Fixing Player engagement DEV pls consider

[Doozer]

People already pay others to play on their account so they can get a flashy weapon (or multiple) and titles, so it would only be a matter of time before people were paying for someone else to get them 'medals' and then wave around the fancy rewards to try to trick people into thinking they're good.

I don't think this system is required, only because it sort of already does, just not in such a specific way. You get loot at the end of a duty (tomes, etc.) and possibly loot throughout. Those are your rewards for completing parts or all of it. That's your gold medal. If you complete the duty, you pass. In regular content (i.e. outside Savage and Ultimate) there's no reason to go above and beyond what the average duty requires, and there's no reason to expect it of others too. Dangling loot in front of their faces because you want to finish a dungeon 2 minutes faster will just create a whole host of other problems, like others have mentioned.

[Caitsithhh]

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

Uninformed and leaning towards the casual toxicity which is rampant in game rn because of no officially sanctioned rating system. AS I just stated this is an mmo not a single player game

[Zarkovitch]

The game lack of devs power(employees). If only we have more of them content wouldn't feel 'lack of something',but I congrats the devs do the best what they can. However, it matter of time it will go rip mode.

[Ath192]

How would this work for healers?

...

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!"

I posted an answer to this question on page 2, but you know, I'd hope a DEV team would put a lot of thought into building this, this is just a guess of how it could work:

"Yeah it would be a complicated algorithm for sure. Now for one I envision this more for max level stuff, alliance raids, normal raids mostly. As those are the ones that can drag out and involve the most people. As a healer I suppose it would be a combined score of damage, healing, and raising. Meaning they all count towards your performance. So if no healing is needed then theoretically a healer can glare a certain amount of damage that would count, but if he cant dps because everyone is dying then Raising and healing all have similar weights as well.

Dragoon or monk on positionals I would hope the requirement is low enough that even though they missed some positionals their good rotations are more than enough to earn them a medal, this is, casual content after all, what it wouldn't reward is someone being AFK or doing nothing. Also Mechanics already give you vulnerabilities and damage downs for missing them, so likewise a vulnerability from personally avoidable mechanic would count negatively towards the total score, discouraging that behavior since it would negate any benefits incurred from doing so.

And it is true others actions do impact the game, so likewise I think the requirements should be mild so that a good player that got killed by someone else in an accident can easily recover. But you can also not ignore that this is a team based game, so if the healer did not healing whatsoever and everyone was dead 100% of the time yes noone would get medals. However that isn't likely to happen in my experience, especially at high levels and regardless of whether there is a medal system or not, if people don't do a decent job at things they die and people get angry because of the wipe, so I don't necessarily see what would change in that regard, only that people may be more interested in doing better because of the medals.

Also, since this is casual content, if you don't get a medal because others were doing so impossibly bad that run you could never recover you could just run it again, they are not something extremely hard to get or to farm necessarily. I do not see a witch hunt for players happening if they didnt get a medal because of them in that one Nier raid, although theoretically a player can still receive that amount of hate from simply wiping the raid a million times right now, in which case it is a reportable offense to the GMs of harassment and they already have the tools to deal with those types of toxic players."

[Ath192]

As for the players concerned that they may get "filtered" or "measured in their worth" by these gold medals I highly doubt it since it wouldn't get advertised or shown to anyone but you, the requirements of said system hopefully are mild enough to encourage good gameplay on normal content, in other words if you are doing an extreme or a savage, someone who has 1 or 10,000 medals would make no difference to you because the content is so much easier than Savage or Extreme it wouldn't really be a reliable indicator of whether that person is any good for higher end content, it would simply encourage decent play at normal difficulty.

I've also seen people say that people would post these online or find ways to rank people on these medals, but for normal content I just don't see that happening, I don't think anybody would be interested enough, assuming they could even get a hold the medal data which obviously would be breaking ToS and such.

Also, yes there are people that may want to buy a reward and just grind the easiest content to farm medals, but if they keep adding things in the future that people may be interested, once they grind and have everything they need, they would keep performing well simply because why not? They can have the medals in case something nice pops up. And they already learned how to play well so you may as well try to get a medal in the instance if it is available.

Again this is not measuring or trying to get people to perform at PEAK performance, just a reward if you happen to play decently well, with a weighting system that does not encourage DPS over healing, or Greeding and staying in AOE puddles.

Say a healer rezzes 20 people, did low damage, and healed a ton that wasn't overheals, that would be a gold medal

Say a healer had no healing to do because everyone was super pro and so they just did damage, that would also be a gold medal

All you would need to do is assign weights to actions and make sure to think of ways to prevent gaming the system. So that if you perform your role decently you get medals. There is no need to go into obscure techniques to "game" the system for said medals either because they wouldn't be all that hard to get in the first place. It is just encouragement to do your job reasonably well.

People always like to take things to extremes but it is nothing like that.

Lets take Wolf Marks for example, you get more for winning, but I don't see people being toxic or measuring performance on said wolf marks, and even if someone had 1 million you wouldn't know if its because they grinded them or won every single game. I don't see toxicity coming from this.

[Penthea]

Also, since this is casual content, if you don't get a medal because others were doing so impossibly bad that run you could never recover you could just run it again, they are not something extremely hard to get or to farm necessarily.

Do not underestimate how prickly some people can get over feeling like their time was wasted because of someone else.

I do not see a witch hunt for players happening if they didnt get a medal because of them in that one Nier raid, although theoretically a player can still receive that amount of hate from simply wiping the raid a million times right now, in which case it is a reportable offense to the GMs of harassment and they already have the tools to deal with those types of toxic players."

I didn't say there would be a witch hunt, but some people would certainly make comments that could easily start drama, and given how SE handle disputes surrounding performance it's very clear that they much prefer if nothing in the game points fingers at anyone, so I seriously doubt they would introduce a system in which it can be super obvious person A won't get gold because of person B. From this alone I would be surprised if this feature was introduced. It would go against why SE are so adamant about not having an in-game parser.

Sure some people use parsers right now and they do lead to drama sometimes but they're not part of a reward system in the game. The game doesn't give you less or lower quality loot because you parsed low. However with your suggestion the game would and if a person feels like it's someone else's fault that their performance is graded low they're not always going to be quiet about it.

Yes we have tools to deal with toxic behaviour but prevention is better than cure. But that's not even my chief concern.

What I'm mostly concerned about is there are so many variables to consider when grading performance especially how someone else's mistake can be the reason why you do not perform well. How do you program software to know that a person didn't stand in the spot everyone agreed on? You can't. Unless the software is sophisticated enough to read the chat and know exactly what the text means but programming something as advanced as this would be a tremendous feat which frankly isn't worth the time and money for something that isn't even vaguely a core feature of the game.

[Derio]

Wouldnt people just choose the easiest content and spam it to get the medal rewards and then just run content as normal and not care?

[EtherRose]

We already have this system. It's called or in "FATE's". They just need to apply it to actual dungeons/raids, etc.

[Seera1024]

Thing is, playing well is not engaged playing.

Someone could be the one dying 20 times and be engaged.

In some content, players can watch Netflix and still do everything they need. That's not engaged playing. Because most fights follow a typical pattern with their attacks.

What would cause a rise in engagement is if they created dungeons where all the attacks don't happen in specific patterns. It would need just enough randomness so that you have to pay attention to the fight at all times for the most part.

There are also still way too many variables in a party to account for all possible combinations when determining who gets what medal.

Given the fact that we don't even have personal DPS meters in game - which would help players learn - I doubt we'll get anything that ranks you on how you performed in a group setting.

Fates just deal with how much you participated compared to other players. Doesn't matter how well or not you were playing while doing so. You don't get any special measurable token when you complete it. You get seals, experience, and gil. All things with multiple different means of acquisition.

[StriderShinryu]

On the surface, I actually don't mind this concept. I've said myself I would like to see just a personal "report card" pop up at the end of an instance. Nothing big and detailed, and no real rewards tied to it at all, just something that says "You got an A+ for DPS but a C for Damage Taken. You could really work on avoiding more enemy attacks." The problem is, of course, how to actually implement this without it just ending up being a giant pile of extra work on the developers, and with it somehow being equally applicable for Tanks and Healers.

At the end of the day, I guess I just settle on wishing the game itself was more proactive in giving direction and teaching instead of foisting it all off on the players.