A self-improvement tool is needed in this game, especially for end game

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

No need for a tool. Just put enrage timers in normal. Leniant ones for sure but not overly so. Like 15 minutes for normal alphascape fights, 7 minutes for dungeon bosses etc. People will either wise up real quick, stay out of the content or quit.

Jokes on you - normal mode raids already have enrage at around 15min each since probably Gordias (can confirm A8N Brute Justice and O3N Halicarnassus based on own experience).

Despite that you could have dragoons never using blood of the dragon, black mages never using fire spells and bards never use songs and still not hit that enrage timer, so thats not gonna help.

[TURBODOG]

Seems to me, the simple answer to a lot of these requests and the solution to a lot of division in the community is a difficulty setting. You want a challenge, set your difficulty up, take more damage, deal less; challenge yourself to the max. For those of us that don't want it set it down, take less damage, deal more. To balance it out, rolls for loot would favor higher difficulty settings first. No freebies for the carried, but no lockout from a large part of the game for the uncoordinated either. win/win.

[dragonseth07]

but no lockout from a large part of the game for the uncoordinated either. win/win.

Mind if I piggyback on this bit? This is something I see float around here all the time, that a paying customer should be able to do all or most of the content. The thing is, that's just not how nearly any video game in existence works. If I suck too much to beat a boss in God of War, I can't skip it. I can't get carried by other players. I don't get to see the rest of the game. I need to get better, if I want to make the most of my purchase. MMO's hit this weird area where we want to remove skill gating, when skill gating is an integral part of a game experience.

[Legion88]

Seems to me, the simple answer to a lot of these requests and the solution to a lot of division in the community is a difficulty setting. You want a challenge, set your difficulty up, take more damage, deal less; challenge yourself to the max. For those of us that don't want it set it down, take less damage, deal more. To balance it out, rolls for loot would favor higher difficulty settings first. No freebies for the carried, but no lockout from a large part of the game for the uncoordinated either. win/win.

This wont work.
In mixed queues there will be a huge chunk of max difficulty players just for boosting their loot rolls, even if they wont really participate in the content due to too high difficulty for them.
And seperated queues are already implemented, Hard/Extreme for trials and Normal/Savage for Raids and even Ultimate for the extra high difficulty.

[TURBODOG]

...If I suck too much to beat a boss in God of War, I can't skip it. I can't get carried by other players. I don't get to see the rest of the game. I need to get better....

The key difference in a single player game is that you're wasting no-ones time floundering while trying to get better, a single player game doesn't blacklist you for not being good enough. As I put it, I get to test drive content that's over my head in an attempt to get good enough to do it properly, you get the trophy I'm not allowed to preserve your bragging rights, I get practical experience to get better as a player. Where would the downside be?

[TURBODOG]

This wont work.
In mixed queues there will be a huge chunk of max difficulty players just for boosting their loot rolls, even if they wont really participate in the content due to too high difficulty for them.
And seperated queues are already implemented, Hard/Extreme for trials and Normal/Savage for Raids and even Ultimate for the extra high difficulty.

Fair enough, I seldom examine things from the loopholes that would be abused, not sure why I even joined the thread, it's all what if anyway....

[Kirsten_Rev]

The key difference in a single player game is that you're wasting no-ones time floundering while trying to get better, a single player game doesn't blacklist you for not being good enough. As I put it, I get to test drive content that's over my head in an attempt to get good enough to do it properly, you get the trophy I'm not allowed to preserve your bragging rights, I get practical experience to get better as a player. Where would the downside be?

This is a good point.

I do worry, however, about the unforeseen consequences to any difficulty adjustment / solo practice system. My general experience right now suggests that people only tend to vote kick / rage / blacklist people over repeated, critical mistakes. If there were more coping mechanisms introduced, would there be less tolerance? Would there be immediate pressure on individually struggling players to lower the difficulty, with increased loot odds serving as extra incentive? Would there be immediate rage for even isolated or slight mistakes, since additional practice tools would in theory improve the base level of player skill?

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All this said, I personally wish MMOs weren't so focused on providing players with comfort zones. To me, the beauty of an MMO is precisely that it isn't like normal games. There isn't practice. It's part of what makes them so addictive for me: my decisions have consequences. I can't just hit the quickload button and have it all be forgotten.

That said, I've spent over 20 years playing video games, so I speak from a position of relative privilege. I've never been afraid to enter content in FFXIV, nor was I afraid even in less-forgiving titles like FFXI. I knew I was never going to be the weakest link in any arbitrary group of 6-8 people. So I can sympathize with people who prefer MMOs that more closely resemble cooperative theme parks than anything else. To each their own.

[Baka_Neko1]

a self improvement tool. ie take note from snapchat and make it hard to share. if people can't see it easily, they won't force others to share. still ban harassment because some people are still tools. boom.

[Dzian]

With this in mind, what I'd propose - and which SE certainly won't implement - is FATE-style reward tiers for instanced content. This would require a mechanism that measures, in a rough sense, how well a person is executing their job: oGCD usage, rotations, DoT uptime, healing, enmity. It can't be a simple parser, because that would naturally prioritize damage alone, rather than job performance, and would also penalize players significantly for lower-quality gear. Now, supposing such a tool was implemented, a player running an Expert Roulette wouldn't necessarily get the full 90 Tomestones of Genesis. Say their performance was the equivalent of a bronze: they might only get 20% of the base dungeon reward, and 20% of the Roulette bonus. Say that they're running Ridorana, and a Glamour item they want drops, but they got a low performance rating on that fight and were barred from Needing on it.

In this scenario, individuals who suck slow themselves down. Now there's incentive to improve: it saves you a lot of time. Better reward ratios means fewer dungeons to run. It means faster leveling. It means higher likelihoods of getting the rewards you want.

This approach would address both player skill, and player motivation. That's the ticket forward, in my estimation. It's possible that player ignorance is the primary culprit, but from my perspective, I see far more of an issue lurking in the realm of player motivation.

Something like this would generally be impossible to implement fairly without causing mega dramatics..

Can you imagine it if for example if a tank dies in a fight and suddenly one or more of the dps eats a massive cleave and get killed because they had hate.
Let's suppose it takes a minute or so for them to get raised and now there rating is going to be way down even though there's nothing they could have done about it.
open the loot chest from that boss andtheres the item you want but you can't roll....

Or times when alliance members generally end up killing each other because they overlap all those puddle aoes that happen. and now those players who were safe at the arena edge now find themselves in puddles because players have put those puddles on them and left them no where to go. Or 3 or 4 people die because no one else stacked with them for a stack mechanic. both things that seem to happen frequently in 24 man raids. If players were locked out of rewards because of stuff like this there' would be so much outrage.

i cant tell you how many times i've been killed because some idiot with one of those repeating circle aoes makes a bee line for my blm who's then forced to try and move when i shouldnt have to. so even if i survived my rating would go down because this dumb guy is chasing me with his puddles....

a couple of bad players can make even the simplest of things a nightmare to deal with. like in allaince raids yesterday people were dying to the red blue mechanic on angra maiyu because the tanks just couldnt keep the boss still. so what would usually be a quick one or two steps now ends up being trying to dash half the arena floor

[CorbinDallas]

They changed based on speed runs or party setups. Openers are the most important thing to learn for endgame content as they set you up for the rest of the fight. And all classes have a general opener to use doesn't need to be the best for every single encounter but it provides a baseline for the lowest players among us to hit.

Some jobs have multiple openers, so which ones does the game teach you?

It's wasted dev time, they would have to update it potentially every major patch cycle, and you know how good they are at continually updating a system. Egi glamours every other patch, everyone?