[dev1058] Say no to the hate meter.

[Ceons]

I think the dev team seems like they are starting to know what their doing with the game. I dont see why this feature would be bad. Again I do wish people would have learned by now to wait and see and the judge and cry.

[Tsuga]

You're still going to play pretty much exactly how you were before, you'll just know the state of your aggro now. If you know how to manage it without the meter you'll be doing pretty much the same thing with the meter.

Also having the meter allows you to push the limits of what you can do without having to worry about pulling hate. If you know you've got a decent amount of leeway with the hate you can go crazy and try things you may not have been willing to do so before without knowing.

All this does is take the guess work and speculation out. The mechanics work the exact same way with or without the meter.

This.

I think it's funny that people are acting like holding hate is some secret art that needs to be mastered. In XI all Paladin did was voke, cure cure cure, voke cure cure cure, WS here and there, more voking. Nin tanking is a totally different story, so I won't even get into that.

The reason I bring up Paladin is because Gladiator and Pug are the only real tanks in this game (at the moment, and unless you equip their voking abilities to other classes), and they pretty much follow that same strategy. With that said, it takes little to no SKILL to tank, you just need to know how to spam voke, and hope that your mages aren't idiots that spam high level spells. The meter won't change the way tanks play their classes, it will just give them more options other than "uhhh, I guess I'll just throw another voke, 'cause I don't know whether or not I'll maintain hate".

Again, this is all based on the current system. For all we know the new system will take advantage of the meter with skills and battle regimens, or something like that.

In summary, people are going to bitch about every little change that happens regardless of what I say, but please don't knock it before we've even had time to try it. Especially since we don't even know how it will be applied to the new battle system.

[Preypacer]

@Preypacer

Whatever you might have thought about my examples, you got the purpose of them. Yes it's a game, but hate meters have to do with the life or death of the party. There has probably been thousands of skills, far better examples than the ones off the top of my head I'm sure, that has been lost over time due to modern technology. If you are going to call it a crutch, you will have to call those advances crutches as well. In the meantime, someone who might have otherwise been very good at a job except needing that one tool, might be less successful at his job, and be overlooked due to poor performance.

Actually, no.

The point of my responses was that your analogies were flawed in the case of using an axe versus using a power saw. And in the case of having a tumor checked, was completely and abysmally off in the weeds.

With the axe/chainsaw comparison, your reasoning is flawed because as I explained, in either case, the user has to gain skill in each tool by using it and finding for themselves what angles or approaches yield the best result. There is no guide or gauge showing them if they're getting more or less effective. Not really sure how you could read my responses and twist them into somehow validating your statements.

As for the tumor one... You are trying to equate life or death in reality to life or death in a game. There is no comparison. Period.

In real life, the doctor making a mistake and mis-diagnosing a tumor as benign is life threatening, especially if it's ignored early enough to have been properly treated with the correct diagnosis. There is no "resurrecting". There are no home points to return to. There is no "gear damage" to repair. If a tumor is wrongly diagnosed and it leads into an advanced stage of cancer that can't be dealt with... That's it. Game Over.

It's okay to make mistakes in a game because if you fail, and your party wipes, you get to come back, try again and hopefully get it right. Real life doesn't offer that option.

Really not that difficult a concept to grasp.

It's appalling, frankly, that you would make such a comparison to begin with, and then continue to argue it as "it's the life or death of the party".

FFS, get some perspective before you start whimsically throwing out comparisons like that. And find a better analogy while you're at it.

There is more to each job than just watching aggro. A good tank keeps an eye on the entire party’s needs, making sure everyone is ready before beginning the fight. A good healer watches the party’s back, and compensates for the party until they can respond to whatever threat came from left field. A good dps knows to help keep aggro off the healer. These are things no tools will compensate for.

The meters remove the need for players to learn where that balance is by hands-on-experience, and replaces it with a meter that spells it out for them.

It's not the end result I'm arguing against... It's the means of getting that result.

As for telling someone how to play, that comes from both sides. I’m sorry you were refused by so many, but that just suggests that the majority like and want addons. I personally never used any, other than a dmg meter to measure my performance, and whatever was built in the game. But by saying no one should use a meter, you are effectively telling people they should play like you. That is why the toggles have been made available. Anyone who wants to be that skilled, or have the mystery in the fight, can if they choose.

No... I'm not telling people to play like me. I'm expressing my point of view that it's far more interesting and challenging to learn a mob's behavior by paying attention to the flow of battle to learn the most effective tactics to maintain or mitigate aggro with them, than to look instead at a meter that spells it out for you.

You disagree, that's fine. But do not twist my words around into some kind of strawman to do so.

[Mightyg]

I support having a hate meter. People will eventually make one anyways with third party mods, and it's better to have the game community understand the mechanics than to have them rely on intuition and superstition.

[Arcell]

The meters remove the need for players to learn where that balance is by hands-on-experience, and replaces it with a meter that spells it out for them.

By learning through hands-on-experience do you mean accidentally pulling hate, dying and getting your party killed because now the monster's AoE attack is facing the squishy characters?

The hate meter takes out the guess work and just shows you, this does this. You still have to use your own better judgement on when to use certain things, especially if they generate a lot of hate. You still have to know how to mitigate hate generated as well as lower it if need be. If you don't know how to do these things on your class you're an unskilled player and will pull hate.

As for skilled players, enmity control will be pretty much the same. Though as I said before you can try to push the line of how much you can get away with while you're riding the line of pulling hate or not. You can more effectively use your actions without having to worry about pulling hate accidentally because of a miscalculation due to the amount of speculation involved.

That being said I don't really care how they do it. Numbers are fine, % is fine, even a more ambiguous system is fine. It doesn't have to be spelled out exactly but however they do it I'm still going to be playing the game and enjoying my time.

[Peregrine]

Hate meter is a great addition. Not only will it let players know what's going on, but it will allow the developers to do more novel things with hate that would have otherwise utterly frustrated the player base before. Now that everyone knows what hate is doing, the devs are more free to create new hate strategies based on different mobs, etc.

Knowing your hate is also useless if you can't do anything about it, so it's fine. In many cases, knowing your hate will not save you. If your tank is taking way too much damage, knowing you're about to surpass the tank in hate as his healer doesn't present any solutions to that problem to you. It just confirms what you already fear--you're about to die.

[Cogs]

Overall I say no to having a hate meter, in this regard there is fun in the mystery of not knowing this detail. It keeps you on your toes because you dont know, and makes things interesting when someone else pulls hate. If they do have to implement this, I would only want to be able to see my own hate meter...

Even better if they can perhaps make an ability learned similar to a scan that can show everyones hate for 10 seconds, and is on a 3-5 minute cooldown. Perhaps even have a few different type of scan abilities, with fair cooldown timers. One that can show hp/mp of a monster or something like this.

[DarkOrca]

It is indeed more fun to learn by experience even at the cost of dying/wiping...it's what makes things memorable.

I'd vote for no threat meter, but it might be a good idea to give a hint that a mob is going to turn to you soon like displaying a message "Mob is starring at you angrily" in the log.

[Ayate]

Hate meter? No, thanks. Why make it more easier instead of thinking about what you are doing in a battle?
Say no to "brain afk" gamestyle...

[kukurumei]

You can see what happened when you show the enmity meter in WoW/clones. Developers just work around it to the point it's worthless or completely standard.

In WoW you have fights that are plain old "tank and spank" because everyone can calculate their hate and always be one step above. (aka min-maxing the hate meter)

or

You have fights that constantly screw it up, making it worthless, like hate resets, attack lowest, attack random hate, hate deducting, etc.

Basically it's more or less worthless in hindsight unless they make it a "fuzzy" hate meter. One that doesn't really show enmity, but enmity-ish responses. Usually reserved for animations (which way he's facing etc).

Since FF14 is so cheap when it comes to animations, a fuzzy hate meter will prove useful...though really weird...like a big pointy arrow at the person it's attacking...is practical...but really dumb.