Parsing? Drama? ToS? Solution!

[MitsukiKimura]

I would love to have a setting in party finder that you can only join a high end party if you can cleared SSS in x time, or allow folks to join that parse blue and above.

These last few days PF has been garbage with parties barely able to pass content, dps and mechanically. Just because you were carried to your first clear does not mean I have to waste time trying to continue to carry you. Your grey/green parses do nothing but lower my game experience, how is that fair to me when I just want to farm stuff. why do we need to carter to lowest common denominator. if they want to play casually and grey/green, great, form a party just like everyone else. Parse is a tool, and while not the end all be all factor, it does assist in gauging someones potential.

People who want to use a third party parse tool to be toxic with it end up on my blacklist. Those kind of people are what's bad for this community. Nothing wrong with using it to improve yourself but if you're going to degrade others with it, then you need a reality check.

[purgatori]

Let's stop catering to the huge portion of the subscriber base who belong to the 'casual' classification, and instead focus entirely on endgame raiding and preparing people for endgame raiding. That worked out spectacularly for Wildstar, after all.

On a more serious note, I don't think that gating off Ex/Savage behind some sort of test of ability within a given role would be unreasonable. They did this in The Secret World, and I don't remember them being a big to-do about it. As a casual player myself, I attempted the boss fight required for high-end content in The Secret World, got thrashed, and promptly decided "well, I guess I'm not ready (yet)."

Similarly, I have done a few Ex fights in XIV, and didn't like being carried so much, so I decided that this content wasn't for me (I haven't even tried Savage yet, and doubt I ever will). I'm happy with doing normal raids, dungeons, and 24-mans, and have worked fairly hard on getting better at tacking that sort of content—e.g. through watching dungeon/job/raid videos on YouTube, practicing rotations on dummies, reading tool tips etc.

But I am unwilling to wade too deep into the technical minutiae of jobs, as it runs counter to how my brain works, and how I approach games: e.g., intuitively. For a person like me, an in-game parser isn't going to work, and if you spit back my numbers at me in a dungeon I'm not going to pay that any heed, either. If, on the other hand, you politely call me out on something sub-optimal I'm doing, then I'm always going to be amenable to changing it up.

All of that being said, I do wish the game did a better job of explaining mechanics, job actions, etc. in the game itself. External resources are fine, and they are probably necessary for high-end content or working out the niftiest ways of 'breaking' content, but for the people who just want to use whatever time they can spare for gaming to enjoy the game itself, it would be handy if, say, job quest lines actually did more to teach you how to play your job, in addition to telling a story.

[tdb]

I would also support gating savage/extreme content behind a test where you can prove you are worthy. However the test should be more than just a passive striking dummy. It should have mechanics similar to the actual fight. Otherwise you're going to get players who pass the test but can't keep up their DPS when they need to dodge mechanics at the same time. Party finder should have an option to require players to have passed the trial, so that the party leader can set it as appropriate for practice, clear and farm parties.

Requiring a particular clear time in SSS or other similar way of requiring arbitrary player-supplied DPS, on the other hand, is elitism. It allows requiring much higher DPS than is actually necessary to beat the fight. If you want to save those precious seconds of your time, set up a static. That not only allows you to vet players based on their ability, but consistently playing with the same group will also allow you to work tighter together than a bunch of random people.

[Mansion]

I would also support gating savage/extreme content behind a test where you can prove you are worthy. However the test should be more than just a passive striking dummy.

Oddly enough, that's roughly the purpose that Fausts used to serve in Alexander tiers. And players asked it away because it was getting tedious. It's difficult to include that kind of system to gameplay I guess.

One step in the good direction would be based on the Hall of Novices and try to get more stages of that content with higher difficulty settings. Like DPS check while dealing with mechanics, or healing checks, that kind of stuff. It does not have to be savage difficulty,but I'd argue than we are now 80 levels in the game and that's still quite common to see people with no basic understanding of combat gameplay in level cap content. We are not asking speedkills of anything really, but people understanding how mechanics and rotations should be the common ground. I don't like tagging in an Expert roulette and see DPS not using AoE skills (or AoE skills on a single target), or healers contributing to nothing DPS-wise, or a tank eating dmg with no CD at all.

Now in the high end scene, I'm not sure gating would work regardless. There are a lot of external factors about why people can be "bad" or why people can be "elitist". I don't think it's up to FFXIV to provide content to shave off those players (and I don't think it's possible). FFXIV can just enforce rules, and people who break them can face sanctions.
What is concerning here is how FFXIV/SE's holy judgement can sometimes feel weird.

[purgatori]

We are not asking speedkills of anything really, but people understanding how mechanics and rotations should be the common ground. I don't like tagging in an Expert roulette and see DPS not using AoE skills (or AoE skills on a single target), or healers contributing to nothing DPS-wise, or a tank eating dmg with no CD at all.

But are the players who haven't got these basics down really putting their hands up for Ex/Savage in the first place? At lot of the players like me who don't consider ourselves ready for Ex/Savage have these basics in our toolkit, but we're not confident about lining up burst windows, tank swapping, knowing fights back to front, and all the other things that confer competence on a high-end hopeful.

[tdb]

Oddly enough, that's roughly the purpose that Fausts used to serve in Alexander tiers. And players asked it away because it was getting tedious. It's difficult to include that kind of system to gameplay I guess.

Interesting. It never occurred to me they could serve that purpose. But then I didn't reach Lv60 until well into the Stormblood era, so I never got to see what Alexander was like with contemporary gear. And there wasn't much incentive to try it on savage.

Now in the high end scene, I'm not sure gating would work regardless. There are a lot of external factors about why people can be "bad" or why people can be "elitist". I don't think it's up to FFXIV to provide content to shave off those players (and I don't think it's possible). FFXIV can just enforce rules, and people who break them can face sanctions.

Savage and extreme content has one hard requirement: you must beat the boss before the enrage timer expires (or shortly after; some enrage mechanics allow pushing quite a bit into the enrage with good enough heals). That gives a minimum total party DPS for a successful clear. And that in turn gives individual player DPS. The different damage output of different roles must of course be accounted for. There will also be some variation between the DPS players, so some of them may have slightly lower than the required DPS and still clear the fight. But it's easier to perfect your DPS in a solo trial, free of distractions caused by other players. So if the trial is based on the bare minimum DPS required, it's probably enough to allow for the variance.

Healers are a bit of a difficult case here since their DPS output depends not only on how well the party avoids mechanics but also on the balancing of heals between the two healers. When I raided Omega savage with a static back in late 4.x, it was typical for me to get a low damage parse but a very high healing parse; for my co-healer this was the other way around.

It doesn't matter if it's your own lack of skill, a potato for computer or a poor Internet connection with high ping - if you can't meet the DPS requirement, you're not pulling your weight. It's regrettable that in some supposedly civilized parts of the world you still can't get decent Internet service, but if it's bad enough that you can't compensate for it with skillful play, the best thing to do is to admit your situation and ask if the group is okay with trying anyway. Demanding to be carried will get you nowhere. Maybe this is my own bit of elitism, living in a country where good Internet service is the norm. But at least I'm trying to be fair and base it on facts rather than a desire to farm the fight as fast as possible.

[tdb]

But are the players who haven't got these basics down really putting their hands up for Ex/Savage in the first place? At lot of the players like me who don't consider ourselves ready for Ex/Savage have these basics in our toolkit, but we're not confident about lining up burst windows, tank swapping, knowing fights back to front, and all the other things that confer competence on a high-end hopeful.

As someone with the requisite mental capability to memorize a fight as well as the manual dexterity to execute the necessary maneuvers, but with some difficulty committing to the rigid schedules most statics have, I would appreciate having a solo trial as a way of perfecting my skills and hopefully joining random groups in PF without having to fret too much about whether I can perform up to expectations.

[EaMett]

There already is a system, it’s called content tiers. If ex trials are a struggle you probably aren’t ready for savage, if you try savage but getting past floor 2 is a struggle you know you probably shouldn’t grief a all floor savage static.

Was said streamer running an ultimate reclear when this happened? I wasn’t really paying attention

[KageTokage]

I would genuinely love if they had some kind of mandatory competence check for getting into savage raids, even it's just being able to destroy the associated target dummy (They'd need to tune them in a more reasonable manner that assumes you're not wearing any savage loot yet, though). The biggest problem I had in the early weeks of Eden savage was people simply not pulling their weight in OS 1/2 and repeatedly hitting the enrages.

Was said streamer running an ultimate reclear when this happened? I wasn’t really paying attention

They were helping people get their first clears of Eden savage.

Honestly, if I knew someone good at the game was going out of their way to help me (I did actually get help with OS3 from one of said bored hardcore raiders back in Stormblood), the last thing i'd do is start mouthing off at them for offering constructive criticism (Which is what happened before the "victim" started getting roasted).

[Teros]

People who want to use a third party parse tool to be toxic with it end up on my blacklist. Those kind of people are what's bad for this community. Nothing wrong with using it to improve yourself but if you're going to degrade others with it, then you need a reality check.

add me to that list if you like , I have never bashed anyone for their parse, In fact I join a good deal of clear parties to see if I can help. All raiders started out in the grey area, some learned to get better on their own (typically the toxic ones), others found someone to teach them. I myself was very casual in HW until a FC mate took me under his wing and guided through SB.

all that I am claiming here is that if you want to play with a certain level of player that should be allowed in PF. I love the casuals on here that just respond with "just go make your party tryhard" when you cannot in game. I have put in PF a description of parse party and end up getting tells from a bunch of people on their soap boxes about the tos. I have even put up PFs in the past asking for grey and greens that want to learn how to be better and still get the same bunch of people about tos. Heck if you think about it, if you could gate your PF, toxicity would probably go down because you would know exactly what you are getting before you join that party.

the attack on raiders by "casuals" is also a major factor in why populations spikes for new content. They come back do the raid tier, 3 months later they are out because PF sucks most of the time and they get frustrated for the reasons I already mentioned.