Good Vs Bad Player

[Rivienne]

This game uses a "Job" system. So your character is one of the jobs implemented in the system. Like any job you have to know what you are doing, even if it is your first time/day, you are expected have some knowledge of what your job details. There are people who are good at their job and people who are bad at their job. Knowing the optimal rotation, priority, or mechanics of your job in any situation is what makes a person great at their job. On a side note doing research is never a bad thing! Research is what makes the world go round and the only thing putting money in my pocket !

A few quick points on this: (while I wait for the DF )

Like with any job, you learn as you go. Some jobs you can have some prep/background for. But rarely do you know exactly how to do everything or can just jump in and know what you are doing at every step of the way. If your real world job you can, that is great, but in my experience that is not the norm for at the very least first time jobs (which is what these are in game), and rarely for well, any job.

Also, this game doesn't teach you any of the new job skills. It just gives them to you. No quests to train, no text bubbles. Just "here have a new skill!". So, in game, you are expected to learn the skills and how to use them "on the job" so to speak. And while it is true you are playing a character with a given job, in game context, you are doing it without outside support. These jobs are "ancient" jobs, hidden/gone from the world. You are mostly learning them on your own in game, without much support. As far as job rotation/groups, I agree that perhaps there should be more practice involved in game, but mainly through guildhests. People should be playing those over and over again for practicing groups and there should be more of them geared towards specific roles. These should probably be more widely used and tied to the main story to encourage them, but they aren't currently, so expecting people to have the skill acquired through such practice is naive: most people will learn again, "on the job" in dungeons.

Finally as far as dungeons go, in storyline, your job doesn't help you with mechanics or knowing what is required to win any given specific fight. In game you go into each dungeon "blind" for the "first time". So if you believe in story context, and adventure, then it is actually contrary to story immersion to go in already knowing the fight. It has nothing to do with "being prepared" and everything to do with story immersion/adventure.

If you don't care about that level of story immersion, that is perfectly fine and I don't think anyone would fault you for it, but don't expect others to feel the same way as you or try and force them into giving up the story immersion simply because you don't care to play that way.

[Sixmp]

Since when does doing homework = learning the fight before hand? You're already making assumption that's based entirely on your opinion. Let me ask a question in return then. How do you determine a good adventurer? One who learns how to use his chosen weapon properly, who frequently maintain his gears and learns as much about both the location and monsters he'll encounter going into a forboding dungeon as he can? Or someone who can barely pull the string on his bow, who wears rusted and worn out gear into battle and who charges into a room filled with monsters and traps ignoring the warning of his party members?

I never ever minded someone who's new to an encounter. However, I will always tell people who don't know how to play their class that they don't know how to play their class. If that makes me an elitist bastard, then so be it.

Its common knowledge that certain people expect other people to know things in game that they could never know about unless they read a guide or already completed it themselves.
Anyone can learn to improve their character play on the road, or at an inn or from some stranger etc, there is nothing wrong with expecting people to have the best gear that they know about,but you cannot expect them to know about things they have never been to or seen, knowing in advance the workings of a trap ridden castle that nobody has ever entered before, or the exact pattern of a one of a kind mob, how is that possible?

As for my idea of a bad player, it is very hard to gauge, having bad gear doesn't make someone a bad player, you could argue that the person who has got as far as you have with bad gear could be a better player.
Once everyone is in the best gear with the best weapons a parser will tell some people who is the best players are, unfortunately those numbers don't mean much.

People who go in blind are at a larger disadvantage than someone who has read guides, yet they can still win by reacting to what is happening around them, learning tactics on the fly or during a break after a wipe. Wouldn't that be the better player?
Personally i don't really care about the best, i prefer nice people. If they happen to be good at the game cool, if they are bad, cool.

I always giggle when people i know have learned a fight inside out from guides and youtube after completing it first try then boast to me about how easy it was.
To me it is just like someone getting the answers to the Times crossword filling in all the answers and then telling everyone how easy it was.

[Mithent]

I would prefer to learn as I go, personally. If you've watched videos of a fight beforehand, you already know everything that's going to happen and what you're supposed to do, so there are no surprises and the game really becomes about how well you can copy what you've seen. I did do a brief stint in a permadeath guild on DDO where (in addition to the rule on permadeath) such things were frowned upon as metagaming, and if you'd done the content before you weren't supposed to tell anyone else how to do it.

That said, the chances of getting a party who are all new to the content or tolerant of such behaviour and are all of a similar mindset is vanishingly small. As I don't want to be a horrendous burden on my party, I'm happy to read up on mechanics or have them explained to me in advance, but I avoid watching videos. At least then it's a matter of executing a plan rather than pure mimicry.

[Raikki]

On its own, there's nothing wrong with wanting to learn as you go along, but you need to form your own learning group or tell people ahead of time that you're going to be learning as you go before they invite you.

If you don't understand why, consider the analogy of a series of math classes: Everyone starts at a basic level, say, addition and subtraction, and works their way up to, say, calculus. When you join a PUG of people who know the fight, and you don't, it's like you're walking into a calculus class knowing only addition and subtraction and you're asking to be taught your way up to calculus while everyone else waits for you. Now imagine by the time you start to grasp calculus, the class lets out. The next day, another student shows up knowing only, say, basic algebra, and they need to be caught up. This continues day after day, and the students never get to learn or practice any calculus. This is what you're doing when you join PUGs without knowing what to do ahead of time.

[Rochetm]

I do the primals all the time for fun and to help FC members. I have to explain the basics of every fight and then run randoms through them which almost always results in a few wipes before they get it.... well not Ifrit but he is really easy... I do not complain, I do not whine, I have fun. Maybe some of you should try that sometime?

Anyway point is if you don't like watching the cut scenes, want speed runs, expect perfect gear, expect experienced players, or any combination of those then you should be making your own private group. Joining up with randoms and acting like that just informs everyone else you are a dbag.

[Rivienne]

On its own, there's nothing wrong with wanting to learn as you go along, but you need to form your own learning group or tell people ahead of time that you're going to be learning as you go before they invite you.

This is true of self formed pugs absolutely, people should know that they are going in with the same expectations. But if you refer to the duty finder, the duty finder is the key place for the story adventurers. Why? Because that is what the in game story prompts tells them to do, and why it was put in the game in the first place. On the other hand, those who are working outside of the context of the game, and learning from the internet and youtube etc, should already be aware of this, and be looking for people who share their perspective of how to play, or at least be okay with running with those who do not share their views.

Some thoughts for you: in over 50 runs of Sastasha through Halatali, I have run across at most 5 new people entering a dungeon the first time with prior research.. The ratio changes with HM and Qarn, but not hugely (Cutter and Stone I haven't done enough to have a good sample size).

In other words, the norm is to come in without researching the dungeon. So your entirely analogy is flipping the situation on its head. Also remember: you are on a legacy, your perspective of how many end-gamers vs non-end gamers there are is very very skewed. The majority of all end-game players are on legacy servers. The new players far outweigh the experienced on other servers, and in my own runs to date, most new players do not subscribe to the research beforehand method of playing the game.

[Eirny]

Teamwork, not homework!


- Your goal. Is an encounter completion your primary or secondary goal? Are you visiting a dungeon for the very first time as a part of the story or are you just grinding tokens? If you are grinding tokens and are doing so with PUGs, you might want to familiarize yourself with the most efficient method of running a particular encounter.
- Your group. Are people in your group friends who are helping you or random people? If you are with friends, there should be no reason to do homework, unless the encounter is very complex, because they will give you a few hints, if needed.
- Encounter difficulty. Is an encounter difficult? How likely is the encounter failure if you don't know what to do?

Thus, depending on the combinations of these factors, you could consider whether you should do homework or not. Personally, the only time I would do homework is when the content is substantially harder than usual because just attempting it unprepared may hurt my team.

Over the years of playing MMOs, the most fun time I had was venturing into the unknown with a group of friends. We may fail the first time or even the first few runs - we'll have fun in the process anyway, but we'll learn from our mistakes and succeed eventually. One of the most fun parts of MMOs to me is overcoming obstacles with teamwork!

[Cluebilly]

30 years of MMOing...

This statement made me laugh really really hard.

[AnkoYaoi]

Even watching a video or reading a guide before hand won't help you with actual experience.

[Reiterpallasch]

Now here is the thing. How is anybody a bad player because they chose to NOT do their homework?

You could say that someone who studies hard and always does well on tests is a good student. Is a school student that never studies and always fails his tests a good student? Sure, he can always just retake the test over and over again, never bothering to study and he'll eventually get enough answers right to pass the test, but that doesn't make him better than the person who studied before hand, not by a long shot.

This statement made me laugh really really hard.

Why? They've been around longer than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...r_online_games