Tools they could add besides DPS meters... (For endgame)

[Colt47]

These definitely don't sound like they'd make the cut due to the baggage involved.

1) Score Cards or scoring systems. They did have something like it for deep dungeons, but putting it in savage is asking for trouble. It's better just to keep victory binary.
2) Systems that track Efficiency. Basically, it falls into the same realm as the DPS meters.

Stuff they most certainly could add

1) Better systems to facilitate learning a fight. I'm talking giving people actual information on the mechanic in the game and spelling it out for them, because this is one headache that isn't going to go away. Even if it only happens upon dying to the mechanic, it would greatly reduce the requirement on seeing videos before the fight, which means less prep time and more time playing the game.

2) A better progress tracker. They got progress trackers for when you do dungeons and things so I don't know why they can't be used for savage mechanics.

[Sealish]

So I've been reading through all of this and have a few opinions to throw in.
First (and most on topic), I think that it would be nice if there was some sort of soft indicator that would tell you as a DPS player if you were dealing enough damage to not be holding your team members back in whatever content you are playing. A simple indicator that only you can see somewhere (maybe a dot beside your party panel or whatnot). It would change colour as the encounter progresses to keep you informed.

Green: You are doing well. If you keep doing what you are doing, you will be able to make up for personal mistakes or even mistakes of others.
Yellow: You are still pulling your weight but you are making enough mistakes that one or two more big ones or if you start being even messier on your rotation you could start causing the group trouble.
Red: You are currently performing at a level where someone else is needing to perform higher than normal in order for the encounter to be beaten.

If everyone has a yellow dot, the encounter will still be completed. In fights without an enrage mechanic, the dot will never turn red. The reason I would like this is because if you are playing as a tank or healer... you know if you are playing well enough to beat an encounter. The party either dies or it doesn't. But when I play DPS I find it hard to tell sometimes if I am being a productive team member.

As for the other things discussed in this topic about elitism and gatekeeping and such... Here are my two cents.
Different game modes are targeted at different people. If you want to play the hard content, the content specifically made for people that enjoy challenge at a level where you need to optimize your play in order to be successful, then you need to make sure that you are playing at the same level as those you are playing with. The fun from THAT content comes from overcoming a difficult task with expert execution and tactics. You unfairly ruin other players' fun by not improving and playing at their expected level of competence.

HOWEVER that is not the only content in the game. A player should not be locked out of experiencing a piece of content entirely because of their ability to perform at the highest levels. They should still be able to play every raid/dungeon/whatever at a lower difficulty which requires only basic competency to complete, and all statistical and cosmetic item rewards should be the same across all difficulties. Drop rates can vary (reasonably, like 2-3x higher not 20-30x) but the availability of the rewards should not. Exclusive rewards for higher difficulties should be things like titles. An exclusive reward is important for a feeling of satisfaction, but the reward does not need to be something that excludes another player from advancement. Someone playing this content should be able to do the content without feeling anxious or feeling pressure from other players.

[Colt47]

There shouldn't even be a discussion on performance in the game. There are people that swear by dps being in a good spot and yet they are the busiest, most over burdened jobs in the game. Rotations are way better in other games compared to this one when it comes to damage dealers and end game. A lot of people who are not playing very well on dps in this game are probably just fine in any other one.

[Mikey_R]

What I would define as basic competency is the minimum required performance by everyone to beat an encounter which is often quite forgiving and this is chosen by the devs,...

I am interested on your opinion on a simple scenario I will list below.

If we go by an encounter has a minimum required performance set out by the devs, then that means the fight will be cleared if everyone performs to this minimum standard. However, what about when you have a group that can still clear the encounter, there are no deaths, however, one of the DPS is performing at under 10% of their potential. This means the other players are having to make up for the DPS deficit of this one player.

My question is, despite, as a group, the party as a whole is meeting the 'minimum required level', one player is massively underperforming. Would it be fair to say this player is NOT performing to the minimum required performance which means the others have to perform to a higher standard? If so, why is it fine for that one player to put less work into clearing the fight than the rest of the party? They could replace that member with someone else and clear the boss quicker, which means less time for mistakes to happen, less time for resources to drain etc.

Basically, what this boils down to, SE has a set expectation, a minimum performance level that needs to be met. So, how do you measure it? If you keep hitting enrage with no mechanic failures and no deaths, however everyone in your group thinks they are doing fine for their rotation, how can you find where your weak spot is. You cannot just say, play better, they already think they are playing at their best and this is where the issue lies with alot of people.

People go into content that they are not ready for, however there is no way ingame to tell if someone is ready or not, this is why people then turn to parsers. Even with a new fight, an experienced player can still output a respectable level of DPS, so if you have someone who is clearly underperforming from the get go, you can either say they need to get better or you replace them.

Even if you do a personal one, you still fail a check and someone asks how everyone done. Are you going to be the one who says, yup, the game tells me I'm the one who is doing badly, or are you going to stay silent or lie?

Again it comes down to the minimum expectation and the game does not give any feedback to say yes, you are good enough or no, you need to get better. A minimum performance line has been set, however, you don't know if you have crossed it yet.

[Sealish]

snip

That is why I like my idea of a coloured dot. It is simple, it tells you if you are performing within, below, or on the border of what the developers have set as the minimum needed, it is private, and it is non-comparable (you cannot ever go "my green dot is more green than yours"). The bar for a green dot in normal content would be VERY low.

[Awha]

LUL this is far too much effort just allow for meters to be used and just follow the protocol if someone harasses someone over numbers and they get reported GM's take action.

[Vahlnir]

LUL this is far too much effort just allow for meters to be used and just follow the protocol if someone harasses someone over numbers and they get reported GM's take action.

At the very least I think it could implemented seamlessly into the Stone, Sky, Sea mode instead of just telling players "Here's a dummy. Kill it fast. Good luck have fun" and leaving it at that. If there's a good place for a meter I think it could be there. Or maybe have it pop up when a player attacks a regular training dummy. Out of sight and out of mind until needed, and it could give players a decent idea of what they could be doing. Then they can work it into whatever mechanics they need to deal with. Not having to see their names publicly displayed with 3/7/23 others might also take some pressure off anyone who's a little uneasy in a party setting.

[Ralph2449]

I am interested on your opinion on a simple scenario I will list below.

If we go by an encounter has a minimum required performance set out by the devs, then that means the fight will be cleared if everyone performs to this minimum standard. However, what about when you have a group that can still clear the encounter, there are no deaths, however, one of the DPS is performing at under 10% of their potential. This means the other players are having to make up for the DPS deficit of this one player.

My question is, despite, as a group, the party as a whole is meeting the 'minimum required level', one player is massively underperforming.

And my opinion is very simple, if you need to invent some extremely rare scenario to justify your design preferences then something is amiss, a far more realistic scenario is that you will often have a few overperformers along with many average people and a small number of underperformers meaning you are well above the minimum requirements together, actually the more overperformers you have the bigger the room of error for the rest which further lowers the actual requirements to beat an encounter.

Now if you want to talk about a ridiculous scenario where everyone somehow ends up being exactly on the minimum requirements and you found a player that somehow afks most of the fight to reach that 10% of their potential number of yours, I would say you need to be more honest with yourself.

Why are you constantly saying that people who want to be rewarded for their efforts, or who don't want to play with people not as good as them, are elitists with their ego solely tied to video games? Did an elitist hurt you in the past?

You should read what I wrote in the previous better then, I wrote specifically why certain design ideas and personal feelings are wrong and shouldnt be promoted because they are both unhealthy, lead to delusions of elitism and hurt the community, a pretty decent list of important reasons to avoid.

And to be honest I was merely explaining, we have a perfect representation of what happens when you pander to the tryhard/elitist crowd in the form of WoW, a game who has chosen to focus on high end content and achievement driven rewards at the expense of everything else.

And I would not want to see this great game be turned into the elitist tryhard mess that is WoW, especially now that we are seeing FF14 numbers consistently increase which shows it is a far healthier mmo than WoW, which btw droves of casuals are abandoning since the latest expansion doubled down on your "reward for their efforts" design mentality.

[ForteNightshade]

Reasonable*=See inflated

I wasnt talking about soar, I was talking about flare star which is why I mentioned p1, that phase that literally lasts for less than a minute, I was in a group with a tryhard who unironically complained about the placement as if he was in some static tryhard group, it was a pug and it was not something that caused anyone problem and there was more than enough safe space to move to, he just complained because it wanst that perfectly stacked flare star IN A PUG.

So no it wasnt about a dps check, it was just a delusional tryhard who for some reason expects people to have done the fight in some l33t group a million times before and follows their l33t strat at all times cuz of course everyone must have done that fight when it was current.

So a basic opener is inflated in an Extreme Trial fight? That's literally the barest of minimum expectations to have of anyone.

Could they have been a Black Mage, Bard or Machinist per chance, all of which had cast times in Heavensward, and in the case of Black Mage, very minimal movement tools? If so, they were likely upset someone baited a Flare Star AoE near them, which focused excessive movement. While not something to rage over, it's certainly annoying, and yes, worthy of being brought up. Perhaps instead of defaulting to calling someone a tryhard if they show even the slightest interest in maintaining their damage, you might notice these things. Granted, they could have threw a gasket, though based on your responses in this thread alone. I suspect it's you making them out to be the bad guy far more if only because in less than a paragraph, you've insulted them several times.

And you show your elitism by literally what you said, the devs did not intend for soar to always be skipped else it wouldnt exist, it is a mechanic that exists to be done, by saying everyone should skip it or disband, it means you expect everyone to have performance above what the encounter actually requires which is chosen by the devs, therefore you have falsely inflated the requirements for that content which results in elitism and gatekeeping.

And now we see you throwing "elitism" around for even the slightest disagreement. Not everyone wants to perform at the barest minimum and just "get by". If a party advertises "Skipping Soar," then by joining their party you're agreeing to such a prerequisite. If you aren't capable of doing so, you have no business joining. That isn't elitism but simple courtesy. If there aren't any parties available tailored towards your preference, make your own. If it doesn't fill quickly, then the community has spoken.

Speaking of which, what the devs intended is, frankly, irrelevant. The community decisions what standards exists. A prime example is healer DPS. The dev team never intended for healers to contribute large amounts of DPS. In fact, Yoshida infamously claimed they don't calculate healer DPS at all despite releasing Gordias and Mids, which were downright impossible without. That statement has since but walked back to claim they don't calculate healer DPS outside of early week prog, or at least not heavily. Regardless, the community has more or less thrown out that entire philosophy be it due to equal contribution arguments, lackluster healing design both mechanical and encounter wise or simply adapting to the systems given.

That last statement is important as I can flip your argument and say if they didn't want players setting higher expectations like Skip Soar. They shouldn't have put it at a HP threshold low enough players can easily skip if they're reasonably competent at their job. Expectations don't arise out of thin air but from adaptation within the game rules.

Yes, when the content has generous checks and even allows for mistakes so you can still clear after that then it is okay, the world didnt end, someone just didnt play well, instead of being offended by the fact not everyone is a tryhard maybe you should have felt better for yourself for having above average performance to get everyone through, I am starting to think this western mentality that seems to be repulsed by anyone underperfoming comes for the delusional "pull yourself up from your bootstraps" meme since it is the same thing but for irl.

My issue with this mentality is that hypothetical Black Mage only cleared on the backs of better players putting in a greater effort then they were willing to. If everyone shared their mentality, they wouldn't meet the DPS check, no matter how generous. Therefore, why is it okay for players to essentially leech—queuing into content woefully above their skill level—yet players criticising them for doing so are "elitists"?

Put another way. We all started off bad and/inexperienced at some point. Except some of us opted to learn how to improve. Why can't others if they want to attempt harder content?

Maybe players shouldnt be playing a game if they cant have fun without expecting people to be on their already INFLATED level, this is a video game, not a job, not something you do to please others and definitely not something that your self worth should depend on.
If you are frustrated cuz someone is learning or is new, you are the problem for having severely unrealistic and false expectations and that is on you, if you treated this like a video game you wouldnt be having such problems.

Your definition of fun isn't the holy grail. I'm not particularly keen having someone like the aforementioned Black Mage waste my time in Savage level content because they can't be bothered to put in any effort beyond the barest of minimums. It's disrespectful to upwards of seven other people who are attempting to clear say, E10S, but now have to deal with more mechanics they may otherwise have skipped or risk things like damage downs or repeated wipes due to someone having no idea what they're doing.

And your now shifting the goal posts. We aren't talking about new players and you know it. People weren't demanding Skip Soar and whatnot in learning parties. Most people are far more accommodating in a learning party, provided you're there to learn the actual fight and not your job. It's when players who don't know their job join clear/farm/two chest players that upset people as they have business doing so.

Scenarios like Mikey_R are not "extremely rare" if you frequent PF whatsoever. They are, in fact, quire common. Hence why it's been a continuous talking point for several years. Hell, I only just saw someone on stream who when told to upgrade their i500 weapon (last tier BiS), they promptly responded with "Why? Who cares?" This was in E11S, by the way. And with your logic, since they cleared they're above criticism despite using outdated gear.

[Raelsar]

While it's definitely tempting to add such systems, especially if you're knee-deep into the endgame aspects... parsers and other performance-related tools do represent a slippery slope for player behaviours.

Just from my own experience playing WoW, it's evident that these led to the game pretty much becoming dominated by a performance-obsessed mindset that put optimization and efficiency above all else -- including actually enjoying your time playing the game. To make matters even worse, it bled into ALL levels of content; new players were not spared from the demands for optimization and efficiency, basically making that game unapproachable.

The current "detente" between FFXIV and parsers where a blind eye is turned to them if they aren't causing a problem despite being against the rules is probably the best situation that I can think of. Making it more widespread might make it easier for those who are concerned with a good performance, but it will be to the detriment of everyone else; the snowball effect couldn't be stopped.

---

I recall reading/hearing that the developers for FFXIV actually did consider implementing these tools at one point (may have been during one of the Live Letters)... but promptly stopped working on it when they saw it was affecting their own behaviour, namely making them more unpleasant to be around because of the strong competitive aspect they invariably start playing up. And again, from my own experience with WoW, I can actually attest to this. It was pretty much inevitable that I tried out using a damage meter... and I found myself being more and more of a jerk, and I wasn't liking it. I stopped using it pretty quickly after this realization, and I suspect Yoshi-P saw the exact same thing happening when his own team got a hold of them for FFXIV.

Needless to say, it's likely why he's dead-set against implementing them... they affect player behaviours and cause social problems.
Competition isn't always a good thing, especially when you're trying to work together.