Keeping Content Hard and Helping People Learn

[Mawlzy]

I don't know how I feel about this one. It is an online game so there really is an acceptable level you need to play that some people truly don't care to play at. I see people with like 40% ABC, vipers with less emnity than the healer, etc. When you do group content and you are sandbagging, you're wasting some else's time who many not have fun spending 25 minutes in their roulette. In group content you should always try your best. Your best doesn't have to be good or perfect, but it should be your best. If you try your best, you will almost certainly improve.

TLDR: Playing bad ok, as long as you are trying your best. Learning is encouraged though, it doesnt just benefit you.

I think part of the problem we're facing is that a single mechanic now dominates fights: responding rapidly to (often obscure) tells and moving to the safe spot.

Anyone playing a game will instinctively try to resolve that mechanic. In that sense they are trying their best. But it's also a mechanic that is difficult for a subset of players (for multiple reasons).

Many "good" players seem genuinely baffled by how "bad" some others are in PvE in this game. I'm convinced it mostly stems from this DDR trend.

You can't teach speed.

And the side effect is a "good" player will see a "bad" one who is barely casting and assume they're just goofing off, whereas in fact that player is completely overwhelmed by simply avoiding the bad.

[Carin-Eri]

I think part of the problem we're facing is that a single mechanic now dominates fights: responding rapidly to (often obscure) tells and moving to the safe spot.

Anyone playing a game will instinctively try to resolve that mechanic. In that sense they are trying their best. But it's also a mechanic that is difficult for a subset of players (for multiple reasons).

Many "good" players seem genuinely baffled by how "bad" some others are in PvE in this game. I'm convinced it mostly stems from this DDR trend.

You can't teach speed.

And the side effect is a "good" player will see a "bad" one who is barely casting and assume they're just goofing off, whereas in fact that player is completely overwhelmed by simply avoiding the bad.

This.

Fair to say that I probably qualify here since, in terms of the new content at least, it does often feel as if my preoccupation with desperately trying to not be dead interferes with my doing anything useful in terms of attacking or healing

[AmiableApkallu]

I think part of the problem we're facing is that a single mechanic now dominates fights: responding rapidly to (often obscure) tells and moving to the safe spot.

To be fair:

As far as any normal-mode content is concerned -- that is, anything someone can reasonably queue for in Duty Finder -- I can't recall any "obscure" tells. If someone can see the tell, then they have a good chance of knowing what they need to do. (I'm setting aside concerns about reaction times.)

Having said that, my "if" there is carrying a lot of weight, and there are two aspects to this:

1. Cast names are meaningful, but the default UI and tutorials makes no effort to highlight that information.
2. Visual effects in Endwalker and Dawntrail have emphasized flashiness to the exclusion of all else. These effects look fantastic in a job trailer, where there is a single character going up against a striking dummy, but those same effects are utterly oppressive and blinding when you have a striking dummy that fights back, or 3 or 7 or 23 other players alongside you.

So, in practice, the boss might be casting, "I Will Fail My Right Arm Like a Crazy Person in 5 Seconds," but good luck actually seeing that in the cast bar or in their character model.

[Alice_Rivers]

As far as any normal-mode content is concerned -- that is, anything someone can reasonably queue for in Duty Finder -- I can't recall any "obscure" tells.

The only one that comes readily to my mind is where the English translator apparently decided to be a dick by naming Omega's attacks Starboard and Larboard like anyone who doesn't know maritime terms is going to know or remember that. From what I read somewhere, English is the only version of the game where it's not just Left and Right.

I do have a few issues where the devs use enemy anatomy/posing as attack cues but that's a little bit self-inflicted because I don't want to turn people's animations off. I think it's reasonable, since all these animations are enabled by default, that this is the intended way to play the game and that all the cues you need to complete an encounter perfectly should be visible with all these effects on but that's a slightly different matter.

[Shurrikhan]

The only one that comes readily to my mind is where the English translator apparently decided to be a dick by naming Omega's attacks Starboard and Larboard like anyone who doesn't know maritime terms is going to know or remember that. From what I read somewhere, English is the only version of the game where it's not just Left and Right.

I didn't know the terms either, but tbf, it takes seeing only either one once to figure it out (larboard is left), and they weren't hitting for lethal damage pre-vuln-stacks.

I do have a few issues where the devs use enemy anatomy/posing as attack cues but that's a little bit self-inflicted because I don't want to turn people's animations off.

This is my bigger issue: We should, frankly, have the option to make enemies (at least during said cues) visible at partial opacity through occluding visual elements (i.e., making occluding visuals partly transparent). Same goes for ourselves and our nameplates' health bars.

[Mawlzy]

To be fair:

As far as any normal-mode content is concerned -- that is, anything someone can reasonably queue for in Duty Finder -- I can't recall any "obscure" tells. If someone can see the tell, then they have a good chance of knowing what they need to do. (I'm setting aside concerns about reaction times.)

Having said that, my "if" there is carrying a lot of weight, and there are two aspects to this:

1. Cast names are meaningful, but the default UI and tutorials makes no effort to highlight that information.
2. Visual effects in Endwalker and Dawntrail have emphasized flashiness to the exclusion of all else. These effects look fantastic in a job trailer, where there is a single character going up against a striking dummy, but those same effects are utterly oppressive and blinding when you have a striking dummy that fights back, or 3 or 7 or 23 other players alongside you.

So, in practice, the boss might be casting, "I Will Fail My Right Arm Like a Crazy Person in 5 Seconds," but good luck actually seeing that in the cast bar or in their character model.

My eyesight isn't the greatest and the additional visual clutter and flashiness in DT has been a major problem for me. So, agreed, "obscure" was the wrong term; some tells are simply increasingly difficult to see in the sea of flashing lights.

[Altina_Orion]

I think part of the problem we're facing is that a single mechanic now dominates fights: responding rapidly to (often obscure) tells and moving to the safe spot.

Anyone playing a game will instinctively try to resolve that mechanic. In that sense they are trying their best. But it's also a mechanic that is difficult for a subset of players (for multiple reasons).

Many "good" players seem genuinely baffled by how "bad" some others are in PvE in this game. I'm convinced it mostly stems from this DDR trend.

You can't teach speed.

And the side effect is a "good" player will see a "bad" one who is barely casting and assume they're just goofing off, whereas in fact that player is completely overwhelmed by simply avoiding the bad.

You'll never learn if you never try, and you have already expressed that you don't care to in other posts many times over. You don't need speed, i promise. I brought my girlfriend into savage and she was AWFUL. like 30% abc, didnt know to do damage as a healer, got hit with basically every mechanic, struggled to learn new mechanics. She has now cleared every single savage since EWs launch.

There has not been a single person who has wanted to learn savage that I have failed to teach. Not a single person. It's simply a matter of wanting to put in the effort. If you don't want to because you don't think you will enjoy it, fine. If you just are ok with being bad, also fine. "It's impossible for me but i never actually put in the time or effort to do it," get over yourself. Just be honest and say you don't care to learn, not that you can't do it.

[CidHeiral]

It's really not. The conclusion it generates is simply that one's time is valuable enough to spend it where one wants to spend it, and not merely in route to whatever arbitrary milestone they could potentially reach. That doesn't make a person lazy, only deliberate.

That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said.

Your view screams very... american culture to me, not gonna lie. Living to work instead of working to live, etc. Always trying to overdo oneself to reach imaginary goals while missing what actually matters on the way. Very sports talk in a way, which tends to echo very well with a lot of raiders in the game imo.

I am genuinely mystified at how you could extrapolate all of that from what was basically "good job, believe in your dreams." Maybe in Europe when someone says they want to accomplish something it's common to tell them to go to hell, I wouldn't know, but I try to believe in people more often than not. Obviously this doesn't mean I think they should abandon all free will and throw themselves into the most ball busting challenge imaginable. They can choose to do whatever suits their fancy.

[Mawlzy]

That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said.




I am genuinely mystified at how you could extrapolate all of that from what was basically "good job, believe in your dreams." Maybe in Europe when someone says they want to accomplish something it's common to tell them to go to hell, I wouldn't know, but I try to believe in people more often than not. Obviously this doesn't mean I think they should abandon all free will and throw themselves into the most ball busting challenge imaginable. They can choose to do whatever suits their fancy.

The three people most associated with that phrase are Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, and Walt Disney.

And free will doesn't exist.

[Valence]

You'll never learn if you never try, and you have already expressed that you don't care to in other posts many times over. You don't need speed, i promise. I brought my girlfriend into savage and she was AWFUL. like 30% abc, didnt know to do damage as a healer, got hit with basically every mechanic, struggled to learn new mechanics. She has now cleared every single savage since EWs launch.

There has not been a single person who has wanted to learn savage that I have failed to teach. Not a single person. It's simply a matter of wanting to put in the effort. If you don't want to because you don't think you will enjoy it, fine. If you just are ok with being bad, also fine. "It's impossible for me but i never actually put in the time or effort to do it," get over yourself. Just be honest and say you don't care to learn, not that you can't do it.

What is this obsession people have with having everybody "learning"? People just want to have fun.

The problem isn't that savage or whatever is completely closed to most if not all players. The problem is that it becomes too much of a hassle, effort, or hurdle, for many to continue enjoying the game. There is an insistence in the community that everybody should constantly try to reach for the stars just because it's technically possible, which as an ex veteran raider, I do find pretty wild to be honest. It's not a question of possibilities, it's a question of effort and work, which can be absolutely through the roof for a lot of players. I've never needed to deploy crazy amounts myself (until more recently), but I sure as hell wouldn't have bothered if I sucked at the game. It's like asking a kid that sucks at math to enjoy it and still aim for high studies in science just because with a little (a lot of) work they can. Guess what their answer will be?

They'll do it if they have fun, they won't if they don't. It's not exactly rocket science.

I am genuinely mystified at how you could extrapolate all of that from what was basically "good job, believe in your dreams." Maybe in Europe when someone says they want to accomplish something it's common to tell them to go to hell, I wouldn't know, but I try to believe in people more often than not. Obviously this doesn't mean I think they should abandon all free will and throw themselves into the most ball busting challenge imaginable. They can choose to do whatever suits their fancy.

I mean, you literally said "everybody can achieve anything if they put their mind into it", which you'll excuse me sounded pretty much differently, but if that was just about believing in one's dreams and have confidence, then I guess this is a storm in a kettle then. And it's pretty much besides the point that is whether or not you have such dreams, aspirations and goes to begin with. A lot of people just don't, and assuming that they do, or consistently insisting or telling them that they could, really reminded me of that person I know that was told by americans, verbatim, that if they also know carpentry beyond their gardening little job, then they should start designing garden pagodas and whatnot and mount a business out of it.