Shrinking the gap by raising the floor | brainstorming skill incentives

[Veis_Alveare]

If there's one thing I've learned in my time playing and discussing FFXIV it's that you can't underestimate the skill floor. This is just my brainstorming on potential ways to raise that floor across the board, admittedly motivated at least somewhat by my selfish desire to not see the dev team continue to lower the ceiling in an effort to narrow the gap.

I admit I'm not the most ideal person to come up with this sort of thing. I'm motivated to do my best both out of pride and also a sense of responsibility towards the other people I encounter; I never want to feel like dead weight or like someone might perceive me as such. I realize that this isn't entirely uniform across the board so rather than focus on driving home the moral point behind my reasoning I'd prefer if we could leave any kind of ethical discussion to the side and focus on functional applications within the game to steer people in the right direction.

The first step to try to increase overall player knowledge/performance would be to understand why some players are doing so objectively poorly to begin with. I think this can be broken down into two main reasons.

Firstly, a lack of knowledge that they are underperformers.

In plenty of games (though not really FF games) you're able to win by mashing buttons a fair bit of the time. There is no inherent reason for someone trying to play this game differently from those. There may be some sort of overarching strategy to what they're doing (I've seen people in fighting games who understand high/mid/low hits but don't bother to learn combos) but overall they're of the belief that it's effectively a free-for-all.

To try to combat this we need to show this group of players that there is a really big difference between playing correctly and incorrectly. I think we can do this with either a carrot or a stick, since it's been made clear (though I strongly disagree with the stance) that there will be no ingame dps meter. ,

The stick is simple, but unlikely. Solo instances which necessitate some basic understanding of your skills to complete. I think tying such things into job quests would have been great but even just some main story battles that you will fail without proper dps would be awesome. Sadly, SE has already backpedaled on the laughably easy standard of difficulty in the story battles we see now with their introduction of easy/very easy modes. I'm sure in the coming years we'll see an option to just watch a cutscene of the battle too.

If we can't punish people for doing poorly I do think a really attractive option is to reward people for doing well. Clearly there is a measure of dps within the game, I think seeing a tangible reward contributing appropriate levels of dps would be really great. Even if it wasn't tied to every instance, if we gave out 1.5× exp/tomes for any roulette where you contributed adequately (with perhaps a small nerf to the baseline reward) it would incentivize people to try to reach the threshold for their bonus. With no ingame dps meter, and therefore no way to know exactly how well they're doing or need to do, they'd have to actually try if they want the gold star.

I'm also specifically not trying to delineate multiple levels of play here - it would functionally be a pass/fail system. Encouraging min/maxing in casual content is not what I'm after here, I'd just like to see people get more educated about the game.

So that's how I'd like to propose we help people who don't know they need help, but there are certainly people (even people I've encountered on these forums) who are aware they're underperforming and don't want to improve. This is a really foreign concept to me but I'm trying to wrap my head around it.

I do think the prior suggestion might get some of these people off their butts enough for the sake of their own rewards, but is there another way to change some minds?

My first thought was of the mentor system. I thought it was great that SE updated the qualifications necessary for mentorship, it was a move in the right direction in my opinion. I hope to see this continue to develop.

Next up I'd like to add a further prerequisite to mentorship - completion of a Stone, Sky, Sea-style basic trial. It would be ilvl-synced so that gear is a non-issue and require some basic, relevant mechanical handling to your role. If you're tanking you'd need to properly mitigate a few big hits, if you're healing you'd need to keep some NPC targets alive and every role would have to do a set amount of damage as well as contend with some common mechanical indicators like ground AoE, stack markers, look-away mechanics and the like.

I don't want this to be some really difficult gate to mentorship, I think the standards should be quite low. Mechanically it should be no more involved than a normal raid and the dps requirement should be tuned as such.

My reasoning for picking the mentor program is also two-fold. First, people want the shiny thing by their name. Second, it's currently a pool of people who aren't consistently able to set even this relatively low-level example for new players. We'd be killing two birds with one stone.

Sure, I know that even if SE implemented all these changes there would still be a group of people who just wouldn't care enough to try and that's fine I guess… but I think it'd go a long way towards convincing a lot of people on the fence about things to at least look over a guide and read their tooltips.

So what do you think? Can you see any other ways to convince people to improve? I'm all for some more suggestions, I'm positive I've not come up with the best ones yet.

[HeulGDarian]

Tutorial, its called a tutorial

[RitsukoSonoda]

Part of the issue is that they've caved in the past to the people crying over duties they couldn't clear claiming it was gating content instead of just standing firm and telling them to get good. The duties in question they did this with weren't even difficult. They just required actually doing mechanics. A couple of them were group duties and others were solo duties.

Add to it that the game itself in core mechanics is extremely dumbed down in comparison to nearly any other FF title as things that work here either wouldn't work at all in another FF title or it would progress forward about as fast as an Urbanmech trying to move uphill during a rockslide.

Then add to it the main story skip items in the store which a number of people are using immediately with their first character so they're jumping into the game trying to get into the latest content without experiencing any of the past mechanics or learning their selected job. I kind of feel like purchase of those items should require someone to have reached that point in the game through normal play first making it something people would use on alts.

As for the whole argument of tutorial. Tutorials only work if people actually do them. The problem elements aren't going to do a tutorial because the problem is these people think they know what they are doing or just don't care at all and expect other people to carry them.

IMO I feel like they need more mechanics heavy solo MSQ's and to stand firm and not nerf them when people inevitably cry on here because they didn't clear it. The people that are doing poorly because they think they know what they're doing when they actually don't will eventually catch on and correct what they're doing wrong and be better players for it. I honestly could care less about the latter group of lazy players. It's not worth making an effort to help people that deliberately choose not to help themselves.

[Seddrinth]

The only way you get people to improve is to officially allow parsers/fflogs and to make it so that you won't be punished if you call people out for poor performance in pf/df. SE will never do that because the majority of the sub paying players are super casual and would be turned off from the game, if SE were to go that direction. That means less revenue for the game and less resources to fund development of new raid content for players who like to push end game.

[Jojoya]

You don't understand people very well if you think "raising the floor" is going to get them to decide to improve.

Not everyone is here to be personally challenged playing a video game. Most are just here to relax and have fun. If they wanted to be a better player, they would already be working at it.

[Ilenya]

The only way you get people to improve is to officially allow parsers/fflogs

Implies this will actually make people improve and not blame the parser.

[Darsien]

You don't understand people very well if you think "raising the floor" is going to get them to decide to improve.

Not everyone is here to be personally challenged playing a video game. Most are just here to relax and have fun. If they wanted to be a better player, they would already be working at it.

And the 3-23 other players need to make up for that personal choice. That 1 person's selfishness inhibits others' ability to just "relax and have fun" because they need to make up for the person that felt improving in their 100+ hour investment was just too much.

Unacceptable. If people are so lazy, selfish, and entitled to not contribute, force becomes a viable alternative.

Edit: And to the surprise of no one, the person with this mentality has a 50% downtime in the content they do. At least as per magical mythical math. Tell me: What are you doing with those spare 4+ minutes in instances where you did literally nothing? Serious question.

[Sauteed]

Not everyone is here to be personally challenged playing a video game. Most are just here to relax and have fun.

I am kind of in this group with a tilt towards the occasional endure something I don't like for a glam or ingredient for house deco.

[Kleeya]

The only way you get people to improve is to officially allow parsers/fflogs and to make it so that you won't be punished if you call people out for poor performance in pf/df.

I totally fail to see how this is gonna work with people answering "you don't pay my sub", ignoring you, not caring of what you say, having the chat disabled, etc. You might even end up being the one kicked out of the group if they have enough votes for that because they were with another underperforming friend XD

[Veis_Alveare]

You don't understand people very well if you think "raising the floor" is going to get them to decide to improve.

Not everyone is here to be personally challenged playing a video game. Most are just here to relax and have fun. If they wanted to be a better player, they would already be working at it.

I'm assuming you didn't read the post?

The very concept I'm talking about here is how to raise up the bottom performers, it isn't just a vague topic about "make stuff harder, people need a challenge" but rather "how do we make people want to try" which... has nothing to do with what you posted?

As to your claims about knowing what "most" people are here for they're just unsupported by any evidence and will be ignored. You don't know the potential motivation of the greater playerbase any more than any of us does.

When it comes to me not understanding people - yes, that's something else I touched on already. I don't understand the laziness exhibited by some or how they rationalize wasting the time of others. It's gross.

The only way you get people to improve is to officially allow parsers/fflogs and to make it so that you won't be punished if you call people out for poor performance in pf/df.

I just didn't see the point in even really suggesting something as cut and dry as parsing. Like, would it definitely motivate some people even if they weren't able to be "shamed" for doing poorly? Of course. But SE has come out rather strongly against it and somewhat recently as well.

I totally fail to see how this is gonna work with people answering "you don't pay my sub", ignoring you, not caring of what you say, having the chat disabled, etc. You might even end up being the one kicked out of the group if they have enough votes for that because they were with another underperforming friend XD

I've already been kicked for the crime of competence, specially for "dpsing too much" as a healer in Mt. Gulg. No one died btw.

Can confirm when bads have the majority they don't seem to hesitate to use it.