I wonder why it is you're continuing to pay to play a game you seem to dislike so much. Games should be fun, and if they're not fun, why would you continue to pay at least 13USD/mo just to be miserable? There are millions of games out there to play. Surely there's at least one you will enjoy.
Oh I agree, to be honest I feel like corporations do a horrible job in soliciting feedback due to the multitude of reasons you given. Funny enough, the best example I saw of a game soliciting feedback is a mobile gacha game called tower of fantasy. There, the surveys was sent to a player's inbasket IN-GAME, and players were incentives to take the survey by receiving crystals that could be used for unlocking characters. They stated on their website that they receive tons of feedback through this model and I think a model like this in FFXIV would work infinitely better. That way, you reach your gaming audience as a whole so you have a larger response and you don't have to worry about "discrediting it" like many often discredit the negative nature of a forum. People are much more likely to submit a survery if they receive a free dragon mount along with it lol.
The biggest problem, however, is I honestly don't believe Square is looking a lot into feedback at the moment. And that's largely due to the recent boom in FFXIV's popularity. According to the same MMO website, FFXIV and WoW are literally neck in neck in daily player count. That certainly wasn't the case when FFXIV first came out. Yoshi has regularly referred to the explosion of popularity seen with the introduction of Shadowbringer and Endwalker, while many within this thread has stated problems have gotten worse over the last two expansions. That by itself spells a major conflict because Square is going to listen a lot more to a rise in subscriber count and daily player activity then negative feedback given on website forums.
To use an analogy would be Post Malone. Many who started with Post Malone knows he began making music with a hip-hop/r'b vibe. He was popular for sure, but his populairity reached new heights when he transition to more of a pop/country style singer. Now are there people upset towards Post Malone cross over and prefer his old content? Certainly, but he's less likely going to listen to it when he's reaching new levels of success under a different genre, even if the people who prefer his r'b/hip hop approach have legitimate concerns. The same applies to FFXIV, Yoshi's seeing unprecedent success in FFXIV with Shadowbringers and Endwalkers.
For FFXIV to take really take in feedback, they need to be on a downward slump, not a upwards rise. That's what happened with WoW and why you're starting to see WoW take elements that were incorporated in FFXIV (I'm looking at you Delves lol.) For WoW, Shadowlands was there "come to jesus" moment, Diablo IV had something similar in their patch that nerfed everyone, causeing a massive departure of players. It was so bad they started fireside chats to to damage control lol. FFXIV needs something similar in order for them to be more receptive to the requests seeing here.
I really like that he calls out waiting for two years and "maybe you might get that one button". Simply incredible that devs set this expectation after years of feedback already and don't even have the decency to be clear and concise in their plans, prolonging hope by saying wait until 8.0.
It also doesn't make sense at this point because players who would quit healing based on direct statements are quitting the role anyway based on lack of statements.
that will not be for 2 years.
Yoshi P has said they made a mistake and went to far in simplification. with some of the other changes I have heard that they are rumoured to be looking at, I expect that 8.0 could make the game better.... or stick it in a hole so deep they are unlikely to ever recover from... no matter HOW much feedback they get. I really like the game, but they have been coasting on the goodwill from ARR for so long... I think they believe they can do no wrong.
I hope its not true... but as they say.. "if wishes were horses...."
#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE
I missed the first roughly 500ish pages of this whole discussion, but I have to say my experiences have been quite a bit different from what I've seen posted here.
The core complaint seems to be about the buffing of mitigations for tanks. Fair enough, you're entitled to your opinion, but the idea that this somehow makes the healer less relevant does not align with my experiences. I've had multiple people throw major hissy fits because, as a tank, I wasn't using enough mitigations or the proper mitigation order. I know I'm bad about that, and it's been something I've been working on for a while now. I'm still far from perfect, but I'm a lot better than I was before. However, I'm a controller player (borderline carpel tunnel, and want to keep it from ever advancing any further) so I have a grand total of 16 hotbar buttons I can assign things to and that means having to make some difficult choices. However, trying to explain this to people in-game just results in a lot of being ignored and continued whining.
One of my complaints is about tanks who abuse TF out of healers. Like, for example, take the Bardam duty. That first pull is pretty brutal, but virtually every time I land that duty via the duty finder, the tank just takes off like a shot the moment the duty starts and is half-way to the first door before anyone else has left the starting block. They pay zero attention to their support, like letting DPS chars whittle the trash mob down a bit, are completely out of range of healing spells, and by the time you finally catch up to them they're on death's door and it's all you can do to keep them alive. It's one thing to act like that if you're playing with a group of friends who all know what to expect, but it's another entirely to play Sastasha with 3 random noobs from the duty finder the same as you would a level 90 savage raid with a group of people you play with often.
Personally, I just stopped caring. It's a game, it's supposed to be fun. So, from now on, if I'm working on leveling my healers, I won't race after a tank, I won't kill myself trying to keep them alive... if we wipe, we wipe, and if they start getting tetchy about it I'll just take the 30 min penalty and abandon the duty. If the changes being made to healer jobs aren't to your liking, play something else, be it a different job or even a different game. FWIW, I do try to make a point of complimenting healers who are able to handle some of the more brutal choke points with seeming ease, I don't say anything if we wipe a couple times, and unless the healer's already a mentor or really screws something up, they always get my commendation. Instead of focusing only on the negative, I try to amplify whatever positive elements I can. It may not be much, but I can only control my own actions, and I make a conscious choice to try to focus on positive elements.
The issue at the core of everything is that you spend the vast majority of your time using your two damage buttons, on every healer. And if they buff tank and DPS's ability to sustain themselves, while leaving incoming damage the same, then you are going to spend even MORE of your time with your two damage buttons. If a healer is brought along at all, at that point.
This isn't the core complaint- at least, not in a vacuum. The complaint that motivated that example is that there simply isn't much to heal on a lot of on-patch content that isn't Savage, and the more self-healing and mitigating the other roles get, the less healing there is, to the point that it becomes optimal to run said content without a healer. That's two strikes- healer gameplay and the general encounter design cannot fulfill the fantasy of meaningfully healing/mitigating, and the gameplay as a whole (healing and dps both) for healers isn't engaging.
You're touching on another problem here without realizing- that healing becomes less relevant and less engaging the higher level you are. Most of the difficult healing done in dungeons is from very old content... like Bardam's Mettle, a dungeon from 6 years ago, from 4.0. You're absolutely right that the first wall-to-wall pull can maul a lenient party. It seems counterintuitive that healing becomes easier the further you progress, wouldn't you agree?
I applaud the positivity, but this thread exists because, for many experienced healers, there is no positive in 90% of the content. And I agree. I played a lot of healer in Anabaseios savage and I realized, at some point, that I was rooting for my party to mess up third wings so we couldn't tank lb3 Harrowing Hell and I could have some fun. This doesn't seem like good design.
I'm only replying for an abridged summary of some (not all) of the issues listed in the thread, because I really think reducing it to "new tank mitigation bad" doesn't do it justice in the slightest.
The issue is that we require people to be awful in order to be relevant. The second people can put the square peg in the square hole is the second we become useless wastes of space. Something I brought up all the way back at the start of this.
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