An Alternative? to parsers..

[Tridus]

During the course of a duty damage done, damage taken and effective healing (not overhealing) will be calculated awarding you with a grade at the end C, B, A and S.

Who is going to figure out what the threshold for these grades is, and how are they going to determine what it should be? You see wide fluctuations in expected DPS on different fights due to the mechanics of that fight and group composition (a SAM paired with BRD and AST is going to look a lot better than the same one pared with BLM and WHM on any DPS measurement scale). SE having to assign someone to come up with grading criteria for every new piece of content they add, without having large quantities of sample points to work with because it's new content.

That will be a significant ongoing expense any time new content is added, let alone if they wan't to give meaningful feedback on existing content when job mechanics change.

Now depending on your job these values will differ for example a MCH will not be weighed as heavily for damage to say a BLM or SAM each is taylored to the job much like the savage dummy challenges

So take the above cost and multiply by the number of jobs, because now you have to do it for all of them. Do we want SE developers doing this instead of working on game content or system improvements?

For healing as stated above effective healing (damage absorbed by shields also would count towards this) meaning no overheals would increase your "score"

But non-overhealing amounts are determined entirely by how much damage people take. A good group will require significantly less healing than a bad group, and thus in the good group a good healer will have less healing but more DPS than the exact same healer in a bad group. Grading how effectively healing is being done is a not-straightforward task. That gets even more true if you want to grade stuff like "did the AST use their cards correctly", because what does "correctly" mean in the context of a dungeon where the tank is undergeared and getting hammered, thus making extended Bole a great card?

So during the course of a dungeon you will generate invisible points for your contribution to the group and after the duty complete message you will recieve your grade card showing you what rank you got ( varies on job and duty naturally) showing people where they have room to improve ranks A, B and C or knowing you did well with a rank S, your grade is only viewable by yourself to stop abuse if you didnt meet certain expectations.

Perhaps include a rewards system to help enforce the idea that if your playing with people especially strangers that doing your best is best for all. C 1 point, B 2 points A 3 points with S granting 5 points possibly to spend on glamour items, minions, mounts, untradable consumables, titles etc

Any thoughts? Additions? would like to know what you all think, could it work or is it just another shower thought.

I think it's an overcomplicated way to try and get around the problem. An entirely new system needs to be built to mostly track something that's already trackable (DPS) and will require constant work because every time new content is added new scoring tiers will need to be added for every job.

It also doesn't address the problem that C is entirely satisfactory for a lot of people, and with no failure grade that'll cover someone who is trying but just doesn't understand their rotation, and the guy who thinks Jolt is the only spell that he should ever use even when there's 10 packs to AoE. Not to mention the guy who stands in stuff and dies 10 times.

Fundamentally, the content itself needs to give you the risk of failure in order to address this problem. I'd much rather see them introduce enrage timers in Doma Castle or even earlier, instead of letting people get by until it suddenly slaps them in the face at endgame.

[Sebazy]

Who is going to figure out what the threshold for these grades is, and how are they going to determine what it should be? You see wide fluctuations in expected DPS on different fights due to the mechanics of that fight and group composition (a SAM paired with BRD and AST is going to look a lot better than the same one pared with BLM and WHM on any DPS measurement scale). SE having to assign someone to come up with grading criteria for every new piece of content they add, without having large quantities of sample points to work with because it's new content.

This isn't actually much of a problem and the majority of the work can be avoided with a few tweaks to the proposition IMHO.

First off, the easiest approach to working about basic threshold values has already been done by logs. You just work out a series of averages from your big table of results and go from there, there's really no need to have an internal team do this (Beyond maybe throwing the QA team's score into the pot so the players can get scored from day one), once the code's in place, it'll do the maths itself. As the game evolves, so will the results.

Secondly, avoiding issues with party comp disparities is doable but it's not perfect. Going by potency per second takes much of the RNG away and also levels the playing field somewhat through ignoring party buffs and such. That still leaves jobs that might impact their own rotation to maintain a buff for others as well as jobs where some of their potency rests on RNG (eg bloodletter procs).

As long as the ranks were reasonably lenient I don't think these details would be impactful enough to actually prevent a decent player from scoring in a manner that they should. And let's face it, SE aren't going to implement something like this in casual content whilst expecting people to perform at a 99% percentile.

Fundamentally, the content itself needs to give you the risk of failure in order to address this problem. I'd much rather see them introduce enrage timers in Doma Castle or even earlier, instead of letting people get by until it suddenly slaps them in the face at endgame.

Yeah agreed, I've said it so many times, but at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, Amdapor Keep was a fantastic dungeon because it did such a good job of preparing people for the end game.