How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[Post]

Yoshi says all kinds of things. He's a public face, it's part of his job to spin.

Ironically it was much easier for me to pick up and put down jobs in a game like WoW, where kits were distinct and memorable and full of choices that depended on the situation, than one like FF14 where all the barely-differentiated skill slop runs together.

I couldn't tell you what the MCH skill order is anymore after not playing MCH for 8 months but I could tell you what the Warlock pets in vanilla WoW did and when to use each one despite having played it as an alt job over 16 years ago. Not even as a main job.

I think this is because when skills are creative, they're more memorable, and when choices are meaningful and impactful it feels good to make the choice, and good feelings are more memorable.

A Warlock's Healthstones don't use your potion cooldown btw, so passing them out before a tough pull is a great way to relieve some pressure on your healers. :-)

I dunno man, it's pretty easy to figure out the best way to play most of the jobs in FFXIV just from reading the tooltips if you're already familiar with the game. I haven't played WoW since 2010, but even just going from one patch or item level to the next, your stat priority, talents and rotations could all change pretty significantly to play 'optimally' to avoid 'wasting the group's time'.

I get what you're trying to say about a job's identity (and I don't disagree), but I think when it comes to just playing the jobs, our different experiences might mean that this point is more subjective than it seems.

I tried making that comment from a more generalized perspective, anyways. I was trying to mean more like 'they design the game as a whole to limit the amount of player friction from interaction as possible.' I believe this has always been the case, and it's why Duty Finder is a core tenant if the game (and not Duty Support, but now that they can do Duty Support that's where they're heading, even with encounter design). It's why players could skip cutscenes in Prae originally, and why we had to complain to get them to put in an ilvl sync on Endsinger and a rolling min ilvl on Alliance Raid Roulette.

I believe they basically don't want players to have to interact because some aren't comfortable doing it, and while that's a noble goal, I think it's gone on to affect things like job design so that there's less of a chance your healer or tank aren't up to snuff and need some help or interaction.

As it is now, either one can carry most of the MSQ content alone, and it's not too difficult to do so.

As it is now, deep, meaningful choice is too dangerous to exist in the players hands because so many avenues of choice could lead to player friction, and the simpler road avoids this.