Idea: Commendation Coins

[Shougun]

Loooooong ago, before the commendation system, I had suggested using the mailing system (because I really want that to be a thing in the game lol) to receive other worldly letters with gifts from other players who liked your presence in the dungeon/content (none of the reward token ideas were this creative though, it's a nice list ). One of the reasons why it was to be used to mail, not sure if I made it clear when posting at the time, was by not having it at the end of dungeon you could separate the issue of only having one free gift to give when there were more than one in the group (so like a day or two later you'd just get mail from another world). Also then it wouldn't be important to quickly pick who you liked because it's not like they received the 'commendation' right away anyway. I don't think I had thought of it at the time but having these delivered in bulk would have been smart, .. maybe because the game was less popular at the time but that'd clearly not work singularly delivered commendations in the mail lol. Anyway, these void gifts could be used to buy other things. In my mind a moogle would have been more important than they are now, so you'd get kupo feedback talking about good a person you are and cute stuff like that lol.

Btw I really like the echo idea. Blue Mage, for the most part once you get both a spam-able heal and healer mimicry (with basic, which is easy to get) becomes really strong solo but one idea had been an incense they could burn to greatly enhance their power (made by beast tribe quests) for solo content sync or doing like raid content unsync (1 person doing a 24 man content lol).

I have had reservations about some of the rewards and maybe people turning this into the new "Mentor" thing.. just seems like a few bad apples are going mess it up.. but in a vacuum at least I read the idea and think that'd be fun.

I really enjoy the ideas of people rewarding each other like a Death Stranding system. Wonder if there might be some cute mechanic in pay it forward where there is a chance a pay it forward commendation replicates itself into that person's possession (such that they can then pay another forward, not crazy high chance but still ).

[Fyrebrand]

That could be a cool way to keep commendations... relevant(?)
That doesn't feel like the right word...

That's a fine word, and represents my intent well enough. I guess "evergreen" would ideally be how I'd put it -- a system that is timeless and always useful no matter what the current state of the game is. Whatever terminology we want to employ, however, I realize this could be a real pain in the neck for the developers. With every new patch, they might have to make new tweaks to the Commendation Coin mechanics.

Loooooong ago, before the commendation system, I had suggested using the mailing system... to receive other worldly letters with gifts from other players who liked your presence in the dungeon/content...
so like a day or two later you'd just get mail from another world...

I like that idea. When you don't know who your benefactor is, you feel compelled to be nice to everyone equally. Obviously, this is why commendations are awarded after a duty is completed and all players have left and gone their separate ways. Similarly, in a lot of online games, exploiters and bots are banned in waves at set intervals, rather than acting upon them as soon as they're discovered. This is done so as to not give away hints regarding when and why they were discovered. The same could go for encouraging friendly and constructive play: when you don't know who is rewarding you, you seek to please everyone. I wish we didn't need that degree of artificiality to force people to be nice, but it is what it is.

I really enjoy the ideas of people rewarding each other like a Death Stranding system.

I gotta be honest, that aspect of the system only came to me as I was typing it out for my forum post, but it's my favourite part of the whole "Commendation Coins" idea and I think it has the most potential. Players will always be selfish and do what they want to do, but developers still have a lot of power to design mechanics that naturally bring players together and see each other as allies instead of enemies or obstacles. I have played MMOs where I strongly hated seeing other players around, because they would take my resources and quest goals, or try to outright murder me. But I have also played MMOs where having other players around is nothing but a good thing, we're all on the same team, and as a result we all feel an urge to help one another.