DT Job Reworks - Unconfident Developers and Poor Communication

[W00by]

Hey all, one of the resident Grumpy Vipers here on the forums chiming in again about the recent interview with Naoki Yoshida-san from Eurogamer.net. If you are interested in reading the interview before this post, please refer to this hyperlink. https://www.eurogamer.net/naoki-yosh...nal-fantasy-14

It also goes without saying that this is a translated interview, so there is no way to be certain that Yoshi-P's words are being completely accurately represented here. But I will assume they are, as I have no other choice if I want to participate in the discourse surrounding the game. Big wall of text coming, but I'm very passionate about this issue. Furthermore, this is respectful (albeit concerned) feedback and I have no ill will for the developers, I just think they are handling things wrong and want to share now.

Like many of you, I have been anxiously awaiting hearing about the future of several jobs in FFXIV after the controversial 7.05 changes, especially to Viper, a job that drummed up a fair share of controversy both when changes were initially announced and when those changes were implemented.

Of course, Viper is not the only job that has had a rocky road here in Dawntrail; Samurai and Black Mage were both partially reworked on the launch day of a Savage patch due to negative feedback, and Dark Knight and Monk players have had mixed feelings about their jobs since launch. This is just a summary, but since this is the DPS forum, I will focus mainly on DPS, and the incredibly problematic issues that have been made increasingly apparent since DT's launch and, of course, the publication of this article. As much as I want to, I will not make this a complaining thread specifically about Viper, there's a megathread for that, but I do want to talk about two things: confidence and communication. Viper is just the vehicle I will use to do that, but this problem applies to all jobs, and I'd love it if other job experts could share how DT's changes have made them feel about their jobs.

The recent job changes reek of a lack of confidence in how to design the game moving forward. I speculated in the Viper threads that they were willing to go through with this change in such a short amount of time not because there was a lot of feedback, but because they were already afraid before the job was even out, and this has proven to be true based on Yoshi-P's statements in the interview. To quote:

"We had adjusted right until the last minute and we did have in mind the possibility that some players might provide feedback that it was too busy to play."

This puts a lot of job changes into perspective for me. Monk, Samurai, Viper, Black Mage, and the like have not been reworked and reworked again because the developers have a confident direction moving forward. They have been reworked because the developers are just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and they have no idea how things are actually going to ship until they have gone out. Them "working right until the last minute" and agonizing over job changes is not a good thing. You're telling me they don't design jobs with an idea in mind and then execute on that idea? That they're perfectly fine flip-flopping within days of a job's release, because they had no idea what they really wanted the job to be to begin with?

Regardless of how you feel about the Noxious Gash change, the Tsubame Gaeshi change, the Black Mage simplification, or the removal of Monk timers, I find it hard to believe that it could be interpreted as a good thing that they lack confidence when they design jobs and ship changes. Did they honestly believe that the changes they made to VPR, SAM, and BLM in 7.05 would be better, or did they just shamble toward release on that issue too, thinking "we'll solve it when we get there?" Or, what about the announced Dragoon rework for Dawntrail, that they walked back on in the end? Were they ever confident in that decision, or did they just get scared? I can no longer trust that, when they make a good decision in a job's design, they did it deliberately, because this makes them sound so wishy washy.

Which brings me to the next issue: communication. Honestly, this is the bigger issue of the two, and it's actually baffling how many red flags about communication there are in these short few paragraphs of Yoshi-P's interview. Whether you are pro-developer communication, anti-developer communication, frustrated or happy with changes, this is deeply concerning. There are so many red flags here. I will address several of them.

We did release the job in that state, and then we found a lot of players say it was very busy to play to the extent that they were not able to see mechanics.

Where did this feedback come from? A big part of the initial pushback to the Viper changes' announcement was that people could not find feedback of others complaining, so who are these "a lot of players"? It would help if we knew where these voices were coming from so we could compare, but there's no other information given. This gets more concerning later, so I'll come back to this point in a second.

"We announced that we were considering making adjustments to the job . . .

No, you didn't. You announced that you were making changes to the job, not that you were considering it. There is a big distinction. There was no invitation to dialogue about whether or not it should be changed, nor any directions to official channels through which feedback could be given about what sorts of changes there should be.

The response to that was a lot of feedback from players who had already reached the level cap and were already used to playing with the job, and they were happy with the way it played.

Great! So, if there was a lot of feedback (there's that phrase again) from players who liked it and were happy, we should keep it the same, right? Or at least try to reach a compromise?

However, we had already identified some actions which would inevitably be a cause of stress for players. Eventually, we just went through with adjusting what we had initially planned, and that was unrelated to community feedback.

Oh.

What Yoshi-P has said here is that, even though players liked something, they internally decided they didn't and intentionally ignored feedback. They saw it. They read it. And they ignored it on purpose. He even confirms this by saying:

'Hey Yoshida, you're listening too much to community feedback', but that was only a little bit so really you don't need to worry.

Which is it? In the first quote in this excerpt, about "a lot of players saying it was very busy to play," you decided to do an adjustment based on their feedback. But then, when people gave feedback because they didn't want the adjustment, you . . . ignored their feedback? Are you listening, or not? If you aren't, that's quite concerning, given the fact that you admit to being incredibly unconfident in the direction of Viper until the last minute, and if you are, you're incredibly inconsistent about how you listen and who you listen to.

I understand that it is a necessity of game development that some people will dislike certain changes. Ignoring feedback is not some unforgivable crime, and eventually you will have to ignore someone's feedback. You cannot please absolutely everyone, and I am not so entitled as to think that every job has to be for me. This is why I am okay with jobs like Summoner existing even though I find them painfully boring, because they are objectively successful designs in terms of play rate and player satisfaction, and I get that it was the right choice even if I did not agree.

But now, I do not even know if the team thinks THEY are making the right choice. If I truly believed they made this Viper change because they were honestly 100% confident it was for the best, maybe I could get behind it. But when they admit that they had no confident design direction for the job, how can I? Same for these recent changes to Samurai, Dragoon, Monk, Black Mage, Dancer, Machinist. . . Some of these changes have been successful and some haven't, but was this success a result of deliberate planning or totally by mistake? The more I read, the more concerned I am that it's the latter.

I am sorry for the big wall of text, but this is deeply concerning. With all of the voices in the community right now talking about job design as a major point of contention, the fact that they don't know what they're doing and then brazenly admit to ignoring some of the community's voices can only be described as an alarm siren. And this isn't even getting into issues like Healer design or the MSQ. . .

I think going forward, the FFXIV Development Team should consider implementing official channels of communication that people will actually use. Game surveys when they consider changes, and announcements about what they are thinking internally when they consider changes (like what Yoshi-P SAID they did for Viper when they actually didn't). Maybe allow the playerbase to vote on proposed changes or preview things in a test environment like the media tours. I don't know. It's just so hard to sit here and read that my voice and the voices of my friends were intentionally ignored while others get heard, all in the name of changes the devs have no faith in.

What are you all thinking? I'd love to hear more voices and perspectives. I know we all just want the best game possible, so if you like these changes, more power to you. But I am growing increasingly worried for the future of this game, not based on the changes themselves but the way the devs are handling them.

[TheAmazing3]

For how much the team prides itself on being in tune with their players and listening to their feedback, this in particular was almost heartbreaking to hear. I realize it would most likely cause a huge uproar if they actually told us who they listen to when making changes so they'll never tell us, but it's the whole bait and switch of "go to the forums and tell us what you think, we are monitoring feedback" followed by "oh, we didn't actually care what the feedback said" that really gets me.

Regarding the confidence in their design... I'm really conflicted. It seems like the desire to make everything as braindead and streamlined as possible stems from them wanting to please everybody. This is something they've doubled and tripled down on time and again. It was some two expansions ago I think that Yoshi-P straight up told us that he is happy with how healers are and that he wants healers to heal even though... the game they make is literally nothing like this vision they seem to have. So they seem to be confident about something at least. Unfortunately that "something" is that every class should play the same and anything that is even remotely different gets immediately smashed back into the mold. They first did it with tanks, when DRK got everything fun or interesting about it ripped off and even given to other classes. They then did it with healers, albeit in a roundabout way with the "pure" and "shield" healer paradigm along with the single damage button change that they've kept to this day. Lately I feel they've been doing it with melee. They reworked monk into the bastard child of NIN and SAM. Then they made both MNK and DRG religiously alternate between their two combos. Then they made the two-for-one style of combo switching that we have for both NIN and MNK now, plus the new VPR that also religiously alternates their "two" "combos". The only unique mechanic left among the melee is NIN's mudras I guess. RPR is still nominally different from the bunch but it's still a fairly skeletal iteration of a DPS job that plays more like a tank. With this in mind, it feels to me like they're trying to pummel all the melee into the same mold, like they did with tanks.

So with all that being said, they are apparently confident about wanting to make everything as cookie cutter as possible. Same job, different visuals basically. So I guess what I'm trying to say is... I don't think they lack confidence in design, I think they lack confidence in communication. They probably realized a long time ago that if they keep doing it bit by bit instead of all at once, there'll be less pushback and they get to keep their brownie points with the gaming community at large as a team that listens to what their players want.

On the other hand, I kind of get it. It's clear by summoner's rework being extremely successful that this is what the majority of their playerbase wants. The ones who pay the bills. I just wish they'd leave SOME JOBS for the rest of us.

[Carighan]

But when they admit that they had no confident design direction for the job, how can I?

I mean, the job has no job direction or identity. That's its biggest flaw, there is no reason it should exist. Naturally any design of it - no matter who does it - is going to be a lot of faffing about as there's no goal to reach, you can just randomly toss ideas at it and keep some random ones.

[W00by]

I mean, the job has no job direction or identity. That's its biggest flaw, there is no reason it should exist. Naturally any design of it - no matter who does it - is going to be a lot of faffing about as there's no goal to reach, you can just randomly toss ideas at it and keep some random ones.

This isn't a thread entirely about Viper or changes to Viper, though, so regardless of your feelings about Viper, I think we can confidently say that Samurai, Black Mage, Monk, and Dragoon have both Job identities and design directions that have existed in the past. Why are those jobs getting reworked, unreworked, reworks announced but not actually implemented, and hotly protested changes? If it was just Viper, I could chalk it up to "new jobs are hard at this point," but they're clearly struggling in the design of several jobs, not just Viper. I mean, speaking from just here on the forums, I've even seen complaints about the new abilities on jobs like Dancer and Ninja which received relatively minimal changes. Oh, and they accidentally made Reaper even more gauge negative, which a lot of people are really unhappy with, too. And Machinist is mechanically really weak, which was a problem they tried to solve in 6.3, but now they've got that problem again? Even when they've solved it deliberately in the past? There's clearly something going on here, right?

And, moving back to the subject of Viper for a minute, I don't think it has absolutely no direction or identity. It's clearly supposed to be the rogue/ranger hybrid of the game, with appeals in the "skillful and stylish" department. But many of the changes they've proposed or implemented, like the removal of positionals or Noxious Gash, hurt the skillful rogue/hunter fantasy a lot, so it's inconsistent. I know some people thought of Noxious Gash like a "Hunter's Mark" from other threads, and rogues sometimes have positional mechanics in other MMOs, so the fact that they want to discard these things hurts a fantasy that, like you say, some people already struggle to notice or buy into.

Also, in terms of design direction, it certainly seemed like they had a goal for the job. It was supposed to be the high APM job. To quote the FanFest where it was announced, Viper was described as a "fast paced, technical-yet-stylish" job. If we interpret this bit of advertising as a sort of mission statement, we can reasonably deduce they wanted to make it fast paced, technical, and stylish. Which is why I'm so baffled and surprised by how unconfident they are in their fast-paced job. They obviously deliberately wanted Viper to be high APM, or it wouldn't have the highest APM in the game -- but then, after they ship the highest APM job that they designed that way on purpose, they're terrified that it'll be "too busy"? Like, dev team, you made the job! If you thought a high APM job was going to be too busy, then why the heck did you even create one to begin with? Why did they ship something they weren't confident in? Especially if they were working on it "until the last minute," you'd think they'd've found a solution.

I obviously don't think Viper as a high APM job is a problem even if it makes it unappealing to certain players, but they clearly thought it would be disliked even before launch. And it doesn't speak well of their internal design direction or decision making ability when they made something that they didn't think was going to succeed, on purpose, intentionally, and then changed it afterwards when it had already succeeded. Like, read that again. It just sounds bad.

There is something going on internally, and I don't like it.

[AvoSturmfaust]

One thing i wanna say, the Samurai Change with Tsubame in 7.05 was great nearly everyone loves it i dont hear anything bad about it, sam makes finally again fun.

[W00by]

One thing i wanna say, the Samurai Change with Tsubame in 7.05 was great nearly everyone loves it i dont hear anything bad about it, sam makes finally again fun.

I don't think it's bad either, I think it's great. But the original 7.0 change to Samurai was really bad, and most people I've spoken to really disliked it. The good of the current change does not erase the bad of the change of the past. What I'm getting at in this post is: while 7.05 SAM is fun, why did they need to fix issues with 7.0 Samurai to begin with? How did a bad version of SAM that needed to be fixed make it to live? I know every expansion will have at least a few changes in the 7.05 patches, but three major job reworks on Savage launch day feels pretty crazy to me. Samurai didn't even have its BiS and optimal rotations worked out until, like, a week into the tier, which was a really negative impact for people who were week 1 progging as Samurai.

The Tsubame change is awesome, and that's fantastic. But if they're making these changes willy nilly and unconfidently with no idea what will work, it kind of doesn't matter if they made a good change, because it leaves us asking: was it on purpose? Did they actually know that this Tsubame change was gonna make the job way more free form, solve issues with filler GCDs, and help realign after Higanbana drift? Or was it an accident that happened to work out? We can't know, because their communication sucks, but the comments made about Viper and the simple fact that BLM and SAM needed to be reworked in 7.05 to begin with makes me really concerned for the future.

[Archeron]

Poor communication, ignoring feedback, and a lack of direction in content is the killer of MMORPG's. One only needs to look to WoW to see where that path leads.

Surveys would be massively beneficial on any and all changes they have planned but aren't confident would recieve a positive reception.

I imagine they're ignoring feedback because in their minds, its all negatively charged, or laden with personal insults. To that I say they need to grow a thick skin. People do not complain about a game they don't care about. Yoshi himself has said that in the past. He has thousands of devoted players to draw from. It doesn't hurt to put surveys out. His passive attitude and failure to take a stance on issues that are blaringly obvious with the MSQ and battle content is undermining the communities confidence in his ability to carry out a new story for the next 10 years. If he doesn't see that, he is truly lost.

I don't think the forums have even had ANY developer presence since at least 2021. And it really reflects on the content that came afterwards if you asked me.

[Aravell]

There's a lot of little things they've done over time that really makes it look like they have no idea on how to progress the jobs.

Remember how they redesigned every healer in Shadowbringers and, to this day, still dodge giving any concrete explanation on why they did such a thing or what the goal was.

MNK also has had a rework on every expansion launch, but I think this one has been the worst flip-flopping yet. They strip timer management off of MNK and change their rotation flow, then they reverted MNK's rotation flow and also deleted VPR's timer management which they took from MNK, so both MNK and VPR ended up with a net negative.

Another noteworthy thing is that they just completely dropped the proposed DRG rework and never mentioned it again. If they were confident in their direction, they wouldn't get scared by the Kaiten backlash.

All this certainly doesn't bode well for the rumoured 8.0 job identity rework.

[Carighan]

This isn't a thread entirely about Viper or changes to Viper, though, so regardless of your feelings about Viper, I think we can confidently say that Samurai, Black Mage, Monk, and Dragoon have both Job identities and design directions that have existed in the past.

Errr... no?

I mean, Black Mage kinda, yes, don't lump them in with the others tbh. Yeah their identity is IMO really really bad, but at least they have a somewhat unique one with their ebb&flow gameplay that actually has a relevant effect on your decisions and moment-to-moment play.

The others? In particular the melee jobs? They all lack design direction, it's just that Viper also lacks a design concept, they're just a demo job for how superior autocombos are (which they are, but that's not the point and doesn't make a dent in job identity either way). Melee jobs are utterly generic, with the exact same concept applied to every one of them, and gameplay so similar that like tanks you can find "equivalent" keyboard layouts when swapping between them as many abilities have correspondent abilities in other jobs that while sometimes different in effect are used in the exact same way as far as moment-to-moment game flow goes.

That's in fact the big thing here: There was no point adding a sixth melee DPS when the existing 5 ones have only enough ideas for maaaaybe 2 jobs. Where is the random proc chance based melee? Where is the melee without positionals? The one with all positionals? The melee with an extended ranged phase? The pet-job melee like the old EQ1 beastmaster? The melee healer? Nothing. They're all just "have a side and a rear positional and maybe a raid buff, and a strict rotation because we hate people having to think during combat". 6 melee jobs should all have utterly different designs, but as it stands, they have the thinnest different color veneer over the same brittle drywall.

[W00by]

Errr... no?

snip

You need to note the distinct wording of my comment. I did not say "right now, all of the melees are not homogenous with great design directions!" As a matter of fact, a solid chunk of this thread and my comments is about how the recent design directions for Samurai, Black Mage, Monk, and Dragoon are weak. But I said they had Job identities and design directions that existed in the past, not right now. And I still believe in that.

Monk was the melee with all positionals. It had 6 positionals, one on each step of the combo, with each form having both a side and rear positional. In exchange for this, it had no raid buff and was less based around burst timing and more based around optimal GCD upkeep with the Greased Lightning and Twin Snakes buff. This was a design direction.

Samurai was a highly resource-management based job. In the past, Hagakure was a 40s cooldown that was DPS optimal to use at 3 Sen, even when compared to a Kaiten'd Midare Setsugekka. Balancing your Sen and Kenki to be able to Hagakure on cooldown, keep Higanbana up, Kaiten every Iaijutsu, and hit all your positionals (which gave you your Kenki in the past, not potency) was a unique resource-based job design that was clear and determinate.

Dragoon has of course changed a lot over time, but once upon a time Gierskogul spent Life of the Dragoon and Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrusts returned 15 seconds to you so that you could Gierskogul more often. It had continuous upkeep, which they eventually transitioned to the Blood of the Dragon style design in Stormblood with eye phases that happened every 90s and kept buff phases variable. With Blood on a 90s timer, Litany on a 180s timer, and your personal buff on a 60s timer, Dragoon had incredibly varied, nuanced, and diverse buff phases.

These are design directions that existed, again, in the past. So why do they not exist anymore? That's what I'm getting at here. We don't disagree, you just misunderstood what I said. As for whether or not the jobs have IDENTITIES, these are all Final Fantasy kingpins that are consistently represented across lots of the games. They definitely have those, and they have had design directions in the past, so I fail to see why it's impossible they couldn't in the future.

If you don't mind my asking, when did you start playing? I don't ask from a gatekeepy perspective--I'm actually really curious, because I think it influences people's perception of the history of these jobs.