#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[Aravell]

Dude.

Look, nobody is forcing you to come in here and call everyone clowns and terminally-online MMORPG addicts or whatever else. That's what you have chosen to do. Going into places you don't have to be in and calling people names because you disagree with what they're doing is generally regarded as being rude and very likely troll behaviour.

Why are you so concerned over this anyway? If you hate the idea of it so much, why even bother engaging with us here? Why not just leave us be and go enjoy your life if you're so certain that this would end in failure?

[Telkira]

Why are you so concerned over this anyway? If you hate the idea of it so much, why even bother engaging with us here? Why not just leave us be and go enjoy your life if you're so certain that this would end in failure?

I just think it's stupid, and you all should too. It represents a sheer lack of critical thinking that's equally crass in its self-righteousness and its entitlement.

Part of what gets me is that nobody in this thread actually sat down and came up with a plan of action, or some universally agreed-upon copypaste strategy to actually make this work like a grass-roots thing.
Part of what makes a strike effective is getting people who would be affected by the strike to be on your side. Did anyone think about this? Does anyone actually understand the socio-political dynamics of the very thing they're trying to do??

Nobody even mentioned demographics, how to best quantify and reach out to them. Or time zones, or region and language breakdowns of any kind.

The whole thing is so impractical. Laughably so.

And the part that bothers me the most is that MMOs are the types of things where grassroots movements like this are possible, it's in their very nature as community-driven games.
But the way you all went about handling this isn't going to achieve anything, aside from maybe annoy casual and hardcore players just looking to get stuff done, and maybe even get a few people banned who were naive enough to buy into this.

You're all better off starting a petition, or waiting for Japanese hardcore players to notice and see how they feel about it.

[PercibelTheren]

Dude.

You guys are unironically trying to organize a STRIKE on a Japanese MMORPG.
The fact that you don't even speak the same language as the majority of the game's playerbase (also said game's target audience) should have been enough to dissuade you all from thinking this was a productive endeavor.

Is the majority of the playerbase Japanese? That doesn't sound right considering the game has a ton of players in EU, NA and other smaller regions.

[xbahax92]

Also, this isn't your game. If Japanese players were upset about this, then there'd be some merit, since it's their game and it's they who are the primary audience, but a literal handful of Redditors LARPing like this is an Amazon fulfillment center isn't going to do anything to persuade SE to make what are core gameplay adjustments.

Know your place and enjoy the game.

I had a good laugh at this. I can't even. Since we're not japanese players our very fan fests, interviews and Q&A sessions are useless.
Alright guys, time to wrap up and clean the EN forum.
(Also if you havent noticed, there are german and french players in here too. And even some jp players who show up time to time)


Thanks for your contribution.

[ForteNightshade]

snip

Couple things. According to all the census data available to us, albeit unofficially, NA outnumbers JP quite handedly by slightly over 150,000. Once you factor in EU, which is predominantly English speaking, you'll quickly find that no, Japanese players, are not the majority. They haven't been for years now. In fact, the console and AAA gaming industry as a whole, including JRPG titles, typically do significantly better in North American than Japan due to the latter's higher interest in mobile gaming.

Furthermore, you, anecdotally, showing this thread off to a couple discord friends and all having a giggle isn't any different than people laughing on TalesofDF. You're welcome to find this whole thing absurd just as other, paying customers, are welcome to criticise a design approach they dislike. And before you cry foul about "organizing a strike!" How people voice their criticism isn't for you to decide so long as they follow the rules. To be blunt though, we've all tried to have discussions. There are threads on this very forums several hundred pages long--one in particular even got brought up in a Q&A... where it was poorly translated and healers were told to "just do Ultimate." Bit ironic how the sustain has gotten so out of hand, players were able to beat said Ultimate (TOP, specifically) without healers.

With all that said, I suggest you take your own advice and kindly "know your place" by allowing others to voice their criticism.

[Telkira]

Couple things. According to all the census data available to us, albeit unofficially, NA outnumbers JP quite handedly by slightly over 150,000. Once you factor in EU, which is predominantly English speaking, you'll quickly find that no, Japanese players, are not the majority.

This is just wrong. If you look at the datacenters, you'll find that there are more congested servers in JP, in addition to more servers overall than in the NA datacenter. That conveys more need, more necessity.
Also, that website you cited is from 2023, and is not official. It's interesting, but in no way, shape, or form conclusive enough for you to sit there and think you can discredit my point about the game being primarily for a Japanese majority audience, because it is.

In fact, the console and AAA gaming industry as a whole, including JRPG titles, typically do significantly better in North American than Japan due to the latter's higher interest in mobile gaming.

This is just not true at all. Mobile gaming is definitely more popular in Japan, but that isn't to say that console or traditional video game platforms (consoles, PC) are struggling there.

Also, to argue that JRPGs do better in foreign markets than they do in their home one is just conjecture on your part. That's like arguing Fallout New Vegas is more popular than SMT or Persona in Japan, or vice versa. There are exceptions, like FFXVI which did very poorly in Japan but better in the West, but that isn't saying much given that it sold poorly overall due to being an exclusive to the PS5 when more people are still playing on their PS4s or have PCs.

[Supersnow845]

This is just wrong. If you look at the datacenters, you'll find that there are more congested servers in JP, in addition to more servers overall than in the NA datacenter. That conveys more need, more necessity.
Also, that website you cited is from 2023, and is not official. It's interesting, but in no way, shape, or form conclusive enough for you to sit there and think you can discredit my point about the game being primarily for a Japanese majority audience, because it is.


This is just not true at all. Mobile gaming is definitely more popular in Japan, but that isn't to say that console or traditional video game platforms (consoles, PC) are struggling there.

Also, to argue that JRPGs do better in foreign markets than they do in their home one is just conjecture on your part. That's like arguing Fallout New Vegas is more popular than SMT or Persona in Japan, or vice versa. There are exceptions, like FFXVI which did very poorly in Japan but better in the West, but that isn't saying much given that it sold poorly overall due to being an exclusive to the PS5 when more people are still playing on their PS4s or have PCs.

I’m not arguing for or against your point that the strike would be better with a little more organisation and some kind of “manifesto” but your point that there are more JP players than English speaking players is wrong

This is the official census
https://ffxivcensus.com/

And NA outnumbers JP alone in both total and endgame characters even ignoring OCE and EU

If you add all non JP servers together (I’m ignoring China) JP is outnumbered 2 to 1

[Telkira]

I’m not arguing for or against your point that the strike would be better with a little more organisation and some kind of “manifesto” but your point that there are more JP players than English speaking players is wrong

This is the official census
https://ffxivcensus.com/

And NA outnumbers JP alone in both total and endgame characters even ignoring OCE and EU

If you add all non JP servers together (I’m ignoring China) JP is outnumbered 2 to 1

That's not official at all. That's someone's Github project. I'm basing my information on what SE is willing to give out, not what some crawlers or botnet is willing to do via scraping Lodestone with inconsistent/inaccurate criteria.

The fact that Japanese datacenters are prioritized in terms of physical capacity and quantity, along with the way the game is received there overall compared to the West, is enough. It also makes sense, it is their native market after all, and that there are more JP datacenters that are at full capacity (meaning even new characters cannot be made there) is all I need to see.

[Saraide]

In case anyone needs to read this: you dont need to be perfect and without any flaws to criticize healer design. I'd rather have people do something than be bogged down by unrealistic standards and comparisons to IRL unions which have existed for decades or by people allegedally concerned about optics.

[Lyth]

There's been a summary of the main frustrations facing healers on the OP for a while now, although I'm not sure if Gemina formally mentioned having updated it in here.

The primary issue comes down to providing value for effort. If your chosen role doesn't provide impact, you aren't going to want to play it.

Role Erosion
We've seen a progressive erosion of 'support roles' over several expansions now. These roles provide value through player interdependence. FFXIV has had a deliberate design shift to try and eliminate those interdependencies and to turn team-based encounters into eight disconnected but parallel single player experiences.

Tanks have been affected by this in part, simply because self-positioning bosses were introduced to eliminate the dependence that DPS, especially melee, have on tanks (in fairness, I don't trust the average PF tank to be able to position a boss efficiently either). But healers have been hit the hardest, because their role has been eroded entirely. And with the healerless clears posted from the Media Tour, there's a growing perception that healers are not entirely necessary in Dawntrail content. That's an incredibly bad precedent to set at the start of an expansion.

The first point listed in the OP speaks directly to this. You need clear boundaries set on what a non-healer job is capable of doing to keep themselves and their teammates alive. Ideally, party-wide sustain effects should be the exclusive purview of healers. Self-sustain effects should be limited and insufficient to keep you up indefinitely.

You shouldn't ever see a twenty minute 'clutch save' where the party dies and the tank clumsily heals themself through two vuln stacks to solo the boss on current content. You shouldn't ever see healerless runs on current content. I think the instant that you allow a role to become redundant in current content, then you've failed as a designer. They should be falling over themselves to stop this.

In my mind, this is probably the most immediately achievable goal, simply because it's a numbers balance. None of the tank heals are traited in Dawntrail, unlike the heals on other roles, so you can easily design content such that it completely outscales the self-sustain that they provide in later dungeons. Bloodwhetting also should apply per weaponskill rather than per hit as per its skill description. All these things are easy to change, the dev team just need to stop worrying about pushback and fix it.

Content Design
The fifth point relates to content design. I think healers are probably the hardest role to design content for, because your engagement level drops off rapidly as players' familiarity with content increases. If nobody knows a fight and players are making mistakes, then you potentially have more room to make an impact through clutch saves. That same fight a week later may be completely boring simply because you have nothing to do.

This partially comes down to how predictable and scripted fight design is. It also comes down to the fact that many fights aren't that threatening from an outgoing damage perspective. Your primary worry are mechanic checks which tend to be all or nothing, to which it's more about individual responsibility than it is about role responsibility.

Part of the problem is that most fights are designed from the perspective of someone who plays DPS, which is why DPS jobs are so much fun to optimize in raid content. You really need someone who is passionate about healing to oversee fight design and ask critical questions of each encounter design on how to make the fights more interesting and engaging for healers both during progression and during farm.

I don't think that we'll see this sort of change immediately, but this is the sort of thing that the dev team needs to come out and make a clear and definite statement committing to improving fight design for support jobs over the 7.x patch cycle.

Job Design
Some of the limitations in encounter design stem from job design. It's hard to keep farm content interesting on a job that uses a single button rotation. Likewise, part of the reason why support 'role mechanics' have fallen out of favor is because we have an increasing armament of defensive tools that negate a lot of challenging mechanics.

This isn't just a healer issue either. Invulns can let you delete entire mechanics from the fight, and they have absurdly short recasts (four minutes on Holmgang!) Tank defensives get stronger with every expansion, with multiple burst heals and rolling regens on every action. And in the event that they don't press those buttons, you have instant on-demand counterparts on healer to erase the damage.

There's just a general lack of direction with the job team when it comes to these designs. There's a global power creep when it comes to defensive job actions, combined with progressive homogenization to keep everyone equally competitive. The growing list of defensives leaves less room for interesting and unique rotations. And healer jobs end up feeling less and less distinct from each other over time, outside of each expansion's marginally upgraded sparkle count on the new actions.

Job design is a more fundamental problem with healers. Everyone knows it's an issue, but it keeps getting kicked down the road. They probably need to hire someone to oversee healer design, for one. But they also need to make a conscious effort to make each support job's gameplay feel unique and interesting to play. The next expansion's actions are set, and we're not going to see the changes needed on this front immediately in 7.0, but again, the dev team need to come out and make a statement committing to reworking healer designs and developing their individual gameplay identities, as soon as they are able to.

That's what I think when I read through Gemina's manifesto as a non-healer. I'm sure that someone more closely connected to the healer experience could elaborate more specifically.

Thread Concept
I suppose one more point worth mentioning - it really doesn't matter whether this thread/hashtag is representative of real life industrial action. Healers have been expressing their frustration with the game design direction for several expansions now.

I'd actually go a step further and say that support gameplay across the board has been progressively less satisfying from Stormblood onwards. Tanks have been less impacted because they have eroded into healer functionality in exchange for losing control over fight movement and positioning, but it's still deeply unsatisfying to see the role essentially amount to being a melee dps on training wheels. What I've wanted to see is the dev team make some statements about their vision for these 'support roles', and commit to making them more interesting. But I've given up for a few years now.

I think regardless of framing or actual 'strike action', what matters is that this gets the discussion out there and gets people openly talking about it before the expansion launch. For whatever reason, the dev team seem to be averse to running into direct confrontation and controversy with the playerbase. But this wound has festered and must be let. The developers just need to have it out, be honest about what they are willing (or not willing) to fix, and let players decide for themselves if they still want to invest in the development team's vision for their chosen roles going forward.