Include positionals, friendly AOEs and Tank invulnerabilities into the Hall of Novice

[Minali]

...and make it mandatory, even for skippers.

Hello,

I hope this category is ok. It felt a bit out of place in the role specific forums when it concerns all roles.

The problem:
Many jobs have mechanics, combos or other specialties like positionals that are important for certain roles to know. However, currently there is no place in the game where they can learn about it. Which leads to healers not knowing how to handle or not handle the tank's invulnerability skills (especially dark knight), to tanks pulling enemies out of ninja dotons and summoner's floor AOE and people running away from a faerie tether.
Unless a friend, an FC member or a frustrated party member sits down and tells you, or you watch a guide, you have no way of knowing about this. And one shouldn't be required to level multiple jobs or refer to external material to learn the job they actually want to do.

The solution:
Teach it to the roles that have to deal with it. And the best place for this is the Hall of Novice because it is role specific and you get access to it very early on. (Adjusting all job quests to include this kind of info would be an enormous task. And considering that the scholar quest still tells you about faerie mechanics that got kicked out two expansions ago, I also feel like these quests are off-limits when it comes to big changes.)
The skills in questions might be learned at a later stage and won't be important in Sastasha, but a neutral arena and a system that is specifically there for teaching role stuff is a better way of teaching than learning it the hard way by being shouted at in a dungeon. And those lessons are available at any time afterwards, if you ever need a refresher, you have access to it.

Making it a pop up for the active help feature would not suffice, a lot of people just click those away as any pop up nowadays. For a more visual appealing pop up, like the explanations for the new dialogue area when NPCs follow you, it would be too much information for some roles. And it would be hard to find a good place for it within the game, considering you can jump past that with a story skip accidentally and won't be able to get it later.

Of course none of this helps if the most important change is not implemented:
Make the Hall of Novice mandatory, please! A lot of people coming from other MMOs think "I know MMOs, I don't need a tutorial" and then go into a dungeon and it turns out their knowledge from other games doesn't help them anything. Because other games are, well, other games. That's not a huge problem in Sastasha, but becomes a big one when those people buy story and job skips and suddenly stand in Holminster without a clue. Especially when the Hall of Novice would have vital information as all the stuff I wrote above, it is important that everyone goes through this once, no matter "where" they start the game.

I hope this post was understandable, English is not my native language. ^^;

2024 Edit: I elaborated a few things further down below after a comment about this at the Dawntrail Media Tour.

[Martynek]

I think the better solution on the topic of mandatory HotN would be to force a tutorial instance on level boosters before they can access the content they boosted to, something that teaches and then checks all things they naturally should have learned up to that level (such as common AOE markers and the basics of your role).

[Minali]

Well, those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. After all, HoN is a tutorial instance, so exactly that kind of thing that you are suggesting. And adding more advanced info with new lessons the further you progress is in the MSQ is also a great idea! Though this should not be limited to skippers, being able to readjust yourself with mechanics more complex than "don't stand in AOE markers" is certainly helpful for many people, returning players for example. Advanced stuff should indeed be only mandatory for skippers though, I suppose it would be pretty annoying for a player who played through all this content if they'd have to spend their time with stuff they deal with daily. I agree with you there.

Especially now where they start to unify markers it should be easier to create a short and simple lesson for that topic. In comparison to before where the same mechanic had several different or overlapping markers depending on the duty you are in... (Looking at you, Sohm Al!)

Maybe add one for every max level at an expansion, Level 50 for the basics, Level 60+ depending on how much new battle mechanics were introduced there? (New markers, but also stuff like "okay folks, this is what a duty action looks like.") Excluding the latest expansion where finding out how stuff works is half the fun of new duties. ^^

[Minali]

*digs thread up*

So, someone asked at the Media Tour if there are considerations to rework and update the Hall of the Novice so new players and players who have played solo most of the time before can learn the basics better and the answer was "no". They prefer it when the community teaches each other, helps out sprouts and takes care of each other. Additionally running a dungeon with Duty Support would also be another sufficient option to get to know everything you need.

Both of these justifications are really flawed and can cause a lot of harm - and this is not a theoretical dramatic statement, this is the system we have experience with now and it is disheartening the producer of this game would consider this okay. Maybe in JP it is, I can't judge about this, I play in EU, but giving a player an option to understand your game when you create one should be a no-brainer. The idea of a tutorial isn't suddenly a bad one as soon as more players are involved than in a single player game and runs with AI and word of mouth are not sufficient for replacing that. (Heck, we get tutorial-ish quests in the starting city for interacting with a sparkly object, so there should be some awareness for the advantage of tutorials in general...) Let me elaborate on why this justification and the lack of rework is not helping anyone.


1. Geing good doesn't equal being good at teaching.
This is true for basically every field of life. This is why teaching itself is a thing you have to learn before you are being put in front of a group of kids in elementary school. Many people learn how to give advice and questions like "How do I unlock mounts?" in Novice Network might not need a degree in rocket science for an answer, but learning how to play in a dungeon is also a bit more complex than "Do quest A". I have spent quite a lot of time in the Novice Network and I have seen so many sprouts asking if (insert tank job here) would be a good tank for dungeons and then getting hit by some triple legend dumping their expert knowledge about endgame savage tank meta and optimal rotations on this poor person who was preparing for Sastasha. Many people like to help, in FCs, in NN, in dungeons when they see someone struggeling, but providing the help in a way the sprout actually learns anything and is not just scared off or feels cornered or is simply confused... These are two very different things.

2. Players are not always right.
I know, this is super shocking for many of us to read, was a mindblowing realization for me as well, but it's true. We are not all-knowing. Even worse, a person can do a thing wrong for 20 years and being perfectly convinced they're doing it right, irl in their job just as much as online in a game. This doesn't require ill will or being an egoistic douchebag, mind you. Everyone makes their own experiences and draws their own conclusions from them. You might have also have received faulty advice yourself once and are convinced this was the correct way because it worked out for you somehow. In a game which is constantly updated and has been around for over 10 years a lot of guides, player made tutorials, blogs and advice given in game is also outdated. I have struggled hard trying to understand scholar for a long time and only really understood it in the last year or so, because when I googled for guides as a wee sprout during Shadowbringers, I found guides telling me about stances and using skills that don't existed anymore. There are better ones around now which also clarify for which state of the game they are from (shout out to Wesk Alber!) but the other stuff is still out there. The beginners video provided by CBU3 are a good start, but they are external media and the healer guides don't even mention healers also have to DPS when there is not much healing to do. And yes, many people do believe this is the right way, despite their class quests having them attack a ton of stuff.

3. Not everyone speaks every language.
Might not be such an obvious issue when playing in NA or JP, but in EU a big chunk of the players is from countries whose languages are not supported. That's why your language settings in the Duty Finder can have a significant impact on how long your queues are: The overwhelming number of people playing this game in EU are likely using English to communicate because their language doesn't exist in this game. Now, an official tutorial or guide wouldn't change that, but it would give you clear straight answers in Oxford English you can throw into Google translate or decipher it with your basic school English well enough. (You can also repeat a tutorial like this ad nauseaum if you have issues understanding it the first time for language or other reasons.) The community developed their own personal slang on top of new and old general internet slang and I'm not even talking about this weird word salad gibberish in Party Finder descriptions for hardcore raiding. Just check this "A = Adds, B = Belly, C = Chains" people throw into the doggo fight in the Crystal Tower raid. None of these things explain anything to a first timer, maybe with "Adds" being the exception if someone else mentioned this word to you during your first 50 levels and you didn't just get a "hi - gg" run or Duty Support. When I got into this I asked about Belly and they told me to stand in the purple. I stood in the purple. I got killed. Turns out I have to stand near the other purple first before going into the purple puddle. It was a funny situation in this moment and certainly a "teaching moment" of sorts, but... uh.. yeah. xD Or just tell a newbie in Sastasha they should turn on their stance to generate aggro. The tooltips for Iron Will etc. mention neither "stance" nor "aggro". They mention giving you a lot of "emnity". What's "emnity"? Who knows! (Ok, tbf, this is what the current Hall of the Novice actually clarifies, but it teaches you to get it once and then attack each enemy with single target attacks.. a little outdated.)

(While we're at it, please add Spanish, even if it's just the text: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...al-Fantasy-XIV )

4. Many sprouts are afraid of asking.
When you are the newbie, you are always feel like the odd one out at first. It's just a general human habit for many people. You don't know the unwritten social rules of the community you are new in, the basics of communication and you don't know squat. It's daunting enough at a random social event, being the new boyfriend at a family dinner or the intern at a company meeting, but MMORPGs and gaming in general have a certain unfriendly reputation on top of that. A sprout has barely any way of knowing how much of this applies to a new game and FFXIV is no exception. Of course people say "we're nice", but come on, are there really that many players of a game who'd say "we are toxic af and proud of it and will eat you alive if you dare to play less than perfect"? I know a person who just noped out simply because of the prospect of having to deal with people in dungeons because they had horrible experience in the past in other games, and nothing I said was enough to convince them otherwise. And I know of many sprouts who were in a similar situation before the first run, and getting some "Healers adjust" tank in Sastasha who didn't even let them watch the cutscene didn't exactly help with this. Many people are understanding and eventually they might warm up to the community, learn the social rules, find a nice FC or hop from guide to guide until they finally find a good one, but it takes time to get there. Everything connected to "let the community help you" comes with all the baggage of social interaction with all it's pros and cons and this is an extra barrier, if you like it or not.

5. Duty Support doesn't teach you your role.
The AI teaches you battle mechanics, that is nice. Follow the NPCs into the stack marker might teach you the point of a stack marker and that is helpful. However, it doesn't teach you how to pull mobs, nor how to heal wall to wall. If you keep turning your stance on and off, nobody is telling you to do otherwise, the healer NPC just tries to take care of it to the best of their abilities. If you start kiting the boss because you learned it like this in another game or two, the melee doesn't tell you to keep the boss steady and away from the group, so its AOE doesn't hit the whole group and they can hit their positionals. (Granted, positionals are barely mattering anymore atm, but I heard Viper got all the positionals Monk lost, so that topic isn't entirely off the table for now.) The NPCs don't tell you about friendly ground AOEs you should keep enemies in or when and where you should put yours if you have one. They only adjust their DPS output so each run takes roughly the same time and suffer in silence. :P

6. Story / Level skippers are getting thrown into the deep end.
Now, I'm not going into the debate if skipping the story is good or bad and I'd appreciate if this discussion won't be derailed into this. If they feel like skipping the story it doesn't affect me, you do you. However, it does affect me when they get into a dungeon and have no clue about anything because story skipping and job level skipping also means skipping the long learning curve you get for dealing with dungeons. Yes, they can try to look up a guide, but, uh, yeah reread point 2 for this. They can do the current Hall of Novice and get info that's barely sufficient for anything past level 20. They can run all dungeons Duty Support has to offer, but they just paid so they don't have to do all of this. Maybe they run one or two, but see point 5 why this isn't enough. It doesn't matter if you like it or not, skipping is a feature that exists and is here to stay and the game needs to give skippers a chance to learn the basics about the gameplay. And it needs to be mandatory, we'd all profit from that. See the older posts for reasons and ideas.

And last but not least...

7. The current Hall of the Novice is simply outdated and teaches mechanics wrong.
It explains tank stance to tanks and how to grab aggro with AOEs, but then teaches you to attack the mob enemies one by one. It teaches DPS to focus on the enemy the tank is focusing on with single target attacks. It's no surprise because it's taking place at level 15 when barely any job has an AOE to begin with, but this is why I suggested adding more lessons for later stages when people have a more well-rounded toolkit. (This and general common duty mechanics.) The Hall of the Novice is not simply not a big help, it teaches you a way of playing that is outright wrong or is going to change as soon as you get AOEs. If you don't want to update it properly, at least correct the objectively wrong stuff they are teaching new players. They are the ones getting in trouble in a dungeon when they follow this faulty advice, not the NPCs, not CBU3. Don't leave them hanging, please, they deserve better.

Please, I beg you, Yoshida-san, reconsider your decision about this. Players need an option with a low entry barrier to learn the basics. Leaving things as they are is not sufficient.