Comments from the Devs

[Gadritan]

I have to say i'm probably going to play GW2, however i'm curious, is FFXIV even worth 'NOT' uninstalling when i get home in a week?

Worth trying just for the fact that it's free, but honestly it's still a far cry from a fun game. It's interesting for a couple of weeks after each big patch, then it's just bleh. So maybe just keep it installed to check out the patches and hope that one day it's genuinely enjoyable.

GW2 looks like it smokes the ever living dogshit out of it, so if you end up playing that...can't imagine you spending much time on XIV. And believe me, I've tried to stick with it, I'm just finally hitting "that point."

[Priran]

Please, spare me. Finding pickup groups for tedious CoP missions took hours of shouting when the storyline was current.

this. level caps, no gear scaling, relatively difficult and certainly long missions along with a lack of reward meant that unless you were in a static or had saintly LS members willing to repeat missions, you probably never got past riverne access while CoP was "current". if you didn't have SMN or BLM leveled, finding a pickup group was hopeless.

[Grey Jorildyn]

CoP was pretty poor in its implementation of "needed" jobs, or at least how it made players think certain jobs were "needed". The invite thing was a big mess that could have been solved a lot of ways.

Now we see both SE and the majority players making the same mistakes. We still severely lack avenues of communication within the server (it's a game of who you know and too many people believe what the vocal elite say), and players who complain about "you need this job to beat it/do speed run".

Plain and simple--people need to understand that SE allows us to level up seven battle jobs and swap between them at will. This is a lot like XI but with greater degrees of freedom. Casuals and/or shitty players (purposely not lumping those together because they are different) complain about party setups and needed abilities or whatever, and at the end of the day they're dead wrong.

There will always be a way SE intends us to play the game. The hardcore and/or skilled players will see it, adapt, do that, then make it better each try. Everyone else is stuck speculating and never winning for various reasons, but one thing is common among them; they will bitch.

Sorry if this seems like an aside, but it is relevant to the discussion, only in terms of XIV and other general mmo problems.

[Lordender]

I just hope they do a much better job with making everyone useful in XIV than in XI. Bring the player not the class etc etc.

[Kaylia]

do you realize that the majority of the games in the FF series are single player rpgs and therefore entirely "soloable" in the same sense ff14's missions are?

I would rather take solo xp, and group mission, than group xp and solo mission. At least I would be able to make some progress on my own and unlock mission.

[Hyan]

No no no, Hyan's right! We have no idea what the Job system is going to bring. It could somehow signal a complete reverse of SE's philosophy of class balance over the last 10 years. Lets all have faith in his wisdom.

Yes, it could. Unless you seriously think that Tanaka = Yoshida.

[Cichy]

I just hope they do a much better job with making everyone useful in XIV than in XI. Bring the player not the class etc etc.

When I played XI I always felt that everything revolved around excluding people because of that.

[Celeras]

This is a game where you can level everything on a single character with tons of horizontal growth, just like XI. I never understood the "bring the player not the class" whiners in XI either, when it was your own dumbass fault that Drg was the only job you leveled over the course of the first three years and you idled in Jueno the rest of the time QQing.

But yeah, I'm probably the minority on that thought. Casuals.

[Charismatic]

DRG should never be made useful for anything because you can level WAR or SAM instead.
Is that what you're saying? Sounds dumb as all hell. Yeah, I can see why you'd be in the minority on that.

Despite being able to level multiple classes, there should be a good place in endgame for all of them... else why do they even exist? This shit is pretty much common sense.

Now, I agree that people shouldn't just sit and whine and do nothing about it. Either quit and stop all the whining or adjust, but does that mean there isn't a problem? Hell-to-the-fuck-nah. And the same problem is arising here, problems need to be fixed, not ignored.

[Grey Jorildyn]

Indeed. It does need to be fixed. The major drawback to said system is that not everyone wants to level a mage, or a certain DoW, they just wanna be what they wanna be, and there should not be any harm in that. But there is, there definitely is, and in giving players so much freedom, they've stunted game growth by designing the game around this feature. That's imo of course.

[dfdfpp]

I'm with Celeras on this. "The class" moved around and changed quite a bit even without S-E actually balancing anything at all, and when S-E did balance stuff the prior conceptions were often really hard to get rid of. We were often just whining about ourselves not knowing how to play the game or misjudging the difference between combination A and B.

[Hyan]

DRG should never be made useful for anything because you can level WAR or SAM instead. Is that what you're saying? Sounds dumb as all hell. Yeah, I can see why you'd be in the minority on that.

More like "it's not the end of the world if a job isn't the best at something".

And that's true- it wasn't for XI and it isn't so here.

Either way, they will have to do more than they did in XI because that's what the modern players demand. And I don't see why they wouldn't. They will go as far as they need to to keep the profits coming in. It's ultimately a small drop in the ocean compared to what lengths they are going with this game as-is.

That doesn't mean that there will be a better balance, but there will probably be more fluctuation. No long drought seasons for some jobs like in XI.

I'd rather have a ton of jobs with so-so balance than few jobs with a perfect balance. People will adapt (and not just in the ways the hardcore adapt). Players will look for like-minded people and end up in linkshells where they are accepted. They will play the not-so-popular jobs because they find them entertaining in one way or the other. Taking this opportunity away from them for absolute balance doesn't sound like a cool thing to me. It's not even a PvP game, and the PvE isn't that difficult.

Of course I am biased. I leveled PUP and DNC because I found them entertaining jobs to play as. I didn't use them for "serious" events but I did use 'em for events where no one gave a shit.

[Manako]

Yeah, I definitely hope that they are able to keep it so that all classes and be useful for group content.

In ffxi I was definitely a hardcore player way back in the day, but now between work and other games I realize that I'm forced to be casual. It's rough because I recognize I could be better, but w/e... Rather play than not play.

[Grey Jorildyn]

I think that is the effect of aging on the mmo genre in general. People either wanna be hardcore, have the mindset, and play as hard as they can when they can (semi-hardcore) or were hardcore and wanna play that way but don't have the time nor want to put in the effort because other things are more important (casual). That's the difference between casuals and bad players and why I don't lump them together. Life's a bitch and this is a game.

Going back to "the game", I too would rather have several so-so balances classes than a few perfectly balanced classes. When you break it down, the latter is impossible when you consider between-class balance, but not within-role balance. In other words, you can have two tank classes balances against one another, but one or both of those jobs imbalanced against the rest. Class balance is relative and while most of the arguing stems from dps meter analysis, we've also seen how poorly SE has tipped the scales in the mags arena in XIV. We saw THM be a veritable S-tier class for 9months and now it is reduced to a standard enfeebler/support mage out-of-the-box. It's a nicer fit both between-class and within-role (although some would argue the latter isn't true).

Hopefully these class adjustments and job additions they've got planned are a big game changer. This game needs it because, as what was already stated, class balance is an expectation of a modern mmo. SE can't afford to lose anymore of the market share trying to be original all the time.

[Spider-Dan]

Um, they tried solving the balance problems in this game by letting everyone use (almost) everything, and what did they get for their trouble? A bunch of whiners complaining that their class isn't "unique" enough. Simultaneously, when the two mage jobs have only the most basic of differences (cone AoE vs. radial AoE, even though the radial AoE alone is an incredible upgrade over, say, XI), the playerbase immediately declares the mage with the slightly-less-amazing AoE targeting completely useless.

[Grey Jorildyn]

Pre-patch the difference between con and thm was quite a bit more than just the AoE...

[Hyan]

Not really class balance but shifting the scales more often than not. Constant fluctuation that never really results in anything with closure, but hey, they keep trying, and all jobs hopefully get to be in the "OP" spotlight at one time or another.

The most important thing is to keep the actual intended roles relevant. I think we'll see some shift in that department soon enough. I think they'll change archer mechanics, for one, and do away with primary ranged non-mp dps for a mix of buffing and light dps.

Then the actual dps jobs will have a use (although there's still a problem between magic dps and melee dps, unless they give blm enfeebles).

[Kaiyoko]

All the classes should have purpose for using them imo. Each one should be given their situation that they are good at.

-COJ (or thm) best at healing but weak at nuking/dps
-THM (or coj) best at nuking/dps but weak at healing
-GLA best at tanking, low dps
-MRD best at slashing dmg
-PUG best at blunt dmg
-LNC best at piercing
-ARC standard piercing dmg but can range attack

The problem comes is why would you use arc over thm or lnc at that point. The answer would be you wouldn't unless you need distance and physical and/or piercing. It's a trade off, makes a lot of sense why ARC could become brd as well if that's how SE is looking at it.

[Gadritan]

Pre-patch the difference between con and thm was quite a bit more than just the AoE...

How so? You had to rank up both to be a "mage." Just like taking 1 DoW to 50 means jack diddly since you need all those cross class abilities as well. It's sub requirements all over again in a different form.

[Hiruke]

this. level caps, no gear scaling, relatively difficult and certainly long missions along with a lack of reward meant that unless you were in a static or had saintly LS members willing to repeat missions, you probably never got past riverne access while CoP was "current". if you didn't have SMN or BLM leveled, finding a pickup group was hopeless.

Don't get me wrong, I think the original CoP was too hard, as well (though, I was in a static, and was said saintly LS member), but given a choice between "walk from A to B" hard and "do this epicly difficult encounter" hard, I'd take the latter. It was fun to burn down the Ouryu mission with BLMs after the fact, but it was also fun to try to hobble together a party that could do it beforehand (and, eventually, win). PLD tank lol? As stupidly hard as that stuff was, that's also what made it memorable.

I'm honestly curious about something, though: If you didn't have an LS that could help you through CoP (while it was current), was there a huge drive to get through CoP? If so, why? (It's hard for me to see the other side, since I was never without such an LS.) Finding a pickup group for anything (including xp) was pretty hopeless, which is why I never did it unless I wanted to torture myself (though I do remember laughing plenty of times at pickup group Promyvions I joined for some sick reason).

Ideally, though, the missions would have a "healthy" amount of difficulty (not insanely difficult, but not "burn through this on your botanist" easy), and there would be rewarding encounters outside of missions that were very difficult. If you want missions to just be a storybook, well... this is a game, ne? I've never believed games should rely on a good story, graphics, whatever to make up for poor game play (which is the core of the game).

Currently, the only thing difficult about 14 is finding the will to log on. Presumably this will get fixed in a year or two.