speak with your wallet if you feel unheard

[Galvuu]

Final Fantasy XIV is mass-market sloppa designed to hold up a dying company. The only complexity is the brief one-second dopamine hit you get from dodging the orange circle. It has less depth than a first-person shooter. As someone who exclusively plays FFXIV and retro games, I am fine with minimalism. Making spreadsheets on The Balance Discord is not a video game, it's a chore that you do for social standing in your clique. Real people do not find 4x Transpose BLM fun and no one wants to type a missive with every rotation. Pressing buttons in order is not gameplay. Dodging circles is gameplay, especially when many players are bad at it (including me). Video games that encourage sensory overload either flame out (see every other MMO) or only benefit a small clique of minmaxers.

I don't know why you keep posting stuff like this. Some people enjoy solving problems/coming up with a plan, and then executing it. They approach encounters like a puzzle they need to solve- part of the satisfaction is in cracking that puzzle, and the other half is in bringing that plan to fruition in combat. Many of the people who you keep deriding in your comments by "making spreadsheets for social standing" (what social standing? Playing an MMO is the quickest way to lose social credit in most circles) do it because they enjoy it. Because they like solving the puzzle, or execute a plan, or see big numbers. This kinda puzzle solving is similar to the magic of progging an Ultimate and figuring things out on your own. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Sure, a minority might do it for some twisted sense of pride or clout, but I very much doubt this is the majority.

Also, if "pressing buttons in order isn't gameplay", I guess a lot of rhythm games like Muse Dash or FnF and fighters like DBFZ aren't games then lol

[caffe_macchiato]

They approach encounters like a puzzle they need to solve

Bingo! And we agree. I support that kind of gameplay because it is simple and timeless. But that was not the criticism indicated in my post. Your job rotation should not be the main challenge. Pulling off gimmick rotations to get a higher number on a third-party tool shouldn't be the objective of FFXIV. And yet this forum is filled with threads griping (hopefully ironically) about the loss of non-standard rotations in BLM, SMN, MNK, and so on. Thus, this is a strawman.

Also, if "pressing buttons in order isn't gameplay", I guess a lot of rhythm games like Muse Dash or FnF and fighters like DBFZ aren't games then lol

Rhythm games have a much faster pace than FFXIV rotations because pushing buttons is the main challenge. They are not comparable.

Fighting games have spontaneity that does not exist in FFXIV rotations.

[Galvuu]

But that was not the criticism indicated in my post. Your job rotation should not be the main challenge. Pulling off gimmick rotations to get a higher number on a third-party tool shouldn't be the objective of FFXIV.

This is like, you know, your opinion. And there is no strawman- you simply make sweeping statements based on your subjective experience as fact while also blatantly deriding people who enjoy a different aspect of the game.
I'm stating that your assumptions regarding what people enjoy (and why) do not necessarily correspond to the truth (in fact, they probably don't).
You're stating right here that people only enjoy certain aspects of gameplay because of a parse. But this is unlikely to be true (and, as far as I'm concerned, it's not true at all, I just enjoy more reactive gameplay in general).

As for the latter comment, of course those genres have fundamental differences from XIV. But even in XIV, your rotation most definitely is gameplay. Your hyperbolic comment and apparent dismissal of it doesn't even make sense- do you think the game would be better if there were no rotation? Because apparently the rotation "isn't gameplay". Is the game better- or enjoyable to the same degree- if your rotation consistent of the same button press once a minute? Perhaps once every 3s? Evidently these scenarios are all different and require a different type of mechanical engagement from players. We can go down that line of thought to the other extreme of high apm, complicated and reactive rotations (which other mmos do better), or more reflex-based ones (like in GW).

In general, you project an image about a subset of the playerbase that finds enjoyment in a different type of gameplay experience within the confines of XIV that you do. I don't enjoy SMN because I feel it's incredibly dull, but there's nothing wrong with people that prefer a lower load on their job's kit. It'd be silly and downright impolite of me to insult them over this preference. And this game, with 20 jobs, has enough design space to accommodate all of these breadths of playstyles if the team puts in some effort and is so inclined. I'm not sure why you feel the need to make wild assumptions about people who enjoy flexible, more fluid gameplay in their rotations.

(There also might be some unintentional hilarity in your response because the "puzzle" I meant was figuring out how to maximize a job's output for a given fight, and not the figuring out of that fight's mechanics)