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Re: Can players' interests and needs be balanced?
I do take issue with the attitude expressed by tdh. Meleeburn would have come about as a result of the conditions making it viable even if it only achieved xp parity with traditional party. The underlying problem it solves isn't "How can I get xp faster?"* or even "I hate having to think." Meleeburn allows you to take the most common and popular party role (DD) and manage to accommodate five times as many of them per party as support. If you're a DD frustrated by losing a PLD or BRD to another party that asked faster, the appeal is undeniable.
I don't know how many times I've considered building a party, seen no NINs or PLDs but a couple of WAR/NINs and enough other prospects to make a functional party, refreshed the list a couple times while contemplating the prospect of asking one of the WARs to tank and their likely response, and ended up just thinking "forget it, not worth the hassle" and gone lfg instead.
Versatility is an underappreciated trait in a lot of jobs in FFXI. Party leaders like to look at the search list and know exactly what someone is bringing to the table. The fact that most WARs don't begin to know what they'd need to do in order to tank, let alone the fact that so many seem to take offense at being asked to, doesn't mean I'm going to just have to offer them the "better" role of DD instead. If I'm asking a WAR to tank, lack of DD is not my problem. If you as a WAR are asked to tank and refuse, you're setting aside an opportunity at a role in a party because you are unprepared for it or otherwise find it distasteful. If as a community we decide that WARs are not to be used as tanks, that opportunity simply disappears, unnoticed.
I don't know if there's much SE can do about the disdain for versatility that the community currently has. In part I'm hoping that making noticeable payoffs for tactical coordination might have some influence on this... A lot of this is a question of how we organize ourselves, and the search/lfg questions bear some relevance here. Most of the problems I'm observing are issues of how players of this game (especially party members) behave in an information vacuum. I personally think search comments are too space-limited to be as useful as they should be, but even as limited as they are few NA players can be convinced to use them -- either as seekers offering up useful info for prospective leaders, or as leaders seeking info on prospective members. Given that SE provides no other means with which we can express our playstyle preferences, understanding of our job's capabilities, whether we are open to experimentation or demand tried-and-true approaches, etc., the refusal to even use this limited resource means that the process of seeking and forming pickup groups is ruled by assumptions -- about what style of party you'll accept, what role you'll play, what kind of gear/food you'll bring, what camps you're willing to party at -- and when these assumptions don't mesh perfectly, you have players whose parties suck or parties whose players suck, depending on perspective.
I suppose the only suggestion I have that doesn't involve an overhaul of how people register their interest in xp and search for party members would be to increase the seacom line length and shorten the NA versions of some autotranslator phrases (and add a phrase of some sort for tank), but that's really not likely to do much on its own...
*Yes, I'm aware that for some significant groups, "how can I get xp faster?" is THE question, and that at 75 there's some alleviation in terms of job availability compared to lower levels, but most people I party with are more concerned with whether they can get into a decent party at all. If a party with 5 DD and 1 healer worked and pulled in tolerable xp at every level, I believe we'd see meleeburns at every level, just because it lets those 5 DD and 1 healer party without waiting for tanks to spawn.
Originally posted by tdh
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Originally posted by Karinya
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I don't know how many times I've considered building a party, seen no NINs or PLDs but a couple of WAR/NINs and enough other prospects to make a functional party, refreshed the list a couple times while contemplating the prospect of asking one of the WARs to tank and their likely response, and ended up just thinking "forget it, not worth the hassle" and gone lfg instead.
Versatility is an underappreciated trait in a lot of jobs in FFXI. Party leaders like to look at the search list and know exactly what someone is bringing to the table. The fact that most WARs don't begin to know what they'd need to do in order to tank, let alone the fact that so many seem to take offense at being asked to, doesn't mean I'm going to just have to offer them the "better" role of DD instead. If I'm asking a WAR to tank, lack of DD is not my problem. If you as a WAR are asked to tank and refuse, you're setting aside an opportunity at a role in a party because you are unprepared for it or otherwise find it distasteful. If as a community we decide that WARs are not to be used as tanks, that opportunity simply disappears, unnoticed.
I don't know if there's much SE can do about the disdain for versatility that the community currently has. In part I'm hoping that making noticeable payoffs for tactical coordination might have some influence on this... A lot of this is a question of how we organize ourselves, and the search/lfg questions bear some relevance here. Most of the problems I'm observing are issues of how players of this game (especially party members) behave in an information vacuum. I personally think search comments are too space-limited to be as useful as they should be, but even as limited as they are few NA players can be convinced to use them -- either as seekers offering up useful info for prospective leaders, or as leaders seeking info on prospective members. Given that SE provides no other means with which we can express our playstyle preferences, understanding of our job's capabilities, whether we are open to experimentation or demand tried-and-true approaches, etc., the refusal to even use this limited resource means that the process of seeking and forming pickup groups is ruled by assumptions -- about what style of party you'll accept, what role you'll play, what kind of gear/food you'll bring, what camps you're willing to party at -- and when these assumptions don't mesh perfectly, you have players whose parties suck or parties whose players suck, depending on perspective.
I suppose the only suggestion I have that doesn't involve an overhaul of how people register their interest in xp and search for party members would be to increase the seacom line length and shorten the NA versions of some autotranslator phrases (and add a phrase of some sort for tank), but that's really not likely to do much on its own...
*Yes, I'm aware that for some significant groups, "how can I get xp faster?" is THE question, and that at 75 there's some alleviation in terms of job availability compared to lower levels, but most people I party with are more concerned with whether they can get into a decent party at all. If a party with 5 DD and 1 healer worked and pulled in tolerable xp at every level, I believe we'd see meleeburns at every level, just because it lets those 5 DD and 1 healer party without waiting for tanks to spawn.
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