Does 14 Promote a Culture of Mediocrity?

[MidnightEquinox]

What is the purpose of this semantic argument? "Does not posses the skill" doesn't mean "has 0 capability of learning", it just means insufficient to be effective. Just like I do not posses the skill to clear a Savage raid. "Everyone can teach" is as meaningless as "everyone can play", nobody disagreed with that.

The point is that many people misread ability to play the game well as equivalent to the ability to teach, but they're different skills, and having one doesn't mean you have the other. If your communication skills are poor, which are core to teaching, your advice will fall flat.

And, by the way, effective communication and teaching skills are actually relevant to life. That's why for some of us, there's very little to compromise here. If you're a tank that doesn't use AoE abilities I will be internally going ??? and wondering if you're playing drunk or trolling or misplaced your keyboard, but if you insult another person for not meeting your arbitrary standard of skill you're lost to me.

[SturmChurro]

I don't know about promoting, rather it's adapting to it.

[Rinhi]

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.

but that is the thing, quite a few things you can learn in this game, that would make you instantly a better player, are immediate processes
a tank would immediately see the results from trying out mitigation a pull vs no mitigation in a pull, a melee dps would see a marked improvement in a group dying by going from st to aoe, a healer would immediately see how much easier it is to keep a tank alive if they would use their ogcds and so on

it's not like people are talking about low levels players in 90% of the cases on the OF, either, it's people who have spent hundreds to thousands of hours playing the game and their class, people who, most likely, have access and knowledge of guides to improve, but still chose not to, where people, in my opinion at least, rightfully get annoyed with them and give advice that the person that receives them should've known about 30-40 levels ago

I don't disagree with the message of your post at all, but to the defence of many who complain about players like that, they do fully commit with giving tips and being helpful, hence their frustrations with people attacking them over it

And, by the way, effective communication and teaching skills are actually relevant to life. That's why for some of us, there's very little to compromise here. If you're a tank that doesn't use AoE abilities I will be internally going ??? and wondering if you're playing drunk or trolling or misplaced your keyboard, but if you insult another person for not meeting your arbitrary standard of skill you're lost to me.

agree, though in my case I'd replay the drunk with never really having learned how to play a tank, which can be frustrating when it's in 80+ content, but which also makes it really satisfying when the little advice clicks with them and you can see them improve on the field

[Rhais]

I don't know about promoting, rather it's adapting to it.

This is true, ff14 is just a product of the zeitgeist.

[Driavna]

I don't know about promoting, rather it's adapting to it.

I think you nailed it. If we consider current player base a lot of their design choices make sense. With that in mind current difficulty for most content is perfect. Personally I more worried about little to no gameplay of certain side content (like beast tribes), or even MSQ itself. Has turned more about watching than doing.

[Kaurhz]

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Quite a few things you can and should learn naturally or be able to apply almost immediately which is fine in the cases of doing AoE on multi-target instead of a single target rotation, or similarly using cooldowns. But not all issues are narrowed down to being that simple, again, there's plenty of case scenarios on this forum and even outside where people are just crying out for not meeting other expectations outside of these. That being said the game is a victim of its own approach as far as the community is concerned. People aren't put into a position where they're forced or at least encouraged to develop good habits early on, and this issue is just further exacerbated by their insistence on normal content being as easy as humanly possible, so people trail these bad habits into harder content. There's just as many people that pick apart or cry about even intermediate or advanced executions which might not necessarily be an expectancy for the party or group with which it is designed. - In practically both of the examples you've elected to utilise are not done so from lack of knowledge or experience but just sheer laziness or absolute choice which is a different matter entirely, and unsolicited feedback won't do anything to resolve that, barring to create some bizarre notions that have been present lately.

Don't get me wrong, sigh all you like, get as pent up as much as you like, but when this emotion leeks into your advice (of which it very quickly becomes apparent) then don't be surprised when people just simply aren't receptive to your feedback or advice and ignore it or just bite back or if it is done so in an unsolicited fashion. Is it selfish that people go into content with which they're woefully underprepared for? Sure. But on the other side of the coin; unsolicited advice is generally a pretty naïve thing to do - In more cases than not accomplishing the opposite of which you're intending to do in the first place. You need a very special sort of grit and the acceptance that some people just simply aren't willing to play ball with you. - This is not one of those tit-for-tat scenarios, just subtract or eject yourself from the environment. - Many people have this bizarre notion that they must make some snarky comment before ejecting.

Personally, if I were to be frank but this does come from the same place that is under the impression that presenting some feedback or a criticism could, or would result in a nice 1:1 with a GM upon the next login, so I can't really give much benefit of the doubt that people are 'presenting some constructive feedback in a civil fashion'.

[Nizzi]

Things can be simple and fun. I find Dancer a lot of fun, and it's considered a very easy job. Things can be simple and unfun, which is generally how a lot of people feel about DPS on healers at the moment. I think a lot of contention comes from the fact that the devs would rather scrap ideas entirely instead of finding a way to make it more fun. When they have good ideas with poor execution, instead of saying "Okay, how can we make [x] more fun?" they instead opt to remove it and instead not replace it with anything fun in return. I think there's definitely a lack of direction for a lot of jobs (healers, MCH, DRK, etc) and that the frustration definitely comes from there being little communication on what their vision for these roles/jobs are. I know Yoshida said that they weren't "going back to 3.0 complexity" but the problem with that is it assumes that fun to people complaining about their jobs means they want it to be "hyper big brain and complex" when something can easily be hyper complex and unfun.

I think the developers need to accept that no matter how much you lower the skill ceiling on jobs, there are always going to be players who refuse to play properly. DPSing on healers for example, is incredibly easy, yet I still come across loads of healers who refuse to damage at all and just stand there doing nothing in content, while spamming GCD heals and rarely/never using their wide kit of oGCDs. If those players are able to have fun playing that way, great, but it shouldn't come at the expense of everyone who found fun in the mechanics of their job. A happy medium is what they should try to achieve, and a lot of jobs are lacking on that front at the moment.

[MidnightEquinox]

If a person has thousands of hours in the game but performs what you consider poorly, that's likely a choice at that point, and nothing you say will make much of a difference. I don't see an inherent issue with that. I'd assume that person's endgame is the MB, glamour, the Gold Saucer, etc., and they happen to be in your dungeon for some auxiliary reason like some tokens or what not.

Also, in-game instruction beats guides for the common playerbase. There's a segment of people that simply doesn't read guides. There's a segment of people that does not register the concept of "meta". I belong to a segment of people who will refuse to go to a game discord if I can avoid it, and I also never watch streamers. If people are continually missing really obvious things there may be insufficient in-game instruction or reminders. 3rd party resources are naturally insular and what many define as "the bare minimum" may be reminiscent of disparity in 3rd party resource usage.

In-game, the only forms of instruction I'm aware of are Hall of the Novice, which is nice, but as far as I understand, it's no longer even required, and it's very barebones and very early; Novice Network, which from what I've heard is a mixed bag in terms of whether it ends up a good place to ask questions or just a mentor fan club; and SSS, which is only relevant to DPS.

I have not seen any teaching groups or teaching FCs. MMORPGs tend to be very sparse on teaching environments in general, the only one I remember is EVE University.

[aveyond-dreams]

There are some basic things that I expect in a group otherwise I'll straight up leave without a word in any dungeon past level 50:

Tank stance. Is it on? Great.
Everyone using their aoes when appropriate? Fantastic.
Mininum 2 packs per pull if not possible to w2w? That shows me you are trying, and if I'm playing a healer then I'll at least have something to do.

I will admit though towards the end of Shadowbringers before EW launched the state of DF was...horrific. One or more of these absolutely basic requirements wasn't being met on a regular basis and the result is that I just avoid the headache and run with trusts to level my remaining jobs. It is better to deal with 30 minutes of trusts than 40 minutes of players who haven't grasped the fundamentals.

[Zsolen]

...

I see two main points.

One you continue to assume that those that teach in this game are being passive aggressive, which I had pointed is not the case already. People learn from others in this game all the time and are quite appreciative when they get that advice. There are others still where it is not they are not being taught properly so much as they refuse to adapt. I'm not referencing people that leap to pull vs those that use a ranged attack, which makes little difference most of the time. I'm talking about players face pulling and refusing to accept help. I'm also not doubting there are elitist types but they are a very, very small minority to the point of not even being worth consideration.

You second point focused on how teaching works. It is quite clear you know little about just how impactful even informal teaching is. It is not as diffict as you make it sound. Yes, some are better at it, but you don't have to be college certified to teach someone a mechanic. Anyone is capable of teaching it.