/Accuse @ the devs: have you set us up to fail...?

[RichardButte]

Something occurred to me about how XIV's leveling experience does (or does not) prepare players for max level play...

(FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE DO NOT GET CONFUSED AND BELIEVE THAT I AM ACTUALLY SUGGESTING THESE BOLDED POINTS. I'M SAYING "WHAT IF...?" AS A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ONLY):

Imagine if these changes were made to the game:

• Monsters in dungeons level 69 and below only attack tanks, regardless of enmity level, and ignore other players entirely.
  
• Players in dungeons level 69 and below cannot fall below 90% health. If an attack would reduce their health below 90%, it will be set to 90% instead.

Now, if these changes were to go into the game (and they should NOT), tanks and healers would arrive at level 70 having no clue whatsoever about how well they're ACTUALLY playing their classes, and they'll find out the hard way the first time they're thrown into a situation where those skills are tested.

This would be an awful way to prepare players for the endgame, yet this is exactly what DPS players endure: the game asks next to nothing of you and gives you no means to gauge how well you're actually playing your class, allowing your performance to not matter...

...Until the sudden and often humiliating moment arrives when it DOES!

For starters, this is bad game design: the game should be teaching the player how to better play their class as they level it, including giving them feedback mechanisms that allow them to test what works and what doesn't, thus learning at their own pace.

Beyond that, isn't this kind of...cruel?

I've heard horror stories of DPS players in a dungeon/raid coming up against their first ever DPS check and being thoroughly humiliated before being kicked from the group, hesitant to ever use the duty finder again after.

It's not that at all that they're bad players, it's that the game failed to properly teach them how to play at a level it later EXPECTS them to play at (DPS checks aren't just for savage raids, either).

I know the devs don't want to go the parser route that's their call, but please, give us DPS players SOMETHING to go on so we can learn to play our classes as we level like tanks and healers do.

I don't care if it's an icon that only we can see that turns red when we're slacking and green when we're killing our rotation, but we need some form of teaching feedback.

Without it, we're wandering out into the DF completely unprepared, setting us up for the most toxic experience this game has to offer, and that's exactly what you're trying to avoid. :\

[Nedkel]

Is it true, thats pretty insane.
I can find myself hard duties to be pretty challenging at my lvl as a tank, but the upcoming changes the difficulty level will jump of the cliff.
At one side, its nice newcomers would not be discouraged to tank or heal, and there will be more of them in the game, but with inferior knowledge about the game not ready to do highest lvl content, so they should put much more work into the novice hall and make it more rewarding, so at least people will get basic things to learn.
They probably calculated it with statistic and find out a lot of healers/tanks were leaving the game before lvl 70, so they decide to make it super easy for them instead, and i believe they hope it will decrease the number of people leaving the game due to the difficulties. Its easier to leave the game at 20-40 lvl than on 70 lvl, and thats why they came from with this idea.

[Vidu]

...okay, where is your source for this? You claim you're "imagining" this could be a thing - have the next patch notes being data minded, including those statments? Or is this just your fantasy running wild? Or just another take on the whole parser-discussion.

Until there is such proof that those points are actually gonna be part of the game - which I doubt - I see no reason to discuss them.

And if its parsers/DPS-feedback you want to discuss yet again: Do we need another thread for that? Specially one that tries to hide its real agenda with some fantastic, made-up claims instead of being straight forward or, even better, sticking to the countless threads we're having on the matter?

[RitsukoSonoda]

IMO the game needs to do 2 things.
1. Actually up it's difficulty curve on solo/leveling content to actually encourage the idea of improving as a player early on. Games in the past did this which contributed to there not being a visible skill level difference between casual and hardcore players and the difference between the 2 was little more than the amount of actual time they spend on the game.
2. Needs ilvl requirements on every non solo duty so that players get into the habit early of actually keeping their gear up to date or relevant for their content. Many of the DF horror stories are caused by players being horrifically undergeared for content in DF because they have not updated their gear in 10+ levels.

[Rongway]

tl;dr: yet another want parser thread, only based on a more outlandish premise than others.

[SilverObi]

Richard your posts are usually decent and warrant discussion and debate but what even is this? If this is a continuation from one of the other threads you started or participated in, shouldn't it go into those and contribute instead of further clogging up the forums and giving yourself another soapbox?

That being said, the game's leveling experience does teach you the basics of what's required to function at max level with the exception of PotD which neuters any and all lessons on team composition and play (positionals, tanks pull, stick together, etc). Every dungeon has mechanics that will be used later and the player is advised when they learn/can learn a new ability. Now the matter I believe you're addressing is that bad players will ignore these notifications and repeated lessons. Sadly that's on the individual unless the game delves into levels of handholding that I'm sure very few of us want.

The state of the game is hardly as bad as your theoretical situation and places a lot of the responsibility on the player to find the ways and means to improve themselves, just like most any game of any merit.

[RiyahArp]

Actually up it's difficulty curve on solo/leveling content to actually encourage the idea of improving as a player early on. Games in the past did this which contributed to there not being a visible skill level difference between casual and hardcore players and the difference between the 2 was little more than the amount of actual time they spend on the game.

This would make the game spectacularly less fun and just make players quit a lot earlier. The hard content in this game simply is not fun for a lot of people, and trying to push it down earlier in the pipe would just make leveling as unpopulated as savage.

[Nedkel]

IMO the game needs to do 2 things.
1. Actually up it's difficulty curve on solo/leveling content to actually encourage the idea of improving as a player early on. Games in the past did this which contributed to there not being a visible skill level difference between casual and hardcore players and the difference between the 2 was little more than the amount of actual time they spend on the game.
2. Needs ilvl requirements on every non solo duty so that players get into the habit early of actually keeping their gear up to date or relevant for their content. Many of the DF horror stories are caused by players being horrifically undergeared for content in DF because they have not updated their gear in 10+ levels.

The time when people were willing to spend more time to play more and learn are gone forever, most of the games including the big ones focus now on simplicity and making things easy to understand (look at wow for example).
A lot of people that used to "work in game" are now adults and cant really do it anymore, if they are either bored to do it again or dont have time for that, the gaming market is full of other games that offer fun for no effort, it was different back then when there was no good games to waste time on.
Thats why the most succesful games are the easy and fast ones today, where you put no effort into learning how the game works.
Sadly, but if the game is challenging and complicated, it will simply just not be succesful in the finance perspective.

[RichardButte]

That being said, the game's leveling experience does teach you the basics of what's required to function at max level

It teaches you the basics, but for tanks and healers, their objective in a level 20 dungeon is the same as it is at level 70.

For DPS, that objective changes dramatically the moment the game hits them with a DPS check in an encounter because it's suddenly, after 69 levels, demanding they do a minimum amount of damage, despite the game giving them very little feedback as to how to actually DO that.

That's the problem that needs fixing.

tl;dr: yet another want parser thread, only based on a more outlandish premise than others.

I know the devs don't want to go the parser route that's their call, but please, give us DPS players SOMETHING to go on so we can learn to play our classes as we level like tanks and healers do.

This is the OPPOSITE of that.

They can give us something to gauge our effectiveness (especially in a group) without a parser.

[SenorPatty]

The only thing these devs are guilty of in regard to this thread is overestimating the playerbase.