Fixing Player engagement DEV pls consider

[Ath192]

I'd rather not see this come to pass. It fosters unnecessary competition and gives players with a high ego more of a reason to flex their totally awesome skills.



Honestly, a system like this would just make whatever elitism exists 10 times worse. It doesn't solve anything.

How? If no one will ever know how you performed and you get a generic acknowledgment at the end of a duty when you're gone from the instance? I do not see any prestige and only a mild sense of satisfaction that you did decently coming from this.

[linayar]

=/ But they did, in PVP you have a giant performance chart at the end, and also earn more medals if you win, and in Bozja you can't get a duel if you dont perform well with a set of criteria.

Those examples have a built in element of competition. Normal PVE content doesn't despite the community having world first race "events."

How? If no one will ever know how you performed and you get a generic acknowledgment at the end of a duty when you're gone from the instance? I do not see any prestige and only a mild sense of satisfaction that you did decently coming from this.

Because your performance in group content is affected by the performance of others in your party. You put a reward based on that, and you could bring about more conflict with no guarantee of the desired result of people trying to be better.

[Seera1024]

I think it seems the general consensus is that there are some reasons people would not prefer this, and that is okay, it is always easier to do nothing, but I think people are failing to analyze the other side of this equation. Which is the current state of affairs, with the current system I've seen people kick poor performers without saying a word or helping them for fear of being reported, High end raids get locked behind super high ILVL so people who haven't raided cant get in and have fun, elitism is very common, I've even heard poor performers get black listed so that you don't see their listings in party finder. People have found ways to segregate themselves, and even here we have a person who has confessed that as a healer they don't heal and just dps, this in my opinion would be grounds for no medal since healers are supposed to keep the party alive and do damage when there's no healing or raising to do.

Encouraging better performance for the base population may somewhat alleviate these issues. I don't know what the exact criteria and balance of this formula would look like, but ideally it should encourage healers to heal, raise and do damage when not busy, tanks to tank, use cooldowns to mitigate and DPS to perform their rotations well and do damage, which seem to be the base required functions of each role. It's not all about uptime and damage like people here seem to be interpreting. That is categorically wrong and not the purpose of the system.

But if this is what the community deems preferable of course I am just one person that disagrees. None the less the idea is out there, and even better ideas are welcome and encouraged. All I'm seeing here is doubt, but what we currently have definitely isn't perfect in my opinion.

In the first post you state the problem is engagement.

This post states the problem is people not playing with a certain skill level.

Which problem are you trying to solve?

No system will solve the latter one. Players have to want to learn and no amount of carrots will make people want to learn if they don't want to. They'll just complain that they can't get the carrots instead and that the content should be easier.

Engagement simply means people actively playing the game. Even if they are doing so at a low skill level. Which the game already does a good job of doing.

Could they make it easier for those who want to learn to get the skills by updating the Hall of the Novice and/or adding in a Hall of the Intermediate and/or Hall of the Expert? Yes.

But dangling a carrot isn't going to suddenly make players who weren't ready to learn suddenly ready to learn. They'll just complain that they can't get the carrot.

[MilkieTea]

I was talking with a few friends about this issue and wanted to pitch this idea, maybe the devs like it, or it may make a difference.

Essentially, We think it would be beneficial and non-toxic to introduce the following system to ensure players are encouraged to perform better and be engaged in fights:

A Medal system, exchangeable for cool glamour items that take a long time to farm. This medal would get given to players upon completion of a current level alliance raid for example. Not too different to unreal trials (the item shopping experience)

A gold medal for doing good damage and using cool downs.

A silver medal for doing average damage maybe.

and simply no medal if performance was just meh.

This does not involve any damage meters the players can see or any shaming at all. But if collection of these medals can be traded for glam items that take a long time to farm it would keep current content populated with people trying to do well at their jobs right? It would also encourage people to look up how to do proper rotations and strive to do well so they can get these, all without shaming.

And if they dont want to, no harm no foul, they just simply dont get a medal. And since you're the only person that gets the medal noone else will know whether you did well enough to earn one.

Maybe a 5 silver medals can get traded for one gold medals, and you need 99 of them for X glam item, and the bar for these medals can be set at average performance right? noone has to play immaculately to earn one.

For example if a player did 50% of their max theoretical job output damage and managed to mitigate an X number of damage from the boss then thats a gold or silver medal depending on how tough the devs want to make it.

Anyways, this discussion started mainly because we were noticing that in Delubrum Reginae for example runs were taking forever and a lot of ppl were very uninterested or even AFK at times. So perhaps this system could introduce engagement but no toxicity.

In Delubrum Reginae a gold medal would be reserved only for those that used an action on top of performing well, and maybe a silver for no action but still performing well.

I also know in FFXV at the end of a battle you get graded for style, speed of completion etc... so there are systems like this in play through final fantasies that encourage you to do better without shaming.

Anyways I wanted to see people's thoughts and in no way do I mean to introduce negativity and I hope the discussion is civil right? Elitism really downgrades the experience of a game, but so does unengaged people that don't do anything.

If how people run content over and over when a relic comes out is any indication, I am sure this system would see the average player base perform much better in any duty it's implemented.

I also hope this doesn't offend anyone it was just a thought.

Archiving this because there’s been quite a few people deleting the contents of their first post once it gets criticized more than it gets praised or agreed with. Not saying OP will do that, this is just in case.

[Ath192]

Archiving this because there’s been quite a few people deleting the contents of their first post once it gets criticized more than it gets praised or agreed with. Not saying OP will do that, this is just in case.

Not planning on deleting it, I think its a great system. And despite initial opposition I still think its something the DEVs should consider along with other ideas here like revamping hall of novice. That is also a good idea.

[Ath192]

In the first post you state the problem is engagement.

This post states the problem is people not playing with a certain skill level.

Which problem are you trying to solve?

No system will solve the latter one. Players have to want to learn and no amount of carrots will make people want to learn if they don't want to. They'll just complain that they can't get the carrots instead and that the content should be easier.

Engagement simply means people actively playing the game. Even if they are doing so at a low skill level. Which the game already does a good job of doing.

Could they make it easier for those who want to learn to get the skills by updating the Hall of the Novice and/or adding in a Hall of the Intermediate and/or Hall of the Expert? Yes.

But dangling a carrot isn't going to suddenly make players who weren't ready to learn suddenly ready to learn. They'll just complain that they can't get the carrot.

I disagree, and the problem is one and the same, what I consider engagement is people focused on the fight doing their job well. I am not sure what you mean by actively playing if its not the same as me, since bad performance is correlated with just playing, disengaged and not really active. Dangling a carrot does work in my opinion, in the same way relics are dangling carrots for people to grind old content, and they do with great success. Some people may complain about it but I still am of the mind it would help rather than detract from gameplay.

[MilkieTea]

Not planning on deleting it, I think its a great system. Dangling a carrot does work in my opinion, in the same way relics are dangling carrots for people to grind old content, and they do with great success. Some people may complain about it but I still am of the mind it would help rather than detract from gameplay.

Not saying OP will do that, this is just in case.

[Nethereal]

The primary question for all of this:

Are you willing to endure the latency that would be generated in a 24-man battle in order to record and analyze how 'good' you are? That's a lot of data to analyze on-the-fly.
Remember, this is data that would need to be reported back to the servers, rather than to a file on you local computer, for. Every. Individual. In. A. Raid.

Very much a non issue. The site that shall not be named does exactly this and also keeps a 2d recording of everything, SE wouldn't have an issue doing what a random site with less funding can do.
They won't though simply because the method is tried and true and now ffxiv is in the milking phase, no large changes will be made to the recipe anymore, especially with yoshi leaving the scene.

[linayar]

yoshi leaving the scene.

What are you talking about?

[SenorPatty]

Can we be real for minute and just simulate a meeting where you (the OP) sits down with YoshiP, face to face, alone and you just read him all this
What do you honestly believe he would say?

Come on, just try it. Simulate it in your mind, then reply here.

Genuinely interested.