How to give advice

[JohnSeal]

Okay, I am honestly not trying to belittle you here, but is English your first language? I know first hand that some things get jumbled in translation and I worry that this might be one of those things.

I just need to point out that criticism is absolutely not necessarily toxic or even impolite.

If you think it is, then I feel like that explains some of the misconceptions you have on this particular subject. In that case you are mistaken. Criticism is inherently neutral, neither good nor bad. It can become either based on how the person presents it to you. And, as an aside, criticism can still be constructive, even when presented in a toxic manner.

No is not, but I live in England since many years,I speak English better than many locals lol I also speak other three languages anyway....
yes that’s the point of all the thread!! Criticise is TOXIC, advice is appreciate by most of players.
Criticism= impolite,rude,unsettling and not appreciate
Advising= kind hearted,helpful,useful for the community.

I wrote another reply earlier with examples between the two.

If have make some spelling/grammar mistakes is just the damn keyboard changing words lol

[Vidu]

No is not, but I live in England since many years,I speak English better than many locals lol I also speak other three languages anyway....
yes that’s the point of all the thread!! Criticise is TOXIC, advice is appreciate by most of players.
Criticism= impolite,rude,unsettling and not appreciate
Advising= kind hearted,helpful,useful for the community.

I wrote another reply earlier with examples between the two.

If have make some spelling/grammar mistakes is just the damn keyboard changing words lol

"Its not what you say, but how you say it" - you can criticize someone without being toxic. And you can give advice in a toxic fashion.


This is an actual defintion of criticism - I shortend it a bit, you can find the long version here: http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/criticism
1: the act of expressing disapproval and of noting the problems or faults of a person or thing : the act of criticizing someone or something
2: a remark or comment that expresses disapproval of someone or something
3: the activity of making careful judgments about the good and bad qualities of books, movies, etc.

I can criticize someone and still remain polite and friendly, it just depends on how I present it. At the same time I can give advice and be very unpolite and unfriendly by doing so, for example if I call the person in question names or belittle them like in OPs example.

I dont know enough about monk to give a person soild advice on how to play that class to its full potentital or just how to play at all. If I play it, I hit the glowing buttons (and I dont even need a job guide to figure that out). But I made it a point for myself to know enough about each class to notice (obvious) mistakes (and I believe that aftter 5 years of playing the game I also developed a kind of "sense" for that). So I can point out that I'm seeing some flaws, but I cant really assist on fixing them - the only "advice" I could give there would be to look up a guide or ask someone else.
Now, as long as I'm saying this in a friendly way - is that toxic, rude and unpolite? Is saying "Hey, I see you struggle with monk, you should look up a guide" toxic? Or is that already advice? In which case, I'll circle round to the "spirit" of a point I made earlier in one of my posts: Doesnt every advice countain some sort of criticism? Because if you were doing everything perfectly, you wouldnt need advice in the first place - so giving advice is already saying "There is something wrong", it just comes with a solution.

Both advice and criticism are mere acts, that can both come off as rude or friendly, depending on your tone.
Rude = criticism
Friendly = advice
...thats just not true.


(Also, little critic on your posts: for me its not grammatic errors and spelling mistakes that make them difficult to read/understand at times - I'm not a native speaker myself, so my posts are stuffed with such errors aswell - but your use of "lol" and "xD" and the like. For me those belong into a chat, not a foren-post - and certainly not when you're trying to have "serious" discussion about a more or less serious topic. Kinda irritating and it makes me take you a lot less serious.)

[JohnSeal]

On your BLM and SMN you\\\\'re incorrect. Your procs blink to alert you that they were obtained, such as Firestarter, or Ruin IV. Also, I\\\\'ve had my expectations murdered enough to the point where I don\\\\'t expect the RDM to melee, I don\\\\'t expect the NIN to use anything but Doton, and I don\\\\'t expect more than the gecko combo from a SAM (Yes, I don\\\\'t even expect them to laijutsu anymore) and they still somehow manage to do even less than that.

Also not having that expectation either for buff allignment. Notice how my wishes for someone in 50+ content is to at least be pressing more than 1 button? And I\\\\'m saying they somehow still aren\\\\'t? I\\\\'m actually going to focus on the dps factor here, because one of the few reasons I wanted to drop SCH/AST was because of dps not doing anything. You ever see a 45 minute run of Compass?

You\\\\'d also think people would actually want to be done things sooner than later too, actually. While this is a WoW example and not a FFXIV example, a Youtuber (Preach) did a challenge to prove some people wrong, about how pugging is. One thing he noticed was that he didn\\\\'t realize how little he actually played until he did that, because people were so bad and not wanting to improve, that he would spend an entire day just trying to upgrade his keystone by 1 level.

So that\\\\'s just an extra note. You get to do more activities if you actually read your abilities and figure out how to play. Guide or no. And honestly if you need a guide to tell you to use fire spells as a BLM, or to use combo lines on a melee, you probably shouldn\\\\'t be at a high level. The game outright explains this to you. Go make a new character, pick BLM, and don\\\\'t turn off those little hints they give you. At level 2, they actually explain Astral Fire and Umbral Ice to you. And there are people at 70 who can\\\\'t even do the thing explained at level 2...

I\\\\'ve been either ignored or verbally harassed for almost exactly the same wording as your examples almost every time. In some cases, even after the dungeon was completed and I left.

Yes, people got that uppity that I asked a BLM to aoe, that they whispered me after the dungeon to tell me nasty slurs that, again, I\\\\'d post, but get reported and banned for just stating the words.

Yes I though of it after post it, BLM got
prova but thunder you expect and hope it to proc, Ruin basically updates to R4.

Anyway you are right in most of things you say just probably are to rough in the way are expressed lol

As I said this morning,who choose to play DPS want to see things killed,burned and destroy and are suppose to be happy if someone’s give them helpful advices,most of player are! BRD are special because they sing, if they don’t sing doesn’t make sense.

Still the thread is about how to give advice.
We all agree advices are a good thing!
We also agree everybody should to their best at all time

[Nixxe]

No is not, but I live in England since many years,I speak English better than many locals lol I also speak other three languages anyway....
yes that’s the point of all the thread!! Criticise is TOXIC, advice is appreciate by most of players.
Criticism= impolite,rude,unsettling and not appreciate
Advising= kind hearted,helpful,useful for the community.

I wrote another reply earlier with examples between the two.

If have make some spelling/grammar mistakes is just the damn keyboard changing words lol

Blaming your mistakes on your keyboard is utterly absurd, especially when you make so many, including basic syntactical errors that a keyboard or even an autocorrect program is unlikely to be responsible for. I'm hardly a prescriptivist zealot, but I do find it a bit irritating when people refuse to own up to their shortcomings, especially if they're fairly reasonable ones.

Essentially what you are arguing though are your connotations, which are frequently idiosyncratic, not denotations. You can't hold other people accountable for your connotations though, as those are simply the associations you make with a particular word.

[Ranetsu-Akagane]

If someone gives advice multiple times, and the person still makes mistakes, then there isn't much you can do other than kick them. I personally appreciate feedback (If its legit feedback not a pure insult like you suck quit the game, or incorrect info). If someone takes the time to type out advice, it's only polite to at least look at it. I'm not one that feels insulted easily if I was ever parsed and someone said my damage was bad, I wouldn't be offended as I know where to start looking for mistakes. If someone said "you're a terrible tank, use flash more" to some that might be an insult, but I would take the advice and ignore the insult.

[NessaWyvern]

Criticism= impolite,rude,unsettling and not appreciate
Advising= kind hearted,helpful,useful for the community.

You know there is such thing as bad advice, and there is such thing as constructive criticism, right? Not all criticism is unappreciated, and not all advice is good for the community.

Your use of smilies, lols and over-positivity is coming off as slightly patronizing. It's my advice to you to tone it down a tiny bit, and have a more neutral tone. I'm sure many people are replying to your comments simply because it's rubbing them the wrong way.

[MoroMurasaki]

No is not, but I live in England since many years,I speak English better than many locals lol I also speak other three languages anyway....
yes that’s the point of all the thread!! Criticise is TOXIC, advice is appreciate by most of players.
Criticism= impolite,rude,unsettling and not appreciate
Advising= kind hearted,helpful,useful for the community.

I wrote another reply earlier with examples between the two.

If have make some spelling/grammar mistakes is just the damn keyboard changing words lol

I think perhaps the fact that English isn't your first language is negatively impacting your ability to participate in this thread and this post is a great example of it.

Criticism and advice are synonyms. They may not mean exactly the same thing but in many instances they are interchangeable. All criticism is advice while not all advice is criticism which also might be confusing you.

If someone says 'Your DoT uptime is particularly low, if you focus on bringing that up it will help your dps. I used Iron Jaws as I started playing each song when I was getting started on BRD, maybe try that.'

The entire thing is advice. The part about DoT uptime being particularly low is criticism. None of it is 'toxic' or bad in any way though, despite pointing out a flaw. Things like 'omg uninstall scrub' or 'you suck' aren't criticism or advice, they're just rude comments.

I hope this helps bridge the potential language barrier here so this thread can move on. For the record there are a plethora of mistakes in virtually all if your posts that could not be attributed to 'the damn keyboard changing words' so perhaps be more open to the idea that while you may speak English fluently there is always more to learn.

Also, yes, that was both criticism and advice.

[Ilan]

Omg not guides for Savages but I meant Job guides.
Like the ones that tell you which button to press one by one lol
A real good player figure the best rotation by himself with hours of practice,you can get tips here and there.
Most of player will be lost without a job guide to spoon feed them xD
Someone was talking about pressing buttons in sequenze and research so basically like when we use to go to school and copy the homework’s from the class nerds lmao

Dude you still don't check it huh? The job guides are also important because people learn rotations (your pressing buttons one by one thing) because otherwhise they wouldn't learn rotations.
If people would listen to you we would have even more people who just press buttons the way they like and not the way they should be pressed to be optimal. But what ever you say man, you are just like this other person with strange ways of seeing things.

[Rymm]

No is not, but I live in England since many years,I speak English better than many locals lol I also speak other three languages anyway....
yes that’s the point of all the thread!! Criticise is TOXIC, advice is appreciate by most of players.
Criticism= impolite,rude,unsettling and not appreciate
Advising= kind hearted,helpful,useful for the community.

I wrote another reply earlier with examples between the two.

If have make some spelling/grammar mistakes is just the damn keyboard changing words lol

I only speak two languages (and the second one rather poorly at that.) But I know how difficult language barriers can be so I have nothing but respect for those willing to put forth the time and effort to speak something that is not native to them.

That being said, you are most certainly mistaken about your use of the words 'criticism' and 'advice.' I'll not repeat the definitions of the words or the explanation of their uses, as those have been pretty well canvased already. The one thing I will bring up, is that you can not arbitrarily decide to use your own preferred definitions for specific words rather than the established definitions accepted by the populace who natively speaks the language you are conversing in. The language itself will break down at that point and it will be impossible communicate in any meaningful way.

About your keyboard changing words, are you typing on a phone with autocorrect? If you are, I highly recommend turning that feature off if you can. I know I had a lot of trouble trying to message in English with my cell phone that I bought in Brazil. It was a mess, constantly trying to change my English words to the closest guess it could get in Portuguese. In my experience, autocorrect is more trouble than it is worth.

[Miste]

DPS with no guide= DPS with 2k dmg.

Is this like...personal experience? Cause...you should only speak for yourself and not make a blanket statement like this.

I can do more than 2k on a DPS job with no guide, in fact I rarely look at guides for jobs.

You don't need to exert much brain power to come up with a basic rotation that can give anywhere from 50%-80% of what the job is capable of depending on how well you take the time understand the abilities the job has and the math by examining tooltips.

The game is not that complex where you need a guide telling you exactly the order to do all of your button presses on that job in order to do above average on it.

Also, I even suck at math, but I still manage.

2k dps at the moment would be simply a case of not pressing buttons, you can roll your face on the keyboard and do 2k right now.

Sadly this is something I notice....a lot of players who are lacking in their jobs are often players who simply cannot seem to manage to continuously be pressing buttons and be active throughout the fight. It destroys your DPS more than anything else to waste GCDs.

If you want to know how braindead easy 2k dps is.....non-combo jobs (RDM/BLM/SMN/BRD/MCH) can do 2k dps just pressing one button over and over...some jobs can even do more than 2k just spamming one button.

Combo jobs like NIN/SAM/MNK/DRG can do 2k dps or more just using one combo over and over. So 1-2-3-1-2-3 over and over and the game even lights it up for you.