This game has serious free-rider problems and it's getting worse. A suggestion.

[Lastelli]

This has always been a problem to be fair and some may argue that it’s part of the mmorpg genre or any other genre based on rng rewards to artificially keep content relevant, but lately I feel that we’ve reached an unsustainable point.
The main culprit here is Save the Queen content. The amount of people that clearly pay no attention and/or don’t care at all about fellow players is astonishing and, frankly, depressing. I’m not only talking about players that fail or refuse to do the content as intended (e.g. use the damned lost actions and essences, they’re there for a reason), but also people that clearly want to wait for the rest of the group to clear the content for them, which is pretty obvious in some cases (like people dying and refusing a res until the end of boss fights in castrum or dalriada). The problem is, the current design of Save the Queen content not only allows it, but it even encourages it, which is a real pity as mechanically it’s probably the best casual content the game has ever offered.

Then you have the usual clueless players that seemingly got to level cap without ever reading the tooltips of their skills, but I’ve lost faith in them at this point and I’m not going to talk about them.

Now, I know this has been discussed in this forum previously, and it’s probably me just venting here to an extent, but do people really find the current situation acceptable? Is it wrong to think that players performing terribly should be given a penalty and ideally be denied any form of reward for the content they’re running? I’ve seen people literally suiciding on the edge of boss arenas to then gleefully come collect their treasure chests after everything is over in castrum. The average player in Delubrum is doing around 20% of their ideal damage, as can be easily inferred by glancing at the aggro list when there’s not a tank with a tank stance on in your party.
We’re not talking about min-maxing or tryharding here, we’re talking about a performance gap so huge that one good player can literally outperform an entire full party.

Suggestion to the devs: expand “FATE-like” performance based rewards to most aspects of the game.

One thing Bozja did (almost) RIGHT is duels, namely the fact that you’re allowed to engage in them only if you’re “good enough”. The system is not perfect, since you’re technically eligible to participate in duels even if you do almost no damage at all and just dodge mechanics correctly, but it’s still something at least and at the end you still have to beat the boss by yourself. What I suggest however is something slightly different: take the reward system of FATEs, refine it and apply it to, well, any other combat content of the game.
At the end of an instance, you’re rewarded with a medal based on a general measure of your contribution to the party depending on damage, healing (excluding overhealing), damage mitigation and resurrection/raise casts. If you don’t pass a certain threshold, let us call it the “basic decency level”, you should be denied any kind of reward. This threshold shouldn’t be too high, in qualitative terms it should be reachable by performing a decent rotation at min ilvl while not dying too much, and reaching this minimum threshold makes you eligible for normal rewards.

Then, increase the probability of dropping rare items if you do particularly well, so that those few players carrying the whole alliance are at least awarded something for their effort. Just like FATEs, high damage and spot on healing result in better medals and each medal is associated with a multiplier that is then used to increase your reward in various forms. In the case of a huge performance disparity, reward the carriers with a special platinum badge that guarantees or significantly increases the drop rate of the rarest items in the instance (this should be a rare occurrence, hopefully, so it wouldn't make rare drops too common).

What I believe this system achieves:
1) it aligns the interests of all party members. Be an asset to your party and you get more for yourself, it’s as simple as that and it’s a fundamental rule of most group activities, including games;
2) it encourages people to gear up and not tackle content with bad gear;
3) it makes it obvious to less experienced and new players if they need to get better (if you think you’re good but you’re only getting bronze or silver medals, maybe it’s time to take a look at your job’s guide);
4) it might remove or reduce some of the toxicity and passive-aggressive behavior that can be witnessed in some aspects of the game thanks to the incentive given to the carriers.

Alternatively, if you believe similar systems have no place in ffxiv, please consider allowing full parties and pre-formed alliances to reserve an instance in large scale content such as Eureka and Save the Queen, while scaling the bosses’ hp to the number of parties in the instance.

[Kes13a]

its a good sounding idea, but this is an mmo and as such, you will have many different skill levels, hardware levels and participation levels. while I wouldnt mind running something with a group of, in theory, equally competent/geared players, it starts to lent itself to elitism, which I think is bad and never a forward looking option in any mmo.

once you start introducing mechanics to reward the top 1% then only the top 1% are able to get them, and the disparity becomes even worse. since to get the rewards, you already have to be doing things at that level, which is impossible without the rewards...see where that is going?

would it be nice if everyone had the same drive and skill, of course. but its more of a dream than a doable reality without ruining what the game currently is.

[Lastelli]

once you start introducing mechanics to reward the top 1% then only the top 1% are able to get them, and the disparity becomes even worse. since to get the rewards, you already have to be doing things at that level, which is impossible without the rewards...

What? That's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm more talking about not rewarding the bottom 20%, which is what normally happens in most aspects of anyone's social life. Because after years of playing, I can confidently tell that the average skill level of the player base has plummeted and I link this to the distorted reward systems currently in place.

Actually, since I'm suggesting giving better rewards to overperformers, ending up in a bad group should be a desirable outcome for top players, as long as the content can still be cleared. This is the opposite of elitism.

Sandbaggers are just as bad as parser metaslaves.

I don't understand what parsers have anything to do with it all.

[Kes13a]

What? That's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm more talking about not rewarding the bottom 20%, which is what normally happens in most aspects of anyone's social life. Because after years of playing, I can confidently tell that the average skill level of the player base has plummeted and I link this to the distorted reward systems currently in place.

Actually, since I'm suggesting giving better rewards to overperformers, ending up in a bad group should be a desirable outcome for top players, as long as the content can still be cleared. This is the opposite of elitism.

ah, my apologies then. I have few problems with people who do zero damage because they afk'd the whole fight getting nothing (even to the point of not even getting credit for the run)

no, I am NOT okay with leeching at all, just hard to set something up which would be hard to set the brackets on for getting the best loot.

[Alxyzntlct]

What? That's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm more talking about not rewarding the bottom 20%, which is what normally happens in most aspects of anyone's social life. Because after years of playing, I can confidently tell that the average skill level of the player base has plummeted and I link this to the distorted reward systems currently in place.

Actually, since I'm suggesting giving better rewards to overperformers, ending up in a bad group should be a desirable outcome for top players, as long as the content can still be cleared. This is the opposite of elitism.



I don't understand what parsers have anything to do with it all.

In my experience, that's the very definition of "elitism". Deciding based on subjective reasons who should and shouldn't get rewards. It's a slipper slope and introducing any form of punishment invariably will go too far in the wrong direction. Maybe that wasn't the intention, but it's where I've seen such thoughts go toward.

I feel that hobostew nailed the issue, that it's just the over-arching structure of the groups for the instance that's the issue. Not being able to kick/remove seriously problematic people is a core issue that I agree, hopefully gets addressed in the future.

But to reiterate, anything involving punishment on one end and extra rewards on the other isn't a practice I ever want to see again. I saw that too much in WoW and it resulted in making the game unpleasant to play because if you weren't part of the top-tier, then you were considered garbage.

[Lastelli]

In my experience, that's the very definition of "elitism". Deciding based on subjective reasons who should and shouldn't get rewards. It's a slipper slope and introducing any form of punishment invariably will go too far in the wrong direction. Maybe that wasn't the intention, but it's where I've seen such thoughts go toward.

I feel that hobostew nailed the issue, that it's just the over-arching structure of the groups for the instance that's the issue. Not being able to kick/remove seriously problematic people is a core issue that I agree, hopefully gets addressed in the future.

But to reiterate, anything involving punishment on one end and extra rewards on the other isn't a practice I ever want to see again. I saw that too much in WoW and it resulted in making the game unpleasant to play because if you weren't part of the top-tier, then you were considered garbage.

Here's the thing, it's not subjective. It would be based on a formula, and formulae by definition are not subjective. But the main thing I feel many are not getting is that what I'm suggesting would make playing with less skilled players desirable for top players. This is the whole point. In other terms, pick up their slack and you get better rewards. That's it. WoW is different in that you really want to play with good players because your reward is dependent on the group's performance. But I'm suggesting something very different. So if, say, you're in dalriada and do great and most other people do very bad, it will take you like 45 minutes to clear instead of the 15 minutes of an optimized run, but you get (just as an example of course) 3x mettle, 3x exp bonus, 3x the amount of whatever you're farming for your relic, increased drop rate for mount of hairstyle. That's the general idea behind it.

On the other hand, the "bottom" should be penalized in absolute terms. If, say, your potential is 100 and you're doing 20, it's not about not being very good at the game. It's just that you're leeching, plain and simple. You absolutely know what you're doing. What I'm saying is, in those very obvious cases, remove the reward. Set the bar low, but set it somewhere. Because it's absolutely preposterous that if I wanted to I could enter castrum, use a rubber band to fix my analogue stick and come back in 30 minutes to collect my rewards.

[Roeshel]

In my experience, that's the very definition of "elitism". Deciding based on subjective reasons who should and shouldn't get rewards. It's a slipper slope and introducing any form of punishment invariably will go too far in the wrong direction. Maybe that wasn't the intention, but it's where I've seen such thoughts go toward.

I feel that hobostew nailed the issue, that it's just the over-arching structure of the groups for the instance that's the issue. Not being able to kick/remove seriously problematic people is a core issue that I agree, hopefully gets addressed in the future.

But to reiterate, anything involving punishment on one end and extra rewards on the other isn't a practice I ever want to see again. I saw that too much in WoW and it resulted in making the game unpleasant to play because if you weren't part of the top-tier, then you were considered garbage.

Well, you are still considered garbage when you are greatly underperforming. Most people just won't tell you that they think you are a garbage. So you get away with the same rewards as everyone else while contributing with basically nothing to the party/raid.

[StriderShinryu]

I'll always agree to the game having some sort of soft rating or grading system to help players see their shortcomings (and give score chasers a chance to SSS+ rank everything if they want to). And I absolutely agree to the game doing a better job of teaching players how to play.

However, though, and it always comes up in threads like this, I think we need to stop treating under performing players as leechers who intentionally free-ride to get clears and loot. You have no idea why a player is underperforming and, as others have noted, the only real and legitimate "fail state" for content is to not clear said content. Maybe a player doesn't even know they're not performing well. Maybe a player can tell they're not doing well but doesn't know why because the game doesn't tell them. Maybe they know they're not great but aren't dedicated enough to spend their valuable game time outside of the game researching on third party sources how to get better. Maybe they have legitimate and real mental or physical challenges that prevent them from performing better than they do. Etc. Or, sure, maybe they are just a leecher who doesn't care.

People love to bring up the YoshiP comment about higher skilled players "carrying" low level players as proof of how right they are. In truth, though, this is about team content and maybe what you need to do is look at that statement from a different perspective. Instead of fixating so much on having to carry other players, what is so wrong with taking it as being good enough to be able to help those that are less skilled than you are? It's been said a million times by me and others, but if you're choosing to do random casual content with a random group of players then you're sometimes going to end up as the best player in the group.

[Roda]

I'll always agree to the game having some sort of soft rating or grading system to help players see their shortcomings (and give score chasers a chance to SSS+ rank everything if they want to). And I absolutely agree to the game doing a better job of teaching players how to play.

I will bring this up every time this discussion occurs. I want an end-of-instance grading scale that shows you how you can improve. It doesn't show anyone else's data to anyone else, just where you personally rank among your group.


(It took account of ties too)
(Dont' pay any mind to the bronze reward, it's not for individual performance, but for completing/not completing certain optional challenges in the instance, which is ANOTHER thing I want xiv to do lmao)

Give me a ranking of
#x in survivability. (How much avoidable damage you ate vs dodged)
#x in damage. (pretty straight forward. The game already tracks this *points to UwU*)
#x in teamwork. (Probably have to take into account job/role DPS, cards/strategem usage, and avoiding overheal for healers (whms could get overheal weighted less when using assize), DPS, interjects, Boss stability and party mitigation for tanks, and buffs and role utilities for dps. It would all be weighted differently depending on how much your role has to offer. (yes role, because if a brd has no chance of beating a similarly skilled sam on dps, then they should get somethin' on this ranking))
and then a time to complete.

Each section could have a mouse-over tip of something your play could improve with depending on how they were messing up in the run

Survivability: Remember to dodge out of the way before the cast is finished!" or "Avert your gaze when you see (picture of that eye gaze icon)"
Damage: mind your positionals / Always Be Casting, or even "make sure you use X ability!" if, say, a blackmage wasn't keeping enochian up, or a smn was letting garuda hang out during a boss
Teamwork: yeah it would have to be more personalized like "Use addle if you think a target is casting a magic attack!" or "Warden's paean can help cure what ails you or a teammate!".

Sure it would be some upfront cost in implementation, but damn would it be more useful to the general player than another stone sky sea (yeuck!)

It's just how streaming (used to) beat piracy. Ya can't beat these things by saying "oh golly gosh, pweeze don't use them". Ya beat them by providing an accessible means to their proper function in a place you can control. Proper use of a dps meter and logging sites aren't "to see how big your number is" it's to see feedback on what your doing, how your changes affect your performance, and how others who are performing better than you achieve that success. And that's why stone sky sea is not going to stop anyone from using logs, and why it's not going to help anyone who needs to improve. (well one reason why, the other reason is because it's optional and out of the way. Seriously stone sky sea is the worst.)

[Velnora]

In my experience, that's the very definition of "elitism". Deciding based on subjective reasons who should and shouldn't get rewards. It's a slipper slope and introducing any form of punishment invariably will go too far in the wrong direction. Maybe that wasn't the intention, but it's where I've seen such thoughts go toward.

I feel that hobostew nailed the issue, that it's just the over-arching structure of the groups for the instance that's the issue. Not being able to kick/remove seriously problematic people is a core issue that I agree, hopefully gets addressed in the future.

But to reiterate, anything involving punishment on one end and extra rewards on the other isn't a practice I ever want to see again. I saw that too much in WoW and it resulted in making the game unpleasant to play because if you weren't part of the top-tier, then you were considered garbage.

Someone performing at 80% of their job, vs someone doing 30, isn't "subjective".