In light of recent talks about better responding to and acknowledging player feedback, I wanted to return and share some details about my experience with trust and FFXIV and where I lost that trust. I have not played any amount of Dawntrail content at all. I haven't been subbed for roughly a year, and I have no intention of actually logging in to play FFXIV at this time. However, I chose to buy a month's sub to share my feelings here because, despite having given up on the current expansion, I do still care about this game and I want to see it succeed, not fail.

The reason I quit was solely a response to the mediocre state of job design--more specifically for me healer design. I won't sugarcoat it. Job design in FFXIV has become dull and lifeless. I do not feel any love or passion for making a fun, exciting game when I look at how jobs have changed and how they continue to change. And it has been like this for multiple expansions. Every patch seems to do nothing but continue the combat design team's obsession with aggressive simplification. And those of us who have been trying to give feedback for the last six years have been ignored and disregarded.

When I sat down to try and at least do the MSQ of Dawntrail last year, I couldn't bring myself to start because there is no job in the game that I am willing to play through what little required combat encounters the MSQ would inevitably force me through. The healers I loved playing have been long gone. Sage failed to live up to the expectation of the job fantasy it was pitched as having--a more intricate DPS oriented healer with an offensive play style. And that sucks because that's exactly the job fantasy I really hoped for coming out of Shadowbringers.

Back in 2024, Yoshi P made a bold statement that job identity would be a focal point of the expansion after Dawntrail. But I have lost faith in FFXIV's ability to live up to that lofty promise. The only thing that will restore my trust in FFXIV and Yoshi P will be a genuine response to the six years of backlog job design feedback (which will be 7 when 8.0 releases) and a conscious effort to try and restore fun and excitement back into all jobs. That doesn't need to mean jobs become hard and punishing either. We had a healthy middle ground before, and we can have it again.

But that leads me to the title of this thread... FFXIV has a long history of putting gameplay last when it comes to actually showcasing new expansion content. We didn't even get the jobs actions trailer for Dawntrail until two months prior to its launch, and the media tour information later than that. But by that time, any feedback players might have has no time to be considered because the game's basically at launch.

Yoshi P, NA community management team, combat design team... If you really want to try and restore the trust of players like me--those of us who have been significantly dissatisfied with the ongoing direction of job design because it's not just me, it's a lot of people....Start sharing your plans for 8.0 job design now. Before Dawntrail, you were willing to share the work in progress development of the graphics update and respond to feedback as it rolled in. While it seems there are still lingering criticisms of the update, there was a lot of change in direct response to feedback. Job design needs that same respect. This is the time to communicate and be transparent with us. More transparency would go a very long way in building better trust with your playerbase. Show us what you're working on. Ask us what we think. Please stop hiding job changes until the last possible second before an expansion's release, and please stop simplifying jobs every single patch in Dawntrail.

This post will more than likely fall on deaf ears and disappear into the sea of dead, abandoned threads here, but any chance I have to try and make this game better I still want to take. I really want to see news of 8.0 and feel excited again. I want to come back and enjoy this game again. My criticism is not from a place of hate, but a place of passion.