"...money's most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don't have it."
Yes. It is clearly an instanced e-sports game now. RPG is not the name of the game, nor is world.
Addons did contribute to that, yes.
1) No, it has been that way since I started playing at the start of Wrath. People just have easier access to better information now than they did back then.
2) No, plenty of games without addons or logs get min/maxed.
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No. It doesn't matter if you "reduce the emphasis" on DPS (which they've already done), more DPS still makes the fight end faster meaning fewer opportunities for mistakes. There's very few hard DPS checks in the game anymore, as you can tell by the fact that the top guilds clear the raid on the hardest difficulty in under 2 weeks. They wouldn't be able to do that if the DPS checks were actually hard, because they simply wouldn't have the gear for it.
I don't necessarily disagree on the other points, although I do much prefer being able to tailor my UI to how I want it to look/work rather than being locked into the devs' idea of what it should look like.
ofc you are more relaxed when you can just get carried/be bad/not contribute,and no one can really tell that thats what your doing
also those games will ultimately be forced to dumb down their content to account for that
its why wrath is the most worshiped expansion,it apealed to the casual care bears
its why you see stats on steam of game achvments on harder difficulties be far far lower %
Always has been.
No. People will optimize their gameplay no matter how many tools the game itself gives you to do that. Just look at speedrunners. Hiding information will not suddenly make people not care and just pick for cosmetic, lore or rp reasons. If information is hidden in the game then people will use google for that information. Covenants are the newest example for that.
WoW has some shitheads in auto-que systems, where I agree, that being a dick should be punished, but advice should be allowed. No insulting. If a person is not following it - vote kick is there for the group to decide.
In group finder tho? Anything outside of ques is organized group activity. You should be ready to be told off, because you have to carry your weight in the group. Insulting someone still gets you suspended - I know people who got infractions and weren't allowed to do qualifiers for MDI for talking shit to someone. Banning people for pointing out someone being shit in organized group activity using using performance measuring tool (not someone's opinion) is absolutely toxic and stupid.
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Yeah. Using addons in WoW is one of the selling points for me. UI especially, you get so many games with UI which is hindering you that it just reduces you enjoyment. WoW let's you to mess it up completely or just absolutely tailor it your personal needs.
Playing shadowpriest with weakaura which starts to play Super Sayan 3D music when you press surrender to madness is absolute best thing I have done in the game
Ok, her'e my 2cents about the topic.
Answer 1: yes, it slowly turned to a more performance oriented game than a fantasy one. But it depends on multiple factors - novelty that disappears after time, players getting naturally better, more information spreads around and addons as you mentioned. However performance was a staple since day one, with things like Enrage timers. If you have a time limit on a fight, you have to dish a bare minimum of damage to be able to beat it, thus performing better makes things easier. And we all know people will go toward the path of least resistance - cookie cutter builds, guides, simulations all serve the purpose to make the game easier for the player.
Anyway, as someone else mentioned, it's not something you can simply apply to every player. There's plenty of people not playing for the perfomance - maybe they only want to beat a boss or just enjoy the content while being carried. The fact they have the "best build" it's just because they checked a guide and followed the direction to have an easier time in the game.
Answer 2: yes, most of the job has been done by addons. But again, it's not because players are driven by the will of performing the best, but just to make their life easier. It's not only that players have become very used to game mechanics and many things are not automated and/or expected, but also it's much easier to perform good due to the insane amount of tools readily available. Example, if i drop an item, i don't even check the stats - i just go in raidbots, plop the simc output and wait for the computer to calculate it for me and then choose if to keep it or trade it. If anything, i think it's just fair - in this way i know that something is not an update and can trade to someone else who needs it.
The only way to avoid this is to ban addons and hide the combat log. If any of these tools are available to players, they're going to analyze them and check if they can do better.
Non ti fidar di me se il cuor ti manca.
Yes it does. Make such mechanics dependant on boss health rather than timer. Boom, can't overgear fight and skip half mechanics.
There are not a lot of HARD dps checks but lots of mechanics are literally dps checks, often included in strategy: "If you cant kill this this or that before X, just wipe it". And dont tell me its not like this because on progression, 1-2 people dead (no CR) in vast majority of cases equals wipe. 1-2 = 10-20% overall dps of raid.
It's a double edged sword though. Sure it's nice for the bad player who can just be ignorant and bad and get into a group, do that dungeon, beat it in half an hour and feel like they did something without having someone pester them about their performance. But it's also super annoying for the rest of the group who want to do a quick dungeon and then have some dps player join and do like 40% of their max performance because they can't properly press 1-2-3 in a row.
That's the whole thing about FF14. It's super easy, except for the one difficulty that isn't super easy. 99% of the game is so easy that half the group carries the other half of the group and everyone beats content. That's great for the ones getting carried but it's annoying for those who do the carrying.
The problem with "toxicity" is that people use a very narrow definition for it and will disagree with you because they think "toxicity" is being mean in chat. But toxicity is so much more than that. Being toxic means you are poison to your team. It's any intentional behavior to sabotage the team and make it weaker. It's any intentional behavior that ruins the fun of the rest of the group. If I go into a dungeon group as Shadow Priest but am not using shadow form because I want to RP as a shadow priest who is scared of shadows, then I'm toxic to the rest of the group (unless it's a specific RP group).
Afaik, this "toxicity" problem in FF14 is mostly prevalent in the west, not in Japan. Because in Japan people have the mentality of doing their best for the team, while in the west people have a "I do what I want, fuck the team" mentality. This protection of bad players isn't really a big problem when people inherently try to be the best they can be. But it leads to some really toxic cesspool when people who just press random buttons and freestyle their rotation hold the rest of the group back. Especially when you get multiple players like that into one group.
If you are signing up for some auto-queue system you play by the rules. If you make your own group, you make the rules. Simple as that.
And... listen to this veeeery closely... FFXIV does not have dps meters, so how the hell are you going to "stand out of crowd" or "give advice"? By being a dick.
You can give advice to others but they have a right to completely ignore it. And I really doubt simple advice would get you banned/kicked.
Lots of those "advice Andy's" gets triggered when someone ignores them and start flaming left and right.
Then DPS is actively detrimental which is absolute dogshit design. This tier had a bunch of DPS stop fights and it's horrible. Going AFK in order to get the right push timings is miserable.
The DPS checks on progress are usually based around the strategy you're using rather than the game having explicit DPS checks. And you should not be able to kill bosses with multiple dead people that you don't have rezzes for, because that means you've had something like 3-5 deaths already. The game is already extremely mechanics-focused rather than DPS focused compared to the past.
Last edited by Tradu; 2021-05-28 at 09:16 AM.
I don't see a distinction between fun and preformance. Performing well and challenging myself IS fun for me and when I am in a group then I always give it my all.
Sadly in pug groups that is very rarely reciprocated. Especially in the lower keys below 10 or so I keep getting into groups that do not care one bit about doing well. Mechanics aren't executed, Interrupts lie unused and the poor healer (me) can see to dealing with the fallout.
This ruins my fun and I feel I have a right to know why I need to spend halve my Mana bar on a trashpack while the 3 DPS sit on their Interrupts or aren't using their CDs.
It doesn't because FF punishes you for trying to be good. Damage meters are forbidden and poking a person about their performance will lead to a ban. The only thing this leads to is good players leaving the game because they aren't allowed to improve and are forced to constantly carry weaker players.
It's a great game for those weaker players because they can do what they want without fear of big bad elitists telling them to L2P, but for people who actually have fun pushing themselves and joining a group of equally skilled people, its quite terrible.
Very difficult to make the world & story living and relevant when it takes 7+ months between story updates. Complete it in hours, wait 7 months
The last one made objective sense (Fewer people complete the hardest achievements, bit obvious, but at least it's true), the rest was just a lot of name-calling, "Being bad", "Dumbing down", "Casual carebears", the exact kind of phrases that make people think hardcore players are all toxic people.
It's about how you design the game, fun first or performance first. Of course performance can be fun but if you design the game with performance first in mind the outcome will be completely different.
Counter-strike is a great example of a game that is designed with performance first in mind, if it wasn't it wouldn't be popular. A game like Fallout 4 is designed fun first, you don't have to minmax in order to beat it. Both of these games are objectively fun in two completely different ways. The question is what design philosophy is best for a MMORPG.