FFXIV Has A HUGE Problem with Job Design...

imagine for a moment that you're a job designer for final fantasy xiv now before you go and spend your new game dev riches on that one blow up doll you've been eyeing for a while how about we go over your rule real quick consider this your orientation of sorts as a job designer your goal is to make jobs that not only work well with the existing game mechanics but also keep players coming back for more you want a feedback loop that hooks them on dopamine and rewards them for executing simple yet fulfilling mechanics properly sounds pretty simple right wrong there's still one more thing the curse of the console you're designing with controller players in mind and because you want this game to be accessible to as many potential customers as possible that means jobs with skills that fit on the first hop bar are especially good that gives you 16 major buttons that you expect to be pressed frequently and another 16 minor buttons that even a cure one spammer can swap to when you use every other minute or so any button above this magic number is problematic for job design because three hot bars are very annoying to cycle through on controller now because scholar and astrologian are suffering from this you choose to ignore them because they're filthy little healers samurai though now that's a dps a big boy job that has way too many minor buttons to fit on the hop bar so your task is to fix that your mind may instantly fly to guden and senei couldn't that simply upgrade into guden 2 a stronger potency aoe with falloff damage or heck you could turn shoha 2 into a trait upgrade with the same thing you could even make iki shoten turn into oginamikiri like you've done with other jobs any or all of these changes would be good ones to make but you remember that you're supposed to simplify gameplay mechanics across the board after all that is what you did with summoner the numbers show more people play the job now whereas it was just a niche playstyle before players clearly prefer simplicity so let's rethink a bit is there anything we could remove that saves buttons and makes things appeal to casual players well that's probably kite 10 right when you think about it it's just an obligatory button you press right before every ei jutsu so why not just remove it entirely since it doesn't matter it won't change the play style and everyone will be happy not only that you're gonna let their big skills crit every single time damn you deserve a race players are gonna love it except they don't you can take off that dust cap right now because your job simulator is over well well well just look at all of you you get a glimpse at what healers go through and you just can't handle it i'm giving you a hard time sucks but before i go further into this i want to let you know a couple of things one i'm not complaining that the game itself is too easy easy and hard are completely subjective and that's a really pointless argument to have i am going to talk about the deletion and pruning of job skills that are core to gameplay though because it is impossible for anyone to understand the thought process behind some of these decisions so here's the thing as much as they want to give you the illusion that they're down to earth and not mark zuckerberg levels of out of touch square enix is a company they're here to make a profit and when they make decisions you love or you hate it's always done in the name of the bottom line trust me they're not working on island sanctuary just to make me happy they're doing it so i'll get addicted to that and maintain myself and damn do they know me well if the devs could make more money by making players unhappy they would and they have why do you think new hairstyles are no longer given to the player automatically because by getting you to play pvp or run deep dungeons or farm mgp they're making you engage with game mechanics that could get you hooked on that form of content if nothing else they've got you going until you get that item the reasoning that kaiten was removed to reduce button bloat is at best a half truth because kaiten does require a little decision making not a lot but you'll be punished with not having enough kinky for your ei jutsu if you go around button mashing shin tin willy nilly yeah kaiten may have only taken one brain cell to use properly but the difference between using one brain cell and using absolutely no brain cells whatsoever can have a huge effect on job satisfaction you're stepping not only on muscle memory from dedicated players but you're removing a fun little wind-up animation that rewards you for proper kinky management by powering up one of your epic gamer moves what's not to love for a casual either at best this decision is neutral and at worst you're harming the experience of both casual you don't pay my subtypes and hardcore spreadsheets are my body logs or my blood types all at the same time so while the removal of chitin is pretty bad in my opinion i think we should have seen this coming it started with every healer getting reduced to two buttons and then the highly controversial summoner rework like it or not this is the current direction of 14 jobs will continue to get easier and lose mechanics for as long as kleenex sees that as the profitable thing to do and while it will make the game more accessible for a handful of new players i don't think this is the best strategy long term i think when the baseline content is very approachable as is making the jobs very simple as well will eventually put you in a situation where 95 of content is easy to complete and there's no real sense of progression when it comes to improving your own gameplay are we at that point yet for some jobs yes for some jobs no do i think samurai will still be fun to play probably do i think losing kite 10 is a big deal yes actually because take it from a former healer maine if taking it away from you makes their job easier they will absolutely do it and they won't just stop at kaiten after all hakazee is just an obligatory button you have to press before every gcd combo why not just throw it away and let us start combos with jinpoo or shifu or hell why don't we just throw away shifu and hakaze keep genpoo and make that give us both the skill speed and damage buff getting sent would be much faster and way more accessible that way right yeah simplification can go on and on up until the point that your entire rotation is hitting one single button it's just a matter of where you draw the line between too much thought to enjoy and too thoughtless to feel satisfied you and i might draw that line in different places but make no mistake that there is a line for every person i just so happen to draw minor chitin sense myself as a casual samurai and many samurai mains believe it's central to the gameplay loop it added choice reward and punishment to the kinky gate without it the kanki gauge is effectively just the shinton gates and ironically enough having an entire gauge for just one skill with a lackluster animation a scholar it's bad job design i'm not trying to be a doomer or make everyone freak out and overreact but the deaths have shown a pattern that might not be the absolute best path to take going forward that's all i'm saying i think having easy content and engaging jobs is a good strategy but having easy content and brain dead jobs is uh pretty cringe take it from someone who could probably apply to be a cringe mentor and get approved as for what we can do about this absolutely flooding the official forums did seem to work for getting male vieira on board and considering it's just job skill you might not even have to wait over two years to get it basically if you hate this change make it very hard for them to ignore that you hate it that is unfortunately the only advice that i can really give i promise my next video will be a post i just had to join the kite in simple wave this time what's that quote when they came for the healers i said nothing because i was not a healer when they came for the er pierce i said nothing because i wasn't an ear wait that's not entirely true where was i going with this anyway thanks so much for your understanding i appreciate you very much and i'll see you next week gamers [Music] you

Channel: Lucy Pyre

Views: 137,299

Keywords: ffxiv, ff14, final fantasy xiv, final fantasy 14, square enix, squeenix, yoshi p, devs, game devs, job design, samurai, kaiten, 6.1, changes, updates, job changes, job updates, skill, skill removal, skills removed, skill removed, kaitent, this video is going to get more chair lucy same person accusations im sure, sam, dps, dps changes

Id: 502gpaH-zNE

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 06 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/ledditorino]

On OP's video there are 3,5K Likes & 92 Dislikes - a 97.5% positive ratio

For another example I just opened the 4 most recent criticism videos with negative clickbait thumbnails from Xeno (Housing market, new hairstyles, new PvP and Job Changes), the respective ratios are as follows: 100%, 99.1%, 73.7%, 94.3%

There's your answer, OP (and all other narrative-seekers/validators in this thread making stuff up). Sorry that you got baited by a fun chart that Asmon made for content's sake, but criticism has ever been present in this game and is generally welcomed, just like any other game or MMO.

Though all you guys remember are the huge blow-ups, like Quin, and associate that with how the community reacts to actual criticism, so your view is probably scewed as an outsider, as there is no reason for you to know about the day-by-day stuff and only ever hear about the handful of absolute worst takes getting their respective absolute worst reactions.

[u/baylaust]

I understand the reasoning and design philosophy that led to these changes, but I also think they could have a problem moving forward.

There has been a lot of discussion in the community about how the classes are feeling increasingly interchangeable and similar, and these changes will definitely fuel those discussions further. The unfortunate truth is that there's no easy solution here.

The classes being simpler is what makes switching jobs and trying new things so much more appealing, in a genre that's always eager to immediately pinpoint the objective "best" class to use. On top of that, a significant chunk of the player base (including myself) play on PS4. Meaning controller support, which makes button bloat a HUGE concern for the team (especially for an issue that will slowly creep in with any MMO in the style of WoW or FF). At the same time, each class needs a unique identity outside of the aesthetic of it all, and part of Samurai's was Kenki management, something that Kaiten was CRITICAL for: making sure you're always able to double your damage on your most powerful attacks.

On top of that, this will also impact synergy with other classes. I main a Dragoon, and one of the Dragoon's party buffs is Battle Litany, a party-wide crit rate buff of 15%. If Samurai is going to have auto-crits to compensate for the loss of Kaiten, guess what? Battle Litany is now useless on them, just like on Warrior, another job whose burst window relies on auto-crits.

[u/[deleted]]

Yeah, the devs started a trend of simplifying/streamlining the jobs back in Stormblood and they've been monotonically moving in that direction ever since. The community has been hashing out this conversation over and over again over the past 5 years.

There's a few forces at play here that are always brought up:

1. If you have an MMO where part of the design is that every job gets 3 new buttons every 2 years, then eventually you have too many buttons. WoW hit this point in MoP and had to start pruning down in WoD. FF has been trying to creatively confront this problem for years now, through outright pruning or overhauling jobs. The reality is that when you have an MMO like this running for 8+ years, you're going to have to prune at some point; or start introducing borrowed power systems.

2. Jobs in HW were just waaay too clunky and waaay too punishing. I know that the community loves to reminisce about HW job design, but that shit was janky. SE really wanted to move away from that direction and make raiding more accessible in Stormblood.

3. Like Lucy says, this game has to be Controller accessible, and that necessitates keeping the number of buttons down. The easiest way to do it is to remove 'filler' buttons like kaiten.

4. The devs are steering the design of the game in the direction where all jobs are homogenized to have 2 minute burst windows and raid buffs. Outliers (like NIN having a 1 minute burst) are slowly being cut out.

So yeah, it's an ongoing thing. Many of the healing jobs and SMN have been lobotomized recently, and these changes tend to be received positively by casuals and negatively by raiders. Overall though, casuals tend to be the target audience so they get catered to first.

[u/LuxySt]

I really wanted to discuss about it but it seems impossible in this subreddit lol

[u/BlastTyrant2112]

I main Dragoon and it's only been improved since I've started playing, so it's whatever for me.

[u/NebulaGray88]

Nothing to say other than I wholeheartedly agree with Lucy and Chair. Classes should be unique in most aspects, including difficulty. And this is coming from a former Dancer main turned healer. I like healing, but it's legitimately braindead in anything below Savage and some Extremes. The game is already casual enough as it is, they dont need to dumb it down even more. They should learn the difference between QoL changes and difficulty changes.

[u/Hunterino_Stupidino]

I Will miss kaiten 😔

[u/Kupogasm]

I see the issue they're trying to solve, and can see how they might think some abilities would be better as passives - because it is a button bloat solution. I wish they doubled up abilities more (sam sticker combs could be 4 buttons instead of 6 for example). Clean ass PVP bars comes to mind (not that clean though, that's toooo clean for all the time).

If you are a controller player - there are some good guides out there to make setting up your XHBs make sense. It's not intuitive to make a good controller set up, and that might be part of the issue too.

[u/sh4dowbunny]

I play paladin on FF and when I played WoW, I played aff lock. My paladin, in FF right now, has almost as many keybinds as my warlock, with pet management, and target=focus binds for coil, fear, counterspell. A paladin...

I'm 100% okay with FF removing some OGCD abilities in order to cut down on this bloat.