The problem with Tripling Down on Shadowbringers Job Design

[Aravell]

Show me receipts that this simplification has either prevented loss or generated gain--either of which must be entirely because of the simplification and not because of any other factor. You can't say "Endwalker has more players" because that is not why more people joined FFXIV, unless you can provide evidence to suggest otherwise.

They can't show you any receipts because there are none. Population growth cannot be directly attributed to one thing and one thing only. That's why when asked this question, people can only reply with "Shadowbringers and Endwalker has more players than Stormblood" and refuse to elaborate further.

Surely it has to be the simplified jobs that bring in the players, right? Surely it can't be that Shadowbringers has the most hyped story after the expansion that many regards as having the weakest story. Surely it can't be that Endwalker is the climax of a multi-year long epic saga that many want to see to the end. Surely Dawntrail won't do well because of the graphical update and other major QoL stuff. No, it has to be entirely the simplified jobs!

[ty_taurus]

They can't show you any receipts because there are none. Population growth cannot be directly attributed to one thing and one thing only. That's why when asked this question, people can only reply with "Shadowbringers and Endwalker has more players than Stormblood" and refuse to elaborate further.

Surely it has to be the simplified jobs that bring in the players, right? Surely it can't be that Shadowbringers has the most hyped story after the expansion that many regards as having the weakest story. Surely it can't be that Endwalker is the climax of a multi-year long epic saga that many want to see to the end. Surely Dawntrail won't do well because of the graphical update and other major QoL stuff. No, it has to be entirely the simplified jobs!

If we could somehow get metrics on what type of effect job simplification has on the population of players, that would be a different story, but it's impossible to do this because each expansion is not just a change in jobs, but dozens of different attributes of the game. Even simply the time that an expansion comes out can have an effect on someone's interest in the game, so we don't really have a way to isolate this metric to gauge its exact impact in a vacuum.

But we can see what people say and how people react to the game. I would be shocked if someone could name a single person who's approach to an expansion like Shadowbringers or Endwalker would look something like this: "You know, FFXIV has always been too complicated, but since I read they're streamlining job design, I think I want to play it now." Because as you said, it's the story that has driven players to try FFXIV (and the increase in the game's marketing budget). You can find dozens of examples of people talking about hearing how good the story is, and total radio silence on people talking about how people hype up the job design. The most I could imagine would be hyping up the job system in the sense that you can play different jobs on a single character, which has nothing to do with the design of the jobs themselves.

[Sjol]

They can't show you any receipts because there are none. Population growth cannot be directly attributed to one thing and one thing only. That's why when asked this question, people can only reply with "Shadowbringers and Endwalker has more players than Stormblood" and refuse to elaborate further.

Surely it has to be the simplified jobs that bring in the players, right? Surely it can't be that Shadowbringers has the most hyped story after the expansion that many regards as having the weakest story. Surely it can't be that Endwalker is the climax of a multi-year long epic saga that many want to see to the end. Surely Dawntrail won't do well because of the graphical update and other major QoL stuff. No, it has to be entirely the simplified jobs!

The one flaw I can see with this logic is that new players didn't experience the story leading up to Endwalker when they decided to buy it. A lot of the people who decided to try it probably just decided to try it because it became a common exodus location after Blizzard debacles. That's clearly not every player who decided to try ShB or EW during the spike, but it's got to be a lot of them.