Musings on Mods

[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.