#FFXIVHEALERSTRIKE

[flowerkatie]

This is wrong, and the devs actually put out an apology post explaining their paper calculations after overtuning a fight. They admitted to taking the numbers their teams were capable of reaching, and adding percentage points based on what they felt the actual players were capable of. Literally paper-calculations.

Feel free to reference this where they've stated the overtuning came from paper-calculations, might be the first time we actually get a real piece of evidence behind these statements.

Edit: Re-reading your statement actually I realize this doesn't prove anything wrong. You said yourself, "They admitted to taking the numbers their teams were capable of reaching" and then applied a percentage to that. So you're saying they did do in-game testing and balancing, but then on-top of that they proceeded to make the mistake of adding a % increase.

Meanwhile, I was asked to try and somehow come up with an arbitrary value of a pretend raidwide damage for a party we have no context on. That's totally the same situation (/s)

[ForsakenRoe]

If you're not a troll then go ahead, feel free to enlighten me how you, based on the information you provided would calculate how fast and much that raid-wide damage would need to be. Given the fact you provided no information on the composition of the party, no information on the size of the party, and least of all not a single piece of information on the hit points of the party. You call it maths and calculations whilst not providing any context that would be required to make those calculations. Even if you provided every single piece of needed context, you'd still be asking me to do something in the least efficient and most nonsensical way ever.

MMO balancing is not done with paper-calculations, its balanced via in-game testing and experimenting. Encounters are ran tens of times to balance certain aspects of the game, and if you don't understand that - I don't know what to say.

I said 'a dungeon boss', so that's a standard comp of 4 players, one tank, one healer, 2 DPS. Which particular comp is up to the reader, but presumably if we're talking about balancing how much healing is asked of the healer, it's going to be a comp with no extra healing provided from non-healers. So, let's say a DRK, SCH, and 2 BlackMages who have forgotten that Manaward exists. And let's say Tank HP is 175k, Your HP as the Healer is 108k, and the BLMs are also 108k HP.

I don't see how I need to 'provide context' so much. Surely, being knowledgeable enough on the topic to speak with such authority, would also confer the knowledge of how to work out 'how much healing can a job put out over X timeframe' (which could already be inferred from the previous post as 'the duration of a dungeon boss encounter'). I don't see how it's nonsensical, inefficient, maybe, we don't have whatever tools SE uses to make these calculations, but we can napkin-math it out pretty easily.

I am well aware that MMO balancing is done via testing, iteration and reiteration. But my point is, that testing and iteration starts from a starting point. And what decides that starting point? Calculations on what the job is capable of. The devs don't just go 'ok we'll make this raidwide do uhhh, idk 20k damage, probably not enough oh well lets see what happens LOL', because that WOULD be inefficient. Horrendously so. Literal guesswork to create a starting point for the iteration process is a terrible idea. Which brings us back to the original point: There's a base value, derived from calculations regarding job output, that the devs 'start with' when balancing content. I want to know, what you believe that 'starting value' would be for a SCH, when designing a dungeon boss in such a way to burden the player to use at least 4 healing GCDs per minute in the encounter.

I'll even make it easier. Let's say the dungeon boss encounter lasts exactly 4 minutes.

[Rolder50]

Feel free to reference this where they've stated the overtuning came from paper-calculations, might be the first time we actually get a real piece of evidence behind these statements.

Edit: Re-reading your statement actually I realize this doesn't prove anything wrong. You said yourself, "They admitted to taking the numbers their teams were capable of reaching" and then applied a percentage to that. So you're saying they did do in-game testing and balancing, but then on-top of that they proceeded to make the mistake of adding a % increase.

Meanwhile, I was asked to try and somehow come up with an arbitrary value of a pretend raidwide damage for a party we have no context on. That's totally the same situation (/s)

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...acaff4567b4e40

To quote:

We always add a little bit extra to the boss values before rechecking the fight and releasing it live.

The team responsible for balancing boss fights does so without debug commands and at the appropriate item level, employing available materia, foods, and medicines while experimenting with mitigating actions and various job compositions. Yet we recognize that player skill far exceeds our own. If we were to ship content with the same values which challenged our battle team, the top raiders would be deprived of that by-the-skin-of-your-teeth victory in the initial week of release.

Based on the team's skill and our experience, that "little bit extra" usually translates to:

Balance test clear values +1-2% HP

[Isala]

Feel free to reference this where they've stated the overtuning came from paper-calculations, might be the first time we actually get a real piece of evidence behind these statements.

Edit: Re-reading your statement actually I realize this doesn't prove anything wrong. You said yourself, "They admitted to taking the numbers their teams were capable of reaching" and then applied a percentage to that. So you're saying they did do in-game testing and balancing, but then on-top of that they proceeded to make the mistake of adding a % increase.

Meanwhile, I was asked to try and somehow come up with an arbitrary value of a pretend raidwide damage for a party we have no context on. That's totally the same situation (/s)

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...340b373870140b

We always add a little bit extra to the boss values before rechecking the fight and releasing it live.

The team responsible for balancing boss fights does so without debug commands and at the appropriate item level, employing available materia, foods, and medicines while experimenting with mitigating actions and various job compositions. Yet we recognize that player skill far exceeds our own. If we were to ship content with the same values which challenged our battle team, the top raiders would be deprived of that by-the-skin-of-your-teeth victory in the initial week of release.

Based on the team's skill and our experience, that "little bit extra" usually translates to:

Balance test clear values +1-2% HP

The final values account for other mathematical factors too, of course, such as the estimated damage the party could deal from the moment of victory to the end of the time limit, as well as total burst damage potential based on frequency and amount inflicted. The numbers these various calculations are based on are what we were referencing when we said that our team’s performance was higher than anticipated.

Emphasis mine. "Estimated damage." based on players being more skilled than the dev team. So, not even real numbers. They estimated it and got it wrong.

Say it with me. Paper. Calculations.

[Rolder50]

Emphasis mine. "Estimated damage." based on players being more skilled than the dev team. So, not even real numbers. They estimated it and got it wrong.

Say it with me. Paper. Calculations.

It's even funnier because this would be the easiest game to determine how much DPS a group could do just with math. There aint any crazy talents or gear options or anything to really throw a wrench in the works.

[flowerkatie]

Say it with me. Paper. Calculations.

Applied after real testing was completed and then proven to be incorrect to the point where they needed to make an apology clearly showing that paper-calculations are neither efficient or synonymous with good implementation, you really proved me wrong and didn't just reiterate what my edit of my original post stated.

I don't see how it's nonsensical, inefficient, maybe, we don't have whatever tools SE uses to make these calculations, but we can napkin-math it out pretty easily.

I disagree, it's still nonsensical. Proven by the above, paper-calculations lead to nothing but terrible implementation and nothing meaningful. I am a healer who feels that healing is clearly too easy based on the fact that any healer worth their salt can farm most content without ever dropping a single GCD damage throughout the entire fight. I personally believe that is an issue. You also know as you've read my post that I believe the solution is to make healing more engaging, something that can be done a variety of ways. One of which is increasing the damage of incoming raid-wide damage. That is the extent of my opinion and I've never stated to know more than that, and I have seen many terrible solutions.

If you think refusing to spend time arbitrarily calculating how much damage would be required to force a healer to use X amount more GCD's means I cannot express I think healing can be more difficult then you're free to have that opinion. I remain under the belief that doing such calculations isn't required for throwing out suggestions on a forum.

[Isala]

Applied after real testing was completed and then proven to be incorrect to the point where they needed to make an apology clearly showing that paper-calculations are neither efficient or synonymous with good implementation, you really proved me wrong and didn't just reiterate what my edit of my original post stated.


I disagree, it's still nonsensical. Proven by the above, paper-calculations lead to nothing but terrible implementation and nothing meaningful. I am a healer who feels that healing is clearly too easy based on the fact that any healer worth their salt can farm most content without ever dropping a single GCD damage throughout the entire fight. I personally believe that is an issue. You also know as you've read my post that I believe the solution is to make healing more engaging, something that can be done a variety of ways. One of which is increasing the damage of incoming raid-wide damage. That is the extent of my opinion and I've never stated to know more than that, and I have seen many terrible solutions.

If you think refusing to spend time arbitrarily calculating how much damage would be required to force a healer to use X amount more GCD's then you're free to have that opinion. I remain under the belief that doing such calculations isn't required for throwing out suggestions on a forum.

Oh, I have no skin in the discussion between you and the other guy, really. I was just pointing out that yes, SE is so bad at their job of balancing that they use guesses and estimation to create their Savage fights. And while you are correct, in that a good MMO wouldn't use that kind of metric, well, XIV hasn't reached the quality for "good" in a few expansions.

[flowerkatie]

Oh, I have no skin in the discussion between you and the other guy, really. I was just pointing out that yes, SE is so bad at their job of balancing that they use guesses and estimation to create their Savage fights. And while you are correct, in that a good MMO wouldn't use that kind of metric, well, XIV hasn't reached the quality for "good" in a few expansions.

This is unfortunately something I can actually agree with.

[ForsakenRoe]

If you think refusing to spend time arbitrarily calculating how much damage would be required to force a healer to use X amount more GCD's means I cannot express I think healing can be more difficult then you're free to have that opinion. I remain under the belief that doing such calculations isn't required for throwing out suggestions on a forum.

Would you like to use your Phone-A-Friend for this one

[flowerkatie]

Would you like to use your Phone-A-Friend for this one

This is the response of somebody who's original post wasn't trolling, by the way.

And (once again) we're wondering why I've come to disagree with so many of these suggestions.