thereafter... woe be them. The math would be there for those who don't want to settle for a gross oversimplification.

Something I once saw a person say was (paraphrasing) that the reason we have homogenization and simplification and all the other stuff people now complain about is because of people asking for it.

While that's true for certain things, there's at least as much for which it really isn't; the complaints just did not have enough in common with the reasons the devs gave for the action and/or who/what would actually benefit from the changes to say that it's even a sort of Monkey's Paw outcome, unless the reason for the corrupted wish would be that the spirit housed in the severed paw was both hard of hearing and had a prior agenda.

[ForsakenRoe]

I think this is the problem, but it's super hard to fix. If we give people SB AST cards, how can we be sure there won't be people advocating for Balance fishing? We can't. And there almost certainly will be such people. The question is how to deal with it.

By having a design which does not allow for Balancefishing. The reason we fished for Balance was because AST back then was capable of giving people what we now know as Brotherhood, the 5% damage buff, for 15sec, potentially each minute. Compare that to other options, such as 'no damage (because you got Bole)', 'no damage (because you got Spire)', 'no damage (because you got Ewer)', and two flavours of 'a bit of damage but not as much as Balance'. Of course people were going to fish. But if the cards ALL give damage in some way, such that the 'extra effect' is the focus, eg the Mit on Bole, the MP on Ewer, etc. then Balancefishing isn't needed. In fact, the Seals (and Astrodyne) are the answer to Balancefishing from SHB onwards, even if the Balance was 'the best card', the reward for doing the 3 seals just needs to exceed the Balance's contribution to make 'play slightly worse effects for a massive payoff later' work out to be 'the best option'. As I've said previously, the easiest way the devs would have access to, to lower the 'damage variance' of the cards, would be to keep them singletarget and keep Divination as the 'big raidwide partybuff'. Then the cards only need to be balanced as 'Balance contributes this much RDPS, so the other cards should do this much too, but with their own way of applying that damage'. And then once that's done, slap the unique effects on them. Bole gets mit, Ewer gets MP regen, Arrow gets movespeed or something idk. And you wouldn't fish for one over another per se, because you'd still have Seals to play into I'd assume (since the devs seem to love that system).

I can guarantee, with 100% certainty, that people will not Balancefish if the design is set up to avoid that outcome. It's not some situation where 'we have RNG buffs, so we cannot have any outcome from them except 'players try to get the best one'

[ty_taurus]

But if the cards ALL give damage in some way, such that the 'extra effect' is the focus, eg the Mit on Bole, the MP on Ewer, etc. then Balancefishing isn't needed.

I don't think this is a good answer. If the cards have a DPS buff attached to them, then the AST player is heavily incentivized to use them when they're most convenient, such as saving them for buff windows. Any utility you attach to the cards will only ever offer value if the utility is conveniently aligned with a buff window. In other words, you're not going to use a Bole to mitigate a tankbuster, you're going to use it during buff windows, and if that helps the tank, great! If not? Oh well. Not to mention Ewers will never be used on healers for the same reason you never play Ranged cards on healers currently. Why boost the damage of a gimped DPSer when you could get more value from the actual DPS jobs? And none of them benefit from MP regen except for maybe Summoner or Red Mage and only if they had to rapid-fire res half the party since neither even has a way to spend large amounts of MP beyond their raises. Black Mage's Astral Fire negates MP restoration. You might as well bring back TP regen on Spire without returning TP for all the good the MP regen on Ewer would do.

If you want six cards with unique effects, you need to segregate them. Offensive buff cards cannot share a resource system with utility cards, or the utility cards will never see the light of day unless they're made aggressively busted. Hybridizing them is just another flavor of what we have now, just with the off chance that maybe the card utility will do something.

[Shurrikhan]

By having a design which does not allow for Balancefishing. The reason we fished for Balance was because AST back then was capable of giving people what we now know as Brotherhood, the 5% damage buff, for 15sec, potentially each minute.

That... doesn't actually fully explain Balance fishing -- or rather, even having that did not make constantly Balance fishing optimal.

At the time, even the most oGCD-based job in the game still did nearly 80% of its damage through GCDs and was not misaligned by receiving additional Attack Speed. When it offered new rotational breakpoints, Monks and BLM could actually do slightly more off of Arrow than off of Balance.

Granted, perhaps this comes down partly to semantics.

• If by "balance fishing" you mean only a preference for Balance, while still settling for other cards where it was net optimal to do given the chances for improvement under different conditions (your comp's raid buff timings with which to synergize / time until next raid buff set and density thereof, your comp's use of Arrow, your comp's use of Spear whether you had non-Balance viable single-target recipients to fill with, time until Spread was off CD, number of remaining Redraws, and so forth), then sure.
• But that's rarely been how the term was used then or since, which was nearer to "Get Expand, then throw out anything that's not Balance", even where such was non-optimal (perhaps just because it was easier than actual optimization and it made some people feel better to pretend that was all there ever was or could be).

As I've said previously, the easiest way the devs would have access to, to lower the 'damage variance' of the cards, would be to keep them singletarget and keep Divination as the 'big raidwide partybuff'. Then the cards only need to be balanced as 'Balance contributes this much RDPS, so the other cards should do this much too, but with their own way of applying that damage'. And then once that's done, slap the unique effects on them. Bole gets mit, Ewer gets MP regen, Arrow gets movespeed or something idk. And you wouldn't fish for one over another per se, because you'd still have Seals to play into I'd assume (since the devs seem to love that system).

I feel like this muddles the intent and available utility value of those other cards, though. Especially if still including Seals (which I like for the variance it can add) and Divination, both, it seems unnecessary, given that you could just have a bit more of that total rDPS value end up within Divination and re-tie Divination to one's Seals to ensure that the other cards are mixed in for at least half of one's Play casts.

[vetch]

Something I once saw a person say was (paraphrasing) that the reason we have homogenization and simplification and all the other stuff people now complain about is because of people asking for it. It may not have been all at once, it may not have been a majority, it may have been without realizing the now-obvious outcome...but people asked for things. And what we have now is the result of SE trying to give people what they asked for or come up with solutions to what people said were problems.

The "law of unintended consequences"/"be careful what you wish for"/"corrupt a wish".

It's all-too tempting in situations where you have no control to think, "oh, something I did must have caused this," because in so doing it creates the comforting illusion that you did and do have some control over the situation. Re-framing suffering as a consequence is a balm for frustration; it supposes that if we act differently, we won't have to suffer. It gives a perceived course of action to take to prevent future suffering (in this case, I suppose it would be arguing with the people giving the feedback we don't like). But in reality, we never had that power.

The reason that we have the game that we have is because CBU3 chose to make the game this way. We can't blame players for giving feedback, not even ill-considered, knee-jerk, and wrong feedback, when it's the developer's job as a professional video game studio to study and understand what makes games fun and prioritize that.

CBU3 doesn't do that. 'Fun' as a priority is a long way down the list. It's been subordinated to things like 'keeping expenses down' and 'maintaining the production pipeline'.