A proposed solution for having players become better players.

[NovaLevossida]

We've had a lot of posts lately either commenting / complaining about player skill levels or proposing punishments for players who don't cut it. I think a better method is to incentivize players rather than punish them since SE will never implement a punishment system.

What I propose is creating a skill-based bonus reward per player not dissimilar to the adventurer in need bonus you can get for queuing up as a needed class (ie, tank). This would be a rewards incentive of bonus tomes, gil, experience, and/or a small chance of a drop at the end of the dungeon based on how well you have performed. The base criteria I propose would be the following, but they can certainly be tweaked:

1. DPS roles: Your bonus rating is calculated by the amount of DPS you deal. If the system were advanced enough to allow it, I'd also have it subtract a number factored by the amount of avoidable damage you take.

2. Tank roles: Your bonus rating is calculated by DPS combined with enmity and damage mitigation.

3. Healer roles: Your bonus rating is calculated by amount of actual health restored (ie, overhealing or spamming heal on max health characters wouldn't count) combined with DPS. As content becomes easier from being overgeared, you'll find your DPS contribution scaling a bit more than your healing contribution.

These would basically just be looking at only the boss fights for the calculations. Think something akin to Stone, Sky, Sea's expectations but the number would be higher since SSS is looking for a minimum effort. The bonus rating requirement will be calculated by your gear's stats and the fight itself (which would vary because a Savage raid fight is different than Fractal), so you will always have to perform well to achieve a bonus. At the end of an instance, if a player ended up getting a bonus, a special animation / effect would play like a level up so as to encourage earning that.

Some good things about this proposal:

1. It directly incentivizes people to care.
2. Not getting the bonus would likely make people want to earn the bonus and thus educate themselves to play better.
3. Extra experience and tomes directly cut down on leveling and anima grinds. People will want to play better.

Some problems I see with this proposal:

1. It won't help anyone who truly doesn't care. There's no helping these people no matter what you do.
2. Since we're only looking at boss fights and since pulls can vary so much in size and pacing, it doesn't do anything to encourage people to actually use AoE skills on trash packs.