Parsing? Drama? ToS? Solution!

[Angus-Beef]

I think the worst part about everything is that being rude and expecting someone to not be bad is synonymous.

[Hyrist]

I think the worst part about everything is that being rude and expecting someone to not be bad is synonymous.

I actually haven't had this issue in game as much as being advertised in forums. Typically, when a person is under-performing, they know it. And if they don't, being shown ways they can have a bigger impact on the fight usually helps them feel better in the game overall.

Because nobody LIKES losing constantly.

In my experience, it's usually in the pitch. "How have you not gotten this down!? This is basic stuff!" Might be the truth, but it's not going to get someone to listen or improve. It's going to put them on the defensive. Ultimately it's up to you whether or not investing in helping that person improve (and insuring they're receptive to it) is worth your time. But if you're leading ,or even a part of the group, it's best to make that call quickly - and in the rules to make that call respectfully.

But in general, life rarely works out 'as expected'. It's all in how we react to it.

[Jimmymagic]

Wow can we please talk about the topic and not how to treat others. There are plenty of other threads on ToS.

This is about conditions for entering the hardcore end game content raids and/or trials. Please can we talk about this I think the OP gave up on this already on this thread at least but my opinion this is a good topic and should bring some attention to the devs.

Qualifying for Savage, EX, and ultimate is great idea imo. Not just for the sake of keeping people out, but also keeping people in. Look I admit as some others have stated that this isn't for everybody. Some people like a more difficult challenge and should not be penalized for it. An instance qualification could render or at least give an idea to a player like me who wants to do the hardest content possible and gauge what I need to do to get better so I don't pug it up and create df drama and resentment.

AS far as the other stuff....No one can control other people only yourself and how you react..no more debate there...

Anyone else have a solution?

[Hyrist]

Wow can we please talk about the topic and not how to treat others[...]

AS far as the other stuff....No one can control other people only yourself and how you react..no more debate there...

Anyone else have a solution?

I'm game.

Sadly, I don't have a solution so much as a problem.

My fear with the instance situation is that doing so will measure one thing - how good you are at outputting DPS. The problem is that Sky Stone Sea does this already, and does this poorly. People have long since proven that they're over-tuned.

What I contest is that it does not properly test the right skills.

Having decent DPS, or knowing when to work your DPS into your Tank or Healing duties is one thing. Doing so under pressure is where most people falter, and most DPS especially fall short. If we're going to talk about gateway instances - I'd want them to have mechanics, not just a dummy to smack. Even better if they host a small preview of what mechanics to expect in the content they're going into.

Edit:

And if we're addressing the basics, I don't think it'd go remiss if Square Enix created an "Enemy Mechanic Indicator" addition to the Play Guide, as a quick reference points for things we take for granted, like Stack/Seperate Indicators, Gaze Attack Indicators - things you'd expect in most content on the non-savage level.

[Angus-Beef]

Wow can we please talk about the topic and not how to treat others. There are plenty of other threads on ToS.

This is about conditions for entering the hardcore end game content raids and/or trials. Please can we talk about this I think the OP gave up on this already on this thread at least but my opinion this is a good topic and should bring some attention to the devs.

Qualifying for Savage, EX, and ultimate is great idea imo. Not just for the sake of keeping people out, but also keeping people in. Look I admit as some others have stated that this isn't for everybody. Some people like a more difficult challenge and should not be penalized for it. An instance qualification could render or at least give an idea to a player like me who wants to do the hardest content possible and gauge what I need to do to get better so I don't pug it up and create df drama and resentment.

AS far as the other stuff....No one can control other people only yourself and how you react..no more debate there...

Anyone else have a solution?

The devs should kindly reinforce what is and isn't casual friendly content and start adding more difficult content back into the game.

If the game itself is enforcing the need to self improve to progress, then people will naturally adjust to the ever growing difficulty and competency should naturally reassert itself amongst those who want to see all the content.

This is the most non invasive way to force it without out right gating people out of savage and EX. It's fair and realistic and something this game used to do very well until SB. When MMOs set the bar low it only allows people who don't try pass through with their hands held.

Edit: I'll even further Elaborate.

If Sastasha is the easiest dungeon in the game the lvl 80 dungeons of Shadow Bringers should be the hardest. The game should naturally be building off the difficulty from dungeon to dungeon and the beginning of each expansion should be reinforcing that difficulty from the last dungeon in the previous expansion in the first dungeon of the current expansion.

If you regularly normalize the difficulty one should expect from content through out the game people (NOT ALL) but most people will naturally improve. It creates a situation where your body naturally creates muscle memory over time and allows you to adjust. FF doesnt do that anymore. It normalizes the bare minimum and people skirt by without actually improving over time.

[Hyrist]

The devs should kindly reinforce what is and isn't casual friendly content and start adding more difficult content back into the game.

If the game itself is enforcing the need to self improve to progress, then people will naturally adjust to the ever growing difficulty and competency should naturally reassert itself amongst those who want to see all the content.

This is the most non invasive way to force it without out right gating people out of savage and EX. It's fair and realistic and something this game used to do very well until SB. When MMO set the bar low it only allows people who don't try pass through with their hands held.

I get your approach, but the problem you run into that, from the business perspective, is falloff. Even before the 'casualization' of the game, you have a very small percentage of people completeting harder content, so them adding more of it, that players won't enjoy, will cause friction.

This friction is what caused Normal Raids to exist.

Also, I'm confused as to how you are thinking to accomplish reinforcing the non-casual content. Anything on the level of Extreme Trials and above is already gated by requiring you to use Party Finder. A pop-up disclaimer is just going to go ignored with all the rest of the help text. And trying to tilt the game to be 'more difficult' means you're going to bleed people if you put it in there way.

So, let me suggest some groundwork barriers for the suggestions.

1. We have to recognize existing trends and elements in the game - so, while fights in the story defiantly had more mechanics, they did make the fights through the story overall more easy to get into thanks to Trust System.
2. We're on restriction on manpower, so to add something, we must take something that could be updated and/or added away. SE's current trend of already doing so has sort of dictated that rule to us.
3. We have to keep in mind the expected participation limits when adding this content. Are we expecting to sacrifice potentially 95% of the player base enjoying another piece of casual content for 5%? Is that a wise decision for a company that's already showing strains of development time and manpower to make?
4. What sort of reward system for this new content do we add in? We're already enticing more powerful gear rewards across the board when it comes to Ex and Savage content, how do we entice players to do this content if our existing system already covers the essentials through multiple means?

Angus, I'm not saying your ideas are wrong off the bat, but there's a lot to consider here when you make a broad statement to say "Make the game harder/make more hard content." We're no longer in an era where people will tolerate needless difficulty for its own sake. Make the game too unappealing to casuals and you'll loose them. And like it or not, even with the staggered subscriptions, they're holding up the game. SE needs to (and will) make those decisions carefully and I would like to make suggestions with the same considerations in mind.

Edit About Dungeon Diffiuclties:

Gating people on story won't work. It was attempted by putting story in raids and the backlash was catastrophic. We're already adding mechanics into each dungeon and building off of already existing concepts. (Stack Mechanics, unique mechanics, indicators for common actions to be done within the raiding scene. Even soft enrage mechanics in dungeons made a return with Amarot.) So, how further do we educate them on basics they've already been shown repeatedly? If you overtune the basic dungeon fights people will just use Trusts to bypass that, and they have to be passable by Trusts or that system they've created is useless. You'd have to individually tune each dungeon to correspond requirements for each role to increase the difficulty and that's a huge amount of manpower to tune something 4 different ways for each dungeon. Do we restrict it to non-trust dungeons?

No I think if we're going to encourage the building of skills more than we do already, we're going to have to come with a better intermediary than simply tuning the storyline harder. We're already getting more mechanics there, and people are pushing through.

Given this I am leaning more towards gating.

[Angus-Beef]

I get your approach, but the problem you run into that, from the business perspective, is falloff. Even before the 'casualization' of the game, you have a very small percentage of people completeting harder content, so them adding more of it, that players won't enjoy, will cause friction.
This friction is what caused Normal Raids to exist.

[~]

Angus, I'm not saying your ideas are wrong off the bat, but there's a lot to consider here when you make a broad statement to say "Make the game harder/make more hard content." We're no longer in an era where people will tolerate needless difficulty for its own sake. Make the game too unappealing to casuals and you'll loose them. And like it or not, even with the staggered subscriptions, they're holding up the game. SE needs to (and will) make those decisions carefully and I would like to make suggestions with the same considerations in mind.

Look at my edit, I'm not saying to give needless difficulty, I'm saying naturally enforce and reinforce it through out the game so that by the time you reach max lvl things a lot of people might find harder will be second nature. While yes I do know SE is limited on Man power(That in itself can be a whole thread) I feel it is possible for them to do that going forward into 6.0 over redoing how every dungeon works from 2.0 on. I'm not saying we should sacrifice 95% of the player base for the 5% who do savage and ultimate. But the fact that the game doesnt build upon its own difficulty in an intuitive way is the issue ShB as a whole is facing.

[Hyrist]

Look at my edit, I'm not saying to give needless difficulty, I'm saying naturally enforce and reinforce it through out the game so that by the time you reach max lvl things a lot of people might find harder will be second nature. While yes I do know SE is limited on Man power(That in itself can be a whole thread) I feel it is possible for them to do that going forward into 6.0 over redoing how every dungeon works from 2.0 on. I'm not saying we should sacrifice 95% of the player base for the 5% who do savage and ultimate. But the fact that the game doesnt build upon its own difficulty in an intuitive way is the issue ShB as a whole is facing.

I disagree with that. Again. Look at the number of mechanics introduced and reinforced in the existing dungeon content, and compare it to our previous content. Amarot far harder in comparison to Sastasha, and comes with a soft-enrage, a mechanic we haven't really touched on in quite a while. Tuning that more difficult isn't teaching so much as frustrating, and as I said before, DPS checks are usually the last problem

The real issue isn't the difficulty of the dungeons itself, but in the ability of someone to be carried through a dungeon. Personal skills are not tested when a group of 3 can usually clear. To make mechanics hard requiring all 4 to be on point would tilt those scales too far.

I think instead we need to focus on building the individual, rather than on Trust/Group content. I like the idea of leading into stronger and harder mechanics, and we used to have a system that, on the rudimentary level, was trying to teach that. One we might be able to purpose in 6.xx.

I'm referring to Guildhests - more specifically.

If we could make a line of more extreme-based (possibly solo-only) Guildhests, and put enticing rewards for entering, we can isolate and focus in on specific skillsets for each role that would enable them to learn and refine. We can even create a scaling reward system that encourages them improving their performance.

It'd be easy to tune those to scaling difficulty, and there we can even control what mechanics need to be most reinforced with each role. Wouldn't take much manpower for something so short and sweet, and it would both not be a gate, and not be over-pressuring the storyline. For validations sake, you could even tie a title/achievement to conquering each difficulty to see if someone's gone through their paces.

It might work.

[Angus-Beef]

.

Edit About Dungeon Diffiuclties:

Gating people on story won't work. It was attempted by putting story in raids and the backlash was catastrophic. We're already adding mechanics into each dungeon and building off of already existing concepts. (Stack Mechanics, unique mechanics, indicators for common actions to be done within the raiding scene. Even soft enrage mechanics in dungeons made a return with Amarot.) So, how further do we educate them on basics they've already been shown repeatedly? If you overtune the basic dungeon fights people will just use Trusts to bypass that, and they have to be passable by Trusts or that system they've created is useless. You'd have to individually tune each dungeon to correspond requirements for each role to increase the difficulty and that's a huge amount of manpower to tune something 4 different ways for each dungeon. Do we restrict it to non-trust dungeons?

No I think if we're going to encourage the building of skills more than we do already, we're going to have to come with a better intermediary than simply tuning the storyline harder. We're already getting more mechanics there, and people are pushing through.

Given this I am leaning more towards gating.

This is why I said do it going into 6.0, The trust system is optional and should only offer a much more (tame?) experience for those who dont want to be challenged, that'll keep both ends happy. If they can create Baldesion Arsenal, and Ultimate 2 forms of their most successful content, then I imagine they can slightly scale up dungeon difficulty over time.

[Angus-Beef]

I disagree with that. Again. Look at the number of mechanics introduced and reinforced in the existing dungeon content, and compare it to our previous content. Amarot far harder in comparison to Sastasha, and comes with a soft-enrage, a mechanic we haven't really touched on in quite a while. Tuning that more difficult isn't teaching so much as frustrating, and as I said before, DPS checks are usually the last problem

The real issue isn't the difficulty of the dungeons itself, but in the ability of someone to be carried through a dungeon. Personal skills are not tested when a group of 3 can usually clear. To make mechanics hard requiring all 4 to be on point would tilt those scales too far.

I think instead we need to focus on building the individual, rather than on Trust/Group content. I like the idea of leading into stronger and harder mechanics, and we used to have a system that, on the rudimentary level, was trying to teach that. One we might be able to purpose in 6.xx.

I'm referring to Guildhests - more specifically.

If we could make a line of more extreme-based (possibly solo-only) Guildhests, and put enticing rewards for entering, we can isolate and focus in on specific skillsets for each role that would enable them to learn and refine. We can even create a scaling reward system that encourages them improving their performance.

It'd be easy to tune those to scaling difficulty, and there we can even control what mechanics need to be most reinforced with each role. Wouldn't take much manpower for something so short and sweet, and it would both not be a gate, and not be over-pressuring the storyline. For validations sake, you could even tie a title/achievement to conquering each difficulty to see if someone's gone through their paces.

It might work.

I would love a system like that. But would SE make it Mandatory if they put something like that in?