Novice / Beginner / Training Hall -- General Discussion Topic

[silentwindfr]

we will see, i simply wanted to point out that give tool without place where to use them are nice but.... not efficient. beginner hall can be good or bad, we will not know before 3.2.
however we can point out already them lack of understanding about the playerbase that need to be covered to some point later.

believe me, i wish the beginner hall to work and help new player, but soo far people don't get a lot of reason to improve and that the whole point. if they don't give player an incentive reason outside hardcore raid, you can be sure that they will do it for the reward and barely remember what they did try to learn in the beginner hall.

[Kallera]

The reason a smooth curve of content going into raids is needed is because without the proper venue to apply the skills players will go through the hall, but lose the lessons from it. This is why mechanics training is also as important as rotation training.

[Beskar]

Unless this goes into extreme depth about what each class should be doing then I don't think it will do a thing. The game does a horrible job as it is explaining a lot of things (I still see people going around as classes rather than jobs in high level content). Even if we got another page or tab saying 'Core Spells' where it then lists a recommended usage of said spell seeing as people don't read tooltips either. For Example,

Cure 2 - Use when a player has taken heavy damage. Use Cure in other cases.
Regen - Keep applied to the tank and use on others when there is little chance of big damage. Do not use inbetween trash pulls.

Just something to give out more information.

[Fevelle]

...

IMO this would cause more harm than good. Newbies would follow exactly this and fail to realize that there are times that a Cure II is needed even without big damage (because you gotta top someone off for a big hit incoming) or that you need to put Regen on DPS and yourself everytime they take a little of damage.

Personally, that tooltip increase would be more well utilized if they made it a mini-lore for the skill (like differentiating the source of Cure from Physick and Benefic).

[hagare]

snip

I'm not disagreeing with reality. It's you who's only looking at this from NA perspective. Even the fact that you admit there are people in NA that won't blow up when things don't go their way supports my claim.

The community's problem is not one of skill, but of attitude.

The increased skill won't change the attitude of the people who are toxic, it'll just change how often they rage.

[Brian_]

I'm not disagreeing with reality. It's you who's only looking at this from NA perspective.

I've spent time on both JP and NA data centers. The JP data centers prove what I am saying. Because the general level of skill is higher, people don't have much to be toxic about. Of course, I'm not saying that's the only reason -- the culture is also very different. But, it's not like the JP players don't retaliate against poor play in their own way. They auto disband and they have a centralized witch-hunting and black-listing system for repeated offenders.

The raid community's problem isn't skill level, it's the prevailing attitude driving people away.

And, like I said earlier, your skill level has a direct influence on how you're treated by people. If you are joining groups and pulling 600 DPS as a DRG, they are not going to treat you well. It's a vicious cycle, really. A lot of people I know would've taken the time to help and teach people a long time ago but have grown apathetic at best and callous at worst because the people they try and help don't listen and don't care. To them, they can be bad and get the rewards anyways because the content can either be cleared even with poor performance or better players will carry them.

Maybe this new beginner's hall and mentor system will finally give those players a way to reach receptive students rather than people only concerned with their own individual experience.

Snip.

I don't think a title is enough incentive. Personally, I think they need to gate the next Ex-roulette unlock behind the beginner's hall for that job.

Is it already in game? I didn't see anything about it in 3.15 patch notes. If not, than nothing to discuss about for now.

The idea is we can put out ideas for what it should be and what it should accomplish. It might already be too late for any of this to make a difference. But, at the very least, we should make it known that this matters more than some other issues.

Just in the last dozen posts or so, I've seen some fairly central ideas I agree with.

It should be difficult. It should be made in a way to reinforce individual accountability (though this may back-fire). It should help smooth the transition from the current casual content to harder content.

[Tinibou]

I think that this hall is a good idea anyway. A nice place to learn your class / your job and what are the keys of it. But I don't think that it will help with the awful HL players behavior. For instance, I've seen a lot of low level tanks who were very good tanks, marking enemies, pulling a few enemies at a time, and so on. It's just that the endgame transforms all that good things in creating rushing farmers who just care about getting their tomestones and have no respect. It's like most of people change in this game once they arrive in HL... so well, this hall is still good but won't change anything at the end.

[Kallera]

I think that this hall is a good idea anyway. A nice place to learn your class / your job and what are the keys of it. But I don't think that it will help with the awful HL players behavior. For instance, I've seen a lot of low level tanks who were very good tanks, marking enemies, pulling a few enemies at a time, and so on. It's just that the endgame transforms all that good things in creating rushing farmers who just care about getting their tomestones and have no respect. It's like most of people change in this game once they arrive in HL... so well, this hall is still good but won't change anything at the end.

This comment about the attitude cannot be stressed enough. The culture of having to grind content over and over creates the urge to learn speedruns and have players adhere to taking characters to the edge, then complaining when something goes wrong. Throw in old content that is repeated again and again, and it reaches and affects the newer player's experience.

[SpookyGhost]

I think that this hall is a good idea anyway. A nice place to learn your class / your job and what are the keys of it. But I don't think that it will help with the awful HL players behavior. For instance, I've seen a lot of low level tanks who were very good tanks, marking enemies, pulling a few enemies at a time, and so on. It's just that the endgame transforms all that good things in creating rushing farmers who just care about getting their tomestones and have no respect. It's like most of people change in this game once they arrive in HL... so well, this hall is still good but won't change anything at the end.

This is an inherent problem with the game, that fosters this kind of attitude. Imagine a version of XIV where everything was a cake walk, no raids, just a casual briskly paced MMO. You wouldn't have this attitude because elitism would go the way of the dinosaurs. That's not to say that an MMO has to be casualized to allow for this sort of community, but you can't actively support it with allowing speedruns, allowing gear to be an epeen competition, etc. XI has a slew of problems, but I'd argue that because of the amount of horizontal progression and difficulty to get to end game, the community is a lot kinder and helpful than most you'd find in the XIV end game communities. Regardless, it's nice to pass the book onto the players as many do and exclude SE's involvement entirely, but expecting the community to be kind and nice when the game is built the way it is is a bit rose-tinted.

[Aoxaviar]

I understand where the OP was trying to go with this thread, and I agree with the OP that this is something that should be seriously discussed.

However, I am afraid that this Training Hall that will be implemented soon will fail, fall short, and not fully be what some in this thread think it should be for the community overall, and my reasons are the following:

1 - In game Parser - the PS3 and PS4 (including myself as PS4) community have been asking SE for some type of Parser system. The General Community consensus seems to be that they want it for raiding. That's great and good. Personally, I want it so I can finally understand the point of the following comments when in raids and dungeons:

"We have low DPS, we are gonna wipe"

"The DPS check is to low to clear this"

Now, I am not a hardcore raider by any means. I also don't consider myself a midcore raider by any means, even though I do try to clear all of the raids (and no, I haven't finished BCoB completely, but have cleared A1 through A4). By nature I am a completionist type of player. I want the full story of everything including all of the substory lines and weird offshots as well. I play the game for that...and kicking ass in dungeons after a crazy ass work week is a nice way to unwind.

I do believe that this Training Hall is being built as a way to create a Parser for the PS3 and PS4 community in game and to try to serve that purpose.

2 - Rotations and Mechanics - I also believe that the main point for the creation of this Training Hall is to aid Yoshi-P in a comment made after 3.0 launched which was "get good" about the new jobs, and the expansion of the existing jobs as well.

This enviroment will allow for players across the board to learn the skills of a job/class and what they do. Since we have been "told" (quotes because we have been "told" alot of things, and so far no much has come from it across the board) that the dummys in the Training Hall will also fight back (about time SE) to some degree, we will also get a feel for rotations and very generalized to the point of what we see on the open world map for creature/monster mechanics.

With that said, we have also been told we will get 3 types, I expect this to at least show up, but the big question for SE is what will these 3 types have for mechanics? Will they open be world creature mechanics? Will they be Titan and/or some other Primal style mechanics? Will SE go crazy with it and make them have mechanics equal to LoA, CT, and A3 final boss fights but with with a damage debuff so we don't drop dead on a single hit? I fear that we will get 3 types to battle, and the mechanics will be a joke in comparison to what we have seen in CT and VA to this point. Hell, even the new expert dungeons may seem like a rehash of mechanics, but the feel of them is different as well as the dungeon not being hugely linear (topic for another time, but loving the long drops and flying tunnel in A4.)

3 - Individual Based - (But you can duty up for a teacher!!!!!!!) - This is where this content is really gonna fall short. Since it will be solo player based, the top tier players and I would expect most mid tier players are not going to do this content because they play PC and have a parser or already know they are the cheese since they have done their homework.

The mid to lower level players will do it for fun. I agree with some who have commented that this could and will hopefully help the toxic nature found inside the DF and in some cases PF, but I don't seen it being significant. I agree with and do hope that new players and veteran players who have leveled everything but haven't learned everything for every job will be able to get something out of this and also improve themselves as players. However, my last point backs up those that came before it.

4 - Server Population - This will either make a huge server like Gilgamesh a completely kick ass server if it works well, or it will keep it the same. With that said, servers that have nothing going on in the DF/PF will probably not even unlock it since there is no reason to do it because of how low pop they are in the grand scheme of the servers and population densities across them all.

Closing, I like the ideas that truly could become a great side story/plotline with content that could be brought into the game in a literal Training Hall. I personally think that SE is, at the moment, wasting time and resources on this content when they should looking at ways to deal with server crowding and population problems.

Yes, just like in the Real World, people go where the faces and names of the famous and powerful are. In the real world (for the USA) its Hollywood. Online, it seems to be Gilga and Behemoth.

Can't say I blame them, but I am glad that Exodus still seems to have a good population that seems to be a fairly easy going bunch.