How Should SE Represent Player Competence?

Master trial weapons only talk about how much time you spent on a fight that only gives you an epeen lockstyle weapon.

V25's and Master Trials are the pinnacle of excellence. Unlike ML50 that can be botted by no skill idiots, you know someone with a V25 Bumba and Master Trial weapons have earned that stuff through sheer dedication and skill.



dammit

It may well be an Asura thing. However, I don't see much difference between people who buy MLs or bot them themselves.

And disclaimer, I know a fair number of ML50 players that are very skilled players. I'm not generalizing or saying I pass judgment on them (well maybe a little bit) just that I tend to take it as a huge red flag if I don't otherwise know the person.

Like if I'm filling out a PUG for some random thing, Peach Power or RP run or something, I'll take a rando ML20-30 person over an ML50 person any day of the week. I won't even ask further questions, if I see ML50 and don't recognize your name then you can just keep walking.

I cannot believe this made it to page two without anyone bringing up the ultimate way to test the competency of players:

https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/56018/momoria-ls-recruiting-test-u-on-nm-before-join

Maybe the small servers are different from each other, but on my small server there are LOADS of people with ML50 who have no idea what they're doing, because they botted and/or bought ML50. We have someone in my LS who's ML40 (or 45?) on a job and has only Ambu gear and hasn't touched basically any endgame at all.

I think the best suggestions for how to show someone is "gud" would be the thing people suggested about clearing content on many different roles. People who are REALLY good but only at a specific job/role don't impress me anywhere near as much as people who can swap from WHM to PLD to SAM to RNG to BLM on a dime. These people are, in my experience, exceedingly rare though. Especially those who actually know the detailed nuance of each job and not just "yeah I have that job, it's ML50 and geared, but I don't have the first *** idea what to do on it"

Everything else is cheesable and frankly, there are lots of people I've played with who have been carried HARD through a lot of content, including some of the hardest ***in the game. While the fights are very challenging, there's always a couple jobs you can throw an idiot on and they don't have to do anything too complicated while you walk their happy *** across the finish line.

If I had to pick something in the current game, I think the most impressive things to me ATM are the super hard master trials (maybe there's only 1 right now?), St5 Prime weapons, and R30 Nyame/all Ody bosses V25 (easy to cheese, but not on Carbuncle).

While prime weapons/Aminon aren't actually all THAT skilled/difficult to get, it shows me that you have at least some social skills to be able to (probably) regularly do well in Sortie and (definitely) clear HM Aminon a bunch of times, which is no simple task. Prime AG are quite uncommon on Carbuncle, to the point where I still turn my head when I see one and I'm surprised, even a couple years into the release of them.

I don't think being ML50 makes a difference either way.

They can be ML50 and be great, or they can be ML50 and not know basic mechanics.

I can't say I've ever seen an ML40+ in ambu gear though, that definitely screams "bought account" or something wrong.

Maybe just the group have been lucky to play with, but seen and played with several people that play tank, dd, support and mage all on the same character, or multiple characters, very effectively.

As in doing sortie on a tank and knowing what to do and when, playing rng and being real good, playing mage and being real good. I on occasion play whm for example but don't pretend to be as good as the best whms.

Anyway for OP, I think playing the "hard" jobs is a good indication of skill and knowledge. For me those are tanks, whm, rdm, and some support like brd.

Brd can be hit and miss, you have uber career brds that do everything and you have "bards" that sing then want to afk and get annoyed at being told no, you have to do more.

But if they have v25 clears on tank, whm and rdm or sch, or even tank and a mage job, that's pretty top tier for me.

For sortie IMO it's more about gearing not really skill. Once you know the fights and have geared for them correctly, odds of going wrong are slim.

The niche jobs are niche, you don't see a lot of great rngs because you don't see many people that even play rng much, let alone know how to play it effectively.

Buy a new account after each ban, then tackle V25 to prove your strength and dedication. Clear Bumba V25, get banned again, then jump into Sortie or Nyzul with Tako and get banned once more — rinse and repeat until everyone recognizes you as one of the elites in our community, and you becomes someone’s favorite customer.

Vanilla onry.

If you plan on playing with them more than once, I'd say all that really matters is that they have a high school (or greater) reading comprehension and can take constructive criticism. Everything else is derivative from those, IMO.

How should SE represent it?

Well they shouldn't. You should represent it by being good, and encouraging/teaching others to also be good :)

Competence recognition is what the new master trials are designed for. Basically no one has cleared August or Chaos/Bahamut (literally no one in the case of the latter). Of course, this is most impressive to people only tangentially connected to modern FFXI, but it was interesting enough that the FFXIV world race coordinator wanted to talk to Bigtymer.

For players in the thick of endgame who would rather not spend several weeks working on August for a level 1 weapon, this might not have the same luster. I think Vyre hit the nail on the head with what he mentioned in this case.

You make a shout for Sheol C, a WHM joins, your party enters, and you see the WHM is full-timing a warp ring and Ambu gear. What do you do?

Why would you shout for sheol C, that sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Probably blame myself then ask them if they've done sheol C before. Then suggest we do B instead and if the party doesn't like that, go home to bed and rethink my life choices.

can they skillchain and magic burst?

The ultimate skill test is whether you agree with me or not.

I'm usually pretty impressed by the R25 ML50 warriors who savage blade crabs/lamia/pugils in segs.

Some people say they bought their accounts/had everything merced, but I think they are next level min/maxers.

The type of player who pulls an entire room of fomors in an aminon idle set to take the maximum amount of damage and inevitably die without ever putting reraise.

We all know at least one.

What is that, some kind of 75 cap joke I'm too ilvl119 to understand?

Aside from, like, three fights, skillchains and magic bursts are dead and buried. Pretty sure Naegling's listed as cause of death.

Better still is the Sam that says "*** off while I 'solo' skele C shard (you still need to burst but I did all the work lol)" then blood aggros the entire *** room while wearing those god damn dragon feet because why would they take off 8% more zanhassin and expecting the whm to both heal them so they don't *** die like a noob and burst at the same time.

I do almost exclusively PUGs. Mlvl 20-40 seems to be competent players (overall), then 41+ I see diminishing returns.

I formed a PUG for Ody C with a mlvl 50 REMA Brd that didn't know how to NiTro... I've seen people with all HQ Accessories and SU 5 gear fail to understand basic game mechanics (#WhatIsASkillChain)

Its much harder to identify 'a good player' just from looking today than it used to be due to RMT, people buying gil, botters, and mercing.

That being said, typically if someone has 5/5 R25+ Ody gear (was able to do multiple RP farms and get clears) OR if they have 5/5 +3 Empy Armor (prob able to work in a group) /or/ a Prime (end game) ... it's a very good indicator of capabilities.

I make the most of it, and earn whatever Segments/Gil I can earn :)

You make a shout for Sheol C. A WHM joins. They're R30. You enter. What's this, they're /dnc? They pull hate on a Halo mob on the 2nd floor and die without Reraise.

What do you do?

This is normally about the time I’d record myself making fun of them and put it on YouTube.

To be fair though I’d make fun of the r30 person more than the ambu gear person.

1-why did they pull hate over proper DD? Says more about you than them (other than the no-RR part)
2-theyre R30, thats the pinnacle of skill and they definitely earned it unlike those filthy ML50 no-skill botting scrubs.

Just make people beat you in Ballista first. EZ

In Nynja's world, the DD tank the Sheol mobs/attack the same one as the melee WHM, and the tanks can tag all 40 or so mobs on the 2nd floor in the mass pull >_>

(but our solution was to raise him with the Raise Helmet from that one seasonal, and keep on trucking)

What every responsible DD would do, sack pull as many camps as possible asap while making sure to stay outside of the WHMs cure range. Just mind to fall the right way so that your index finger points towards the healers while mortis kicks in.

The real test, is to uninstall FFXI and Deactivate your account...

... then re-install, reactivate, and get through POL Viewer WITHOUT A GUIDE.

/thread

I mean, that's the real test right there, isn't it? Having weird niche stuff like the reraise hat in your back pocket because one time you saw somebody else bringing it completely save a run?

One time I was scouting for Aurix way behind enemy lines - wave 2 Dyna-D Windurst, the main group headed up the Yoran-Oran side and I was somewhere around Shantotto's manor. I finally found a statue that was too sharp for me to sneak past, and it got me. Everybody else died trying to carve a path to my corpse... but one guy had the raise hat, and managed to die far enough back to not have his reraise turn into a double tap. Somehow, that was enough to turn the mess around, get our white mage up, rescue everyone else, regroup, and get some revenge.

So now, because of that, the next time Feast of Swords rolled around, I made damn sure to go get that hat. Never know when it's going to be the difference between a complete wash and a survival story.