The Illusion of Choice

[Alahra]

If you're not using the 'perfect build' then you are only ever hindering the people you are playing with and if you do that then people will call you out on it and shun you from content.

Doesn't this argument also apply to classes within the same role though? For instance, BRD has a DPS edge over MCH at this point in time. What is the point of having both BRD and MCH if one of them is always going to be mathematically superior?

[Malzian]

Doesn't this argument also apply to classes within the same role though? For instance, BRD has a DPS edge over MCH at this point in time. What is the point of having both BRD and MCH if one of them is always going to be mathematically superior?

Which is, indeed, an argument that happens.

[Alahra]

Which is, indeed, an argument that happens.

Just because an argument happens doesn't mean that it's a good argument.

[Malzian]

Just because an argument happens doesn't mean that it's a good argument.

Yes, I agree, but just because it's not a good argument does not negate the reality that it happens. I don't agree or prescribe to that particular notion myself... But then I also don't agree with a lot of bad things people still do anyway...

[Alahra]

Yes, I agree, but just because it's not a good argument does not negate the reality that it happens. I don't agree or prescribe to that particular notion myself... But then I also don't agree with people ruining around shooting up places but it still happens.

I think you're missing the point of my bringing it up though. I think it's just as invalid an argument against player customization as I think it is against classes in general.

[Malzian]

I think you're missing the point of my bringing it up though. I think it's just as invalid an argument against player customization as I think it is against classes in general.

No, I understand what you meant, and I agree in the terms you state it that it's a bad argument. However, you're comparing apples and oranges here because the difference you're talking is that if I have to choose between a BRD and a MCH I will always know how those two classes stack up because I know for the most part what each class can do. I know a BRD, regardless of gear (which you can always check), will come with a pre-determined pool of skills that will generally result in certain expectations I can make about what that BRD is potentially capable of.

However, if it's possible for two BRDs to have entirely the exact same gear set that you can see, but have a totally different set of skills at their disposal... and if I present that to you and say, 'Okay, one has a fantastic build with great skills and the other's build is complete crap, but I'm not telling you which'... well, are you just going to pick one at random and pray you get the best one? Even if you're doing some dinky little dungeon that normally you can complete in 15 min? If I told you the one with the bad build would make you take twice as long? I highly doubt most people would just grab one and go hope for the best.

Now all of this is just a player-side issue, how we as a community handle the 'choices' we're given. There's a whooole other side to the issue as well where the devs are concerned. As it stands, the devs already have a difficult time developing content that's tuned equally to all of the classes. Yes, all content can be done with all of the classes but some compositions inherently make things much, much more difficult than others. This is with the devs also knowing exactly how every single class will handle in every instance they make because those skills are pre-determined. They make decisions about this all of the time and we already see what comes from that. Throw this complexity on top of it and it's just making it even harder for the devs to tune the content appropriately to give everyone a chance and it just makes everything harder if even the devs can't be certain what skills any particular job can come into content with or without.

However, in the vein of the title of this thread it comes down to this... in order for a true skill-tree system to be effective and viable it has to be created along with content that makes any choice you make in how you distribute your skills just as effective as any other. That means that if you have 3 routes you can go down, in order to make it work so no one route is favored all routes must be equal. Route 1 must be as good as Route 2, which must be as good as Route 3. If Route 1, 2 and 3 are all essentially the same in the end... why add on the complexity of tree that only leads you to the same destination in the end? Your choice in that is an illusion... it's an aesthetic and it is artificial in its complexity because it is ultimately meaningless. If you don't make the ends equal, then one end will always be chosen and then you also really have no choice. When all routes are equal, it is just as unfulfilling as if there was only one route. When one route is superior to all others then most people will eventually move to that one and no other routes become viable unless the devs design content specifically to make you use that route... and then you end up shuffling your builds for everything you do. We do this enough with jobs as it stands, we don't need to be doing it with builds on top of jobs, as far as I'm concerned.

At this point, I think I've said all I have to say on this topic and I'm going to bow out. Have a good day.

[Ibi]

After thinking about it last night, I realized SE has done this before in FFXI. This is what choice looks like though.....

<snip skillchain chart>

This is not what choice looked like at all.

Almost every party tried to set up a Distortion skillchain from the Dunes until the mid-60s and a Light or Dark skillchain from the mid-60s until skillchains went out of fashion with TP spam merit parties.

The skillchain chart is actually a far better example, once again, of illusion of choice. It looks like you can do a ton of different things, but one or two options were so much better than any alternatives that you effectively never used them. How often did you have a party go to a camp and start intentionally making Gravitation skillchains, for example?

Which included massive amounts of macro gear swaps for abilities due to stat modifiers

Again, not an example of choice. If you had a piece of gear in FFXI that enhanced an ability, you equipped that piece of gear for that ability every single time.

hours upon hours of increasing weapon skills(picture desynth leveling, but your whacking rabbits and/or crabs)

Not a choice. No one intentionally chose to have an under leveled weapon skill.

studying the above chart so you're prepared no matter what your class composition is in any party, and hoping your party members have done the same.

Almost no one actually memorized the full chart. Most people just learned if they could open/close Distortion and what jobs they could make Light/Dark with. Or they had a copy printed out or saved to their hard drive and pulled it up if they ever needed it.

Regardless, once again, you're not choosing between different options here, it's just Hobson's choice; either you learned parts of the chart or you didn't.

However, in the vein of the title of this thread it comes down to this... in order for a true skill-tree system to be effective and viable it has to be created along with content that makes any choice you make in how you distribute your skills just as effective as any other.

No, it doesn't. A distribution can be less effective, as long as you gain something in the trade off.

That means that if you have 3 routes you can go down, in order to make it work so no one route is favored all routes must be equal. Route 1 must be as good as Route 2, which must be as good as Route 3. If Route 1, 2 and 3 are all essentially the same in the end... why add on the complexity of tree that only leads you to the same destination in the end? If you don't make the ends equal, then one end will always be chosen and then you also really have no choice.

See the example of the three WoW druid talents that I mentioned in post #120 of this thread, back on page 12, for an example of why this is incorrect.

You do not need different options to be equal in order to have a meaningful choice.

[Shurrikhan]

However, if it's possible for two BRDs to have entirely the exact same gear set that you can see, but have a totally different set of skills at their disposal... and if I present that to you and say, 'Okay, one has a fantastic build with great skills and the other's build is complete crap, but I'm not telling you which'... well, are you just going to pick one at random and pray you get the best one? Even if you're doing some dinky little dungeon that normally you can complete in 15 min? If I told you the one with the bad build would make you take twice as long? I highly doubt most people would just grab one and go hope for the best.

You point this out like this would be a new problem. The same gear has never meant the same output. Even in our rather simple systems, not every player actually performs optimally, an issue that has nothing to do with combat preparation of equipment variation (including spec). Moreover, no well crafted spec choice is going to have this kind of range; you're giving an approximation of a Bard somehow wearing full caster gear. That's simply not the case with any choice of one of many DPS specs I've ever heard of. A player can easily be that bad, but a spec... that's unlikely even if there were a near total utility spec, and all of that utility wasted.

Now all of this is just a player-side issue, how we as a community handle the 'choices' we're given. There's a whooole other side to the issue as well where the devs are concerned. As it stands, the devs already have a difficult time developing content that's tuned equally to all of the classes. Yes, all content can be done with all of the classes but some compositions inherently make things much, much more difficult than others. This is with the devs also knowing exactly how every single class will handle in every instance they make because those skills are pre-determined. They make decisions about this all of the time and we already see what comes from that. Throw this complexity on top of it and it's just making it even harder for the devs to tune the content appropriately to give everyone a chance and it just makes everything harder if even the devs can't be certain what skills any particular job can come into content with or without.

However, in the vein of the title of this thread it comes down to this... in order for a true skill-tree system to be effective and viable it has to be created along with content that makes any choice you make in how you distribute your skills just as effective as any other. That means that if you have 3 routes you can go down, in order to make it work so no one route is favored all routes must be equal. Route 1 must be as good as Route 2, which must be as good as Route 3. If Route 1, 2 and 3 are all essentially the same in the end... why add on the complexity of tree that only leads you to the same destination in the end?

Except this is almost never the case. All that balance is even attempted on is average dps in a mixed-mechanics fight, and then again on the pure dps level. Each spec's dynamics and ability to cope with each different mechanic or situation in such a fight may and almost certainly will differ significantly.

Your choice in that is an illusion... it's an aesthetic and it is artificial in its complexity because it is ultimately meaningless. If you don't make the ends equal, then one end will always be chosen and then you also really have no choice. When all routes are equal, it is just as unfulfilling as if there was only one route. When one route is superior to all others then most people will eventually move to that one and no other routes become viable unless the devs design content specifically to make you use that route... and then you end up shuffling your builds for everything you do. We do this enough with jobs as it stands, we don't need to be doing it with builds on top of jobs, as far as I'm concerned.

If that truly were the case, which would mean that the spec range was very poorly developed, then yes, it'd be an fulfilling waste of player and development time. But that is simply not the case when specs are done right, especially where undermechanics and acceptable play-styles allow for a larger range of strategy.

Take Wrath WoW for another example, especially when people were still undergeared -- pure dps was a hefty issue, but quite simply not dying was even larger. There were several bosses in which DPS needed to use things other than pure damage just for the tank to survive, no matter how well s/he and the healer were performing. As a Frost DK that commonly meant taking adds before they could reach the healer and slow-kiting them around the boss while melee dpsing. On Blood DK that meant swapping in periodically to take two vuln stacks for every four the tank took, etc. On Unholy that meant making use of my pet to hold new adds in place before they could destruct on the party, making use of my ghoul form to sac towards the end of the fight, or taking a single really hard TB with my CDs. That's all for one class, and differing further with each hybrid spec. In those situations, where fights actually warrant strategy and creativity (e.g. where both the classes and fight are well-constructed), these dynamics lead to very different playstyles. As we become continually overgeared, we turn to more pure dps-oriented strats or (longer) CD-based utility only to ignore mechanics completely, causing a shuffling of talents -- one weakness (depending on how you look at it) of any talent system where one can prioritize utility over dps, AoE over ST, etc.

Or, take class variance in early T5. DRG was sometimes favored simply because it could open with Full Thrust onto Conflagration, and then ID-DB for a 6-sec or FT combo again for an 8-sec, while Bards couldn't use anything but a 150 spam without 2-3 DoT ticks' time (contributing as much as any combo job only with Barrage up), and a SMN without an AF stack was useless (though with two stacks, almost as amazing as a BLM with SC and Convert, and pot at the ready and Flare pre-casting). Readied burst was necessary for mechanics. And yet Bards, the worst in that regard, excelled in general dps for that fight, and SMNs both performed well generally and could reverse a wipe. (In a min ilvl, no Echo fight now, a MCH would excel in both regards.)

Because of these small variances, whether in damage or utility dynamics, as much as they may look much the same when compiled onto a dps parser at the end of a fight, players can have the ability to pick how they want to rotate, how many little situations they wanted to be immune to or to dominate, what kind of things they want to prioritize to get more out of how they actually (like to) play. Jobs (XIV), sub-jobs (XI), sparsely-alterable specs (Mist/WoD), and highly-alterable specs (Wrath, B&S, and beyond) are just spectrum to that. And those choices, whatever their end product may be, feel really good. To cut them out of the game, isn't a failing of the talent system concept or that of any other player customization system; it's a failing of the game to support creative choices and interesting effects, and likely a general under-tuning that washes out actual performance dynamics.

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To put it another way, the only real problem with talent systems or combat gameplay player customization in XIV isn't actually those systems at all -- it's that there's so little to the game other than pure damage. All spec dynamics outside of their parser impact are dependent on both the game's undermechanics and the communities willingness to experiment. I'm not talking about tolerance for gimmicks or non-optimal play, either; I'm talking about actual optimal but non-conventional play. Much of the things we call non-optimal as a rule of thumb (e.g. shorterm dps tanks) already are actually because few people actually even tried learning strategies that make use of them. Single-tank Titan or (tank-and-Lancer) Garuda Ex are prime examples of when we actually did try these things, and they worked. We try to mass-pull during AoEs despite "poor" Ninja AoE and an undergeared healer, but then forget that a Warrior can Doton kite the entire pack while being hit by no more than a couple of the mobs at any time, without interruption to party AoE dps. There are the occasional WHMs who know how to stun a pack of room-AoEing mobs just before they can cast, or the (sadly) rarer still DPS who hold their stuns a few seconds for incoming necessary tank movement (positionals) or would-be mob damage, but generally our tolerance of anything outside of zerging is pretty low. We fall back to T&S in just about every situation we can, often forgetting about what little utility we do have. In that environment, by no fault of the specs themselves, yes, it may be hard for those specs to distinguish themselves. Though at least they'd provide a few more rotational options. But with some small changes, who knows... we might just feel like jobs instead of differently geared (in terms of clockwork, not necessarily ilvl) dps machines.