Quote Originally Posted by Post View Post
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'.
Certainly. It's not hard to determine the rotation by reading the skills. What's hard is finding the desire to do so more than once when the skills themselves are as interesting as a bowl of rice gruel.

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.
'Designing to reduce friction from interaction' is giving them too much credit. They straight-up design the game to reduce player interactions, period. Even should I want to talk to people it's more efficient to use a third-party chat program because of crap like not being able to whisper someone if one of us is in an instance -- a technology that has existed since at least 2005. That's a HUGE bootstrapping issue to ever making friends. And it's not a noble goal, because of the following:

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.
People literally crave agency! When they don't have any agency over their lives they get violent and irascible. It's why people trash public restrooms. How shameful for a multiplayer game that promotes itself as a recreational activity to remove the fun elements people crave because some players might be rude to others, instead of just keeping the fun and having more GMs to deal with the rude players! You can literally have both if you choose them, except that Square is the EA of Japan and won't tolerate making 1% less profit in exchange for an immensely richer game experience.

To tie it to your examples, Prae might be unskippable, but you can still skip the incredibly long MSQ cutscenes in Bowl of Embers, Toto-Rak, ARF, etc., and yet the players stopped bugging sprouts to skip them because the company made it a point to protect that aspect of fun with enforcement instead of amputating it.