SE needs to do more to help bad players

[Tsukino]

I know I won't get much agreement here on a forum dedicated to the game, where most everyone is going to care about being better at the game, but I think this is something that works in the game's favor, just as it worked in the favor of WoW at least for a few earlier years.

It may sound crazy to you, but most people do not play video games including MMOs to be ultra efficient at them. They play them to have fun. And if learning how to throw out AoEs or stack up their buffs in between specific cooldowns isn't fun for them they're not going to do it, regardless of how much the game tries to offer them opportunities for it. If it's forced on them at a certain point, then they will just quit, which is the last thing SE wants. In fact, they'd probably rather lose every single serious endgame raider than every player who can't be assed with learning mechanics, because there's way more of the latter paying for subscriptions.

I get that it's frustrating when you are someone who plays more seriously, and I bitch in voice chat and FC chat about random people failing things all the time. But overall it's better for the game that they stay than if SE let people go around telling people they parsed bad and causing them all to quit. Losing all those players, frustrating though they may be to play with, means the game would start dying and you would stop getting updates to the game you care so much about in the first place.

[HumanNinjaToo]

This responses in this thread seem insanely condescending. Just because you post here basically saying over and over, that if the devs gave us more tools to learn mechanics that people wouldn't be able to learn anything more using said tools. You ppl complain that people are bad, and when someone suggests to add tools to learn the fights, you completely and with NO proof, say people aren't capable to learn in anyway with additional help. Just get over your selves seriously... But coming from these forums this kinda thing comes as no surprise here.

I think it would be cool if some kind of dungeon trainer were implemented. Something that players signed up for, like being a mentor, that you could drop in with duty-finder to be either a "sprout" or a "mentor" and run dungeons designed to teach you party mechanics specific to your role, but still allow for real player interaction during the process. The current tutorials that I've done did well to help me realize ff14 is very different from ESO, but they didn't do much to help me interact well in a group-content dungeon.

[briarth0rn]

I think people who truly want to improve their skill at this game already have a lot of resources to do that.

[Krotoan]

I think it would be cool if some kind of dungeon trainer were implemented. Something that players signed up for, like being a mentor, that you could drop in with duty-finder to be either a "sprout" or a "mentor" and run dungeons designed to teach you party mechanics specific to your role, but still allow for real player interaction during the process. The current tutorials that I've done did well to help me realize ff14 is very different from ESO, but they didn't do much to help me interact well in a group-content dungeon.

The problem is the people that most of us are complaining about will never utilize these things. They either don't know, or don't care. Sometimes both. People who DO care will listen when people give them advice and believe me that people WILL give you advice the 3rd time you wipe to something relatively straightforward like a gather marker. People who want to learn how to pass things will go get that knowledge from other players or tutorials. People who repeatedly mess the same things up will just end up getting carried into endgame raids to turn them into 7 player fights with 1 wildcard mechanic that none of the others know about.

There is little to nothing we can do about it without making a mandatory intermediary "MECHANIC SCHOOL" that is a gateway to 50+ content. MAYBE that might work but you'd have to have a check in every 10 levels after that: "these are new mechanics to watch out for: Practice AOE dancing, PAY ATTENTION TO THE CAST BAR, THESE MOB ANIMATIONS MEAN GET BEHIND.

This might help but it's going to be a big takeaway from the content we actually WANT. Instanced content will have to be sidelined and every time something new comes out it'll have to be smushed in and the lockout will be reinstated till the new thing is learned.

I personally do my dangdest to train people I see make simple mistakes. I never kick, I only quit if it gets too frustrating. I've run out my share of dungeon timers because someone just can't seem hold more than 2 mechanics in their head at the same time or are just woefully undergeared and underpracticed...

There just are players who pay their money but don't bother to learn the game and don't want to and we kinda gotta accept that they'll be in those roulettes. Humanity sucks sometimes.

[AxlStream]

They've toned down early savage fight to the point floors 1 and 2 are trivial to pretty much anybody familiar with MMO gameplay at an intermediate level. EX is so easy anybody can do it with PUGs within 1 lockout. They pruned all abilities that added depth to most jobs and allowed people to be more than their designated roles. Yet you want to make it even MORE accessible? At some point why not slash the bosses HP by 80%. Will that satisfy you, you savages?

[FrejyaAthenes]

"2) They are just really bad and do not care...." (Bolding added.)

As one of the people who fails mechanics regularly, I just wanted to address this assumption that I see being made throughout this thread.

Background: 19 years of MMO gaming, from EQ to EQ2 to Rift to GW2 to SW:TOR to TESO to here. No, I never played WoW.

So I have a bit of experience in gaming. One might suspect (rightly) that it's even something I enjoy - perhaps even care about? But, here's the thing - skill levels just differ. I didn't manage to live through an Omega 3 w/ that fricking 'larboard/starboard' mechanic until almost the end of the 4.x cycle. I had watched videos. I had people call out over Discord. Didn't matter - my reaction times simply _are not_ fast enough to handle the 'if you see yellow ground it's already too late' timings that SE seems to favor on current cycle mechanics (I remember going off the edge on Titan all the time during ARR; now I could sleep & still dodge that because they've clearly changed how long the warning is up before the effect triggers).

I try to limit my 'fail drain' on groups by not running too many times repeatedly - I realize that people may get frustrated when I drop after 3-4 attempts, but I think it's probably best for everyone as the group gets another person who's almost certainly more competent (also I often seem to 'get' mechanics better if I STOP beating myself against them for a few days before trying again). After 9 runs at TitaX this weekend, I've managed to make it to the add phase without dying... um... well, I'll let you know when that happens. I've at least made it into the forest phase w/o a death a couple of times, & for me that's progress.

I think the game itself does a decent job of distilling the skill levels through the system of varied difficulties. I've never entered a Savage & probably never will, so the content certainly exists for the hard-core gamers who don't want to get stuck w/ the low-skill people like me. It would be nice if we could continue to share the regular and (on occasion) extreme trails & such, though, without the assumptions that everyone who isn't 'as good' is just lazy or AFKing (as I was once accused of after a 3rd death to an AoE in Dun Scaith; I wish I'd thought of the proper retort at the time - 'Sir or Madam, you severely underestimate my capacity for ineptitude!').

The problem was that you weren't supposed to react to the aoe. You were suppose to read the attack as Omega charged and position yourself accordingly. Same with Phyllia's Left Knout/Right Knout attacks.

[Alucard135]

They've toned down early savage fight to the point floors 1 and 2 are trivial to pretty much anybody familiar with MMO gameplay at an intermediate level. EX is so easy anybody can do it with PUGs within 1 lockout. They pruned all abilities that added depth to most jobs and allowed people to be more than their designated roles. Yet you want to make it even MORE accessible? At some point why not slash the bosses HP by 80%. Will that satisfy you, you savages?

And after all that, we get people clicking off buffs.

[LunarEmerald]

Or you could teach them

You can't teach someone unwilling to learn.

[Cidel]

They do plenty to help these players.

Have you seen the rolls these players are blessed with for loot? I'm tempted to purposely mess-up in farm parties in case a mount actually drops.

/s

[AxlStream]

And after all that, we get people clicking off buffs.

/triggered/