Can we get a materia required option for party finder?

[Packetdancer]

It's less controversial and more how exactly does the OP expect the game to police something like this past "something in the slot" which doesn't really solve the problem since as others have pointed out, someone can put any sort of higher level materia in there to bypass the requirement.

I mean, moreover, unless I'm misremembering... if you're cheesing spiritbonding techniques to generate materia, it's actually potentially more efficient (and certainly more cost-effective) to have utterly trash, meaningless materia in the slots as long as you have something in the slots; the spiritbonding formula doesn't care what you overmelded with, just "is there materia in this overmeld slot, yes/no?"

It's why you go meld, like, Piety II into gathering gear temporarily when you're generating gatherer materia; you can overmeld with something you don't care about burning through in order to get the overmelded spiritbonding bonus, then when you've 100% bonded it and extracted the gathering materia several times, you strip all the garbage back out and put in real melds.

[LittleImp]

It's less about making sure the players have the proper substats allocated, and more about excluding the archetype of player who doesn't meld their gear, who are generally speaking, people who are ignorant to the requirements and expectations around endgame content.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if someone knows fairly obscure information about how melding interacts with spirit-bonding, they're probably going to know more about the game and be a more effective player than someone who potentially doesn't even understand what melding is.

[Alxyzntlct]

I don't have a horse in this race as I don't do endgame raiding as of yet (still exploring the rest of the game), but out of this entire conversation one statement stands out as the crux of the request:

It's less about making sure the players have the proper substats allocated, and more about excluding the archetype of player who doesn't meld their gear, who are generally speaking, people who are ignorant to the requirements and expectations around endgame content.

...

This stands out to me because in everything I've seen in the game thus far, it seems that SQEX's general design philosophy is focused around INCLUSION, of getting players to interact and learn from each other. And the idea that OP is recommending is the exact opposite of that, it's to create a tool that instead instigates EXCLUSION, coming up with an automated means of pushing people out and not even giving them a chance.

I get it to a degree, all human beings are all about personal efficiencies, about getting from a to b with the least amount of effort (nature always takes the direct path). But admittedly, if SQEX did start making design decisions to move the game in this direction, I'd avoid endgame raiding altogether and begin looking for another game because this is exactly the kind of design philosophy that Blizzard implemented in WoW and I wanted to get away from.

I have no issue with how people make their own groups in party finder, to each their own. And right now everyone has the means of reviewing their teams and making their own decisions. I just personally like how the Devs have approached this game and hope they maintain that standard, I feel giving more players more reason to interact with each other in a healthy manner is a good thing, not building tools that further enforce excluding others.

Edit: Just to note, in case anyone decides to get "personal", lol, I do personally enjoy melding when I get max-level gear. I still have a LOT to learn about it, but I do go about it because as others have mentioned, Materia is practically thrown at players. Heck, even though I came in late to ShB, I still procured essences in Bozja to improve my performance even though everyone else clearly overpowered the content.

I just recognize how much of the game is designed to get players to speak to each other (looking at those relic weapon quests in particular, lol).

[Imora]

I don't have a horse in this race as I don't do endgame raiding as of yet (still exploring the rest of the game), but out of this entire conversation one statement stands out as the crux of the request:



This stands out to me because in everything I've seen in the game thus far, it seems that SQEX's general design philosophy is focused around INCLUSION, of getting players to interact and learn from each other. And the idea that OP is recommending is the exact opposite of that, it's to create a tool that instead instigates EXCLUSION, coming up with an automated means of pushing people out and not even giving them a chance.

I get it to a degree, all human beings are all about personal efficiencies, about getting from a to b with the least amount of effort (nature always takes the direct path). But admittedly, if SQEX did start making design decisions to move the game in this direction, I'd avoid endgame raiding altogether and begin looking for another game because this is exactly the kind of design philosophy that Blizzard implemented in WoW and I wanted to get away from.

I have no issue with how people make their own groups in party finder, to each their own. And right now everyone has the means of reviewing their teams and making their own decisions. I just personally like how the Devs have approached this game and hope they maintain that standard, I feel giving more players more reason to interact with each other in a healthy manner is a good thing, not building tools that further enforce excluding others.

Edit: Just to note, in case anyone decides to get "personal", lol, I do personally enjoy melding when I get max-level gear. I still have a LOT to learn about it, but I do go about it because as others have mentioned, Materia is practically thrown at players. Heck, even though I came in late to ShB, I still procured essences in Bozja to improve my performance even though everyone else clearly overpowered the content.

I just recognize how much of the game is designed to get players to speak to each other (looking at those relic weapon quests in particular, lol).

Except we're talking about party finder.

You know, the tool we use to build our groups for our liking and can be as discriminatory as we want in who we pick for the party? You can apply all you like, but there's nothing forcing them to bring you. If your gear isn't good enough, or up to their standard in general, then they can remove you and find someone else.

For Duty Finder, I can totally get on board with the inclusion thing even though there's a number of subgroups in the player base I can't stand, but when it comes to party finder, the leader knows exactly what they're looking for in order to succeed at whatever they're planning to do, and should not have to settle for anything less. If they want you to be fully melded, that's their prerogative.

[LittleImp]

I have no issue with how people make their own groups in party finder, to each their own. And right now everyone has the means of reviewing their teams and making their own decisions. I just personally like how the Devs have approached this game and hope they maintain that standard, I feel giving more players more reason to interact with each other in a healthy manner is a good thing, not building tools that further enforce excluding others.

I agree that gatekeeping is generally a bad thing, but it's sensible as you start to climb the ladder into more and more difficult content. A lot of this content takes a significant time investment, and players may have a limited amounts of hours per-week that they're able to spend tackling it. As unfortunate as it may sound, there is a point where the scale tips, and you become too inclusive at severe cost to your own time and ambitions. Making such filters available won't instantly encode some kind of hard toxic meta into the game; ilevel restrictions and one-player-per-job are applied responsibly in most cases, and I would expect similar behavior around meld-required parties.

I've seen both edges of this issue; I teach a lot of people in this game to raid, I've lost count of how many people I've sat down with and explained melding to, linked BiS to, etc. A lot of high-end players want to share their passion and help to grow the fairly niche raid community, and this game has no shortage of inclusivity at the moment despite fairly similar restrictions already being available. At the very same time, I don't owe my time to anyone. I shouldn't be expected to always be ready to donate my time to other people at the drop of a hat, particularly at the cost of my own goals and ambitions. To that end, giving players tools to try to control the quality of their experience in a custom party setting isn't inherently evil or something. There is a time and a place for inclusivity, but a party full of people working hard to push narrow margins may not be it.

A balance has to be struck between allowing players to try to control the quality of their experience, and making sure other players aren't completely left behind. A lot of the time this comes down more-so to the culture of the game, rather than the actual mechanisms provided by the game itself. If the game itself did a better job of teaching players how to play it, I don't think any of these types of things would really be necessary tbh.

[Alxyzntlct]

Except we're talking about party finder.

You know, the tool we use to build our groups for our liking and can be as discriminatory as we want in who we pick for the party? You can apply all you like, but there's nothing forcing them to bring you. If your gear isn't good enough, or up to their standard in general, then they can remove you and find someone else.

For Duty Finder, I can totally get on board with the inclusion thing even though there's a number of subgroups in the player base I can't stand, but when it comes to party finder, the leader knows exactly what they're looking for in order to succeed at whatever they're planning to do, and should not have to settle for anything less. If they want you to be fully melded, that's their prerogative.

I know it's about Party Finder, I even stated that in my comment, lol.

Plus I also acknowledged and agreed that it does make sense that as a part of PF, that groups absolutely have the right to decide who they can/can't include. I'm not arguing either of those points at all. (I'd recommend re-reading what I wrote)

What I'm addressing is the fact that folks want to add in-game automation to preemptively exclude players in party finder, thus immediately bypassing part of the process of interacting with other players, which seems antithetical to the general design philosophy of how SQEX has approached the game. They seem more interested in having players interact with each other because let's be honest, the game doesn't really prepare players for endgame raiding. I mean, technically, all of the information is there, but it doesn't really describe in-game what the endgame expectations are since that's mostly discussed / explained by people outside of the game.

[Alxyzntlct]

I agree that gatekeeping is generally a bad thing, but it's sensible as you start to climb the ladder into more and more difficult content. A lot of this content takes a significant time investment, and players may have a limited amounts of hours per-week that they're able to spend tackling it. As unfortunate as it may sound, there is a point where the scale tips, and you become too inclusive at severe cost to your own time and ambitions. Making such filters available won't instantly encode some kind of hard toxic meta into the game; ilevel restrictions and one-player-per-job are applied responsibly in most cases, and I would expect similar behavior around meld-required parties.

I've seen both edges of this issue; I teach a lot of people in this game to raid, I've lost count of how many people I've sat down with and explained melding to, linked BiS to, etc. A lot of high-end players want to share their passion and help to grow the fairly niche raid community, and this game has no shortage of inclusivity at the moment despite fairly similar restrictions already being available. At the very same time, I don't owe my time to anyone. I shouldn't be expected to always be ready to donate my time to other people at the drop of a hat, particularly at the cost of my own goals and ambitions. To that end, giving players tools to try to control the quality of their experience in a custom party setting isn't inherently evil or something. There is a time and a place for inclusivity, but a party full of people working hard to push narrow margins may not be it.

A balance has to be struck between allowing players to try to control the quality of their experience, and making sure other players aren't completely left behind. A lot of the time this comes down more-so to the culture of the game, rather than the actual mechanisms provided by the game itself. If the game itself did a better job of teaching players how to play it, I don't think any of these types of things would really be necessary tbh.

1. Absolutely agreed, nobody owes their time to anyone else, that's why it's important that PF be as flexible as it is now. People need the freedom to make their own choices.
2. Also agreed, having tools doesn't automatically make them evil, lol
3. And agreed, this statement is fantastic:
"A balance has to be struck between allowing players to try to control the quality of their experience, and making sure other players aren't completely left behind. A lot of the time this comes down more-so to the culture of the game, rather than the actual mechanisms provided by the game itself. If the game itself did a better job of teaching players how to play it, I don't think any of these types of things would really be necessary tbh."

My only concern is that over the years of playing WoW, I saw how little innocuous things like "do players have materia" were slowly added to the game, and the playerbase evolved over time to use those tools more and more to exclude new/learning players from the endgame scene. So yeah, I'm more than a little gun-shy about any design philosophies that are geared toward creating tools that specifically exclude vs. include.

If there were more/better tools designed around inclusion, as that statement I quoted above denotes, I'd be less concerned, but thus far I haven't seen that (then again, as I mentioned before, I'm still newish to the game so maybe I'm missing something).

Edit: Had to edit to get full response in

[LittleImp]

What I'm addressing is the fact that folks want to add in-game automation to preemptively exclude players in party finder, thus immediately bypassing part of the process of interacting with other players, which seems antithetical to the general design philosophy of how SQEX has approached the game. They seem more interested in having players interact with each other because let's be honest, the game doesn't really prepare players for endgame raiding. I mean, technically, all of the information is there, but it doesn't really describe in-game what the endgame expectations are since that's mostly discussed / explained by people outside of the game.

I can speak from a lot of experience on the problems with this kind of approach.

I would prefer to minimize the amount of time and energy I need to spend vetting players after we've already entered the duty. You run into a lot of situations like this in PF, where once you've queued in, a kind of sunk-cost situation develops with the party, and people are unwilling to back out and find a replacement. This puts you into situations where you're essentially forced to try to carry or teach someone who has entered content underprepared, at your own expense. The alternative is to back out, remove the person, and then watch as the party you may have waited hours to fill disintegrates before your eyes. It's a large part of why we've seen people asking for prog checkpoints to be added to fights over the years, as there is no more iconic a duo than FFXIV players and lying about their experience in a particular fight to try to get some easy prog at the expense of others.

[Alxyzntlct]

I can speak from a lot of experience on the problems with this kind of approach.

I would prefer to minimize the amount of time and energy I need to spend vetting players after we've already entered the duty. You run into a lot of situations like this in PF, where once you've queued in, a kind of sunk-cost situation develops with the party, and people are unwilling to back out and find a replacement. This puts you into situations where you're essentially forced to try to carry or teach someone who has entered content underprepared, at your own expense. The alternative is to back out, remove the person, and then watch as the party you may have waited hours to fill disintegrates before your eyes. It's a large part of why we've seen people asking for prog checkpoints to be added to fights over the years, as there is no more iconic a duo than FFXIV players and lying about their experience in a particular fight to try to get some easy prog at the expense of others.

Ah, ok, my ignorance to the mechanics of the process just clicked, I wasn't aware of that critical detail that you can't review the players who have queued until after you're already in the duty...

Damn. Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem. And that in turn makes more sense why folks are seeking a means to do that determination prior to getting into the duty.

Thank you for the info! Makes much more sense to me now!

I'm still not excited by the idea, admittedly, I'd be more curious to see if there were a way to review applicants prior to diving into the duty. Automation, while powerful, is invariably abused sooner or later, lol

[Caurcas]

Gatekeeping is good and I agree with OP. Gatekeeping keeps those that threaten to water down and dilute your community out, while giving those that want in and will expend the effort to take place amongst your ranks.