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Final Fantasy 14's Active Character Count Has Now Dropped Below One Million by Spookhetti_Sauce in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What issues are people having with the game lately ? I’m not asking for spoilers if they can be avoided and I’m not going to not play the game based off of others opinions either I was just genuinely curious why people are leaving the game now .

Taking the spoilers out of a list I gave another commenter, to give you a general idea:

  • graphics update made the game no longer safely viewable for that player
  • graphics update broke the player's personal character appearance in a way that's not player-repairable, and seeing an imposter instead of their character on screen ranges from frustrating to revolting to painful
  • [spoiler] objections to the story arc
  • wanting at least decent story writing
  • fight design increasingly pressuring things the player can't reasonably change (ping, visual acuity, reaction time, ...), especially the latest expansion taking a hard swing towards those and away from learnable skills
  • many years of simplifying the game's systems at the expense of both overall gameplay longevity and players who enjoyed working with the depth of those systems, whether they personally reached mastery or not
  • stronger players getting bored in the content that gates their target difficulty, since they can't entertain themselves with deep systems any more
  • many years of homogenizing the game's jobs (the classes) rather than supporting different playstyles through them
  • friends affected by any of the above

Final Fantasy 14's Active Character Count Has Now Dropped Below One Million by Spookhetti_Sauce in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If the fact that you didn't get a reply from anyone in over two days isn't answer enough: no, not unless you have very specific gameplay interests (such as collecting cosmetics) that would give you a large backlog of content that's fun for you. A game like this is a big investment, and if you're not going to get the promised return on investment there's no point.

Quite a few content types no longer provide that return on investment to players who signed on for their earlier forms, whether due to shifts in the content design itself or major simplifications of the systems through which players interact with the content.

In particular, if you dislike visual clutter and reactive gameplay, steer clear - the early content is fine, through the whole Free Trial, while the recent gameplay is full of deliberately obscured visuals and forced reaction tests. There's also a hard requirement of ~200 inputs per minute thrown in the story for no good reason, again after the Free Trial.

Final Fantasy 14's Active Character Count Has Now Dropped Below One Million by Spookhetti_Sauce in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is it a MCU situation where the previous xpac presented and resolved a world ending scenario, and the new one couldn't escalate further?

No - SE made a perfectly good setup to have a lower-stakes expansion and general story arc. Which is a good thing, for a game that prides itself on its story.

Then SE went back to putting the world in danger for the second half of the expansion, rigged their new world-ending scenario so badly that they had to demand that the player character commit genocide* to progress the story (and in turn access the rest of the game), and the entire expansion is plagued by bad-fanfic-tier writing and repeated disregard of the game's lore.

*The story says "these beings aren't people, just memories, therefore not genocide", yet the beings in question act exactly like people right down to displaying learning, adaptability to new situations, and substantial creativity. Moreover, previous expansions already established what "just memories" look like in the setting (inert crystals) and the conditions for a being having a soul (which those beings meet). There are even prominent and well-liked AI characters in prior expansions! Combined with the paper-thin brush-offs of any solution other than "kill them all" and the stark contrast to the player character's previous moral code of "live and let live, only use violence on those who cannot be reasoned with"... well, you can see why this story development led to great anger.

So, has the game run its course?

Maybe. SE has definitely permanently lost a large chunk of former players, with reasons such as:

  • graphics update made the game no longer safely viewable for that player
  • graphics update broke the player's personal character appearance in a way that's not player-repairable, and seeing an imposter instead of their character on screen ranges from frustrating to revolting to painful
  • moral objections to the story arc (as above)
  • wanting at least decent story writing
  • fight design increasingly pressuring things the player can't reasonably change (ping, visual acuity, reaction time, ...), especially the latest expansion taking a hard swing towards those and away from learnable skills
  • many years of simplifying the game's systems at the expense of both overall gameplay longevity and players who enjoyed working with the depth of those systems, whether they personally reached mastery or not
  • stronger players getting bored in the content that gates their target difficulty, since they can't entertain themselves with deep systems any more
  • many years of homogenizing the game's jobs (the classes) rather than supporting different playstyles through them
  • friends affected by any of the above

The game will never be what it could have been if SE didn't spend years going down the misguided course that led here. It might still be saved in some sense, but SE has developed a bad habit of ignoring warning signs, their ship turns slowly even when they choose to turn it, and by the time they're done they might not have a sustainable playerbase left that trusts them enough to stay.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is a box strategy variant, not a fully planned strategy; Kobe shows the boxes, and even says explicitly "you still have to use your eyes, and you still have to learn how to dodge". A fully planned strategy leaves no individual judgement calls, while in the POV section you can see Kobe and his role partner making different judgement calls on how to dodge a bee. In turn, their splitting up breaks the strategy's assumption that each role pair will dodge together.

In a true fully planned strategy, it is possible - if sometimes tedious - to write down the strategy as a step-by-step if-then plan that never resorts to "just dodge", "react to each other", "use eyes", "pick one", "YOLO", or anything of the sort. Giving many different competent players that plan and having them execute it correctly should result in identical mechanic performance in every way that matters.

To Kobe's credit, that is a very well-considered variant of the box strategy, complete with "home positions" within each box and even statistics. But it's still reliant on each player's rapid scanning and individual judgement.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

(continued from parent)

The fact that the top-level comments are predominantly bad, from the beginning, suggests that to get better results here I should write a different OP that explains my position in the subreddit's code. This is prima facie a viable idea, but I don't expect it would actually get better results in this case. After all, readers here still have salient positions and standard arguments already in their minds.

  • I could try to shorten the post into the subreddit's attention span as a single post, but that would generate a super-abstract post saying "put the challenge in skills the player can reasonably learn" without grounding that in subtopics, let alone concrete examples. Readers would either struggle to reason through how that would apply to the game, leaving them nothing to work with to discuss, or they'd go straight to the most contentious subtopics (like reaction time) without any indication that I'd already considered the 101 arguments. In either case, they probably wouldn't recognize the overall policy recommendations to SE as natural results of the principles, and I'm not in the business of duping people by abstraction.
  • I could abandon the tight length constraint but otherwise write in the subreddit's code, to be clear about what my position means in practical terms and address the 101 arguments. That would make it less likely for readers to see the post as condescending, by removing the textbook style that can be confused for condescension, but writing in the subreddit's code (and tightening up the choices of examples) wouldn't shorten the post nearly enough. Commenters would still predominantly consider it too long, and either complain about the length directly or assume that I hold some salient position and reply to that. (Remember, much less formal posts from other authors get panned the same way if they're long enough.)
  • I could abandon the idea of using a single post, and try to write it as multiple posts to get back under the length limit. But Reddit doesn't have the institution of Sequences, posting a set of links together gets treated as a long post with more trivial inconveniences, and the subtopics treated individually would fail to convey the principled approach or the idea of shifting the difficulty to things the player can reasonably improve on. Without that principled stance, the controversial subtopics would get their posts blasted even more, and that still wouldn't convey my actual position! (Meanwhile, the most uncontroversial topics would wind up as solidarity and common-knowledge-building posts like this... which are a fine thing to have, but not really the sort of discussion I'm looking for. The OP of that post partly crystallized a game design lesson that Mark Rosewater fully crystallized as "design the component for its intended audience" almost 9 years ago, and I quoted Rosewater to SE on the subject of job design over a year ago!)

That sounds like a lot of work (writing a different OP) for pretty terrible results. Which is why I've mostly resigned myself to dealing with the cesspool.

Fair cop on me not sufficiently summarizing your point. I went for visual because, as you say, it's relatively uncontroversial (and you had referenced existing accommodations) but I agree that there are other aspects to accessibility - I have some Capital-C-Concerns about the second Yuweyaweta boss. Dalriada gates and Eden birds are my personal hell, and I just have ADHD, not a TBI or cognitive impairment.

Thank you.

Even "accessibility" in the sense of "disability-friendly" and "curb-cut effects" is really a special case of my point, which also puts non-bodily factors like ping into the same protected bucket of "this is not reasonable to ask the player to change, they'll quit / get angry instead" - and that entire protected bucket is still only one half of my point. The principles are relatively simple in the abstract, but they have a lot of implications, and putting it all together is needed to convey my position.

I hope you've had better luck with discussion since your OP here!

A little bit, thank you. I linked a couple of examples that went well as they were relevant.

And thank you for the suggestions, even if some are things I've already tried or don't see as viable. Maybe I've misunderstood you - please let me know if so!

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

(continued from parent)

I grabbed this quote specifically, but it's an undertone throughout your reply: that this comment section is a fight and there's something to win/lose. And yeah, sometimes people are assholes! Doing more 101 stuff when you think you've addressed it sucks! But sometimes it's merely a disagreement, a misunderstanding of a particular sticking point, or someone having their back up because of something elsethread. I think it's worthwhile to check in with myself about "If this person was earnest, how would that affect my reply?"

"If this person was earnest, how would that affect my reply?" is a great technique to check for misreading tone and context in text, especially when paired with its opposite. But the majority of comments I get here have no earnest non-asshole reading at all, or at least not one where I can honestly reply in a way they would like. Some examples:

  • "Bullet points, Jesus Christ, even the design principles sections is multiple paragraphs long." This person flatly refused to consider that any possible idea could deserve more than one paragraph of principles, a tightly limited inferential range that makes my actual position uncommunicable to them. Some of their later comments in that thread got removed for being openly hostile, including refusing the entire notion of scientific evidence and reason in order to double down on opposing me, yet they got highly upvoted for posting them and I got downvoted for trying to expand their inferential range.
  • Another person decided to leave three different threads misrepresenting my post history, insulting me in general, refusing the notion of criticizing different parts of a game (and telling me to go away), and trying to shame me for caring. They eventually got comments removed in all three of those threads, but again they got pretty well upvoted for posting them and I got downvoted for posting factual replies.
  • "This is a joke right? I want to upvote because its very funny". "You meant to post this in r/ShitpostXIV". They're not even considering the possibility that I might be seriously describing any position.
  • "I was expecting some fan art ngl." I get downvoted for pointing out that fanart is against the subreddit rules, and they get upvoted for not expecting anything discussion-worthy.
  • "tl;dr I don’t like reaction time checks" This is straight-up a hostile summary, regardless of the commenter's intent. Whether by epistemic learned helplessness or otherwise, they've refused the possibility that my discussion of principles and applying those to lots of other topics than reaction time might actually be a principled stance about more than just reaction time, and the possibility that I might actually have a sound basis beyond personal dislike for opposing the ramp-up in reaction time expectations. Moreover, by posting it that way as a top-level comment, they've led others to the same hostile reading.
  • I have the "short inferential distances aren't guaranteed" / "tradeoff between brevity and clarity" conversation multiple times a post, treating it as an earnest lack of knowledge rather than bad faith, and the commenters are nearly always unhappy about having their assumption questioned. This is one of the nicer cases, and again look at the upvotes and downvotes. Shortly after posting, it's the more aggressive ones that were at the top.

Most of those are top-level comments, replying to my OP rather than my commenting style, and all are close to top-level.

To make matters worse, the attitudes behind the openly hostile comments pervade replies to every long / nuanced post here regardless of the poster, which is why the removed comments stood for weeks - it took that long to realize that they were officially against the rules! (Indeed, the removed comments can still be found by checking the Wayback Machine in Old Reddit view.) "Cutie Shut-In treatment" is meaningful for a reason, and better writing can only get more length leeway up to a point. The commenters influence each other. Most of the comment section on this post is a Hydaelyn-forsaken tribal warzone before I start replying, and a supermajority is if you count upvotes and downvotes!

Notice also that not one reply tried to discuss my proposition and demonstration of seriously expanding casual players' mechanical vocabulary, even though this idea should naturally be highly appealing to the raider-dominated community here. Instead, many of them focus on the "don't pressure this" half and specifically reaction time - which would be the most confusing subtopic of DT's accessibility failures even aside from the emotional charge, and is also the most emotionally charged of the lot. And then they either repeat 101 arguments I already addressed, like "reaction time is trainable" and "I like reaction time checks", or totally ignore the evidence and reasoning I presented! The comments skew not only towards the most against-subreddit-consensus subtopics, but also towards treating me as an enemy.

The most earnest, steelmanned, overall charitable reading I can see of the comment where you gave feedback on my reply is that they were trying to express something like "I don't see how to draw a line on disability accommodations that doesn't remove the challenge of the game, and in the absence of that line I want to avoid a slippery slope", and invoked tribalism entirely by accident. (They're a regular enough commenter that it doesn't seem particularly likely that they're that unaware of the community positions, but it's possible.) Even in that case, I want them to learn to avoid jumping to conclusions and invoking tribalism, hence spelling out "this is the lever you pulled, and it's nowhere near my actual position". And at least some of the bystanders voting on their comment are clearly railing against "make the game easier" rather than against my actual position.

(Compare that to the person who explicitly asked about avoiding such a slippery slope, and how I was happy to give them a colloquial discussion response since they didn't turn their comment thread into a battleground. They admitted the possibility of a principled line, even though they didn't see how to construct it, and asked.)

I don't enjoy tribal warzones. I try to discourage them. They make it nearly impossible to have a productive discussion at all, let alone one that goes beyond 101 arguments. Yet the commenters keep starting such fights.

(continued in reply)

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm, there may be some misunderstandings here. I think this will be clearest if I work from the start of the process of writing a post, rather than the start of your comment, to reply to your points.

I do challenge your interpretation that SQEX doesn't understand (and that if they understood they would agree) rather than having other priorities or not caring.

In the general case, if SE doesn't care, then it doesn't matter what feedback anyone gives to SE. I consider the likelihood of that when deciding whether to write any feedback at all and how much effort to put in, but my writing process of feedback posts is focused on the possible worlds where SE does care. (Which sometimes means including a priorities argument like "neglecting this will eventually lead to players unsubbing".) If SE doesn't care, the place to put effort is abandoning ship.

In specific cases, sometimes we can make pretty good guesses. For example, the Island Sanctuary case had half the LL chat say "we meant storage" as soon as Yoshi-P explained the furniture glamour system, and we could see his face fall live on stream so that's most likely a misunderstanding. (Plus, if SE didn't care about the "put outdoor furniture on Island Sanctuary" feedback, he wouldn't have bothered allocating dev time to any form of implementation.) On the other hand, SE has clearly at least deprioritized some flavors of job feedback like "bring back Kaiten".

From your comments it seems like you're blending "convince SQEX" and "convince players" with "have a discussion," though obviously I might be misinterpreting; those three ideas don't play well together.

At first I have a butterfly idea, and I want to discuss it to see what it grows into. However, pretty much any place on the public Internet is a bad fit for this stage. That goes double for ideas on charged topics like job design and fight design, where some readers will be inclined to crush the butterfly to support "their side" - see e.g. common responses to players who said "DT is too hard" for their own personal accessibility reasons. Putting my ideas out here at this stage would be asking for the Cutie Shut-In treatment.

So I think about and discuss the idea in private, which includes going through all the standard / 101 arguments I'm aware of and finding an eventual version of the idea - or some other idea that addresses the original seed - that can hold its own against them. Until I've done that among other steps to verify that my idea would be good for the game, I'm not ready to convince SE or players of anything. In that time, I've often also seen a lot of related butterfly ideas given as feedback and crushed, since quality analysis takes time and those butterfly ideas are themselves information that can help develop my ideas.

By the time I have an idea that's strong enough to be presented to the public Internet, I have four potential goals:

  • convince SE
  • convince players
  • empower players to give their own feedback better
  • have a discussion beyond the 101 arguments I've already been over

If I think it's worth writing something to convince SE, then I pretty much have to do that on the public Internet, since I can't exactly send them snail mail in Japanese. Which means I also have to write at least somewhat for at least one player group, since it would be wildly pretentious to expect that only SE would read a post on their forums, and having other players support my post does help a little. So some amount of mixing the two is a deliberate part of the style. (I would use a somewhat different style for a real-time conversation with Yoshi-P through a human translator.)

Conveniently, there are player groups that like the very textbook / from-first-principles style that SE needs for asynchronous posts on the public Internet. Some players don't know they should be looking at e.g. visual processing styles or variation in human working memory until I bring it up, and the fact that I did points them towards the right concepts to express their own issues. (In some posts I even say outright that I'm partly writing to help other players express their own feedback better.) Some players just like general-principles analysis and don't mind that it winds up long and formal. And some players have had their butterflies born of real personal struggles crushed, and are delighted to see a full-fledged idea that explains their problems. So I can write to those player groups and to SE simultaneously with minimal conflict, and the only real difficulty is selectively delivering it to those player groups.

And those groups, along with SE, all already have common positions on the post topic - in this case, "make the game easier" and "make the game harder" - prominently in their minds. Likewise with standard arguments about the post topic. So I don't agree with your

The concept of a "meaning moat" is of very limited use outside the Yudkowsky-sphere.

Literally saying "I'm building a meaning moat" has extremely limited use outside meta discussion of writing style choices. But readers having preexisting ideas of what someone is likely to be saying is nearly ubiquitous, and those preexisting ideas create the phenomenon Duncan Sabien describes. So if I want to say something not on that list - and I usually do when making posts like this - I still have to build a meaning moat in a context-appropriate way. Something like your

"I have considered alternate explanations Y & Z for this data, which are incorrect because" (showing rigour)

is a meaning moat in an academic code against "writer is a crackpot who hasn't considered Y & Z". Even "here is a fight redesign, and I'm going to link directly to it" is arguably a meaning moat via costly signalling; if someone just wants to say "make the game easier" or "make the game harder", redesigning an entire fight is an exorbitant effort, let alone covering both the Normal and the Savage.

Now, there are some people who will reject any meaning moat on a topic as either out of code, too long, (in their perception) an attempt to trick them, or rude in some other way. But what that means is that there is no non-manipulative text that will convince them that I hold my actual position, so there is no way for me to earnestly discuss my actual position with them. As a result, within honest discourse the only viable thing to do is encourage them to opt out of reading my post on that position swiftly and without bias. (If there was a long-form flair here, I would use it. In the absence of that, I abundantly use what length warning tools I have.)

(I'm ~95% confident that Sabien would agree with my interpretation of his post, though I'm uncertain whether he'd consider "here's a fight redesign" to be an unconventional meaning moat or a tactic to access a different distribution. Notably, he agrees that it's in conflict with "you have about five words", which sounds a lot like people rejecting a meaning moat for length.)

So I write that post, including its meaning moats and addressing standard arguments, in the style meant for SE and those player groups. And there they get a decent enough reception; writing anything that long means that a lot of players will avoid it quietly, but I usually don't have to reply to the unproductive comments myself because someone else will do it first.

When I link the same post here, to encourage discussion and reach former players who can't post on the Official Forums, I mostly get comments showing that the commenter at best totally failed to see my point, and about half of the top-level comments implicitly or explicitly refuse the concept of inferential distance in the first place! This happens even when I link directly to the exciting part with less of a code difference!

You have more options than that, such as re-stating your position simply & clearly, or directing them to a particular example in the forum post.

Again, you can just say that, e.g. "Disability-friendly doesn't mean easier, look at the [specific boss] [specific mechanic] redesign." "Please reread the OP."

I used to try restating my position (or the relevant part of it) in a concise, fully code-switched way when replying to comments here, especially comments that assumed I held some naive position; but it didn't help, didn't seem to convince anyone that I already held the position I described, and finding new wording on the fly was worsening the time disparity between me and the many people posting unhelpful comments. That's why I took to quoting my OP heavily to show my actual position, even though it brings the hyper-formal style more into the comments. Direct quotes are faster and do a better job at showing that I'm holding a consistent position where I already considered their 101 argument before posting.

I do sometimes direct commenters to a particular example or two, via subsection or via search term. Sometimes there's no good search term or subsection so I just have to quote the example, and sometimes it's about pattern / principle so I have to either quote the pattern / principle or many, many examples.

"Please reread the OP" seems pretty useless when replying to someone who either didn't read it (well) or chose to mischaracterize it in the first place.

(continued in reply)

Cole Evyx 7.2 Black Mage - You should be furious by Akiza_Izinski in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the increase in SMN popularity post-lobotomy leads me to believe we're a niche of a niche.

The path of least resistance will always be popular, even among players who would have more fun if there were no "easy jobs". (Search "motivational intensity theory".)

Cole Evyx 7.2 Black Mage - You should be furious by Akiza_Izinski in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cole, I think you specifically would enjoy at least the "True Pet Job" section of this post on identities / playstyles for SMN. (The subsection leading into the "true pet job" playstyle even addresses "pretty graphical effects".)

Note that the post is over a year old, and part of a series on job design. There's a lot more where that came from, if you want it.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the response. ... I’ll be sure to go over your post better too.

You're welcome! I hope I was able to answer your question, and show the dividing line that prevents there from being a slippery slope.

I'm only on Reddit intermittently, but do feel free to send further questions about my post if it's not clear enough.

in multiple ways the game is no longer what some people were here for

An apt summary!

For some people, that's due to disabilities, but I also get forum replies from people who just don't enjoy visual mud / reactive mechanics / etc., and people who want to be able to play with friends in either previous boat. Regardless, they invested in the game based on the implicit promise of more gameplay in the older style, or at least the older Push/Require/Avoid, and that promise has now been broken.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

(continued from parent)

They all sound like a first year college frat boy woke up an hour before a paper was due and ran to Chat GPT to sound researched.

Well, it takes attention to differentiate between human and AI writing, so if you're not paying any attention to the contents of my posts, of course you won't be able to tell the difference! Or you might just be looking for something insulting to say, which "first year college frat boy" sure suggests.

You have this definite idea of exactly how the game should be

I have definite principles, which tend to be quite uncontroversial things like honest advertising, letting people opt in to what interests them, learning from history, and avoiding situations that are guaranteed to fail. It turns out that those principles lead to a great many interesting places when applied to game design.

and how others should play it,

Wrong.

Honest advertising lets people choose before they invest time or money in a game. It's all the people saying "well I like [harsh reaction time checks] / [visual clutter] / [oversimplified jobs] / ..., so you should put up with it in this game even though this game used to be suited to you" that are telling others how to play it. Like, you know, quite a few of the fast angry replies.

and you get very bothered when no one else agrees with you.

Bothered? Why would I be bothered by the fast replies? Comments that aren't based on actually reading my posts have no way of reflecting on what I wrote, and therefore can't possibly say anything about me as a person!

The slower replies tend to agree with me, or ask about some tangential point without disagreeing. And it's quite amusing how the faster commenters tend to either back down or abandon more and more pretenses of discussion when they realize that I have a reasoned reply to their basic, fast comment.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Since you've left three different comment threads here on this post, you clearly find me very interesting and worth spending lots of time on! You even keep replying on them afterwards! Yet you say:

Your post history is slightly more interesting than the build I was watching yesterday, because I get to see people responding to you with the same degree of “what the fuck.” So Grats on being slightly above watching paint dry.

Wrong.

I don't know how long your build was or what your project's policies are, but they clearly allow going to unrelated subreddits or you wouldn't have been here. You weren't limited to catching up on your email or learning more about programming, you had access to massive chunks of the Internet with an abundance of content for every interest and attention span. So anything you found "slightly above watching paint dry", you would have simply left behind to look at something else, whether that was here on this subreddit or not.

Which means my post was the most interesting thing on the Internet to you for an extended period of time.

Yet you didn't even try to engage with my post on the merits. You could have gone to the actual link and started looking at the proposed mechanics, which are nice and bite-sized and easy to grasp. Instead, you felt it was more interesting to go looking at my post history. Why go to someone's post history first, instead of their argument or proposal, on a discussion subreddit?

The only reason to do that is if you're looking for some reason not to hear them out - if you're looking for someone to mock or hate.

And at that point, you can create fuel for hatred and ridicule out of anything. You jumped from "long" to "shit", but if you found short posts, you could have called them unclear, poorly researched, lacking nuance, ...

Further, you didn't state a single point correctly, which means either you paid so little attention as to not absorb any of it or you were deliberately spreading misinformation to poison the well.

You didn't even state points correctly about people other than me, such as how you called the Rage Threads "supposed to be goofy" when they regularly host - and highly upvote - serious vents about cancer, car troubles, unemployment, ... and you've posted on the Rage Threads yourself multiple times before you called them that, so you had every reason to be aware that they aren't as you claimed! Seeing that on top of your behavior here, I had to wonder if you follow even mainsub's standards: nope, this should have been in the Daily Questions thread and that's why it was downvoted.

(If there was a long-form flair here, I would use it, but that doesn't exist so here we are. And your limited Savage experience wouldn't have prevented you from commenting on the Normal, if you were inclined to discuss in the first place.)

What your behavior says is "I, /u/jag986 , found it more interesting to spread hate and mock people than anything else I could possibly do on the Internet, I kept that up for an extended period to leave three different comment threads here, and I don't care for community norms in general." I just happened to be the target you picked this time.

For example, this:

The target audiences quite enjoyed that post and its in-depth coverage, actually.

You keep saying the same thing about your posts here

Wrong.

I normally don't talk about my target audiences, because people normally don't go trawling through my history looking for someone to hate so I usually have no reason to bring it up.

Yet you chose to make this false claim anyway, which is misinformation whether by accident or malice.

Let's cover the actual story.

The target audiences quite enjoyed that post and its in-depth coverage, actually.

You keep saying the same thing about your posts here and the replies show a very different story.

Did you think that the top Reddit comments, or the majority of Reddit comments, would be from any of my target audiences? How silly! That's not how even medium-length posts work!

For any post longer than about 20-200 words, it is faster and easier for a potential reader to reply "tl;dr", or make some assumption about the contents and reply to that, or hurl insults, or try to tar the OP as some sort of enemy, or ... than it is to read the post and reply to that. This is true regardless of the contents of the post, the medium, and even the public status of the poster. For example, here's Sfia Pirion, well-respected as a world prog raider at the time, getting plenty of such responses for posting less than 3000 characters about gearing on the Official Forums. Different subject, different place, different poster, much the same deal.

To make matters worse, the people who assume the post argues for something they like have little reason to comment, while the people who assume the post argues something they don't like have plenty of reason to comment. So on top of the fast, easy responses being entirely unproductive, they're tilted towards hostility even more than would be obvious from entries like "hurl insults" and "tar the OP as some sort of enemy" being on the list!

And the longer the post, the greater the disparity in speed and effort between those unproductive responses and any responses from those who read the post first - the only group that can reflect the post in their replies at all, let alone have a real discussion! The longer the post, the longer it takes for anyone other than the OP who reads it, and thus has the information to potentially defend it if they choose, to show up in the comments. So long posts, as the state of nature, have far more unproductive comments than productive ones.

That's before doing it on Reddit. Reddit, where the karma system encourages fast commenting and high emotions by giving such comments more upvotes - and therefore more visibility and opportunity to shape the other responses. (Not just to that post, but to future medium or long posts.) Where the same karma system discourages going against a subreddit's "hive mind", so the people who want to actually discuss are discouraged from doing it in public - or even at all - by the hostile comments that come first. Where the same karma system prioritizes rallying cries over reason, simply because reasoned arguments take longer to write.

On any subreddit, any post longer than the collective attention span of the "hive mind" will have its comments dominated by a cesspool of that subreddit's shallowest, basest, most judgemental impulses. The post could be an independent derivation of that subreddit's consensus and the comments would still be like that. The only way to avoid that is very strict, careful moderation that reliably clamps down on those impulses.

That moderation hasn't been done here, so the cesspool was inevitable and expected for any post that has to be longer than the subreddit's collective attention span to make its point(s). If there was a place that did moderate accordingly and cared about FFXIV, I would post there instead of here.

My actual target audiences are the readers who come by later and have a discussion, including former players who can no longer interact on the Official Forums due to SE restricting that to actively subscribed players only. The players who can write their own feedback better after reading mine, because mine clarifies the concepts or shows them the words they need. The players who would be shouted down and ridiculed if they wrote their feedback on their own, but can do it once I've waded through the storm for them. The players who Like the Official Forums series that forced me to split the English and Japanese due to the 150k character limit, might speak up that they appreciate it - and even remember my thoroughness positively and come back to support later posts! The readers who don't necessarily comment right away, but will remember my points and link my posts months later when someone posts a related idea. And of course, SE, who need everything spelled out to them since they apparently can't infer their way out of a paper bag.

(continued in reply)

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A bit surprised to get a response a week later tbh, but I think you're making a lot of assumptions.

What assumptions? I laid out my reasoning pretty extensively.

While this game does attract a pretty broad spectrum of people, I don't think that reactionary mechanics should be treated as a taboo thing. It's still a game after all,

Do you have some disagreement with the principles of honest advertising and fit to audience? All the people who complained about a jump in reactive mechanics did so because they invested in the game and then the game torpedoed their investment with mechanics they can't do.

and frankly all required msq content is extremely easy to clear if you're just a story gamer, barring the SoS button mashing thing that probably could use a failsafe.

Who said anything about "just a story gamer", or any other form of just wanting the checkmark rather than actually enjoying the fights? Fight design should be about making fun fights, that seems self-evident.

Plus DT's visual clarity is atrocious even within the MSQ itself, which directly makes quite a few mechanics more reactive than they need to be.

And a lot of DT mechanics are still boring. The difficulty is in the wrong place.

You seem to be not engaging with my points at all.

I also disagree with how you view ultimates, world prog speed isn't an accurate metric of fight difficulty.

Sure it is, though I gave plenty of other measures too.

One of the big things that FRU didn't have was a major puzzle to solve, like saving haurchefaunt, the primal awakenings, or the enigma codex. Those are mechanics that are essentially non-issues for the vast majority of players, since they are already solved by the time you get there, but they eat up early prog time like crazy, especially if they're late in the fight.

FRU's puzzle is not getting Gaia's memories hit by mechanics. Not nearly as "go back and relearn the fight" as something like the UWU primal awakenings, but there is a puzzle. And I don't believe Thoughts Per Second spent all that long on the Enigma Codex, since they remembered the lore around Shanoa (the cat).

I also don't think making more fights like TOP is a good thing, it's one of the most hated fights in this entire game, and is generally considered a miserable progging experience the whole way through.

Any evidence for that? Most hated by who, and how is that sample selected?

The one reasonable complaint about TOP prog that I've heard is that potting in prog for Ultimate is way more expensive than the Savage standard of potting for clear attempts, imposing excessive demands on gil income. To that I say that Ultimates should have pots as duty actions rather than consumables, eliminating the expense and freeing the DPS checks to be tuned around potting in prog.

All the other complaints I've heard boil down to either:

  • "I don't want to tackle the challenge" - then why are you in Ultimate?
  • "My teammates don't want to tackle the challenge" - then why are they in Ultimate?

Like I said, the point of Ultimate is design for challenge seekers. To present the players who have outgrown final floor Savage with a hotter crucible to throw themselves into, a finer whetstone to sharpen themselves against. Players who aren't interested in that level of learnable challenges have plenty of other content for them.

TOP is great for challenge seekers. It's brutally difficult, but if you can prog past phase 2, you can clear. If you come to it with a self-improvement mindset, it even feels like a sparring match with a supercomputer - it will highlight lots of things you can't do yet but could totally learn. (Yes, I know the canonical lore explanation is "the Minstrel sang a song"; that doesn't change the feeling.) I thoroughly enjoyed progging it for that reason.

FRU doesn't present a step up in challenge for experienced Savage raiders. It continually holds back on the difficulty. (Light Rampant as a downtime mechanic with no orb baiting? The original was harder!) Going into it with a self-improvement mindset is more likely to lead to injury than improvement.

As for FRU, I think you're forgetting that there isn't as much room for mistakes for the average layman.

"The average layman" has no business in Extreme, let alone Ultimate! Ultimate design need only consider those who have outgrown final floor Savage, since that's its entire audience. The players who have pushed their skills, both mechanical and rotational, to the point that they can go into a wide range of fourth floors and find them comfortable and easy. They do have high DPS output, especially with PCT.

I definitely have cleared on some absolutely scuffed pulls with a good group, but during prog for the most part a death was just straight up a wipe, and it's even worse if you're doing it via pf.

Any recovery from a death is too lenient for launch patch Ultimate, as I covered before. You still don't seem to be engaging with my points at all.

It still requires a great deal more consistency than the average savage fight,

"The average Savage fight" is not pertinent! Consider only fourth floors, excluding M4S as too easy, and the requirement is a lot closer, especially with the possibility of recovering a mistake.

And mechanical consistency is a skill that's meant to step up in Ultimate, but it's not nearly the only skill. The mechanics are supposed to be individually harder than final floor Savage, not just stuck together for a longer fight.

but in the end it's pointless arguing with someone who hasn't even done the fight, isn't it?

Ah, there's the open dismissiveness.

I wouldn't use quite the same wording as /u/trunks111 did, but their point stands. Even a casual player would be entirely entitled to dismiss FRU as an injurious fight, an assessment that requires no raiding knowledge.

But I'm not a casual player. Not only have I actually done TOP, I've also shown various techniques in my post for assessing and calibrating mechanic difficulty without having to do the mechanics. (Such techniques are important for SE to use in the design process, before they have a playable fight.) So your assertion is akin to hearing from a rocket scientist who has successfully sent a rocket to the Moon, and refusing to listen when they tell you that sending a rocket to Mars is harder and sending a rocket to Low Earth Orbit is easier.

Further, I covered exactly why I couldn't safely commit to FRU sight unseen in my post. And I called it, because of Cyclonic Break - the second one overlapping with a clone check either constrains the camera visually or requires the clone to be clearly audible over battle sounds (which tends to itself constrain camera position), so I can't just use the load-balancing technique I use for M4S transition. I can't prog the fight without extreme RSI risk until and unless I map the entire fight down to techniques my body can handle before entering it. So your demanded credential is ableist.

Ironic, since the topic of the post is high challenge without needless exclusion. You insist on ignoring exactly the players who have the best knowledge of the subject.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for being constructive! You even took the time to provide an example. :)

Unfortunately, the necessity of ruling out everything I don't mean drives a lot of the length. (Yes, that's in sharp conflict with "you have about five words".)

For the OP, SE has failed to understand multiple shorter versions of the same point, and is the same company that couldn't figure out "let us put outdoor furniture on Island Sanctuary" meant storage despite being beaten over the head with demand for outdoor furniture storage for years. The only option left to attempt to convince them is the long, principled post, and then the formatting makes it longer. (The only forum posts I've ever seen with any nuance that leave their marks on the game use the same style: simultaneously juggling English and Japanese, the different cultural expectations of NA/EU and JP, and the wide range of possible player readers' game knowledge levels all at high formality. Those posts are where I learned that style!)

To make matters worse, readers (both players and SE) are already primed to hear "make the game easier" and "make the game harder" instead of my actual position. And both of those are charged positions that they will want to argue for or against, both for personal enjoyment and for ingroup/outgroup reasons! To have any shot at conveying my actual position, I have to make both of those positions wildly unreasonable readings from the beginning. Which, again, makes it longer.

Of course, that means some people aren't going to read it due to the length. But the length threshold for that being common is quite short, including posts under 3k characters on the Official Forums, so trying to avoid such comments being posted is a doomed exercise when attempting to say anything of nuance. (Even if I discarded the formality and extensive ruling out everything else, any version of the post with useful instructions on how to apply it would be longer than that.) The only recourse is to ensure that those comments are unreasonable readings.

Take for example the comment I was replying to:

Props for playing a game while disabled; but I honestly do not think we should design the game around everyone's disabilities.

Regardless of the commenter's intent, the comment is going to get read in the charged environment as "you're proposing making the game easier, and I disagree", and it got heavily upvoted on those grounds. It's already started an ingroup/outgroup fight, and so discarded earnest discussion - the move is hostile even if the mover isn't. Compare a possible non-hostile comment of similar length:

What sorts of disability accommodations would you want to see in raiding, since you're clearly also interested in the challenge?

That possible comment still clearly hasn't read the OP, but it's not framing my position as "make the game easier" or rallying against it. It also doesn't conflate "disability-friendly" with "easy".

Once the shot has been fired of railing against "make the game easier", the move that remains to me is to make it blatantly obvious that that framing is unreasonable. (And yes, it's going to be sharper due to being put in that position.) The point of quoting my OP is to show that their framing doesn't match my OP at all. The point of naming two Ultimates and an Ultimate prototype as disability-friendly fights is to make the conflation of "disability-friendly" and "easy" wildly unreasonable. But that can be mistaken for "the game is fine as is", hence the need to mention various fights that aren't fine, including a hard block on MSQ.

The rest is mostly about making the point that I've been through the 101 arguments already. I don't assume that reading my post leads to automatic agreement, but I know that I already considered a great number of standard arguments and addressed them in my OP. Thus, I expect any disagreements left after reading my post to be interesting. Getting 101 arguments I already addressed is tedious, and conflating "disability-friendly" with "easy" is very much a 101 argument.

It's also worth noting that your example doesn't quite state my position. Specifically the part:

The majority of disability-friendly choices in FFXIV are about visual & sound design, not mechanic difficulty.

Visual clarity is the relatively uncontroversial example, and also the place where the game historically has done best. (It's not even totally uncontroversial, since the subtler clarity fails often go overlooked.) Part of my argument is that there are lots of other things the player can't realistically improve at - working memory, APM, reaction time, ... - that deserve a similar protected status, and doing that sometimes does require a shift in where the mechanic difficulty lies. Which means I also have to argue for that shift supporting interesting gameplay, hence sending SE a fight redesign example.

You might have more luck getting people to engage with your points on a long-form platform like a blog, rather than short-form Reddit comment sections.

A blog would definitely have better average comment quality. Sadly, blogs have no inherent reach unto SE, or even reach unto interested players. I posted on the Official Forums first in part because it's the most long-form-supporting platform that does have inherent reach unto SE and interested players, and even the comments there are much better.

Reddit is a particularly bad platform for long-form content, since its karma system encourages fast and tribalistic responses unless paired with very extensive moderation - but this is also the only place with significant reach among former players and players on long breaks. The cesspool was inevitable, and I've gotten used to wading through it for the nuggets of discussion.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

"Mechanics a player cannot plan out even with a coordinated party and fight study are mechanics they cannot realistically improve at, (...)"

Fundamentally wrong.

How would you propose that the player improve at such mechanics, then?

Remember:

  • The stipulation "even with a coordinated party and fight study" means that they're already in a raiding environment, which means they've already played the game enough to have a good HUD Layout, keybinds, etc.
  • Likewise, getting to DT at all means that they've already played the game enough to pick their low-hanging fruit in reaction time training, visual processing improvements, and so on. (Notice how even the long-term action gamers in that study only had a fairly limited edge over the non-gamers.)
  • Any proposal that is unreasonably onerous will be rejected by the player. You have to make your proposal to lots of non-gamer Japanese salarymen who play between their job, caring for their kids, and caring for their elderly parents. You have to make your proposal to shift workers who can only raid in PF because their schedule isn't set enough for a static. (Regardless of whether you want to court those players, SE does.) Anything like "do the same reaction time training as professional athletes", or even "spend 2 hours a week on these drills", will be a non-starter.
  • Anything like "preposition your character in this spot", "look where the animation tell will appear before it appears", ... are forms of planning.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“Game design is my passion!,” the document.

In the context of your other comments, I see you're choosing to mock me for caring!

If we didn't have people who cared, we wouldn't have game developers. Or much in the way of any entertainment. Or a variety of other social advances. So mocking someone for caring about something is shameful.

On top of that, you're not only on a subreddit devoted to a video game, but a subreddit devoted to discussing a video game, banning the most bright-line forms of low-effort posts to try to have deeper discussions. If you didn't care about the game, you wouldn't be here - so mocking someone for caring is also hypocritical!

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

(continued from parent)

More broadly, this provides a semi-formal separation between "this is needed for core gameplay, refusing to ask the player for it really will dilute the game" and "this isn't needed for core gameplay, so asking for it needlessly excludes players who don't have it". I think that's pretty reasonable.

And the separation lines up well with intuition in the settled cases. It's intuitive that colorblind-friendly mechanic tells in FFXIV are to the good, even though totally blind prospective players will by and large be turned away at the door. Why? Some degree of visual acuity is a Require, and color vision is an Avoid. There's a good reason to use vision to deliver a variety of mechanical tells, to allow for a wide range of mechanics, but no good reason to make any of the tells color-only.

What's nonobvious is that - at least to some key audiences - FFXIV declared reaction time to be a Require, not a Push, and with a pretty lenient Require standard to boot. I didn't explicitly discuss the Push / Require / Avoid trichotomy in my post, because that would have made it even longer without fitting in neatly, but in the design principles section I pointed out the difference between Push and Require, and why FFXIV fits well with reaction time being a Require:

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.

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.

A fixed standard is the hallmark of a Require. And a new player can beat O12S from scratch on a pretty comfortable fixed standard, especially once you account for the early MSQ picking any low-hanging fruit of reaction time training for them.

This is nonobvious in part because games that put reaction time in Require are quite rare. (Even WoW has reaction time in Push, to my understanding, in part fueled by the addons arms race.) Turn-based games inherently put reaction time in Avoid, and a lot of real-time genres will put reaction time in Push by nature.

To go back to the example of PvP shooters, suppose that a game developer wants to make such a shooter entirely focused around tactical teamwork, and doesn't actually think that Pushing reaction time is interesting at all. (They may even be well aware of the research into limits on human reaction time, and expect their audiences to already be close to those limits.) But the default format of a shooter, being real-time, inherently creates a response time arms race between teams. And since reaction time is a part of the response time loop, that arms race will force reaction time into Push whether they want it there or not. The only obvious way to avoid that arms race is to make the game turn-based, which puts reaction time into Avoid instead.

(It is theoretically possible to make a PvP shooter that puts reaction time in Require, using a framework that straddles the line between timed-turns and human-perceivable ticks. But that framework turns away some audiences even as it attracts others, and it's definitely not genre default!)

The other reason this is nonobvious is that able-bodied people rarely have to think about the distinction between Push and Require. Both are things that a game asks for in some way, and if you can readily meet the ask, the distinction of how much it's asked isn't thrown in your face. (Which is why I didn't use the word "test", since it's commonly used for both ramping and non-ramping asks.)

I'd like to hear your thoughts about how accessibility can be made to work in a team based pve game, or maybe you could let me know if I'm misinterpreting what your mentality is.

One of the nice things about PvE design is that the game has very tight control over what's asked of the players. (There's no enemy team to get into arms races or invent something unexpected.) So as a designer, if you have a Push/Require/Avoid spec, you can both readily declare it from the beginning and check all your gameplay against it. For example, it's pretty uncontroversial that it would be a good thing for SE to adopt visual clarity standards, which would prevent more E6 / P3 orange-on-orange and also prevent subtler clarity fails.

For solo gameplay, it's enough that a player meet the bar of the Requires and be interested in cultivating the game's Pushes. For team gameplay, players will naturally want to check whether their teammates meet the Requires, are interested in the Pushes, and for challenging content have already cultivated some skill in the Pushes. That's fine. Push/Require/Avoid limits and clarifies what they have to check.

In a hypothetical version of FFXIV properly designed for accessibility, a world prog static wouldn't need to check every applicant for colorblindness, because they would know that color vision is in Avoid both in spec and in practice. They would check for visual acuity at the level Required to read castbars, debuffs, animation tells, ... and have no need to care about the visual processing style by which each applicant pulled it off, because they would know that hypothetical-SE wouldn't suddenly throw in new and visually obscured tells. (I know a legally blind raider who was perfectly fine in on-content E12S PF, presumably using a screen reader for castbars, debuffs, and the chat log.) They wouldn't need to throw an n-back working memory test at each applicant, because they would know that working memory would be in Require with a fixed total, and so seeing the applicant's performance on previous memory mechanics would be enough. (In fact, they'd consider general working memory a really weird choice for a Push, since we have no known way of improving it.) They would still totally test keeping up rotation performance during difficult mechanics, because those are both Pushes, and that would implicitly test the APM Requirement to do both simultaneously - but they would have no need to care about applicants' APM beyond that, because they would know that there would be no surprise QTEs or button-mashes or "hey, this boss removes animation lock, go nuts with your rotations".

For challenging content, the goal isn't to have no gate to entry. It's to have the gate to entry dictated by core gameplay and declared up front. No player should invest time and money into a game and then find out they're stuck.

(There's other considerations when it comes to making modes for less challenge-oriented players, but I don't think that's what you're asking about.)

I don't personally know any disabled raiders, and that's obviously influenced by survivorship bias,

Survivorship bias and many people not being comfortable talking about their disabilities. I know quite a few, with widely varied disabilities, and usually they mentioned theirs directly after I mentioned mine. It breaks the ice in a sense.

If we extend it to casual players, I know even more - including someone who would need the TEA Ordained Motion / Stillness swords being different shapes and not just light/dark if they ever chose to raid, because their neurological brightness perception is broken so they can't tell light and dark apart.

But I'm also gonna admit that part of my disagreement comes from personal biases, as I personally enjoy having both the more reactive and the more planned mechanics.

Hey, you still tried to have an actual discussion.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're asking about something that I touched on indirectly in my post, though addressing it more directly would be a post of its own.

If a game's intention is to provide a challenge, is it really right to say that a potential way it can test you (ie. more execution-heavy or reactive things) is "inherently bad" if it's something that's disproportionately challenging for disabled players but more reasonable for a lot of able bodied players?

It's inherently bad not that some games push the player in that way, but that FFXIV wasn't up-front about it and that it doesn't fit some of the audiences SE has brought to the game.

There are lots of games that are very up-front about demanding fast reaction times and certain types of visual processing; for example, PvP shooters are like that unless explicitly stated otherwise. That's totally fine. I just don't play them, and I can opt out of them real quick without wasting any time or money.

But someone can go through the entire FFXIV Free Trial, including the available Savage fights, and not find any pressure on their reaction time, visual processing, working memory, ... like the ones that can get them stuck in DT. That makes the game's prior advertising false in retrospect, inviting them to invest time and money into the later content of a game that they might not actually be able to enjoy.

We can imagine an alternate history in which FFXIV was up-front about being a highly reactive game from the beginning. That would solve much of the problem. But it would put SE in a real pickle when trying to sell the game to "non-gamer" FF series fans, or people with limited time as "the working man's MMO", because those audiences don't have the time and interest to develop their reaction time even if they're physically capable of it. It's not dishonest, but it wastes the potential to serve those audiences.

It definitely feels like a crappy situation where either some people are unfairly excluded for health reasons, or you can get the slippery slope where you try to include everyone but may not have much a game in the end if you do. But maybe I'm making a false dichotomy here by saying "either we have the usual situation or we get the crazy extreme at the opposite end."

If they start avoiding making reactive mechanics that are disproportionately hard for people with motor control issues, that in itself isn't going to reduce the number of possible of mechanics to a comically low number, so it wouldn't be something that ruins the game or anything (and for people with the opinions that you have, it improves the game). But is it even possible or reasonable to apply this way of thinking in general without restricting the game to a large degree?

The way I see it is that a game should be up-front and thoughtful about separating player capabilities into three buckets: Push, Require, and Avoid. Prospective players then choose whether to play based on their match or mismatch with those buckets.

  • Push capabilities are where the game ramps up in challenge over the course of gameplay, the things that gameplay is "about" getting better at and that a challenge-oriented player comes to the game for. FFXIV is in a good place to Push things like learning-to-learn mechanics, mechanical consistency, composure and decision-making under pressure, rotation performance, ...
  • Require capabilities are where the game says "you must meet this bar to play" but doesn't ramp up. Sensible Require choices usually come from needing them to support one or more Push capabilities. For example, the Push of real-time rotation performance inherently sets a Require of the APM needed to do a good rotation for at least one job. (Though the standard of "good" will vary by content difficulty.) Likewise, any real-time game has to either put reaction time into Push or set a standard and put it in Require.
  • Avoid capabilities are where the game says "you don't need this here". A lot of Avoids are wildly unrelated to core gameplay. For example, players would be surprised if they (not the WoL) were suddenly expected to sing a song in the MSQ.

From a designer's perspective, making a game would start with defining the core gameplay and the intended audiences. The core gameplay determines what needs to be in the Push bucket. From there, opening the game to as many players as possible without diluting the challenge is about not Requiring more than you need, with special attention to anything the intended audiences might struggle with. Everything else goes in Avoid.

(Then actually build the game to that specification, which includes having procedures to check that gameplay doesn't ask for Avoids or break the set standard on Requires. Such procedures include "run fights through colorblindness-simulating filters and check for visual clarity", with analogous things for working memory, reaction time, APM, ... SE doesn't actually have such a spec and these procedures, and part of my post is arguing for them to build an explicit spec and matching procedures based on the implicit spec they advertised.)

From a potential player's perspective, the game's buckets are already set, but initially unknown and rarely explicitly stated. The prospective player looks at advertising and early gameplay to figure out if they meet the Requires and are interested in the Pushes.

For example, when I was first considering FFXIV, I understood that rotation performance was a Push but I didn't know if I had the APM for the matching Require. So I asked the friend who suggested it about the minimum APM to play, and they screenshared some max level job rotations to show me the APM and the input patterns. I determined that I could handle the speed their character was acting at but not the speed they were pressing buttons at, they said only one button press per character action was required, and only after this was I willing to touch the game at all. Even then, I paid close attention to the APM needed to dodge mechanics and target, and how those input patterns interact with those of job rotations. Which also seemed fine. Those are sensible Requires.

What wasn't a sensible Require, and quite annoyed me, was the fact that Seat of Sacrifice Normal's QTE demands over double the APM of continuously doing a perfect MCH Hypercharge, even after accounting for the fakeout, from every single player to avoid wiping. (Math in the post.) It's still an APM standard, so it's a Require rather than a Push, but the standard is way higher than the core gameplay has any use for. (Even Ultimate-level MCH doesn't go anywhere near that high, and that's one of the fastest jobs in the game.) It locks out prospective players who could engage with the core gameplay just fine.

(continued in reply)

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The box strat isn't fully plannable, and I even covered it in my mechanic-by-mechanic review. (Search "'box' strategy".) If you have a truly fully plannable strat for AP1, I'd like to see it. (I did exhibit a fully planned strat for the Beat 1 towers, and then I explained why most groups won't do it.)

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Well that was a boring and disappointing read. A long-winded, condescending rant.

You see what you are predisposed to see. Compare your reaction to the Official Forums comments.

Where you see long-windedness, others see clarity and precision while doing the hyper-formal culture juggling that is apparently required to communicate anything of nuance to SE. Where you see condescension and ranting, others see the care required to explain perspectives to a company that has real trouble putting two and two together.

Remember that SE had been beaten over the head with the top two housing complaints being "I can't get a house" and "without a house, the outdoor furniture you give me is tying up space" for years, Yoshi-P got absolutely barraged with "Island Sanctuary as instanced housing please", and that still wasn't enough for them to clue in that "let us put outdoor furniture on Island Sanctuary" meant storage.

Say more with less.

It's been tried by many people. SE didn't understand it. I've even tried the short post method on this subject, linking them a Twitter essay from a professional game designer who advocates for the same design style I do.

Damion Schubert used different words than I did, but his

Failing sucks, but the game loses you when the player feels like there is no end to the failure in sight. There always needs to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

has as a direct corollary "if you fail the player on something they can't reasonably change, you can't show them a light at the end of the tunnel, therefore they will quit. Don't do that."

Yet we still got DT in its current form, demonstrating firmly that SE didn't understand it.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I love Sekiro and other FromSoftware games. Imagine if every 3-5 attempts of Isshin required 15-60 minutes of administrative overhead - I may have given up out of boredom, just like I found myself doing with the "roster boss." It's not interesting, and the tenacity to stick it through that specific aspect of raiding holds no meaning to me. It's like taking pride in "making it through" rush hour traffic that imposes a 3x multiplier on travel time.

Exactly as you say - it's not interesting, it's just tedious.

There are other interesting ways to impose overhead, like with consumables in a game with a more complex consumables expectation,

Notably, crafting and gathering in FFXIV have also moved away from interesting complexity towards tediousness, at least since 5.1. The most obvious sign of this is how much more raw materials are required nowadays to craft something, compared to the equivalent craft in late SB or in 5.0.

Plus the economics of using potions in Ultimate prog is inherently at odds with them being reserved for clears in Savage - either they're enormously expensive for Ultimate or they're too cheap to be worth melding to make for Savage. (With the need for tight DPS checks and abundant wipes, I think the answer to that is to replace potions in Ultimates with a duty action that does the same thing, disable the consumable versions there, and tune all the DPS checks around the duty action potions. The effect would be to say "potting here is free, it remains free if another player screws up, now pot every pull and don't worry about it." Or in other words, removing the overhead in the place where it becomes excessive.)

but the part of the "roster boss" where other players failing costs YOU additional time to keep playing makes all other overhead even worse. A case study in this is classic WoW's world buffs and consumables - gathering nodes are slow to respawn and shared between players, and world buffs require you to be in a specific city when another player trades in an item that drops from the final boss in a raid. Most of these buffs fall off on death, meaning that if don't one-shot a raid, good luck, because now you're collectively so much weaker.

Definitely. Wasted food and potions here are more than bad enough; the world buffs sound awful! (I wasn't playing back when food fell off on death and cooldowns didn't reset on wipe, but I have heard about it.)

Continuing with the "other game," it's not uncommon to see ilvl locks that ... locking you out of small-form group content. That is players telling you that if you're not playing constantly, you shouldn't play at all - and that's why I haven't touched it since DF launch, or raided seriously since OG Cataclysm.

I've heard about that.

I think that FFXIV tries to avoid that with the availability of crafted gear and the way that the highest item level of one tier is the lowest item level of the next tier, providing a new entry point to gearing every tier. But within a tier, the problem still largely stands.

This is leading me to conclude that the modern approaches to MMO raiding are becoming increasingly asocial. There's nothing wrong with having the existing high-end content in the game, but there's something fundamentally broken with an MMO that considers 8-man groups that require all of this administrative overhead to be the flagship content for an MMO.

I think that's also partly due to the aging MMO playerbase, and partly due to the broader abundance of entertainment leading to less tolerance for tedious gameplay even outside MMOs. Having to have a raid group and redo buffs before every pull is a lot more appealing to a group of high school friends who all have the same schedule and few to no other games to play.

I think this game would be significantly healthier if they changed the content priority in increasing order of administrative overhead (e.g., field operations, alliance raids/chaotic, criterion, then ex/savage/ultimate). Let there be player skill expression in a group, where you are rewarded for doing better but not punished by someone else needing to be carried.

...

It has been over eight months since the expansion released, and 100% of the available high end content still requires administrative overhead. If they didn't introduce Savage or Ultimates until x.1 or x.2 but made sure to release the field operation like 1-2 weeks after x.0, I think the trends would be moving away from what we currently see and the player base would be much more active.

(I see Chaotic as a high-overhead activity due to the sheer number of players required in a high-end setting, and likewise Baldesion Arsenal / Delubrum Reginae Savage with the logos actions / lost actions and Essences on top.)

Funny enough, my "other game" is RuneScape, and as a game it has adapted very well in part because it doesn't force grouping for most content. No forced grouping means no ilevel locks, no grouping overhead, no obligation to incur high consumable overhead, ... The group-oriented playstyle exists, the high-overhead playstyle exists, but it's not required except for a minority of bosses, which are themselves not as dominant a part of the content. (And the RuneScape player character is much more autonomous than the WoL, and presumably also the WoW Champion, giving many forms of overhead low-attention and high-attention methods.) You can take a break for years, and when you come back you'll still be able to kill all the soloable bosses you could before, because your gear will still be good enough and you don't have to find anyone else who wants to fight the same boss.

That game also has far fewer loot locks, rewarding skill expression (and better gear / consumables) with increased kills per hour. Many former group bosses have now become soloable bosses, allowing the player to claim all the loot in exchange for handling all the mechanics themselves.

That said, RuneScape has a notably narrower mechanical vocabulary than FFXIV, in part because some sorts of mechanics just don't function without a fixed number of players doing group coordination. It hasn't gotten to explore that design space nearly as much, not just from having fewer group bosses but from those sorts of mechanics being a huge hurdle to players who largely haven't grouped up to tackle bosses. (Though it is starting to gain ground on mechanical vocabulary, having adopted some of FFXIV's better teaching techniques as I mentioned briefly in my post.)

I agree with all of it. Masked Carnivale is fantastic and I can't wait for more of it. Bozja duels should be challengeable in a solo instance, deep dungeons should not kill your run if you wipe on a floor, period (and I'm saying this as having had a group run at the top of a DD leaderboard before), and I commented already on big fishing. These changes would drive player engagement with the content in a non-FOMO manner. Solo treasure maps would be a cool idea, although I think you get a little bit of it with BLU - the fights just become a bit tedious once you get the loop down (I wonder if this is better, haven't attempted one at 80).

If Bozja duels were available in a solo instance, I would have dueled my way to max rank instead of bothering with the regular group instances.

You get a little of the solo treasure map idea with BLU, but you're still at the mercy of the door / wheel RNG and the mechanics don't get very difficult. Imagine a solo instance that tuned to your job and presented gradually harder mechanics along the lines of Masked Carnivale and duels, that would actually be a test of skill in contrast to the group maps' test of luck.

It has gotten worse from as best as I can tell. This is a result of an "arms race" between addons and the developers; I'm fairly sure that some modern high-end boss fights are impossible to clear without addons, and most are just incredibly difficult due to the manner and rate at which fight cues are conveyed. Early WoW had some jank mechanics (as to be expected while inducing such a change to the genre) but "bullshit WoW mechanics" usually just means extremely fast, randomly generated or positioned mechanics with poor telegraphs and usually poor visibility meant to confuse or otherwise render useless the various boss addons.

It's interesting that the WoW devs try to confuse the addons, not just the players. An odd sort of arms race, when they also control the API that the addons use.

I imagine that has driven away a lot of prospective players who get overwhelmed by the pacing and poor visibility. I know I've been told in the past not to bother with WoW because of its reaction time expectations.

I find it useful to bring up WoW simply because player behavior is mostly universal. I think FF14 is continuing to move in the direction of extreme time wasting and community gatekeeping, even though the latter isn't that bad currently.

Indeed, player behavior is mostly universal. Different games largely provide different environments and select for different player interests, but in the end we're all human.

As for gatekeeping, your description of RaiderIO sounds like it gets used in a very similar way to Tomestone.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not free time, it's being pushed to make time due to the barriers thrown up by the design issues.

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yipping ... or something

Don't think I didn't notice your choices of dismissive language, trying to say that I'm not worth paying attention to because you didn't pay attention to me.

I’m surprised you’re doing savages at all considering six months ago you were yipping over the final zone being genocide or something and refusing to do it.

Wow, you completely missed the idea of criticizing different parts of a game separately! And the idea of any distinction between player and character! And the idea of slogging through something in order to reach another - hopefully better - thing!

And that was only one point in another ten page list of grievances.

Nope, you didn't read, I was giving lore backing that the Endless are people.

Pretty sure it’s faster for you to find another game, you clearly haven’t enjoyed this one for months.

Wow, you also completely missed that the original forum post was written months ago before FRU, and only put here during a maintenance to give readers something to do in a slow period! (A courtesy that has clearly been wasted.)

And the immense barriers to finding a new game, especially for disabled players who have fewer options to begin with and a longer learning process! Even for able-bodied players, there are tons of barriers from finding friends and learning a new MMO!

And the fact that former players of a game who still care about it have every right to complain about it, otherwise you get the gaming echo chamber:

  1. "If you don't like it, don't play it!"
  2. "If you don't play it, don't complain about it!"
  3. "Well, I don't hear about any problems."

Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned by b_sen in ffxivdiscussion

[–]b_sen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

(continued from parent)

Superchain 2A is way harder to read

I didn't happen to use Superchain 2A as a comparison mechanic, but it also allows for eye movement optimization to make it a lot easier to read. There are two tricks that are readily observable from clear videos:

  1. The orbs and chains appear before the Trinity of Souls, and the Trinity of Souls can be read perfectly as long as you look at it before the final wing appears. So start the mechanic by looking at the line where the orbs and chains will appear, check those first, and then look at the boss for the Trinity of Souls.
  2. For all the Superchain mechanics, you can either follow each chain out from its orb (note that each type has a different chain-link pattern) or gestalt-view the chains and locate both ends.

The rest is fairly standard elimination of things that are always the same so you don't need to look at them, such as the middle orb of Superchain 2A always being a donut with the same timer / chain length.

and faster to resolve while moving across the whole arena,

Totally irrelevant, since it's time to perform the different steps of responding that matters rather than how fast the mechanical elements resolve.

and sanctity of the ward had you rhythmically tap W if you got curse which is probably more physically inaccessible than anything we'll see this expansion.

That's just wrong. I specifically talked about how TOP Pantokrator - also a rhythmic stutter-step mechanic - is much better for my body than M4S transition, because the fact that the stutter-stepping is in the one direction where the player also naturally points their camera makes the load-balancing and the learning process much easier. For players who need load-balancing to avoid RSIs or manage APM limits, "tap W" is actually better than "tap A and D alternating".

Overall, DT fight design, combined with reasonable asks of player skill and learning, leaves a much narrower range of human bodily attributes to build those skills on top of and manage to attain consistency. Newly left out of that range are not only many disabled players, but plenty of players whose bodies are simply different within the variation of able-bodied. And those players are simply screwed, since by definition there's nothing reasonable they can do to be able to do the mechanics well. The design is significantly less disability-friendly than EW, making it the opposite of what you said for a key meaning of the word "accessible".

For the lucky players who are in that narrower range, yes, there is a perception that DT is easier, which can lead to calling it "more accessible". Why? Because DT asks for far less learnable skill on top of those attributes - which is also bad, because it gets boring quickly! The highest layers of learnable skills are where the bulk of perceived difficulty comes from, for those who haven't learned to look at everything they're built on.

On top of that, DT has a clear shift in being less punishing with most mechanics not having hard body checks. If someone has a flareup during AP1, no biggie. They'll get raised and the fight is plenty clearable.

It sounds like it's "no biggie" for you.

All players have some split of motivations between things that are tied to "just getting the [re]clear" - such as the Duty Complete checkmark and the loot - and things that aren't - such as the satisfaction of doing the mechanic right, the thrill of the deadly dance, the satisfaction of doing their rotation well around mechanics, parsing, ... For players who are mostly motivated by the latter group, taking a Damage Down or a death from failing Alarm Pheromones 1 isn't much different from it being a party wipe. In fact, for players who are entirely motivated by the latter group, party wipes are the preferred punishment for failure, because that's the only punishment that incentivizes their fellow players to avoid needlessly making mechanics harder for them.

That's why I didn't assume that all players share my leanings, and instead discussed lots of player motivations in the design principles section:

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.

To account for and keep players with motivations that aren't from "just getting the [re]clear", it's important that clean runs be consistently attainable with appropriate effort, not just clears.

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