Finally Understanding SE's Decision Making (And Why It Won't Change)

[Shougun]

Everything makes sense once you consider that Yoshi is, in fact, not a good developer.
His greatest success was copying WoW and making 2.0 a WoW clone with an FF skin. Since then, he has done absolutely nothing innovative, at all. Every patch since 2.1 has been the same two, alternating formulae. His great chance was FF16, to do something completely new with no technical debt or prior mistakes to work around, and it followed the FF14 formula to a frightening degree.
Player concerns and common sense things are largely ignored, and the devs make nonsensical decisions, like you mention, by releasing a piece of content on Xmas eve.

Job design has been getting worse and worse every expansion, and every expansion Yoshi dangles a carrot in front of us telling us "next time it will be better, a rework is coming this time for real", and it never does. No one expects the 8.0 rework to fix the issues people have with job design in the game.

All of the issues involving third party tools are of his own doing. By reneging on his promise prior to 2.0 launch of an addon API he has lost the ability to control what is okay, and what is not okay. By ignoring the overwhelming demand for some sort of parser, he has allowed feature creep to create tools such as triggernometry and cactbot. By making the login experience so basic, quicklauncher was created and everything that came along with it. Again, a failure on the lack of an official addon API.

Island sanctuary, the largest piece of casual content we got last expansion, was merely a chore that involved running around clicking single nodes hundreds of times and managing spreadsheets. Because heaven forbid we get something genuinely new instead of recycling the gathering node system.

Seasonal events are 1-2 quests long, mostly with just dialogue, instead of unique events and minigames like every other MMO on the market does.

I could go on, but the more I write, the more annoyed I get.

For a while I've described what I imagine his style is, which is sitting down creating a timeline with achievable goals in a consistent manner, in a conservative format, and doing exactly that. When FFXIV was death spiraling with 1.0 I think that is probably great, and not a sign of a bad developer; however, when its time to shine and do something wild.. even the most audacious examples are severed from the main game.

I've described it as a tree where the core never strengthens and they just add branches here and there wildly and sometimes haphazardly, afraid to affect the core. It's definitely a personal issue for this example but I think BLU is one of many, where they are afraid to do something wild with the core so they just set it off to the side (and at launch it was so conservative with minor changes to very specific spells you'd have a worse performing job than a regular one lol, the spells are a bit better designed now at least). You already exampled Island Sanctuary too. We clap for exploratory content, but for the most part it's far more narrowed borrwed power (like at least for the most part WoW allows that borrowed power to affect the whole expansion, meanwhile ours is just a zone or so). Not that I am saying borrowed power is an amazing thing (they should at least have left it alone in that expansion content, instead of purging it.. kind of silly), but the scope of our power is much smaller.

I think ultimately it all feels almost always safer, smaller, and less consequential - like go ahead and ignore it because you could forget it exists (because it's purposefully built off to the side).

While I don't feel passionately about the first statement, and I think these things can sometimes be choose the lessor of two bad choices (so you'll always get hate), I dislike that I want to like this post and feel like the game has an issue with its creative forces...


I've gone from happily taking breaks here and there (to offset content amounts / burnout, sure I have concerns, but time allowing familiarity to rest helped) to just thinking "this game not only could be so much more, but honestly really should be, they're resting on laurels".

As long as people keep whiteknighting for them instead of demanding what they are owed for a monthly sub as MMO players. The game wont change.

I am sure some things I've thought of are just bad, but I do get bewildered when some of the responses I've seen have absolutely no point except to say no or to try and budget / be an apologist for SE. Not everyone that disagrees is that person, to be clear, some will articulate their thoughts (most excited when I get quote farm responded as it means someone is attempting to respond sincerely), but definitely some, especially in the past, when asked to articulate had nothing more than what boiled down to "don't ask SE to work, the idea actually doesn't impact me but I still want to say no".

I have noted there are far less defensive individuals here than there used to be.. That concerns me, I think that is an example of game health (I think it would be better sign if there were more). I don't blame bad choices on people who disagree though, even literal white knights, SE is in charge here.. so SE needs to use their noggins, it's not the white knight's job, gray, or black knight, to be that.

Unfortunately money is a large part of their considerations, so I think honestly we're all to blame if SE says "yo I make choices based on money and you seem to be happily giving me that". So if we had to blame the players, I'd blame us all lol. Though I really want to say that should be SE's responsibility. We're not being paid for it, so we're not responsible .

Risk reduction -- the man, the myth, the legend.

Start by scrapping customization. Continue by scrapping compositionally-varied strategy. Plot the course by following prior trend. Deviate minimally.
/shrug

This one, though, is what annoys me most. If one builds their value around just keeping the ship sailing, the least one could do is preempt improvements against obvious storms or wear. Instead, he's mostly defaulted to over-promises, half-promises, "It's just not doable from a technical standpoint", and a bunch of backpedaling.

I recall literally telling people they're going to lose in the end, though I am surprised it took this long. We're here though, the addon scene in FFXIV is substantially more powerful than WoW's because FFXIV chose not to control the fire.