What is a "bad player" to you?

[Selova]

I've been yelled at and harassed as a healer for not doing enough damage. I was yelled at by tanks for keeping them at full health. That's not improving myself. It's not making be better as I want to be better. When I play a healer, I do just that, play a healer. I loathe magic damage with a very firm passion. My overall least favorite anything in the game.

While I in no way, shape or form condone any level of harassment you are literally admitting that you want to be a better player/healer but you aren't willing to do what it takes to become a better player.

There isn't any reason to keep spamming healing spells onto people every time they take damage, there is not enough consistent damage going out to be doing that, all you are doing is wasting mp and over-healing like crazy. Pure healing roles don't exist in this game, there is no reason to be a pure healer nor any benefit to it outside of your personal distaste for dealing damage.

It honestly depends on what your mind set is when you decide to be a healer, you can either decide to just keep spamming your heals when healing isn't needed or you can decide that you want to be as helpful to your group as possible by throwing out damage when healing isn't required. The latter is what separates mediocre healers from great healers.

If you honestly want to aim to improve yourself you will strive and adapt to play your class to the best of your abilility that you are capable of doing. That's really all there is to it if that's your goal.

[HyoMinPark]

I've been yelled at and harassed

>Claims you’re “yelled at” and “harassed” for not DPSing as a healer.
>Slings insults at anyone who tells you that this is a damage-centric MMO

I don’t think you’re getting “harassed” because of your lack of healer damage... I think it’s probably more so because of your horrible attitude.


But remember kids! Raiders are the toxic players!!!

I'll be anecdotal here (aren't we all anyway) and say I have a few RL friends that play this game.

They work 40 hours, some have college lecture afterwards, some have kids and some have to travel for business.

They play this game to tune out during their downtime and feel like a hero without having to put in too much effort. That's what those dungeons are for. Is 5 minutes really that bothersome to you? If so, why solo queue? Because that's who you're going to run into. People like my friends who only play this game minimally as a hobby make up the majority of the population. They're bad players by whatever standard you want to put, whether it's their numbers they're putting up to just healing fulltime to just grabbing single packs of mobs.

Imagine coming home after busting your tail off from work, school and you want to kick back in the easiest way possible in the game and someone tells you to put more effort in an inconsequential piece of content like a tomestone farming dungeon that has the most trivial of requirements (for a reason) to enter. I'd just laugh at them because that's what harder content is for. You don't have to accept the, "it's not savage" excuse, but that's all the excuse most people need to not go full max in something as irrelevant as a tomestone farming dungeon.

I'm not going to presume what you do outside of this game, but I work just like them, I just have the good fortune to not have to go back to school or have any kids, so I can take the time to learn this game as a hobby.

Would I ever tell them to play better? Nah, I don't have the nerve to be that incredulous over a dungeon.

A lot of us have things like school and jobs and other responsibilities. Some of us even have families with children to take care of.

I have school 4 days out of the week. I spend what free time I do have playing the game to have fun — be it raiding, farming Ex primals, goofing off with friends, whatever. However, my fun shouldn’t involve dealing with players who don’t want to press buttons because “I play this game to relax, chill dude”. Why does their relaxation take more priority over being respectful of their fellow party members? It’s not a very good excuse, in my opinion.

[Deceptus]

>Claims you’re “yelled at” and “harassed” for not DPSing as a healer.
>Slings insults at anyone who tells you that this is a damage-centric MMO

I don’t think you’re getting “harassed” because of your lack of healer damage... I think it’s probably more so because of your horrible attitude.

Or more accurately, they are being asked to use their kit in it's entirety. Healers not doing any dps is like a PLD who just uses flash and possibly just spams aggro combo. Sure, the tank is holding aggro just fine but they're not doing anything remotely what they should be.

In fact, that's my personal definition of "bad". Someone who doesn't use their entire kit.

Tanks who don't use def CD's liberally? Bad.

Healers who don't DPS? Bad.

DPS who don't use aggro reductions, or self heals? Bad

Also, people who can't take honest, constructive criticism. I'm not attacking you personally. I'm asking you not to waste other people's time be it 3 other people in a dungeon, 7 other people in a trial, or 23 other people in a raid.

[Jaywalker]

Honestly for me it's a rude player above all else. Players who just don't know how to do something and mess up can be helped and I mentally file more under "inexperienced" than bad, since they can always learn.

Main point of FFXIV as a game, to me, is to have fun. Even if you're dealing with a frustrating challenge, it should be fun to keep trying on some level. When players are actively rude, whether by being nasty or deeply inconsiderate (ex. ditching newbies who are watching a story-based cutscene for the first time even when they mention that's what's going on or ask for patience), to me that compromises the ability of other people to have fun while playing. More than that, it ruins fun to a degree that is way worse than just needing to be patient or dealing with some inconvenience.

It's like getting smacked in the face by someone you thought was friendly. Douses cold water on everything.

Edit: Aaaand I just saw previous pages debates lol. XD Honestly it seems like "bad player" might be semantically too broad for the different stuff people focus on. There's skill focus and there's overall experience focus as two different aspects of playing I think. My sense is people might be putting different levels of emphasis on skill versus overall experience. This seems almost like there's an unspoken question of "is it worse to be unskilled or to be mean" in a way, which people do seem to disagree on.

As a 2 cents thing... skill focus, for me, is more of a real life point. It's something I apply really hardcore to my work, which I love, but which remains on a completely different level compared to gaming. I like to be skilled in games, but it's not why I personally play. It's important to git gud and all haha, but when I see people get really serious about it to the point that they get honestly mad about lack of skill it feels like they're missing the point of a game and lack perspective. Games are literally there to make you happy. They don't get you a better paycheck, a better house. They can sometimes lead to real life friendships or relationships but that doesn't happen because of your skill level.

[Hazama999]

Being that this is an MMO, presumably centered around player interaction. I would probably put attitude and overall disposition at the forefront on whether or not a player is "bad."

I don't personally care all that much about how that person performs as long as they got a good attitude about it and are open to suggestions. You may not play well, but if you play well with others, you're alright in my book.

[Vahlnir]

I understand that with any player base there are many types of playstyles and varying degrees of skill. Typically, as long as someone is a decent person, I don't particularly care what their skill level is. But when it comes to certain pieces of content where there is very little room for error and someone simply can't or won't comprehend what they're being told...I have very little patience for that, admittedly. Sometimes people simply can't get it, and that is alright. Not everyone is meant for every piece of content in the game. If I get frustrated enough I will typically leave without saying a word, the whole "don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" sorta deal. If I need to vent it is done outside the game through my own mouth where I can say whatever I want to myself. lol Just because someone isn't up to par doesn't mean they're a bad person or player per say, they just don't have the skill required to complete the content they're attempting. My definition of a "bad player" is someone who could in all likelihood improve themselves, but simply won't. That or someone who's a straight up jerk. My experience has been most of the time that they both go hand in hand.

[Penthea]

Someone who:

• is rude without provocation
• puts down others in order to elevate themselves
• expects more of others than they would expect of themselves
• acts like they were never a new player who also made mistakes
• acts like they're an expert on raiding just because they know what "the meta" is, even though they know little else about raiding
• will take any opportunity to display their superior knowledge or skill
• acts like "casual" is a synonym for "bad"
• flags themselves as an english, german, french and japanese speaker to get faster DF queues but then gets annoyed if they meet people who don't speak the language their game client is in
• wears a mentor crown in DF and then gets annoyed when they're expected to mentor. If you don't want to mentor, turn off your crown.

[HarryTipper]

No, it's not. You only think that because that's what the world first guilds do and you're an elitist tryhard who mimics them.

No content but the very upper upper content at the given time relies on healer dps. It's been said MANY TIMES NOW by Yoshi P himself that no content is designed with healer dps in mind.

The metric to base yourself as a healer is simple, did people die?

I've died as a tank more time than I can count by bastard healers like you who focus too damn much on dps and fail to do their primary job.

You guys seem to think how low can you go is the healing norm.

This right here would be a good example IMO.

The kind of player who, when confronted with an opposing opinion, immediately feels attacked and lashes out and resorts to name calling.

[Barraind]

It's been said MANY TIMES NOW by Yoshi P himself that no content is designed with healer dps in mind.

A few answers to this:

If you're one of the healers who doesnt dps, and just heals, and a significant amount of healers actually do damage and keep parties alive while doing it, you are, in comparison to the whole, a bad player. If you spend multiple cooldowns to do what you can do with 1, you are, relative to the whole, a bad player. And if you KNOW you can do it with less, and free up more time to optimize your output, but choose not to, you're square in the "willfully ignorant" pile.


Additionally, if you've played MMO's (or games in general), you'd learn not to take things people say about their content as gospel.

I've been assured, by Sony, Blizzard, Squenix, Nintendo, and others, that "x is working correctly" or "x content is not bugged" or "x is intended" only to see those be hotfixed, patched, removed, re-broken, swapped out or re-implemented.

[Penthea]

A few answers to this:

If you're one of the healers who doesnt dps, and just heals, and a significant amount of healers actually do damage and keep parties alive while doing it, you are, in comparison to the whole, a bad player.

So are they bad players even if they keep everyone alive without risking the well-being of the party? I would be slow to call them bad because they can clearly do their primary role just fine. I would merely call them serviceable. Like a boring cheap car. It gets you from A to B but it's nothing special. I wouldn't bring them to savage for similar reasons why I wouldn't bring that unremarkable car to a F1 race. But for normal stuff both are fine even if they're not ideal.

A bad healer is someone who either cannot heal a normal combat situation effectively even when they try, or someone who plays their class as if they're in a savage team who carefully planned their healing spells and mitigation so they could pump out as much dps as possible, even though they're with a pug who made no such plans...and they continue to do so even though it's clear that more healing needs to be done.

Both of these are far worse than a pure healer who can keep everyone alive. Yes it's annoying when the healer does no dps when they clearly have time to, but healer dps is far from a requirement in normal mode content. I prefer to do things a bit slower and be confident that everyone will stay alive, rather than be stressing out because the healer acts like only mobs can lose hp. These healers are the bane of my existence when I play rdm. It's annoying that I have to stop dpsing and toss out heals to keep the tank alive because they're too busy pretending they're an all-star savage player to do the most basic requirements of their role properly.

The few times I have been curious enough about these players to look them up in fflogs, each time none of them had anything resembling impressive savage kills as healers, if any at all. Which is why I say "too busy pretending". Likely they read a healing guide intended for top tier savage raiding, and they lack the presence of mind to realise that this particular playstyle can be destructive if you just blindly do it all the time. This is definitely a definition of a bad player. Someone who copies what top tier savage raiders do without thinking about whether it's appropriate for the given situation or not.