Does 14 Promote a Culture of Mediocrity?

[Shibi]

Don't you have to log in at least once every 45 days for an hour in order for you to not loose a house?

Log in, and enter the house, doesn't need to be an hour.

[Waterscape]

All i see in this thread is people trying to find excuse for their lazyness in game.. This game is not hard at all , all you need to do is read your skill.Literally....

[MidnightEquinox]

Some expectations in this sub-section of the FFXIV community seem to a bit strange. Taking a bit of a step back: why are you criticizing people? I've not been doing that in WoW, either. There are very few situations where that doesn't end poorly, and it has nothing to do with the game. Furthermore, often the advice giver is not even better than who they give advice to, if better at all. The thing is, the sort of people who know things worth sharing also know that randomly criticizing people you don't know is a questionable endeavor. The whole issue is when you start feeling entitled to control how another person plays because you think you're better than them due to your difference in skill.

One thing you have to understand: teaching and directing people is hard. It's an actual skill. If done well, it pays huge dividends. You do not gain that skill by being a better than average player. Nor do you gain that skill by acquiring a mentor crown. You gain it through patience, empathy, and understanding the perspective of another. It doesn't take much reading of peoples' complaints to see that that is certainly not happening in most cases. As soon as you are dispensing advice to alleviate your own frustration or to improve your situation you missed the point.

And, by the way, what you're calling coddling is mostly common courtesy. The only environments where that's not expected is the military... and the gaming community.

The game mechanics are probably getting dumber as the OP says. However, the better you play, the more likely you are going to encounter rude, impatient players who are playing for parse number on FFlogs. They are trying to impress strangers with their Internet points.

I've experienced the same and this is the funniest thing. You're never really rewarded for playing well, because you just end up with angry players who demand perfection, and that's not a standard you're going to meet. Why I gave up on serious raiding ages ago, I can't deal with the ego and with the people also not actually being great on top of it, completely refusing to think besides what the latest streamer told them, put your brain in the microwave already if you're so intent on not using it.

Ego ego ego. That's the problem. If it was high skill it wouldn't be a problem, but it's mostly ego.

[Zsolen]

Some expectations in this sub-section of the FFXIV community seem to a bit strange. Taking a bit of a step back: why are you criticizing people? I've not been doing that in WoW, either. There are very few situations where that doesn't end poorly, and it has nothing to do with the game. Furthermore, often the advice giver is not even better than who they give advice to, if better at all. The thing is, the sort of people who know things worth sharing also know that randomly criticizing people you don't know is a questionable endeavor. The whole issue is when you start feeling entitled to control how another person plays because you think you're better than them due to your difference in skill.

One thing you have to understand: teaching and directing people is hard. It's an actual skill. If done well, it pays huge dividends. You do not gain that skill by being a better than average player. Nor do you gain that skill by acquiring a mentor crown. You gain it through patience, empathy, and understanding the perspective of another. It doesn't take much reading of peoples' complaints to see that that is certainly not happening in most cases. As soon as you are dispensing advice to alleviate your own frustration or to improve your situation you missed the point.

And, by the way, what you're calling coddling is mostly common courtesy. The only environments where that's not expected is the military... and the gaming community.

I've experienced the same and this is the funniest thing. You're never really rewarded for playing well, because you just end up with angry players who demand perfection, and that's not a standard you're going to meet. Why I gave up on serious raiding ages ago, I can't deal with the ego and with the people also not actually being great on top of it, completely refusing to think besides what the latest streamer told them, put your brain in the microwave already if you're so intent on not using it.

Ego ego ego. That's the problem. If it was high skill it wouldn't be a problem, but it's mostly ego.

As an actual teacher, what you said is not all that accurate. Anyone can teach. Anyone can learn. None of us stop doing either in our lifetimes.

Someone teaching someone else is not inherently toxic at all. Throwing a fuss, because someone is pointing out your mistakes is.

[Allegor]

I could give my honest opinion on the matter, but topics like this always just devolve into "Team lazy/enabler" vs "Team toxic elitist" as if you could only be one or the other (when the majority of us are neither)...so...

[Kaurhz]

As an actual teacher, what you said is not all that accurate. Anyone can teach. Anyone can learn. None of us stop doing either in our lifetimes.

Someone teaching someone else is not inherently toxic at all. Throwing a fuss, because someone is pointing out your mistakes is.

Teaching and teaching effectively are 2 entirely different things. Anyone can stand in front of a class and waffle, but ensuring they actually retain the knowledge, and creating an environment that is actually conducive to learning is a skill. Regardless of your own personal feelings on the matter. There's an abundance of teachers and there's also an abundance of teachers that are absolutely appalling.

If people aren't learning from your advice then you should probably look at how you're conveying that advice, equally if people are giving you pushback when you present advice or a criticism of their work then you should probably take a stare in the mirror to see if it's as a result of what you're saying and how you're saying it, rather than just the person complaining because they were simply flawed in their approach. Because I can assure you the former is a fairly common case - "I'm only giving advice, I'm only helping" - Which in many cases was presented in the most vile way possible because people utterly devoid of the ability to reflect on their own action - Yet seemingly have an 'all seeing eye' when it comes to other peoples' actions - and this does apply to both ends of the spectrum.

[Misutoraru]

As an actual teacher, what you said is not all that accurate. Anyone can teach. Anyone can learn. None of us stop doing either in our lifetimes.

Someone teaching someone else is not inherently toxic at all. Throwing a fuss, because someone is pointing out your mistakes is.

Everyone can teach but very few are good teacher. I was teacher once, and I have to admitted I was never a good teacher in those year.
Teaching require patience, a lot of patience, understanding how to reach out to the pupils etc.

I believe most players do not reject constructive criticism but in all my year in FFXIV, criticism almost always come out with judgemental language.

I see a lot of “bare minimum” comments, but what is the standard? We have solo instances which I don’t think an “ice Mage” would be able to clear it. Does clearing solo instance mean the player could execute bare minimum.

Every expansion pass there are some good change and some I don’t quite agree with. That’s the way, it will never please everyone

[Zsolen]

Teaching and teaching effectively are 2 entirely different things. Anyone can stand in front of a class and waffle, but ensuring they actually retain the knowledge, and creating an environment that is actually conducive to learning is a skill. Regardless of your own personal feelings on the matter. There's an abundance of teachers and there's also an abundance of teachers that are absolutely appalling.

If people aren't learning from your advice then you should probably look at how you're conveying that advice, equally if people are giving you pushback when you present advice or a criticism of their work then you should probably take a stare in the mirror to see if it's as a result of what you're saying and how you're saying it, rather than just the person complaining because they were simply flawed in their approach. Because I can assure you the former is a fairly common case - "I'm only giving advice, I'm only helping" - Which in many cases was presented in the most vile way possible because people utterly devoid of the ability to reflect on their own action - Yet seemingly have an 'all seeing eye' when it comes to other peoples' actions - and this does apply to both ends of the spectrum.

Who said people aren't learning? There are plenty of people given advice and learn in this game without issue. I'm merely responding to the individual that said you should not teach. That's a silly notion, because we all teach every day and we all learn every day.

Teaching is a skill everyone has. People just have different skill levels, like they have with everything else. I never made any statement that those that were toxic were teaching properly. While not in 100% of the cases, generally the most toxic people are those that try to AFK/ throw a FL match or have max levels characters and are doing some very basic things wrong like "face pulling."

[BokoToloko]

I have very mixed opinions about the matter because, on one hand, jobs have been turning more streamlined and simple but that in itself doesn't necessarily correlate with making them less engaging. It's really something that varies depending on the removed element and, of course, it also depends on the person itself.

Aggro management back in 2.0 and 3.0 was more of a nuisance than a rewarding mechanic. PLDs having to waste GCDs for a non-damaging spell (Flash) to keep aggro, DPS being forced to reduce their aggro or to target whatever tank targeted at early levels to not get punished and warriors having to also use flash whenever their TP dropped were counterproductive and annoying as they were handicaps with no visible reward to it. Stance management, on the other hand, was a mechanic that, while it complicated healers and tanks, it gave them a chance to expand their possibilities beyond the minimum. You could theoretically do the minimum expected if, as a tank, you never ever used the DPS stance or, as a healer, you never turned on Cleric Stance. But if you did the 'dance' with the stances, you would perform way better contributing with DPS. You had a risk and playing around it correctly would reward you in turn (obviously, it wasn't perfect either and it wasn't always the case).

And when it comes to class mechanics, there were mechanics that weren't engaging to begin with, beyond the appearance of seemingly making the class more "complex". MCH in HW was complicated but it was also a convoluted mess which only "fun" mechanic was the ammo imho. The CD lineup for every Wildfire window wasn't all that fun. And while some people mourn for SMN now, ShB SMN wasn't really any better, despite being more complex (ironically, some of the issues people had with SMN were solved in EW, starting with the pet system). Greased Lightning won't be missed, either. And on the other hand, there is also classes that feel like a shadow of their former selves, like SCH and DRK, and feel less engaging than before.


Regarding the players, I believe there is a fair share of people that can't take even the slightest hint of criticism but, more often than not, I find people that, whether they will it or not, come out as rude and dismissive when giving feedback to other players then act surprised when they receive defensive or rude responses back, then believe they're refusing to improve rather than they're actually being stubborn just to get back at a rude person. Manners can really go a long way in making people receptive to advice and, if I want to be rude, I shouldn't be expecting people to be receptive with me.

[Kaurhz]

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Teaching in this game has a singular inherent flaw in that the people that are 'teaching' often are expecting the results to be an immediate process rather than a gradual one. That is the issue with teaching in this game and unless you have the commitment and understanding of this fact then trying to teach in this game is just counterproductive because the likelihood of people actually executing it is going to be fairly negligible. There's practically several posts alone in this very thread that would give credence to this fact and an entire thread created on this - You know people creating the bizarre suggestion that content should have a solo component or option simply because people aren't meeting that expectation. These are all perfectly reasonable cases why most people shouldn't be teaching, really. Some responses in this thread and arguably a myriad of other threads on this forum can be attributed to people acting like children because people didn't learn. - That said we can argue people did eventually learn, but in many cases they certainly didn't to do anything meaningful with it in the presence of the person 'teaching'.

To summarise - I wouldn't dispute everyone is always learning something, but having the patience and commitment to actually follow through with this is where the difficulty comes. People have the expectancy that they'll give advice then the next few pulls will be nigh on perfect in execution, or that they'll present some rotational advice and all subsequent pulls will magically result in said advice being executed when I'm pretty sure you and I know full well that learning is a gradual and not an instantaneous process - and this is not discounting the simple fact that it is very difficult to learn or adopt new muscle memory. Sure, by all means we can preach teach if you like. But please don't bother teaching if it is only at the expense of you being frustrated and expecting immediate results, and failure to do so results in said person throwing a hissy slugfest.

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at with this, that much is clear. Teaching is a skill you learn to develop and some (rather many) people simply don't develop to an adequate enough level to where their teaching is meaningful, or productive in the first place. - In fact I would take it a step further and argue that teaching is not a skill, but rather a profession that involves a wider range of skills, be it communication, management, passion and adaptability just to name a few. If we wanted we could argue that you can learn and develop communication and management to a varying degree, but adaptability and passion are things you can only teach the principles of and not the execution of it. If you aren't passionate that will reflect on your ability to communicate the knowledge in a meaningful way. Similarly, if you aren't an individual that is able to adapt then it will only further stagnate your ability to communicate because you'll be approaching different problems using the same methods where said methods might not necessarily apply - This is why people can absolutely be abysmal - Don't get me wrong it's a nice notion but it's just a detractor to a degree from the reality.

That being said, this relates to the thread because many people are simply only using teaching a fight or parts of a job as a means subverting their own frustrations and sooner than later for people this just results in a toxic slugfest for a myriad of reasons. Either fully commit to it or don't bother at all, really.