I'm bored when I heal because I need more complex DPS rotations

[LilimoLimomo]

While game design is going to strive to provide the optimal user experience, game design in and of itself is not the solution to player conflict.

Oh it's certainly not the tool, because as you've said, zero is never a realistic expectation. But game design does sculpt player behavior, and thus it's a valuable tool in a designer's arsenal to mitigate conflict and promote harmony.

I would dispute that in FFXIV there is a "non-trivial" chance of encountering TOS violations

It sounds like you're implying that in your experience you haven't seen much of this behavior, and I believe you when you say that. I'm sure each player's experience varies.

I'd also hazard that players like us that are good at the game are much less likely to witness such behavior, as we have to simultaneously end up in a group with both a "callout" player and a "barely good enough" player to see this; if only one of those is present, we won't see it.
ie: Probability of Experiencing Callout = Likelihood of Grouping with "Callout" Player x Likelihood of Grouping with "Barely Good Enough" Player

However, when you are a "barely good enough" player, there's always a "barely good enough" player in your group, and that means all it takes is:
ie: Probability of Experiencing Callout = Likelihood of Grouping with "Callout" Player

[Sebazy]

Oh it's certainly not the tool, because as you've said, zero is never a realistic expectation. But game design does sculpt player behavior, and thus it's a valuable tool in a designer's arsenal to mitigate conflict and promote harmony.

This is actually a very interesting topic and is surprisingly well understood and documented, more so than you might realise.

Probably the best quick summary of it is an old Penny Arcade comic from nearly 20 years ago. (Profanity warning etc if you're at work).

The actual game's design doesn't have nearly as much bearing upon player behaviour as you might think. The real issues arise with a feeling of anonymity, the lack of a tight community and the resulting lack of accountability for your actions. This goes hand in hand with people being very tribal creatures. When that 'tribe' becomes too large or simply doesn't exist in the first place (aka you feel like you don't belong) a lot of people can't help themselves but become hugely problematic. It's all too easy to vent your frustrations at someone who has no ability to retaliate nor are you ever likely to see them again if you don't want to.

Meanwhile, older MMOs such as Everquest, FFXI and vanilla WoW had far more room for players to grief each other than FFXIV ever will, yet I'd argue outside of FFXI at a pinch, the drama was always much lower and more contained despite the griefing often being vastly more impactful. Why? It was because in these days, servers were much smaller and self contained. If someone genuinely rocked the boat and caused problems they would quickly get found out across the population quickly getting avoided and blacklisted from most groups and teams. For the most part, the communities self policed. Something that's almost unimaginable today.

Modern MMOs communities draw a scary number of parallels to an old 1970s study called the Behavioural sink.. Stuff too many rats in a cage and no matter how well you provide for them, they will eventually self destruct.

The TLDR of the above is that a vast and largely anonymous player pool breeds unaccountability which causes much of the bad attitudes you see in game. This isn't exclusive to FFXIV by any stretch

[LilimoLimomo]

(i read it all) The TLDR of the above is that a vast and largely anonymous player pool breeds unaccountability which causes much of the bad attitudes you see in game. This isn't exclusive to FFXIV by any stretch

I think you might be misunderstanding what I'm getting at, but that's fair because I haven't been super explicit. The problem of people being anonymous jerks on the internet is indeed A Thing; that goes without question. But as designers we know that we can impact how much of that behavior occurs; we have seen how different designs for the same system can result in increased conflict or decreased conflict.

At least in my experience, it's inaccurate to blame the entire issue on "griefers". Without a doubt, there are plenty of players who criticize the play of others with good intentions; they have a view of how they think the game should be played, they see a player not playing it this way, and they genuinely think they are doing a helpful thing by pointing out a player's imperfections and telling them what they should do. Many of these players probably don't realize how much of communication gets lost over text, and may not be able to adequately conceive of players who perceive the game differently than them and thus find their criticism to be demanding and upsetting rather than helpful. Which is simply to say: conflict can be created even with the best of intentions.

And in my experience from playing with my less skilled friends, most of the poor behavior I've seen is from that kind of player: a player who doesn't seem like they're intentionally setting out to grief, but rather thinks their way is right and isn't being considerate of other experiences and perspectives. The hardcore trolls are much more rare, and thus constitute only a minority of the problem in my experience. Which is good, because if people are looking to cause a problem, they will find a way to do so regardless; but if people aren't, then we can often design solutions that mitigate the chances of conflict.

In addition — and in reviewing I realize I never mentioned this before — designers can influence how toxicity manifests. It's true that even if someone isn't being criticized about their DPS, they could still be criticized about something else in their kit. But not all criticism is the same, and some of it hits different. For example, if someone in my dungeon tells me my heals are bad, but nobody has died, then they don't have much of a leg to stand on; the game has given me transparent feedback that I've healed well enough, and that can make a misguided statement to the contrary easier to swallow. But if that same person points out that I'm not doing my full healer DPS rotation, that's likely going to be harder to shake because the game doesn't give similar feedback about my DPS. And the worst part is, at least part of what they're saying is objectively right: I haven't been doing my DPS rotation, just Dia and Glare but never Glarera or Glarega. So even if they're a jerk, even if it was uncalled for and against the ToS, it's going to sting more. Enough of that can ruin the class or even the game for people. And with clever, compassionate design, we can mitigate this kind of experience. As I said before, nobody can criticize you for not pressing two DPS buttons if you only have one DPS button.

Which is why I think it's good to have an option for those kind of players, something that transparently asks less of them. A diversity of options allows players to pick the level of engagement that works best for them, while allowing other players to get a different level of engagement that works for them. With the energy it takes a player to be a decent BLM, they can be a great SMN, and I think that same approach can work well with other classes.

[Sebazy]

As I said before, nobody can criticize you for not pressing two DPS buttons if you only have one DPS button.

Some people simply can't take criticism, be it grounded in reality, trite jabs or even clearly fictitious nonsense purely aimed at getting under the victim's skin. Even if we had no DPS capabilities whatsoever, there are people that will merrily hurl abuse at you for standing around badly and some people would still allow that to get to them. You can only wrap people up in cotton wool so much, there's a point where people have to do a bit of the leg work themselves and either apply a bit of logic to the flak coming their way or simply grow thick enough skin to ignore it. Different people will handle this stuff in all sorts of ways, some better, some far worse.

Fun story for this tangent:

I helped some randoms in PF carry a PLD through T5 in ARR late in the patch but when it was still current, the PLD was clearly struggling with the fight and as someone who had experienced something similar with a static tank playing on PS3, I offered some tips that we had used to make things easier. The BLM who was organising the carry neatly pointed out if I healed as well as I gave advice, we'd have killed Twin already. Rather than take offence or fire back, I took this as my cue to completely overheal everything, chad the healing as much as I could and step on the SCH's toes as much as possible.

An expansion and house fire later, once I started looking to raid again for Midas, I got recruited by the group that I did that T5 with, BLM, SCH and all. I'd proceed to raid with them from then onwards and we're all still a static to this day.

If there's one thing FFXI taught me well, it's that being able to extract something positive from negativity is a huge skill to have. Even if it's just finding humour in it, it makes a massive difference.

[LilimoLimomo]

Some people simply can't take criticism, be it grounded in reality, trite jabs or even clearly fictitious nonsense purely aimed at getting under the victim's skin. Even if we had no DPS capabilities whatsoever, there are people that will merrily hurl abuse at you for standing around badly and some people would still allow that to get to them. You can only wrap people up in cotton wool so much, there's a point where people have to do a bit of the leg work themselves and either apply a bit of logic to the flak coming their way or simply grow thick enough skin to ignore it. Different people will handle this stuff in all sorts of ways, some better, some far worse.

I guess I don't really see the point of bringing this up? It seems like a way to dismiss the issue as being not really an issue at all, but more of a personal problem for people who have skin with deficient thickness. Please correct me if I'm misinterpreting what you're saying though.

For my part, I'm not interested in who can or can take it the best; as the FF14 team has stated, players shouldn't need to take it. Ergo, that's the guiding principle that will guide my discussion of these issues.

[Sebazy]

I guess I don't really see the point of bringing this up? It seems like a way to dismiss the issue as being not really an issue at all, but more of a personal problem for people who have skin with deficient thickness. Please correct me if I'm misinterpreting what you're saying though.

You're not, my point is that there's only so far you can protect people. Even if you disable chat, people will still find ways to be obnoxious.

*edit*. I'll drop this one though if that's your preference, apologies if it feels like I'm trying to pressure you on the point++

[Shinkuno]

I guess I don't really see the point of bringing this up? It seems like a way to dismiss the issue as being not really an issue at all, but more of a personal problem for people who have skin with deficient thickness. Please correct me if I'm misinterpreting what you're saying though.

But it is a personal problem. Sorry but i dont think crying over being told to do the job you signed up for is anyone elses problem. Not the other players, not the devs. Ive read that some of your friends are "barely good enough" for the baseline content and i have to say - sorry, but at that point you cant further nag the devs or get mad at other players calling your friends out.

The baseline in this game is already intelligence-insulting levels of easy. People press 1 button while spending 90% of their time looking at their second screen and still clear content. If your friends have issues with content that has been already dumbed down so hard you can barely call it "playing a game" then maybe its either time to get better or quit and move to a more suitable game... whatever that game might be cause outside of idle-autoplay mobile games i cant think of a single game that is this easy.

Heck, no one commented in-game on the absolutely atrocious DPS that led to the 14+ minute, wipe-free run of P7N that I got to experience.

This - it takes ALOT for people to start speaking up, they rather carry an absolute deadweight through the finish line than speaking up. So if they do, you know that something is horrible wrong.

SE also have consistently failed to push the strength and flexibility of the armoury system. With the number of jobs we have now, IMO it makes perfect sense to have some jobs more suited to content than others. As long as everyone gets their time in the sun somewhere but being off meta isn't crippling, it's all good IMO.

Before someone comes along and says 'but noooo, it'll be bad because 'insert favourite job here' will get blacklisted from PF in content it's not meta for'. My honest response is 'deal with it, make your own if you care'. FFXI showed the strengths of this in action perfectly. I'd always be one of the first to arrive at the raid and I'd usually start out on SCH so I could cover a bunch of different roles until more people turned up. As the raid gathered I'd switch out to BRD, WHM or BLM as needed and I can promise you, the variety of gameplay really kept things fresh far longer than they would have been if I'd just have turned up as BRD and spent the evening on that day in and day out.

Sometimes you've got to save players from themselves and pushing a bit of variety on them is a good way to stall burnout even if they aren't entirely onboard with it. Besides the penalties for switching jobs are minute in this game compared to a more traditional MMO like WoW.

YES YES YES thank you. It bothers me so much that people try to sweet-talk this absolute homogenization with "but what if my job was not meta?" SO WHAT, you can freely switch the jobs in this game. If someone refuses to do so because they want to play pretty flower WHM then thats on them and the game should make it clear that they dont get to do certain content then.

[Aravell]

This - it takes ALOT for people to start speaking up, they rather carry an absolute deadweight through the finish line than speaking up. So if they do, you know that something is horrible wrong.

From my years of playing this game since starting in ARR, I notice people are more likely to call someone out for greeding than they are to call someone out for underperforming.

[ForsakenRoe]

YES YES YES thank you. It bothers me so much that people try to sweet-talk this absolute homogenization with "but what if my job was not meta?" SO WHAT, you can freely switch the jobs in this game. If someone refuses to do so because they want to play pretty flower WHM then thats on them and the game should make it clear that they dont get to do certain content then.

I wouldn't agree with 'block player out of content for playing the 'wrong' job', that's a bit far. Rather, if there's any encounters that heavily favour one job's kit over another, having the other job have a moment of it's own to shine too in the same fight. So, in P3S where AST could delete a mechanic with Macrocosmos, WHM should have been given a mechanic where AST has a bit of a rougher time to solve it, and WHM can solve it effortlessly. Fountain of Fire, with a couple of minor adjustments, could have been so much better for WHM than other healers, by really making Lilybell's remote-healing effect be pronounced, but AST didn't mind that mechanic either because Earthly Star exists. When WHM's whole kit is just 'it has a lot of burst healing', it's hard to design a situation in which it can excel uniquely, because AST is also capable of pumping out a lot of healing when it needs to

Or need to give healers I suggest DPS wise 2 single Target ability and I aoe ability a DOT to maintain and a proc (can be aoe or single depending on class) this gives him a dots up key a one two rotation that can sometimes lead into a three and a healing. I'm not saying it has to be competitive with like Black mage but at least something to do.

The only people saying anything about 'making it like Black Mage' are those who want zero changes, and seem to be trying to poison the well on the topic by exaggerating what the pro-changes people want. We don't want to make the jobs have some insurmountable barrier to entry, we just want them to have 'more than they currently have'. Even what you've asked for here is more than what some of us have asked for, if that can be believed