Musings on Mods

[Carson_The_Brown]

So, I heard from a fairly popular Youtuber that Square Enix is considering mods. Generally I take a fairly libertarian view towards game design but I think I have a few... reservations... on the matter of mods in MMORPGs.

So, I'm not going to fluff this thing too heavily, lets jump straight at the elephant in the room, namely damage meters. I heard from this youtuber that you can read your DPS against a target dummy, I don't know how that works but I think damage meters are great in the abstract. The problem is when you allow damage meters in the field.

The pro-damage meter argument usually goes like this: "I want to know how well I'm doing compared to other DPS". To that I say: Awesome. My Lich King raid group regularly had friendly arguments about who was top DPS 1 week or the other. This doesn't become a serious issue until you look at the PUG scene. My personal, very unscientific case studies indicate a general attitude of camaraderie among PUG groups in FFXIV. Attitudes typically come down to "did we kill it or not?". I think this is an excellent attitude and I sense it regularly in PUG groups on FFXIV. Seeing as how 90% of the content is geared towards PUGing I wouldn't change it for the world.

Compare and contrast to the PUG scene in World of Warcraft. Damage meter mods are not just expected for raiders, you are actively looked down upon if you choose to keep it off. This, my friends, is very stressful. On top of that, other people can see your damage readings in which case you run headlong into what the folks at Penny Arcade refer to as GIFT (Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory) which is normally formulated as:

(Normal Person)+(Captive Audience)+(Anonymity) = (Complete Asshole)

That usually covers the reason why people become insensitive and generally sociopathic online. I would offer a corollary that I believe includes why this is worse in online games; formulated as:

{(Normal Person) + (Captive Audience) + (Anonymity)}*{1 + (Data Known)/(Data Available)} = (Online Game Troll)

So, what does this Gobbledygook mean? All it means, generally speaking, is that what is considered general internet douchebaggery is amplified by raw data. The type of people who fall victim to GIFT are generally made far worse when given just enough information to give them a sense of empowerment. I point again to World of Warcraft. I played heavily in Lich King (I was a semi-pro Holy Paladin) and PUG raided as a resto druid in Cataclysm. PUG raids in WoW are... pretty vitriolic. All it takes is 1 wipe for people to descend upon the lowest DPS like a pack of ravenous Tonberries. On top of that we have all seen that one mage that is constantly pulling ahead of the tank because he wants to pad his Damage Dealt reading. On top of that, damage meters eventually leak into players' expectations for game design. The drive for optimized builds and streamlined experiences has pushed Blizzard to embrace level design that closer resembles hallways with copy paste monsters than well fleshed, organic zones with mystery and danger like The Vault.

As a quick aside, I would like to point towards Rift : Planes of Telara. specifically the class system. you are allowed to choose 3 classes and mix/match them to suit your play style. This would normally lead to thousands of potential classes but the drive for optimization has slimmed that down to 2 or 3 viable combos per archetype.

To compound this, mods require a great deal of momentum from the player community. We can romanticize all day but ultimately, mod designers do what they do for recognition. This isn't a bad thing, I'm not saying modders are greedy or fame obsessed. All I'm saying is that human beings need to eat. People do in fact make mods because they love the medium, but in the end every modder hopes to bet scouted by an organization that can pay more regularly than a tip jar. For this reason, modders will generally flock to games that guarantee a large payoff in exposure for their input of time and effort.

To illustrate this point I would like to bring Rift back into the argument. Rift does in fact have mods but they aren't nearly as high in quality as World of Warcraft. This is because there was a mad rush initially to become the Tandanu of Rift. Unfortunately, the lack of a very large player base meant that the Curse Spotlight only fell on Rift developers rarely; sure, there were mini spotlights like "Best in Class: Rift" or "Best in Class: Elder Scrolls IV" but the major spotlights always went to WoW and Minecraft and those were the guys getting scooped by talent agents. Nowadays, Rift's mods are out of date and buggy.

Another quick aside, Optimization. 1 guy in his basement can't ensure that his killer app will work on every PC out there, let alone the PS3/PS4. when Blizzard allowed DBM in WoW it worked... okay because it allowed them to slack on encounter design (specifically conveyance) because DBM could pick up the slack. Will there be mods on PS4? if so, what kind of quality control could you possibly enforce? how do you know Tandanu will develop for all 3 platforms? Hell, I cant even get Recount to work right on my top of the line 2011 PC. We cant expect someone working for free to make a mod that will run equally well on an '08 laptop and a PS4 while maintaining the 30 FPS minimum necessary to remain competitive. That kind of thing takes dozens of programmers and QA personnel with fleets of computers testing on a wide array of hardware skews. WoW modders can (kind of) get away without the professional QA testers because the player base is so incredibly huge that the reams of metrics data provided by the 6 million players allows for them to pull off--- admittedly half assed--- quality control but those same devs would have to hire entirely new teams to develop for the PS3 and PS4.

TL;DR: Square Enix is one of my favourite development firms, but I seriously doubt they have the infrastructure to do it. just because Blizzard can (barely) pull off mods that doesn't mean that its a good thing for every MMORPG, or even any MMORPG.

[AlphaFox]

Just a tip, you can edit your post to bypass the limit. Personally I've heard nothing of the sort.

[Risvertasashi]

SE has been promising addon support since before ARR's release. They just keep pushing it back, again and again and again. It's not a huge deal since people are making useful addons anyway, just we can't talk about them.

...Still no third party replacement for party bars that show when a party member is out of range, alas, but not really something that can be done with an overlay. So maybe we'll get official support, someday, and it will be nice...

[Callinon]

Damage meters are a tool. Every tool that has ever been created can and has been abused (I'm looking at you, awl... you know what you did).

The reason "people will be jerks" is not a reason not to do something. You are never going to stop people being jerks. So if we accept that "jerks exist" as a given we cannot change, there's no longer a reason not to provide the tools.

As someone else also pointed out, damage meters exist right now. You can't talk about them in-game because they involve third party programs which are technically against the TOS (though Yoshi P has said in the past that he's fine with people using them... just don't be a jerk with them). So it's a tool that some of us have right now. Keeping it in this state is really unfair to console players because there's no way to make it available to them.

Also, have you seen the dps checks in this game? They're the realest. It actually IS important for me to know not only if I am doing my job properly, but that everyone else is too. Otherwise you can't fix problems.

[nyttyn]

if they didn't want people to be annoyed about people putting forth poor DPS, they shouldn't have put such extremely strict DPS checks into heavensward.

(hello Bismarck EX)


any single argument anyone might have about "oh but people will use it to harass" is outweighed by the fact that you absolutely need to put forth a certain amount of DPS to clear specific heavensward fights, and being unable to tell who is dead weight on your team is a severe handicap as a result.

not that i condone harassment of course, but it's extremely stupid that the current extreme primal fights have such strict DPS checks, with absolutely no way ingame to tell who's lagging behind if you cannot pass said checks .

[Ayuhra]

if they didn't want people to be annoyed about people putting forth poor DPS, they shouldn't have put such extremely strict DPS checks into heavensward.

(hello Bismarck EX)


any single argument anyone might have about "oh but people will use it to harass" is outweighed by the fact that you absolutely need to put forth a certain amount of DPS to clear specific heavensward fights, and being unable to tell who is dead weight on your team is a severe handicap as a result.

not that i condone harassment of course, but it's extremely stupid that the current extreme primal fights have such strict DPS checks, with absolutely no way ingame to tell who's lagging behind if you cannot pass said checks .

I think a problem with Bismarck Ex, especially right now, is its minimal ilvl requirement. You can go in there with ilvl 142 which is total nonsense. Even Neverreap and Fractal require 145.

[Carson_The_Brown]

So, I see a lot of interesting points here. There are a few troublesome ones that mostly fall under the purview of the "Git Gud" defense. I don't know how useful that sentiment is; its not like most low DPS are going into their pugs with the "how little can I do" mindset. I wont say that demographic is nonexistent because I know a few people who only play DPS because they can basically get carried so long as they spam Heavy Shot. I feel that this particular thread fails to consider the community support angle. I mentioned earlier that optimization is difficult if you don't have a fleet of testing machines.

Also, I think I sense a certain... misunderstanding; Blizzard does not take responsibility for quality control on their mods. That is entirely the responsibility of the modder. When SE says "we want to include mod support" that only means "You will be able to use 3rd party mods" and not "we will do the legwork to make sure your mods actually work on anything other than your one computer". It also doesn't ensure that SE will strive to maintain compatibility, if a new raid comes out and it causes a fatal exception with your UI mod then fixing it is between you and whoever might be in charge of the mod (if anyone is even paying attention) or whoever is developing a competitive product at the time. All and all, I think this issue is largely soluble once your community hits a critical mass.

Kisai makes an interesting point about mechanically incentivizing skillful play. I'm not sure if the dev team has the firepower to pull off a system that allows better loot drops depending on contribution, plus, I can't help but imagine all of the new players who showed up at the tail end of Heart of Darkness and would, by no fault of their own, be kept away from any of the gear by such a system. I would like to see Kisai elaborate a bit more on her idea, however, sounds interesting.

Risvertashi mentions the unofficial addons. these include parsers but also include the spawn timers for rare mobs. I think these exist in a kind of "sweet spot". They are accessible to people who really need to know how they are doing and are willing to put in some work and ultimately lie just out of reach to players who just want to attack people with bad gear or low skill. I also would like to add onto my point that the ilvl system seems to be doing a decent job of weeding the slackers out of high end content. My wife and I both do high end content regularly (she is disabled and I'm on summer holiday from uni) and while I've never really seen any of these vitriolic players, she has seen one, so, in over 200 combined PUGs, only one jerk is pretty good. Compared to the completely unverified 10%-20% asshole ratio in WoW, I think those stats are damn fine.

Which leads me to a quick aside to Hobostew. The community in XIV is actually very kind compared to other online games, I would, however, urge you to understand that your experience in this game may be an outlying factor and may not be reflective of the general experience.

[KisaiTenshi]

Kisai makes an interesting point about mechanically incentivizing skillful play. I'm not sure if the dev team has the firepower to pull off a system that allows better loot drops depending on contribution, plus, I can't help but imagine all of the new players who showed up at the tail end of Heart of Darkness and would, by no fault of their own, be kept away from any of the gear by such a system. I would like to see Kisai elaborate a bit more on her idea, however, sounds interesting.

To simplify:

A DPS is there to DPS, a Tank is there to Tank and contribute some DPS, and a healer is there to Heal and maybe throw some DPS if there is opportunity for it.
But what happens is someone with a 'parser' goes "oh X isn't contributing enough DPS, kick em" and that player gets kicked not knowing why they were suddenly kicked.

So what has to happen is that rewards (including tomes) need to be distributed by participation. In a light party two DPS players should be contributing >50% of the Damage, and if they aren't, that is a problem. Tanks and Healers would be based on Enmity. Where a Tank needs to keep Enmity > 90% of the time, and Healers need to NOT take enmity by overhealing (it would probably require tracking unnecessary overhealing vs revives itself.)

In a Full party, the conditions change depending on the number of tanks. No DPS should be carried, if there are 5 DPS means that 12.5% x 5 = 62.5% of the Damage must be done by the DPS, of which each DPS needs to contribute at least 12.5%. When there are two tanks, the combined tanks need to have 90% of the enmity time. When there's one, then it's 90% alone. When there are two healers, both healers need to be healing, not just one.

Which comes back to the entire idea where if a healer or a tank is contributing more DPS than a single DPS player, than the weak DPS player shouldn't be rewarded for doing nothing. In the case of things like Extreme Primals and Raids, where "carries" are endemic, someone who doesn't contribute enough, wouldn't get the reward gear/token, and it wouldn't count as a clear.

[Carson_The_Brown]

To simplify:

A DPS is there to DPS, a Tank is there to Tank and contribute some DPS, and a healer is there to Heal and maybe throw some DPS if there is opportunity for it.
But what happens is someone with a 'parser' goes "oh X isn't contributing enough DPS, kick em" and that player gets kicked not knowing why they were suddenly kicked.

So what has to happen is that rewards (including tomes) need to be distributed by participation. In a light party two DPS players should be contributing >50% of the Damage, and if they aren't, that is a problem. Tanks and Healers would be based on Enmity. Where a Tank needs to keep Enmity > 90% of the time, and Healers need to NOT take enmity by overhealing (it would probably require tracking unnecessary overhealing vs revives itself.)

In a Full party, the conditions change depending on the number of tanks. No DPS should be carried, if there are 5 DPS means that 12.5% x 5 = 62.5% of the Damage must be done by the DPS, of which each DPS needs to contribute at least 12.5%. When there are two tanks, the combined tanks need to have 90% of the enmity time. When there's one, then it's 90% alone. When there are two healers, both healers need to be healing, not just one.

Which comes back to the entire idea where if a healer or a tank is contributing more DPS than a single DPS player, than the weak DPS player shouldn't be rewarded for doing nothing. In the case of things like Extreme Primals and Raids, where "carries" are endemic, someone who doesn't contribute enough, wouldn't get the reward gear/token, and it wouldn't count as a clear.

That's some pretty interesting math. Unfortunately this sounds like a system that would reward anyone who bothers to step into the encounter room, which would make it redundant. I want to see that idea fleshed out, though. Maybe a feature that only allows the party to /kick people who contribute less than X enmity per second, requiring a specific pack of enemies be defeated before the option becomes available.

I don't think the only difference between this community and WoW's community is the existence of addons, and that giving us access to an addon API changes us into WoW's community. I don't buy that. It's a strawman, and not a very effective one.

WoW players and FFXIV players are pretty fundamentally different. I say that having played both games at a high level. I don't believe that giving us an addon API turns us into some kind of MMO Lord of the Flies rendition.

But of course, I don't mean to insinuate that the two communities are at all similar.

I personally believe that communities are moral entities. So what does that mean? The full explanation is here with a study on the ramifications thereof here but to grossly oversimplify, that means that they can be effected by their environment. Obviously there is a huge difference between the XIV community and the WoW community and no action can possibly make them identical. My concern is what the tools made available might do to the personality of the community. Once again, your results may vary but my observations (which I admit could be deeply flawed and are easily falsifiable) indicate a certain quality present in XIV's community that isn't present in communities that have these quality of life addons. My studies (I am a student of game design, hence why I would have case studies on the matter) indicate that while antisocial personality types are equally represented in all communities, there are environmental qualities that encourage these fringe elements (the rough estimate is that these antisocial elements constitute about 15% across the board on all communities) to behave more proactively.

In short, of course there aren't more sociopaths on WoW and of course there are some fundamental differences between the WoW community and the XIV community just like how there are some fundamental differences between any two entities, be they people, cities or corporations. Nobody is arguing those points. What I would argue, however, is that things like easy-access damage meters and boss assistants allow the more troublesome elements of the community (including both players and developers) an easier means to express themselves.