And the slow death of the RPG based battlesystem

[Lyth]

...

There's nothing fallacious about the change in player expectations. Players do have less time and less tolerance for wipes. PF facilitates this, because you're no longer obliged to sit around and watch a single player repeatedly wipe the group across multiple instances until they catch up, since it only takes a few minutes to find a fresh group. You very quickly gain the ability to size up groups and learn what player performance at different prog points actually should look like.

It really doesn't matter what role you're playing. If a tank obviously doesn't know how to press the tank swap button on a fixed timestamp, the group is going to silently disband within a few pulls. The healer is consistently letting players die to predictable, unavoidable raid damage? No shot. DPS keeps messing up the same mechanics prior to the prog point? Thanks for the prog, gl! These are just pass-fail checks. Either you do them consistently well, every single time, or you don't clear. They are not measures of skill. This is the price of admission.

The problem comes after. Once you can clear a fight consistently, how do you continue to improve as a player? And that's where support roles are really lacking at the moment. Because so much of their gameplay is tied into pass-fail mechanics that the dev team refuse to push you on, there is a much lower ceiling for optimization. And that's what's disappointing about support gameplay right now.

[Valence]

What's your point again? If people are less patient with battlesystem tied wipes (are they?), and are also less patient with somebody consistently screwing up mechanics or body checks (are they?), then what? We can't keep the battlesystem facets we had, but we have to keep the fight mechanics and double down on them even though it generates the same frustration? Genuinely confused.

[Shurrikhan]

There's nothing fallacious about the change in player expectations. Players do have less time and less tolerance for wipes. PF facilitates this, because you're no longer obliged to sit around and watch a single player repeatedly wipe the group across multiple instances until they catch up, since it only takes a few minutes to find a fresh group. You very quickly gain the ability to size up groups and learn what player performance at different prog points actually should look like.

It really doesn't matter what role you're playing. If a tank obviously doesn't know how to press the tank swap button on a fixed timestamp, the group is going to silently disband within a few pulls. The healer is consistently letting players die to predictable, unavoidable raid damage? No shot. DPS keeps messing up the same mechanics prior to the prog point? Thanks for the prog, gl! These are just pass-fail checks. Either you do them consistently well, every single time, or you don't clear. They are not measures of skill. This is the price of admission.

The problem comes after. Once you can clear a fight consistently, how do you continue to improve as a player? And that's where support roles are really lacking at the moment. Because so much of their gameplay is tied into pass-fail mechanics that the dev team refuse to push you on, there is a much lower ceiling for optimization. And that's what's disappointing about support gameplay right now.

Okay, but... while I'm not sure I necessarily want back duller forms of "RPG" mechanics, I also don't see how players' tolerance/patience for other players' learning time decreasing over time necessarily makes most/all RPG mechanics less feasible.

We've got few close but ultimately separate factors here:

• Total difficulty one must face just to pass the fight's checks (the "floor"),
• the number of pretty tangible/apparent steps to optimization thereafter (things to busy oneself with beyond mere passage, adding longevity to the player's novel experience within that fight), and
• the sources of those difficulties (what, by however fine of categories, one is actually doing to pass/master the fight's checks).

Naturally, each of those factors/qualities may each vary by role.

If one role is far harder to even pass the fight's checks with than others, then yeah, the other jobs will start to get frustrated waiting on the last so that they can again experience more novelty in/from the fight, especially if they've nothing more (to their eyes) to optimize (that, to them, would be at all worth the effort of doing so). It's the problem of the slow reader group in a book club when there's not much depth to the text to parse out on a re-read, or an interdependent group project for which the work hasn't been so smartly divvied up.

But no DPS or healer is going to give a damn about what considerations or mechanics a tank's difficulty comes from (outside of mistaking their own mechanic, like not standing in front of the boss like an idiot, for solely someone else's mechanics, such as the tank's to make all cleaves avoid that Melee somehow). What matters is simply whether they can simultaneously have fun, much like a question in hanging out at a paid experience of whatever sort among friends rich and poor.

Giving back the ability for tanks to move bosses, for instance, is one more way we can wipe, but... it's most likely going to be in place of something else (or rather, those mechanics seem to have been replaced by yet more lethal or lethal-by-X-vuln-stacks dance steps). The tanks' total difficulty experienced needn't necessarily thereby increase, and when such options are pretty consistently available, they don't much even increase the learning time floor for each fight anyways despite tanks getting to feel more like tanks.

Bad tanks and bad healers are equally likely to wipe us so long as relative difficulty remains high, regardless of whether you restrict their agency from boss manipulation, mitigation, utility, and damage to just mitigation or what have you; it's just a matter of variation (or, breadth of interactions) comprising that difficulty.

The biggest factor, ultimately, is just going to be whether role responsibilities are horribly imbalanced (e.g., damage just gets to zone out and dummy-rotate with a bit of added DDR while tanks and healers still have to think) so that a given role sufficiently learn fights far sooner or later than the others, and the others, in consequence may get annoyed at the "leech role" or the "bottleneck role".

Yes, MMORPGS becoming increasingly isolatable experiences reduces our average tolerance/patience for other players' learning, but... if our own role still has ways to pass or optimize the fight's checks left to be learned, we're not likely to complain about tanks having more tank-like things to interact with, healers having more healer-like things they'd need to do, nor DPS having some actual short-term DPS checks they may even want to (gasp) hold CDs for.

[Valence]

I'd actually argue that having a stronger team based experience would frustrate people less. We're currently sitting within a half-assed system tunneling into individual performances that comforts players into solo play, and they suddenly get mad when an external factor (another solo player of the party) messes up.

But honestly I'll also call bullshit on that one to begin with. While I find the PF experience frustrating like nothing else and mostly prog through statics, I've had the displeasure to prog 10S+ on week 1 this tier, and while it was a total mess, in 80% of the cases people stayed for the whole duty's duration, so I'm pressing X for people supposedly having less patience. If anything, they had less of it when I played on NA in Stormblood. Much more entitled, and didn't want to use fight macros, which makes me think this may actually stem from outside parameters here..

[Mecia]

I miss Stormblood and my biggest regret is not leveling all jobs back then.

[Shurrikhan]

I'd actually argue that having a stronger team based experience would frustrate people less. We're currently sitting within a half-assed system tunneling into individual performances that comforts players into solo play, and they suddenly get mad when an external factor (another solo player of the party) messes up.

But honestly I'll also call bullshit on that one to begin with. While I find the PF experience frustrating like nothing else and mostly prog through statics, I've had the displeasure to prog 10S+ on week 1 this tier, and while it was a total mess, in 80% of the cases people stayed for the whole duty's duration, so I'm pressing X for people supposedly having less patience. If anything, they had less of it when I played on NA in Stormblood. Much more entitled, and didn't want to use fight macros, which makes me think this may actually stem from outside parameters here..

That's generally my feeling as well. The less there (seemingly) is to do, and the simpler things are (or, appear to be) overall, the more baffled we tend to get by someone falling short.

Yes, that perception is relative and the bar rises as communities get more familiar with the game in question or even their genres as a whole, but generally still, a bit more of a sense of the unknown beyond us, too, makes us less judgey about what parts of our own (then still seemingly limited) knowledge others haven't yet reached. But, visibility, Dunning-Kruger (or I guess, Dunning-Sanchez, more accurately?), and all that.

Personally, I just don't have enough sample size for PuGing Savage to make any useful comment on whether the community has on average become less patient. Been too busy with work and post-grad to have much desire to attempt the PuG life; subbing on just the one character, maybe every other tier, has been plenty for me. /shrug

[Godzillaxpowerrangers]

Ok at this rate the 3rd party tool thing is purely projection and or insecurity.

Why not both.

[HikariKurosawa]

Why not both.

Who would be insecure about third party addon use? It's a problem in the game and threads like this highlight the issue. You really think I'd be insecure? It's a high horse thing and a wanting the game to be better thing.

[ZiraZ]

A 3rd party tool just flew over my house!

[Valence]

Why don't you go make a thread about third party where it would actually be the theme to discuss instead of shitting on this one constantly with off topic nonsense? I already disclaimed first, then told you how this isn't about the game difficulty, but battle system facets we have lost over time. If you can't wrap your head around that simple concept, I do think you'd be better deserved with an actual debate in a thread where your problem belongs.