Why Does It Feel Like Poor Play Is Acceptable (I'm Venting.)

[Tridus]

I think it is all related to lazyness, even if more indirectly. Lazyness of not asking for tips, lazyness not looking up information, lazyness of not reading tips. This game appeals to seems to be wants to be open for everyone. Well if it is going to be made for everyone, you need Tutorials to be explained in a way to people that never played a game before. I did get in a low level group once where this mentor was trying to explain to this new tank how to play. After a while they where having problems because they never played a game before, let alone MNORPG. Maybe there can be a prompt giving extra optional Tutorials to do. I do not mean the hall of novice and it does take a bit to understand it. I mean before you even see the first cut scene, "Would you like to see basic tips of the game ? (This is a good idea to hit yes if you never played a MNORPG before)"

I'm a professional software developer. Speaking from first hand experience, tutorials won't reach the players you want to reach. Why? They don't read them. They want to click them away as fast as possible to get back to whatever they wanted to do. Ever tried making a Delete function that won't result in accidental deletion? It's impossible. No matter how many checks, confirmations, and warnings you put in, people will still do it. At some point it becomes counter productive because once you have too many, they stop reading them entirely and just click "Yes" to everything blindly. People also do this with browser security prompts, which is part of why security is so terrible and also why browsers display far fewer prompts than they used to. (True story: I had someone delete a record, then call support. They asked where the record had gone and why it was missing. I checked the logs, walked up to their desk, and showed them the delete button they pressed, then the giant red warning that it'd delete the record they also pressed. Clearly they didn't read either of these things because they were surprised that a delete button existed, and it was very hard for me to resist asking if they were in fact capable of reading.)

It's not even about "laziness", per se. At the end of the day, people want to clear content. For your core gamer, they also want to optimize, try to find tricks, and such. For another segment of the market, they don't. They want to get their goal done, and that's it. If they can do that, as far as they're concerned, nothing is wrong. If they're being carried? So what? The game doesn't tell them that, and there's no real disincentive to do it in roulette because the only problem aside from a kick is failure, and failure is RARE in roulettes.

It can be a real culture shock when people hit Ex/Savage and suddenly start being told they're doing bad DPS when nothing has ever told them that before and it hasn't mattered at all. A tutorial won't fix that. If you want to fix that, you need to surface that information a lot earlier. IMO you also need to up the difficulty of levelling and expert content so that poor play is more punishing, because if you can stand in absolutely everything and be carried by the healer, what's the harm?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

It can be a real culture shock when people hit Ex/Savage and suddenly start being told they're doing bad DPS when nothing has ever told them that before and it hasn't mattered at all. A tutorial won't fix that. If you want to fix that, you need to surface that information a lot earlier. IMO you also need to up the difficulty of levelling and expert content so that poor play is more punishing, because if you can stand in absolutely everything and be carried by the healer, what's the harm?

This here is why I get so tilted over the eased difficulty we've seen since mid-Heavensward. Look no further than Sunsao and Lakshmi EX, where the excuse was "people are learning their new abilities!" Fast forward to Shinryu EX and pf is a complete shitshow. Why? The former two didn't allow people to learn but simply made it far easier to carry bad players since you scarcely even need six people for either. Shinryu, on the other hand, exposed those detrimental to the party. The easier casual content becomes, the less people pay attention because nothing reinforces the notion they should. A friend of mine actually got a tank who had never touched Savage before and said "I cleared V4N. Shouldn't be that much different." They legitimately thought normal was just a slight tier below. Honestly, I suspect many newer players have similar opinions only to get absolutely decimated.

If the devs ever truly want to shrink the skill gap, they need to stop coddling and make reasonably paced difficulty curves. Considering they've come out saying The Vault was too much for leveling healers, I won't hold my breath...

[Tridus]

If the devs ever truly want to shrink the skill gap, they need to stop coddling and make reasonably paced difficulty curves. Considering they've come out saying The Vault was too much for leveling healers, I won't hold my breath...

That frustrates me to no end because I main WHM and I loved healing The Vault. When you get a total mess on that and the group pulls it out anyway, it's a great feeling.

There's no real sense of accomplishment without the risk of failure. They seem to have lost sight of that in favor of "nothing can kill you". Like the last boss on Sirensong Sea. If your healer is awake, everyone else can fail the mechanic every time and be fine so long as they run back out afterward. That's it. Compared to the punch in the face The Vault would give you for messing up repeatedly and it's just not satisfying to beat it unless you try to push your healer DPS as high as possible (because that's where the only challenge is).

Seems like the wrong direction to me.