Shrinking the gap by raising the floor | brainstorming skill incentives

[ForteNightshade]

It only becomes a problem when a lesser skilled player starts demanding access to content designed for higher skill levels, or when a higher skilled player starts demanding better performance from lesser skilled players in content that doesn't need the greater skill.

Which, to be fair, has become an issue with Shadowbringers. A prime example would be crafters, which were already made easier throughout Stormblood but were reduced to comical levels of ease despite no real demand for such simplification except from players who didn't want to put in the same degree of effort yet wanted the same results. On the combat side of things, healers were gutted and healing itself made noticeably easier with the reduction of tank busters and heavily healing requirements even at the Savage level. In fact, the third tier fights (Leviathan and Idol of Darkness) are a big step down from previous third three fights, which used to be a benchmark or "wall" of sorts. The aforementioned reduction in tank busters have made tanking notably easier—nevermind the homogenization with both roles.

[linayar]

But it is objectively true, like that is the definition of the word.

I'm talking about whether we need mentor to fill queues. What is also objectively true is that the function is part of mentorship right now, and the commendation system reflects that.

A queue that is functionally mentor roulette but called something else (perhaps Duty in Need as Liam suggests) would allow for the continuation of queue help by people who have everything unlocked but would detach that (as well as the related mount) from mentorship. This would likely lead to less people disinterested in mentoring from doing it but only for the carrot on the end of the stick.

I think Burger King crown mentors are enough of a meme at this point. It'd be nice to see less of that.

Well, the reason why I'm not concerned about those so-called "BK" mentors is because of what I called the passive effect of mentors. Even if you're not actually interested in actively mentoring someone, you could still benefit them just by being in their party.

Anything beyond that would be the same regardless if you're a mentor or not. You could still be a jerk or give wrong advice or quit if you don't like the duty or whatever regardless if you have the crown.

Meme or not, I think the mentorship system is fine as is. People would just have to judge each mentor individually, but also understand the purpose of mentors. Mentors do not have to be someone who has ever entered any content more difficult than Hard mode. (You may need to know Extreme for the roulette, but that's a separate issue for the roulette itself.)

[HyperiusUltima]

Meme or not, I think the mentorship system is fine as is. People would just have to judge each mentor individually, but also understand the purpose of mentors. Mentors do not have to be someone who has ever entered any content more difficult than Hard mode. (You may need to know Extreme for the roulette, but that's a separate issue for the roulette itself.)

No, it's not. The mentorship system is skewed at the moment due to how you simply can just buy 3 Lv 70s in Mog Station and then whiz all the way to 80 after you already have an 80. Though, that's only the most extreme of examples; the most common ones are people not having the experience that's required of their job(for combat) and general idea of the role, as most people will put Tanks as "Takes hits, gets hate" and not talk about using CDs in rotation. There's also the handbasket that says "Healers only heal" and DPS that just press one button and not much else. If anything, I am on board about Combat Mentorship having a Solo Trial of sorts to at least show you know basic mechanics for each role as mentioned(a la Hall of the Novice style). For DPS in particular, it'd be meeting a DPS Check or Healers keeping their party alive for an extended amount of time with raid-wides and stacks(which should be taxing on resources somewhat in design so they know to use Lucid and MP Management).

We also need a Hall of Adventure to show the person various mechanics that otherwise they may never understand, as the current Hall of the Novice is partially outdated due to only showing basic AoEs, not any of the other markers that are all prevalent in Stormblood and beyond.

The Hall of Adventure should at least be shown at around Lv 50 since that's when Stack Markers start to become more prevalent, I believe; but that's only off of what I can remember.

[linayar]

No, it's not. The mentorship system is skewed at the moment due to how you simply can just buy 3 Lv 70s in Mog Station and then whiz all the way to 80 after you already have an 80.

But what does that get you? That's the easy part. You might as well level manually and work toward getting commendations and the required amount of duties done along the way instead of having to start fresh after paying for boost. On the other hand, not boosting wouldn't change much regarding the type of mentor it is.

[Stigmar]

I think the big problem here is the game is not very clear on how each job works and with SE taking the approach of lets just scrap move sets and add new ones in (tho they are getting better with that by having abilities auto upgrade now} when a job is broken it makes it hard to have a in game tutorial on how a rotation should look when they keep changing it every expansion.

The other issue is SE only have a basic idea of a rotation when they design jobs ultimately it is the player base that figures out optimal rotations which have differed from how SE envisioned it would play out (War 2.0 Yoshi P: Your playing it wrong) I bet most of here figured out most of it but we probably all looked around online for advice, but not everyone is going to do that and just assume the bread crumbs of information they get from the game is how you play the game as its the official source.

However I do understand the other side of it that moment when your in a dungeon and its taking 30 mins to 45 min and the other dps is a sam or blm you do not need a parser to know something is going very wrong here and you as the other dps is left to carry them as complaining would just get you a nice visit from a gm because your suggestions on how can be considered harassment. I am sure some of you have been there personally I have not but I have had FC mates that it has happened to.

So what is the solution? well SE could make a tutorial to help but they already said they won't (thanks SE) so other option why not implement some kind of hud element that shows you a rotation and one one that shows you the button presses you done think like in fighting games like tekken II and the rotations could be from a database that players could upvote the best ones that the game uses based on your skill/spell speed and a flag system so this would potentially avoid trolls making one that would not be helpful.

so what do you guys think?


Remember somewhere out there there is a dragoon that dies every minute and 15.45 seconds a black mage gets hit by something for not moving out of laylines.

[ADVSS]

So what is the solution? well SE could make a tutorial to help but they already said they won't (thanks SE) so other option why not implement some kind of hud element that shows you a rotation and one one that shows you the button presses you done think like in fighting games like tekken II and the rotations could be from a database that players could upvote the best ones that the game uses based on your skill/spell speed and a flag system so this would potentially avoid trolls making one that would not be helpful.

so what do you guys think?


Remember somewhere out there there is a dragoon that dies every minute and 15.45 seconds a black mage gets hit by something for not moving out of laylines.

You mean exactly like the training area from MonsterHunterWorld? One with striking dummy, and dps meter as well as moveset and input display?

[ZedxKayn]

Hot take, but I actually don't think you should be able to progress in a game when you refuse to put in the work for it.

You know, whatever happened to video games having some sort of trial or boss right that would sooner or later force the player to improve or prepare themselves beforehand, in other words, force the players to do more than drooling over their keyboard or controller for once?

I honestly wouldn't even care how other people play if it didn't affect the time I would spend in a duty. And before I get hit with that "wow can't even handle a no DPS healer for ONE dungeon XD" or something like that, it's never just one duty, it's nearly all of them, and MY time wasted by someone not understanding healer DPS (for example, really, so many things can be wrong with how some players perform) and those who enable them (no, the AST doing nothing while waiting for me to drop to 80% to Benefic me in SB dungeons is not "doing fine") becomes quite significant when you run a lot of things. I don't pay their sub, but I pay my own sub, and while my enjoyment of the game ultimately takes precedence over my annoyance with some of the playerbase, I frankly don't like spending some of the time I'm paying for with people who don't put in their share of the work. Rant over.

BUT I also cannot (entirely) blame these players because SE provides absolutely NO in-game resources for people to learn how to play their role efficiently or their job on a basic level and this is really the elephant in the room. If you add such tutorials and then a DPS meter that at least indicates what the "minimum" amount of DPS would be expected of you I don't think there would be much room for harassment.

Making solo duty easier to allow people who don't care enough to progress was a mistake imo, downright the opposite of what was needed. If a player fails, if SE won't give us proper tutorials and/or a DPS meter, at least give them general tips on things that might need to be looked at, ie the level of their gear or their DPS output, and encourage them to ask other players what might be wrong if they don't want to just say "google it".

[Jojoya]

Hot take, but I actually don't think you should be able to progress in a game when you refuse to put in the work for it.

I agree in general but MMOs aren't your standard game where the developers expect you to buy it, play until you've hit your skill limit then quit. MMOs need to retain players for the long term. Putting in barriers where players can't get access to new content without increasing their skill level would depopulate servers rapidly.

It's why MMO content tends to be layered for different skill levels instead of a single progression path with an ever-increasing skill level. Someone might not have Savage level combat skills, but they can still craft or gather so the Savage raiders don't have to spend hours of their time doing those things for themselves. Cut off their access to new content, and they're not likely to stick around just for the sake of the Savage raiders who do get to have new content.

[Veis_Alveare]

I agree in general but MMOs aren't your standard game where the developers expect you to buy it, play until you've hit your skill limit then quit. MMOs need to retain players for the long term. Putting in barriers where players can't get access to new content without increasing their skill level would depopulate servers rapidly.

It's why MMO content tends to be layered for different skill levels instead of a single progression path with an ever-increasing skill level. Someone might not have Savage level combat skills, but they can still craft or gather so the Savage raiders don't have to spend hours of their time doing those things for themselves. Cut off their access to new content, and they're not likely to stick around just for the sake of the Savage raiders who do get to have new content.

I think this was a reasonable response for sure, it just lacks the nuance surrounding the actual skill gaps in this game. In any other context I'd be agreeing but the difference between the real bottom performers and just what I'd deem "acceptable" for casual content is so huge it's hard to find an analogy to really demonstrate it.

Let's try! Excuse my american standard school terms.

I think we've got the bleeding edge raiders, people competing in world first races and stuff. They're like the kids who graduated high school early. We have the normal raiders in mid-to-hardcore groups/early PF then who are like your normal seniors. Casual statics with no defined plan of when they're clearing are juniors, along with a bunch of people PFing long term. The sophomores are people who might dabble in EX and do well but just don't really get into raiding or optimization.

If you follow this train of thought I'd say you'd have a decent chance of picking a player at random who has maybe a 4th grade education. That's where I see a lot of people right now. Never mind not making it to high school, they aren't even in middle school. They are so far behind they can't even begin to fathom the things that they don't know. Many don't understand things like the difference between GCD and oGCD or spells/abilities. Some of us are over here talking about how they don't AoE properly and these people literally don't know what that means.

I've encountered at minimum 3 separate players in the game who did not know that there were descriptions of their skills that popped up when they hovered over them and more had no concept of customizing their UI which included moving skills from the keys to which they were assigned as they were learned.

To raise these people up doesn't take plopping them into a Savage difficulty fight, it's literally just forcing them to learn some of these incredibly basic things.

Yes, I would say if you've literally not read a tooltip you just... shouldn't be able to get through the story. Nope, it's not for you. You need to fail enough that it occurs to you to maybe try to understand what any of your buttons do. Right now that isn't the case and it's completely absurd.

So no, I don't think the answer to any of this is more high end content. My thread has been and continues to be about the idea of helping the worst of the community to be less bad and what the most effective way to do that is. Arguing against the idea that anyone is talking about a single skill level being the only acceptable one is just literally a strawman, most of us just want these people to do the ffxiv equivalent of graduating middle school.

[HyperiusUltima]

To raise these people up doesn't take plopping them into a Savage difficulty fight, it's literally just forcing them to learn some of these incredibly basic things.

This was what I was getting at with the Hall of Adventure idea. Literally they can take resources right now to help with that and make it a requirement for anyone that Jump Potions, along with Hall of the Novice, before attempting Holminster Switch given how people tend to die in that dungeon a lot still because they don't know what their job does because they get flooded in the button layout and trying to understand systems that would probably confuse a person who's completely new to MMOs.

Also...

But what does that get you? That's the easy part. You might as well level manually and work toward getting commendations and the required amount of duties done along the way instead of having to start fresh after paying for boost. On the other hand, not boosting wouldn't change much regarding the type of mentor it is.

It was a joke, and you probably missed the 'extreme' part of it? Highly doubt people will do that, unless they just want to throw money at SE. Either way, there's a lack of a baseline for mentor other than "Get three different roles to LV 80", which is kind of a joke. SB created the Burger King Crown meme(provided it wasn't there in Heavensward; didn't see it thrown around then), but what's important is that that baseline creates mentors who at least have a basic understanding of what their job is and what they're supposed to do. That's literally it.