It's been a week since "Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail" launched (this includes the Early Access period, symbolically to spread out the server load). In the meantime, Square Enix has already promised a number of job adjustments based on player feedback, as posted on the news site yesterday.

Among these changes, game director Naoki Yoshida (Yosi-P) is investigating what one of the new melee combat jobs from the expansion can do for the poor Viper, a vicious warrior who wields twin swords and sometimes glues them together like Darth Maul.

"We have received feedback on how busy their skill rotation is. As such, we are planning several improvements, including easing the direction and changing the effects of some actions," Yosi-P writes. These changes will be implemented in patch 7.05, and we intend to make small adjustments to the scope of certain abilities in patch 7.01." It will take a while, but we want to address player concerns as best we can."

For background: as a job, Viper has "positionals" on some abilities that deal additional damage from behind or to the side of the enemy. This means that Viper needs to slide left or right after most combos.

However, many players (myself included) are not troubled at all, so one wonders who on earth actually filed these complaints.

"Seriously guys, Viper is too busy," one player wrote after getting 2,000 upvotes on the game's main subreddit.

"Even after 10 years, you can't put a directional device in your job. It may be hard at first, but the euphoria when you finally figure something out is one of the best feelings. I hope Viper continues to be a busy job because more complex work needs to be done."

"It seems too early to make any changes to Viper." Another player wrote on the ffxivdiscussion subreddit in response to the news posting." [It] looks like people are not taking the time to hit the dummy a little first and get used to the job, but [instead] go to the forum to complain."

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Turning to the official English forum, there is even more confusion." While it is easy enough to understand once you get the hang of it, there is plenty of room left to grow. Changing classes so early on seems like an overreaction," wrote one player. Another thread creator suggested, "Maybe we shouldn't listen to players' enthusiastic comments about how 'difficult' Viper is when it has been on the market for less than a week."

Some complainers point out that this overreaction is due to Square Enix prioritizing the feedback of Japanese forum players over English-speaking players.

Indeed, Square, as a developer, has a nasty habit of ignoring non-JP-specific issues, such as the "clipping" effects of the game's poor netcode.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell (through machine translation), some Japanese players are discussing the strict position requirements of the job before the news is announced, while others are as confused as their English-speaking counterparts.

Personally speaking, I feel that Viper is too straightforward at the moment. I'm leveling alongside Ninja while completing the main scenario quests, but its core rotation is mainly MMO whack-a-mole.

That said, players may be reading a little too much into this announcement. Just because there are plans to look into a position does not mean that all positions will be removed from that job. I wonder if the "mitigation" here is, for example, to improve the color contrast of the hotbar icons, or to indicate which position is next on the job's UI elements.

One of the reasons I enjoy this is because on my UI, I put the important debuff timers on a transparent hotbar to the left of the character. In Viper, I actually put the branching combo attacks (which light up to show the correct direction) there. Usually that spot is reserved just for important buffs or abilities that I use once a minute.

I think another part of the problem is that Viper's Job Quest, for all the kindness in the world it says, does a comically bad job of actually teaching anything. I'm overwhelmed by the completely meaningless technobabble about branching combos, and the tooltips feel like the ingredients list on the back of a medicine bottle.

Perhaps you should target the dummies and draw your own conclusions. Especially since Viper ultimately boils down to "press the buttons that the UI tells you to press and occasionally shuffle around to attack the flanks and rear." It's incredibly simple.

In any case, I hope Yosi-P and co-team see the direct question marks flying over players' heads and change course. It takes more than five days to get used to a new job, and as many players have pointed out, it's not a bad thing if the viper is somewhat complicated. Still, I haven't tried Pictomancer yet, and I think there are a few happy accidents in my future, so if Square Enix massacres my son, I'll probably give up and become Bob Ross or something.