As a reminder, I am not asking for the game to be made easier in general, nor for a return to Endwalker's duty design. In fact, if I had to describe the duty design style I want by reference to expansions rather than principles, the closest existing expansion would be Stormblood.
(Note to newer players: Do not judge Stormblood's duty design style by how its duties play with the Dawntrail jobs, or even most of the Endwalker jobs. Duty design style must shape the duties to create the demands on the player from playing their job in the duty, as that combined demand is what the player will experience. The Stormblood jobs were significantly more demanding across the board to reach acceptable competence for every type of duty, from MSQ dungeons to Ultimates. On top of that, there are several forms of expansion power creep involved: better food and potions becoming available each raid tier, better effective gear from syncing down, lenience in the stat squish applied with Patch 6.0, newer expansion jobs having outsized potencies below their original cap level, and easier raid buff synchronization due to the "2 minute meta" implemented with Patch 6.0.)
Stormblood's duty design style aims to challenge players at every level of play. It is not just the expansion that introduced Ultimates, it is also the expansion that put trios - otherwise an Ultimate mechanic type - in an Alliance Raid (Ultima, the High Seraph in The Orbonne Monastery). The expansion that gave us the original Thunder God Cid, which has since been nerfed three times. (And two of those are because it dared to ask Duty Finder for Extreme levels of party coordination.) The expansion with the infamous MSQ solo instance fighting Sadu. The expansion that made tanks check boss buffs for Local Resonance / Remote Resonance and move Omega-M and Omega-F accordingly... in Normal Mode. Of course, it has memorable and iconic Savage mechanics too - Playing Field, Grand Cross Omega, Forsaken, Hello World - but it does not limit the challenge to high-end duties.
Remember Omega's motto: "Fight, win, evolve." As a duty designer (and as a job designer), you should be inspiring players to apply it to themselves.
Challenge is necessary to avoid boredom and spur growth. Accordingly, you can and must challenge players. That means having penalties for failure, as it is those penalties that create the difference between success and failure. Hand out the avoidable hits, the Vulnerability Up stacks and Damage Downs, the KOs, and even some party KOs in regular duties.
But the immediate goal of duty design is not for the duty to "win" over the player by pushing the player into giving up. The goal is not even to push the player into trying to complete the same duty indefinitely, since eventually the player will lose patience and give up - and "eventually" is not that many attempts for most combinations of player and duty. The goal is for the player to complete at least the regular duties and improve in the process, so the failures need to be motivating rather than demotivating.
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Which raises the question: what is the difference between a motivating failure and a demotivating failure?
We have some intuitive understanding of this, but we also have existing scientific research that can give us more details. From my previous writing on balancing the magical ranged DPS role, in January of this year:
At the risk of stating the blatantly obvious: Motivation is all about the player's perspective. They are working with their own information, interests, and capabilities, not those of a duty designer or even a different player.I must make a brief detour to psychology. In particular, I must explain Brehm's motivational intensity theory, which has not only been tested in video games and held up, but overall has been replicated so extensively that Richter, Gendolla, and Wright's summary paper had to direct readers to narrower summary papers. For brevity and clarity despite machine translation, I will explain only the points of the theory that relate to the question of balance at hand, and I will explain via example.
Suppose a player is considering a goal with a fixed difficulty, such as completing a dungeon. If they had to do something ridiculous to accomplish that goal, like find three other people and teach them the game in order to have party members, the player would almost certainly reject that goal and find something else to do with their time. Likewise if they had to do something blatantly impossible. This illustrates that they have a maximum amount of effort that they find worth it or possible, which we call their "potential motivation" in the context of that goal.
However, even if the player can complete the dungeon within their potential motivation, that does not mean that they will put forth that maximum amount of effort - they may be willing to spend an hour in the instance, but if the party completes the dungeon in twenty minutes, they will not then spend the remaining forty minutes in the same instance pressing their buttons with no targets. (They may well spend it in the same instance exploring the environment, but that is a new goal.) Rather, they will put forth the minimum amount of effort needed to accomplish the goal, and no more than that.
This theory makes intuitive sense from the perspective of conserving energy. A rice farmer who insists upon moving to a desert and constructing new rice paddies there will probably produce no rice and starve. A rice farmer who insists on hauling their harvest back and forth for no reason, not even physical training, will not put themselves in a good position either. The many experiments confirming the theory show that it is very much correct - conserving energy in this way is an evolved imperative of the human brain, and games for humans must bend to it.
(In general within this letter, I would rather state something you already know than omit something and be misunderstood. It is all too easy to wrongly believe that some knowledge is already shared, and working through a language barrier does not improve the situation.)
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From the player's perspective, the effort they must put in to complete a duty is fixed but initially unknown. (The same is true of longer-term goals, such as completing the MSQ up to a fixed point or completing a Savage tier.) Before entering a duty, the player has an estimation of the effort they must put in to complete it, based on factors such as their prior experience with the game and their understanding of the available duty difficulties. If that initial estimation gives too high a chance that the effort they would need exceeds their potential motivation, they will preemptively decide "not worth it" and not even attempt the duty. (Which is often a good thing - this is what keeps players with no desire to raid from joining progression parties for high-end duties anyway. But it can also keep a player who perceives themselves to struggle with MSQ from pursuing optional regular duties such as Normal Raids and Alliance Raids, even if they would perform acceptably there.) If they enter the duty, they will continuously refine their estimation of the effort they would need based on the feedback from the duty itself, the effort they put in and the mechanical successes and failures they experience... and if at any point that refinement gives too high a chance of exceeding their potential motivation, they will declare "not worth it" and quit the duty in frustration.
Hence the first major design principle of this letter:
Every time you tell a player that they have failed something, they must correctly perceive a way to do better next time that will lead them to success within an effort they find reasonable.
(There are two exceptions. One is when dealing with the small minority of players who thoroughly refuse to learn, as they will do that no matter how carefully you teach. The other is in high-end duties that players can enter while woefully unprepared in prerequisite foundational skills, where it becomes necessary to tell unprepared players "this is not currently a productive use of your time" to discourage them from making themselves and their party members miserable. TOP is admirably designed in this regard: its first two phases carefully test many mechanical skills required for the later phases, so players who are not ready to tackle the later phases will generally fail out in frustration early on, rather than after their whole party has each invested several dozen hours into the duty to reach the special surprises.)
Allow me to go over this wording in more detail to present sub-principles.
"Perceive": The existence of a route to success does no good if the player does not understand at least the first step.
For example, it is well within casual players' capabilities to avoid KO from Judgement Nisi in Alexander - The Burden of the Father (A4N); they need only arrange their characters such that the two healers avoid contact with each other and all other player characters for the 30 second duration of the Nisi debuffs, and have the healers heal themselves periodically. (The Nisi debuffs start with one type on each healer, spread by contact, and having more than one type is an instant KO.) But casual players cannot be relied upon to read their debuff bar, even in the healer role but especially outside it - and that is the only indication of the Nisi debuffs in A4N. Thus, players whose characters are KOed by Judgement Nisi often do not perceive even the immediate cause of the KO, only that their character "mysteriously exploded". And they are correct about their own state of confusion!
Accordingly, they become frustrated at a penalty that seems out of their control, even though technically the duty has given them both a way to succeed and the information to discover it. If preceding duties had taught casual players to reliably notice when their characters are debuffed, then they would perceive the information given to them and take it as a clue. Likewise, if the Nisi debuffs had an additional indicator that casual players would reliably notice, such as the overhead markers in The Epic of Alexander (Ultimate) (TEA), once again they would perceive the information given to them and take it as a clue.
In the Patch 7.0 duties, violations of this sub-principle (and the next) regularly manifest in the form of mechanics that discourage the player from looking in the correct place to understand the mechanic, whether by overwhelming visuals, forcing the player to fight their interface, or sometimes even actively unhelpful non-diegetic cues. When that happens, the player enters a mindset of "try to constantly look everywhere", which is not a fun kind of stress. (Notably, it is not physically possible at high fidelity, due to the layout of the human eye where details require using central vision. Plus, the player has no way of knowing if they can relax out of that state without learning the duties.) In high-end duties, it can sometimes be appropriate to ask the player to figure out what information is mechanically relevant, but that requires too many attempts to be viable in regular duties.
"A way to do better next time": The player must learn something from every failure, but not necessarily a complete solution to the mechanic. The player's evolution is the cumulative effect of many small steps they take to improve.
If the player correctly thinks "okay, I got hit by this attack, I should watch out for where it comes from", that is acceptable. If the player correctly thinks "I misjudged the timing of that attack, I needed to move earlier rather than staying to deal damage", that is acceptable at low frequency; it is necessary feedback for a player developing their timing, but they will require long practice over many duties to significantly improve those skills rather than always moving early and cautiously. (Which is why so many players come to love snapshots at the end of castbars, despite the visual mismatch with attack animations - the castbar provides a fair and consistent cue to use in timing judgements.) If the player correctly thinks "I need to learn the duty timeline to plan for that before it appears", that is only acceptable in high-end duties; not only is the practice and memorization too much to expect for regular duties, but requiring advance knowledge of the duty timeline often diminishes the story experience of regular duties. If the player correctly thinks "I need a reference sheet for this mechanic", that is only acceptable if it is one small reference sheet for the entire duty, that they can write or draw out themselves rather than relying on a second device or monitor. (Which is why The Ridorana Lighthouse is acceptable - a dyscalculic player can write themselves one small reference sheet based on the notes in the instance before the "math boss" or given to them by other players.)
If the player correctly thinks "I moved as soon as I knew where to go, but I was not fast enough", that is only acceptable insofar as they perceive an actionable step to know where to go faster on their very next attempt and are willing to take it. (Which not only limits the speed one can demand of players, it largely confines such demands to high-end duties.) "Oh, this cast is always followed up with another attack in a corresponding pattern, I do not have to wait to see the follow-up" is actionable so long as you can get the player to notice the connection between attacks. "I should be looking at my debuff bar when this cast finishes" is actionable, but only reliably perceived in high-end duties, since casual players as a whole have not currently learned to reliably look at their debuff bar at all. "I should drill my planned movement sequence for this mechanic" is only actionable for players who already have such a sequence and are willing to dedicate external study time to a single mechanic, qualities you cannot rely on at all below Savage - and even in Savage and Ultimate, there are strict time bounds to that before the player gives up instead.
"I just have to react faster" is not actionable under any circumstance, and therefore not acceptable. Even the vast majority of Ultimate raiders will not perceive "make time in one's schedule for generic rapid processing drills, and keep that up over weeks to years for at most 10%-20% improvement, before returning to progressing the duty" as an option - and if you directly tell them to do it, they will balk!
Proposed changes to the player's Earth circumstances are almost always not actionable either. The speed of light and the Internet infrastructures of different regions introduce unavoidable latency, but that does not make "move to live beside the servers" actionable unto the player. (Indeed, players may have moved away from their original region due to a variety of Earth circumstances, but not be able to move their character without losing various server-bound features (like housing!) and/or the ability to play with their friends on that region's Data Centers.) Even "get a VPN" may not be actionable for a player on a tight budget, let alone "change Internet Service Providers" or "find housing that allows for a hardwired Internet connection". Likewise, "get a better computer / console beyond the declared minimum specifications", "play on PC to use accessibility third-party tools", and "get another monitor to flip through many diagrams" are not actionable on budget grounds.
"That will lead them to success": The player must succeed eventually, rather than getting stuck in a dead end or an infinite regress of failing by ever-slimmer margins, or you will exhaust their potential motivation and they will give up. Simple enough, and another reason players find the prospect of "just react faster" demotivating - they often know intuitively that training reaction time reaches a dead end eventually, and are loath to invest heavily into it without knowing if they can improve sufficiently.
(Puzzle mechanics are an interesting case here. From the perspective of a player aiming to solve the puzzle, some reasonable directions for potential solutions may be dead ends, and that may even be necessary for the difficulty of the puzzle. But a well-designed puzzle mechanic will give the player clear feedback on all wrong potential solutions - even if only with some random variations of the mechanic - that tells them their plan is wrong rather than imperfectly executed. That feedback is what prevents the player from getting stuck in a dead end even if they enter it, since it shows them to rule out the potential solutions in that direction eventually. As for that "eventually", see the next sub-principle.)
"Within an effort they find reasonable": The player's cumulative effort put into the duty, both every mechanical failure you hand them and every mechanical success they work for, must not exceed the effort they are willing to put into it. The player does not have Omega's relentless drive to evolve, at least when it comes to your game rather than their life as a whole. They can walk away at any time. You have to work with the time and effort they are willing to give you.
Obviously the player's definition of "reasonable effort" will vary massively depending on the context - just about anyone will be quite frustrated if they cannot complete a regular duty before its instance timer expires without advance knowledge of the mechanics, while raiders tackling an Ultimate would be understandably angry if they could complete one that quickly.
"Correctly perceive": If the player believes incorrectly that a way forward exists, they will try what they believe to be a way forward, continue failing, then give up. If the player believes correctly that a way forward exists but is incorrect about what it is, they will try the route they perceive rather than the route that works, adding to their cumulative effort spent. Accordingly, the further your intended solution is from the player's existing mechanical knowledge, the more extensively you must guide them to the answer. The easier you want the duty to be, the more extensively you must guide the player to mechanic solutions. This is why regular duties cannot have puzzle mechanics - Duty Finder's matchmaking cannot even guarantee the presence of a single player who can solve the puzzle in the party, let alone the patience from the whole party to wait - and all the most elaborate puzzle mechanics are in Ultimates.
But the implications are not limited to puzzle mechanics. The Duty Finder population can actually learn quite a wide range of mechanics, but teaching through regular duties must be done in small incremental steps. There, the player is trying to finish their quest or roulette, and does not have the interest in studying anything outside of attempts at the duty to learn a complex concept all at once. (A key point in which Shadowbringers and Endwalker did better than Stormblood is the guidance and teaching: using markers, NPC commentary, and sometimes even NPC demonstrations to teach players in those small pieces.)
"You tell a player they have failed something": If a player in some sense fails but perceives no penalty, it does not matter whether they perceive any steps to improve; they have no reason to take them regardless.
This is often a matter for job design, as duty mechanics are themselves pass/fail, but it is relevant to duty design where jobs create multiple degrees of mechanic success. If a casual player only undertakes regular duties and never actually sees an enrage cast, it is fine for them not to understand any steps they can take to increase their damage output without upgrading their equipment - including mechanic resolution techniques such as slidecasting for jobs with frequent cast times or gap-closing back to a boss immediately after the snapshot of a mechanic that requires leaving melee range. Not accomplishing such things will not frustrate them, even though it is "failing" relative to optimal performance. Should they choose to pursue greater skill at their job, whether to undertake harder duties or simply for intrinsic enjoyment, then they may come to perceive the downtime / lower potency output as a penalty, and at that point the rest of the principle once more applies.
This is also relevant to regular duty design when it comes to giving feedback to the player(s) who can act upon it.
For example, Alexander - The Fist of the Son (A5N) contains a "tank swap" mechanic: a series of attacks targeted at the player character with highest enmity that are especially dangerous if the same player character takes all of them, encouraging or requiring the two tanks in a full party to swap who has highest enmity in order to split up the series of attacks. In A5N, the relevant series of attacks is very slow, with layers of feedback. The boss, Ratfinx Twinkledinks, grows dramatically before using four individual Gobjab attacks, each of which inflicts a stack of Headache. The Headache debuff description reads: "Suffering mild head trauma. Damage dealt is reduced. Increased trauma results in a Concussion." If this does not clue the player in, the Concussion debuff makes the player character unable to act with a special animation, which becomes quite obvious to the player. Only after that does the boss use the Gobstraight tankbuster, which deals massive true damage if taken by a player character with Concussion, thus producing a KO. Tank swapping at any point between the first Gobjab and the start of Gobstraight will avert the KO, and tank swapping at any point between the first and fourth Gobjabs will avert the Concussion as well.
The biggest problem is that all of this feedback is given to the player whose character has the current highest enmity, the "main tank". The player who needs to act in order to take highest enmity, and therefore needs to receive feedback, is the other tank, or "off tank". (Nowadays, the main tank can Shirk the off tank, yes, but that will not actually swap the off tank to highest enmity unless the off tank already had at least half the main tank's enmity. And Shirk was added in Patch 4.0 Stormblood, so tanks did not have that option when A5N was current. The off tank absolutely had to be the one to act, in an environment of job designs where the easy ways to have high enmity involved sacrificing damage output.) And the off tank perceives none of this unless they not only look at their co-tank's debuff bar, but read what the debuffs do - which the vast majority of casual players will not do! They will perceive only that their co-tank "mysteriously exploded", and will likely attribute it to a failure of mitigation or healing.
Given this duty design, what must happen for the casual player off tank to learn to do better next time, without the unrealistic expectation of reading their co-tank's debuffs? First, the main tank (or another party member watching the whole party's debuffs) must work out that it is possible for the off tank to act to split the attacks. Second, whoever figures this out must tell the off tank that they failed the mechanic, which requires both social willingness and some typing speed. Third, the off tank must accept this rather than blaming another party member. Fourth, some party member must break down the relatively complex concept of tank swapping so that the off tank understands when to take the highest-enmity spot, how to do so, and that the former main tank will have to take the highest-enmity spot back in a future tank swap at some point.
Casual players see all of these steps as significant hurdles, and so A5N could not teach the Duty Finder population to tank swap. (Players pursuing high-end duties do manage it, because the expectations surrounding high-end duties create a player population that is more dedicated, expecting to put in more effort to learn, and willing to kick players who cannot or will not take feedback from others.) More broadly, casual players cannot be relied upon to give others feedback or receive it, so you as the duty designer have to give the feedback to players who can act upon it.
(Indeed, Heavensward is further from the design style I want than Stormblood not because of its attitude to challenge, but because it did worse at teaching players. Alexander - The Burden of the Son (Savage) (A8S) is the duty that convinced me to pursue Ultimate, because I thoroughly enjoyed the difficulty and the intense focus required.)
Want to teach casual players to tank swap? You can, but not like that.
First, create a marker for attack sequences that should be tank swapped, so that players have a cue to apply the concept in future duties before seeing the enemy finish the dangerous series of attacks. (That could be on the castbar, like the "interruptible cast" marker introduced with Patch 5.0 Shadowbringers, or it could be on the boss's current target like the various tankbuster type markers introduced over the course of Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Either offers the opportunity to give extra feedback on a successful swap, over the "target of target" HUD element or by moving the marker to the boss's new target.) Then create a solo instanced duty with an NPC co-tank who can instruct and demonstrate. For example, if you wanted all players entering Dawntrail's endgame to learn it, whether they currently play tanks or not, the solo instance could have been in the MSQ as an Echo vision of Wuk Lamat's combat training with Gulool Ja Ja. (Even players who dislike Wuk Lamat as a character can still come away with new mechanical knowledge, and it would fit the themes of the existing MSQ.) In that duty, have the player character be the main tank first, while the boss begins a very slow and flashy tank swap mechanic that will show the player the new tank swap marker for the first time. (A5N did the "slow and flashy" part right.) During the series of attacks, have the NPC co-tank comment on the danger and demonstrate a correct tank swap to the player, taking the end of the series of attacks and moving into position to keep the boss still. Then, after a short "spacer" period of familiar mechanics, have the boss begin the same tank swap mechanic again targeting the NPC, showing the player the tank swap marker for the second time. Now that the player has seen a tank swap demonstrated, the NPC can comment that the player character needs to take the boss's attention back, and the duty can even give a non-diegetic prompt as some solo instances do. If the player correctly takes the highest-enmity spot from the NPC during the mechanic and keeps it through the end of the series of attacks (using Provoke and their tank stance), give them some appreciative feedback from the NPC and carry on. If not, KO the NPC and start the duty (or section of the duty) over.
(Concepts building on that foundation, such as when to use Shirk and double tank swaps, could be covered immediately afterwards but are best covered once players have solidified the basic form.)
Do that, and they will try to tank swap when they see the marker again on their co-tank in future duties. (And since they have seen both sides, they will not be confused when another tank swaps off them.) They will likely not be quick about it the first few times, but that would have been a good opportunity for the first two Dawntrail trials to allow players to practice with Duty Support without any fear of embarassment. For some concepts, you really have to guide the player's hand to get casual players to pick them up.
"Must": Why not "should"? Because "should" creates temptation to put the responsibility back on the players instead of the game design, without first seriously considering how the game can be designed to improve the player experience.
If a casual player mistakenly thinks that Normal Raids are Serious Raiding and avoids them accordingly, that is not the community's responsibility to fix - that is your responsibility to tell them otherwise. (Players who complete the MSQ through Duty Support may barely talk to other players at all!) If a colorblind player struggles to tell the difference between the two types of fists in Alphascape V3.0 (Savage) (O11S) or TOP, that is not their fault - that is because you did not make the shapes distinct enough without relying on color cues. (Everything else in TOP is thoroughly distinct for colorblind players... in contrast to the tethers in Asphodelos: The Fourth Circle (Savage) (P4S) Act 2, which have no distinguishing features at all other than the colors shown over player characters' heads. Likewise, the orbs in Emerald Weapon (Extreme) are distinguished only by their colors.) If a player cannot complete the Active Time Maneuver (also known as a Quick Time Event or QTE) in Seat of Sacrifice Normal, or injures themselves trying, that is not their failure to learn - that is your design error in considering what pace of inputs the game should really require or make players think it requires.
And yes, I am aware that that particular QTE has a "fakeout" where the first 75% of the bar depletes rapidly to make the player think they are always on the brink of failure. I have seen the metronome demonstrations that it can be completed at 200 actions per minute (APM), even though it looks like the player is about to fail. I am aware that QTEs in this game do not require clicking specifically; any button that does not open a menu, send input to the chat window, or cause the operating system to take focus off the game will do. It is still an unreasonable demand to make of players, because your actual gameplay is not nearly that fast even on fast jobs, so it needlessly excludes players who are capable of the interesting challenges you want to set them.
Let us take a very fast job and work through the math. Suppose a player is able to do a perfect MCH Hypercharge window, hitting Heat Blast / Blazing Shot every 1.5 seconds and hitting a Gauss Round / Ricochet / Double Check / Checkmate evenly in between every Heat Blast. That is two inputs every 1.5 seconds, so one input every 0.75 seconds. Suppose the player is able to keep up this pace of inputs continuously, not just during the brief period of Hypercharge. One input every 0.75 seconds is 80 inputs every 60 seconds, so 80 APM. Even if the player uses only one hand for actions with animation locks (primarily job and role actions), leaving their other hand completely free for movement and targeting, and they are capable of the same APM with their other hand while keeping both hands perfectly staggered... that is still only 160 APM. A player can be comfortably able to play one of the fastest jobs in the game and still be physically unable to succeed at that QTE. (Or be at high risk of injury from attempting it repeatedly!)
And since the penalty for a single player failing that is an instant party KO, in an MSQ duty, that locks them out of the rest of the game.
That math pretty much matches my APM, by the way. I deal with QTEs in this game by giving up on controlling what keyboard keys I hit for the duration, and instead devising an elaborate method of hitting multiple keys with each finger motion by "rolling" each finger along one axis with staggered timings while "rolling" each hand along a different axis. (Note that this method will not occur to most players, and is very demanding on the player's motor coordination, which means that a player with limited APM is quite likely to be unable to do it even if they think of it.) And even then I nearly did not make it through the sustained input requirement of the Seat of Sacrifice Normal QTE. It is absurd that anyone who can clear an Ultimate was nearly hard blocked from completing the MSQ. This is a clear design error.
In contrast, the QTE in Alexander - The Heart of the Creator (A11N) is entirely acceptable, as it requires one input in several seconds to avoid an individual KO, and that capability is likewise required for even beginner gameplay. Likewise, the required use of the Omega Jammer in Alphascape V3.0 (O11N) is entirely acceptable even though failure generally results in a party KO, since the Omega Jammer has a 1.5 second cooldown and the party has significant leeway on the number of collective uses they need to form the shield. That does not require any more input speed than playing a very slow job casually, nor does it require better input cadence, and the players who struggle most can still be helped through the duty by their party members contributing more inputs. They match up to tasks that are both much less demanding and inherently necessary for core gameplay, so you already have a good reason to require them.
Since QTEs are not used in this game for anything mechanically interesting, you could have an accessibility setting to remove them or turn them into single button presses like the A11N one. Or you could replace them for everyone with forgiving cadence checks like the Omega Jammer, which would still function well to represent the player character fighting independent of their job actions. You have the technology. But you need to think about that sort of thing every single time, or design errors will slip through.
Every expansion has various good mechanics, even Dawntrail. But having mostly good mechanics is not enough. It only takes one bad mechanic to ruin a duty. It only takes one bad duty to ruin a roulette. It only takes one mechanic a player simply cannot do to prevent them from continuing.
You must meet the bare minimum standard of the duty being playable without pain or undue injury risk every single time. It is simply the rigorous nature of the task.
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The first major principle comes of considering how the player's required effort estimation changes. What about how the player's potential motivation changes?
Well, what moves the player to enter a duty in the first place? Not the effort that they expect to put into the duty, but everything they expect to get out of it: story progression, power fantasy of playing their job, access to and power in later duties, access to other game systems and areas, cosmetics, light entertainment, personal accomplishment, socializing, completionism, ... Gear is either cosmetic, for access to and power in later duties, and/or a form of accomplishment. Gil is similar, though it can also be used for non-duty gameplay. The meaning of an in-game item comes from the journeys we take for them and/or with them, without which they are just pixels.
And from the player's perspective, the total rewards of completing a duty are fixed but initially unknown, just like the required effort to complete the duty. (Even if they know how many times they must do Expert Roulette to get all the tomestone gear they want, they do not initially know how much and what forms of enjoyment they will get out of the duties or the gear.) So they likewise continually refine their estimation of what they will get from completing a duty, changing their potential motivation. If their potential motivation drops below their estimation of the required effort to complete the duty, they will also declare "not worth it" and quit the duty - depending on the cause, this can be out of frustration, boredom, or apathy.
Hence the second major design principle of this letter:
When trying to make the game challenging, do not lose sight of making it fun throughout. You must challenge the player to avoid boredom, but you can only challenge the player in proportion to what they get out of undertaking that challenge.
Let us examine some corollaries.
The player is constantly refining their estimation of how much they will enjoy the game later based on how much they are enjoying the game now.
You cannot expect the player to persist in improving at combat for very long at all without giving them regular positive feedback of actually succeeding at something related to that improvement, even if the success does not take the form of a duty completion. Thus, especially for casual players, "fight, win, evolve" is actually the correct order of operations. The improvement comes by learning from failure, but it needs success too. Even Ultimate raiders get frustrated by spending hours on progression without doing the mechanic they are working on correctly.
Likewise, the player's estimation will naturally include factors outside of duty design, and outside of combat entirely. If the player is interested in the story, their finding Wuk Lamat poorly written will mean that you have less opportunity to challenge them in the MSQ, where they reasonably expect to see more Wuk Lamat for their trouble. If the player wants something specific out of their job, not having and funneling them into a job that matches that desire will make them get less out of duties, and so have less tolerance for putting effort into duties. If the player wants to play their Warrior of Light as a morally upstanding hero - which most players do - and considers the Endless to be people, forcing them to genocide the Endless has likely permanently put them off of all future storylines and the associated duties, even if they continue the game at all. Dawntrail has done rather poorly at giving players who are not already "good at combat" a reason to persevere.
(Personally, I started playing the game for the old crafting system, and pushed through my initial struggles with the MSQ duties to reach to new zones to craft and gather in. Indeed, I first started attempting high-end duties in order to prepare myself for future MSQ requirements, and then discovered that I prefer the planning-oriented design style of raiding and its encouragement of job mastery to any design style so far for regular duties. And that got me far enough to start seeing improvements in how I work with my physical limitations outside the game, which is an extremely strong motivation to raid. When it comes to player persistence, I am very much an outlier... and yet someone just like me who started playing today would not make it to the endgame at all. The new crafting and gathering actions are good for restoring rotation depth, but they are not nearly enough to sustain someone like me through the discouraging aspects of the Patch 7.0 MSQ duties.)
Of course, the player's expectations of enjoyment of future duties will be informed by the duty they are currently in, whether they complete the duty or not. (And the player almost always has some interest in completing future duties of similar difficulty if they have a healthy interest in the game - pretty much the only non-concerning reason for a player to lack that interest is pursuing a single Ultimate for glamour purposes.) Push the player too hard, and they will not enjoy the duty even if they complete it. And if they keep not enjoying a category of duties, they have good cause to give up on the category. This can arise from their party "carrying" them to completion, or in solo instances where the panic of repeatedly scraping by and worry about future duties push out enjoyment. Most players want to feel useful to their party, even in casual story-oriented play.
(When The Copied Factory first released with Patch 5.10, I struggled with certain mechanics and found them overly reactive. Having that experience once is one thing. Completing the duty several times in the first week, in order to get a specific gear piece for raiding purposes, and still having reaction problems with mechanics is another thing. When subsequent weeks still did not improve matters, I made a detailed plan for each such mechanic just like I did for final Savage floors, complete with prepositioning not only my character, but my hands, eyes, and camera... which resulted only in my character being KOed in the safespot instead of out of it. I then asked several raider friends to help refine my plans, including one who had already completed TEA, and none of them could suggest improvements.)
(At that point I had gone above and beyond to rise to the challenge, only to find that my initial impression of a reaction time problem was correct. So not only did I stop entering The Copied Factory, when The Puppets' Bunker released (with Patch 5.30) I refused to unlock it - to avoid further worsening my chances of getting a personally enjoyable duty in Alliance Roulette - and pointed anyone who protested on gearing grounds to my Eden's Verse Savage gear. To anyone who protested because they thought I would enjoy it, I replied "ask again when I clear an Ultimate." Not as a deliberately absurd statement, but as a logical conclusion: having already exhausted all the rapid ways to improve my practical response time by better planning and HUD Layout, the only remaining option was to undertake hundreds to thousands of hours of practice efficiently processing mechanics and hope for improvement... and already being comfortable in Savage, the only remaining higher difficulty that could show that improvement was Ultimate.)
(I knew full well that the other 23 players could carry me through an Alliance Raid even if my character spent the entire time KOed. I was even already playing a DPS. I was miserable regardless, and naturally unwilling to attempt the extended reaction time drills in the same duties that were making me miserable. Needless to say, the vast majority of players who see frustrating lack of personal improvement in a regular duty are not going to even attempt to fix that in Ultimate - they are just going to quit the game.)
It is also worth noting the game's repetition-based gameplay loop. If the player knowing all the details of a duty makes it boring - or frustrating - they will not want to repeat that duty. In particular, based on the Patch 7.0 duties:
- Delaying the first indication for what random variation of a mechanic the enemy is doing does not make the duty interesting or fun. It only teaches players to learn when that first cue appears and wait until then in boredom, despite the brief moment of stress from resolving the mechanic once the delayed cue is finally given. The result is a boring experience punctuated by brief moments of stress, and at no point is it fun. Even stressful and difficult duties can be boring; this is why I have been more likely to fall asleep in Dawntrail duties than those of any previous expansion!
- Movement sequences that push reaction within the sequence are not fun, nor are they interesting. The player is denied the opportunity to plan, and instead learns that there is no recourse but reacting repeatedly - with the result of being bored even during the reaction stress. (If you are expecting the player to get some sort of enjoyable adrenaline rush out of reacting, well, I do not get that, and the mixed player feedback makes it clear that I am not alone in that. It is annoying at best to people like me, and your player population has been shaped by the older turn-based Final Fantasy games, along with this game itself historically being quite lenient on reaction time for a real-time game. Anyone who does get a reaction thrill has lots of other options.) Instead, give the player the information needed to plan the movement sequence, and then ask them to execute it at a speed appropriate to the duty and intended effect of the mechanic.
- Making needed visual indicators difficult to see is anti-fun. (Mind that there are significant differences in style of visual processing even between able-bodied and fast-reacting players using the same console / computer setup! Plus a screenshot that gives a clear view of a mechanic is not an accurate representation of what the player sees with limited time, since the human eye does not have high detail outside central vision and various action effects briefly blur the screen.) For players with any sort of visual impairment, photosensitivity, reliance on rapid processing, or simply visual processing style you did not expect, it is an active detriment. And for everyone else, it does not matter either way. Have visuals that suit the lore of the duty, yes, but do it in a way that prioritizes visual clarity.
(The word "needed" is important. The A8S Mega Beam obscured by explosions is quite fun, because it is actually a planning test - its earlier appearances teach the party that it is baited on a random player character, so they need only arrange their solution to the preceding mechanic to create a safe zone no matter who the boss chooses for the bait. Plus every duty has visual elements that are not mechanically relevant, included for other reasons, and those may be as subtle as the artist and/or lore writer creating them desires.)
In fact, ensuring visual clarity makes for more fun mechanics that are easier to design. Why? Obscured visuals delay some players much more than others, while clear visuals eliminate that delay, therefore yielding a relatively uniform discernment time among the player population attempting the duty. (Many forms of obscured visuals also vary how much they delay the player based on random variations of the mechanic.) You can then plan around that discernment time when leaving time for other tasks in the mechanic, such as making a decision or moving their character. This gives you finer control of how long the player has for those tasks, allowing you to tune the challenge level more precisely while ensuring that it remains achievable.- Adding randomness to a duty does not automatically make it more fun, or even less boring. To be helpful, the randomness must contribute to something interesting, while ensuring that all possible duty timelines created by random variation have a similar skill floor (required competence to complete) for every job. (Branching timelines regarding the order of mechanics, such as those in Alphascape V1.0 (Savage) (O9S) and Abyssos: The Eighth Circle (Savage) (P8S), are generally fine. (There is a limit, in that the player who puts in the effort to plan out all possible timelines reasonably expects to get to use all those plans before they stop returning to the duty.) Major variation in what mechanics are presented at all is prone to unexpected differences in skill floor, and therefore is best avoided.) Randomness in the wrong places can even make the duty less fun, by denying the player opportunities to plan uses of powerful job actions.
To reconcile giving the player an encouraging first-time experience with avoiding boring repeat experiences, encourage and reward skill expression so that the player will add more challenge to the duty at their own pace. Skill expression should be welcomed, not feared. (Which does not have to make fellow players feel bad, since the skill expression need not be clear to any player other than the one doing it.) This is tightly linked to job design, as it relies on the jobs to define what skill expression for each job is. Again from my previous writing on balancing the magical ranged DPS role:
However, duty design can and should give the player both the opportunities and the tools to express their skill with their job. Having frequent cast times is what makes moving no more than necessary valuable, but it is duty design that can allow the player to know exactly where an AOE will hit so that they can remove unnecessary movement. (The Patch 7.0 duties have a recurring lack of floor geometry for the player to use as reference points.) Being limited to melee range to effectively attack is what makes staying close to enemies valuable, but it is duty design that can allow a tank to reposition enemies towards a safespot for a later mechanic. Having limited usage of mitigation and healing tools is what makes planning their use valuable, but it is duty design that creates the timeline and its patterns to plan around. (In particular for dungeons, fighting two packs at once - known as "double pulling" - is a form of skill expression. If you are going to deny the player that option for a given trash pack, you should present some other form of skill expression in that trash pack instead.)The fifth problem [with relying only on the duties to provide difficulty] concerns the longevity of any given duty, even one of appropriate difficulty for the player. As I am sure you have experienced in raiding, one finds that any given duty gradually becomes much easier as one learns that duty's mechanics. Even if the duty incorporates randomness, one must still learn the variations to reliably complete the duty. In effect, familiarity with a duty lowers the skill floor of completing that duty with any given combination of job and equipment. (Though less so for jobs in different roles that have different parts to play in mechanics.) As a result, any duty that one can complete occupies less than one's full attention on subsequent completions, at any difficulty level from story to Ultimate, even without better equipment. What, then, can occupy the rest of one's attention in order to prevent boredom? Not the duty, by necessity - only the jobs can do so.
Satisfying mechanics actively reward the player's skill expression, adding enjoyment and longevity to the duty. What makes a mechanic or player strategy satisfying to execute is not just the opportunity for the player to show their skill and/or knowledge of the duty, but also clear confirmation of doing well. An earlier mechanic leaving room to handle a later mechanic, or even being used to counter the later mechanic, because the party set it up that way. A spinning AOE dodge where the final hit comes almost but not quite to the player character's position, not by accident but because the player knows how far it turns. A healing and mitigation plan that effectively uses a cooldown exactly on cooldown multiple times in a row, because the party mapped out the fight timeline to make that happen. (This is not even limited to high-end duties - Eden's Promise: Anamorphosis (E11N) allows a magical ranged DPS to Addle three Burnished Glory raidwides in a row by using Addle early on the first Burnished Glory and then exactly on cooldown twice thereafter. Drift the cooldown and the last Addle will be too late.) And yes, sometimes a sequence that the party gets to watch resolve after they have set it up - a flashy sequence is a good way to let the party see the results of their work and create a breather before the next mechanic. The existing Dawntrail duties are sorely lacking in such mechanics, which does their longevity no favors.
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Since players have so frequently remarked on the demands on working memory and reaction time in Dawntrail so far, these two aspects of duty design deserve special attention.
Working memory mechanics are like soy sauce on sushi: a small amount enhances the flavor, too much overwhelms it. (Which is why the soy sauce is supposed to go on the fish, not the rice!) Totally aside from the appropriate difficulty of memory mechanics, Patch 7.0 has too many of them, crowding out other mechanics that could provide other forms of difficulty. The result is boring and repetitive duties.
As for the appropriate difficulty of memory mechanics, the player does have a working memory limit inherent to their brain, which they cannot change... and which they need to use for playing their job in the duty, not just doing the mechanics. (Yes, even for downtime mechanics - jobs still have healing, buff-based mitigation, and resource-building tools to think about.) The player finds a job and/or a duty less memory-intensive with practice not from expanded working memory, but from learning bigger "chunks" that they can work with fluidly. For example, an intermediate RDM can think "basic melee combo" for what a beginner has to break up as "Enchanted Riposte, Enchanted Zwerchhau, Enchanted Redoublement, Verflare / Verholy, Scorch, Resolution".
Plus the player cannot be expected to offload the task of remembering to their chat log - even if they have the APM to type in combat, they may be using a controller without a keyboard in reach or extra hotbar space for text macros. They can only be relied upon to have one tool for storing a duty-provided piece of information outside their brain, and that only if surrounding mechanics permit: moving their character to a location related to the mechanic, such as a direct or conceptual "first safespot". (Prior to Patch 5.2, the party as a whole could also agree on moving waymarks to remind themselves of the random variation shown, but since players can no longer move waymarks in combat, that is no longer an option for memory mechanics.)
What is the working memory limit of the human brain, then? Well, the classic "seven plus or minus two [items held in memory]" is at best an upper bound, and newer experiments best fit the idea that there is no fixed number of items at all, but instead pushing to remember more items results in less complexity and detail for each, until eventually there is too little detail to usefully be a memory. If all the items to be remembered are very simple and familiar, such as individual digits of a number, then "seven plus or minus two" is roughly accurate. (Indeed, telephone numbers without area codes provide a ready demonstration of that specific working memory task, called "digit span".)
While memory mechanics can often be broken down until the player only needs to remember appropriately simple and familiar concepts like "spread" or "left", the rotational chunks of the jobs are not that simple - and making them that simple would be terribly dull. So we must take the low end of "seven plus or minus two" - that being five items - and set aside not just one item, but at least two and possibly more, for the player to continue playing their job. (As well as potentially more room to plan ahead for other mechanics!) Therefore, the total of "stored items not yet released" from memory mechanics may never exceed three simple items at any point in a duty's timeline, and should almost always be less. If the player has a good working memory, they can and should occupy themselves with their job, looking for hidden patterns, planning for later mechanics, ...
Examples:
- Some recurring sets of mechanics where the boss randomly choosing one counts as "one item" for a memory mechanic: {spread / pair / light party stack / full party stack}, {left / right / front / back}, {in / out}, {Deep Freeze / Pyretic}.
- In Eden's Promise: Eternity (E12N), the stored primal combination ground AOEs count as two items, since first-time players will generally remember the primals individually and work out the overlapping safespots. In the Savage version (E12S), the same primal combinations start as two items and end as one item, since the player will see them enough over the course of progression to memorize the overlapping safespots and work with those rather than the individual primals. (And for a final Savage floor, if the player is having problems with how fast they remember the safespots, they can actively study the five possibilities outside the duty, which does not take that long.) FRU would be able to treat them as one item from the beginning, due to the high expectations for external study and number of attempts at the duty in Ultimate.
- In Seat of Sacrifice Extreme, Quintuplecast looks like it violates the three item rule. However, the party can arrange themselves to do the whole mechanic in their clock spots for the Absolute Stone III proteans and close to each other (and the boss) for the Absolute Holy III stack, which allows the player to not bother remembering where those attacks are in the sequence. The remaining three attacks perfectly fit the three item rule, even if the player is not comfortable reconstructing the last attack from the previous two.
- Mascot Murder, the Living Memory World FATE against Mica the Magical Mu, is in flagrant violation of the three item rule. First the boss prompts the player to remember cards (all numbered from one through six) and displays six cards covering the arena, putting the player up to six items to remember as the boss hides these cards before the next section of the mechanic. Then the boss draws a card out of its hat, which the player must match to the cards covering the arena, though they stay at six items to remember since they can move their character to the matching card. (Though later repeats of the mechanic drop puddles on player characters after the hat cards are shown, which can drive them off the card in the arena if they are not careful about how they dodge.) Then the boss draws a second card out of its hat, which the player must again match to the cards covering the arena, and this time they have to remember the location as a seventh item. Then the boss draws a third and final card out of its hat, allowing the player to match the drawn card to those covering the arena once more before dropping the memory of the latter. Depending on how fast the player does the matching, they may briefly jump to eight stored items before dropping down to two. (Finally, the boss asks the player to answer which card it drew first, second, and third, with later repeats doing so in a random order and with other AOEs in between.) But even seven is wildly unacceptable, seeing as they are playing their job the whole time and not just doing a digit span test!
Just because World FATEs are casual duties and players who struggle with working memory can be carried, that does not make it appropriate to make them miserable! (In my experience there is a hidden pattern (that the safe cards on the arena floor do not share any edges), but that does not matter - not only does the player need to have a good experience before finding any hidden patterns, but noticing them is harder under high attention demands.)
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As for reaction time, I wrote about this back in January, but I must expand upon what I wrote:
When I wrote that, I was imagining a continuation of the game's slowly increasing pressure on reaction time over the course of Shadowbringers and Endwalker. I was not expecting Patch 7.0 to take a flying leap into more reactive mechanics! (Especially since your engine and the inherent latency of long client-server trips do not suit reactive mechanics well.) In this regard, Patch 7.0's duty design direction has been the exact opposite of helpful.The second problem [with relying only on the duties to provide difficulty] you have also already experienced with Anabaseios Savage, but more subtly: there is only so much you can demand in duty mechanics. A player can only react so quickly, move so precisely, focus for so long, and so forth. They cannot improve these attributes much by "natural" practice once they have learned the basics of gameplay. And even a player who is dedicated enough to undertake deliberate and thoughtful practice on these attributes will only have so far to go before they run into the hard limits of their body, including their brain. Running into such limits as a player feels awful, especially if it is due to disability or being outside the human body's brief physical prime - a concern for both the aging MMO playerbase and the family members they may want to share the game with! (As a disabled raider, I could talk about this all day, but that would be outside the scope of this series.)
Both regular duties and Ultimates have been grappling with these limits for years, and Extreme and Savage have gradually started facing them too. (For one example, consider Anabaseios: The Tenth Circle (Savage) and its Jade Passage orbs. The fact that they appear within the Pandaemoniac Ray animation and fire shortly thereafter makes them quite reactive, especially when they are later combined with Daemoniac Bonds adding more flashy animations and movement requirements. This sort of design even encourages players to use third-party tools to remove the flashy animations or otherwise get information more quickly, and Anabaseios Savage is full of it.) Players have already started remarking on the fast pace of duties.
These physical attributes limit not only the range of battle mechanics you can make, but how hard you can make them, and how hard you can make them if you want high-end duties to be possible outside a brief player age range. If you refuse to place difficulty in the jobs, these same limits will extend to how difficult you can make the top end of the curve at all, and not in a satisfying way. A player who is currently stuck on an aspect of skill they can improve may aspire higher, reach further, remain motivated to play. A player who is stuck on a physical limit and knows it - or sees the highest difficulty held back by other players' physical limits - is necessarily demotivated, for they know that no amount of effort they can put into the game will fix it.
Obviously this is a real-time game, and therefore requires the player to meet some standard of reaction time. (If a prospective player sets up their HUD Layout and keybinds to their liking, and still cannot react to a basic ground AOE in less than ten seconds, they probably do have some limitation you cannot reasonably accommodate.) But the real-time nature of the game only requires the player to meet a fixed standard and stay there - it is not necessary to demand that the player react ever faster. Indeed, demanding that the player react ever faster is only useful in niche games that are designed as reaction time trainers, since even action games will eventually have players hit their physical limits. Since Final Fantasy XIV is carrying on the legacy of the originally turn-based Final Fantasy series and attracts many "non-gamers" to play with their family and friends, a generous reaction time standard is best for the game even aside from the aging MMO playerbase.
Why, then, is it intuitively correct that the updated version of Copperbell Mines paces its mechanics slower than The Royal Menagerie (Shinryu Normal) and The Ghimlyt Dark? After all, all those duties are required by the MSQ.
- The player cannot be assumed to start the MSQ with familiarity with video games in general, let alone the genre specifics of tab-target and holy trinity MMOs. They can be expected to pick those up over the course of gameplay. In Copperbell Mines, they may still be getting used to the sheer volume of information on their screen, along with foundational concepts like "class / job", "party", and "target". You can show them something slowly, but at that point you cannot rely on them seeing it at all! By The Royal Menagerie, not only are they used to the game's basic systems, they have built on their fluency with foundational concepts to be comfortable with recurring mechanics like "stack", "tankbuster", "raidwide", "add", ... Without any change at all in their reaction time, they understand more quickly what the duty is asking of them because they are better able to organize the information given to them and fit it into their existing concepts.
- The player starts the game with the default HUD Layout and keybinds, which are almost certainly not ideal for them - and may even be downright difficult and counterintuitive to them. (For example, nothing in the game tells the player to try both Standard and Legacy movement modes.) In Copperbell Mines, they may well not know what to consider in setting up the interface to suit them, and may even still be slow with their movement keybinds. By The Royal Menagerie, they have gotten used to their interface and looking over it, even if they stick to the default rather than adjusting it for themselves.
- One way to improve and maintain the human brain's generic rapid processing is real-time video games. Like this one. If the player does have any easy improvement in reaction time available to them, they get it over the course of the early MSQ and other regular duties!
Out of all these reasons, the only one that continues essentially indefinitely is expanding the player's library of game-related concepts, the mechanical layers of which are also known as "mechanical vocabulary". The average player in Stormblood duties will handily beat the average player in early A Realm Reborn duties in mechanical vocabulary, overall game familiarity, interface comfort, and reaction time. The average player in Dawntrail duties will handily beat the average player in Stormblood duties in mechanical vocabulary, but nothing relevant to their speed at dealing with mechanics.
Accordingly, Dawntrail duties can expect the player to make better guesses about what the duty is asking of them during their first time, use their existing concepts more effectively, pick up new mechanical concepts faster, ... than they did back in Stormblood. But the player in Dawntrail duties cannot practically respond to mechanics any faster than they did back in Stormblood. Indeed, one reason that Stormblood is the closest existing expansion to the duty design style I want is that it is the last expansion before mechanics that were still too fast even with practice started creeping in.
Some players have complained of mechanics being too reactive and feeling split-second, and other players have replied that the game does not actually give the player less than a second between presenting the first cue for a mechanic and snapshotting whether the player character has completed the necessary action(s) to resolve the mechanic successfully. While that latter statement is true, it is not a useful response to player frustration for two reasons:
- There are many steps other than the player's conscious perception of time to decide / react between the server sending the first cue for a mechanic and the server checking whether the player character is in the correct state to resolve the mechanic successfully. Those include the server sending the packets indicating the cue to the player's game client, the client system's latency in processing those packets and giving the cue to the player, the player's sensory nerve conduction time, for visual cues the player moving their eyes to focus on the cue (unless they are already looking at it or trained to manage it by peripheral vision, whether by planning or accident), the player's sensory perception processing time, the player's motor planning time converting their decision / reaction into nerve signals, the player's motor nerve conduction time and muscular response, the client system's latency in processing the player's input, however long the player character takes to perform the required action(s) (such as moving over a distance) client-side, and finally the player's game client sending the packets indicating the completed action(s) back to the server.
Subtract all those other steps out, and the player may well be left with less than a second to decide / react even for a completely individual mechanic, and be accurately reporting that length of time! (For mechanics that involve acting relative to the party, including such basics as stacks and spreads, there are more steps unless the party has prearranged positions.)- More importantly, [B]it does not matter to the player's motivation whether they have actually hit the hard physical wall of minimum reaction time imposed by their body. What matters is whether they have hit the soft wall of the practical reaction time they have now[B], such that their wanting to do better next attempt is not leading them to an actionable way to improve - and if they are complaining, that is already the case! (If they perceived a way to improve that they consider reasonable and actionable, they would take it instead of complaining.) Remember, motivation is all about the player's perspective.
When I find something too reactive now, I probably really am hitting my hard physical wall. But if you ask a player to jump through all the hoops I did to get there, they are almost certainly not going to oblige you. They are instead going to say "that is ridiculous to expect me to think of, let alone do" and quit.
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Let us examine what it means to avoid pressuring the player's reaction time in different types of duties through an example.
The basic spread is an A Realm Reborn mechanic, that has recurred over and over again in both regular and high-end duties. It recurs so often that it is the very first marker you teach in the new section of Hall of the Novice added with Patch 7.10. So why has the Duty Finder population never mastered it after 11 years? Why will experienced players still sometimes get their characters hit by two or more spread AOEs in regular duties, and even occasionally have a slow party KO by stacked spread markers KOing all player characters who can raise?
Because Duty Finder does spreads by reacting to each other, and asking the player to react to another player's choice will always inherently pressure their reaction time. No matter what fixed standard of reaction time you or I desire to set, one player meeting it in such a situation will give their party members less warning - and thus less time to react - due to client-server delays. The player improves up to a point by learning heuristic guidelines like "run away from other party members" and "let those with frequent cast times stand still", but that route will never save them from getting stuck in a loop of adjusting to another player. Even continuously tracking the positions of every party member will not lead to perfection.
(Client-server delays are not the only reason for adjustment loops. People do experience them face-to-face, classically when trying to pass each other in a hallway and both moving the same way. But the resolution is usually much smoother in a hallway - there is no "I was ahead of you on my screen!")
In contrast, the Party Finder and Raid Finder populations spread perfectly, even players who are new to high-end duties and doing their first Extreme. And this is not because the players in Party Finder / Raid Finder are better at the game - Duty Finder matchmaking can put a party full of world-class raiders together, and they still might fail a spread in that environment! Why is this?
Because Party Finder and Raid Finder do spreads by planning, not reaction. The party agrees upon a spot for each player character to go to, and they expect each other to go to their own assigned spots. They may react to seeing the mechanic appear again in progression, but they are not reacting to each other. (And they can make such plans for regular duties if they please, as world progression groups used to do back when Normal Raids were released alongside their Savage versions.) In fact, trying to react to each other instead of following the plan is often frowned upon, with phrases like "never adjust".
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More broadly, regular duties must be designed for the Duty Finder population and player expectations.
Imagine the "worst reasonable" party that Duty Finder could matchmake together: all first-timers with no foreknowledge of the duty, all at minimum Item Level, only casual knowledge of their jobs, no knowledge of how to plan for specific mechanics even if they want to, never met before, some returning to the game, others tired and under-hydrated after a long day of work and/or caregiving. (Yes, the latter will make their reaction time worse.) They are all trying to finish their quest and continue the story attached to the duty, and they are a little impatient. They are trying their best in the moment, but not looking beyond the moment, and they certainly have no grand plan of personal evolution.
That party should generally complete the duty before the instance timer expires, and if they do not complete the duty they must correctly perceive that they have come away with enough knowledge to individually queue back into matchmaking and get it the next time. Either way, they should enjoy their time spent in the duty. Challenge them - perhaps even hand them a few party KOs - but without discouraging them from continuing the story. As a result:
- Duty Finder does not prepare outside the game, and rarely prepares outside attempting the duty. Part of why the Hall of the Novice update is so welcome is that "try this solo instance" is about the limit of what casual players can get each other to do, even when the whole party is cooperating. (After all, the player may be on console without a separate device to watch videos or browse guides.)
- Duty Finder is perpetually operating on reaction, since first-timers cannot plan for what they have never seen and even players who complete the duty frequently are unlikely to have its timeline memorized.
- Duty Finder's practical response times are not fast, so the player needs a generous lead time and long periods of information visibility. They are not looking in the right place when the duty first gives them the information they need, they have never actively thought about how they can efficiently move their eyes between information sources in the interface, and they will take time putting it all together - which have so much impact that I often beat my matchmade parties to safespots. (They may also be looking away from cues entirely in order to raise or read party chat.) I have even been regularly beating able-bodied and experienced healers to raising KOed party members in current duties ever since I settled into endgame, despite that being a reaction test that is not even from the duty timeline - because I have taught myself to notice KOs while keeping my party list in my peripheral vision, and they have not. (Sometimes my party position tracking is enough to alert me of the impending KO before it happens, and I can target the player character and use Swiftcast before they even go down on my screen.)
- Duty Finder does not prepare for specific mechanics, as a natural result of not knowing what mechanics are coming. This is why Thunder God Cid did not work out and had to be nerfed: getting three player characters into each tower and getting all of the six Shadowblade AOEs to avoid overlap are more advanced versions of spreading, and thus reliability requires planning who will go where in the Party Finder and Raid Finder style.
- You can get Duty Finder to do a tightly limited amount of general preparation - roughly one thing that is useful without foreknowledge of specific mechanics - before players run from the starting area of the duty in impatience. In Stormblood, that one thing was "wait for the healer(s) to cast Protect on every party member." In Heavensward and A Realm Reborn, that also included waiting for Stoneskin if the party had a CNJ / WHM. In an alternate timeline, that one thing easily could have been agreeing on "clock spots" via a macro or around a waymark, that would then be reused for a variety of mechanics just as Party Finder and Raid Finder do now. (If you really wanted to, you could still do that, but it would require a substantial amount of teaching players new expectations from Hall of the Novice up.)
- Duty Finder requires most mechanical mistakes to allow for recovery and duty completion within that attempt. With no plan and no foreknowledge, they are not going to reach the standard of making very few mistakes per attempt in any reasonable period. As such, mechanics should be carefully examined for what sorts of mistakes can result in an immediate or delayed party KO. Most mistakes should not even guarantee an individual KO for players with good equipment, healing, and mitigation.
- Duty Finder accepts only infrequent penalties for its lack of preparation specifically. The player, so long as they are reasonable, will not be angry at their party members or the game for occasional stacked spreads and similar mishaps. But they will get frustrated by too high an incidence of such things, so mechanics that invite such mishaps are ill-advised.
- Skilled players in Duty Finder will have a completely different experience than the baseline, and it is up to you to make sure they also have a good experience by giving them opportunities and rewards for skill expression. Do not neglect those opportunities in even the easiest of duties. As I have explained regarding healer design and magical ranged DPS design, anything that is appropriate to put in front of casual story-oriented players will not challenge a party that is comfortable in Extremes, let alone Ultimates. (And even the "worst reasonable" players will have a very different experience the 90th time they see the same dungeon in Expert Roulette.) Since your gameplay loop puts all those players in regular duties, that different experience is either going to be occupying themselves with skill expression or it is going to be boredom. Simply completing the duty faster is not enough - strong players can do that while falling asleep by already-acquired skills alone. This is why I made a point of bringing up the connection to job design and satisfying mechanics.
This same approach is why the casual player does not learn complex concepts unless the game (or a fellow player) takes the time to break down the concept into small pieces and teach them that way. Their tracking of effort and reward is long-term, but they are only willing to put in effort in the moment. Guide the casual player to one step at a time, and they will climb a mountain. Set a hill in front of them with no explanation, and they will perceive it as a wall.
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In contrast, high-end duties must be designed for the different expectations of players tackling them. The player still likely does not have any grand plan of personal evolution, but they do have a plan to improve at the duty in front of them. While Duty Finder lives in the moment, Party Finder, Raid Finder, and statics live in the future: job performance standards, party coordination, advance planning based on the duty timeline, practicing their execution of those plans in progression... and for putting more effort in, they expect more rewards out in how the duty treats them. Not just rewards in the gear, but in the gameplay experience of the duty itself.
(Of course, there are degrees to this. A player in Extreme probably remembers their plan for a mechanic upon seeing the castbar and executes it with some hesitation, which is the right general idea of planning, but not nearly enough for Ultimate plans. For example, consider shielding TOP's final iteration of Wave Cannon correctly on SCH: in both cases the party must move around extensively during the Wave Cannon castbar due to Alpha Omega's preceding mechanic, so the correct time to cast the first shield without expending Swiftcast is during the preceding castbar while looking at the preceding mechanic's cues, planned carefully not to be so early that the shield expires before absorbing damage. (Raising is almost useless there due to the structure of the Dynamis buffs, so one can expend Swiftcast to shield without much of a tradeoff, but it is more fun not to.) And then the second shield must be in place 6 seconds after the first shield is fully used, in which time the SCH must also move and help heal the party back to full HP, so the slightest hesitation will lead to a party KO. Oh, and they must also remember the other mitigation that the SCH and the party as a whole must apply to every hit, regardless of what cooldowns they have planned to use where. The whole plan is based on knowing when each of Alpha Omega's attacks will land before they even begin, and it is a delight, but a player new to high-end duties will not be doing it.)
- In high-end duties, the player expects and wants to prepare outside attempting the duty, including for specific mechanics. Remember the community reaction declaring Deltascape V1.0 (Savage) (O1S) too easy because the world first completion took only a single attempt? It is too easy for Savage, but let us be precise: the world first team was able to complete it in a single attempt because they could use their brief exposure to the Normal version and their general preparation to do the Savage mechanics by reaction. They had good reaction times on their side - that is a physical attribute world progression teams select for - but that would not have averted a party KO if the duty had forced them to make a mechanic-specific plan. (The very first time I entered O1S, without a timeline, I could not do its mechanics on reaction, but I could see exactly why the world first team could.) Nothing in O1S demands a mechanic-specific plan, and that makes it too easy for even Extreme.
- In high-end duties, the player's practical response time for a mechanic improves significantly over the course of learning that mechanic, and more so the more extensive their planning. Here the player can plan to always be looking in the right place when the duty first gives them the information they need, to move their eyes efficiently between information sources, to preposition their character for the possible random variations of the upcoming mechanic. They can work out how different sources of randomness combine in advance. They can practice executing their plan efficiently and without hesitation, even if they never actively think about prepositioning their hands or distilling animations down to the first visual cues.
TOP provides an excellent example of this in the opening to Run: ****mi* (Omega Version), popularly known as "the Predation Dodge" due to its resemblance to Ultimate Predation in The Weapon's Refrain (Ultimate) (UWU). Those readers who are unfamilar with TOP can see many examples of the Predation Dodge in real time, courtesy of Sausage Roll's study playlist. Without knowing that the footage is from TOP, the casual player observer can tell that the mechanic is not suited for them; they may not identify it as an Ultimate mechanic, but they understand that putting it in Alphascape V4.0 (O12N) would be a miserable failure. And they are correct - even though every single one of those AOE shapes is known to and manageable for the casual player in Alphascape Normal, as is the notion of AOE combinations! (Omega-F casts her cross AOE, Optimized Blizzard III, and her "Hot Wing" front-to-back-line-safe AOE, Superliminal Steel, in O12N. Omega-M likewise casts his point-blank AOE, Efficient Bladework, and his donut AOE, Beyond Strength, in O12N; in fact, the safespot for Beyond Strength is bigger in TOP to accommodate the combination with Optimized Blizzard III. Both have the same weapon tells in O12N that they do in TOP. (They do cast their AOEs simultaneously in O12N too, though there their positions and facing are dependent on the tanks' choices and the combinations are more limited.) And while the casual player does not get to fight Final Omega, they have seen the hourglass AOE sequence with the same safespots in Alphascape V1.0 (O9N) as Latitudinal Implosion / Longitudinal Implosion.) The casual player even has the notion of remembering an AOE pattern without orange telegraphs on the floor. So why is the Predation Dodge out of reach of the casual player?
The mechanic is purely individual dodging, so there is no coordination requirement. There is no unavoidable damage in it, so there is no healing or mitigation requirement either. And while there is a hard enrage to the phase as a whole, the damage output requirement is not what the casual player is looking at. What they correctly perceive is that they do not know where to go fast enough, even though all the information has been given to them.
The casual player does not know that the Omega-M and Omega-F pairs always spawn on opposing intercardinals, and so does not know to begin the mechanic looking at an intercardinal with their character prepositioned on a cardinal such that all intercardinals are visible on their screen, nor to look immediately at the opposite intercardinal after locating one clone and processing its weapon. The Ultimate raider at this point in TOP progression does know all that, and even in blind progression has been primed to expect opposing spawn locations by the earlier appearance of a single pair in TOP Party Synergy. (In fact, I check the pairs for the Predation Dodge entirely by looking at the arms of each clone, since three of the weapons are visible there and "no held weapon" is always the skates for Superliminal Steel. Only Party Synergy has a decoy clone.)
The casual player has to work out what the overlap of safespots is for each combination while the cues are being shown to them. The Ultimate raider at this point in TOP progression memorized each clone pair combination back when learning Party Synergy, and now can memorize how each clone pair overlaps with the hourglass cleaves from Final Omega. (And from there, how each combination flows into each possible other combination, all outside the duty. That is a large part of why the study playlist exists.)
The casual player has no practice in picking the light gray weapons on the dark gray clones out of the mid-gray floor, gold overlay or not. The Ultimate raider at this point in TOP progression has practiced that abundantly for Party Synergy and still fully expects to take several individual KOs - potentially cascading into party KOs - here. Indeed, by this point the Ultimate raider has gone through hundreds of party KOs in TOP, and the casual player is not willing to persist anywhere near that long for a duty completion.
If you immensely slowed down the presentation of cues in the Predation Dodge to allow the casual player time to work out the overlaps while in the duty, and guided the player's eyes around the arena by presenting one clone at a time with the matching weapon transition / creation animation followed by a "freeze" to have them go off in pairs, that version of the mechanic could have gone in O12N and posed little difficulty to the casual player, even with the resolution of the AOEs at full speed. (The only remaining pain point would be working out the correct distance from Omega-M without waymarks for the Optimized Blizzard III + Beyond Strength combination.) The difference between this hypothetical Normal Raid version and the extant Ultimate mechanic is purely the processing speed demanded of the player, which the Ultimate raider attains through planning for and practicing upon the specific mechanic. Their underlying reaction time need not change at all - for me the Predation Dodge went from scary to comfortable within a few hours of study and practice, long after I had already plateaued in reaction time. Even before knowing the snapshots, I have extra time for the movement in all but the "outer" combinations (Optimized Blizzard III + Efficient Bladework) that have the longest distances to move between the two safespots.- In exchange for their effort in planning and holding themselves to a standard of job skill, the player expects that a reasonable amount of effort put into a high-end duty will yield a plan that (when executed correctly with practice) leaves them ample leeway on their reaction time and results in a "clean" duty completion every single time. ("Clean" as in "no KOs, Damage Downs, or other penalties for failing mechanics". Recovering from failed mechanics necessarily involves reaction to the failure.) High-end duties can, should, and generally do move faster than regular duties, but only ever to force the player to have a plan and execute it with appropriate fluency. Give them all the information they need well in advance and then demand that they act at a specific time, or even perform a sequence of actions without pausing, yes. Have some of that information include debuffs and/or markers given to other players' characters, yes. Demand that they act while receiving and processing information about the next mechanic or portion of a mechanic, yes. Display some necessary information for a limited time, yes, though the tightest limits are only viable in Ultimate to force the player to work out an order of processing and remembering cues. And all that will result in mechanics that can feel reactive while the player is still learning them, because the player does not have the practice with their plan to process the specific mechanic efficiently at that point. But that feeling must disappear with a reasonable amount of practice, as the player's practical response time for that mechanic improves; once the player learns the mechanic, they should have enough time left over that reaction time is not practically a factor. Mastery should feel turn-based, recovering the feeling of the older Final Fantasy games in the real-time format of this one - half the battle was already won in the planning stage.
- Accordingly, any mechanic that requires the player to react to another player's choice, or where all plans that eliminate such reaction are unsuitably elaborate for the duty, is unacceptable in high-end duties. (Responding to information that another player must pass on, such as in Eden's Promise: Anamorphosis (Savage) (E11S) Prismatic Deception, requires a long lead time - for two players' reaction times and an extra client-server round trip - and a way for players to pass on that information without relying on typing, macro space, or out-of-game communication. E11S did it right, but such mechanics can never be fast.) Yes, this means that some mechanics are permitted in regular duties but not in high-end duties. Players put more effort and resources into individual attempts at high-end duties, and taking a party KO or even a personal penalty there because of forced reaction is annoying.
(TOP is perfectly fine in this regard, as players can devise a priority system for the "open choices" presented by Run: ****mi* (Sigma Version) and Run: ****mi* (Omega Version) without undue effort in planning or execution - that players in Party Finder turned to third-party tools instead is not the duty designer's fault. (Technically, there is also an "open choice" in Run: ****mi* (Delta Version), but that is assigned even more easily using the Remote Regression and Local Regression tethers from Patch.) I even know how to take the priority system management load off my party with manual sign placement, I just do not have the APM to personally place the signs!)- In high-end duties, the player expects the duty to present a deadly dance with harsh penalties for failure. That is not just part of the difficulty, but also part of the thrill of attempting these duties. If you feel inclined to build in lenience for failing a specific mechanic in a high-end duty, rather than overall tuning allowing for a small number of mistakes, the mechanic is almost certainly not suitable for high-end duties in the first place. That desire for lenience is a sign that the mechanic does not yield to appropriate planning.
- While high-end duties require a degree of skill from the player to have the baseline experience, the player actively expects satisfying mechanics for their trouble, along with ample opportunities to express their skill beyond the baseline. Not every mechanic must be satisfying in itself to execute correctly, but it is a disappointment that there is not a single such mechanic in all of AAC Light-heavyweight Savage.
In high-end duties, the player will solve puzzles and learn complex concepts from fellow players entirely to the extent that they grasp the bigger picture. (Arena floors may be almost entirely flat after players learned to tilt Twintania's divebombs in The Binding Coil of Bahamut - Turn 5, but their real third dimension has always been time.) The best players work with the whole duty timeline and the whole party as one, creating a single branching plan that is executed by eight players - and in return, they expect both the planning and execution layers to provide them the joy of smoothly countering the duty's every move. The party of players as a whole takes on the role of the single "planner" player controlling a party of characters in the older Final Fantasy games, as well as their individual surface roles in executing their plan.
So in high-end duties, give us planning problems that are worth the effort. Reward the spreadsheets, the hours at a striking dummy, the hours in a single duty. Reactive, otherwise easy mechanics can never do that.
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For all their faults, Heavensward, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers were close enough to these principles to inspire me to fight. To work my way up from being a terrified new sprout to being Ultimate-ready. (It definitely helped that Shadowbringers had very nearly the perfect job for me.) But also to do roulettes long after I had hit my weekly cap of Allagan Tomestones, with no jobs to level, just for fun. I did not mind even Sastasha, because I could still enjoy myself there by working with my job.
Endwalker broke my job, and that was a massive blow to me; this letter is about duty design, but I have always been a systems-oriented player and the jobs are the core systems of combat. I role swapped to keep raiding, because the personal improvement in working with my physical limitations was and is important to me. I did roulettes comfortably to reach my weekly cap of my Allagan Tomestones and level jobs, but not beyond that.
Dawntrail essentially did not change my job. Yet it is the first time I have had to actively remind myself to reach that weekly cap, despite having jobs that could use the Allagan Tomestone gear. A habit sustained for years was broken in less than two weeks, because the Dawntrail duties are so physically demanding that my brain notes the excessive injury risk and pushes me away from them. (Of course, the fact that I am forced to sit out of FRU by Patch 7.0's duty design direction does not help. Ultimate-level skills do not do much for me if I cannot safely commit to the Ultimate.) And injury risk aside, the Patch 7.0 duties are boring!
What Dawntrail has moved me to do is play more RuneScape. In some ways that game is less accessible than this one - its combat system has a far higher APM ceiling than even the old manual Embrace SCH - so I cannot play it perfectly, but at least I can play its combat system solo in my own way and the game will reward me for that. They have something for me, and that is better than having no duties that suit me.
Their latest boss rush dungeon is not only great fun, it copied your attack telegraphs and your system of limited KOs in Duty Support trials to teach the player mechanics... to wild popularity of the Hard Mode that turns the KO forgiveness off! Their "tutorial boss" for recurring mechanical concepts has not only instructional NPCs but individual mechanic selection with a randomized order, allowing the player to choose what they want to focus on practicing... and its own Hard Mode that activates and amplifies all the mechanics. With the mechanics still randomized and repeating once the boss has finished the set, so the player must have at least two plans to avoid KO from each mechanic, in case the boss picks it twice in a row and their cooldowns from their first plan are unavailable. And the Hard Mode smoothly scales from low Extreme to mid-Savage difficulty for an individual completion, while offering a "killstreak" system that gives better loot for chaining up to 200 kills in a row with increased scaling each time - successfully rewarding Ultimate-level consistency! Even their latest gathering boss deliberately allows for strategies ranging from slow but low-effort to fast but high-effort, to encourage and reward skill expression.
(RuneScape is not just copying the best aspects of your duty design history, by the way. They have also been seriously improving their tooltips, combat feedback, and overall new player experience, including by launching their own version of a pet class last year with a full teaching questline. Which inadvertently resulted in their player community learning your term "job gauge", because a player made one for them and it took off enough to start supporting their other forms of combat. Their players can literally bring them the best parts of your interface.)
There is nothing quite like raiding in your game when you design it right. RuneScape would not be in serious consideration for combat challenge if you did. But Patch 7.0's duty design direction has lost sight of both long-term fun and appropriate challenge.
Give us challenges we can all rise to meet and aspire to master, not barriers we cannot do anything about.
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11-26-2024 07:07 PM #3Player
- Join Date
- Oct 2021
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- 120
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- Aurelle Deresnels
- World
- Jenova
- Main Class
- Goldsmith Lv 100
(4)Last edited by Aurelle_Deresnels; 11-27-2024 at 04:35 AM. Reason: character limit too short
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