Musings on Mods

[nyttyn]

if they didn't want people to be annoyed about people putting forth poor DPS, they shouldn't have put such extremely strict DPS checks into heavensward.

(hello Bismarck EX)


any single argument anyone might have about "oh but people will use it to harass" is outweighed by the fact that you absolutely need to put forth a certain amount of DPS to clear specific heavensward fights, and being unable to tell who is dead weight on your team is a severe handicap as a result.

not that i condone harassment of course, but it's extremely stupid that the current extreme primal fights have such strict DPS checks, with absolutely no way ingame to tell who's lagging behind if you cannot pass said checks .

[Ayuhra]

if they didn't want people to be annoyed about people putting forth poor DPS, they shouldn't have put such extremely strict DPS checks into heavensward.

(hello Bismarck EX)


any single argument anyone might have about "oh but people will use it to harass" is outweighed by the fact that you absolutely need to put forth a certain amount of DPS to clear specific heavensward fights, and being unable to tell who is dead weight on your team is a severe handicap as a result.

not that i condone harassment of course, but it's extremely stupid that the current extreme primal fights have such strict DPS checks, with absolutely no way ingame to tell who's lagging behind if you cannot pass said checks .

I think a problem with Bismarck Ex, especially right now, is its minimal ilvl requirement. You can go in there with ilvl 142 which is total nonsense. Even Neverreap and Fractal require 145.

[Carson_The_Brown]

So, I see a lot of interesting points here. There are a few troublesome ones that mostly fall under the purview of the "Git Gud" defense. I don't know how useful that sentiment is; its not like most low DPS are going into their pugs with the "how little can I do" mindset. I wont say that demographic is nonexistent because I know a few people who only play DPS because they can basically get carried so long as they spam Heavy Shot. I feel that this particular thread fails to consider the community support angle. I mentioned earlier that optimization is difficult if you don't have a fleet of testing machines.

Also, I think I sense a certain... misunderstanding; Blizzard does not take responsibility for quality control on their mods. That is entirely the responsibility of the modder. When SE says "we want to include mod support" that only means "You will be able to use 3rd party mods" and not "we will do the legwork to make sure your mods actually work on anything other than your one computer". It also doesn't ensure that SE will strive to maintain compatibility, if a new raid comes out and it causes a fatal exception with your UI mod then fixing it is between you and whoever might be in charge of the mod (if anyone is even paying attention) or whoever is developing a competitive product at the time. All and all, I think this issue is largely soluble once your community hits a critical mass.

Kisai makes an interesting point about mechanically incentivizing skillful play. I'm not sure if the dev team has the firepower to pull off a system that allows better loot drops depending on contribution, plus, I can't help but imagine all of the new players who showed up at the tail end of Heart of Darkness and would, by no fault of their own, be kept away from any of the gear by such a system. I would like to see Kisai elaborate a bit more on her idea, however, sounds interesting.

Risvertashi mentions the unofficial addons. these include parsers but also include the spawn timers for rare mobs. I think these exist in a kind of "sweet spot". They are accessible to people who really need to know how they are doing and are willing to put in some work and ultimately lie just out of reach to players who just want to attack people with bad gear or low skill. I also would like to add onto my point that the ilvl system seems to be doing a decent job of weeding the slackers out of high end content. My wife and I both do high end content regularly (she is disabled and I'm on summer holiday from uni) and while I've never really seen any of these vitriolic players, she has seen one, so, in over 200 combined PUGs, only one jerk is pretty good. Compared to the completely unverified 10%-20% asshole ratio in WoW, I think those stats are damn fine.

Which leads me to a quick aside to Hobostew. The community in XIV is actually very kind compared to other online games, I would, however, urge you to understand that your experience in this game may be an outlying factor and may not be reflective of the general experience.

[KisaiTenshi]

Kisai makes an interesting point about mechanically incentivizing skillful play. I'm not sure if the dev team has the firepower to pull off a system that allows better loot drops depending on contribution, plus, I can't help but imagine all of the new players who showed up at the tail end of Heart of Darkness and would, by no fault of their own, be kept away from any of the gear by such a system. I would like to see Kisai elaborate a bit more on her idea, however, sounds interesting.

To simplify:

A DPS is there to DPS, a Tank is there to Tank and contribute some DPS, and a healer is there to Heal and maybe throw some DPS if there is opportunity for it.
But what happens is someone with a 'parser' goes "oh X isn't contributing enough DPS, kick em" and that player gets kicked not knowing why they were suddenly kicked.

So what has to happen is that rewards (including tomes) need to be distributed by participation. In a light party two DPS players should be contributing >50% of the Damage, and if they aren't, that is a problem. Tanks and Healers would be based on Enmity. Where a Tank needs to keep Enmity > 90% of the time, and Healers need to NOT take enmity by overhealing (it would probably require tracking unnecessary overhealing vs revives itself.)

In a Full party, the conditions change depending on the number of tanks. No DPS should be carried, if there are 5 DPS means that 12.5% x 5 = 62.5% of the Damage must be done by the DPS, of which each DPS needs to contribute at least 12.5%. When there are two tanks, the combined tanks need to have 90% of the enmity time. When there's one, then it's 90% alone. When there are two healers, both healers need to be healing, not just one.

Which comes back to the entire idea where if a healer or a tank is contributing more DPS than a single DPS player, than the weak DPS player shouldn't be rewarded for doing nothing. In the case of things like Extreme Primals and Raids, where "carries" are endemic, someone who doesn't contribute enough, wouldn't get the reward gear/token, and it wouldn't count as a clear.

[Carson_The_Brown]

To simplify:

A DPS is there to DPS, a Tank is there to Tank and contribute some DPS, and a healer is there to Heal and maybe throw some DPS if there is opportunity for it.
But what happens is someone with a 'parser' goes "oh X isn't contributing enough DPS, kick em" and that player gets kicked not knowing why they were suddenly kicked.

So what has to happen is that rewards (including tomes) need to be distributed by participation. In a light party two DPS players should be contributing >50% of the Damage, and if they aren't, that is a problem. Tanks and Healers would be based on Enmity. Where a Tank needs to keep Enmity > 90% of the time, and Healers need to NOT take enmity by overhealing (it would probably require tracking unnecessary overhealing vs revives itself.)

In a Full party, the conditions change depending on the number of tanks. No DPS should be carried, if there are 5 DPS means that 12.5% x 5 = 62.5% of the Damage must be done by the DPS, of which each DPS needs to contribute at least 12.5%. When there are two tanks, the combined tanks need to have 90% of the enmity time. When there's one, then it's 90% alone. When there are two healers, both healers need to be healing, not just one.

Which comes back to the entire idea where if a healer or a tank is contributing more DPS than a single DPS player, than the weak DPS player shouldn't be rewarded for doing nothing. In the case of things like Extreme Primals and Raids, where "carries" are endemic, someone who doesn't contribute enough, wouldn't get the reward gear/token, and it wouldn't count as a clear.

That's some pretty interesting math. Unfortunately this sounds like a system that would reward anyone who bothers to step into the encounter room, which would make it redundant. I want to see that idea fleshed out, though. Maybe a feature that only allows the party to /kick people who contribute less than X enmity per second, requiring a specific pack of enemies be defeated before the option becomes available.

I don't think the only difference between this community and WoW's community is the existence of addons, and that giving us access to an addon API changes us into WoW's community. I don't buy that. It's a strawman, and not a very effective one.

WoW players and FFXIV players are pretty fundamentally different. I say that having played both games at a high level. I don't believe that giving us an addon API turns us into some kind of MMO Lord of the Flies rendition.

But of course, I don't mean to insinuate that the two communities are at all similar.

I personally believe that communities are moral entities. So what does that mean? The full explanation is here with a study on the ramifications thereof here but to grossly oversimplify, that means that they can be effected by their environment. Obviously there is a huge difference between the XIV community and the WoW community and no action can possibly make them identical. My concern is what the tools made available might do to the personality of the community. Once again, your results may vary but my observations (which I admit could be deeply flawed and are easily falsifiable) indicate a certain quality present in XIV's community that isn't present in communities that have these quality of life addons. My studies (I am a student of game design, hence why I would have case studies on the matter) indicate that while antisocial personality types are equally represented in all communities, there are environmental qualities that encourage these fringe elements (the rough estimate is that these antisocial elements constitute about 15% across the board on all communities) to behave more proactively.

In short, of course there aren't more sociopaths on WoW and of course there are some fundamental differences between the WoW community and the XIV community just like how there are some fundamental differences between any two entities, be they people, cities or corporations. Nobody is arguing those points. What I would argue, however, is that things like easy-access damage meters and boss assistants allow the more troublesome elements of the community (including both players and developers) an easier means to express themselves.

[KisaiTenshi]

That's some pretty interesting math. Unfortunately this sounds like a system that would reward anyone who bothers to step into the encounter room, which would make it redundant. I want to see that idea fleshed out, though. Maybe a feature that only allows the party to /kick people who contribute less than X enmity per second, requiring a specific pack of enemies be defeated before the option becomes available.
...

The math is just aligning it with the Role's purpose.
In a 4 player dungeon under "perfect" conditions:
1 Tank has Enmity 100% of the time
1 Healer does 100% of the healing
2 DPS deals 50%+ of the damage (each responsible for 25%)

In an 8 player dungeon under "perfect" conditions:
2 Tanks have Enmity 100% of the time
2 Healers do 100% healing in tandem with each other
4 DPS deal 50%+ of the damage (each responsible for 12.5%)

In both cases it should be assumed that the Healer does ZERO DPS and thus the DPS players should be able to do 66% of the DPS without an issue if both healers are not doing DPS. In overgeared situations, the Healers may have less need to conserve MP for healing and could probably drive the DPS players portion of DPS down below 50%. So that's when it starts shifting back to the point where a healer may end up doing more DPS than one of the DPS players.

Like what would "improve" the dungeon content management would be to have the dungeon prompt to kick DPS players that can't meet the generous 12.5% or 25% requirement to not be a "lame carry" or kick healers that are spending too much time DPS'ing or attracting enmity with overhealing, or Tanks that are not tanking.

"<Player> DPS is not sufficient to continue the dungeon and will be replaced if the party is KO'd", "<Player>'s healing technique is not sufficient to continue this dungeon and will be replaced upon Party KO", "<Player>'s enmity control is not sufficient to continue this dungeon and will be replaced upon Party KO"

At least that way, it's much easier to get rid of carries, bots, and you don't get situations like what happens in Coil where you wait for 2 hours only to see a vote abandon after the first wipe.

Hence giving a heads-up for the named player to improve or for the rest of the party to be less aggressive on taking other roles (eg Healer tanking, DPS healing, DPS tanking) if they want to keep them.

As for rewarding simply stepping into the encounter room, no if a player can't hit the target, they wouldn't get to "need/greed" on the item, and wouldn't get a clear from such content. For harder "extreme" and "savage" content, the numbers would probably be less generous since they are tuned differently.

My studies (I am a student of game design, hence why I would have case studies on the matter) indicate that while antisocial personality types are equally represented in all communities, there are environmental qualities that encourage these fringe elements (the rough estimate is that these antisocial elements constitute about 15% across the board on all communities) to behave more proactively.

Oh my, you have picked an interesting field.

I'd say you're probably only correct about communities that do not have fulltime PvP. So PvE games, yeah, 15% seems pretty consistent.

PvP games, is all about pulling down "white knights" to the bullies level. So games that have a specific PvP element (eg WoW, SW:TOR, Aion, Archeage) where PvP is engaged all the time, players will go out of their way to cause misery to the other faction "because I can." Other games that have PvP as a criminal element instead (Wizardy Online, Archeage), actually creates a community out of the sociopaths and the role players who can keep their moral sense in check to play with them. Like in Wizardy Online... at least the NA version before it was closed, also had a Permadeath mechanic, so it was not in your best interest to keep throwing yourself at someone, because eventually you'll just get ganged up on. Even then, we had at least one "notorious criminal" that everyone had on their personal KOS (Kill on Site) list. Making friends with the players who play criminals, tends to get you a certain level of "Mafia-like" power in that game. I think most players went to TESO or LOTR who played it when it shutdown. But it makes for an interesting case study in how the toxicity of the player base combined with a mechanic (full time PvP) that allows it, actually keeps people from enjoying or even trying it.

So a small portion of players willingly drive people from the game through various forms of griefing

Which comes back to the mods question. Do not, under any circumstances give players tools to enable griefing. Allowing players to see other players DPS other than their own enables such. In another game I played there was this notorious mod that allowed a decimal value of combat power to be displayed in the game where otherwise would show "weak, weaker, strong, very strong" beside the monster or player's name. That unauthorized mod is so notorious that it's claimed to be the sole excuse to install mods/hacks/cheats into the game client. That mod was the equivalent of being able to see the players maximum DPS, even though it had zero bearing on the players actual skill level as it was only a calculation based off their stats and gear equipped. Still, players would use this unauthorized mod to find PvP targets. I even called out people on this by equipping a kind of twinking gear (gear that deliberately changed the combat power to a low value, to change the skill experience gained when fighting weaker monsters) and standing in places that people same-race PvP, and sure enough there will be every half hour or so, people that just come by entirely to score "weak" kills, when I could kill them in one shot with or without the gear.

Fortunately FFXIV doesn't have such a PvP system, but if a "dueling" system ever came out, this is exactly what would happen if too much access is allowed by authorized mods.

[Carson_The_Brown]

The math is just aligning it with the Role's purpose.
In a 4 player dungeon under "perfect" conditions:
1 Tank has Enmity 100% of the time
1 Healer does 100% of the healing
2 DPS deals 50%+ of the damage (each responsible for 25%)

In an 8 player dungeon under "perfect" conditions:
2 Tanks have Enmity 100% of the time
2 Healers do 100% healing in tandem with each other
4 DPS deal 50%+ of the damage (each responsible for 12.5%)

In both cases it should be assumed that the Healer does ZERO DPS and thus the DPS players should be able to do 66% of the DPS without an issue if both healers are not doing DPS. In overgeared situations, the Healers may have less need to conserve MP for healing and could probably drive the DPS players portion of DPS down below 50%. So that's when it starts shifting back to the point where a healer may end up doing more DPS than one of the DPS players.

Like what would "improve" the dungeon content management would be to have the dungeon prompt to kick DPS players that can't meet the generous 12.5% or 25% requirement to not be a "lame carry" or kick healers that are spending too much time DPS'ing or attracting enmity with overhealing, or Tanks that are not tanking.

"<Player> DPS is not sufficient to continue the dungeon and will be replaced if the party is KO'd", "<Player>'s healing technique is not sufficient to continue this dungeon and will be replaced upon Party KO", "<Player>'s enmity control is not sufficient to continue this dungeon and will be replaced upon Party KO"

At least that way, it's much easier to get rid of carries, bots, and you don't get situations like what happens in Coil where you wait for 2 hours only to see a vote abandon after the first wipe.

Hence giving a heads-up for the named player to improve or for the rest of the party to be less aggressive on taking other roles (eg Healer tanking, DPS healing, DPS tanking) if they want to keep them.

As for rewarding simply stepping into the encounter room, no if a player can't hit the target, they wouldn't get to "need/greed" on the item, and wouldn't get a clear from such content. For harder "extreme" and "savage" content, the numbers would probably be less generous since they are tuned differently.



Oh my, you have picked an interesting field.

I'd say you're probably only correct about communities that do not have fulltime PvP. So PvE games, yeah, 15% seems pretty consistent.

PvP games, is all about pulling down "white knights" to the bullies level. So games that have a specific PvP element (eg WoW, SW:TOR, Aion, Archeage) where PvP is engaged all the time, players will go out of their way to cause misery to the other faction "because I can." Other games that have PvP as a criminal element instead (Wizardy Online, Archeage), actually creates a community out of the sociopaths and the role players who can keep their moral sense in check to play with them. Like in Wizardy Online... at least the NA version before it was closed, also had a Permadeath mechanic, so it was not in your best interest to keep throwing yourself at someone, because eventually you'll just get ganged up on. Even then, we had at least one "notorious criminal" that everyone had on their personal KOS (Kill on Site) list. Making friends with the players who play criminals, tends to get you a certain level of "Mafia-like" power in that game. I think most players went to TESO or LOTR who played it when it shutdown. But it makes for an interesting case study in how the toxicity of the player base combined with a mechanic (full time PvP) that allows it, actually keeps people from enjoying or even trying it.

So a small portion of players willingly drive people from the game through various forms of griefing

Which comes back to the mods question. Do not, under any circumstances give players tools to enable griefing. Allowing players to see other players DPS other than their own enables such. In another game I played there was this notorious mod that allowed a decimal value of combat power to be displayed in the game where otherwise would show "weak, weaker, strong, very strong" beside the monster or player's name. That unauthorized mod is so notorious that it's claimed to be the sole excuse to install mods/hacks/cheats into the game client. That mod was the equivalent of being able to see the players maximum DPS, even though it had zero bearing on the players actual skill level as it was only a calculation based off their stats and gear equipped. Still, players would use this unauthorized mod to find PvP targets. I even called out people on this by equipping a kind of twinking gear (gear that deliberately changed the combat power to a low value, to change the skill experience gained when fighting weaker monsters) and standing in places that people same-race PvP, and sure enough there will be every half hour or so, people that just come by entirely to score "weak" kills, when I could kill them in one shot with or without the gear.

Fortunately FFXIV doesn't have such a PvP system, but if a "dueling" system ever came out, this is exactly what would happen if too much access is allowed by authorized mods.

I think a dueling system would be interesting so long as it was exactly that, 2 explicitly consenting players (that does not mean 1 consenting player and another player that "consents" by being in the same zone; something that involves a button prompt saying "Nosrac has challenged you to a duel, do you accept?") or 2 consenting teams fighting in a format similar to Arenas. I personally abhor violence against moral entities (even in a virtual environment) but some people genuinely find pleasure in PvP.

That being said,

many open world PvP games include a similar mechanic. WoW's level notation (gray for >10 below, yellow for competitive, orange for >2 levels above, red for <6 levels above, and ?? for everything else) a system that tells you the exact power level can be a boon or a bane depending on the general intent of your game. I agree that it would be a system breaker in a game like WoW. How much worse would the griefing be if you could get a handy readout on that Belf saying "you have 50 ilvl over him"? I doubt this would become an issue in FFXIV since SE doesn't really do PVP design.

Also, 15% is actually accurate even in PVP games. Griefers and Campers are actually a very, very small portion of an MMO's community. I mean, if you expand griefer to mean "anyone who has ever intentionally engaged in PVP against a vastly inferior opponent" then I could see the percentage jump up to 60 or 70 percent, closer to 90 or more if you include people who have engaged in the sort of cowboy justice that used to go down in The Burning Crusade; but if you're only defining griefer as "an individual who intentionally and habitually engages in violent behavior against a target to the exclusion of the intended use of the medium" then 15% basically holds true everywhere from ArcheAge to 4chan.

Unfortunately, Finagle's Law is a real thing that needs to be tended to. You can rely on people using any given thing for the most perverse possible ends. That's why I typically believe MMORPGs need to be highly controlled environments. Your average individual cant really be trusted to police itself.

[Hyunckel]

I think a problem with Bismarck Ex, especially right now, is its minimal ilvl requirement. You can go in there with ilvl 142 which is total nonsense. Even Neverreap and Fractal require 145.

Well it can AND has been cleared at ilv150 (and ravana 160) lol

It's just that some people plainly suck at rotations, keeping up buffs, positionning etc. Some jobs also underperform in regard to others.

[KisaiTenshi]

if they didn't want people to be annoyed about people putting forth poor DPS, they shouldn't have put such extremely strict DPS checks into heavensward.

(hello Bismarck EX)


any single argument anyone might have about "oh but people will use it to harass" is outweighed by the fact that you absolutely need to put forth a certain amount of DPS to clear specific heavensward fights, and being unable to tell who is dead weight on your team is a severe handicap as a result.

not that i condone harassment of course, but it's extremely stupid that the current extreme primal fights have such strict DPS checks, with absolutely no way ingame to tell who's lagging behind if you cannot pass said checks .

It's a BS response to tell people "you're dead weight according to my unauthorized mod that tells me you suck"

SE clearly has the ability to tell the player/party who is purposely dragging down the party, it exists in the PvP content.

What needs to happen is that the rewards need to scale by participation. So you can't "carry" dead weight, or better yet "can't sell clears"

A dungeon should not be clearable with one person being dead weight. Regardless of the gear creep.

But to the OP...

Mods are extremely abused in MMO's, especially mods that give the player access to content they should never ever have. I'd rather the status quo stay, and SE hand out a better carrot for preventing bad behavior and breaking existing DPS mods than opening add-on's up and someone figuring out how to automate the fight due to too much information being present in the client.