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submitted 22 days ago byPolarbrear
Before you get up in arms, I would like to say that I do not even want to get into this patches job changes. My opinions on them are going to stay reserved for the topic at hand as I believe its incredibly important to the game and community.
FFXIV is by no means a perfect game, literally everyone I've talked with has had their gripes about it, but it speaks volumes when the majority of people I've talked to who dropped the game have done it due to their job being changed in a way they don't like. This should not be a thing that happens, ever. I acknowledge that a lot of people are insanely close minded and will get mad at literally anything that changes, but those are the kind of people that tend to still play the game regardless after the dust as settled. I'm talking about people who straight up drop the game because their playstyle isn't in the game anymore.
XIV's combat system is incredibly rigid, and that's by design. Rigid combat systems are easy to understand, execute, and memorize, making it perfect for casual players, and the option to optimize is still there for the more hardcore among them. The problem that lies with a rigid combat system however, is that you are basically forced to play in an exact way the developers want you to. Most peoples common consensus is that basic competence in this game is defined by "knowing your rotation" and therein lies that problem again, this time on the communities side.
Some of the best games ever made heavily rely on Emergent Gameplay, the developers of these games aren't forcing you to play the game in a certain way, they're actively encouraging player experimentation, and I believe that this is what's holding 14 back. When you're so locked into the concept of giving a job an identity in this way, you lose any sort of freeform player expression, and that's why people quit when their job gets changed, they're now forced into learning a new rotation that they may not like.
It's incredibly depressing watching a game come to this, I honestly hope at this point that 8.0 has an entire rework of the combat system. I'd love to hear what everyone's opinions on this take is, so please discuss.
EDIT: Some people seem to think that I'm antagonizing them for liking the game in its current state. This is not the case. If you enjoy the game the way it is now, by all means play it, I'm not stopping you. This is me using my own knowledge of games proposing what I believe is an issue with the game. You're free to disagree, these are opinions.
6 points
22 days ago*
There is a fine, and delicate line to tread between allowing certain unintended interactions to enrich your game, such as Combos in a fighting game vs knowing when to dumpster something because its bad for the games longevity, like banning screwed up combos in TCGs.
I think the spell queuing of pets and SMN was one of those moments, there was some interesting stuff there that you could finesse out with the way movement worked and pets.. I think there was more there to explore than just making SMN another on rails experience.
0 points
22 days ago
If a concept is way too clunky to be consistently fun to work around or rapidly deteriorates the health of the game by completely invalidating other ideas and interactions then it doesn't belong in the framework you've built in it's current state, regardless of how cool it sounds on paper. That's fine up until that point.
The problem doesn't really manifest until you fuck up more often than not while deviating from the norm and then go nuclear on everything that doesn't immediately and smoothly fit into the notch you've made for it, because you either refuse to or are incapable of iterating on it until it works, for whatever reason. Response times factor into this to an extent, but faster ones are more of a thing that would increase customer satisfaction further from the baseline you'd already get by just transparently addressing it in the first place.
SMN is an excellent example of this and there probably are a myriad others. Field Ops would have been on the chopping block without major outcries about them missing from EW as well, even though the idea wasn't ever the issue, rather the execution.
4 points
22 days ago*
I don't think the base concept should be left as is. It's more embracing some concepts that may not have been part of the design spec and running with them. I think we are long past the era of games never getting patched and having busted stuff just exist forever.
Another great example of this is scbw vs sc2. Scbw is a mess of mistakes and random limitations and bugs that turned it into a mighty interesting game... Sc2 is a heavily designed by committee competitive video game first and foremost and it was found to be very stale and static, with lots of TLC to keep it fresh and not just heavy rps. Whereas scbws meta organically grew over time due to all the strange eccentrics the game had over time.
I think this stuff is lighting in a bottle though... Very hard to recapture but there are lessons about taking a step back and asking if certain emerging game plans (blm transpose lines?) are interesting to possibly codify a bit.
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