/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.

[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.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

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.

I find it rather telling how you equate actually knowing how to play your job properly with being less fun. Making dungeons not a complete joke doesn't somehow make them impossible, unless you have no idea what you're doing. In which case, how about some personal accountability? The Vault, Aurum Vale, Weeping City and Final Steps of Faith are all examples of reasonable difficulty, but I suppose anything beyond Xelphatol, where you don't even need a tank stance since nothing remotely scratches you, is just too much. The whole reason higher end content has a low percentage is due to the lack of a difficulty curve. It goes from braindead easy to moderately hard to decimating you. Such a sudden spike makes people quit far quicker than if dungeons actually required some healing outside mass pulls.

[RiyahArp]

I find it rather telling how you equate actually knowing how to play your job properly with being less fun.

People know how to play their job properly. The issue is playing it in Savage, which is the least fun content this game has made. To make leveling train for that, you'd make the game unfun; you'd have to bulk up the boss length and difficulty, because trash teaches you nothing about fifteen minute boss fights with one shots and enrage. The fact you have to almost always use a video walkthrough of the encounter after the first few days shows its not the job, its the mechanics.

[Gleipni]

I find it rather telling how you equate actually knowing how to play your job properly with being less fun. Making dungeons not a complete joke doesn't somehow make them impossible, unless you have no idea what you're doing. In which case, how about some personal accountability? The Vault, Aurum Vale, Weeping City and Final Steps of Faith are all examples of reasonable difficulty, but I suppose anything beyond Xelphatol, where you don't even need a tank stance since nothing remotely scratches you, is just too much. The whole reason higher end content has a low percentage is due to the lack of a difficulty curve. It goes from braindead easy to moderately hard to decimating you. Such a sudden spike makes people quit far quicker than if dungeons actually required some healing outside mass pulls.

I totaly agree,of course new people that go in savage get rekt or can not be at the level,if you put teddy bear difficulty before,and Satan difficulty after,well yeah people are lost.if they could make only dungeon like the one you mentionned,the community of FF would get better,and not full of braindead lvl 70.

[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.

[RitsukoSonoda]

*Snip*

We also need to stop making excuses for people not just in games but irl as well. The real issue is that these kids now at least in the US have excuses made for underperformance starting at pre-school age. A majority of the players that worked at things in game in the past still do so now. The only thing that's changed is either the amount of time they actually play the game or the number of games they play at a time.

The most successful games nowadays aren't successful for being easy and fast paced. The most common factors for game success generally are Marketing (See Blizzard), Franchise (Elderscrolls, Fallout, Final Fantasy as long as the game itself isn't poorly done), Pandering to specific demographics that will repurchase the newest version of a game every year, (Sports games, to an extent Call of Duty games).