The slow decline of FFXIV, a summary.

[ForsakenRoe]

I mostly agree about introducing more failure and raising the skill ceiling of the game overall, but I wanna point out that casuals didn't "went by just fine" during HW. HW was the period where, to my experience, the playerbase was at its most toxic because of the job design. Job design was convoluted, complex and satisfying to optimize maybe, but also unintuitive for most jobs, and a time where balance was at its most out of wack. It made it so casual players were scorned by midcore/regular players and some hardcore players for not mastering what they thought should be the baseline of job usage. It's one of the many reasons for the simplification that started in Stormblood (notably the cross-class skills system, remember that casuals were supposed to "know" they had to level up Thaumaturge for Swiftcast or Lancer for Invigorate).

So, rather than, idk... teach the casual players how to play their jobs with ingame resources (Hall of the Novice, Stone Sky Sea giving, to practice, the rotation the devs used for coming up with the potency balance values for the job, etc), SE threw out the baby, the bathwater, and most of the bathroom, and instead just said 'reduce the skill ceiling of the jobs, so it's easier for the learning player to reach the 'acceptable performance level' for their Job'. Issue is, they STILL don't tell the casual player HOW to get to that level, you STILL have to go on external sites like IcyVeins or The Balance to learn your rotation. So they haven't solved anything, and gave up a massive portion of the skill ceiling to achieve that 'nothing'.

Opposite experiences and bubbles i suppose haha, I remember the toxicity against casuals clear as day. Of course hardcore players have always been somewhat elitist, but the game-design during Heavensward favored this kind of behavior, which is not so much the case today.

Even back in ARR, casuals at least tried out the first two fights of a raid tier just for fun, but the focus on complexity, be it on job or encounter design, made Gordias and Midas a pain to play for casual audiences, hence Creator catering back to them more, making raiding more accessible (also, Gordias was also kinda shit altogether).

And then Diadem, which was supposed to be a more casual experience and the focus of the expansion, also shit the bed. For a good while, the only decent content you could really do casually in XIV were EXs and dungeons.

All in all I wanted to say that I agree with your overall point, but wanted to clarify that HW really was a rough time for the first 3 patches, and while I think casual content needs more opportunities for failure to keep being engaging and job design needs to be more interactive, I also think we shouldn't look back to HW for that.

Lets take these in turn:

- Hardcore Toxic players will always be toxic to players they deem to be 'substandard'. This has nothing to do with 'casual vs hardcore', you can very easily be a 'toxic casual'. Or a 'toxic low-skilled player' , Dunning-Kruger effect exists for this very reason. This is not a reason to reduce the complexity of the Jobs as far as SE did, however. A toxic player will be toxic, regardless of how easy/hard the Jobs are to play. SE could make SMN's rotation all auto-swap in the next 'optimal button' on one hotbar slot, akin to using the onebutton macro, and a toxic player would still find a way to tell the SMN they're playing wrong (for example, by saying 'why are you playing SMN when PCT exists', as seems to happen now occasionally). The TOS exists for this reason, to protect casual players from this toxicity. We didn't need to have SCH lose all of its DOTS going from SB to SHB to 'prevent toxicity', because I've seen plenty of toxicity regardless. In fact, I remember a SCH telling me that I was trolling by using SGE, because 'its less damage'. So I checked. It was SIXTY less DPS than SCH at the time (P8S, week 1 prog). So, SE's not solved the 'toxicity' issues, and in fact, with the constant shifting of potency into less and less buttons, the filler spell is now so vital to your damage output, that losing a single cast is far more punishing to the damage output than it used to be. In ARR, when we had... 4? DOTS to juggle as SCH (Bio, Bio2, Miasma, Shadowflare), Ruin's potency was 80. Broil is now 310. Every time you lose a Broil now due to needing to Succor, or Adlo, or because you are moving, you're losing 4 ARR Ruin casts. The 'reduced punishment factor' of the current design is literally skin deep, look below the surface for even a moment and you quickly realize that SE hasn't solved anything, they've just moved the problem, and slightly obscured it to make it look like they 'solved' it

- Yeh, and Creator was well received by the more casual side of the playerbase. But, they were still using the HW 'complicated rotations' that were apparently so divisive. So, maybe it wasn't the rotations that were the issue. Or, more accurately, it was most likely the combination of 'complex encounter', and 'complex job rotation', together, that made Gordias so unapproachable. But, as we've now seen, Encounter design can't necessarily carry a fight. Look at P7S, absolutely awful fight, 6 minutes of bugger all and then BOOM, Inviolate Purgation, everyone's dead. Strap in for 6 more minutes of bugger all, to get back to the prog point and try to see 'what just happened' again. On the flip side, I don't recall anyone complaining about the EX roulette being boring to do in HW, or SB, nearly as much as currently, and I think a lot of the reason for that, IS the Job rotations of the time. Even if you're a SCH fighting something as simple as... IDK, Mr Sloppy in Baelsar's Wall, yeh, maybe you're skilled enough to be able to handle it all with no GCD healing used. But you can still find some engagement in trying to keep your 4 different DOT timers juggled successfully

- Diadem being hot garbage has nothing to do with the Job design. The removal of 3 DOTs from SCH would not have magically made Diadem more fun to play as a SCH, for example. You're right, that at one point, the endgame was massively lacking (Gordias too hard, Thordan EX was too unapproachable to be a viable 'catchup' method). But that's my point. Look at the 'Sources of Complexity' ratio again, we have Encounter:Job as the two main sources of complexity. If the endgame is lacking in content, then everyone's doing casual content by default, such as EX roulettes. There's no avenue for Encounter to be the source of complexity in that level of content (else it'd gatekeep less skilled players out of being able to get tehir weekly tomestones), to keep the 'hardcore' players engaged in such a patch. So, the Job complexity, which is theoretically optional (you don't have to juggle all 4 DOTs as a HW SCH, and if someone tells you that you do, you can report them via TOS) helps to carry the content, regardless of how complex (or not) the fight is. Now we have the reverse, the Job complexity isn't enough to carry certain pieces of content.

- Yeh, the first 2 patches (HW itself, and 3.1) were shaky, but from what I hear, Midas was a step in the right direction in terms of difficulty, and Creator was so well received it's been the difficulty template for Savage ever since. But here's the question: If Creator was so well received in 3.4, a whole year before SB came out... Why was SE not able to recognise that, and pivot their design direction going into SB? Were they unable to see 'oh maybe the problem was we overcooked the Encounter side of the ratio, now that we toned that down, people are loving it. So, maybe we don't need to adjust the Jobs quite as hard as we originally planned'? It seems like they're locked into a certain design pipeline literally months in advance, and anything that comes up has no effect on the plans. People could have told SE, from the SB Beta/JobActionTrailer/Media Tour (and they did) that the WHM Lily system would flop, but SE insisted on barrelling ahead with it. Surprise, it was a flop, but it remained a flop for TWO YEARS. They just couldn't pivot in response to the feedback that 'WHM kinda bad' for whatever reason.


Feels like they have an idea they want to do, and they stick to it regardless of what challenges the idea's feasibility. Seraphism's VFX are so 'not-SCH-identity' that even JP was asking about it (and got told 'yeh but crazy changes like this are good sometimes right?' by YP), WHM's 'Pure Healer' identity in SB being such a catastrophe for its place in the PF that SE... lobotomized the other two healers down to WHM's level (and only relented on Energy Drain after even JP complained about it), all the tanks lost their 'maintain aggro vs maximise no-tankstance uptime' minigame and had it replaced with... nothing, leading to them feeling like 'melee DPS but you do 50% less damage', AST cards are probably going to be the subject of much arguing going into 8.0, Viper getting changed a couple weeks after release in response to... feedback we can't see as players, because it was internal I guess? And of course, PCT is still ridiculous in any fight with downtime (to the point of trivializing even the most endgame of content in terms of damage checks), and has yet to receive adjustments (though maybe 7.2 will do something about it).