UI tweak to show more details on our stats (courtesy of Blizzard's D3 beta posts)

[RAIST]

Blizzard has recently added a button to their equip screen that pops out a scrolling pane that lists calculated stats like ACC, DPS....all KINDS of goodies in there. Granted, something like this would not be viewable in real time in FFXI....but it would at least allow us to pull it up in game instead of having to rely on a third party app or sitting down with a calculator and scratch paper.....



Not sure on just how it could be implemented with the consoles in mind, PC clients should be pretty straight-forward though. Just thought I'd throw it out there so the Dev team can actually see what other people are doing on this issue to <hopefully> give them some ideas.

[Dragonlord]

Something like this would be much appreciated. We as a community have figured out how most if not all of our stats have been calculated. It's about time we get to view them without using a calculator.

I remember SE bringing up wanting to show stats such as acc, but haven't given any updates about when or how far along they are to implementing it.

[Lushipur]

just give us an official apps that do that

[Feliciaa]

This is a really good idea. I'm a RNG main and it's very annoying that everything ranged related is hidden. We can't see our R.atk, R.acc, and most gear just says "enhance Snap Shot" with no indication of how much said piece really adds, which is VERY important when deciding gear options. Even some kind of distance display would go a long way because at the moment you have to just know where the best spot is to maximize ranged damage.

I'm not bashing this game but even Star Wars the Old Republic displays stuff like DPS, acc, crit rate, and what different stats do. I'm only mentioning this because it's VERY helpful when you're not sure what something does or you could be new to a certain job and you might not understand what's most important to focus on.

[Ophannus]

I feel like Japanese style games have a policy of anti-transparency. The developers probably want players to know as little as possible about battle mechanics and stats. I bet my kraken club that there are dozens if not hundreds of items with hidden/latent effects that we STILL don't know about or will never know about. There are NM pop conditions we may never know and there are modifiers and attributes for spells/weapon skills/job abilities that exist but are still unknown. I'm fairly confident SE will never show us derived statistics like accuracy/evasion/crit% etc.

[Arcon]

I feel like Japanese style games have a policy of anti-transparency. The developers probably want players to know as little as possible about battle mechanics and stats.

It has always bugged me why, though. Do they feel it adds mystery? Do they think it will make people more interested in trying random weapons without any stats on? Well, mystery maybe, but not in a good way. Because, while certain testing-interested parties may get a kick out of it, most people just wanna play the game. They wanna get their entertainment from fighting monsters and reading stories, while developing their characters. They don't wanna spend hours trying to figure out how certain gear works, especially gear that probably won't ever be useful for them anyway.

Just like keeping game mechanics from us. In a game where people need to work together to overcome hard battles, we want to know how to play it. I'm actually dumbfounded at the fact that the developers don't see that. By now we largely know what Attack and STR do, but when the game was first released, why did the developers even bother putting the amount of STR and Attack we get on equipment? What good is knowing the stats, if we don't know what they do? Why won't they tell us how TH works? Why won't they tell us the formulas for synthing chances, magical damage, skill increase?

As I said, by now we have much of it figured out, but still some stuff eludes us. There's tons of gear that we have no idea what it does, even if it's in the item description (I'm looking at you, Goetia Gloves +2). I don't get why it's so hard for the developer team to step in and just tell us how stuff works. If you think it adds mystery, it doesn't. It only adds frustration and confuses your playerbase.

[Annahya]

It has always bugged me why, though. Do they feel it adds mystery? Do they think it will make people more interested in trying random weapons without any stats on? Well, mystery maybe, but not in a good way. Because, while certain testing-interested parties may get a kick out of it, most people just wanna play the game. They wanna get their entertainment from fighting monsters and reading stories, while developing their characters. They don't wanna spend hours trying to figure out how certain gear works, especially gear that probably won't ever be useful for them anyway.

Just like keeping game mechanics from us. In a game where people need to work together to overcome hard battles, we want to know how to play it. I'm actually dumbfounded at the fact that the developers don't see that. By now we largely know what Attack and STR do, but when the game was first released, why did the developers even bother putting the amount of STR and Attack we get on equipment? What good is knowing the stats, if we don't know what they do? Why won't they tell us how TH works? Why won't they tell us the formulas for synthing chances, magical damage, skill increase?

As I said, by now we have much of it figured out, but still some stuff eludes us. There's tons of gear that we have no idea what it does, even if it's in the item description (I'm looking at you, Goetia Gloves +2). I don't get why it's so hard for the developer team to step in and just tell us how stuff works. If you think it adds mystery, it doesn't. It only adds frustration and confuses your playerbase.

This, and the rest of the conversation, just reminded me of the Great Axe "Foolkiller."

I too, would love "derived stats" to appear on our character sheet. Obviously, things like actual accuracy percentage (hit rate) and what not, require comparison to a monster to display; and I can understand their desire to hide this information to make difficult the task of calculating monster stats. But if something is directly provided to a given formula by our character sheet, ie. Ranged Attack, Evasion, Haste, Double/Triple Attack, etc., why can it not be summed up and displayed on our sheet with Attack and Defense?

That said, I wouldn't mind something that parses some limited data for us being available, either. Perhaps something added to the HP/MP/TP display that updates every so-many combat rounds with an accuracy percentage and DPS value - it wouldn't have to be real time, for me, just enough info to indicate how new gear choices impact performance, and a rough guideline as to how I perform against one mob type versus another. Hell, I would even take a fliterable, single message that appears when the monster is defeated that reads "Against that foe, you feel as though you hit X% of the time, and dealt about Y damage per second!" Something that you could scroll up and eyeball over the course of several fights and get an idea of how you are doing.

As a Ranger, myself, I don't mind the "sweet spot" being something that you have to suss out on the fly - it makes ranged attacks feel more active and somewhat player-skill based (whether it is true or not, it at least feels that way).

Though, to be honest, if given a choice between parsing/character sheet/data changes, and some significant cosmetic changes, I would probably choose cosmetic changes.

For instance: I would like the chat filters and font colors to be separated by individual message types, with provided examples as the categories. Sometimes it feels as though the way they are currently grouped is arcane and inscruitable. I am not sure if this would be a considerable memory drain, or other resource problem, but I would really like this level of customization over my UI, and would put up with arbitrary mystery regarding what my axe does if I could seriously customize how my UI looks. I am probably strange in this regard, and I am okay with that.

/shrug

But it would be really nice if we got some more news on this subject - it has been a while since the moogles have let anything slip...

(Edit: Clarified poor wording.)

[saevel]

They could easily display accuracy and evasion, just not hit rate nor evade rate which are two separate things. They could also show magic resistance. All they need to do is drop the equip screen's bottom portion lower and add more fields.

[Annahya]

They could easily display accuracy and evasion, just not hit rate nor evade rate which are two separate things. They could also show magic resistance. All they need to do is drop the equip screen's bottom portion lower and add more fields.

You are correct, I am guilty of "3AM wording" in my post - what I meant was hit rate, et al.; sorry about that. Was thinking in tems of "accuracy percentage" as opposed to direct +acc.

Thank you for the correction. I should post less when I should be sleeping.

I am going to edit the previous post to include the correction.

[Mirabelle]

Also would like to see RATT and RACC stats as well as have monster checks set to my gun skill not my Vulcan staff skill.