Would you like an in-game parser?

[Dzian]

I wish more people had that way of thinking ^^

There was a post about dps gap at the end of HW between good and bad players, the dev team tried to reduce that gap in stormblood with the removal of skills, job gauges etc. Yoshida admitted it failed and the gap is still here, maybe even wider now.
I hope they will realize a parser is needed for one to improve properly, as it provides the right tools and feedback.

My opinion on the huge skill gap is that it has nothing to do with parsers and everything to do with how the games difficulty curve is basically a flat horizontal line. If you can clear yam tara at 15 you can clear ala mhigo and omega normal at 70 basically. Normal mode raids are super trivial. Same goes for trials. 99% of content is 1 long horizontal line of difficulty. With maybe a slight hiccup around the royal menagerie. but that was only tricky because many players tried to do it without there 70 gear.

Then it's suddenly a sheer verticle cliff when you enter an extreme trial or savage raid. And most players are stood right at the bottom of it.
(Please excuse my super awesome ms paint skills)

the skill gap between players is huge. and players wonder why most party finder groups for these contents are all "no bonus" because players haven't even begun to climb yet.

So what the devs then did in order to close that skill gap was make raids easier with creator and omega. They didn't help players at the bottom up that cliff at all. All they did was take the top off the cliff. So instead of that cliff being 1000m metres high. It's now only like 750 metres high. But the players are still right down there at the very bottom.

However the skill gap between players is still huge. as the top teir players are not only at the 750m but even higher up than that. (especially with ultimate now) while the rest are still stuck at the bottom of that massive cliff. What the devs essentially tried to do was bring the top players down rather than help the bottom players up and that's why it failed. The top players found the raids so easy they managed to push even further away from the bottom players. (again ultimate)

If the devs really want to close the skill gap then what they need to do is ramp up the difficulty curve as the game progresses and bring the bottom players gradually up. kind of like this.

In doing this when players do get to the point of the game where they can unlock and enter an extreme primal or savage raid. They'd already be maybe 800 metres up that 1,000m climb. and thus the hurdle they need to clear would be that much smaller. So the skill gap between players would then be typically 200 metres.

However currently the skill gap is basically the full 1,000 because the difficulty curve is a horizontal line. something like this would also go along way to eliminating the "super toxic no bonus culture" that many players complain about. saying they cant get clears because nooone wants bonus in there farm parties yada yada. I think more players would be more willing to accept bonus players if they were 800m up the curve rather than 0 metres

but the devs are afraid to do this for fear of losing players even though they're already losing millions because the game simply isn't rewarding because of it's ease in 99% of the content. 10 millions players they said. but the recent census thing suggests less that 8% are active..

Once again I apologise for my ms paint skills.

[Sebazy]

Snip

Absolutely agreed, early ARR did a great job of using the end game dungeons to introduce players to key mechanics they would need to understand to beat HM primals, The demon wall taught Titan HM, The dragon thinger and mindflayer demonstrated Garyda HM mechanics. If you couldn’t handle these, you couldn’t do the dungeon either. SE absolutely lost their nerve after Pharos =\

[Tridus]

SE absolutely lost their nerve after Pharos =\

Yep. It's telling that the hardest content in levelling and expert roulettes combined is Auran Vale.

[Deithwen]

snip

Those paint skills are wonderful !

I totally agree with what you explained here (in a beautiful way).
When ARR first released, I indeed remember dungeons were a lot more punishing, maybe this smoothed my transition to HM primals and Coil after (actually, this is probably the case) and that's a thing newer players lack now.

Also, I started to parse myself at this precise moment too, when I was running Amdapor Keep at the time, because the DPS checks made me want to improve and check if my rotation was correct, what I could optimize etc.

Maybe that's what the game really needs now : a smoother difficulty curve and the addition of a tool to improve on this content.

[AmeliaVerves]

truth has been painted

Maybe that's what the game really needs now : a smoother difficulty curve and the addition of a tool to improve on this content.

Because simply pressing "Like" is not enough.

This. Is. What. We. Need.

It does not always have to be super hard endgame content (tho this is nice for many raiders including myself ), but just a bit tougher bosses and a rewarding learning curve that teaches you how to beat the ---- out of those.

[HyoMinPark]

@Dzian -- The 10 million comes from active subscribers throughout the game's lifetime (so 4 years). Of course not all will stay, but there is a lot of truth in what you said: a lot of people are fed up will how "easy" a lot of the content in this game is. I get really annoyed by it, and how the game just continues to stay easy until there's just one massive spike in difficulty. It's exactly why when something like ShinEx pops up that people cry for nerfs. There's no adequate difficulty curve. It's "easy > easy > easy > slightly hard 24-man boss > holy hell ShinEx".

[Sebazy]

It’d be interesting to see how different things would be if the current crop of Dungeon bosses punished players for mistakes in the same manner as the early ARR stuff. Mechanically they are more complex, much more so, it just doesn’t matter if you ignore/fail most of it.

[RiyahArp]

It’d be interesting to see how different things would be if the current crop of Dungeon bosses punished players for mistakes in the same manner as the early ARR stuff. Mechanically they are more complex, much more so, it just doesn’t matter if you ignore/fail most of it.

it wouldn't matter, because people do the mechanics in them fine already. The whole skill debate tends to center around being able to do pain in the butt content that has a huge list of mechanics that will one shot you or the raid if someone fails them. Unless you made the dungeons like that, you wouldn't get what you wanted. The greater issue is that a lot of people simply don't care for that kind of content.

[Deithwen]

it wouldn't matter, because people do the mechanics in them fine already. The whole skill debate tends to center around being able to do pain in the butt content that has a huge list of mechanics that will one shot you or the raid if someone fails them. Unless you made the dungeons like that, you wouldn't get what you wanted. The greater issue is that a lot of people simply don't care for that kind of content.

This is exactly what Sebazy said : " if the current crop of Dungeon bosses punished players for mistakes in the same manner as the early ARR stuff"
And people don't really do mecanics fine, they're just non existant or barely noticeable. In Amdapor Keep (before it got nerfed to the ground) you actually had to do mecanics properly while dealing at least decent DPS to clear.

[RiyahArp]

My point was that people already do the mechanics in dungeon fine. Making them more punishing for mistakes wouldn't matter, unless you made the actual mechanics a lot more difficult. And if you did, you'd just suck the fun out of the game, for what? We already clear casual content fine already. People don't do raids because they don't like the way hard content in this game plays; trying to push that mode of content down the chain isn't going to magically make them like it or decide to try raiding.