Shrinking the gap by raising the floor | brainstorming skill incentives

[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.