The Threefold Problem of Magical Ranged Balance: 3-2 - Difficulty, Continued

**Aurelle_Deresnels** · 01-07-2024 12:36 AM

Dear Respected Forum Master / Webmaster,

As with the previous posts in this letter series, would you please kindly forward this letter to Yoshi-P and the job design team?

Thank you very much for your help.

Sincerely,
Aurelle

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Dear Yoshi-P and the Final Fantasy XIV development team,

This is a direct continuation of my previous letter, split up due to the length of the necessary analysis.

To recap, I had just finished recommending that both the job and the duty make significant contributions to each job's difficulty curve at every intended difficulty level, matching closely to a single overall difficulty curve, and that each job's skill ceiling be high across all duties. I then stated that this recommendation raises a looming question, and that I would cover that question here.

To make every job contribute significantly to its own difficulty curve and produce high skill ceilings in every duty does not require that the jobs be clunky or the gameplay be tedious. Indeed, many aspects of recent job and system design are desirable in avoiding clunk and tedium. It does not require that the difference between optimal and suboptimal play be noticeable to casual players, or that a casual player even be aware that their job's optimization potential exists. Indeed, it is desirable that casual players be able to enjoy the game without feeling bad for not taking a hardcore approach.

But it does require nothing less than a total rework of SMN. Endwalker SMN's structure does not have the room to add the rich complexity required in a way that remains optional to casual players.

Such major changes, you only do for expansion launches and emergencies. And it is the Heavensturn season, with the Tokyo Fan Festival on the horizon. As much as I would have liked to deliver you this analysis months ago, to better work with your production pipeline, that was simply not possible. (And I did work straight through Starlight to write this. A proper explanation of why players generally cannot deliver such analysis quickly is important, but outside the scope of this series. For now, I will remark only that it is no coincidence that Cynwise wrote so near the end of Cataclysm.) Perhaps it is still possible to fit the necessary rework in your production pipeline before Dawntrail. Perhaps you have already begun that process.

Or perhaps it is not possible. In which case, the looming question: do you delay the necessary rework until patch 8.0 and maintain this state of affairs for another expansion, or do you delay Dawntrail?

To be clear, this is a question of the lesser of two evils. I will be gladdened if it turns out that neither option is necessary, and hope that this analysis is edifying regardless. But since it may well be necessary to choose one or the other according to my recommendation, it behooves me to follow through on the analysis.

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Surface Numbers

In the 2022 14 Hour Broadcast you announced that the game had reached 27 million players, and an article even speculated that you would reach 30 million players in 2023 - but will those players be happy in the long term, or are those numbers from short-term appeal that leads to long-term disappointment? SMN is one of the most popular jobs in Endwalker, both in casual play and in raiding - but would those players be happier in a world where such an easy job did not exist? There have been multiple waves of content creators making videos saying that Endwalker has serious problems - but are those videos clickbait, or are they part of the voice of the players? Can you trust the strong numbers on the surface to predict the game's future performance?

Gareth Edwards, technology strategist and historian, has advised a wide range of companies that the answer to the latter question is "absolutely not". His article on the subject, "Breaching the Trust Thermocline Is the Biggest Hidden Risk in Business", was later rerun under the title "Slowly, Then Suddenly: How Products Fail", and both titles are very accurate to his main metaphor: (emphasis original)

In large bodies of water, the temperature drops slowly the deeper one dives. That change can, if the descent is slow enough, feel almost imperceptible. Yet at a certain point, the water temperature drops sharply and alarmingly. This point is the thermocline—a near-physical barrier where warm water meets cold. The shift between the two is sudden and dramatic.

In business, particularly digital services or businesses relying on a subscription revenue model, trust works in the same way. Wired into those products and services is a "trust thermocline." It is a point which, once crossed, otherwise healthy businesses and products suddenly collapse.

The easiest way to understand how trust thermoclines work is to look at how they fail. Content services, both print and digital, are particularly prone to these failures. So are social media networks or businesses that focus on delivering quality-of-life monthly services—from TV streaming to beers of the month. Broadly, any business in which the consumer forming an emotional relationship with the product contributes to adoption is at risk of such failures.

Subscription MMORPGs, by their very nature, are at incredibly high risk of such failures. First, they are a tight fit to what Edwards describes. Digital live service? Check. Subscription revenue model? Check. Recurring content releases? Quality-of-life service? Check. Emotional relationship between customer and product? Check - the entire point of a game is to provide the player with enjoyable gameplay experiences, and in RPGs there is attachment to one's character on top of that. Second, the massively multiplayer nature makes them subject to the classic network effect; the game is more appealing to one when it has more players, particularly more of one's friends. Third, the sheer size of MMOs makes joining one an investment of learning effort from the player, not just emotional attachment. Even a player who is just in this game for the story has had to learn various game systems and duty mechanics to experience it: item level, loot rolls, quest emotes, targeting, raidwide, tankbuster, stack, spread, single telegraph, sequential telegraph, ...

Every one of your players has a reason they made that investment in learning the game. Or, as you put it in The Rising 2023, "a reason for first embarking upon their journey." That original reason is something about how the game used to be - not necessarily how it is now. The learning investment alone is a reason for players to wait before dropping the game, on top of all the other reasons. But what do you tell a player whose original reason for playing is no longer in the game?

Combined, these three factors create a very long delay between when a player first starts losing trust in an MMORPG and when they leave it. I know of no industry more prone to trust thermocline failures. And to make matters worse, games have more than one trust thermocline.

Remember how Damion Schubert described a playerbase as an ecosystem? Every single one of those subcommunities has its own trust thermocline - and you have to avoid that trust thermocline for at least every load-bearing portion of the playerbase at once, preferably every portion of the playerbase regardless of others relying on them. (For example, a casual player whose main focus is glamour has no reason to care about how many active raiders you have. As another example, players mostly socialize within their own region and language(s).) And one subcommunity doing well can hide issues with another subcommunity, since they all get lumped into the same surface player metrics.

This sort of thing is why MMOs are so delicate. You have a really, really heavy responsibility running one.

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Beneath the Waves

If surface metrics will not tell us whether the game is nearing a trust thermocline, what will? Multiple people asked Edwards this on the earlier Twitter version of his essay, so he wrote a follow-up to answer (emphasis original):

Okay, so a few people have asked how you spot the [sic] where your Trust Thermocline is, and how to avoid hitting it. I'll give you the same answer I give senior execs:

I don't know.

But the people working on the ground level in the customer-facing sections of your company do.

Because it's those people that will be picking up on the general vibe of your userbase and their 'grumbles' - i.e. the complaints that the user shoulders internally (mostly) rather than makes directly in feedback.

So its [sic] your creators, your community managers, junior sales etc.

...

Do you know what's really effing fun?

Sticking people who do the retention calls in a room, with a white board, and lots of GOOD food and drink, and getting them to list all the stuff they CONSTANTLY hear but have stopped bothering to report up the chain.

And you record it. Or you just take everything on that list.

Vibes, grumbles, problems that players stop reporting because they stop hoping for a fix. Those are the things we need to look at. (Of course they are. Any sorts of player problems you reliably and promptly fix both do not accumulate and do instead become the sorts of things players trust you to handle.)

And once again, we have to be even more careful than a "regular technology company" would have to be. Edwards' advice on how forthcoming customers will be with trust issues is calibrated to North American and European companies, who will often begin growing their userbase in their home countries - and most players from those regions have a language barrier in the way of giving feedback. Japanese players not only may have different issues due to regional culture, they have more cultural barriers to giving negative feedback. So nearly every player who might have a trust issue with the game has some sort of barrier in the way of telling you about it.

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So let us start checking on vibes somewhere where players will be relatively uninhibited. Somewhere not only with lots of players who have few cultural barriers to being open about their thoughts, but where they feel free to joke about the things they find themselves struggling to say directly.

When it comes to English-speaking social media, there are few major sites more intelligible to the non-participating public than Reddit, and its karma system tends to separate subcommunities. The site is far from perfect, and recently has been making proper snapshots troublesome, but it is extremely useful for this sort of thing. Indeed, there are several different Final Fantasy XIV subreddits, in part because the main one has become so large and in part for players to interact with the subcommunities that interest them. Conveniently for us, one of these is even dedicated to jokes, memes, and satire: /r/ShitpostXIV.

What is their opinion of major job changes? Well, such changes are generally called reworks, so that makes a good search term... and a very alarming start to our vibe check. The top result over all time is titled "Rework, then vs. now" (using an older snapshot to show the image clearly - the comments are on a more recent snapshot) and here is its image:

It depicts a shift from expecting changes to be good to worrying and even expecting that changes will be bad - and the root of players worrying that changes will be bad is lack of trust in the development team to make the changes good. What caused that shift?

Well, the image itself says that A Realm Reborn through Stormblood were fine, and Endwalker is not. It declines to take a position on Shadowbringers. We can further narrow things down by looking at the date of posting: July 2, 2022, which falls near the end of patch 6.15 for the global version. (Korean and Chinese players mostly use their own social media, though a few do use and identify themselves in interactions with English-dominated subcommunities, particularly those for fansites such as Teamcraft that actively acknowledge the delayed release in those regions.) So it cannot be based on the 6.3 PLD rework, that rework not having been announced at the time.

What job reworks happened in between patch 5.00 Shadowbringers and patch 6.15 (part of Newfound Adventure)? Let us make a list:

Patch 5.00 Shadowbringers: tank and healer paradigm changes, including major simplifications across the board and additional changes to DRK and AST; removal of pet HP (affecting SMN and SCH); making most pet commands adhere to animation lock (again affecting SMN and SCH, such as by removing manual Embrace); MCH rework
Patch 5.10 Vows of Virtue, Deeds of Cruelty: simplifications to Disciples of the Hand and Disciples of the Land (primary round, continued in future patches)
Patch 5.40 Futures Rewritten: MNK emergency rework, part 1, with part 2 explicitly promised for 6.00
Patch 6.00 Endwalker: MNK emergency rework, part 2; removal of Nocturnal AST; SMN rework

Not quite making the list as reworks, but major changes nonetheless, are putting NIN mudras on the Global Cooldown in Patch 5.10 and the removal of Kaiten from SAM in patch 6.10.

And what were the vibes of player responses to those major changes? Here is the story I saw as a player on the ground, the collected impression of thousands upon thousands of comments in-game, on Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and so forth:

In patch 5.00, the changes were, in a word, controversial. Lots of existing tank and healer players disliked the changes to their roles, but there were plausible arguments that the simplifications would be good for the roles by bringing more players in. There were plausible arguments that the new AST cards would be better by no longer needing to fish for a Balance before each pull, that they were necessary with the removal of TP. There were plausible arguments that pet HP and commands not adhering to the animation lock were making SMN and SCH too input-intensive. There were plausible arguments that the simplification of MCH was a skeleton for you to build on later, that players who no longer liked MCH because they wanted to have a complex rotation on a striking dummy could swap to SMN. Players watched and waited.

In patch 5.10, there were similar plausible arguments about NIN. As for crafters and gatherers, the hardcore players who found joy in rotation design and were unhappy about losing that skill ceiling got not only drowned out by players saying "but I'll be able to craft now" and "but you'll have expert crafts", but also accused of being in it for the gil and the exclusivity. (The player dynamics around crafting and gathering could be a post of their own, but that is outside the scope of this series.)

In patch 5.40, players could see the idea behind making Greased Lightning no longer need to be maintained. Players who wanted a fast, "constantly moving" melee DPS still had that. Most felt that it respected the spirit of MNK, and were happy or at least willing to play it while waiting for the second part of the rework.

In patch 6.00, many MNK players were happy with the new systems, though some were disappointed by the reduction in positionals. Some players still wanted the flexibility of Nocturnal AST, despite the plausible arguments to play SCH or SGE instead.

But Endwalker SMN... There is no plausible argument, to players who liked the older versions for any gameplay reason, that those gameplay reasons were understood and respected by the development process. (What are those gameplay reasons? That is part of the subject of the next post in this series.) No plausible argument, even to those who understood those gameplay reasons without sharing them. A few players did say "it's a skeleton for next expansion", and got told "we thought that about Shadowbringers MCH and look at it now" - especially by those players who had migrated from MCH previously. A few players did say "you can have a hard rotation on another job", but many of those things (and often players need specific combinations) are not present on any other job. And without a plausible argument, even those players who wanted to trust you could no longer justify it.

The result was a sizeable subcommunity of players who feel betrayed, their investment invalidated, that the game they loved no longer loves them back. Those who worry that their job will one day get the same treatment, and perhaps even think to themselves that they should have backed the hardcore crafters in patch 5.10. Those with intuitions that the reworked design would cause balance problems, even without the mathematical reasoning to realize it would guarantee them. Who, no matter how much they believe in your good intentions and those of the development team, can no longer trust the results of the development process.

To make matters worse, these players were often in direct contact with other players who were vocally enthusiastic about "finally having a traditional Final Fantasy SMN". Who were singing the praises of the rework. Who made the first group worry further that their concerns would be drowned out and/or ignored.

Most players are aware on some level that development time is finite, and therefore that a game serving multiple subcommunities often has to split time between them. (And most are not well-versed enough in both game development and finance to understand when the nature of the playerbase ecosystem gets their own subcommunity more fun overall by spending time on another!) There is always that incentive to compete for development time. If you serve all your subcommunities well and keep incompatible playstyles apart, they will mostly get along. But if you make one lose out while the other gains, then they feel like they have to compete with each other in order to have a place in your game. Then they start competing, and resenting each other, and it is not long before they are at each other's throats.

I can exhort players to get along with each other all I like, it does not help if they feel like they have to compete with each other instead. You can ask players to be mindful of the developer on the other side of the screen when they give feedback, and you should - harassment is not acceptable. But it is difficult for players to find something constructive to say as feedback, rather than refraining from harassment but holding their feelings in, when the kindest possible honest feedback they could give you about a rework is akin to:

"Somehow in the development process of this game, none of the things I liked about the gameplay of the job have made it through the rework, and now I have nowhere to get those things, so I feel like any vision for the game that is being implemented in practice has no room for me. I thought 'treat it like a new job' meant 'expect to relearn the job systems', not 'we are no longer providing anything for you'. Further, the other players loudly enjoying this rework make me feel like you are building the game for them instead of me, and will continue to do so, on top of them not always being kind to me."

So what is a player to do if they cannot find something constructive to say? Either they shout loudly and fail to get their point across, they hold their feelings in and stay quiet but wary, or they leave silently. All of these are bad results in the long term.

I must emphasize that there was absolutely no game design reason that these two player groups needed to be in conflict, and there is no game design reason for them to remain in conflict. It is entirely possible to have a traditional Final Fantasy SMN with many of the gameplay elements that previous SMN players liked, and with a difficulty curve that accommodates a wide range of player skill levels. (The vast majority of casual players do not mind not reaching the skill ceiling of their job, so long as you do not make them feel bad for it!) Many of the players who are now unhappy with SMN were excited by the Endwalker job action trailer, and would have happily shared the job with newcomers if it had preserved those gameplay elements they enjoyed!

In patch 6.10, removing Kaiten from SAM was fuel to the fire - another example of a change that had no plausible argument for removing the gameplay and animation that players liked, not just the action itself. It gave further evidence that something in the development process is not preserving the things players like and want in the jobs. It led to players not only giving their own ideas for accomplishing your stated goals, but quoting your own words back to you. It might well have been what prompted the creation of that image we have been considering.

But Endwalker SMN was the moment that turned the tide. The moment you had a large group of players, all at once, move from wondering if your development process reliably preserves what they love, to knowing that it does not.

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Despite writing before the launch of A Realm Reborn, Cynwise has something to say about the situation these players found themselves in:

The only time niche classes are bad is when you discover that you’ve rolled a niche class, and want to do something that they’re not good at.

Or, worse, when your class’s niche switches on you without warning.

...

There are a lot of people who left the game because their class changed underneath them – and not just Warlocks.

... Every time you put a player in a position where they consider changing their character, you have also put them in a position where they consider leaving the game.

Some of them did leave silently, and never look back. Those players, you are unlikely to ever get back, even if you fix all of their complaints for Dawntrail. Others left loudly, not in your (exceedingly limited) unsubscribe survey or these forums (being limited to active subscribers), but they still pay attention to the game's news and sometimes post on unofficial social media. Those players, you might get back for Dawntrail if you fix their problems, or they might wait and watch the news for another expansion to be sure. And some are still playing for now, perhaps finishing up the list of things they have wanted to complete in the game, stressed rather than excited about every official announcement. Those players, you are at very high risk of losing in or just before Dawntrail if you do not address their concerns.

Because they know your policy, that outside of emergencies you only make major job design changes on expansion launches. That makes every expansion launch a commitment to a job design paradigm, and a duty design paradigm to match. Every time you do that, either you address their concerns or you lock those concerns in. Either you build trust or you lose it. There is no middle ground, no neutral option.

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So what do players think of SMN now? Obviously the players angry about the rework will have little good to say about it, and the players who asked for a traditional Final Fantasy SMN are happy about that aspect, but we can get more detail than that.

For the angry players, here are a few posts and comments I found particularly illustrative. I ask that all readers be kind, and remember that "illustrative" is not the same as "leader of a movement" or "opposed to other groups' fun". Most, if not all, of these players would be quite happy with an inclusive playerbase ecosystem; they are simply unhappy about not being included themselves after having invested time and emotional attachment into the game.

Even before any players got to try the job, those following the Media Tour knew that Endwalker SMN would be a huge simplification and considered that a problem. (Click on the image to see it at full size.) "Collapsed head and drooling" is not a positive depiction.
And nowadays even newer creators who have picked up on the vibe are comparing SMN players to literal babies. Again, this is not remotely a positive depiction. It looks down on players taking the easy road, precisely due to both resentment and that easy road offering all the same rewards.
This rewrite of Gaius' speech is focused on the boredom of current SMN and the incentives to play it anyway, but also touches on the strength from the entire party needed to play something else, the fact that Physick remains in the job, and players eventually leaving in frustration.
Via this YouTube video, "Summoners Aren't OK" and its comments on Reddit, we have a rare public look into The Balance's Discord server as well as a highlight reel of recurring frustrations. Note that #smn_lounge is a social channel largely for players currently playing SMN, so for its inhabitants to post despair en masse so late in the expansion indicates discontent not just from the players who left the job, but also the players (new or persisting) actively on the job. Note also in the comments the intense resentment and the hostility towards players who express enjoyment of the current version, even those who express only confusion towards the unhappy players and would prefer to get along. Statements like "they gut my main class so people who don’t play the class are happy". They reflect the justified belief that the game's development process will enrich one group at the expense of another, rather than finding a way for players to coexist.
This comment distills down the resulting bitterness on job changes, mentioning both the commenter's own loss of trust and how job changes tainted the whole game for them.

For other players, we will have to look elsewhere. The same incentives that separate subcommunities on Reddit tend to create self-reinforcing echo chambers, and /r/ffxiv, the main subreddit for the game mostly came down on the side of praise and happy outlooks. (Not entirely; to treat the player separation as entirely operating on the subreddit level would be a gross oversimplification, and indeed one of the angry examples I gave is from /r/ffxiv. But overall, /r/ffxiv discourages criticism of the game for both tone and length, resulting in an environment that many of the unhappy players have left, and in turn that generally gives a rosier impression of player sentiment.)

And yet if we take the comments there on a single official post where players will discuss job balance, such as the patch 6.21 notes which announced the boss HP adjustments to P8S, there are multiple cases where players bring up the subject of SMN to criticize it - and get upvoted or at least neutrally voted for doing so!

The unhappiness may be beneath the surface, but the undercurrents are still there: the impossibility of balancing the role as it stands, the boredom, the staleness even to many who enjoy the aesthetic.

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Does any player group really enjoy the state of SMN? Is its popularity truly for healthy reasons?

Often it is hard to answer these types of questions. How can one measure joy and investigate its causes without succumbing to Goodhart's Law and/or undue assumptions about players' minds? I suggest one sign, however indirect, for also being necessary to form essential parts of the playerbase ecosystem: the results of true passion. (Why this is so vital to the playerbase ecosystem, I will cover later in this post.)

A randomly selected player who chooses their job freely, for their personal enjoyment rather than external or internal pressure, will most likely have moderate joy and attachment to it - but they have the usual chance that their enjoyment will develop into a true passion for that job, whether in "casual" activities such as glamour or "hardcore" activities such as raiding. Meanwhile, a randomly selected player who is pressured into their job choice has little reason to develop such a passion - the job itself does not inspire them, and even if they have some reason to throw themselves deep into the game, they will generally develop that passion on the activity they are using the job for instead. Therefore, a healthy job community will have an appropriate population distribution from occasional play to deep passion, and an unhealthy job community will have disproportionately few passionate players.

Where can we sample your most passionate players, especially those who are happy with the game? The Fan Festivals' physical attendance. Every player there had to enter the ticket lottery, spend money on the ticket itself, most likely spend more money and time on travel and hotel costs, block the time off in their schedules, and do it all while knowing that the environment would be generally enthusiastic - the passionate but disappointed expect to feel out of place. Some extremely dedicated but disappointed players will attend to voice a complaint in person, but the nature of physical attendance there filters strongly for happy players and extremely strongly for passionate ones.

And how can we tell if those players are passionate about specific jobs? Here, we have a golden opportunity in the form of your recent approach to the Cosplay Walks, showcasing as many cosplayers as possible rather than a limited sample for contest judging. Cosplay is not inherently tied to any in-game activity, but it introduces an additional filter for passion in that the cosplayer must bring and manage their costume. Not all players who are that passionate will cosplay, but any player who does walk that stage is deeply dedicated to your game, even if they show up with regular clothing and cat ears. (And if they have a particularly elaborate or difficult costume, all the more so.) It is not a perfect sample - there will be some distortion from other factors like what players want to dress up as and what appearances are most approachable, and the smaller the sample the more vulnerable it is to random chance - but it is far better than no sample at all!

So what do we see, looking at the Las Vegas and London Fan Festivals during Endwalker (promoting Dawntrail)?

Cosplaying as a job rather than a single character is pretty popular. Lots of representation of other popular jobs, such as WHM and DNC. Representation of less popular jobs that have their dedicated players, such as BLM and AST, suggesting that the sample is not terribly small. Many more RDM cosplayers than would be expected from RDM's low Savage popularity. A few cosplays that are ambiguous about jobs, using the A Realm Reborn levelling gear that fits all Disciples of Magic and/or a book but not distinguishing between SMN and SCH. A few that are unambiguously SCH, too.

But there are only two that are unambiguously SMN, one from NA and one from EU, despite the job's high play rate. The low-poly grapes meme got three!

And looking carefully at how the cosplayers behave on stage reveals something further. The North American cosplayer specifically shows their Carbuncle attacking Kefka, which Endwalker SMN cannot do; that behavior is from A Realm Reborn through Shadowbringers, in part via pet glamours. And the European cosplayer opens their book as a gesture exaggerated for the stage, then immediately pulls out a green fruit (representing Garuda-Egi) without a cast time; that behavior is from Shadowbringers SMN, the only version that had the transition from "no pet active" to "a pet active" occur without any cast time. (Endwalker SMN makes the transition between summons an instant cast, but the initial Summon Carbuncle has a cast time.) I cannot tell you what versions of SMN inspired them, built their own internal view of the jobs, but clearly Endwalker SMN is not on that list.

This is remarkable! Endwalker SMN has almost entirely taken over the visual symbols of the previous versions, especially as can be practically depicted on stage. (Can you imagine someone dragging Demi-Bahamut on stage to perform one of the older rotations? It would be spectacular, but the logistics! And it still would not properly convey the relationship between player and pet to anyone who does not already understand it.) And yet both SMN cosplayers have clearly distinguished their depictions from the Endwalker version, whether intentionally or not.

Not one person showed up as definitely a SMN and possibly Endwalker SMN, even though doing so requires nothing more than a robe and a horn on a headband. One does not even need a book, and books are by far the easiest cosplay weapon option at the most basic level. And such a cosplay could easily have been inspired by a previous entry in the Final Fantasy series, since SMN is such an iconic job in the series. Yet we do not observe it being chosen. Why is this so?

RDM, also an iconic [I]Final Fantasy[I] job, is significantly harder to cosplay; for a cosplayer to distinguish themselves from simply a person who chose to wear a lot of red, they require either elaborate clothing styles or a costume sword, and both require skill to make. But that is clearly not stopping attendees: RDM has a comfortable, if not outsize, number of cosplayers for its popularity. The difficulty of the cosplay does not seem to be a barrier.

Could attendees be fearing the disapproval of their fellow players? This seems unlikely. Even the resentful players are not inclined to take issue with a cosplay that simply includes all versions of SMN, and Endwalker SMN does so little that it would be hard to exclude the previous versions of the job by accident. Especially for the London Fan Festival, after seeing the attendees at the Las Vegas Fan Festival calmly accept various easy cosplays, I doubt any player with such concerns would be willing to walk the stage regardless of the state of the jobs.

No, the low number of cosplayers for Endwalker SMN's popularity demonstrates a lack of the passion that comes from players truly enjoying it, and so gives us our answer on why that popularity arises: because it is the path of least resistance, just as motivational intensity theory and the value of consistency both predict. Far too many of those players are not on SMN because the current state of SMN is what they enjoy, but because the current state of SMN prevents them from enjoying anything else. Whether those players are on SMN directly due to loss of motivation, in order to serve the needs of their party, or sticking to the job out of attachment to their character or social image, they are not necessarily having fun.

This accords also with the attendees' responses in the A Realm Revisited game. Attendees cheered for every update discussed except /bahamutsize, later /petsize, showing it as a point of awkwardness and tension even among attendees. It used to be a welcome update without awkwardness; many times in Shadowbringers I told party members "type '/bahamutsize small' into your chat and it will make all Demi-Bahamuts small on your screen", and they were always happy to hear that.

SMN has gone awry.

For that matter, look at your own internal metrics for the magical ranged DPS population as a whole. Raid Finder necessitates that a magical ranged DPS be in every party, and Duty Finder does not care because regular duties are not meant to have the party bonus matter, but what fraction of Party Finder listings for high-end duties fill without a magical ranged DPS at all? How often is the role played in various duties, when players can somewhat escape the tension between lack of fun on SMN and lack of motivation on BLM and RDM by abandoning the role entirely?

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And what of content creators' voiced concerns, as both I and Edwards mentioned earlier?

Well, let us think about what a content creator would want if they were making clickbait, or otherwise not being genuine in their concerns. The answer is money. Particularly via ad revenue coming from view count, which is after all the point of clickbait. And since they want to have lots of views for content about a game, they want to have lots of players in the game, especially players who see them as a stable source of content.

Even if a content creator is entirely genuine, they do not want to take breaks from content creation, let alone breaks from the game they cover. For some, content creation is their revenue stream, but regular and frequent releases help keep one's audience even for hobbyists. (This is why so many creators take little to no vacation time, working straight through holidays.) If a content creator must take a break, they want to avoid giving the impression that they are likely to take future breaks.

Zepla opens one of her criticism videos by saying that she got burnt out, took a 6 month break, still was not feeling great about the game in the long term, and found more dissatisfaction and apathy when she asked Twitter! This is exactly the sort of behavior that compromises her revenue stream, and she is more than experienced enough to know it. She is clearly not saying such things for money, except insofar as improving the game leads to more players who may eventually become her viewers.

Further, throughout the video and its follow-up she takes a very moderate position, regularly ruling out extreme interpretations of her words. And everything she mentions as a problem in either video is a common player complaint this expansion. If she wanted to sensationalize, or to use her platform to push for changes that are to the game's detriment, she could push much harder than that. So she is clearly not saying such things to hurt the game either.

The remaining explanation, and one that fits well, is that she is genuine in her criticism and is offering it in an effort to improve the game. Is there clickbait among the reaction and reply videos that resulted? Probably. Do I entirely agree with Zepla? No. For example, I think the incentives to log in should aim to be things that players want to work towards, not pressure that risks turning into chores. As another example, I have already shown that the duty design is more influenced by the job design than she talks about. But she is serious, and her concerns are common ones.

And even one content creator who is willing to hurt their own revenue in order to sound the alarm is a very bad sign. It means there is, in fact, something alarming going on. They might not be right about the roots of the problem, but the roots of the problem are real.

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Schubert also has something to say about content creators, if we look in the conversations he had at the end of his Twitter thread. In particular, about their role as part of the playerbase ecosystem:

Damion Schubert, Zen Designer @ZenOfDesign:

A playerbase is an ecosystem. One that's up and running is incredibly delicate. It's incredibly easy to write off a low percentage portion of the playerbase without fully realizing they're load-bearing.

It's a pretty common mistake running MMOs, TBH.

breetoplay @nbrianna:

He's talking about hardcores and raiders, but it's true for lots of other groups too, many less-catered to and invisible segments - that they're load-bearing. Good luck keeping your game running when the guidemakers, gatherers, and community organizers quit.

Damion Schubert, Zen Designer @ZenOfDesign:

These don't even have to be online. God help you if the people who run your most devoted fansite get bored and wander off.

Guides are, of course, a form of content creation around the game. Fansites often host player-created content in various forms. So how are your guide makers and fansites doing? What is your most devoted fansite? (At least in English.)

Is it the website side of The Balance, which provides raiding job guides and Best-in-Slot sets? That was in development limbo until almost the very end of Shadowbringers, pointing players to the Discord server instead. (And Discord has multiple properties that make it less than ideal for hosting guides. Plus there was a whole lot of drama that makes a long story.) Yet the last tier it has Savage guides for is Asphodelos! And in Endwalker, SMN has been consistently slow to receive updates there.

Not because it is hard to make SMN guides. The simplicity of the job makes it by far the easiest to make guides for. But in this, we need not speculate.

The "Summoners Aren't OK" video actually gives a reason when mentioning that SMN is slow to get updates - the guide makers lost interest in the job. What do I infer from the fact that they lost interest, but did not outright quit? That they lost their internal motivation, but remain out of obligations and attachments; that they want to serve the community, that players look up to them, that some are paid to do it via Patreon and/or Icy Veins, that it is hard to leave a game and a community behind when it has become a major part of one's life.

We can also hear directly from Elevation, one of the long-standing SMN guide makers and a world progression raider. He has been heavily involved in making guides ranging from total beginner to Ultimate optimization. And he has replied outright to that video, bringing up both players' previous enjoyment of SMN gameplay and the job balance issue resulting from its current simplicity!

Look at what else he says:

The same themes, the same end, again and again! This is a microcosm of despair!

A blackened field of Elpis flowers!

Elevation may be just one person, but there are only a few truly good guide makers per job per language - they often post on multiple platforms. A single guide maker working on multiple jobs is common. And by the nature of the task, they are all quite attentive to the game, smart, and mathematically inclined.

What about Allagan Studies, from whose research on combat formulas all Best-In-Slot and progression equipment recommendations flow? As I write this, it is patch 6.51, nearly patch 6.55 ... and their combat formulas guide has no Endwalker edition at all. They have had over two years to write such a guide, and not done so. And their tables for each attribute still promise more testing for patch 6.0. (Which I discovered while trying to make my own calculator for BLU's Mortal Flame!)

I observe also that Allagan Studies is hosted by Akh Morning, which began as a SMN-specific website and made its last news post shortly after Endwalker launched.

What about SaltedXIV, another raiding-oriented site, but one which has no special ties to SMN? It is slowly falling apart and still says that SGE, RPR, and magical ranged DPS guides are "coming soon"!

And none of these sites have put up notices along the lines of "we have moved new guide releases to this other location". Icy Veins does not even seem to have the sort of resource that Allagan Studies offers.

Let us try fansites that are not focused around combat. What about Garland Tools, the "everything database"? It is receiving its final guaranteed update with patch 6.55, as its current maintainer is overloaded; despite an announcement well in advance, no one stepped up beyond one offer to try - but not guarantee - keeping the data up to date.

What about /r/ShitpostXIV itself, where we looked for uninhibited player feedback? Well, just before the London Fan Festival, someone found that it was unmoderated at the time, so they had to take their parody posting to /r/ffxivdiscussion instead. (And their parody was a reskin of current SMN that fits in 40 levels and has no summons or pets of any kind. Why in Hydaelyn's name is that possible?) Unfortunately, it is a Reddit site-wide policy that the moderators of a subreddit are not listed without logging in, so I cannot use the Wayback Machine to show you the moderator list.

But I can link what the moderators' profiles looked like at that time, which is not a perfect confirmation but is better than nothing:

one;
two;
three;
the fourth landed on an adult content check, behind which was an empty profile.

This accords not only with the posting of increasingly lewd non-commentary images there, but also a "the mods have abandoned us" post that received a moderator comment 23 days after its posting. They seem bored, just as Schubert warned of.

27 million players, and not one would step up to do these things? Kami help you!

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This is not a failure on any individual player's part. Just because a player makes a guide or fansite, that does not make it their duty to maintain it forever regardless of changing circumstances. They have the right to step down, and if nothing else, players can die. The issues are the attrition rate of existing players and the generation rate of new players willing and able to put in the work, such that not enough are stepping up to take over and maintain quality.

Nor is it a failure on the community's part. The playerbase does not control the attrition rate and generation rate of such players. You do.

For a player themselves does not know if they will be a guide maker or fansite maintainer or world progression streamer in three years, or five, or ten. From the perspective of a future pillar of the community, they simply join the game at a beginner understanding level, see that the next step up in understanding some game system appeals to them, take it, see that the next step up appeals to them, take it, ... then one day they find themselves at the edge of the playerbase's public knowledge, wanting to not only take another step but share it.

From an outside view, looking at the whole playerbase, every player joined at that beginner understanding level once. Some players are not interested in taking that next step, and you cannot make them do so; they just want to hang out in the Gold Saucer and/or chat. The earliest steps in understanding combat appeal to most players, simply by trying to do well while playing through the story. But after that point, most players at any given level of understanding are not interested in taking the next step fully - they will at most dabble in it when doing something they find easy. The result is a familiar rapidly narrowing pyramid: millions upon millions of casual players who stay casual, fewer who become midcore and stay there, fewer who become hardcore and stay there, and eventually a small number of world-class players. Out of that small number, only some will be willing to share their knowledge publicly and do the social work that entails.

(This is another place where viewing a job as having a single difficulty curve is illuminating. It allows us to consider each player as occupying a single point on that difficulty curve, and from there see each part of the difficulty curve as tied to the part of the playerbase ecosystem that it supports. From the two-curve perspective, each player utilizes many points on the curves, so it is much harder to visualize the playerbase.)

And who decides the effort required and reward gained for each next step? You do, not just through the difficulty curve of each game system but through the reward structure, in-game teaching tools, and quality of life features. Ideally, no player who wants to push themselves further should be deterred by their next step being tedious, seeming insurmountable, or just plain feeling pointless. Do it right, and you get a comfortable high generation rate for those top players - as a natural result of providing a journey where all players are happy with their choices of taking or not taking each next step. Further, once you have happy guide makers, their presence improves your generation rate by blazing trails for those who walk after them.

Once a player is at the cutting edge of the playerbase's public knowledge, what can keep them taking further steps to share? Obligation, habit, and even pay have high attrition rates; even players who want to keep going for those reasons will burn out and/or have their quality of output suffer. (Any player with a history of good guides can use that same history as a portfolio to apply for positions such as video editing or technical writing, at companies with sensible work hours and vacations, where being sick on patch day is not a disaster. So why should they make massive investments of effort to run sites like Allagan Studies, investments that take years of use in deep systems to pay off?) To keep a comfortable low attrition rate, you must nurture the passion they developed in their journey there: they must be able to trust that you will keep challenging them, or at least keep giving them the joy of exploration.

For all such players are, in a sense, explorers - not of lands, but of systems. To stand at that edge of public knowledge is to be without a map of what lies ahead, and know that each further step requires making the uncharted charted. How could someone who takes further steps anyway not be an explorer?

There are certainly various things you could do to improve your generation rate by removing obstacles to learning. (Which are outside the scope of this series.) But the problem you have here is your attrition rate - because repeatedly lowering the skill ceiling of jobs has eroded your top players' trust that they will have systems to explore, and that in turn is burning out their passion. This also deters the players who could be future top players, as they find themselves frustrated by shallow systems even before they reach the heights that veteran players climbed to on previous expansions' deep systems.

This is why true passion is essential to the playerbase ecosystem. This is also why any attempt to hide a lack of passion among players would merely be falling victim to Goodhart's law. Having people pose as happy players, in a cosplay walk or otherwise, would only hide the problem while making the unhappy players feel more isolated and unheard - and therefore more likely to leave! Paying uninterested people to make guides selects for those who will do as little work as possible to get paid. And even if you managed to get perfect guide making and perfect supposedly happy players out of an AI, you would still be missing a key point: players who do not see further depth they could pursue in a system they enjoy - whether or not they want to take that next step, no matter how casual they are - can easily be drawn away permanently by other games or even other aspects of life.

Gameplay without that feeling of further available depth is less sticky, less appealing to return to after breaks, and grows stale quickly. Some other hobby catches the interest of that player and their friends, some other game has better character customization and glamours, some life event breaks their habit of logging in ... and they might well never think about your game again. Even a devout fan of the Final Fantasy series could wind up only subscribing one month per expansion for the story, which is a shame if they want to dig deeper into the game and would still have time to play other releases that interest them.

So these top-end players are both an essential part of the playerbase ecosystem themselves, and an early warning for problems that affect less dedicated players. But how much can they be hidden by surface metrics? How small a group can be load-bearing?

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One Angry Kami: A Thought Experiment

In business, there is the concept of "bus factor": the smallest number of people whose sudden disappearance from an organization cripples the organization's project or other ongoing work. We need not limit this concept to employees. What is the bus factor of the playerbase, as concerns your announced plans for ten more years of development for this game? If one angry kami desires to scupper your plan and wreak havoc upon your game, how many players do they need to vanish to do it?

I propose an upper bound: despite that "27 million players" overall number, the bus factor of the playerbase is at most 1,000. The whole playerbase, all regions and languages. (At least on the global version, since the Korean and Chinese playerbases are heavily shaped by the ability to know what is coming by observing the global release and its player-made guides.)

Suppose that our hypothetical angry kami chooses to vanish the 1,000 players most willing and able to make good guides. There are 20 combat jobs including BLU, and let us generously ignore the frequent overlaps when allocating 5 guide makers per job for raiding purposes. So for the combat jobs, that takes up 100 slots for English, another 100 slots for Japanese, and let us give another 100 slots to all other languages. For high-end duties, let us say another 30 for each of those language groups, to cover both video and text. For Disciples of the Hand and Land, 5 guide makers each for crafting, MIN/BTN, and FSH, again tripled for multiple languages. For miscellaneous tips relevant to casual play, such as useful settings and understanding how each role operates, another 20 slots, again tripled for multiple languages. This is still only 300 + 90 + 45 + 60 = 495 players, so the kami fills the remaining 505 slots with guide makers for all manner of "side content", followed by whoever would make the best replacement for a player on the list while not already being on the list themselves. (Again, overlap is quite common.)

What would happen?

Not "no guides get made." Nothing so simple. For there would still be social status and money on offer for appearing to make a good guide.

Not necessarily actually making a good guide, note. If a given player can tell whether a given guide is accurate, by necessity they know the subject matter well enough to not need the guide! Thus, guide making and use has always suffered from the principal-agent problem - there is always the incentive for the guide maker to cut corners where the target audience cannot (quickly) discern the difference, in order to gain more status and money by publishing quickly, frequently, and/or simply with less work. (In some cases, guide makers gain more profit by deliberately making a worse guide, such as this example of an RMT gil seller using a crafter levelling guide to promote their service.)

In a healthy playerbase ecosystem, this issue is limited by the prevalence of happy top-end players, who are motivated by their desire to share their passion and the satisfaction of a job well done, and so make actually good guides regardless of their audience's ability to tell the difference. But in our hypothetical, that would not be the case. Those moved by status and money would run unchecked.

Among the vanished would be Wesk Alber, best known for his learn-as-you-level combat job guides for casual play. Mizzteq / MTQcapture, whose work includes mechanics guides for regular duties to help those players who struggle most. (Notice that both of these players also do Ultimates! So long as you give your top players the high skill ceilings they need to have fun, they are quite happy to extend the hand of friendship to casual players who need low skill floors.) Kaiyoko Star, who takes in player test results for the Fashion Report every week and turns them into infographic recommendations. Maygi, who has made the handbooks for every Deep Dungeon so far. Fruity Snacks, who makes concise fish-catching guides that require minimal knowledge of FSH. And so on. Dawntrail would launch without any of those players.

Imagine this from the perspective of a player returning for the expansion launch. They are excited to see new things in Dawntrail! But what sorts of things do they do, and do they encounter problems?

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Most players will make it through the Main Scenario Quest without really noticing. If nothing else, Duty Support NPCs are infinitely patient. But if all they are after is the story, they will not stay subscribed for very long. After all, you cannot realistically hope to make more story content fast enough that they do not run out.

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Does our returning player begin levelling other jobs to do the various role quests? Perhaps Viper or the new magical ranged DPS you are about to announce? Treat the jobs as content and level them all? Quite possibly. But out of 20 regular battle jobs (not counting the one they used for the Main Scenario Quest), it is reasonably likely that they will have some confusion somewhere about the job actions and their uses. Job guides aimed at casual play are popular and get views, and plenty of players know that now that they have seen WeskAlber succeed. Someone will try to fill that niche, and lots of players will be expecting it to be filled.

What does it mean for our returning player to be looking for a casual play job guide, in terms of motivational intensity theory? It means that they are expecting to put in a fixed amount of effort (reading or watching the guide) to get a fixed reward (resolving their confusion about the job), and they consider the reward worth the effort. The amounts they are expecting are set by the current quality of guides, along with a general expectation for guides to be good. If the guide they find is good, these expectations will be met and they will be happy with the effort spent.

But the guide our returning player finds is not going to be that good. Perhaps it is rushed without the maker building up their own understanding of the job first, perhaps the maker has less skill at explaining well. So our returning player may well have to spend more effort than they expected understanding the guide, or get less reward because it does not fully resolve their confusion, or both.

And that might mean they find that the reward was not worth the effort for them after all.

(Most players' potential motivations to do anything in a game are quite low. That is why each further step in understanding deters most players - and why sudden difficulty spikes make most players give up.)

Since they cannot independently evaluate the accuracy of the guide they used, they may not attribute their disappointment to a worse guide than they had expected. They may instead attribute it to the specific job, and come to believe that the job is too hard for them, or to the game as a whole, and come to believe that the overall job design is too hard for them.

With our understanding of job difficulty as a curve, we can see that these potential beliefs are incomplete: they are not stating the duty or range of duties in which they are considering the job, let alone their equipment. But that will not prevent them from complaining to you that "the job is too hard"! Nor will it prevent them from giving up on their project of job levelling, and so having one less thing to do before they take a break and unsubscribe!

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Does our returning player level their Disciples of the Hand and Disciples of the Land? Very well. They can most likely manage the levelling process without a guide. The role quests give fairly good directions, and even specify bait and fishing holes for FSH. But then what? Continuing to make regular recipes and perform regular gathering, such as for levequests and Grand Company Supply & Provisioning Missions, gets stale quickly - and is moreover pointless without something else to drive interest in gil, Grand Company seals, and/or the specific items.

Shall they craft supplies for raiders, potentially including themselves? To do so requires either melding endgame gear or accepting slower rotations using scrip gear. Shall they gather materials for those crafts? Once again they must either meld or accept lower yields from scrip gear. Shall they pursue expert crafting? That requires melding in order to have an acceptable success rate! Shall they gather materials for expert crafts? Likewise! And for fishing up anything beyond the role quests, they must also find out how to catch the fish.

Figuring out whether and what to meld on one's own is, quite plainly, a great deal of work. (Especially when raid supply turns out to favor different melds from expert crafting!) Discerning how best to catch a given fish out of the FSH discovery spreadsheets is also a great deal of work. It is no wonder that the vast majority of players interested in endgame crafting or gathering of any kind decide that it is not worth the effort to figure that out themselves, and so seek guides for it. And to make matters worse, anyone who wants to be quick to the market must meld before the recipes and gathering nodes are available!

Guide makers who are motivated by money and status are not going to do all of that work properly. They are going to cut corners at best - and that is if there is one gearing recommendation that stands above the rest, rather than multiple conflicting recommendations or none at all. Which means our returning player is likely to be recommended some gear plan that is a poor use of their time and effort acquiring it. (There are multiple ways this could come about, which I will not elaborate upon here to avoid getting into unneeded details.)

Again, our returning player's expectations are violated. They were expecting a gearset that meets their needs for a known amount of effort, and did not receive it. And again, they may well attribute this to the game rather than the guide, and complain of difficulty and/or give up.

Then once the recipes and gathering nodes are released, they face a further issue: in crafting and gathering, one's rotation depends on one's gear. Not only will the people filling the niche of recommending rotations give worse advice, but any rotation that does not match our returning player's gear is useless to them. So if there are multiple competing gear recommendations, they may be locked into using rotations from the same guide maker to match.

(As for selling old recipes and/or materials instead? That requires individual market research that no guide can replace.)

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Does our returning player attempt to learn one job more deeply and pursue high-end content? Perhaps. But even if they can find raid supplies at a cost they are happy with - likely from bots - they still have problems.

Figuring out raiding rotations on one's own is a great deal of work. Figuring out gear selection on one's own is a great deal of work for those who do not know where to start - which is most raiders! Figuring out duty mechanics and strategies with only one's party is a substantial amount of work; while it does have a niche as "blind progression", it is not really viable in Party Finder and Raid Finder due to the necessity of sharing strategies with different parties. Once again, the vast majority of raiders will seek guides at some point.

Raiding is popular enough and prominent enough that new guide makers will try to fill that niche. The problem is once more that those guides will not be as good.

Our returning player will be doing a worse rotation than they could manage, making worse Normal Raid gear selections in preparation, using worse strategies to handle mechanics. So will almost everyone around them. And that will make the duties feel harder, and take more effort to complete.

Perhaps they are new to high-end content, and do not quite complete the Extremes that come with patch 7.0. Perhaps they are accustomed to completing Savage tiers, but this time they find it a slog with no idea why. Maybe they give up and decide not to raid next tier. Maybe they tell you that high-end content is too hard.

Or maybe they push through anyway, decide to do the new Ultimate in patch 7.1 ... and resort to piecing together mechanic strategies from world progression streams, because there just is no guide showing up even for the beginning of the duty. (And there will be fewer world progression teams overall, including fewer streamers, because some guide makers are also world progression raiders.) Ultimates are already niche content, and would become even more niche with lower Savage completion rates. Combine that with the sheer amount of work involved in making a guide to an Ultimate, and they are not appealing subject matter for players seeking money and status - it is far easier to make multiple simple guides instead for either of those goals.

(Eventually some players would start passing around links to individual strategy explanations, and compiling those links into collections as is done now, but it would take longer and frustrate many of the players wanting to do Ultimate. Ultimate groups already have enough trouble staying together and maintaining motivation, for those who do their progression over months instead of taking time off work!)

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Does our returning player try to decorate an apartment or house? Well, the old guides to decorating techniques still work. But some of the new furniture they want to use is annoyingly expensive on the Market Board... because the only way to bring that furniture into the game is via Free Company submersible voyages, and no one has made public build recommendations for the new submersible zones.

Submersible managers are a small and quiet niche, and those who make their own builds have a gil incentive to keep those builds private for a competitive advantage. But by necessity, they control a lot of houses and want to stay subscribed for the whole expansion. If they do not have other things to do when they log in each day, they will gradually get bored and stop too.

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Does our returning player go forth to help others making their own way through the story? Friends and family they would like to play alongside? Perhaps some of those players are disabled, very old, very young, especially anxious about letting the party down, ... and do want guides for regular duties. (Especially since they cannot play with a mixture of Duty Support and fellow players!)

Even several months after Dawntrail has launched, such guides do not appear, or are hastily done and contain more spoilers than strictly necessary. Players seeking help with regular duties are a relatively small niche, and not a high-status one either. (Though considering them in the game design is important to avoid accidentally excluding potential players.)

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You release the next Deep Dungeon. Does our returning player venture inside? Sure. But this is a short-lived endeavor if they only do so once for the story. To stay a while, they must try to level many jobs - which we considered earlier - or attempt to see the end of the Deep Dungeon. And the prospect of blind progression for Deep Dungeon mechanics is a daunting one, since a single mistake can mean hours of work just to reach the same enemy again.

Without Maygi to make the exceptionally clear handbooks, noting every last dangerous enemy and how to handle them, perhaps no one would try to fill that void. (After all, someone must undertake blind progression to find out the mechanics before those can go in any guide.) Or perhaps someone does try - but a worse guide will result in more failed runs from its viewers, and therefore more players giving up after one too many failed runs exhaust their potential motivation.

Those who give up after many failed runs will have stayed a while. But that experience discourages them from trying again on the next Deep Dungeon or recommending Deep Dungeons to their friends, and it will generally not improve their impression of the game as a whole. Plus, they may - once again - think that the issue is with the game, and tell you that Deep Dungeons are too hard.

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So far we have only considered pre-existing types of content, where players already have some idea of the underlying systems and what rewards are available. That established knowledge makes it easier for players to determine if the content appeals to them, and reduces exploratory time spent that efficiency-minded players often consider wasted. The same established knowledge also makes it easier for players to step in and make new guides - they already have some idea of what information needs to be conveyed, and often time-tested structures for doing so.

Players ask for new types of content for good reasons, but that desire is not limited to those who seek unblazed trails. Plenty of players want to have a new experience with a known path, just as plenty of hikers want to have a scenic journey after the trail has been charted and rated for difficulty.

Which makes the explorers all the more important when players do not yet know what is possible. How many players would have pursued all the rare animals in Island Sanctuary without the player-made map and weather tracker? How many players would have pursued the duels in Bozja, even with you mentioning them in the patch notes, if they did not know how to prepare for them?

By now it is obvious that worse guides make for a worse player experience in the content. But how and what will our returning player find out about the promised new lifestyle content for Dawntrail?

If they do not read the patch notes, or watch the Live Letters, they may not even know that this new content exists. They would only hear about it from other players or from literally running into it. And if fewer explorers are sharing what they find with clear explanations, to build up the playerbase's knowledge of what this new content is and how it works, our returning player could easily be in the target audience for it and not figure that out.

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Does our returning player go and socialize? Surely that does not require a guide?

Indeed, it does not. But it does require other active players. And there will be fewer active players, due to the collected effects of players getting frustrated and giving up on different content areas, or not getting into those content areas in the first place. Our returning player will have a quieter Free Company and fewer active players on their Friend List. The network effect is a double-edged sword.

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The result is a game where everything seems harder, and players give you feedback as if it is harder, because worse guides do less to lower the effort required for their audience. Where players give up faster and stay subscribed for less time, which is a substantial revenue loss.

(For now, we will note revenue losses but not worry too hard about their impact on your budget.)

In the face of sustained complaints and lower completion rates across the board, would you have any choice but to further simplify the game, thus lowering skill ceilings for patch 8.0?

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Further simplifying the game would make players less reliant on guides to complete content. But it has three problems.

First, it makes all content even less repeatable for all players, because simpler systems get boring faster. You are already getting complaints about content longevity, and this would only make them worse. Even for players who want to grind, the maximum length of grind you could practically ask for would get shorter.

Second, it ruins your generation rate for new passionate players who might replace the vanished guide makers. They know the history of the game. They probably already consider the systems uncomfortably shallow. Every time you lower a skill ceiling, you lose more of their trust.

Third, it loses you even the strong players who have no interest in guide making. Those who might help their fellow players in the course of gameplay, whether with advice or simply by example.

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So for patch 8.0, you would have the playerbase shift to either completing or rejecting content even more quickly, thus getting even less subscription time per player. (New players will be welcomed in, but once they get through the pre-existing story you would have less to keep them with - if they do not get bored of their job choices during the Main Scenario Quest itself! In business terms, your intake rate would go up, but so would your churn.)

The network effect would continue to compound as well. In-game social bonds would weaken with fewer players to keep Free Companies, linkshells, and other social groups running. New and returning players would be less likely to receive basic gameplay advice socially, making the game seem even harder.

The more difficult some system or piece of content is, the more likely it would be to be rejected by any individual player... and the more players considering it will look to guides to lower the effort barrier. The numbers on player engagement, and the largest player groups, would keep telling you to simplify the game.

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Where is the end state, then? What happens if you keep following the numbers? What do 9.0, 10.0, 11.0 look like? After all, 11.0 should not be far from the 20 year anniversary of A Realm Reborn.

Eventually the game would reach a point where players would not need or want guides to accomplish their in-game goals. Where players would stop asking you to make things easier because they would encounter no feeling of obstacles.

But anything that simple is boring to repeat or grind. Anything that easy gives no sense of accomplishment for completing it. The entire game loop of repeating content to improve and gain power would break down, leaving nothing but story and socializing.

You could get every last fan of the Final Fantasy series through all the stories in the game, and then they would run right out of content - even the second time in a duty would be boring, even with the randomization of Deep Dungeons. And you cannot keep up with players expecting entirely new duties every day. They would be taking a lot of long breaks at best.

(Any AI that could keep up would spawn a whole new genre of games with stories tailored to the individual player. AI will not save you.)

Perhaps a critical mass of players would remain to socialize, despite the many cosmetics losing all connection to accomplishment, and thus all meaning. (After all, they are all pixels - the journeys we take for and with them are what make them more than dress-up.) That might be enough to keep servers running in a reduced capacity.

Otherwise? 8.0 would have a clear decline in the numbers. 9.0 would do worse. 10.0 would have players asking why the game is live service at all. 11.0 would be a single-player standalone game that asks to carry over a save from 10.0.

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This thought experiment does not end in a "dead game" in the most literal sense. It is not even a particularly sudden change after the initial act of the kami. But it is an ignominious end and massive revenue loss you cannot practically avert. It does not suit a ten-year plan for a flagship MMO.

What is worse, attempting to follow the surface numbers and loud feedback would tell you exactly the wrong thing.

(The angry kami could also have chosen the top 1,000 fansite maintainers instead. Running and maintaining a fansite is a great deal of work, and likewise a task only undertaken by passionate players. But that example would have been more annoying to work through and less illustrative.)

But the point of this thought experiment was not to instill fear of the kami. It was to understand how small a section of the playerbase can be load-bearing.

One thousand out of 27 million. 1/27,000. 0.0000370370... Less than 1% of 1%.

(I am sure that Schubert understands this very well. But he was writing on Twitter, which ill suits detailed thought experiments.)

This is why I do not care for arguments like "r/ShitpostXIV/ only has 141k subscribers" or "/r/ffxivdiscussion/ only has 33k subscribers". I am well aware that they are not the majority. I do not claim that they are the majority. I claim that they are an important window into small but load-bearing subcommunities.

And with such a small section, it is extremely easy for these load-bearing groups to be hidden by surface numbers, or even drowned out by fleeting new player interest.

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Make no mistake, you need the casual players too. You need the midcore players too. You need the "regular" hardcore players too. All of those sections are also load-bearing.

But if you breach the trust thermocline of casual players, it is immediately obvious. If you breach the trust thermocline of midcore players, it is immediately noticeable. But your tiny cutting edge, your trailblazers? You can breach their trust thermocline, burn their lock-in, burn their replacements' lock-in, put your game into a totally irreversible tailspin, and still not notice by the surface numbers.

Thermoclines are breached suddenly. Ecosystems collapse slowly.

A game cannot survive off the obligations of its players. It must spark our joy, inspire our love, and maintain our trust. Without those things, eventually we stop wanting to play. But a great danger in running an MMO - perhaps the greatest danger - is that habits and obligations can make you think your decisions are working out well for long enough to put the game in an unrecoverable state.

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Why is it such a common path for MMOs to decline in a way very similar to this thought experiment? Because anything less than a proper understanding of the playerbase ecosystem will skew towards this failure mode, or a few related ones.

Follow the surface numbers? Casual players will drown out all else, and your playerbase ecosystem will collapse from the top down as described. No angry kami is required if you cannot replace the top players you have.

Listen to all feedback equally? Each individual top-end player may be more dedicated and likely to give feedback, but there are far more casual players and you know it. The casual players will still drown out all else. And the fact that unhappy players are more likely to give feedback will skew it towards the players unhappy at the time, causing large swings.

Try to reserve some content for hardcore players? Too easy to misunderstand and misaim the midcore content in the process, cutting off the flow of new hardcore players and then collapsing your playerbase ecosystem from the top down.

Try to cater your entire game to the hardcore players? Then you lose your casual audience and your playerbase ecosystem collapses from the bottom up instead! (To my understanding, that is how Wildstar died.)

Correctly categorize each player and apply each group's feedback to the parts of the game designed for them? Much better than any of the previous options, but the fact that complaining to you is a path to rewards will still skew it towards simplification and neglect your top players.

Ask your playerbase to come to a consensus? Most of your players do not understand the perspectives of any player group other than their own, nor do they understand difficulty as a curve. They will not read this far into this series, no matter how much you beseech them. They will not learn the many subjects needed to write a design proposal that accounts for even the entirety of their own group, let alone other player types. In short, they are not game designers! Seeking consensus only devolves into majority vote with more steps!

All of these possibilities can be well-intentioned, but that does not prevent them from failing. Nothing less than properly understanding the playerbase ecosystem and the reasons behind each piece of feedback will do.

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Non-Surface Numbers

Can we find some numbers, or other measures, of how this broader issue is currently affecting or not affecting the playerbase as a whole? None of them will be great, but we can try.

Here are the worldwide Google Trends for Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker to date. This is a measure of mindshare, of interest, of both current and prospective players wanting to search for something about the game. And conveniently for us, Google Trends normalizes the highest point in the chosen time frame to 100, so we do not have to worry about adjusting for the pre-existing population size in each expansion.

The Shadowbringers graph is skewed by the surges in interest from COVID-19 and unhappy World of Warcraft players. (And what is "WoW exodus" but "thermocline breach" seen from the other side?) But comparing the Stormblood graph and the Endwalker to date graph, the latter is noticeably spikier. It is very easy to pick the major patch releases out now, while in Stormblood they were less significant.

And while Endwalker's mid-patch lulls early in the expansion ran higher, they have dropped off now in a way that matches up with those players from the late Shadowbringers surges gradually completing the Main Scenario Quest and assorted further stories then leaving. Surely some of these players would decide to stay, having already made the investment in learning the game?

Yes. But it looks like for every such player who stayed, you lost a player somewhere.

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What about player activity? We can look at Steam Charts concurrent players, which unfortunately does not snapshot custom time ranges neatly. But set the time range for Stormblood, and the major patches are barely noticeable. Set the time range for Endwalker to date, and the major patches are clearly visible. The larger spikes are not only searches, but active player falloff.

What about players taking their next steps, becoming more invested in the game? Despite Reddit severely limiting its API and there being no easy graph, the /r/ffxiv Daily Questions thread remains an interesting indicator - in some ways like a collected English-speaking Novice Network. And it did not take all that long in Endwalker for the comment volume there to drop back to and stay at pre-COVID levels.

That is with more total players, so a smaller fraction of the playerbase was asking for advice. Proportionately fewer players reaching upwards, aspiring higher, perhaps entering the next generation of leaders.

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But there is no need to take my word for it. Pick an experienced ground-level community manager for each region and language, and have them repeat this entire analysis of the state of the playerbase ecosystem within their expertise. Tell them to be blunt rather than saving face. Ask them when they last saw a player truly excited about the state of job design, rather than indifferent or disappointed.

(What about the NA Marketing Manager you were hiring for in a Live Letter? They may have some idea of the problem, but the nature of the position gives them all the wrong incentives to tell you. A marketing manager saying that their metrics are down not because of marketing, and not in any way that retention efforts can help, but due to fundamental game design issues? It sounds like shirking one's responsibility and overstepping authority even to North American ears!)

Job design is not Endwalker's only problem, I admit. There is also something of a content design problem even after accounting for duty design interlocking with job design; for example, the lackluster long-term interest in Eureka Orthos has nothing to do with job design. And there is definitely a reward structure problem separate from both.

But job design has been a major problem and theme of player complaints over the whole expansion to date. And the poster child of your job design problem is Endwalker SMN.

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Now What?

We have ample evidence that the current state of player trust is not good for the playerbase ecosystem. Your top players have already lost not only trust but hope. Your hardcore players have lost trust, but some still hope. Your midcore players may still trust you, but are feeling the effects of Endwalker's difficulty paradigm being both mathematically unbalanceable and fundamentally too limited for the gameplay loop.

(Even casual players feel those limits if they enter duties of any sort regularly. They need not understand any job design or mathematics to realize that they are getting bored in Expert Roulette!)

What advice does Edwards have to offer to a business that has breached a trust thermocline, or is close to doing so? From his article (emphasis original):

But once that thermocline is crossed, there are few routes back. There is no "final straw" - a price cut, a promise to "do better" - that can be reversed to draw [customers] back in, nor was there one that could be avoided. The triggers for each individual are different, but their effect on the group is cumulative.

Trust thermoclines are so dangerous for businesses to cross because there are few ways back once a breach has been made, even if the issue is recognized. Consumers will not return to a product that has breached the thermocline unless significant time has passed, even if it means adopting an alternative product that until recently they felt was significantly inferior.

For businesses that have breached their trust thermocline, the ways back are thus limited. Most of them rely on having sufficient financial reserves or product lock-in to be able to skip a generation of consumers and start again. Microsoft's lock-in on its business software enabled them to weather a significant pre-millennium storm, and a hard pivot toward gaming with its Xbox gave the company time to rebuild relationships with business tech consumers. That salvaging its reputation took almost 20 years shows how serious a breach of the trust thermocline can be.

In most cases, though, the only real solution is to avoid crossing the trust thermocline at all. It requires placing emotional engagement and trust at the heart of product strategy, and accepting that the causes of trust failures are non-linear. Businesses need to address their customers' complaints early and not dilute the value of their product.

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Do you have product lock-in? Somewhat, via the network effect and learning investment. But you do not have hard product lock-in, and you are already burning through it for essential sections of the playerbase ecosystem.

It does not matter how World of Warcraft is doing, or if any companies are developing new MMOs. A player does not need to find another MMO in order to quit this one. They do not even need to find something they like within the growing genre of games that convert some aspect of MMO gameplay into a single-player or small-group standalone game. They need only get sufficiently frustrated, despairing, or even apathetic to find something else to do with their time.

(And remember, that includes players who are being paid to make guides or otherwise serve the community. They merely have the additional step of applying for a different job, and a built-in portfolio to do it with.)

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Do you have financial reserves? You know more about what budget you would get in the event of a decline than I do. But run the numbers for yourself and think about the costs.

Some of your expenses are variable costs: the more players you have, the more you pay to keep the game running. The potential for a Cloud Data Center that you recently tested is a great example - allocate and pay for more cloud servers as the active player numbers dictate. (It may also be useful to distinguish between costs that vary by activity, such as bandwidth, and costs that vary by player count, such as character data storage.)

Other expenses are fixed costs: you pay the same amount regardless of how many players you have. For example, writing and localizing a quest to a given quality standard has a certain labor cost, no matter how many or how few players eventually play it.

And when I look at how the game operates, I see a great deal of fixed costs. Every quest, every cutscene, every duty design, every zone terrain, every interface, every gear model... and the graphical update will only raise these costs! Even the physical servers are effectively fixed costs, as you cannot currently scale down their number - can you imagine the technical nightmare of making a server merger possible?

(Think of all the things that would have to be both disambiguated and kept intact, even aside from the existing partial solution for character names. Retainer names. Housing plots. Deep Dungeon scores. Firmament rankings.)

Run the numbers and ask yourself: How many subscription-months could you lose per expansion before the fixed costs became a problem? (Expansion purchases, additional retainers, and Online Store optional item purchases complicate the math, but players who quit are not making any of those either.) How bad would it be if you lost most or all of a region?

Because if you have to start making less content or lowering quality standards in order to lower the fixed costs, that would also lose you players and compound the problem.

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Would it even be practical to skip a generation of players and start again? There is not exactly a convenient second generation of MMO players independent of the first, nor is there a convenient second generation of Final Fantasy series fans independent of the first. And even if there were, it would still be financially unwise.

In the end, the only palatable option is the difficult one. The ancient tradition of putting quality first that has helped so many Japanese businesses endure. To understand each player group, work early and actively to maintain their trust... and accept the long road to recovery in the eyes of players whose trust you have already lost.

For some groups of players, you do this well. The progress showcases and development panels on the graphics update for Dawntrail are necessary and welcome - many players do care about graphics, and that is not limited to casual players. It is important to preserve that aspect of players' attachment to their characters and the world.

But what does the phoenix motif of the 10th Anniversary of A Realm Reborn celebrations mean to players who still miss Shadowbringers SMN, and see Endwalker SMN as the game being reborn without them? What does "take flight, find your wings and spread them wide" mean to players for whom exploration lies not in zones and vistas, but systems and optimizations?

Every expansion launch, either you build trust or you break it.

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I do not want to have to say this, and I do not think you want to hear it. But I cannot in good conscience recommend going through the Dawntrail expansion launch without addressing the damage that Endwalker's job design has done and is doing - not when that runs the very real risk of dealing a fatal blow to the playerbase ecosystem. If you must make this dreadful choice, the lesser evil is to delay Dawntrail. Or if you have business deals relying on the release date, clearly announce a mid-expansion paradigm shift and follow through as soon as possible - something!

A content drought sucks, a delayed expansion sucks, make no mistake. Neither players nor your bottom line like it. But a delayed expansion is a storm we can reliably weather. Out of the two bad options, it is the only one that does not risk pushing your playerbase ecosystem into an irreversible collapse.

A player who unsubscribes because they have exhausted the content that interests them is a player you can get back as soon as you release more content for them. They are on a break. A player who unsubscribes because you broke their main job is going to be very reluctant to come back, if they are willing to do so at all. They have quit the game.

The earlier you decide to at least delay the release date announcement so you can investigate your timeline and decide accordingly, the better. If you just do not make a release date announcement until you know your timeline to properly fix the role, no one need know if it was ever internally delayed! You have plenty of other announcements to make for a satisfying Fan Festival. So if you see this in time, take the date out of the Dawntrail announcements for the Tokyo Fan Festival. And if you do have to announce a delay, an earlier announcement means an easier time for players making plans around the release date.

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When I see the state of affairs that led me to have to consider this dreadful question in the first place, I think of the great designers and analysts who have walked before me and been so kind as to share their wisdom, on both the developer and player sides of the screen. (I have quoted some of them in this post series, but certainly not all!) Each of them has series of their own in their writing portfolio, showing the games and experiences that shaped them.

And I think of where I want to be in ten years, where I want the game to be in ten years. I want to be having fun in a healthy game, with friends new and old. But I fear that the next generation of designers and analysts will have series named "Things I Learned Watching Final Fantasy XIV Fall".

Thread: The Threefold Problem of Magical Ranged Balance: 3-2 - Difficulty, Continued

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