A potential rework to the level-sync system.

[Hasrat]

Getting them to witness veteran play will give them an idea how to effectively do it.

Y'know, this argument keeps coming up, and honestly, I don't think I have ever in my many years of playing this game paid enough attention to what another player is doing to say "Oh, maybe that's how I should be doing it."

First of all, for every player the newbie may witness playing "effectively," they're just as (probably more) likely to be watching someone not being particularly effective/efficient.

Second, the new player experience is much more likely to be focused on what they are doing and trying their best, not so much on watching the rest of their party.

And third, anyone that has player effects turned off/reduced will pretty much almost never even know what the rest of the party is doing. The only time I've actually known to help anyone out with rotation is BLMs, usually in Stone Vigil, because you can see what they're casting at all times.

Besides, how's the new player going to learn to play "effectively" by watching veterans rolling with skills and rotations that the new player doesn't even have access to?

[Penthea]

Besides, how's the new player going to learn to play "effectively" by watching veterans rolling with skills and rotations that the new player doesn't even have access to?

Oh they'll just google "white sparkly attack white mage" and magically get instantly directed to a page that talks about Glare without much of any digging needed.

Stupid jokes aside, I have watched players and thought "oh, maybe I should try that" but this was long after the point of being a new player. This was when I recognised what the spells were because I had them already for quite a while so I was able to understand that they did take a different approach to me. Furthermore this is also when I was in the position of being able to pay attention to what someone else was doing. In fights that demanded a lot of my attention I didn't have much time to keep a close eye on many of the abilities someone else used.

And honestly even today, from a healer's perspective, I don't know what melee dps are doing a lot of the time because they rarely have castbars showing up in the party ui. I have to read their buffs and pay very close attention to their ability animations to figure out what they're up to. It's pretty easy to spot what casters are doing because they hardcast so much, but even then it's impossible to see everything because they also have instant casts and not all of them leave an effect behind like a dot.

Players learn best by the act of doing, and they learn best by learning their class gradually instead of jumping ahead several lvl brackets and trying to figure out how to use spells they don't even have yet. Sure some curious players do look up what classes can do in higher lvls, but in my experience I have only seen players who are not new to mmos do this frequently.