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.

[Jin-]

Sandbaggers are just as bad as parser metaslaves.

[Jijifli]

Sadly, leeches will never go away, because they pay a subscription just like you do.

Square small indie company, please understand.

[hobostew]

I think the problem you're talking about comes from trying something new which is allowing people to reform groups in an instance. The problem is that this makes it so you can't actually kick people when they're being problematic since kicking them from your group doesn't kick them from the instance. I've complained about this before since it's way more common in DR than it is in the other two instances but without redoing how grouping in these instances works there isn't much they can do and I imagine with the focus being on the new expansion doing just that isn't in the cards. Personally I hope they learned that it doesn't work as well as intended and opt for a different approach next expansion when it comes to similar content. Like maybe use the same system used in frontlines where you can change jobs the starting point of an instance instead of the whole reforming groups thing.

Also fate contribution is based on threat and you can cheese that super easy by being a tank or slotting lost incense(sp?) so it's not really based on merit necessarily lol

[Jijifli]

I think the problem you're talking about comes from trying something new which is allowing people to reform groups in an instance. The problem is that this makes it so you can't actually kick people when they're being problematic since kicking them from your group doesn't kick them from the instance.

Just poking right back in real quick cuz I wanna hang on that.

Yes, that's certainly not helping, but I'd bet in more cases than not, it wouldn't be the difference maker. People really REALLY like to defend leeching in this game. It's enough to the point where I don't even like doing group content half of the time (Oh, and before it's said, yes, I stopped doing group content.) Heck, my 3 day was because I got so tired of this chain I had I ended up cussing out one of the leeches in an e12, to which he reported me. Ya, I'll take the smack, whatever, but considering I had a friend who actually shared an fc with that person, and they confirmed they received nothing for their end of the action, sounds a lot like me leeching is A-Ok both by the community, and the company (Despite the ToS literally having a section about not participating...)

[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.

[Lastelli]

I think the problem you're talking about comes from trying something new which is allowing people to reform groups in an instance. The problem is that this makes it so you can't actually kick people when they're being problematic since kicking them from your group doesn't kick them from the instance. I've complained about this before since it's way more common in DR than it is in the other two instances but without redoing how grouping in these instances works there isn't much they can do and I imagine with the focus being on the new expansion doing just that isn't in the cards. Personally I hope they learned that it doesn't work as well as intended and opt for a different approach next expansion when it comes to similar content. Like maybe use the same system used in frontlines where you can change jobs the starting point of an instance instead of the whole reforming groups thing.

Also fate contribution is based on threat and you can cheese that super easy by being a tank or slotting lost incense(sp?) so it's not really based on merit necessarily lol

I understand, but this is something that should be easily fixable by setting some restrictions on party compositions before entering.

As for the FATE system, that's why I said they should refine it. Nothing too fancy, mind you, just introduce a couple more variables to the mix. They can do it because they already do something similar for pvp.

[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.