Fixing Player engagement DEV pls consider

[Ath192]

I wish the game provided good guidance, encouraged good gameplay and rewarded players for being engaged and playing well. Instead, it leaves everything in up in the air until someone, possibly even unaware that they are performing badly gets called out by his other party members or even kicked, leading to some of the anxiety issues we're seeing here.

Since the game provides barely any guidance and possibly said negative experiences mentioned above, more veteran players do not want to spend the time helping others because it is simply too big of a learning curve, and they also expose themselves to getting reported if their suggestions and advice are not well received. (Don't get me wrong, people giving advice sometimes phrase things in an unhelpful tone as well that only makes things worse)

So the game provides barely any guidance, does not reward players for doing well, most people aren't open to advice, most people aren't willing to give advice. This leads to content that must be created with all these things in mind, meaning it cannot require too much knowledge or engagement on the users behalf, and thus finally leading to zombie runs in many, many, of the dungeons and raids.

These are things I do not think are beneficial to the health of the game or any parties involved.

So will a reward system for good gameplay fix all these issues? probably not. But it may help, or at least it may get the developers thinking about how to address them.

[Ravor]

I can see your point but honestly i dont think this is necessary

The point of doing group content should focus on finishing the content, adding a personal reward for personal activity kinda not what group content should be, i mean imagine doing savage content and there is this personal rating if your dps is not optimal you get no extra reward, well any black mage will kinda lose heart and motivation if he missed or canceled even 1 spell

[Hysterior]

I would like the idea to get a Combat card at the end of an encounter (only for raids or at the very end of a dungeon) with your DPS, overhealing, skill use, dot uptime... and such and why not a grade.
And make the card only available to you.

That way you can see where to improve without being stressed with parser visible to all.

[Kleeya]

Theory : "there is no problem with a rating system if only you can see the results !".

Reality : in less than a week after such a rating system is included into the game, some theorycrafter find how the medals are awarded, all the unauthorized parsers are updated to calculate all of your team members ratings, and the results are uploaded on ff14ratingslogs.com to the whole world to see, leading to even more stress, dramas and toxicity than the current parsers XD

[kaynide]

I would say that I wish the game had a more..meaty training center that allowed essentially a trust party or preformed to just practice mechanics.

1) An iLvl neutral (it won’t care if you have good or bad gear; just testing skill) wave fight; players fight something like 5 or so waves of mobs, some single target, some multi enemy with feedback on the amount of damage dealt , taken, healing done, %mechanics dodged etc. (very similar to pvp’s end scoring)

2) Mechanics dodging (commonly seen mechanics or gimmicks in dungeons; it need not include the newest from raids). Ideally one “fight” showcases several mechanics (one for shadowbringers might showcase rotating attack or the magnet tethers). These fights need not deal any damage, just have players receive a stacking debuff showing how many mechanics they didn’t do correctly and let the mechanics repeat endlessly until the players leave. Again just the most commonly seen ones that players should be able to recognize right away.

[Dzian]

Medals wouldn't work. Even if you tied rewards to them. OK 50 golds gets me this cool thing. Whatsbthebeasiest duty to get gold in. Oh hello Saltasha or some low end guild hest. Easy gold medals.

As for DR someone put a topic up not so long ago about that and I did make the suggestion that using essences and lost actions could yield extra items at the end... so you get 2 of those things instead of 1. Speed up the grind for people doing multiple relics and speed up the runs if people are actually using essences and lost actions...

But this game does the opposite of encouraging players to rise up and grow. It instead brings everything down. Oh I want that mount. Do it now or just unsync it in 3 months .

[AngelCheese77]

Hmm this is a potential pitfall of the system, true. However, I think not, because you're viewing this a very demanding task to accomplish, like you need to perform super well and have no deaths or dmg downs. But the requirements dont need to be that high. And over the course of a raid there is plenty of potential for recovery, it would also get people asking about mechanics if they dont know them or get others invested into explaining them etc... which is something people rarely do right now.

Reminds me of those world group fights EQ2 has and the Warhammer MMO had. Bad for healers as you could keep everyone alive and get no medals cause you didn’t DPS enough to get on the board.

I would rather see some sort of mandatory Hall of Novices and class quest system. That you need to do it and show your competence. Granted I’ve ran into very few instances of players not caring or being so bad they bring the whole party down.

[ZedxKayn]

lol people acting like in that hypothetical system, youd need the equivalent of a pink to get gold.

anyways, as a healer who has been griefed her fair share because I wasn't curebotting, I can see why it could be a bad idea, I really think something similar to xivanalysis should be added to the game, and that the tips it gives actually need to be good (ie don't tell an ast to go noct with a whm), so people would know how to improve and bad tips will be called out as bad more easily.

[Penthea]

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.

How would this work for healers? Sometimes players can take a lot of damage, especially if content is new and the party is just trying to push through all the mishaps. Sometimes the other healer cba to heal so you're doing it on your own. Sometimes you have a group that seem determined to die.

What if you're a rdm keeping the party going with loads of resses? For anyone who doesn't know ressing is super expensive on mana and too much of it can hugely negatively affect rdm dps.

And what if you die due to someone else's mistake? That's hardly a rare occurrence. I could see drama coming from this with people saying "omg you noob, now I won't get gold!"

[Caitsithhh]

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.

It’s an mmo. Not a single player game. This is some of the most entitled attitude I’ve seen lately here but it’s far from rare in game. Thus a medal system would be nice. At least a nudge to get better instead of assuming the gameplay only matters to you while doing group content