Emergent gameplay design(Food for thought)

[Sandpark]

Again, this is coming from a raiding environment. Virus can be used by BLMs, SMN, SCH and WHM. Antibody is in effect because they don't want you stacking something as powerful as 15% reduction output and maintain full uptime on it. It's supposed to be used as a reactive tool for tank busters or otherwise unavoidable raid damage.

Then antibody shouldn't be stackable, & have a diminished reduction output on repeated use not be resigned to a 1-2 time thing a fight.

What? I'm saying the skill functions both as a stun and oGCD damage, to be used as either or depending on what you need from it. If you had a skill that does only stun, then as a skill that only does damage, it causes button bloating because you still have the stun skill that's only used in key instances, while at the same time oyu'd still have the oGCD damage skill taking up another slot for no reason other than just because.

Not necessarily. Look at this game's combat. Stuns/Interrupts take no extra button, they just appear on screen when you are able to initiate one. And you earn stun/interrupt from finesse which is how good you play your job.
http://elderscrollsonline.wiki.fextralife.com/Combat

Which now favors certain group compositions because not all classes have access to such skills, and something like this would go beyond dps checks (which is a reason why paladin currently fails at alexander savage). Not to mention it still comes back to the same problem; what can and cant be interrupted? What if two skills that can't be interrupted come in tantum with each other?

Ok, if all jobs don't have some form of control or damage reduction skill. They could easily be assigned one since no true support or control classes are planned and we have the hybrids.

If two skills can't be stunned in tandem, then they could be silenced, slowed, weakened,etc.

You haven't come up with any good reasoning for GCD to be removed other than making for a dynamic gameplay. The game's latency issue here is worse than that of most MMOs I've seen, so they're practically making it work with what we can. Resource mangement does not come into play for BLM (or really, the casters in general because their cast times are longer than the GCD we have now, so removing it literally does nothing for them), while for melee, it'd break the game toward having an astrologian and ninja to keep their TP up to maximize damage. If TP is the only constraint in damage, the meta heavily shifts toward classes who can provide TP or has the best time managing it.

GCD doesn't help latency imo, because it requires extra graphics to highlight avaiable GCD, and requires skills to be used in certain order.

Well obviously if the GCD was removed, some things would need re-balanced. The TP booster classes would need a slight nerf, tp cost of weaponskills or spells would have to be rebalanced so the big skills cost the most.

Every comment I made on that link had good reason.
-Global Cooldowns change combat from being dynamic and fluid to a game of watching UI and waiting.
-Global Cooldown itself is what overly complicates things by not letting you cast certain things out of order. It places you on rails or non emergence.
-The purpose of character stat resources already tackles the point(they don't want you able to spam skills anytime you want)trying to be applied here.Well TP,HP, and MP should solve that. Sure you could spam your most powerful skills in quick succession, but if the TP/HP/MP cost are appropriately applied, this would result in you being out of resources which would cause players to manage their resources better. If your DPS falls off in this situation, due to missing a combo. No biggie if global cooldown was not in the mix.

Battles would be freed of it's chains which would inherently make the game more dynamic and fluid versus whack a mole. What is the hardest thing about managing a ton of skills besides finger dexterity and memory? Trying to remember when skills can be used or not. It overly complicates things and is complicating hotbar usage.

The only cooldown that are game breaking if not tied to a global cooldown are the abilities that augment other skills to do more potency or control skills. Changing the games overt reliance on GCD and a simple rework of hotbars would make the game a lot more dynamic.

[Shurrikhan]

GCD doesn't help latency imo, because it requires extra graphics to highlight available GCD, and requires skills to be used in certain order.

The GCD absolutely does mitigate the player output-differentiating effects of latency. Why? Because there is a queuing period over which the game can detect outgoing commands from the client before the next actuon is available. It obligatorially slows down combat (give or take oGCDs), and incidentally allows higher ping connections to sort of "catch up". Try any of various Korean MMOs that use spammable abilities without a GCD. Over a minute, the same player at 120 ms ping may only be able to produce two thirds of the same spammed attacks that he could produce at 40 ms. That doesn't end up a factor for XIV until you start adding in oGCDs, or even until attempting to double-weave without clipping. At a 2.4 GCD or less, I typically need under 90 ms latency to double-weave most oGCDs. Some are impossible to double-weave even then (none even so notorious as Jump, but still faintly longer than most), or until as low as 60 ms. By 30 ms, the true limiter is basically the animation lock itself. Which brings us to the true limiter:

Every comment I made on that link had good reason.
-Global Cooldowns change combat from being dynamic and fluid to a game of watching UI and waiting.
-Global Cooldown itself is what overly complicates things by not letting you cast certain things out of order. It places you on rails or non emergence.
-The purpose of character stat resources already tackles the point(they don't want you able to spam skills anytime you want)trying to be applied here.Well TP,HP, and MP should solve that. Sure you could spam your most powerful skills in quick succession, but if the TP/HP/MP cost are appropriately applied, this would result in you being out of resources which would cause players to manage their resources better. If your DPS falls off in this situation, due to missing a combo. No biggie if global cooldown was not in the mix.

As long as the game has reliable queuing, there is no reason at all to look down at your bar just to track the GCD. Even if there is not, your reflexes as a human aren't much more reliable in looking down and attempting to time your next single keystroke to what you see than simply very quickly mashing the button you want to use next. There is simply no real advantage to tracking the GCD. What you do look at are CDs, and if experienced, only when you have to. For very particular jobs, or those with superhuman sense of timing and incredibly unwavering pings, you might also track the global tick to get more out of your DoTs. (The mythical extra DoT tick isn't just myth, but it requires a unique combination of latency, server poling, and timing to the global tick.)

The Global Cooldown is not what prevents you from casting things out of order. The simply temporal matter of order, or simply speaking the idea that your character cannot output two abilities, skills, etc. at once, is what creates order. If abilities had no animation lock to prevent another from being used at the same time, which is effectively saying 'if abilities had no animations', then you could use them in any order because no matter what, they won't be in any order—they'll be simultaneous. Anything short of that will cause order prioritization, whether you use a GCD system, or animation locks only and/or a limiting resource (as in 1.0's stamina bar - skills in which could consecutively go off faster than now, for a time).

All that a GCD does compared to a simple limiting resource (e.g. Stamina) and animation locks only is that they remove the disadvantage of longer animation locks where resource regeneration is quick enough to otherwise cap over the animation, and force a more consistent action rate, almost identically to consuming Stamina always as soon as possible or only to stay short of capping. Our oGCDs are our way of reintroducing dynamics back into that otherwise consistent pace, while also providing a distinctly low-time-penalty tier of abilities, usually able to clip slightly into main skill's animations and generally usable without detracting any uptime from the main tier. This is impossible in an effectively time-locked system (animation locked, where the limiting resource is not presently being a real limitation; you'll see this at immense amounts of Haste and a free-resource CD in WoW; you'll see it in Blade and Soul, Black Desert, Dragon's Nest, etc. But neither the GCD nor oGCDs themselves influence order. Buff windows and the animation locks themselves do. The closest thing to a seemingly unique limitation is trying to line up a GCD (weaponskill) buff/vuln with a oGCD (ability) buff. But, that's actually ubiquitous; you run into the same issue trying to time two oGCDs or 'unbound/free' actions, or whatever label you prefer, together. As long as there is a limited amount of action possible over their durations and one may lose effective duration because you stacked the abilities, there will be order. The only way to avoid that is, again, to remove their animations or animation locks and make them simultaneous.

Now, I'll agree with your last point that it'd be "no biggie if the global cooldown was not in the mix". Things would go more or less the same, except that utility oGCDs would be more costly to burst strings. Utility oGCDs carry only minor damage compared to your combos, but would now run in the same time-locked system of only animation locks and long-term resource (TP). They would, essentially, be no-TP weaponskills. That in itself isn't a problem. Even its implications—that you'd be wasting damage to use (previously oGCD) utility during a CD window—aren't necessarily problematic. But it is a change.

What I would personally consider a problem is burst capability, in PvE and especially PvP. With only long-term limiting resources to hold us back, we would be solely time-locked in burst, and those with lower ping connections could issue more commands within that time than higher ping players. This is already technically the case (in double-weaving, etc.), but as I said, the GCD and its mandatory slowing mitigates it substantially, to where it's basically a non-issue past the openers or unload-all attacks compared to positioning (one of the things that kills playing base movement speed melee for me in XIV PvP). But in a solely time-locked system, I could pull off two additional skills over an Aussie player or similarly less connection-supported region in my battlegroup, while someone with a faster connection still could pull off a skill more than I could.

Battles would be freed of it's chains which would inherently make the game more dynamic and fluid versus whack a mole. What is the hardest thing about managing a ton of skills besides finger dexterity and memory? Trying to remember when skills can be used or not. It overly complicates things and is complicating hotbar usage.

For me, perhaps the only thing bringing this game to an acceptable level complexity for my tastes, is preferable skill order. Take that away, and there's not much left.

Granted, I prefer it when things get chaotic and I have to renegotiate those CD rotations, etc. I like to be forced out of that monotonous comfort zone, and I wish the game had more ways to approach our rotations. But such extra options generally require intentional, math-first, craftsmanship. Paradigms aren't thrown out a generality at a time. They form from minutia.

The only cooldown that are game breaking if not tied to a global cooldown are the abilities that augment other skills to do more potency or control skills. Changing the games overt reliance on GCD and a simple rework of hotbars would make the game a lot more dynamic.

You realize, this would include all of our CDs, historically oGCD, in addition to every buff/vuln weaponskill and ability, like Dragon Kick, Twin Snakes, Heavy Thrust, Disembowel, Straight Shot, Rain of Death, Storm's Eye, Dancing Edge, and now Hot Shot, Darkside, Dark Arts, and even to some extent both Bard DoTs? That is going to feel like a really weird collective to not allow to be used too closely to each other, separated by a given shared cooldown. Some will be entirely unaffected, of course, such as Heavy Thrust and Disembowel as long as the latter can still only be used in combo. But if the GCD is longer than the animation time of Dragon Kick, which would be the only way a GCD or any other shared cooldown would be notice, you'd be forcing every Monk to either wait until Twin Snakes is off GCD or plug onward with True Strike, wasting Twin Snakes buff uptime until the next cycle. Bards would now be forced to blow their CDs, assuming those even remain, one at a time. And I can't even guess what would be done with WM now that that's a thing.

[Shurrikhan]

Anyways, to get back on topic, I'd very much like to see "emergent gameplay" in whatever ways that buzzword could actually be made applicable to this game. Because right now, emergent gameplay is solely optimization.

(One it could argue it always is; the only difference is the focus, or feel, of that optimization and the expected longevity or count of a particular instance of decision making.)

My question for you and anyone else reading this, is how do you make optimization feel creative, responsive, or fun — those things we associate with emergent gameplay.

It's a damn big question, and I'm struggling with it over here as well. I wouldn't expect to hit gold right away; that's what feedback is for.

My only clear impression right now is that is a matter entirely divorced from the GCD or most similar systems of pace control. I may yet be persuaded otherwise, but if what I've written above sounds cogent to you, I'd like to hear your thoughts as they'd apply to other possible solutions or interactions instead.

[Kosmos992k]

Emergant gameplay = metagames

Another form of emergent gameplay would be the Little Big Planet games.

Emergant gameplay is very much in the eye of the beholder. If you pay carful attention, there are examples of emegant gameplay in Eorzea already.

[Kurogaea]

14 doesn't really allow much of free reign of situations like battles and story. As much as I'd want it, "balance" is always a word they'd use. Though if the "balance" was the amount of PvE content in contrast with PvP content then they'd would know a lot less about that. Fairness in this game is similar to Life is Strange. You can change as many variables as you want, but the end will always be the same and you'd have to choose 1 of 2 options. Choices and skill are limited in the designs of our character. We're Warriors of Light.

The story calls us The Warrior of Light as if we're one entity where that's way far from the truth, as we're defenseless when placed in any situation on our own. We can't plan success where the game doesn't want to be completed in only one way. Items don't help much because the game wants you to rely on others leaving strategy to your teammates, in which there is no problem with that, but when players themselves are stuck in roles with predetermined stats, in situations involving no environmental interactions that was NOT scripted for immediate use or otherwise death, in battle mechanics guaranteeing death unless specific actions or needed but not in any way clear until the player(s) solve mostly cryptic mechanics till a strategy develops in which it is only one specific way to deal with them, the player is limited to what they are allowed to do. I call it psuedo freedom since your still doing it within very set rules.

People say you can do fights with different strats. Well in relation to this game, if I told someone they can make a dance performance on a stage with they're group but only allowed to use 3 dance moves and the entire stage. You can do plenty of patterns though each movement will look the same and eventually it becomes point A to point B.

[Shurrikhan]

14 doesn't really allow much of free reign of situations like battles and story. As much as I'd want it, "balance" is always a word they'd use.

Sorry to take this tangentially, but just a pet-peeve, so please allow me this one rant.

Balance isn't a limiter for breadth or depth of gameplay. It's what lets it actually happen.

The sad thing is when a company lacks ambition, and avoids depth purely so that the latter half of conceptualization, balance, is easier. (In which case, the question often comes to mind "why bother with any of it?") Balance doesn't kill specs, or modes, or content types. Lacking quality of development does, and the way it most often shows is by an inability to keep in mind the gritty mathematical realities that produce a concept even while developing it. It's far faster to craft new gameplay from the intricacies of current optomization, tweaking its bits for a result that feels quite different, or even to lay out various changes that would concretely work towards the new paradigm you want, than to throw out a new idea and only afterwards math it out, likely finding parts of the plan fundamentally flawed due to oversights. Working with balance in mind does not hamper development; it merely reduces wasted time. It's working with an overly narrow view of what balance should be that constricts concepts.

When you want a reason to save a given CD, buff, or environmental tool, there's a computation for that, such that the choice becomes optimal. If you still want the other option as well, you run the equation to result in only a slight advantage to the the new playstyle, leaving both viable until you're, say, attempting to clear a pre-nerf A4S in i190 gear.

/rant

....
In all other ways I agree with your above post.

[Sandpark]

@Shurrikhan
For me, a pre-designed best skill order might be a complexity from the developer stance. But to a player that is known as on rails. The best combat systems aren't about what order you do something but when and how you do something. Look no further than the best rpg combat game this decade which is Dark Souls. People wanted an off rails massive multiplayer space combat in Swtor, and what they got was the on rails single player. That is how games with GCD feel when I play them. The focus is more on working your own magic and not so much interacting with other people. Sure the tank and healer might have a bit more interaction, but they have to watch their UI more, and for the DPS, not so much multiplayer interaction, it's even more prevalent when there is no muliplayer synergy combos.

The entire premise of an mmo combat should be how can I combine my skills with other people in the moment not how complex can I make it to pertain to myself. A good combat UI should have you looking at the environment 95% of the times with no need to glance at it all to know when a cooldown is ready.

With a weighty combat system, with momentum, physics, and high cost for skill usage. The more difficult in terms of thought content can become. An article once called this combat cerebral vs others as visceral in the action combat mmo. I could care less about visceral, but cerebral in the sense that I can make things happen alone or with others to do things not necessarily intended by design to be done a certain way. A common phrase used to describe content that has to be done a certain way with strict mechanics is called a gimmick, jump rope. It exist not only on evasive maneuvers here but jump rope with rotations. Because there is not emergence in that.

[Shurrikhan]

@Shurrikhan
For me, a pre-designed best skill order might be a complexity from the developer stance. But to a player that is known as on rails. The best combat systems aren't about what order you do something but when and how you do something. Look no further than the best rpg combat game this decade which is Dark Souls. People wanted an off rails massive multiplayer space combat in Swtor, and what they got was the on rails single player. That is how games with GCD feel when I play them. The focus is more on working your own magic and not so much interacting with other people. Sure the tank and healer might have a bit more interaction, but they have to watch their UI more, and for the DPS, not so much multiplayer interaction, it's even more prevalent when there is no muliplayer synergy combos.

The entire premise of an mmo combat should be how can I combine my skills with other people in the moment not how complex can I make it to pertain to myself.

What I'm trying to prove for you is that (1) the GCD is irrelevant to pretty much any and all broader gameplay paradigms — it may connect certain bad experiences for you, but that is purely incidental — and (2) the idea of "how can I combine my skills with other people in the moment" IS still the concept of optimization. Your group is a part of it, you are a part of it, and you try to perfect the equation. The real problem you're perceiving isn't that rotations and ability order and the like stand opposite against raid awareness, multiplayer synergy, and the like, but simply that FFXIV doesn't give many ways in which the group enters that equation. Simplifying or adjusting rotations will have little to no effect on that. Making adjustments to the GCD system will have zero effect on that, because the two are absolutely irrelevant to each other. At present, effects by composition enter the equation in such ways as:

• A Ninja using Dancing Edge for his Warrior only every other time, allowing the Warrior to use a SE-BB-BB-SP-BB: combo at a such a GCD that he can reapply Maim on Maim but would otherwise be able to maintain SE onto the following Maim or Storm. Line-up issues due to the Ninja's own rotation, and difference in GCD speeds, along with the sheer potency difference between Dancing Edge and Aeolian Edge keeps this from being viable in optimal settings.
• One WAR using one Storm debuff after having seen that the other has used the other Storm debuff. They will usually end up sticking to one or the other to reduce difficulty. Convention may eventually set who should use which in which position (MT may use SE until exceeding X enmity margin, unless the OT could otherwise beat him to the first usage, but will certainly swap thereafter to SP for the extra health regen while the OT uses SE for the extra damage).
• A Ninja using Dancing Edge as an emergency when a tank is struggling to both mitigate and hold threat even after Shadewalker (and perhaps Smokescreen) has been used. Not likely to be seen in optomized content.
• A caster using Virus when the tank blew one too many CDs earlier, or is short a shield. More likely to be used at a set time, rather than conditionally.
• Players skipping DoTs/Vulns/Buffs or using only the shortest duration thereof because the given enemy will die too quickly under combined fire their durations to pay off. This is where most of the thought involved in PotD goes beyond "am I far enough away from him not to die when he combat-loots that trapped chest?" or, "This looks bad. Should I Witching Pom?"

An article once called this combat cerebral vs others as visceral in the action combat mmo. I could care less about visceral, but cerebral in the sense that I can make things happen alone or with others to do things not necessarily intended by designed to be done a certain way. A common phrase used to describe content that has to be done a certain way with strict mechanics is called a gimmick. Because there is not emergence in that.

Sorry to say it, but anything that allows player choice, creating gameplay out of established rules, is emergence. And quite often, the singularity of XIV's emergent gameplay was unintended. The developers didn't math things out as thoroughly as involved players have. That content that must "be done in a certain ways with strict mechanics" is not a gimmick. It's not nearly so kind or optional or intentional or humorous... not once community-accepted, -expected, or -enforced. It's emergence.