Quote Originally Posted by HappyHubris View Post
I'm going to offer an answer to this that no one here is going to like: People who are happy to push simple buttons for impressive spell effects vastly outnumber people who enjoy the process of mastering a complex job. I'm sure the Endwalker SMN has been a huge hit from a "number of subscriber hours" perspective, and developers are eyeing other classes for a similar treatment.

The people on this forum and reddit are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase.

Look at healers. Healers on these forums have been screaming for more engaging responsibilities (either through more incoming damage or more outgoing damage tools), but those jobs remain quite neutered. Because when Joe or Jane log on after work, they just want to slap some buttons and clear some content. And healing has to be "accessible" to them, with few to no failure modes for performance.

I imagine that future expansions will see less core choice and fewer tools while we get more cosmetic elements added, like the multiple stages of Confiteor that all add flashy graphics from the same button. Or how SMN has multiple EGIs that are more or less the same thing with different skins. We already see this in this forum, where some people are happy to ask for "additional summons" to reskin the same skills.
I've been saying this for a while. The casual online gaming market has only grown in the past few years due to overly dense games cutting/streamlining a lot of complexity in favor of "accessibility" and "balance."

Not that I am in favor if it, I want to smack every myopic armchair theorist who brings up an accessibility or balance "issue" without thinking through the ramifications of engagement and fun. But that is the reality we live in: games like FFXIV are successful because their business models care more about the *appearance* of depth than actual depth, so long as the casuals stay fed. Because they, and the in-store glams and level skips, are where the money is.