I Love Bloat Buttons <3

[Naebliss]

I seem like I'm in the minority when it comes to button bloat. I played Diablo II back in 2000. Tried Diablo III but it was boring. Why? Only 4 spells/abilities. I thought how was DII so fun!? You can only have two active at a time BUT you can keybind up to 12 using the F1-F12. Then Elder Scrolls Online, I watched anything I could for that game for an entire year before it came out, ShoddyCast ftw. It released & it to was boring! I haven't played since. Recently a friend brought up ESO & we we're talking about it. It's been 12 years & I was trying to remember what I disliked about it? WAIT, doesn't it only have 6 spells/abilities? I looked it up & nothings changed & of course, 5 keybinds and an ultimate.. BORING. Then World of Warcaft came out with "ability pruning" & got rid of those super niche spells that may have been minor, but if remembered & used correctly, gave you a slight edge & made the game fun. WHY?! It's very easy for me to set up 48 keybinds & use them on PC. Diablo IV comes out, only 4 spells, one for each title of the game! CAN'T PLAY IT, SO BORING! Maybe they added more at some point? I think I remember DIII letting you swap your 4 around for a different 4? WOW SO COOL. I want spells, I want abilities, I want to be be able to do so many different things. I miss FFXI & having to apply all those different buffs. I want to be able to level up my White Mage & cast spells on myself & fight as Reaper. The only good takeaway was the job swap, but I already have macros/keybinds set up that do just that, but the spells don't persist! I realize this is asking too much from an MMO & balancing & blah blah blah but that's what I want. I want to level up jobs individually. I want that GRIND BB! Give me skill based Runescape leveling & I'd eat it up. I always bragged about how superior FFXIV was because I have 48 keybinds set up & 36 of those were for combat. Now it seems they are catering to the casuals, to the console players, like always.

[Naebliss]

The direction they are taking the game scares me. I loved FF 1-11, 12 came out & it certainly was an interesting combat system, but they talked about turning FF an action combat RPG & when they said that I knew they were going to mess the series up all the way back in 2006! Then comes XIII & they shelved Ultimate & came out with Lightning's game instead. BORING combat. Linear maps. You start off in a new area & backtrack 5 feet & find a hidden chest, on every.. single.. map.. That's it. The music was horrendous, you got chocobo like music playing during a dramatic moment. Then XIV comes & it's like YES finally a return to normality, true RPG style, Nobuo Uematsu music. Magic in the making. 1.0 was a little rough, but they fixed it. Reborn 2.0 happens, AMAZING! Then XV is announced, hmm they're bringing Ultimate back, ooh open world?! TRASH LIVE ACTION COMBAT?! I haven't even bothered trying XVI because of the mixed reviews, though I want to have faith in Yoshi-P. I've recently been looking into a lot about Hideo Kojima (MGS fan since the 1998 Pizza Hut demo), his falling out with Konami, now Playstation & it scares me the direction the gaming industry could be taking games. The cheap mobile microtransaction money maker digital games. I don't need UI, I don't need a glowing trail telling me where to go. I don't need auto-travel. I want to play a game where I don't know what to do & have to simply explore to figure it out.

I don't want 16 keybinds. I want my 36.

[Carighan]

You will trivially be able to fix this yourself.

For example if a class like Dragoon has a 1-button combo doing 5 attacks, you can place it on the buttons 1-5, and voila, you can press 1,2,3,4,5 instead of just a single button. This is even the "bad" version of fixing this for yourself, all DT-stuff points towards you just being able to "uncombo" it anyways and place the 5 constituent skills separately if you prefer more buttons instead of less.

I mean you count F-buttons to swap your skill in D2 as valid UX, so this works for you, yes?

I don't want 16 keybinds. I want my 36.

Well good for you, the rest of us still want better designed classes though. You're free to bind as many keys as you like, so the new system gives flexibility. The current system only works for you, and similar people who equate pressing lots of buttons to somehow involved gameplay, not a mouse-reacts-to-stimulus-test. The new system works for both me (using autocombos) and you (uncomboing the autocombos). Win/win, right? You get your bloated mess, I get cleaner design.

[Ilisidi]

You will trivially be able to fix this yourself.

For example if a class like Dragoon has a 1-button combo doing 5 attacks, you can place it on the buttons 1-5, and voila, you can press 1,2,3,4,5 instead of just a single button. This is even the "bad" version of fixing this for yourself, all DT-stuff points towards you just being able to "uncombo" it anyways and place the 5 constituent skills separately if you prefer more buttons instead of less.

I mean you count F-buttons to swap your skill in D2 as valid UX, so this works for you, yes?



Well good for you, the rest of us still want better designed classes though. You're free to bind as many keys as you like, so the new system gives flexibility. The current system only works for you, and similar people who equate pressing lots of buttons to somehow involved gameplay, not a mouse-reacts-to-stimulus-test. The new system works for both me (using autocombos) and you (uncomboing the autocombos). Win/win, right? You get your bloated mess, I get cleaner design.

Placing the same looking glowy button five times is not going to help with anything, like seeing where in the rotation you are. So unless there's unbind option, that's not a useful suggestion at all

[Carighan]

Placing the same looking glowy button five times is not going to help with anything, like seeing where in the rotation you are. So unless there's unbind option, that's not a useful suggestion at all

You press 1,2,3,4,5 before. You press 1,2,3,4,5 afterwards. You don't need to see where in the rotation you are, there is no variance or flexibility. It's 1,2,3,4,5. That's in fact why it can be 1-buttoned at exactly 0 loss of gameplay depth.

[Ilisidi]

You press 1,2,3,4,5 before. You press 1,2,3,4,5 afterwards. You don't need to see where in the rotation you are, there is no variance or flexibility. It's 1,2,3,4,5. That's in fact why it can be 1-buttoned at exactly 0 loss of gameplay depth.

It's not only a loss of visual information but an addition of visual clutter. And you may play with the hotbars off, not everyone does and crosshotbars can't be turned off when in use, so there's still extra unnecessary blinking in the screen among all the other stuff blinking in the screen

[Carighan]

It's not only a loss of visual information but an addition of visual clutter. And you may play with the hotbars off, not everyone does and crosshotbars can't be turned off when in use, so there's still extra unnecessary blinking in the screen among all the other stuff blinking in the screen

Before, you could see whether you are at position 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 based on which button has the ants around it. Afterwards, you see whether you're at position 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 based on whether the icon of ability 1, ability 2, ability 3, ability 4 or ability 5 shows. What's the function difference? You can even turn the ants off if they annoy you.

Again, this is assuming you can't just un-combo things anyways, despite most current combos in PvE allowing that. So even the "worst case" is kinda a "yeah so whatever"-case.

[Moqi]

I think 16 buttons is too few and I was perfectly fine with 32, but also half of the buttons currently are just pointless. If there is no choice in what button to press it might as well be one.

[Allooutrick]

Some consolidation will be nice, like making provoke and shirk target based. Others, like branching melee combos, can benefit from it as well with no loss (see viper). Currently there's no nuance to your button choices and that, I think, is the real problem and one I hope gets fixed starting next expansion. My hope is the consolidation let's them fill space with more situational buttons.

[Carighan]

I think 16 buttons is too few and I was perfectly fine with 32, but also half of the buttons currently are just pointless. If there is no choice in what button to press it might as well be one.

That's exactly my take. Would I prefer actual use for all the buttons we have? Sure. But they don't, and except very very few examples had none since their inception, so removing them to de-bloat is the correct choice. There is no reason to have so many buttons when their only difference is the specific potency and the animation but no further mechanical or rotational interactions exist that cause gameplay to emerge from the constituent elements.