State of the Game: Personal Player Feedback and Stats on PvE Content [No Parsers Plz]

[Genoreaper]

Rather then just one simple stat of Damage, the system could provide users with meaningful metrics and even a score. Values like Damage Given, Damage Taken, Damage Mitigated, Damage Avoided (getting out of an AOE), Overall healing, Player Revives, Deaths, etc... would be great to see. Almost like a little bit of how overwatch provides the player with stats, where each category can get a medal for their performance in this area, and show you your all-time high?

Most parsers keep all those options. There could be a color range to show red (poor) - purple(excellent) for whatever your monitoring, if not people would have various posts on here and reddit determining patterns for diff ilvl and melt options. So you would know what dps you should be doing without ignoring mechanics.

[MoroMurasaki]

I understand you don't want this to be a discussion about parsers specifically and I'll try to respect that. Since you decided to say outright that we don't need them though I will interject and say that I think you're wrong, we certainly do need them. We could make due with these suggestions, though.

I think the largest impact that an ingame damage meter would have would be informing players who are woefully underperforming that they have a lot of room to improve, thus prompting them to look into guides and resources about how to play their job better. This could accomplish that and so therefor I am interested in it.

I do think one incredibly important distinction to make was brought up by Sebazy - any such meter should grade based on potency per second, not damage. Actual DPS meters have their place and are incredibly useful but this sort of system wouldn't be able to fill that role. Using potency instead of damage would mean grading skill instead of melds or skewing things due to a particularly lucky run of crits.

I'm also particularly troubled about the suggestions around healing and tanking - rewarding players for unnecessarily wasting resources on these things is detrimemtal. Healers and Tanks should be graded the same way dps are - as a measure of their PPS. If you want to play a tank in tank stance or a zero dps healer that's fine but those things should still be winding up in the E-F section because they are objectively worse than their counterparts.

[KaivaC]

I'm also particularly troubled about the suggestions around healing and tanking - rewarding players for unnecessarily wasting resources on these things is detrimemtal. Healers and Tanks should be graded the same way dps are - as a measure of their PPS. If you want to play a tank in tank stance or a zero dps healer that's fine but those things should still be winding up in the E-F section because they are objectively worse than their counterparts.

From the state of mind of those who do view those metrics as absolutely vital, agree that things like tank stance only tanks and zero dps healers should be graded between E-F for the fights that it would matter the most in, i.e savage and ex. For the majority of the player base, mostly casuals that don't have an interest in raiding, I don't think having grading set to that level would do anybody any favors - it would do more to incense casuals more than anything, in my opinion if it was not restricted to the areas where that would matter the most - i.e. the endgame.

Would it slow down runs in level 70 dungeons more than necessary? Absolutely. But I don't think it would be fair to apply what is a natural standard from higher level players to the casual base that may or may not want to adjust to it.

For raiders, of course, naturally, this is something of common sense in order to succeed and maximize your potential. But when applied to the player base as a whole, the metrics would be a little difficult to apply. Only speaking from what I personally know, but the tank stance thing would be tough to apply in...say, a place like Skalla where a tank new to the duty is averaging an ilvl of 310, and everybody else averages around 350-365. It would be a bit tough for them to drop tank stance and maintain aggro unless everybody was on the same page to help maintain hate for the tank. That's not to say of the nightmare they would face in a 24-man run with 23 other players who are potentially higher than they are in gear.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

From the state of mind of those who do view those metrics as absolutely vital, agree that things like tank stance only tanks and zero dps healers should be graded between E-F for the fights that it would matter the most in, i.e savage and ex. For the majority of the player base, mostly casuals that don't have an interest in raiding, I don't think having grading set to that level would do anybody any favors - it would do more to incense casuals more than anything, in my opinion if it was not restricted to the areas where that would matter the most - i.e. the endgame.

Then you sent casual players mixed signals, which is what currently happens now. They clear dungeons or say, Ridorana, and the game pats them on the back with a B+ despite them sitting in tank stance. They decide to try out Savage, thinking they're a half way decide player only to abruptly be met with a failing grade or frustrated party mates because they joined a "B rank" PF thinking they met the requirement when they didn't.

You either go all in or there isn't a reason to bother since the information won't be helpful.

[KaivaC]

Then you sent casual players mixed signals, which is what currently happens now. They clear dungeons or say, Ridorana, and the game pats them on the back with a B+ despite them sitting in tank stance. They decide to try out Savage, thinking they're a half way decide player only to abruptly be met with a failing grade or frustrated party mates because they joined a "B rank" PF thinking they met the requirement when they didn't.

You either go all in or there isn't a reason to bother since the information won't be helpful.

I don't disagree with the premise of a grading scale - however, I do think that if it were to go with a grading scale, senarios like ilvl should be taken into account. Whether that is even possible, I highly doubt it. But I can forsee a system like this that does leave tank stance only players with no intention of touching endgame that would be a little put-off were they to hit a grade of 'D' at the end of a run. Don't get me wrong, yes, I would enjoy having something similar to the grading scale proposed. But thinking about the player base in general, it would conflict because Yoshi keeps making statements that run contrary to the content that his team puts out.

[Sebazy]

So you want something that does some of what a parser does which is gauging your own performance but does not work nearly as well as an actual parser due to the lack of real time feedback thus creating this roundabout way for people to improve their own gameplay? It just sounds like extra work and complications to be put towards something that's not nearly as useful as the real thing for the sake of less feelies hurt.

Pretty much. Consider it through the eyes of someone who might log on for an hour every few days to do a levelling roulette. A true numerical parser is going to give them wildly fluctuating feedback depending not only on their own performance, but the level of the content they are put into, the ilvl of their gear as well as their job of course. Great! I did 700 popotos today, is that good?

The whole point of my approach to this isn't to make things as care bear as possible. It's to make it as consistent and quickly readable as possible. Your gear won't factor into things, your comp will have a minimal effect, you won't suddenly find your score halving because you got synced down to a level where your job is missing a key ability.

Don't think of it as another parser. Think of it as Tomy's my first parser, but made to be as easy to read as a score at the end of an Angry Birds level. We want people to notice this. Not overlook it because they aren't interested in learning how to read it.

They clear dungeons or say, Ridorana, and the game pats them on the back with a B+ despite them sitting in tank stance. They decide to try out Savage, thinking they're a half way decide player only to abruptly be met with a failing grade or frustrated party mates because they joined a "B rank" PF thinking they met the requirement when they didn't.

This is a good point, but in honesty, I think it's something that needs to be addressed via better tuned stepping stone content rather than a system like this? This is purely a system to let people know that they are either doing something wrong, or simply might want to try a bit harder. It's most certainly not a true performance metric or parser replacement. Again, think of it like the 1-3 star scoring system you get at the end of a level in a lot of games of late.

[Remedi]

I keep repeating it, but ppl needs to want to improve fot anything to be effective.
If ppl can't read a tooltip and spam cure 3 as a single target heal it's higly probable that an in-game parses will be ignored or ppl will just try to e-peen that without learning.

Problem is that ppl lack the learning mentality not that the game doesn't provide enough infos, because in all fairness those that cared already have found a way to get those infos and honestly they are not that hard to find, what's more even when those infos are kinda invalidated on new content, ppl are able to improve without it.
Which is why I keep saying that the mentality is the most important aspect of this

Unless ppl really want to be like darksidephil and simply blaming Kojima but everything

[Dzian]

*Inb4 this thread also gets derailed by you know who*

On top of showing stats, the duty should also give you a grade between D and S, based on your expected performance with a given ilvl. These stats don't even need to be visible to other players. It probably shouldn't show your all-time high tho.

Too bad Yoshi is against the D-S grading.

It's fundamentally impossible to implement.
If you look at it analytically there are just to many variables to accommodate that getting any measure of remotely usable information is nigh on impossible.

Your BLM might be S ranked one run cos the tank made massive pulls and thus your aoes did insane damage. The next run the tank might grab less mobs making it impossible for you to reach those damage numbers as there just aren't enough things to hit. So now your way down there maybe rank C.

Next run maybe the tank does make those massive pulls but doesn't group them as neatly so your aoes still miss half of them. You might be rank B this time...

The same is true with deaths and dying. A lot of the time if you die it's not exactly your fault. This is especially true in 24 man where you end up getting hit by 4 or 5 circles because your trying to run out of them but everyone is following you because on there screen there in front of you. How do you determine if damage is avoidable? Technically those puddles are avoidable but if players insist on chasing you with them. There's no way you can avoid them especially when they end up overlapping half of an arena because of the way players are spread out.

Again with healers. You can't really grade healing for example. If you heal a million hp in one dungeon and get a rank S. What rank do you get in the next one when the party did mechanics took no damage used defensive shields and cooldowns and you only healed 200k?

There are simply too many variables involved in getting a rank. How do measure the guy who stops dpsing and runs to stand in a meteor circle or similar or the guy who runs a conal marker to the edge of an arena so it doesn't hit everyone. Or the guy running around the edge of the arena with air circles chasing him. Aka diabolos for example.

How do you.measure a guy that disengaged the boss to run a puddle away in comparison to a guy that stays on the boss to keep his dps up but then forces everyone else to either take avoidable damage or lose positional bonuses. By moving away from that aoe?

Even the more powerful tools like act aren't
Wholy accurate and they display information on the whole party. But again they can't account for every variable. Something as simple as where a monster is being tanked can have a dramatic impact on your uptime for example.

There's just to many variables involved

[JunseiKei]

~snip~

While I'm not exactly against the idea, I can't say I support it either.

How would the ranking system show how one player's poor performance didn't, or rather, did, effect mine? It's no secret that deaths lead to less damage from your healers (or a SMN or RDM that raises) as well as tools that might have been saved for something else are now expended. The chance of snowballing is high unless you're in a pre-made group. Will a system see a death and make amends to whichever people made up the difference? The problem with these scoring systems tend to focus on the individual and not necessarily the team aspect of the game. A good player in OW has the potential to carry; there's very little carrying opportunities in FFXIV (this is largely dependent on the fight, though).

Also, will this system take into consideration gear disparity? What about utility abilities and simply bloating numbers to get a good score? If it doesn't, well, I can't say this is a good system to implement.

EDIT:
Dzian made a bunch of other extremely important points to the topic.

[Delmontyb]

So first let me say this -> PvP != PvE

Thanks for your feedback and thoughts here, while I don't agree with your points regarding feedback of data, like overwatch and PvP in the world of FFXIV, I think this information is vital to help players understand and challenge themselves (if they wish too). While PvP content is totally different then what is in PvE, you are correct there, I'm using what we have in PvP and Overwatch as examples of a visual reference guide to bring these ideas to mind in a text-based medium (the forums)

Personally, I love what the development team has done with the PvP in this game (outside of queue times) and while it's content I enjoy, the numbers at the end of the match help me understand how I did and more.