a puzzle game where the greatest puzzle is figuring out why it’s like that

Even When It’s Good Now, It Will Always Get Worse

Final Fantasy XIV is a game where people will, routinely, ask if the developers know what the fuck they’re doing. I believe this question to be simultaneously unfair, and also not mean enough. The developers of FFXIV know how to do good game design, and that game design is apparent in ways both visible and not, some so well hidden that you could spend thousand of hours playing and never catch their influence on you.

Unfortunately, the developers of FFXIV are also so utterly terrified of someone disliking that design, they’ll smash the load-bearing pillars holding it up if it means someone stops complaining about it blocking the view.

Everything ties back to this core issue. Without being able to push against problematic direct feedback, nothing will be solved.

…Because They Keep Throwing Away Their Own Game

As a general rule, when you take feedback in any game, it’s healthy to assume that players know what they’re feeling, that they may or may not understand the problem making them feel that way, and, above all else, that they do not know the best solution, because they are players and not people getting paid a wage to make a videogame. Recognizing the best, cleanest solution, one that doesn’t cause even more problems later down the line, is supposed to be the job of the developer.

Instead, Final Fantasy XIV routinely hands that responsibility to their own base… and as it turns out, when you ask players what to do about a problem, the answer will always be “make the problem go away”. Why would they care about consequences they don’t fully understand?

This creates the feedback loop that defines nearly everything wrong with the game. Nothing gets truly reworked, or revamped, or even merely modified. What happens, every time a job is “changed”, is an active removal of aspects.

People will blame the expansion that their favorite job was ruined as when this phenomena started, but from looking back as far as the beta test for A Realm Reborn, I’m pretty sure they’ve never not operated like this. With the sole exception of Warrior,^[1] they were lopping off things left and right from the moment the game first released under a new development team, always in response to a problem that someone wanted gone.

At the start of every expansion, it almost looks like there’s additions. Look, here’s new buttons! New jobs! New fights, that may or may not contain new things! But, almost always, those come in place of things being thrown away, all across the board, with some of the new things being literal coats of paint over the old. Over the course of that expansion, even more things get removed; jobs lose secondary effects on their buttons, or lose those buttons outright, fights get sanded down of all the endearing parts of previous ones, and, in the rare event one of the new jobs does something a little too interesting, that becomes something inexperienced players might fail at, even when the interesting thing is so miniscule it couldn’t possibly matter to them.

It doesn’t need to always be a removal that’s bad for the game to enforce this loop, there simply needs to be enough bad changes at all to set a psychological death spiral. Nobody wants to play a game where the parts they find fun might disappear forever; to actively pursue a design philosophy of removal is to make it so every major patch comes not with excitement of what comes next, but with a general dread of figuring out what it is they’re going to “streamline”, and that makes people leave before they can be disappointed.

You can tell the most common removals are all lazy outs, too, because most of the time, no thought is put into how to properly remove them. Take Dragoon’s old Dragon Sight. This, once, was a single-target buff that gave a bright, visible tether to the party member you selected, that would disappear (and remove the buff) if you went too far away. Because you could assume that the buff affects who’s being hit with the jumprope, the game made sure pets, like the ones from Summoner or Machinist, weren’t affected, keeping the mechanics consistent with the visuals.

When, mid-Endwalker, they removed this tethering effect from the buff, this mechanical distinction was no longer necessary, yet they forgot to give pets the damage buff back. For the rest of the expansion, you’d have a Dragon Sight priority list where two DPS, both of which being ostensibly designed to have high raw damage output under such a buff, were lower ranked than at least one tank. I had to explain why this was to someone once, and in that moment, I realized the explanation boils down to “yeah they just nuke things without fully remembering what it affects sometimes”.

One might think, at some point, they’d try to fix that. Naturally, the button was removed entirely before it could.

…And They Don’t Know Their Audience Enough For Any Of It To Help

So, let’s give ourselves a random removal as an example. In 6.0, Astrologian had its ability to switch between its heals having a secondary effect of either regen, or shield healing, defaulting only to regen. The rationale given by Square Enix begins and ends with the fact that, usually, regen was better, and ergo they have no need for shields.

I’m about to ask a question, one that will be asked, repeatedly, throughout the rest of this post:

Who is this for?

Certainly not the hardcore audience, who either doesn’t care about balance (they’re going to always pick the better things anyways), or scoffed at them refusing to recognize that the “worse” option wasn’t always worse, merely more situational than others. It was definitely not the casual audience, as I know of many of them who only picked the job because it could do both regen and shield healing, allowing them to switch to whatever their co-healer didn’t have. I know of one who dropped the job forever because of that change! None of them cared if one was technically “better”, especially not when it’s only “better” in raids they weren’t doing.

I think people routinely blame the nefarious, yet vaguely-defined groups of casuals on these patches, and I consider that deeply unfair to casuals. Casuals don’t care if Gunbreaker’s Bloodfest is on a 90 second or 120 second cooldown, they’re not pressing it on cooldown in the first place!

No, this change was meant for Square Enix’s hypothetical audience, the target of every major gameplay change they ever make: the niche PF-obsessive raider, who thinks that because a stranger might do something inoptimal, means that it must not be allowed to exist, lest someone else annoy them with it.

To be clear, I don’t think Square Enix specifically thinks this is their audience. It’s just the only rational audience that these exist for, and it’s also not a real demographic, a fraction (forum-posting) of a fraction (party finder) of a fraction (raider) of a real group that’s worth listening to. Even if they were, they’re inherently un-satisfiable; their problem, after all, is that someone else might fuck up, in hard content, contained within the co-operative MMORPG where other people’s actions have consequences. To even humor them in the first place means choosing not to believe in your own game!

This is a direct result of trying to follow all feedback like all of it is equal in representation. It is healthy to understand how your players feel! Arguably, the most niche ones may even provide interesting perspectives! But it is also a very bad thing to follow the instructions of every complaint to a T without fully recognizing the consequences of doing so. Of course nobody thinks the developers know what they’re doing; they’ll buff jobs that were already good, they’ll nerf jobs already in the gutter, they’ll remove all the things people liked from jobs and keep all the parts nobody cared for, that’s what happens when you exclusively listen to people who represent nobody else but themselves!

A wide majority of the things I will be explaining below are not a result of bad design in and of itself, but a result of good design being slowly ripped apart, patch after patch, oftentimes because of one guy on a forum saying it was bad. All of the issues I list here could be resolved, but without a fundamental change in how they parse feedback, and who they parse it from, new issues will simply crop up in their place.

People are going to complain when Square Enix finally figures it out, and we know this, because even with extremely mild positive changes to fight design in Dawntrail, people already are. This could have gone down more peacefully in 2019, or 2021, before half a decade of players being conditioned into thinking everything should be tuned for people who yell the loudest, but unfortunately it’s 2025 and you’ve raised too many 20-40 year old children on junk food.^[2]

They can eat their veggies, and they’re going to have to eventually. You just have to stomach the crying.

The Single Worst Onboarding Experience I’ve Ever Seen

FFXIV has a very big, very long-running curse with its expansions: until you get to whatever the most recent expansion’s maximum level is (currently 100), your job is, as a result of job actions getting lopped off every other patch, and replaced with things you get later in level, not fully complete. How bad this gets varies from job to job, but some jobs take until level 90 to get a real kit, or a full base game and and four expansions in. It is extremely easy to get very bad habits on how to play, as a result of the game not even giving the slightest indication on very basic aspects of your rotation mattering until several expansions.

This is then combined with main scenario dungeons and trials that try to walk you into mechanics so slowly, an elderly man might pass you by. Instead of trying to give people their toolkits earlier, Square thought it would be a good idea to manually remake every single MSQ dungeon before Shadowbringers, with the explicit intent of them being as slow, and incomplete, as your jobs are! This means it’s extremely easy to spend weeks, possibly even months if you’re only playing a few hours a night, on shit that simply isn’t fun.

The entire time, you’re bombarded with so many important-sounding quests, especially in ARR. Some of these blue plus icons might just lead you to a dungeon that was tuned for toolkits that haven’t existed in over a decade, some of them lead to things you need to perform basic functionality, like glamours and melding, and some you literally need, as in MSQ required, except they don’t tell you this until you’re already walled by it.

And god forbid, for all those hundreds of hours you dump into content that may or may not matter, you actually keep your HUD, keybinds and character configurations at their defaults. Contrary to what the two (2) hotbars visible at the start of your journey might imply, there is not a single job that doesn’t require at least three hotbars if not more, and by the time you realize having sprint bound to the equals key was a mistake, it might have already been too late for your muscle memory, and you’ll be awkwardly having to click on your own hotbar for the rest of your life. You’ll also be slogging around on tank controls, because in order to move like a normal third-person game after the year 2005, you have to open up an options menu (no, not that one, the other one), in that menu, you have to select Legacy, and then also make sure to check Disable camera pivot.

Let me reiterate that last one. To play Final Fantasy XIV like a modern third person videogame, you go into a random menu, to change movement, and then, to do modern movement, you select LEGACY MOVEMENT.

And that’s at least an option easily accessible to you, being the first thing that shows up in the window! There are hundreds of options here, some of which are both things that really shouldn’t be an option to turn off (like showing the enemy’s HP %), yet is in fact turned off by default (also like showing the enemy’s HP %), and some of which are actively harmful to your play, in ways that aren’t instantly obvious, until you have to suddenly figure out what to uncheck mid-dungeon because you don’t even remember which one did it. The worst part is, because FFXIV is deathly allergic to using vocabulary a normal MMO player might know, half of these options don’t mean anything to you. We don’t do loser shit like cooldowns here, buddy, we only deal in RECAST TIMERS.

Unless you follow an online guide,^[3] telling you what to enable and disable, what to bind your hotbars to, what quests you need to pick, and what your job is supposed to do, if you try to eschew all that hand-holding, you will spend so much time on boring, sluggish garbage, trying to slog through everything in the hopes you get to where you swore your friends said was the good part, and come to the conclusion that it’s not worth the journey.

…And The Gear Sync Makes It Even Worse

So, you’re leveling your job, with all your level 90 tome gear. You click on high-level dungeon roulette, pretending it wasn’t going to give you a level 50 dungeon, and naturally it looks like you’re about to enter a level 50 dungeon.

So, what’s your gear look like at that level?

You’d want to say it sort of transforms, numerically, into something like the Augmented Ironworks gear, right? Like, you try to make the big stat of the level 90 gear similar to the big stat of the Ironworks gear, make the small stat similar to the other small stat, maybe adjust the small stat a little to compensate for materia slots, and call it a day. That sounds simple enough, right?

Okay, here’s, in order, an explainer of what actually happens when you sync down.

• Every substat is lowered to the level’s max value.

This concludes the explanation.

Yes, really. Rather than try, even a little bit, to tune gear to be like the gear it’s supposed to be like, it just dumps a bunch of substats to what would technically be a number that could exist at that level and calls it a day. This means, at higher levels, when you have stats that well pass the substat cap of lower levels, you are literally doing more damage when downsyncing by merely existing with high-level gear. You can see what this results in by looking at old ultimates; everyone goes in with as much downsynced gear as they can, because it’s almost always strictly better to, and then you get to watch a big scary Bahamut hit its HP breakpoint roughly five hours before it was meant to.

Obviously, ultimates (being fights that are designed to be “timeless”) are most vulnerable to this quirk, but in terms of how much it breaks, everything in ARR gets affected by it most. There’s a reason people grumble when a roulette gives them actual, high level content, after all, the median ARR trial is treated as such a joke with enough substats, they’re all over within two to three minutes.

This may seem merely stupid, and not that huge of a deal, but one of the big causes of older expansions feeling like such jokes is because of damage rendering those older fights to be even more of a joke. When you aren’t actually synced to the level, you have imbalances that come from not being synced to the level!

Once You Get To The Endgame, It’s Not Much Better

So, let’s say you were the type to tolerate all that bullshit, and you actually managed to get to the endgame. Congratulations! I sure hope you didn’t think all this needless obfuscation and overwhelming options actually came with depth, because as we all know, depth is outlawed in this game, and attempts at providing it come with three years’ imprisonment.

FFXIV’s job design contains what I like to refer to as factory line rotations, because like a machine in a factory, it only appears menacing when you haven’t worked at it. Look at all these buttons that you press, and look at that two minute window. Ten quadrillion buttons in twenty seconds! So busy! That must mean it’s pretty impressive, right? And then you hit a training dummy for maybe ten minutes, and you realize the only hard part is understanding the order. The second you know where to hit these buttons, in this order, you simply repeat that order, forever.

You press your filler, sometimes it’s a 1-2-3, sometimes it’s slightly more buttons, and sometimes it’s even fewer buttons. You build a resource, of some sort. You wait for everyone to press their raid buffs, and then you roll your face on the keyboard, making sure all the attacks with cooldowns are used in that static 20 second window, and then you do it all over again.

That’s the entire game, and if you ever make the mistake of raiding, that’s what you will be doing for dozens, if not hundreds of hours.

Look to Viper, if you want to see the most depressing example of this. All those gauges, all these moves with different animations, the fact that the job has a different animation set that puts you in a completely different idle stance—and it’s all for nothing. You press filler, filler they’ve managed to shove into fewer buttons than ever, and then you hold, and then when a bunch of buffs appear on your screen, you dump it all. None of it exists to provide something interesting to your gameplay; it exists so, for a split second, you might be tricked into thinking it does.

That fancy extra stance, with all those new animations? None of that does anything, you can right click off every single buff you have, it exists exclusively because you happened to press one button specifically. Square Enix, honest to god, got their animation team to spend extra time and resources on an entire idle animation to make it look like something interesting was happening.

Not complexity, not depth, but a set of pretty, ornate curtains, put up in the hopes you don’t look behind it, a design philosophy of a high skill floor, and a ceiling that touches it.

Who is this for? What does this game possibly stand to gain from toolkits that are, simultaneously, inaccessible and pointless? I emphasize the facade aspect of this because, truly, I think that’s the answer. It exists, not to help new players out, nor to give anyone more dedicated something more, but in the hopes that players from eras gone by don’t notice that their favorite job isn’t there anymore, and hasn’t been there for a long while. That tedium of the 1-2-3 may, in fact, be the only thing standing between them and the reality that the “good old days” they talk so much about was so, so long ago.

An act of gaslighting so wide-reaching, it turns everything, the leveling experience, the first hours of someone’s play, the years of fights that were once someone’s reason they fell in love with the game, all into this generic sludge that might resemble design. It depresses me, because you can tell real, dedicated people worked really hard on a lot of that stuff. Sastasha was a dungeon that you had a near-full rotational toolkit for! The Vault was known for things other than the cutscene that happened after! And, god, those Alexander raids are pumped full of some of the most gorgeous aesthetics I’ve ever seen in any sort of fantasy setting in my whole life, and then you compare it to what they play like in the modern day. Press 1 into 2 into 3. Forget to mitigate the tankbusters, except they don’t do any damage so it doesn’t matter. Press a cooldown, perhaps even more than one, if someone liked your job enough to give you that many at level 60. Watch as every boss dies instantly.

I bet, if the bosses in there were alive for just a bit longer, they all would have done something really cool. I sure wish I got to know what.

…And The Entire Healer Role Is The Worst Case

Disconnect from anything you know about this game for a moment.

Imagine you’re controlling a little videogame character with two aspects, running and jumping. You can run, and you can jump! Perhaps when put in equal measure, you could maybe, in fact, ascertain that the character might be about running and jumping.

But let’s say it’s not as balanced as that. Let’s say all of your running is just one key, on your keyboard. Hold SHIFT or whatever, WASD to move, that’s how you run. Let’s then say, purely hypothetically, that every other key on the keyboard is not just jump, but a different jump. Q jumps vertically. 7 jumps at a 45 degree angle, 8 jumps at a 50 degree angle. O just does that cappy bounce shit from Super Mario Odyssey, and so on, for every single key.

You might think to yourself, “wow. I must be playing a game that gets really serious about jumping!” You’d probably want to imagine what a game that requires this many jumps could possibly play like, since they wouldn’t make this many jumps if all of them didn’t have a purpose, right?

And then you find out that instead of being in a platformer, you’re just on a bridge that requires you run forward.

What’s that? You thought your jumps did something? No, silly, that’s only for when you fall off—oh, and don’t think even if you did fall off, or even if this bridge wasn’t here, any of these jumps would matter. Half of these jumping buttons contradict one another, after all! What use is a 5-degree difference in jump arcs when there’s almost no reason not to pick one arc and adjust mid-air? Hell, why bother with those jumps at all, you have that shit they use in Odyssey to cross 50-meter gaps! Some of these jumps are very obviously strictly better than others! And, like, even if you could, hypothetically, find a use in everything here, once you actually know how to move around, you can probably scale it down to maybe three or four jump buttons, for 90% of situations, to cover the only platforms you’d need to get to, and then you’d ignore the rest of the keyboard in the process.

If all goes well, you don’t even use a majority of the tool you have, and even if it doesn’t, you still don’t even use a majority of the tools you have. None of it matters; you have so many jumps, and instead, the most important button is the one that sets $IS_RUNNING to 1 when you hold it down.

If you’re someone who generally assumes actions are coded into programs for a reason, this all sounds pretty stupid. If you’re not, I’d recommend learning a second job once you finish leveling White Mage. You might even learn a thing or two about videogames!

You can try to get mad at me, but don’t lie to yourself: open up a max level healer right now, and mouse over every button you have. Did you know Krasis can go on other people? Are you aware that Dissipation has an actual healing use, and isn’t just +300 potency every three minutes if you’re feeling sweaty? Have you even pressed Synastry before, intentionally, and had it matter?^[4] We have had more than one ultimate designed exclusively in the hopes you would actually use all your healing tools, and even still, they can’t make you do it!

All of this exists in the place of buttons that could actually, god forbid, augment damage. According to people much older to this game than I, this was bad, because healers would be scared and not know how to heal if they had a rotation, and then nobody would play healer. This is, ostensibly, the fix—which would be shocking news to me, and to anyone else who’s had to deal with 0 DPS White Mages, or Scholars who don’t know what a GCD heal is, or any party finder ever struggling to fill the green slots at all.

Who is this for? To continue designing like this drives aways all the dedicated healers who kept sticking around, while very few of the people who might ostensibly benefit from a healing-centric kit care to take advantage of it. When people who “like” healing in this game tell you it’s good, the best case scenario they imagine their job has fun is in a party with seven of the dumbest idiots on the planet, as everyone else but them constantly eats shit.

If it takes everyone else failing to play the game correctly for your job to have fun, what does that imply in a game where everyone needs to work together?

…Even Though It Was Apparently Meant To Be Balanced???

I’ll be kind to SE here, actually. I’m also going to, like, talk about fighting games for a few paragraphs, but I swear these two sentences are related.

See, the belief that drives “balance” in this game is actually a very, very big problem across all modern games where tier lists exist. Just take a look at a game like Street Fighter 6, and you’ll see a game that’s technically balanced, as in the worst characters are, technically, not too bad in relation to the best… but usage stats still indicate people treat it like it is. What gives?

It’s the biggest curse every serious service game creates, both in PvP and PvE: if you don’t give people a reason to pick someone “worse”, they’ll always pick someone better. In this case, SF6 has a lot of characters that all merge into one big sludge pile with a sign next to it reading all-rounder with offensive counterpokes, and as a result, people simply pick the best in the mass and ignore everything else. Elena, one of the characters all the way on the right side, is not a bad character by any stretch, but why ever pick her, in a game where you can instead pick Cammy? It’s a decision that almost exclusively comes with upsides; you’d get a lot of the same strengths, but with better matchups.

To this end, I won’t be mean to SE for the end result. For the sake of completion, though, I do still need to show why the current status of game balance is as cooked as it is.

I’ll use, as an example, the most recent ultimate, Futures Rewritten (FRU). Look at the clears on launch, and you’ll very quickly catch that all but three slots are locked in. Barring one or two exceptions, every clear had a Paladin, a Dark Knight, an Astrologian, a Scholar, and a Pictomancer. Pictomancer was routinely singled out, as it was a legitimate numerically-unfair balance issue… but that’s not the case for any of the supports, they were simply universally chosen anyways.

Once again, you have to ask: why pick something worse? If you’re someone who honestly and truly cares about getting a clear ASAP, what is your rationale for picking, say, Warrior over Paladin? Paladin has just as many support tools, that don’t require heal checks to be useful, and because of all your spells you have to press anyways, you don’t lose damage whenever you’re out of melee range. Gunbreaker is technically sometimes higher damage than Dark Knight, but not only does Dark Knight have more single-target mitigation to give to the party, you also have a significantly easier time finding damage, as Dark Knight is the job built around holding until a bunch of buffs appear on the computer screen.

It doesn’t matter that Sage isn’t actually worse than Scholar in particularly meaningful ways, or even that White Mage is literally fine in this fight specifically.^[5] In real world scenarios, players don’t think in terms of mere numerical gaps, they think in terms of what’s best for them. Unless they’re very very much more comfortable on one job than another—an exceptionally rare problem to have, in a game where all the jobs feel so similar—they can just pick the better thing, and then save time from having to deal with the minor intricacies of other, worse jobs that simply don’t matter.

This all comes from balance philosophy; rather than trying to keep a job’s identity intact, balance patches are repeatedly designed to weaken strengths, and remove weaknesses, when identities primarily revolve around those strengths and weaknesses. Most of the character’s in SF6’s all-rounder sludge pile are, contrary to what you might think, not meant to be all-rounders! They just kind of are, as a consequence of removing what would make them anything else, and much like every other developer, Capcom’s only recently discovered what a mistake that is to true balance.

If the better jobs in FFXIV had particularly meaningful weaknesses, you might actually consider not using them… but of course, weaknesses are considered problems to be patched out. At least in this case, it’s an industry-wide problem.

…And Nobody Even Tries To Use Any Of It

So, all these rotational changes don’t give people anything to do for the hours they’re raiding, they aren’t particularly great for casuals, they turn every job into mush, and it’s not even resulting in jobs getting anywhere near equal usage.

But, like, okay. Surely, even if there’s some, uh, ease-of-use issues with having most of your jobs require 30 buttons to perform the functions of 10, you should at the very least see fewer people fuck up those buttons, right? Like, we’ve seen how few buttons Viper has. There’s no way people are fucking up Viper. Right?

Ahahaha. Hahahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa

This is from a Viper player, doing savage content, and not even on the first floor. I did not cherry pick this, I honest-to-god clicked on a random log from a report on FFLogs, and checked the first melee I saw. I proceeded to do this several more times, and it took about 10 random checks to find someone with a higher GCD uptime than 80%, a number I wouldn’t even consider good.

Yeah, there’s a small hitch in Square Enix’s grand scheme of simplification: how complicated the order of pressing buttons can become is irrelevant when they aren’t interacting with it in the first place. You can’t fix people choosing not to use the tools they’re given! Most players—including savage raiders, and sometimes including PEOPLE WHO WILLINGLY ENTER ULTIMATES—are not even playing the game correctly enough for any of this to matter. All of this shit being torn down, all of the homogeny and quality-of-life, every single thing that has made anyone mad, is all a waste of time when people fundamentally misunderstand that you need to be hitting buttons.

I cannot stress enough how, by merely choosing to press buttons instead of not pressing buttons, you will lap so many of the people online, with thousands of hours of playtime, who think they know more than you. That’s where we’re at, here! Knowing you can press a button the moment it’s been 1.5-2.5 seconds since the last time you pressed a button means you will always have strictly better game knowledge!

Who is this for? It’s definitely not these guys, and these are the ones who can get to savage in the first place. That leads us back to the bitter PF players; not the hardcore audience who’d want more, nor the casual audience who couldn’t care less, but this fine line where a player simultaneously knows how to play on a base level, but doesn’t know enough to deal with any friction.

What could this game possibly stand to gain by designing exclusively for that?

Also Putting Everyone’s Big Cooldowns At The Same Time Was A Mistake (But You Knew That)

If you’ve existed within a hundred feet of a FFXIV youtuber, or FFXIV player, or sometimes not even an FFXIV player, you’ve probably heard a thousand times over why the two minute meta is a mess, so I’ll throw the summary in a footnote for the few who haven’t heard of it here^[6] and hand you another reason to hate it:

Surely, Square Enix definitely accounts for buffs stacking multiplicatively, right?

When I say multiplicatively, I mean, like, if you have a 10% buff to damage, and another 10% buff to damage, that’s not a 20% buff in total, it’s 21%, because you multiply it like DAMAGE * 1.1 * 1.1 instead of DAMAGE * 1.2. This sounds small, but consider that if you’re, say, a sweaty raider doing week 1 savage prog, you’re almost definitely walking in with 4-6 raid buffs, all multiplying on top of each other. Perhaps, not so coincidentally, not only is FFXIV routinely failing to balance raid buffs, like how they couldn’t account for Pictomancer’s Starry Muse being buffed every time another DPS was buffed, they also fail to balance jobs like Dark Knight, being seemingly incapable of recognizing that being a job where almost all of your potency can exist in the burst window is pretty good with buff stack.

…

Listen. They have to know, right. I know I already called them cowards at least once, and also I’m definitely reinforcing that every other paragraph but like, no, I’m not so bitter about a videogame that I can be this mean to them. They’re the ones that should have all the data on this shit, I have to be losing it, right?

Even if I think the overall direction’s cooked, like, there’s so many fucking people trying their best over there, man. All it would take is one person, high enough on the food chain, to know that you can’t just ignore math. There’s no possible way they’ve been balancing while ignoring how their own 2-minute meta stacks together, because they’re worried someone might be sad if they can’t line up the buffs designed to be perfectly lined up.

It’s not possible, right?

Right?

Right, I’m losing it. Will not humor alternate explanations, moving on.

Literally Does Not Function Correctly At High Ping

Did you know that lag compensation has existed in online videogames since, at the very latest, the release of QuakeWorld in December of 1996?

So. In a world where code worked the way you or I want it to, you would hit a button, and then you’d be locked out of pressing another button for a bit, to ensure your animation plays out a fair amount (usually around 600ms), and then you can hit another button. However, for reasons I’m sure some guy in 2013 had a perfectly good reason for justifying at the time, that 600ms timer doesn’t actually start until you get a server response, making your actual animation lock time 600ms + [PING]. This means that if I, living in the west coast of NA, was hitting some buttons, the animation lock time would be around 625ms.

If you live around New York, that would mean an extra tenth of a second is added, meaning ten actions with animation locks, of any kind, would give you a full second less to act overall.

Even in the alternate universe where this extra delay doesn’t explicitly break multiple jobs (and boy, does it ever), timing is one of the most important aspects of all of game design. The most well-structured fighting games, the nicest feeling platformers, and the smoothest racing games are defined by how their developers time animations and states, not merely by how fast or slow they are, but by how exact, the precise amounts of delay and responsiveness to make every punch and turn satisfying. It is not an exaggeration to say it’s the most important part of a game, and in a lot of ways, what makes a game good or bad can almost come down exclusively to it.

If I tried to fully explain why it’s really bad for a videogame’s most essential timing to be dictated by distance to the server, I’d have such an ungodly number of examples to go through that it would take longer than it takes to fix it.

Because, yeah, we know what to do about it! There’s been third-party tools doing this shit for longer than I’ve been playing, and I’ve been playing for over two expansions! You don’t even have to worry about someone abusing that quirk through client-modifying shenanigans because, as it turns out, it’s extremely easy for a server that detects actions to tell if someone’s hitting buttons too quickly for standard play!

Why is this still a problem. Why did you spend an entire expansion patching jobs to solve relatively minor quirks of this problem, and not the actual problem. I’m going to cry, I swear to god—

And Also A Bunch Of Other Problems That Don’t Need More Than A Paragraph Each

• FFXIV doesn’t have a “casual content” problem, so much as it has a problem with content SE thinks is casual, but is actually for people who give credible death threats over Animal Crossing town layouts. I can’t get into too much detail over this fact, because if I do, this word count is getting doubled for me ranting over Island Sanctuary, and that probably deserves its own article outright.
• I know Samurai’s Kaiten was not a real button, but you’ve gotta realize what it says about who you’re taking feedback from when one of the most complained-about removals has no meaningful change before or after removal to hardcores, yet breaks the muscle memory of everyone who isn’t. The outcry over that button, specifically, should’ve said everything about who you were truly designing for and why!
• The continued existence of race stats that cap out in the whole double digits is really, really funny, up until I run into an Abyssos tank situation where my specific race didn’t hit an arbitrary attack stat breakpoint, and I have to either pony up ten bucks for a fantasia, have less health, or do less damage. In that case, it’s still funny, but in a sort of depressing “someone forgot to turn off the lights on the abandoned bit of the New York subway line and now we can see the rats over there” sense.
• There’s an entire, deeply complicated issue with FPS and the GCD (or more specifically, frame synchronization) that can affect some jobs, especially the faster ones. It’s hard to explain the why, but easy to describe the consequences: Monk has different gearsets depending on your framerate, because a 1.95s GCD on a capped 60hz monitor is actually more like 1.96s, most of the time. Like with the animation lock, you can fix it with third party tools; unlike the animation lock, the “fix” is insanely jank and involves intentionally freezing the game to keep things synchronized, which occasionally bugs out and results in the game freezing for seconds at a time.^[7] Shockingly, I think most developers would disagree with implementing that one.
• There will never be a perfect Astrologian design in FFXIV; this is because Arcsys has already made it, and then put it into a fighting game it wasn’t particularly designed for.^[8] However, there is still a chance to create the second best Astrologian design, which is one you actually keep for more than two years.