Fixing Player engagement DEV pls consider

[Iscah]

=/ 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.

PvP (or Frontline at least) battle performance is pretty basic and doesn't try to rank you against a concept of "playing well"; it's just raw numbers and it doesn't give you any points. Winning is a team achievement, not individual.

And getting into Bozja duels isn't a complex judgement of who performed well, just a simple criterion (did you dodge all the AoEs?) to get in a lottery with no additional skill.

[Vyrerus]

What's to stop people from taking screenshots of all of their golds, and then other people putting things up in PF like, "Gold medal earners only." for extremes or anything prebuilt?

As far as an actual scoring system goes, they have a scoring system in XIV in the Masked Carnivale. A lot of the points categories are weird and only something relevant to soloing, like, "Taking a Walk" or whatever the one is, that you get for kiting a monster around the arena perimeter once.

If they were going to implement a medal system, it's likely they'd have a scoring system for each job or role at a minimum. It's just, a lot of it would be stuff you'd have to go out of your way for, or it would be stuff that happened so readily, that it becomes meaningless.

I'll also echo other posters responding to the OP in that, you're stating the problem is engagement. There are tons of people who play FFXIV who are fully engaged, but they have stupid hands. They know what they need to do for their rotation, but can't execute it flawlessly or even nearly flawlessly. Others have cement minds. They like to play multiple jobs, but only one or two really click with them, and most of their muscle memory/rotation memory/setup is devoted to their, "Main" job. Implementing ranking in content will drive up the problems with less tanks/less healers even farther, because people willing to step out of their DPS comfort zone to try them will be met with being reminded that they aren't good at them.

[Sotaris]

If I didn't automatically get a gold medal, no matter what, I'd feel attacked. I'd have anxiety for.. quite awhile because of it. I don't know if I could continue to play the game.

Especially if it's being tracked. It not difference than having a parser in-game.

[Seera1024]

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.

To me engaged means they aren't AFK and are playing. They may not be caring at the moment about how well they are playing - not all play with a group of random players - but they're playing.

A player with a disability that means that they can't get gold but is doing the best they can is engaged with the game.

A new player who hasn't learned a fight well enough to not get hit by enough mechanics and still do decent DPS is engaged with the game.

A player who in their group of friends is with permission of all in the group role playing an ice mage in a dungeon is engaged with the game. He's not doing great DPS, but he's engaged with the game.

A player who has a low or medium skill level but no desire to currently improve but is able to complete DPS checks in the content they play but not get enough DPS to get gold is engaged with the game.

Yea, it gets players to play the content, but that doesn't mean they are improving. It doesn't mean that if the skill level necessary to earn the reward is higher than their current level that they won't complain.

And as others have mentioned, it's more apt to bring out the negative in others than it would the positive as players who want the gold medals will be less forgiving of players making mistakes. Because the more mistakes are made, the longer a fight goes on giving more time for others to make mistakes that end up costing the players gold medals. The medals will increase the chances of players with different goals for the content getting into the same group. When goals differ enough, it can cause problems for groups. Players looking for efficiency in order to get gold are less likely to be forgiving of mistakes than of someone looking to full clear a dungeon.

[Vahlnir]

And as others have mentioned, it's more apt to bring out the negative in others than it would the positive as players who want the gold medals will be less forgiving of players making mistakes. Because the more mistakes are made, the longer a fight goes on giving more time for others to make mistakes that end up costing the players gold medals. The medals will increase the chances of players with different goals for the content getting into the same group. When goals differ enough, it can cause problems for groups. Players looking for efficiency in order to get gold are less likely to be forgiving of mistakes than of someone looking to full clear a dungeon.

Well said.

[Brightamethyst]

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.

No one knows what the criteria should be because it's different for every person every time.

"Tank didn't use all their CDs. Healer barely healed. No medal for you!" Well what if you outgear the content to the point where you don't need to heal as much or use defensive CDs? What if you you're the second tank or healer in a fight that doesn't really need it? There is no system that would even come close to evaluating most players in a meaningful way.

[SturmChurro]

Especially if it's being tracked. It not difference than having a parser in-game.

Yep! It would only lead to further anxiety. I play this game to have fun, and I think others do too! I don't want to feel down for a whole month just because I wasn't performing as well as the game wants me to!

[CKNovel]

What's to stop people from taking screenshots of all of their golds, and then other people putting things up in PF like, "Gold medal earners only." for extremes or anything prebuilt?

Photoshop exist. Paint 3D will be enough. A screenshot of "gold medal" isn't enough.

Also, for the idea, I wouldn't do it the way OP posted but at the end of bosses from trials/raid, you'd get an analysis of your performances.
The game would point out things like "You forgot your defensive CD and you went down to XXX HP/KO'd you!" or "Your gauge was overcapping by XXX amount!" or "Use this action on CD!"/"You missed X GCDs in the wildfire window!"
Problem with that, SQEX actually needs to figure how rotations works, their guide and BRD quadweave weren't the greatest documentation.

Score/medals, I don't think they are usefull. A single "You forgot X that could greatly help to improve your performances" would be enough to motivate many.

[strawberrycake]

I feel like the issue with player engagement is that fact that the game no longer challenges you/punishes you for not interacting with the game currently, outside of a few select dungeons, you're not being challenged/put ina situation where your engagement matters atm. In some cases you can, not do anything outside the bare minimum, and you'll clear. I regularly see people just standing there in many lower lvl runs and most groups dont care to kick them.

If the scaling wasn;t so out of whack, a decent amount of dungeons/trials/normal raids would require more attention outside of the 1-2-3 combo or occasional AoE heal to keep everyone alive, unless you're ina group of very new people who struggle with a lot of the basics of the game.

On top of that, with the current state of the game most lvling dungeons have been horribly scaled to deal with the overflow isues talked about at the Showcase for Endwalker, its understandable why given they have to fix this on their end, but prior to Shadowbringers player engagement was higher and it was a bit more uncommon to see people not wanting to interact with said contents engagement. Adding in a system like this is essentially moot since older content will be scaled differently once we're in Endwalker and said overflow issues are adressed by the dev team, and the games increasing difficulty will naturally encourage people who care to play better so they dont take too long or wipe indefinately.

[Syln]

As long as it's awarded by the game itself and no one else but you can see it : why not^