Honest question about the dreaded sim

I'm sure some of you have already heard of the *gasp* simulator. You know, the thing that apparently literally runs on your browser and allows a group of players to connect together, pick any mechanic of a savage fight or ultimate, turn damage on or off, and practice said mechanic again and again without having to go through the whole fight every wipe?

The horror, right? That's cheating! But it got me thinking about a few things:

- What does it say about the encounter design of this game? Or even the whole way fight progression is done, and sometimes heavily gated behind time (notably ultimates where you have to go over 10+ minutes of excruciating fight to have a new opportunity at wiping after 10s on your current prog point)? Is this respecting our time?

- Does it mean I'm a very bad person when I sometimes feel like I'd like to use that tool in order to directly skip to the parts of the game that I actually find fun? (aka: progging mechanics, not going over things past the group every time, which constitutes 95% of the time spent in prog) Does it mean I'm missing something fundamental about the game? Does it mean I'm just... playing the wrong game?

I honestly don't have clear answers about this, but it makes me very conflicted, especially with how this tool seems to get more prevalent in raiding circles.

Humans make tools to make their lives easier a sim was bound to happen and strictly speaking, using said sim isn't TOS so you shouldn't feel bad. Work smarter, not harder.

This isn't a question with a single answer, as it really comes down to what you value as an individual.

Having done world prog basically every tier since Final Coil, I'm more the opposite. I live for the adrenaline of finally conquering that one hard mechanic deep into the fight through high consistency at getting to your prog point as a team. Getting past Intermission 2 in A8s on week 3 of Midas only to see brute justice unfold his wings is still one of my favorite moments in my raiding career. Or finally conquering wormhole just to see Perfect Alexander's megazord sequence within a few pulls.

Using the simulator would ruin that experience for me. It's easy to conquer any mechanic regardless of difficulty when you can ram at it for 30x an hour due to starting right at it again. Which is also precisely part of the design behind encounters - you could technically de-incentivize the simulator by putting every hard mechanic right at the start of the fight, but it results in a very boring fight once you get past the initial zerg rush. They spread mechanics out, sometimes deep into the fight, to increase the time people spend progging fights, and to attempt to create a more smoother difficulty curve through the fight overall.

That being said, people are free to do whatever they want. It's become more popular lately since at the end of the day, the majority are motivated by rewards, and have little qualms using stuff that helps them achieve those rewards quicker. Like I mentioned at the start, it really comes down to what people value.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I'm sure some of you have already heard of the *gasp* simulator. You know, the thing that apparently literally runs on your browser and allows a group of players to connect together, pick any mechanic of a savage fight or ultimate, turn damage on or off, and practice said mechanic again and again without having to go through the whole fight every wipe?

The horror, right? That's cheating! But it got me thinking about a few things:

- What does it say about the encounter design of this game? Or even the whole way fight progression is done, and sometimes heavily gated behind time (notably ultimates where you have to go over 10+ minutes of excruciating fight to have a new opportunity at wiping after 10s on your current prog point)? Is this respecting our time?

- Does it mean I'm a very bad person when I sometimes feel like I'd like to use that tool in order to directly skip to the parts of the game that I actually find fun? (aka: progging mechanics, not going over things past the group every time, which constitutes 95% of the time spent in prog) Does it mean I'm missing something fundamental about the game? Does it mean I'm just... playing the wrong game?

I honestly don't have clear answers about this, but it makes me very conflicted, especially with how this tool seems to get more prevalent in raiding circles.

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It probably means that your group has limited time and wants to make the good use of that time. It means you arent blind progging. It adds to the pile of reasons why you'll have an easier time progging than world first racers. If you're having fun progging a fight while using a sim, then clearly you arent doing that much wrong.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The sim is a website.
It doesn't break ToS, nor does SE care, likely.

Console players have access to it so it's totally fair to use it if that's your preference.

Favor of the Sim, wanna use it?
Go ahead
Don't wanna?
Surely don't use it then, both are good

Now my biggest issue was that, at least on the time i did TEA, parties would take hours to even get close to fill so prog was both slow outside and inside the raid itself, so add to that reaching a far point like it is wormhole and having to reach said extent even further

So while sitting on PF waiting for said parties to fill sim worked as a double entretainment and practice for a future mech wich everyone would gladly welcome

Both using it and not using it are completely fine imo

The point I was trying to make was less about whether it's ethical or not to use a third party website with a sim on it, and more of the implications. And also what it means for me, and what it means about the design of the game. I want to reiterate that I didn't really make that post to disucss whether it's TOS compliant or not, or kosher or not.

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Originally Posted by Daeriion_Aeradiir

This isn't a question with a single answer, as it really comes down to what you value as an individual.

Having done world prog basically every tier since Final Coil, I'm more the opposite. I live for the adrenaline of finally conquering that one hard mechanic deep into the fight through high consistency at getting to your prog point as a team. Getting past Intermission 2 in A8s on week 3 of Midas only to see brute justice unfold his wings is still one of my favorite moments in my raiding career. Or finally conquering wormhole just to see Perfect Alexander's megazord sequence within a few pulls.

Using the simulator would ruin that experience for me. It's easy to conquer any mechanic regardless of difficulty when you can ram at it for 30x an hour due to starting right at it again. Which is also precisely part of the design behind encounters - you could technically de-incentivize the simulator by putting every hard mechanic right at the start of the fight, but it results in a very boring fight once you get past the initial zerg rush. They spread mechanics out, sometimes deep into the fight, to increase the time people spend progging fights, and to attempt to create a more smoother difficulty curve through the fight overall.

That being said, people are free to do whatever they want. It's become more popular lately since at the end of the day, the majority are motivated by rewards, and have little qualms using stuff that helps them achieve those rewards quicker. Like I mentioned at the start, it really comes down to what people value.

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Thanks for answering to the point. I'm actually interested to hear from people that actually enjoy the parts that I don't. If anything it tends to point at a me problem, which is me not liking 90% of endgame challenging content being about rehearsal. And it also goes a long way to show that the parts I like (progging and job gameplay) doesn't stand itself on its own for that yes, no matter how hard you make those mechanics, they're easy to conquer relatively "fast" on their own (or on a sim).

There is some interesting aspects I've found on different bosses bringing up a certain amount of pattern rng like P8S doorboss (unfortunately made some annoying due to boss going away at non equal timers), or O7S making teams actually prog on different mechanics every time. I don't know what to think of those, but it felt less tedious to me, less repetitive. I think I have a real issue with repetition overall.

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Originally Posted by TBerry

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The sim is a website.
It doesn't break ToS, nor does SE care, likely.

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From what's being said here, this "simulator" ihas a high probability of being copyright infringement.
Copyright is like many things: if you don't defend it, you may lose it.
So SE will care, and they will probably take down the website eventually.

That they haven't already sent a take-down notice may just be because no one at SE noticed it.
But they have notice of it now, thanks to this thread.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I'm sure some of you have already heard of the *gasp* simulator. You know, the thing that apparently literally runs on your browser and allows a group of players to connect together, pick any mechanic of a savage fight or ultimate, turn damage on or off, and practice said mechanic again and again without having to go through the whole fight every wipe?

The horror, right? That's cheating!

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I mean, it's subjective. In my experience growing up, looking at a written guide that explained how to beat a boss in a game was considered cheating. Fast-forward a few decades and a significant subset of the FF14 community expects players to have watched an instructional video before grouping up. Maybe some of those players see this as cheating and do it regardless, but presumably many don't.

For my own subjective experience, I think it's cheating if a player doesn't go into a fight blind and progress purely by iteratively learning from failure while not using any combat add-ons that aren't compensating for a disability. Others will think differently, and that's fine. And what do I think of people who cheat? Keep reading to find out.

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Originally Posted by Valence

- What does it say about the encounter design of this game? Or even the whole way fight progression is done, and sometimes heavily gated behind time (notably ultimates where you have to go over 10+ minutes of excruciating fight to have a new opportunity at wiping after 10s on your current prog point)? Is this respecting our time?

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The question "is X respecting our time" can't be directly answered, because it's highly dependent upon what any given user wants. Having the patience and fortitude to continually overcome the earlier parts of a fight just to have the opportunity to see and learn the later parts of a fight is something some players want; this is a key design aspect of games like Sekiro and Dark Souls. But that's also something that some players hate; they'd rather have things like checkpoints at different phases so they don't have to repeat content they've already had their fill of and can instead focus solely on what's new. Two different types of players (among many others) who want different things, and clearly a single game experience isn't going to please them both. If I had to guess, I would say that the design of Ultimate content seems to be aimed towards a demographic that's closer to the Sekiro camp, and that's going to be better for some players and worse for others.

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Originally Posted by Valence

- Does it mean I'm a very bad person when I sometimes feel like I'd like to use that tool in order to directly skip to the parts of the game that I actually find fun? (aka: progging mechanics, not going over things past the group every time, which constitutes 95% of the time spent in prog) Does it mean I'm missing something fundamental about the game?

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Whenever we talk about morality and ethics, the key question we should be asking is "who does this hurt?" So if you practice a fight using some side-program to circumvent the intended progression loop, who are you hurting? I invite you to come to your own subjective conclusion, but I would say that the answer is "nobody". At worst, you are theoretically "cheating yourself" by circumventing the opportunity to do it the intended way and thus achieve whatever satisfaction awaits at the end of that path. Maybe that would be satisfying for you! Or maybe it would be grueling and miserable, and when you finally reached the finish line you'd feel nothing beyond the end of your suffering. So think about which path you think would bring you the most joy, and take that path. There is no morally correct answer, there is only an answer that brings you more or less happiness. (And of course, probably best to make sure your teammates are on the same page as well.)

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Originally Posted by Valence

Does it mean I'm just... playing the wrong game?

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The problem with finding a different game that suits you better is that you may never find one. It can be helpful to look because you might get lucky, but there simply isn't a perfect game for most people out there. Like so many things in life, most people have to settle for "good enough". So stay open to new possibilities, but at the same time don't discard what brings you some measure of joy simply because it isn't perfectly tailored to your every need. Being scrappy and finding ways to make what you have work (like this simulator) are invaluable skills to have when trying to find happiness in this complex world of ours.

Anyway, whether you agree or disagree, I hope all of this serves as some helpful food for thought.

I don't know how to feel about sims. At best, they're prog tools that don't really work for me, and at worst I think they're 'coward's tools.' For anyone who is pro sim, do you or would you use a sim for any other game to make it easier to beat?

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Originally Posted by Valence

- What does it say about the encounter design of this game? Or even the whole way fight progression is done, and sometimes heavily gated behind time (notably ultimates where you have to go over 10+ minutes of excruciating fight to have a new opportunity at wiping after 10s on your current prog point)? Is this respecting our time?

- Does it mean I'm a very bad person when I sometimes feel like I'd like to use that tool in order to directly skip to the parts of the game that I actually find fun? (aka: progging mechanics, not going over things past the group every time, which constitutes 95% of the time spent in prog) Does it mean I'm missing something fundamental about the game? Does it mean I'm just... playing the wrong game?

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I think it's pretty clear what the existence of it says about encounter design, or rather the problem with it.

With the abundance of bodycheck mechanics and how difficult some mechanics have actually become nowadays it can be incredibly hard to make progress on the thing you're stuck on, because every small mistake can reset the fight.
You end up spending more time getting to the mechanic than actually working on solving it.

So of course a tool that allows you to work on the mechanic that keeps wiping you 6+ minutes in is desirable, it removes the waste of your time that leads up to it.


It's the same reason why I'm sick of door bosses in their current form, they're 6, 7 or sometimes 8 minutes of my life wasted every kill/instance reset.
I'd much rather have an intense short 3-4 minute door boss if they feel the need to include them.


WoW has a similar problem but for completely different reasons.
WoW wastes your time with running back to your corpse or the boss, buffing up and using consumables, basically preparing for the fight.
The fights themselves however are often very short, like 3-5 minutes short, so getting back to your prog point doesn't take long.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/18/f9...7b9ba1672e.gif

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Originally Posted by mallleable

For anyone who is pro sim, do you or would you use a sim for any other game to make it easier to beat?

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https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b8/c1...2fb807b10c.gif

I read video game guides WHILE I'm playing a game.

https://media.tenor.com/DJyjW_EI9qIA...-not-sorry.gif

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Originally Posted by Valence

The point I was trying to make was less about whether it's ethical or not to use a third party website with a sim on it, and more of the implications.

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What implications?

What it means to you can only be answered by you.

It doesn't mean anything about the design of the game. What is created by one set of programmers can be recreated by another set of programmers.

If the existence of the simulator is saying anything, it's saying that the general gaming population has changed over the years. There's now a preference for combat content that can be tackled in more convenient and smaller pieces than tackled as a larger progressive whole (likely because of more exposure to mobile gaming now compared to the past). It's not an issue of good/bad or better/worse. It's just a change in preference over time. What players enjoyed in the past may no longer be as enjoyable. Or perhaps they never really had the option in the past and would have preferred the smaller pieces even then.

I brought this up in several discussions last year and it seems appropriate here. If you're not enjoying the way content is designed, don't do that content. Developers generally aren't collecting information on how players feel about content. They're only checking to see if players are doing it or not, and at what point they quit doing it. If players doing it, they're going to assume players okay with the content as designed. It's when players quit participating in the content much faster than they expected that they start listening to feedback.

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Originally Posted by Valence

What does it say about the encounter design of this game? Or even the whole way fight progression is done, and sometimes heavily gated behind time (notably ultimates where you have to go over 10+ minutes of excruciating fight to have a new opportunity at wiping after 10s on your current prog point)? Is this respecting our time?

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Obviously, no, it's not respecting our time. That's why people use the sims. But the sims also allow you to practice the mechanic alone (this was possible before they added bots to it by opening 7 extra browsers or in some cases setting invincibility).

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Does it mean I'm a very bad person when I sometimes feel like I'd like to use that tool in order to directly skip to the parts of the game that I actually find fun?

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Not really. Groups want you to be at the same progression as them and if you want to not hold them back then this is one of the options, among others.

Everyone has a different pace and sometimes their pace is faster or slower in different fights as well. So using resources like this or videos or PF can help you keep pace and respect your group's time.

Overall, if people don't want to use it then they won't. It's just an option. Just like guides and PoV videos are an option. Not everyone decides to spoil themselves with these options. It's really up to you what you find fun.

In my opinion, the sim is basically a more user-friendly version of what some prog statics already do.

When some groups reach a new mechanic, they review the mechanic, draw up a plan, then they queue into T4 and the raid caller opens a recording of the mechanic and calls out what's happening when while marking people and those people will move according to the plan.

The sim automates the mechanics so the calling according to a recording of the mechanic doesn't need to be done. In essence, it's a more pug-friendly version of queueing into T4 to plan as it doesn't require voice chat or a video recording of the mechanic.

The sim does have the advantage of having accurate mechanic timers and AoE sizes. But is it really cheating? I'd say it's probably about as much a cheat as pre-planning in T4 with a raid caller on voice chat is. In essence, both ways is your team preparing for the mechanic before queueing into the fight, the sim just has the advantage of being game-accurate.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

In my opinion, the sim is basically a more user-friendly version of what some prog statics already do.

When some groups reach a new mechanic, they review the mechanic, draw up a plan, then they queue into T4 and the raid caller opens a recording of the mechanic and calls out what's happening when while marking people and those people will move according to the plan.

The sim automates the mechanics so the calling according to a recording of the mechanic doesn't need to be done. In essence, it's a more pug-friendly version of queueing into T4 to plan as it doesn't require voice chat or a video recording of the mechanic.

The sim does have the advantage of having accurate mechanic timers and AoE sizes. But is it really cheating? I'd say it's probably about as much a cheat as pre-planning in T4 with a raid caller on voice chat is. In essence, both ways is your team preparing for the mechanic before queueing into the fight, the sim just has the advantage of being game-accurate.

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Agreed; you can do this in the game. What I did one time was queued into a dungeon in Explorer mode, found a perfect arena and setup waymarks to act like mechanic obstacles and practiced the movement. Other times, I've used the normal mode to practice the movement since it often has the exact same arena. Sometimes I just do the normal mode just as a warmup if I didn't do the fight at all for a while.

There are also simpler sims I've seen that use HTML and Javascripts. Meanwhile, when I've watched someone prog and wipe repeatedly on a twitch stream, it has actually given me a lot of the muscle memory for the fight purely from watching them wipe for hours. If you haven't done that you would have to watch a stream of someone wiping for hours to understand, but if you do, it can actually make you really good at the fight yourself - except the mechanics that you didn't understand from watching them.

I dont think it fundamentally changes how fights are/should be designed. In essence it's a really good guide but still just a guide. Sim-able mechanics are all about the movement. You can practice that in an empty arena aswell.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

I don't know how to feel about sims. At best, they're prog tools that don't really work for me, and at worst I think they're 'coward's tools.' For anyone who is pro sim, do you or would you use a sim for any other game to make it easier to beat?

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So you do know how you feel about sims lol

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I mean, it's subjective. In my experience growing up, looking at a written guide that explained how to beat a boss in a game was considered cheating. Fast-forward a few decades and a significant subset of the FF14 community expects players to have watched an instructional video before grouping up. Maybe some of those players see this as cheating and do it regardless, but presumably many don't.

For my own subjective experience, I think it's cheating if a player doesn't go into a fight blind and progress purely by iteratively learning from failure while not using any combat add-ons that aren't compensating for a disability. Others will think differently, and that's fine. And what do I think of people who cheat? Keep reading to find out.

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This was more of a tongue in cheek kind of introduction more than a serious statement on my end. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether it's cheating or not, or more precisely whether it's ethically bad or not.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

The question "is X respecting our time" can't be directly answered, because it's highly dependent upon what any given user wants. Having the patience and fortitude to continually overcome the earlier parts of a fight just to have the opportunity to see and learn the later parts of a fight is something some players want; this is a key design aspect of games like Sekiro and Dark Souls. But that's also something that some players hate; they'd rather have things like checkpoints at different phases so they don't have to repeat content they've already had their fill of and can instead focus solely on what's new. Two different types of players (among many others) who want different things, and clearly a single game experience isn't going to please them both. If I had to guess, I would say that the design of Ultimate content seems to be aimed towards a demographic that's closer to the Sekiro camp, and that's going to be better for some players and worse for others.

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Yes, that's exactly where I'm going with this. I feel like there is a problem of balance in terms of audience, not only on the job gameplay vs encounter mechanics that has been discussed to death recently, but also on the rehearsal/repetition patterns vs actual prog of encounters, which unlike the former that went out of balance in ShB, probably goes all the way back to the early days of the game. If anything, personally, I feel like the repetition and rehearsal side of the game is already extremely present in reclears, farming, weeklies, especially in extreme trials or criterion where it's all about farming clears again and again and again and again... As for savage, some people like doing that if just for their fflogs page.

So I understand that farming is a big part of MMOs that I will never completely get to terms with, but is that so wrong to ask for a little more balance in challenging content? Ultimates as you say are clearly cranked to 9000 on sheer repetition, grind and willpower, but even savage can feel that way to me. The only moment I truly have a blast during prog is the first hour I get into a fight. You learn the first mechanics, you wipe, you go at it again and it's all about actual prog.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

The problem with finding a different game that suits you better is that you may never find one. It can be helpful to look because you might get lucky, but there simply isn't a perfect game for most people out there. Like so many things in life, most people have to settle for "good enough". So stay open to new possibilities, but at the same time don't discard what brings you some measure of joy simply because it isn't perfectly tailored to your every need. Being scrappy and finding ways to make what you have work (like this simulator) are invaluable skills to have when trying to find happiness in this complex world of ours.

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If I didn't care about XIV at all I wouldn't be there in the first place. The reality behind that rhetorical question was more that I do feel that I'm less and less the audience of this game, and it depresses me. I have taken part into all kinds of endgame content, extreme, savage, ultimates, criterion, etc, and I'm not sure how I feel about turning into a player that only logs in for the new story patches. It's not gross of course. But it's also not exactly a great feeling either.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Anyway, whether you agree or disagree, I hope all of this serves as some helpful food for thought.

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Sure thing, thanks for your insight. There is also the non negligible probability that being on the end of an expansion and going through fatigue of its content and model is making me bitter about a lot of things, even though it's been bubbling for me since shb already.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

I brought this up in several discussions last year and it seems appropriate here. If you're not enjoying the way content is designed, don't do that content.

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Let's not put words into my mouth? I have never said anywhere that I am not enjoying the content at all. If I didn't, I wouldn't be playing, and wouldn't be here in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Developers generally aren't collecting information on how players feel about content. They're only checking to see if players are doing it or not, and at what point they quit doing it. If players doing it, they're going to assume players okay with the content as designed. It's when players quit participating in the content much faster than they expected that they start listening to feedback.

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Do you work in game development? Or at SE's? I'm sorry but that sounds like a lot of cookie cutter answers that people fantasize about the industry and how it works..