How Should SE Represent Player Competence?

Serious question. This topic comes up in many round-about ways and it's always the same: "{Insert FFXI activity} is not an indication of Player competence/skill.". OK fine, so let's say that you had SE's ear on this issue.

What would you like to see in FFXI, that gives you enough confidence that a player is competent?

Any and all suggestions are welcome. Ideally, your suggestions includes some mechanism that prevents abuse.

I'm not very creative in terms of visual display, but maybe our 3-stars Job Master display or Afterglow intensity could be improved or enhanced, based on our activity in game?

Maybe you've helped people clear VD Ambuscade 50 times in the last 5 months?
Maybe you've beaten V25 Bumba on 3 different jobs?
Maybe you've helped 5 new people get to floor 100 in Nyzule Isle?

...Just thinking out loud. What are you thoughts?

Let's get these jokes out of the way, first. {womp, womp}. :)

All REMA to Rank 15
All jobs to ML 50
Afterglow Ochain

etc etc.

Competence is more of a groups competence than an individual competence in ffxi.

Historically the best indicator of competence was using less characters to accomplish the same task without botting. Sortie changed that because people want as many segs as possible for their daily, and V25s can't really be done with 5 even

Play the game vanilla with only equipsets and up to 8 lines of macros with standard /equip commands, with no wiki and no ability to alt-tab to another window, like the developers intended.

Anything else is ez-mode gtfo cheater n00b.

(/s)

Though I agree having done content on a variety of roles (not jobs because going as a different DD doesn't mean ***) would be one. I consider myself somewhat in that area in that I've done pretty much everything as DD, support, and healer, but never tanked. I think having tanked and healed content shows competence.

Ok Maletaru

OK, so everyone who doesn't use equipsets gets a permanent lockstyle dunce cap? Come on.


OK, true, but you didn't answer the question.


OK. This is insightful. Let's say SE gave us a Tank, DD and Healer Stars if we beat something as a Tank, DD and Healer, respectively. If you saw someone with these gold/glittery stars above their head, would you be more inclined to play with them? or see them as more competent?

I added a /s to indicate I'm trolling.

I am sure someone will say something along those lines though.

didn't inb4 this one so time to repost

I wouldn't even include DD in it. Just tank, healer, support.

Yeah and his name is Maletaru

Tanking and healing are the only tasks that require more than being able to hit 1 button.

That's the only thing of any modicum of skill

We USED to be able to measure competence by your ability to count shadows, to stun, to shed enmity (turn or die)

All that ***is gone, it's only possible to measure INcompetence now. You can either perform at the bare minimum (skillchain, burst, not glasscannon, steal tp) or you can't.

as for your question, there's no reason someone couldn't revamp ffxiah points and track whatever you want to see about other people. I'm sure plenty of people would use it, too. just no one stepped up for that yet.

Me:
Surely this will be a professional and productive thread.

Also me:
Guys is mentor status not a good indicator of how knowledgeable you are? Surely people with mentor status wouldn't give bad advice.

I would re-introduce sub-less/trust-less fights for every job, similar to the RUN + GEO empyrean 135 quests where you had to kill NM solo for mats.

RUN Empy fight

GEO empy fight

These fights aren't hard now, but were kind of challenging at the time when they were new. At least for the RUN fight, you had to know which elements were strong and weak vs what, and the days of the VanaDiel week. You also needed to properly time abilities like Liement, Battuta, and One For All to properly negate (and even heal) oncoming damage. GEO was a basic grav kite and nuke (but still engaging for the time).

Something kind of like Shattering Stars Matt/Balrahn/Pulling The Srings ENM solo fights, but updated to ilvl, with a sliding scale similar to Odyssey Veng fights (V+0 = CL119, v+25 ~CL145), so players can challenge themselves. Reward a trophy, title, visible glow, or an additional tier of merits or job point accessibility based on how high of a level you can clear. Or a unique job-item, similar to "Pulling The Strings" rewards. Track progress on leaderboards, similar to Ballista and VanaBout rankings so people can compete with others for clear times. I think it would be a cool way for players to improve their skills on a particular job by fighting against a mannequin that you need to outwit, and use your job knowledge to overcome. Make it repeatable with no EP loss so players don't feel discouraged for losing, and allow other players to be able to watch the fights live (The Pit/Colosseum is a great place for it).

The catch is you'd have to do the fight solo in a public area just like the RUN/GEO quests (but without a sub, allow meds), not in an instanced zone, so you'd have a bit more pressure on you, but also people cheering you on and able to watch your strategy and see what works/doesn't work. Make the requirements for winning different based on the job (i.e. PLD might need to survive a certain period of time, DD has to kill, WHM has to heal a certain amount of HP within a period of time, etc).

Maat hat.

That would only work if it was like a new maat fight that was tailored for each job.

And there would need to be some way to represent the various clears.

As bunk as the assist system is
Striping people access to the assist channel something that could actually promote player engagement is a shame.
But the mentor rank is actually a decent indicator system
I think it was Byrth tested how challenging it is to raise your level in this system I think it was based on the amount of titles you have.

You would need to do so much content at which point you should have a good understanding of the game.
As well as the Internet rule where if you say something wrong someone will correct you

Master's Cap
for beating ilvl Maat on all jobs


only accessible on a ML50 job

That's funny because when I see someone with ML50 I tend to assume they have no idea how to play the game.

This hat would be a giant red flag to stay away from said player.

Even healing I'm on the fence about. You can for sure whm bot 8 boss sortie and probably some V25s.

Back in the old days (he says as his knees crumble to dust... while seated) we had a thing called reputation. This arose because we had to play the game together to accomplish anything, including getting exp (on most jobs). You knew who was good by running into them in exp parties or events and consistently seeing them make good decisions and get good results. Or you knew about them through others' recommendations.

I don't think there will be any non-spoofable signal of a player's quality in today's post-social version of FFXI. It was even somewhat spoofable in the old days: get people to like you by being funny/fun to play with and then join a prestigious linkshell; others would assume you were a player on the level of that LS.

Since we are playing in a mostly post-reputational era of the game, I'm wondering if we don't have much use for this information anymore. The lack of reputational feedback mechanisms may speak to the lack of a need for reputational feedback mechanisms.

Don't you think assumptions on someone's ML are a bit presumptuous?

Maybe that's an Asura thing, RMT-bought MLs are not a thing on small servers. Not that anyone high ML got them legit, but they are also not able to pay RMT for it.

OTOH someone that "disappears" for a week then reappears with sudden Bumba V20 clears is a massive red flag to me.

Swapping gear period is elitist, jerkbutt behaviour!
You wield your bonanza weapon in 5/5 Espial full-time, the way the game was designed!

/s for SERIOUSBIZNISS

This is a social problem, not a technical problem. You're talking about reputation. You can be a good person who plays poorly. You can play great but be an ***. You can be good at one job and crap at another. You can rip people off and jump servers and change names/races so no one will ever know.

The answer to tracking competence is through experience and maintaining relationships.

When I see someone that cant be bothered to push to ML20, which is a paltry 5 hours of EP grinding, im gonna presume theyre just a shitty lazy player ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Serious answer here:

- Being knowledgable at something means you have enough information to make best decisions in every circunstances.
- Being skillful at something means you can execute something faster than someone less skillful than you.
- Being genius at something means you can see things at unexpected perspectives, and come up with unexpected but suitable solutions for a problem.
- Being competent at something means you can perform moderately or well at something, based in the above three dimensions (you know how to react to most situations, to perform moderately fast and come up with solutions when needed).

Uhh..why are we even talking about this when the answer is so obvious...?

Shiny Body Glow Aura

Like AG but on your body.

Different colors could represent different skillsets.

White (Angelic) - helps noobs.
Yellow (Golden) - Elite gear.
Pink (Pukish) - can play well while drunk.

You get the idea.

Serious answer? This idea likely woulda been useful 20 years ago. Nowadays we pretty much already know your deal. The playground is hella smaller then it used to be.

I don't think the difficult part is to visually represent competency, it's how to measure it.

Imho you can't expect someone new to content do well on the first run.

A good indicator if someone is a decent player to clear content with is, that mistakes that were recognized as such don't get repeated in consecutive attempts.
Another good indicator is if the crucial parts got clearly communicated, that the player doesn't do what was just explained to be avoided.

However you can't measure this without spending time with someone but

so most resort to checking for gear and ML because those allow for a higher margin of error, even though this is the era where ignored gimmicks, that gear creep can't protect you from, are the real killer.

visually I like FFXI older approach to keep things subdued and all within a certain general style. I actually don't like any of the afterglow effects, you didn't need to know much before lockstyle was a thing other than what the visible gear showed, and that worked great. maybe some wtf gear choices, but if you saw ebody or osode for example, you knew what they had accomplished without even checking them.

master trial weapons kind of fill this role.

Not sure this would be a great indication that somebody knew their job unless some really specific stuff went down - like in the paladin fight, you can only deal 1 damage per hit, and are assisted by NPC damage-dealers you have to protect or fail the fight, red mage fight rages if you don't keep enough debuffs up, summoner fight can only be won by changing to a different job - but if there were no significant cost to enter and the reward was only completion (or even a cosmetic weapon like master trials offer, that'd be okay) I could see sinking time into it just for fun.