Quote Originally Posted by ACE135 View Post
... it seems like a lot of data that needs to be carried around by every player which raises the traffic significantly.

What I don't understand about your explanation is why there would need to be points between 1 and 10 when it's only relevant if you have 10 or not at any given mechanic. You say people with 8 points can't joyn someone with 10. But what's the matter if they have 8 points or just 1. And how is it determined if you get 1 or 8 points?
I would have thought such data would be insignificant compared to glams, colors, materia, equipment health, strategy boards, et al. A string of ten values out of ten shouldn't require much space. They could also choose 8-8 if it saves space for base-8 programming. 8)

The actual values need not even be visible to players. Players might only see a list of red X's (<10) and or green Checkmarks (10 or >10). The numbers just mean how many times you successfully passed a mechanic. 1 means you 'succeeded' once. 8 means you succeeded eight times. I suggest having succeeded 10 times as opening access to the next mechanic: i.e. once you get 10 you have earned your green Checkmark and are considered having Mastered the mechanic. The values are what the programmers would see in an invisible spreadsheet; how they visually represent the sheet to players could be very different. They could choose to only show the furthest mastered mechanic.

How many times does it take the average player to execute a mechanic before one can assume they understand a mechanic and will have a good chance of doing the mechanic consistently? My choice of doing a mechanic successfully 10 times is to account for various factors. Above Jeeqbit suggested players could find a loophole: the higher the value, the less likely people will be using an exploit; anyone able to figure out an exploit to achieve 10 completions at the expense of others is probably good enough to simply do the mechanic correctly. Intentionally doing a mechanic wrong over and over isn't going to help you in the long run. It's unlikely that all 10 mechanic checkpoints in a fight will be exploitable in such a manner.

A higher number is better because there are mechanics with many variations: e.g. in M10S Insane Air 2 you might start on 1 of 2 sides; you can get 1 of 2 different debuff colors; and the 3 mechanics to solve can occur in different orders of four (one repeats) and the same job might resolve in a slightly different order (due to where tank resolves); one of the orders (spreads first and last) is sometimes called a cursed pattern if the fire melee does not know how to aim their first fire cone. You can go many pulls before seeing that pattern.

You do not want it too low because players can get lucky: I've seen groups get to a mechanic once and quicky restart the PF at the next prog point after someone leaves and then they never even get back to the previous prog point. I also chose 10 because it would be easier to use the same values for every fight, because copy-paste tables are more efficient than having different values for different fights or different parts of the same fights. Ultimately the choice of 8, 10, or something else would have to be determined by the Devs using their internal metrics. Over time they could tweak the values as they see fit.