Damage Meters

[Adire]

I saw a post talking about FFXI Maast (or something) and it felt similar to certain MMOs (like The Secret World - Gatekeeper) which locks you out of harder content until you clear 1v1 scenario. That's not exactly what I wanted to bring to the table, it's not encouraging anything, but rather is gating content once more.
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but it's really something I feel the MMO genre needs to refocus (while still retaining the various addiction tactics of nowadays videogames - for monetary reasons). Gating content isn't the key.

I played TSW for a long time, the average skill of the players was much higher than here. I highly doubt the Gatekeeper is exactly why this was so, as TSW's community was much more mature than FFXIV's and groups were formed through personal interaction, but the Gatekeeper definitely helped keep bad players out of hard content and forced them to improve to get into it. But having the end game content gated behind the Gatekeeper ensured for the most part that people doing the content had a decent grasp of how to play their role, even if it took them a lot of tries to down him.

FFXIV definitely needs an equivalent, as the amount of Dragoons I see who can't even keep or put Heavy Thrust up, the amount of healers I see who DPS while the tank is at 10hp and literally 1 hit away from dying, and the amount of tanks who don't know how to hold aggro efficiently or use CDs when they're taking big damage, even in late game content, is too high.

People really shouldn't be allowed into harder content without proving beforehand that they're ready for it, solo, without others to carry them. Even a mild gate before things like Aery would be nice. I've seen way too many wipes on Nidhogg because people can't complete a tiny dps check....

In regards to your OP, it seems like a decent idea. However, I can already see players putting out bad dps because they don't care sneaking in to tight dps check content. They won't share their parses obviously because they'd get kicked, and the rest of the party still won't be able to tell who is not pulling their share of DPS without using a 3rd party tool. So that big issue still remains.

[Tarta]

(Wow a lot of replies, ok let's get through them!)

In regards to your OP, it seems like a decent idea. However, I can already see players putting out bad dps because they don't care sneaking in to tight dps check content. They won't share their parses obviously because they'd get kicked, and the rest of the party still won't be able to tell who is not pulling their share of DPS without using a 3rd party tool. So that big issue still remains.

That is the case now yes, for the immediate addition as we have a 2 : 6 : 2 ratio trained and reared with that axis of thinking. However, the system should be organic and be involved in the overall experience to help nurture the players rather than nurture their current state of affair. It's possible, you just have to pool your ideas and implement natural progression tools (think Megaman X. Natural, organic, and by end game player would ostensibly be much better at the game)