Job Complexity and Difficulty

[Valence]

Well, it wouldn't be the first time I've had a higher-skill player tell me I deserve nothing, and the end result would be that I just don't get to play any ranged DPS at all I guess. Though if other vets of other jobs got their way as well, I'm not sure there would be usable DPS jobs left for me period as they slide backwards into... whatever they were before my time. (And since I don't play healer or tank, welp.)

You shouldn't be left with nothing but easy and boring jobs of course, but I shouldn't be left with nothing but hard and complicated ones either, especially when the content its self is already doing its damnedest to skill-check me out of doing most of it that I don't really want my jobs being difficult too.

I'm a little amazed that what you took out of this was that you should have nothing, and I should have everything. And I'm actually sad that you continue to introduce unbridgeable gaps between jobs that have to be easy and jobs that can only be hard. I do not subscribe to that mindset and that's not what my values about good job design align with.

I just want my MCH and my ammo back. Where did I say it had to have an unreachable skill floor?

Edit: like honestly, if Yoshida was actually serious about changing their philosophy to make content for everyone at every piece of content instead of doing some content for a small portion and another piece of content later for another small portion of people, then perhaps they could also apply this to job design as well.

Like I said before, playing optimally won't remain "optional" and players WILL try and force others into spinning the same number of plates they are on those same jobs, and with the the power to kick/mute/blacklist, there's already tools in place to filter out the sub-optimal at every level. It happens right now even, over smaller inadequacies in job performance, and most of those were noob traps made by Square-Enix themselves (like Freecure) where people literally don't know any better. But once the ceiling gets raised this community will simultaneously raise the floor of what they deem acceptable when the complexities cease to be 1% of the job's expectation that can be safely ignored, and instead are 40-50% or more that determines if the run is efficient or a slog (or even a wipe). PVP already has "community enforced scripts" as it were, we would just be bringing that to PVE as well, and anyone who doesn't follow is going to be labeled "lethargic" and be hit with every consequence that comes with it.

Maybe you have a static/premade/friend group/free company that you roll with that would never give you any sort of grief over performance, but I don't really have that benefit, and I'll never buy into the lie again that "nobody cares in normal content" after what happened to me in Ivalice.

You're assuming a lot of things about me. I only had statics for savage/ultimate raiding (and extremes on the way). For the rest I tend to play solo 99% of the time and queue with randoms. If anything it's in a couple of HC statics that I've been given grief over performance (learning speed performance, imaginary or real), not in casual content. But I do understand that I cannot speak for players that struggle in casual content because I don't, and perhaps the only thing I struggle with in casual is luigi's mansions first two bosses (as an ex hardcore raider, I genuinely do).

Now that's out of the way, I want to point out that 1) people generally don't shit on party members because that's a surefire way to GM talks and 2) in all my 10 years of XIV history the overwhelming majority of the casuals that Ive ended up running casual content with were passable to mediocre with their job performance, and some died all the time, and nobody gave a crap about it.

If you however refer to how players constantly shit on "Oh I had another cure bot in my roulette today" then yes, it happens all the time. The community is as shitty and insecure as any other online community even with the current jobs: if anything, when the jobs were more complex, we didn't have more of this, in fact, perhaps less because today people just use the convenient excuse that "jobs are too brainless to fail" or some nonsense like that. I also do acknowledge that I'm actually very worried where the log rot mentality is moving the community to, especially with the appearance of tools like tomestone, but overall that's something you will encounter in challenging content, something that you don't run. Not in casual content.

I'm also talking from a perspective of someone that have played through a time where things were more complicated, and the skill floor wasn't always very accessible depending on the job and guess what, it was the same in casual content, nobody gave a crap, and everybody shit talked everybody behind the scenes on their FC chat or whatever. Nothing has changed one bit in my experience. It's not a difficulty or complexity problem, it's a community/human/species problem.