An alternative idea to allowing parsing: The License Board

Prologue

This is purely an idea and I am aware that it's extraordinarily unlikely that this will ever reach the dev team's ears but I have been contemplating about the matter for a while now and would just like to share how I would tackle the issue that I want to address, which reads as follows:

A lot of people, especially raiders, end up getting access gear from already having bought everything they could on their main class for esoterics or the newly introduced Alexander Savage Tokens. Leveling a class is pretty straight forward and doesn't require much knowledge of the job to get it done, even if it may take a while as a result of not harvesting the job's full potential. At the end of the day we sometimes meet people with really high level gear that play as if they've just reciently reached max level with the class and haven't even tinkered with their new abilities much, to the dismay of a few duty finder groups. A lot of people want, as a result of this, public global parsing so that we can get an idea of ourselves (and others) performances better and can find out if we have to improve and where we can improve. As FFXIV likes to build references to older titles I want to present a different take on the matter: The License-System from Final Fantasy XII.

How would it work?

Final Fantasy XIV needs some sort of practice grounds for jobs as I believe they're already a work in progress. What they could do, is add a sequence of trials (give it 10 for Levels 1-50, 5 advanced ones at Level 50, 5 from Level 50-60 and 5 advanced ones at Level 60 totalling 25 Trials).

Taking the example of THM/BLM they could start with something simple as "Use Transpose to switch between Astral Fire and Umbral Ice successfully 3 times" for the first trial to "Wager depending on the number of enemies whether or not to use Fire I or Fire II" for something early/intermediate to "Maintain Enochian for 3 minutes" as an advanced/final trial.
Completing a trial earns you the appropriate license and certain gear, next to a level requirement, requires an appropriate license level for the class to wield it. (Say i160 gear would require Black Mage License 20, Alexander Normal Gear Black Mage License 23 and Alexander Savage Gear Black Mage License 25).
It could even be taken to the pinnacle of being made a requirement to access certain higher level/expert duties instead of locking it behind the classic item level requirement.

This would mean that the player needs to obtain this degree of knowledge of any class before being able to equip higher level gear - which in return should hopefully increase the playerbase's skill level without the need for public parsing - and FFXII players might smirk at the reference.

Epilogue

What do you guys think of the idea? What would you ammend or do you have a completely different take on the subject? Feel free to contribute, even if it is just for fun's sake.

With regards,
Kanri

I think that your idea is crazy... not the part about job based trials, we have discussed this several times in the past, but the idea of locking gear behind it. That's even more extreme than content gating.

Our current system of overgearing serves one simple purpose - to allow players of lower skill to clear content above their abilities. Now you would strip them of the gear (good luck with that as it would cause riots) making them even more stuck in one place. The matter being even worse if you would not allow them to progress through the game. These players would unsubscribe really quickly and game without subs is a dead game.

Basically no sane developer would kick their catered casuals in the nuts. Personally I would not mind your idea... but we want the game to keep going. Look how Wildstar ended with its "hardcore". I would rather not follow such an example.

You make it sound as if the examples would be hard to achieve. Most of these trials would at most take 5 minutes per to complete if you know what the buttons you're pressing are supposed to do. They wouldnt gate much but serve as a means to prepare new players to a job for advanced combat.

Have you seen our player base? Hard is subjective. If you make it too easy, then our average player would be annoyed by it, not to mention what would be the point then? If you make it too hard, it creates different type of annoyance.

Forcing players to do something they are free to do of their own will (they can study guides) isn't going to work. They are lazy and they want to stay that way. Forced effort is going to be major turn-off for them.

Instead of gating gear behind it just make finishing them all an achievement that unlocks a mount or a minion or something. Then you'll be catching people without affecting stat based gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Archaell

Have you seen our player base? Hard is subjective. If you make it too easy, then our average player would be annoyed by it, not to mention what would be the point then? If you make it too hard, it creates different type of annoyance.

Forcing players to do something they are free to do of their own will (they can study guides) isn't going to work. They are lazy and they want to stay that way. Forced effort is going to be major turn-off for them.

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You see, I see this as actually the opposite of hard. I see this as more of a way to hand the guide to the players than it is now. I don't want to put words in the OP's mouth, but the leveling ones could even have explicit details on how to complete them. Since obviously the guildhests don't offer enough direction to people (as many also simply ignore them for the most part), why not just lay out what a [insert job here] should be doing at a given level? It will no longer be an "option" to look up a guide in their free time because now they can will have to play through a guide and never have to leave the game to do it! Plus they come with an achievement, and gear unlocks! Any maybe even a free pony! I mean, how is that not cool!?

Considering myself an average+ player, I would be happy to do all of these if I never have to encounter another "Blizzard mage," lv50+ Gladiator, dragoon that "doesn't have heavy thrust", or WHM that says "cleric stance makes me heal better." I would be happy to.

A little annoyed? Maybe. Happy to reduce the number of people that didn't RTFM, definitely.

And if someone is too casual to be forced into completing such hard content, then I should at least be able to expect them to not queue for top tier dungeons/raids/trials since they couldn't be bothered to fulfill the prerequisites. We do already have prerequisites in the form of ilv requirement, and this is quite a bit more reasonable than gear requirements imo, and those didn't end the world.

If the problem is with being forced to complete any content at all, well, they already gotta do the story, 25 more solo 5 min. instances would be small beans compared to that.

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Originally Posted by lyndwyrm

they already gotta do the story, 25 more solo 5 min. instances would be small beans compared to that.

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Small beans? That's two hours PER JOB.

Oh, and they would have to make this fair and thus retroactively everyone would have to do this for their existing jobs.

No thanks. I'm all for better tutorials on how to play one's class, but to be honest I've never seen any MMO do it with any degree of satisfaction and I don't need XIV to be the one to start a trend.

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Originally Posted by Dotsusama

Small beans? That's two hours PER JOB.

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Yes. That is small beans. And that's if you actually take 5 min. for each of them.

First, for people that only plan to play one job, that is only two hours. Considering at most you can get 1-2 tome items per week and about 2 items per week from Alex NM, and assuming these sorts of rates remain the same, they would have to complete said 2 hours (or less) of tutorials within a week to not be restricted. Furthermore, as these would at most frequently be added every ~6 months for ilv upgrade patches, it would amount to maybe 10-15 min. of tutorials per 6 months after the initial batch. Or you would complete them at the start of the expansion and not have to worry about it again for ~18 months.

For people that want to have every job geared and play a variety of jobs frequently, it would be more like 26 hours. But with the same loot per week restrictions, there'd be little reason to do much more than the previously mentioned amount per week. Yes, if this extended to farmable-tier gear, then they would have to go through the trials before they go about farming that gear out. Once again however, the 2 hours a week prospect is for the initial batch, and after that it would be a handful of minutes per month.

And this isn't even getting into the comparison I was making to the story. Dungeon time, leveling time, questing time, cutscene time, and whatever else adds up to a lot more than 26 hours.

While I agree that some people need help in understanding how a role works, there is a downside to this method that I can instantly see. Development time. Creating anything in a game takes a lot of time and money, way more than you expect. If they were to spend time in developing this so that the minority of players are forced to understand how jobs work, that would be time taken away from a lot of other content (similar to the drought that we are experiencing now). I don't know about anyone else but I would rather see more meaningful content that all the people can enjoy because let's be honest, the vast majority of people you queue with are likely to be pretty solid, or at least not game breakingly bad. They might not be optimal under any circumstance but the job gets done eventually.

If someone is having a hard time try and help them. If they don't listen then they probably won't pay much attention to the trial.

What I believe SE should have done from the start is to more the job quests more of a tutorial then they are. Give the player access to the skills at the start of the quest and design the quest in a way that lets the player understand how the ability works in relation to their current level. It would be harder to develop, at least that way it would be one and done, no development time lost in creating something otherwise unnecessary.

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Originally Posted by karateorangutang

Instead of gating gear behind it just make finishing them all an achievement that unlocks a mount or a minion or something. Then you'll be catching people without affecting stat based gameplay.

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This, please.
I'm all for teaching people on how to playing a class/job but don't punish or bind them for trying a new class. Reward them for taking the time to learn while also giving them a bigger incentive to do these lessons with a material-thing like a mount, minion, glamour, or whatever.

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Originally Posted by lyndwyrm

And this isn't even getting into the comparison I was making to the story. Dungeon time, leveling time, questing time, cutscene time, and whatever else adds up to a lot more than 26 hours.

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Except you're not removing those hurdles in any way, you're just adding another one between players and the content they find rewarding. No thanks. I think something ought to be done, but this is not it. I do not, nor do I think anyone seriously wants to put content behind tests, much less that the dev team spend who knows how many hours creating this system in the first place.

Stuff like this would work best in something like Rift's Chronicles system (allowing solo queue for guildhest-style content), but I don't know how overloaded SE's instance server is these days. That said, trying to reinforce mechanics by making the player do them to win doesn't work as well as setting a nebulous goal and telling the player to have fun. I think adding dummies that regen/lose HP at fixed rates to simulate DPS/HPS checks would be more effective at reinforcing the #gitgud habits you want people to learn.

edit: Sadly, I don't know how to create a dummy that makes tanks learn to #gitgud, because there's a whole lot of moving parts to being a good tank...

I think having gear, Mounts gated behind this is a bad idea.
Maybe food, a bit of gil, potions?
Honestly if people really wanted to learn they would actually practice or ask people they know that are good at a specific class.
I recently got Bard to 50 and I asked a friend who plays Bard in A3 to help see if I was doing the rotation right and what I could work on. Mind you I tell them to stop me if I mess up.
However a lot of the player base just doesn't try, the player has to want to improve themselves.

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Originally Posted by Archaell

Snip.

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You're auto grouping forever bads with bads who don't know their bads. Plenty of people don't do research, and id argue a much larger percent of bad players would do the right thing if it was shown to them in a private environment. Since we now live in a world where feelings must always be positive. Theyll feel much more comfortable getting tips from the game via trial than someone criticizing them to do it the optimized way. I just fear some trials may not be optimal, and these players will copy what the game taught them then elitist will still be upset cuz there is a better rotation out and the one they use is outdated.