State of the Game: Personal Player Feedback and Stats on PvE Content [No Parsers Plz]

[Delmontyb]

There is a lot to love about Final Fantasy XIV, and having given the latest expansion some thought, I figured I'd like to share some ideas that would add to the overall replayability of the game as a whole.

While I have a lot of ideas that I want to share, this post is focused on the idea of Personal Player Feedback and Stats on PvE content.

Really that's a long way of saying, we need systems in the game to help educate players. Yoshi-P talked about some system they are working on back in 2016 at FanFest and didn't share much, I don't know if that's still being built or already deployed in some fashion. Either way, some simplify this idea as a "DPS meter" and I know those words have the possibility of bringing up a fiery debate, that is not the goal of this post, so I'll try to be as brief and detailed as I can be in hopes that it is understood that I do not want a DPS Meter, we don't need it. What we would benefit from would be personal Stats at the end of PvE content to help educate players on their performance. I think this should be personal, so it wouldn't show other players with you in the group, and I do recognize that if not handled correctly player expectations could shift to a toxic environment where players are bullied, rather then assisted.

Currently, we have this system, in PvP, the game provides stats at the end of the match, allowing us to see how we did, and it gives me feedback to what I am doing. I'd like to see a similar system at the end of PvE content, but that only displays my information, and rather than other players in my party, takes a look at my job and gives me feedback to how I'm doing compared to other players on my datacenter on that same content and same job. There will always be factors that are out of our control, but it would be great to see if compared to our previous runs in the content itself, so we are notified how we did, compared to how we did before... Did we get better? What was our best run of this content? This kind of feedback can go a long way in showing a player how they are progressing in skill. To limit griefing between players, perhaps this system is only there for pre-made groups, rather than just on random groups? There has to be a balance.

Rather then just one simple stat of Damage, the system could provide users with meaningful metrics and even a score. Values like Damage Given, Damage Taken, Damage Mitigated, Damage Avoided (getting out of an AOE), Overall healing, Player Revives, Deaths, etc... would be great to see. Almost like a little bit of how overwatch provides the player with stats, where each category can get a medal for their performance in this area, and show you your all-time high?

At the end of the day, it would be great if we can find a solution to help all players get the information they need so that if they want to improve, they can challenge themselves, against themselves, rather then against others. Would love to know your thoughts!

[Sove92]

*Inb4 this thread also gets derailed by you know who*

On top of showing stats, the duty should also give you a grade between D and S, based on your expected performance with a given ilvl. These stats don't even need to be visible to other players. It probably shouldn't show your all-time high tho.

Too bad Yoshi is against the D-S grading.

[Malzian]

So first let me say this -> PvP != PvE

They whole reason stats like that exist in PvP is because that content is inherently competitive and that kind of information is the heart and soul... the ultimate objective of PvP.

PvE is entirely different in that you're not meant to gauge your ability in the same way. Where in PvP is important to know how well you handled yourself against entirely unpredictable opponents performing unpredictable actions, in PvE your handling opponents that have very specific patterns and tells that you need to learn and the measure of how well you did is how far the enemy's life bar went down.

You simply cannot compare a game like Overwatch to XIV. It's like comparing apples to chickens, they're not even both the same class of thing. In PvE content unless you are hardcore, World First min-maxing you don't need all that information and for 99% of the player base providing that information would actually be too much. You would overload people and make them feel worse about themselves in the long run since there is a near 0% chance that they won't look to compare that information if you handed it to them.

The truth is that the people who need this information, they ones who can really squeeze the most value out of it, are already getting it through other means. Whether that means running a parser themselves or having someone else run it for them especially since the most popular one out there gives you all of that information. On top of that, if you have your game client or the server tracking all of this data and presenting it to you at the end of every run you're going to introduce a lot of extra computing work which will invariably introduce lag in the game.

Those are my thoughts on the matter, feel free to agree or disagree, but for most content you're playing you don't need this information and by advocating that we do you're only furthering the idea that this level of detail is important which is ultimately what causes the grief you want to avoid.

[Delmontyb]

So first let me say this -> PvP != PvE

Thanks for your feedback and thoughts here, while I don't agree with your points regarding feedback of data, like overwatch and PvP in the world of FFXIV, I think this information is vital to help players understand and challenge themselves (if they wish too). While PvP content is totally different then what is in PvE, you are correct there, I'm using what we have in PvP and Overwatch as examples of a visual reference guide to bring these ideas to mind in a text-based medium (the forums)

Personally, I love what the development team has done with the PvP in this game (outside of queue times) and while it's content I enjoy, the numbers at the end of the match help me understand how I did and more.

[Sebazy]

In all honesty, I don't think the majority would be interested enough in Overwatch style stats at the end of a duty. I do however agree that some basic form of ranking would be a good step at the end of duties.

I've said in a bunch of other threads, but it seems like a good place to put it here as well.

A simple 1-5 star or S-A-B-C-D-E-F etc style ranking system would be a good starting point IMHO.

The concept is fairly straight forward.

For DPS, you simply record a player's total Potency per second including personal modifiers across the duty and log it. Then apply it to a percentile based history much akin to FFLogs. However, rather than showing the player a percentile score, you just translate that into a simplified score that can be shown to the player privately at the end of the instance. It doesn't need to be precise, it just needs to show someone who is doing well a bit of a gold star for doing so and someone who is doing badly an appropriately bad mark.

For tanks and healers, you could mix things up by adding an additional score for the number of cooldowns used vs the opportunity to do so. Scoring actual healing done is a little trickier, and frankly, I don't think it's worth scoring with the current trend of dungeons as it's near enough impossible to do so without leaving an option open for exploitation.

Taking this approach has a wide number of benefits, enough so that I honestly wouldn't be surprised if SE actually already log duty wide PPS numbers already to keep a tabs on job balance.

The main one of course is that it gives a little feel good reward for those that are putting effort in, whilst also gentle and discretely chastising those that are openly slacking or underperforming.

Once implemented, it'd be self maintaining and updating. Job balance changes wouldn't be problematic as the percentiles will just shift automatically.

If the idea proved popular, it'd be easy enough to tie in additional achievements and bonuses off the back of this. It could even be used to gate content as has been seen to various degrees of popularity in WoW.

[KisaiTenshi]

In all honesty, I don't think the majority would be interested enough in Overwatch style stats at the end of a duty. I do however agree that some basic form of ranking would be a good step at the end of duties.

I've said in a bunch of other threads, but it seems like a good place to put it here as well.

A simple 1-5 star or S-A-B-C-D-E-F etc style ranking system would be a good starting point IMHO.

You can simplify this down simply to a percentile based on all players when they first cleared that content in the bell curve.

5 star, or S rating is scoring above 95%, and 1 star or F is scoring in the 5% area. A ranking or 4 star is squarely in the center, thus hitting the A rank on first clear, is doing at least as well as others. Everything below the center is ranked lower.

The trouble, really is that you can't have a realtime statistics system when SE won't get rid of the bots. The bots can skew the curve in either direction. So any kind of scoring or ranking system can't be based on absolute clear time or damage dealt.

The game has the PvP system and it's scoring system in place, ultimately because it's competitive at it's core. Dungeon content , look at PotD and HoH. The competative aspect of those pieces of content is in the score, and you get a higher score by simply wasting time and fighting more monsters. Because gear is essentially fixed, your placement on the leaderboard is the result of RNG, not strategy. If you luck out and get nothing but HP+ buffs and all the chests have useful things, you score better. If you get nothing but mimics and miasma, then no you're going to score lower for sure all other things the same.

Regular content, needs some kind of leaderboard, at least if it's run at minimum ilevel. Unsync runs should be absent from the leaderboards. As well as any runs that meet a soft-fail condition.

A soft-fail would be like:
1) Tank or Healer dies once (in content with one healer and tank)
2) DPS dies and are not revived within 30 seconds (Nobody left on the floor for an entire run)
3) Smurfing the run with a sprout character who hasn't cleared MSQ for that content.
4) Player disconnects

[Sebazy]

Defo some interesting points, a first clear score would be a very interesting metric, especially for those with a competitive streak.

I don't actually think the bot armies would be that big an issue to deal with. One simple approach here would be to only count the mean average of all a player's percentiles when it comes to the overall rankings. That'll stop a bot with thousands of clears overwhelming the pool of results. As for the sheer volumes of bots, that's a little trickier, but given that they are really only playing within the same rules that players are. I don't think they would actually poison the numbers all that much given that they are likely going to be average to slightly above average in their play (All the bots I've seen have had fairly poor APM and oGCD usage, but usually AoE quite well. Not sure if this applies to the mass teams of dungeon bots though!).

As far as the leaderboard thing goes, I do agree that that would actually be pretty nice, fflogs has it in theory, but it's really sketchy as to if it ever actually works for some people. My uploads for example, never get ranked =(

Agreed on the soft-fails as well, even outside of the leaderboards, these sort of runs shouldn't really count towards the overall rankings either really.

[AppleJinx]

So you want something that does some of what a parser does which is gauging your own performance but does not work nearly as well as an actual parser due to the lack of real time feedback thus creating this roundabout way for people to improve their own gameplay? It just sounds like extra work and complications to be put towards something that's not nearly as useful as the real thing for the sake of less feelies hurt.

[Sebazy]

So you want something that does some of what a parser does which is gauging your own performance but does not work nearly as well as an actual parser due to the lack of real time feedback thus creating this roundabout way for people to improve their own gameplay? It just sounds like extra work and complications to be put towards something that's not nearly as useful as the real thing for the sake of less feelies hurt.

Pretty much. Consider it through the eyes of someone who might log on for an hour every few days to do a levelling roulette. A true numerical parser is going to give them wildly fluctuating feedback depending not only on their own performance, but the level of the content they are put into, the ilvl of their gear as well as their job of course. Great! I did 700 popotos today, is that good?

The whole point of my approach to this isn't to make things as care bear as possible. It's to make it as consistent and quickly readable as possible. Your gear won't factor into things, your comp will have a minimal effect, you won't suddenly find your score halving because you got synced down to a level where your job is missing a key ability.

Don't think of it as another parser. Think of it as Tomy's my first parser, but made to be as easy to read as a score at the end of an Angry Birds level. We want people to notice this. Not overlook it because they aren't interested in learning how to read it.

They clear dungeons or say, Ridorana, and the game pats them on the back with a B+ despite them sitting in tank stance. They decide to try out Savage, thinking they're a half way decide player only to abruptly be met with a failing grade or frustrated party mates because they joined a "B rank" PF thinking they met the requirement when they didn't.

This is a good point, but in honesty, I think it's something that needs to be addressed via better tuned stepping stone content rather than a system like this? This is purely a system to let people know that they are either doing something wrong, or simply might want to try a bit harder. It's most certainly not a true performance metric or parser replacement. Again, think of it like the 1-3 star scoring system you get at the end of a level in a lot of games of late.

[LeoLupinos]

I think that personal feekback is important for constant improvement.

The "new personal parse" should appear at the end of every synced duty, as a S to F rank of everything, similar to other final fantasy score, and it would reward a new currency, to incentive good performance of every level range. Rank and rewards for low level, mid level, high level, end game etc...

It would incentivate the mastering feeling, dps would see a reason to use stat potions, creating value to crafters, and etc.

I think we deserve something of this level of design, to synergize well with every content.