Parsing? Drama? ToS? Solution!

[tdb]

Guides & Videos have the Problem of Over Explaining. We are seeing and listening to what the author of the video is showing us, but then there is so many things they talk about and show on screen that it becomes like a Sensory Overload and you lose focus and get lost. To many things.

At least if there's too much information at once you can pause the video or watch a section again until you fully understand it. Much worse are overly long videos with minutes of uninteresting filler.

Then there are text guides which under-explain or explain poorly. My pet peeve is when a guide describes the dance the players must do, but fails to properly explain what kind of shape the mechanics have and how much damage they do. Knowing how to do the fight properly is all well and good, but true mastery comes through understanding what's happening and why you need to do the things you do. That gives you the ability to adjust on the fly if something goes wrong.

One example of a symptom of too rigid guides and lack of full understanding is the popular macro used to visualize player positions around the boss in O10S. I was in a static back then and we had a different method of determining positions (tanks/healers take cardinals, DPS are paired with them and take intercardinals clockwise from their partners). When we had to get random players they were often confused by our way of doing things. The positioning really boils down to two rules: during the large X-shaped mechanic DPS get thunder circles around them so each DPS must go in a different direction, and earth shaker shoots a cone-shaped AoE towards each player so players must be roughly evenly spaced around the boss. When you understand what the mechanics do you can easily figure out where you need to be.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

At least if there's too much information at once you can pause the video or watch a section again until you fully understand it. Much worse are overly long videos with minutes of uninteresting filler.

Then there are text guides which under-explain or explain poorly. My pet peeve is when a guide describes the dance the players must do, but fails to properly explain what kind of shape the mechanics have and how much damage they do. Knowing how to do the fight properly is all well and good, but true mastery comes through understanding what's happening and why you need to do the things you do. That gives you the ability to adjust on the fly if something goes wrong.

One example of a symptom of too rigid guides and lack of full understanding is the popular macro used to visualize player positions around the boss in O10S. I was in a static back then and we had a different method of determining positions (tanks/healers take cardinals, DPS are paired with them and take intercardinals clockwise from their partners). When we had to get random players they were often confused by our way of doing things. The positioning really boils down to two rules: during the large X-shaped mechanic DPS get thunder circles around them so each DPS must go in a different direction, and earth shaker shoots a cone-shaped AoE towards each player so players must be roughly evenly spaced around the boss. When you understand what the mechanics do you can easily figure out where you need to be.

See thats why I just dont do guides. I need to learn by DOING the content. Then when I die or we wipe I need to be told what happened and at what part. Seeing it and playing it myself and having my Party Members help me understand is leagues better then watching a video from someone else perspective.
My own experience and perspective along with helpful teammates is the way to learn.

[Lambdafish]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this:

Your idea has been done already, his name was faust.

[Derio]

He already admitted he was wrong. The real problem was how the JP community pretty much harrassed the guy on the forums because of it.

Surprised SE didnt do a scoreboard at the end of the dungeon/instance like they do in pvp

[Raven2014]

I gonna put it blunt here, the OP's solution or any solution of this nature won't work: simply because people don't care.

This game is easy. Even without external resources it's not hard to figure out how thing work decently by yourself as long as one actively seek improvement like read the skill description, try out your rotation on dummy ...etc... And by decent, I don't mean people to get purple or even high blue parsers. Low blue or green is what I consider decent level, as in not amazing but at the very least one is not being a budern. And again, it's very simple to get to that level of play.

But you see people become butt-hurt when other talk about their performance. Have you ever tried to give advice in a dungeon run - in an informative-non-aggressive way - and see how it usually turns out? With so many resources out there, if any one player want to become better, barring physical disability they can become decent if they want to, fact is a lot just don't want to. You can create all the resources you want, as long as they're voluntary it doesn't matter the audience it was meant for doesn't care about using it. And if you try to enforce it ala WoW, why do you think there was a backslash against it.

I used to thought up my own solution to suggest. Something like an internal-private parse purely from an informative perspective. Like the game record your numbers and at the end of the run, inform you how you're performing comparing to the average, and it only display this result to you only. But then I bet even with that, instead of using that as a motivation to improve, there gonna be complain of nature like "I'm playing the game for fun my own way, I don't need the game to make me feel bad every time I run a dungeon!"

[Mikey_R]

While I agree there needs to be something to help a players performance, I don't think this is the right solution.

For starters, While it might do a good job of accurately depicting DPS numbers on a stationary target, it will do nothing to help in the fight itself. With added mechanics to deal with, it just is not the same. Even if you add AoEs or other mechanics to do, it's a different scenario in the fight itself where you have to coordinate the mechanics with 7 other people.

A healing Dummy is also an odd one to do as a healers DPS output is related to the other people in the party, the more unnecessary damage they take, the more the healer has to heal. Having a dummy you have to heal every now and then that takes consistent damage is not going to help in the real fight situation.

As for a tanking dummy, between tank busters, hard hitting adds, raid wides etc. there are many ways a tank can mitigate damage, but you cannot effectively account for all of them in a dummy fight, meaning, it, again, is not an accurate comparison between dummy fights and an actual encounter.

Then I'll just add the most glaring and obvious thing. Just because someone clears the dummy, doesn't mean they will consistently be putting in that much effort all the time.

To take a slight tangent, I want to talk about how effectively you can tell someone is doing a good job or not. For tanks and healers, it is easy. Is the tank positioning right, are they mitigating effectively, etc. For healers, are they keeping the party alive, are they mitigating/regening when needed, are they throwing out damage spells when they can etc. All these things can easily be seen my anyone in the fight, you know when something goes wrong when the tank dies to a tank buster, when the healer doesn't apply proper healing etc. It is there for everyone to see and it's generally easy for someone to point out that one tank/healer who isn't pulling their weight and call them out for it. Now, a DPSs only job is to do as much damage as possible. If you fail an enrage due to DPS, how do you know who the weak link is? In theory you don't know how anyone performed, was it 1 DPS, 2 DPS? Ok, if someone dies, you could point the finger that way, but I've seen cases where the DPS that died still managed to do more than they DPS who was alive for the whole fight. In short, there is no way at all for the group to find that weak DPS player and go, you need to improve. You can do it with tanks and healers, but for some reason, you cannot do it for DPS. Why should it be one way for tank/healer and another way for DPS.

With that, slightly long tangent out of the way, back to the issue. the main issue is that fact we have fights that have an enrage based on how much damage your party puts out over a certain time limit. This gives you a minimum DPS limit your group needs to hit if you are to succeed in the fight, no ifs or buts. However, the game gives no feedback in the fight as to where the improvement needs to be made. Yes, DPS needs to improve, but who? Which person is not pulling their weight. Again, tanks/healers are under scrutiny if something goes wrong, and the problem person can easily be dealt with, whether its telling them they need to improve or kicking them and getting someone else, improve your odds of beating the fight. However, since you cannot do that with DPS....you are at a standstill. You don't have the DPS to beat the fight, you don't know who is causing the DPS issues, so you either keep at it until either the timer runs out, or you get a miraculous victory, the alternative is making a new party from scratch and hope for the best. DPS players are essentially getting a free pass to be an underperformer, but they might not necessarily know that they are, and that's the thing. People don't have to tools to tell someone, you need to go and learn a proper rotation before you think about coming back in again.

It all comes down to the lack of some sort of DPS meter as a tool that should be used to gauge party performance, in the same way you can gauge a tank or healer and no, having something at the end of an encounter after you have cleared it isn't good enough. If you are already struggling with DPS somewhere, having a performance rating at the end isn't going to help here and now. Having a dummy act as a gate isn't going to help here and now. However, since SE don't want to add a parser, we will forever be stuck in a state where we have encounters with a minimal DPS requirement, but no way of knowing where that weak link is.

[Raven2014]

If you are already struggling with DPS somewhere, having a performance rating at the end isn't going to help here and now.

Why not? For example: if you're playing SAM and after the encounter the game inform you on average SAM class does 11k for this fight with a high of 14k

- If your number is around 11k, you can say alright I'm good enough. Like I said when I pug, I'm thankful if people are just average, I won't impose people to try and chase that 14k.
- But if your number significant lower than the average, say you only does 7k when the average is 11k, then it's a tell for you to improve.

But like I said, I don't think that's where the problem is. You are assuming people are oblivious to their (bad) play, want to improve but lack a mean to. I had played this game (and MMO) long enough that I believe for most, it's not that they don't know or can't, they simply doesn't care to. Again there is already plenty of resources for anyone want to improves, adding one more won't make any difference.

Again, even if you don't want to use any external resource, there are just a few basic things to adhere to as a DPS:

- Don't break your combo (and the game is pretty much in your face about what your combo are).
- Don't let your attack sit around un-used.
- Keep your buff and debuff up.
- Do your positional.

That can be applied to any DPS, you don't even have to do it perfectly, you don't even have to do all of them to be 'decent'. For example, the difference between a DRG who got every positional right and a DRG who did zero positional, the difference in DPS is only around 4%. But when you see an "ice mage" in dungeon, then you know "this dude doesn't even bother to read the skill description".

[Coatl]

The solution would have been to not allow in the BLM in the party in the first place. If people want no drama they'll just look at your logs when you join their group. If you don't meet their standards you'll be promptly removed for someone better. This will most likely be done without anyone saying anything, as no one wants to risk getting hammered by a GM.

This way there's no drama, no chance of ban as there's nothing to trace. Sad it has to be this way.

[Moonlite]

The solution would have been to not allow in the BLM in the party in the first place. If people want no drama they'll just look at your logs when you join their group. If you don't meet their standards you'll be promptly removed for someone better. This will most likely be done without anyone saying anything, as no one wants to risk getting hammered by a GM.

This way there's no drama, no chance of ban as there's nothing to trace. Sad it has to be this way.

Just want you to take a second and think of what you said. Now think you are SE. Lets see if we can agree on a few things before going on. SE has tried to set the bar low, they want the game to be inclusive as possible, and they allow tools with a don't ask don't tell policy. Now imagine the very casual players SE tries to help by making the game easier in the first two points. Those players are being excluded heavily by a tool that is a don't ask don't tell. It might not even be that they are being excluded based on that alone, but the perception by a certain percentage of the players. Still following hopefully. Do you think SE would have to take some sort of action to continuing protect the much larger casual player base over the much smaller and using non sanctioned tools high end progression group.





I have come to the wish about meters and similar tools. Make the third party tools illegal and the sites that post numbers from them take them down. Have what they deem high end progression exclude any random party making. And give those people a dps meter and a finished number that they can screen shot. Once they deem those instances no longer high end with ilvl increase remove the meter. They have meters, they have recorded stats in pvp, and they seem to be able to hide meters. Included it with patches. They don't find a solution that some what works this is only going to get worse.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

The solution would have been to not allow in the BLM in the party in the first place. If people want no drama they'll just look at your logs when you join their group. If you don't meet their standards you'll be promptly removed for someone better. This will most likely be done without anyone saying anything, as no one wants to risk getting hammered by a GM.

This way there's no drama, no chance of ban as there's nothing to trace. Sad it has to be this way.

This just create new Drama...a Black Mage Main or a BLM player is being denied access to content.
If groups just kick you outright for playing BLM, or you cant form groups because you play BLM, or if you matchmak and people leave because there is a BLM, that doesn't solve anything and it sure as heck doesn't help somebody improve.
Gatekeeping isn't good, its part of what creates all these nerfs and weird buffs to things