The Curious Case of Healer Queues, Part 2

Final Fantasy XIV

I’ve mentioned it before: healer queues for dungeons are surprisingly long in FFXIV. Green Armadillo added, in a comment to my last post, that from his experience, healer queues are almost as long as DPS queues. That’s an unusual situation, then. I wonder why that is?

First things first, the Tank:Heal:DPS ratio is probably more less (thanks to Green Armadillo for pointing this out;  I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that) favorable to DPS in this game than in most others I know, being 1:1:2 (=2:2:4 for full parties), in contrast to, for example, WoW or EQ2, which run with 1:1:3 (with EQ2 adding a support in their sixth spot for “canonical” group setups). Rift, though, is similar, with the same ratio as FFXIV (again, adding a support in the remaining slot).

I’ve witnessed healer queues in these games before, but never to that extent. It seems that there must be an awful lot of healers around. Are they that popular in FFXIV? And if so, why? I enjoy playing one, of course. But I did so in other games, too, so I’m not a good data point. But since that’s all I can go by at the moment, I’ll give some anecdotal input of why I like my healer. (This post also sneakily doubles as “what I’ve done in FFXIV in the last two weeks”.)

Higher-Level Healing

Classical game design, as far as I understand it, tries to increase the difficulty over the course of the game. This is mostly to offset the players getting better at the game. As they better understand their abilities and how they work together, the difficulty needs to be increased, or the game will become dull. In addition, many games design the very beginning to be faceroll-easy (at least these days) to give you some fuzzy sense of achievement early on. It’s a thin line, though: ramp up the difficulty too strongly, and the game becomes frustrating towards the end; too slowly, and players will get bored.

With RPGs, you have the additional dimension that, as you progress, you get new abilities. That way, you can never stop learning how to play your character, because the conditions change.

In FFXIV, my impression is that healing actually has become easier as I level. Not to the point where it’s getting boring; more to the point where it’s not frustrating any more. I’m not sure whether that’s simply because the spectacularly bad groups seem to be confined to the low end of the level spectrum… I haven’t had a tank unable to hold aggro on more than one mob, and DPS running off in different directions… but I think part of it lies in the ability toolbox. In the beginning, you start with very few abilities: one heal, one cure for debuffs. Your mana is also very limited. Depending on how bad your fellow group members play, you can feel helpless as you try to keep them up, but either run out of casting time (raw throughput) or out of mana.

As you level up, you get additional abilities that fundamentally change how you play. For me, these were Regen (a HoT), Stoneskin (an HP shield), and Shroud of Saints (instant threat reduction and mana regen over time). Stoneskin, cast on the tank, means that you don’t have to heal them for the first few seconds of every pull. You can then start with Regen instead of a direct heal, which means that I now rarely have the problem that half a pull beelines for me. It allows me to feel in charge when it comes to my threat generation. Stoneskin also has a long buff length, so unless it gets consumed, it will stay on you for 30 minutes. Which allows you to also buff up the DPS with it, which gives you more leeway in healing. It also allows you to “preload” some healing before boss fights, which saves you a little bit of mana during the fight itself.

The big Achilles heel, from what I had read before, is a white mage’s mana consumption. You can put out spectacular healing, but you won’t be able to keep it up for long. Thankfully, this is where Shroud of Saints comes into play. The mana regen is very helpful, and I don’t think I’ve run out of mana on a boss fight more than once since I got this ability. That doesn’t mean you can be careless: you still have to precast and cancel, fish for free heal procs, and all those things. But SoS allows me to heal and even battle-rez careless DPS, and still have the mana to keep the tank up 30 seconds down the road.

I feel much more in control, which makes me happy. I also very much like the planning factor of playing a healer. When do I cast heals on who? Which ones? How can I make sure I will have some mana regen phases? Even though four abilities account for 90% of my casts, the class doesn’t feel dull.

Maybe other people also have noticed that, and enjoy it. Maybe that’s why we have so many healers.

And if playing a healer gets so much more rewarding at higher levels… I should really play my paladin more again. I used to love tanking. Maybe I’ll rediscover my lover for it.

Plus, you know, instant queues.

ETA: Longer than Expected

Final Fantasy XIV,

I’ve been back into FFXIV. I’m slowly making my way up to 50 on my White Mage. Quite slowly: it’s my first class, and even though I was out of the game for three weeks since the launch two months ago, that’s still not blazingly fast by any stretch of imagination. I wonder whether I’ll be able to find a good FC once I’m at level cap. But that might be a topic for a different post.

The game runs really well overall. There’s some creaking along the seams and some almost-to-be-expected things that are not 100% polished yet. Every couple of days, the game becomes almost unplayable during the later evening in the crowded zones: everybody will freeze in place for 10 seconds, then scramble in fast forward as the game catches up. I blame server overloads. Oh well, I play something else on these nights or read a book (cf.: why I’m slow on my way to 50). About 50% of the time, the game doesn’t close properly when I quit and I need to kill it. The weirdest quirk, though, is this:

 

Not quite the definition of "spot on".

Not quite the definition of “spot on”.

I’m not really sure why this happens. It happens all the time, though. Not necessarily quite as extreme, but I don’t think I’ve had it happen that I got into a dungeon (sorry, duty, or whatever) in less than the “average wait time”. Doesn’t sound very average to me. Even if you assume that tank queues are instant (which looks like it) and DPS queues are no worse than healer queues (a bold hypothesis, seeing how I typically pick up “my” two dps almost instantly), that would still mean a combined waiting time of 60 minutes split among four players in that scenario. Not exactly “less than 5m” either.

I don’t know what goes wrong in their calculation, but something seems to. Oh well, I got used to it. Maybe I’ll finally finish my copy of “American Psycho” that way. Only 80 pages left.

EQ Mac Closes. Surprise!

General Game-related Blathering, , , ,

Well, not really.

The thing is, even though I feel sad for Al’Kabor closing, I really can’t blame SOE. And believe me, I like to blame them for everything they do; it’s the safe choice most of the time!

So what we had was a Mac-only, time-locked Everquest server. Take the small fraction of gamers who use a Mac. That probably already removes 95% of all gamers. Probably more like 99% if you add consoles and all that to it. Hell, by now, I wouldn’t be surprised if Linux gamers had a larger share of the gamer pie. Of those 1%, take the people who would be interested in playing an MMO, but not WoW or EVE, the only other ones I can think of that have a Mac client. (caveat: I didn’t bother to check many games. I have a Macbook, but it’s from and mostly for work.) Instead take those who’d rather play something nostalgic: an Everquest, stuck in late 2002 and the Planes of Power expansion.

That doesn’t leave a lot of people.

Now, granted, SOE has other games in their portfolio that are wildly unsuccessful (Vanguard, I’m looking at you, with a weeping eye thinking of the things that could have been). Will they be in danger of being taken off life support next?

Not necessarily, because Al’Kabor had it even worse with the unfortunate combination of the Mac-Nostalgia-MMO-gamer target group. All the other SOE games I can think of have Windows clients. And as different as the code base is between them, at least they use the same operating system. If you have one tiny Mac game that doesn’t even produce revenue in an otherwise Windows-based shop, you pay an extraordinary amount of money for upkeep. You need Macs for testing, you need Mac programmers, all that stuff. Granted, a game that’s not gotten any content updates for more than 10 years only needs a minimal staff. Nevertheless, you still need to have someone to fix bugs or (when you talk about such a timeframe) keep the software compatible with OS updates. At some point SOE probably just had to cut financial corners somewhere.

Criticism in Guilds

General Game-related Blathering,

Alright, I’m back from my vacation. If I run out of things to post, I might actually torture you with vacation impressions. You’re in luck though, because for today, I have a topic to write about. Like many of my posts, it started as a comment on a blog, but grew enough that I told myself, “wait a second, this is getting unwieldy enough for a comment to become a blog post on its own”.

I’ve been following Stubborn’s blog for some time. It’s been interesting to read about his experiences with his (now ex-) guild. I won’t say too much about that part; it’s water under a bridge by now, in a way. It didn’t work out, and I’m sure (or at least hope) that Stubborn sees it the same way, and won’t linger too much on “how it could maybe have turned out better”. Better to look into the future.

What I want to talk about (and what has been discussed to a certain point in that blog post’s comments) is an excerpt from his recent blog post (link below the quote):

That’s something that a lot of more casual guilds lack: the willingness to put players’ performance out there. It may be because they’re worried about people taking it personally[.] […] [I]n some of my guilds it’s just not considered acceptable. That baffles me; don’t people who are doing poorly want to know specific ways in which to improve? Of course, the fallacy there is that not everyone thinks the same way I do or wants to play the game the way I do.

Stubborn, of course, already hints at the problem with this, but I think he dances around the problem, as seem to do most commenters. They point out that some people are too touchy and can’t accept criticism, but also that some people voice criticism in the form of personal attacks.

I’d go a step further and say that the very same criticism can be both at the same time, to different people. People just have very different thresholds for criticism. And that doesn’t only apply to the point at which they get offended (I’ll call it the “tolerance threshold”), but also the point at which they start noticing hints and are able to apply the criticism constructively (which I’ll call the “response threshold”). So to provide effective, constructive criticism, you’ll have to take that into account. There are (at least) two factors at play here: tone and audience.

Regarding tone, some people are accustomed to strong responses. They are fine with and even prefer direct, sometimes even curt, factual criticism, will say “yessir”, and apply it. Others will shy away from the strong authority inherent to that tone, even become defensive. To reach those people, you are better off making sure you stay below the tolerance threshold. You will notice that those more easily offended people often have a low response threshold, too. It’s not necessary to be quite as direct. They will pick up the hints in what you say, and act accordingly, often improving quite well, because they don’t feel the pressure they might feel from a curt criticism.

Therefore, it’s often good to start soft. In one guild I was in, we had different people for the different approaches, because everybody’s best at one type of tone. I was typically the guy who tried it with careful hinting first, because I generally was quite okay at that. If that didn’t help, somebody else with a more direct approach took over, because they were better at being direct and potentially more confrontational.

The second factor is audience. Criticizing people in front of others is, by its nature, a more confrontational approach than private feedback. Therefore, if at all possible, I try to give criticism, even constructive factual one, in private rather than in public. Public criticism can very easily be perceived as humiliation in front of your peers. Private criticism is eye-to-eye and feels more like a discussion between peers, while public criticism easily has a component of power play, because the criticizing person can be perceived as being in a superior position to the criticized.

Of course, it can be quite hard to properly do private criticism in a raiding environment. You don’t want to wait with feedback until the end of the night, when you’re on your own, because you preferably want to give feedback before the next pull. So that only leaves public voice channels, or whispers. Which, in a time-constrained raiding atmosphere, make proper communication and tone problematic. So there’s a bit of a trade-off here. Some stuff isn’t so vital that it can’t wait until the end of the raid. In that case, it’s a good idea to just wait until then. A raid is already a stressful environment (if it’s progression, for all members; if it’s about a new member, even the simplest raid will be stressful to them while they adapt to the new environment; and so on). If possible, save yourself and the other person the additional stress and postpone criticism until after the raid.

Of course, it’s a fine line, and it doesn’t mean to ignore or postpone everything. Sometimes you just need to say, “Dude/Dudette, I know it looks pretty, but get out of the fucking fire!” (see what I did there? always add some light joke. bonus points for self-depreciation!)

So yeah, bottom line of my opinion: consider tone and audience in your criticism. Start easy and escalate from there. But that’s just my opinion, maybe there’s a reason I’ve never been a guild leader (not that I would ever want to do that, officer was more than enough for me, thank you!).

Intermission: Zany FFXIV Items (1)

Final Fantasy XIV

I’m currently away from my home, so I can’t play any games. I also have little time to post about games. I don’t want to keep this blog completely silent in the meantime, though. So until further notice, I’ll run a couple of screenshots of zany FFXIV quest items.

I feel like a lot of a game’s soul can be in the tooltip flavor, if used well. It’s a great way to tell a funny side story in 2–3 sentences. It would rarely ever be enough for an engaging quest description (which game was it again that prided itself of having twitter-length quest texts?), but it works for amusing asides.

This time: goblin cheese. (Goblins in FFXIV always wear snout-like masks, in case you don’t know.)

ffxiv_goblin_cheese

35 Million Skill Points

EVE Online,

Good thing that Wilhelm keeps track of his skill points. When I saw his post, I realized hadn’t checked my SP total in some time. It had just rolled over to 35 million, so you’re out of luck and have to endure another pointless numbers post:

Spaceship Command               11,702,768 (*)
Gunnery                          7,752,860 (*)
Engineering                      2,978,040 (*)
Missiles                         2,745,062 (*)
Shields                          1,553,335
Armor                            1,290,305 (*)
Navigation                       1,265,805
Targeting                        1,048,000
Trade                            1,338,235
Drones                             911,217
Resource Processing                471,680
Electronic Systems                 444,776
Rigging                            436,774
Leadership                         421,824
Production                         222,767
Social                             198,935
Neural Enhancement                 159,765 (*)
Science                             45,255
Scanning                            20,729
Corporation Management               1,000
Total                          ~35,000,000

Since EVE recategorized its skills, there are now a lot more categories than before. Some of them make sense: for example, you don’t have to remember any more that armor and rigging skills are under (the now defunct) “Mechanics” and shield skills under “Engineering”. Some categories are a bit more dubious: why Scanning was split off Electronics for a mere seven skills… who knows.

The downside is that it is a lot harder to compare the areas in which I earned additional skills. For the most part, the asterisks are educated guesses on what I remember training. Basically, it’s been another 5 million in mostly gunnery, missiles, and spaceship command. The other categories are short trains for skills that were added to the game with the recent Odyssey expansion: “Infomorph Synchronizing” for reduced jump clone timers, and “Armor Layering” to fly faster with heavy armor. The latter one has already been renamed once in its short life. I have no idea what was wrong with the original “Armor Honeycombing”, I liked it a lot better…. However, most skill progress is still done in The Big Three, with a bunch of long-running skills. That works well with my current play time: I don’t play at all, I just let my pilot sit in his ship, waiting for the subscription to time out.

The Mandatory Titan Test

I’m still 128 days from flying a Titan. That number hasn’t changed a bit in the last 5 million SP. Gunnery skills are not required to get into a Titan, so they don’t get me any closer to one. They do get me closer to actually fit weapon on the theoretical Titan, though, so there’s something.

Plans for the Future

Sit in a station. Log in to train skills. See the subscription timer tick down. Unless something unexpected happens, this might be the last round-number skill point post for a long time. I’ll train a couple more extra-long skills until then. Next up: Advanced Weapon Upgrades V. Getting that out of the way would, in theory, allow me to fly dreadnaughts, the smallest capital class of ships, within a month, and only a couple more days for their guns. Not that I think that’s very likely to happen… ever. But AWU also gives you some other benefits, so it’s probably good to finally get that done. It’s not a fun skill to watch train for weeks while you’re actually playing.

The Curious Case of Healer Queues

Final Fantasy XIV

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a duty finder queue as a white mage. And sitting. And sitting. I first thought it was broken, because I didn’t even get any DPS to keep me company while we were waiting on a tank. Earlier on, I did eventually get a group, though.

FFXIV might be the first game I’ve played where at least in the mid-game, healers seem to be in less demand than DPS. (I can tell from LFGs that it’s not the case at the level cap.)

Or maybe the duty finder is indeed just buggy, after all.

Oh! At least now it decided, after 10 minutes, to give me an ETA. 22 minutes. Great.

I should’ve continued leveling my paladin…

10 Days of FFXIV

Final Fantasy XIV

Yes, I know it’s been out longer than that. But I also ran into the “realm full, please try again” problems after launch, so I decided to wait a bit and focus on other things. I picked it up early last week, which makes it now 8–10 days since I started again (don’t know exactly any more).

At the moment, I’m enjoying the hell out of the game. I love the visual style, the quirkiness, the wonderful English localization. Some people complain about too much to read, but… really? I think it’s great! Some people make it sound as if reading was a chore? I never got that. In fact, the game is best when it uses text for conversations. The voice actors are not all that great, in my opinion. Thankfully, you only have voices in rare important cut scenes, everything else is text, so it allows me to imagine voices that are much better than the voice actors.

Some obligatory "beautiful scenery" picture.

Some obligatory “beautiful scenery” picture.

White Mage

It’s my current “main” class. Again, I really like it. It would be great if I had another attack abilities or two… playing offense feels a bit like a WoW frost mage around 2005… but I won’t complain. It has some refreshing simplicity, and I don’t expect to do a whole lot of attacking once I reach max level anyway, so it’s a transient thing.

Healing-wise, white mages feel awesome. Especially now that I also got a HoT at 35, I feel quite powerful, and there’s little I think I can’t heal. Except for stupid. Can’t heal stupid. I had it a few times with people in groups who don’t move out of stuff. Here’s the thing, though: I can still heal them through it most of the time, if it’s not an insta-kill thing. But I won’t be able to keep that up, and I will probably run out of mana towards the end of the fight.

Mana is the big Achilles heel of white mages, anyway. You can pump out lots and lots of healing, but your burn through mana sooo fast… bards with their MP regen song have become my best friend. Especially if I don’t have one in my group, it becomes management game: when can I stop healing to regen? Can I afford to use small, cheap heals to fish for the proc that gives me a free heal? More than once, I was OOM and medding for the last 20% of a fight (typically if I enter a dungeon at the low end of its level range), and the fights got really close, losing either a DPS in the process, or a tank at 5%, with burn phase hilarity ensuing.

If I get my white mage to level cap (and I assume I will), I wonder what the end game will be like. I’ve never played a healer to level cap, so this would be a new experience for me.

I have no idea what the sign says, but it looks like an awesome beach bar.

I have no idea what the sign says, but it looks like an awesome beach bar.

Got to have a tank, too

One downside of the free classing system in FFXIV is that I can’t decide. I ping-pong between conjurer/white mage and gladiator, with my prospect on the paladin advanced class. I seem to do this a lot more than I other games, where I would have to roll an alt. The barrier for switching around is much lower.

My first experience tanking for groups on my gladiator was miserable. I won’t sweet talk it. Between 16 and 19, you do your first three dungeons within the story line. The problem is that at that point, you’re missing vital tanking tools (you only get a snap aggro “taunt”-like ability at 22), and the ones you have are weak (the AoE aggro builder is almost useless until you get the improved version at 20). As a result, tanking at low levels feels like a constant uphill battle. I was close to throwing in the towel, especially since I’m still somewhat scarred from my last long-term tanking experience before I stopped playing WoW.

I tried again in the mid-20ies though, and it’s a much smoother experience now. I’m slowly getting to the point where I feel more at home with the targeting system, too. It seems like every game has an ever-so-slightly different implementation of tab-targeting. They behave differently, and it can be infuriating if you try to quickly switch between mobs to taunt them back or distribute aggro abilities. The click system also took some time to get used to. I still miss a way to have non-overlapping name plates, but for now I resort to the “aggro list” at the left of the screen, which also gives you rough estimators of how your hate is compared to your group members. I’m a bit annoyed of the calibration of that thing though. Aggro is denoted by four icons (green, yellow, orange, red), so DPS has a quite fine-grained information about when it gets dangerous for them (green: guns ahoy! yellow: doing great on the damage, mate! orange: Awesome, you might want to be a bit careful though! red = OH MY GOD GET IT OFF ME!). You simply lay off in case you hit orange. On the other hand, there is no advance warning for tanks. The instant a mob switches from red to orange, it takes off. Oh well, guess I’ll have to get used to that and be vigilant.

I seem to have a thing for sunrises and sunsets.

I seem to have a thing for sunrises and sunsets.

A cruel FATE

FATEs, FFXIV’s implementation of “dynamic” events, are both a blessing and a curse. They are fun if you just do them on the side while traveling (the main story line has you do a lot of traveling). The rewards are a bit out of whack, though. If you have enough people, you can wrap up a FATE in less than a minute, and you receive (depending on your participation) about as much XP as for a normal quest. That means that FATEs can be a firehose of XP. The difference is especially great to dungeons: I would assume that you can probably make about four times as much XP per hour grinding FATEs than doing dungeons. That’s just too much of a lopsided distribution. Sure, dungeons give you chances of high-quality loot. But, here’s the kicker: FATEs award grand company seals, and you can use those to buy high-quality loot, so that advantage of dungeons is non-existent either. From and XP/hour point of view, there is no reason to do dungeons more than once for story progression and map discovery XP.

As a result, people swarm FATEs. No, seriously. I’ve seen 40–50 people descend on a FATE likes flies on a corpse… or piranhas on a piece of mutton dipped into the water… or whatever other comparison you can come up with in your mind, I think you get the picture I’m trying to draw. In the evening hours, it’s so bad that I’ve had FATEs where I wasn’t able to hit more than one or two targets, because every mob that spawns was instantly DPSed down so fast that I couldn’t finish a single cast before it died. It’s probably because I’m not ahead of the leveling curve this time, because I level two classes at once. It would probably have been a better idea to focus on one first and stay ahead of the curve enough to prevent that issue. But it’s too late for that now.

There are almost two raids worth of people in this picture. That's from today; it was worse on the weekend.

There are almost two raids worth of people in this picture. That’s from today; it was worse on the weekend.

Dungeon for sale

I can see now why servers are still locked in the evening hours. I really wish SQEX would look into dungeon XP again. Because the situation is so lopsided, it’s also hard to find dungeon groups on your own server via chat. About half the time, I resort to finding at least part of the group via the dungeon finder, something that I really like to avoid as much as possible, because I’d like to build social ties to people on my server. That will probably get better at level cap, though. I see calls for high-level content in chat already.

Some of those though… are not quite what I would’ve liked to see:

ffxiv_selling_runs

Drama seems to be the resident server-first guild. I’ve seen them advertise with “raid every night”. I don’t have a problem with that, more power to them if that fits their play style (I’m getting too old for such shenanigans, I think). I’m not a huge fan of the “sell spots for dragging” though. Especially that early in a game’s life cycle. There is so much else you can do if you can’t finish a certain dungeon at the moment. I can understand if some people aren’t interested in gathering or crafting, but there’s also leveling other adventuring classes (which might also give you additional abilities for your main class to use).

On the positive side, I’ve had a lot of fun with runs staffed with people from Moogle. I think the most fun so far was with a tankless group. We ran content almost at-level (two DPS were +2 levels, one was +1) and it worked great! Better than many runs with tanks that I had. It probably helped that one of them was a bard… remember what I said about bards earlier? I added all four to my friends list. I’m trying to fill that list slowly but surely, because I can’t really decide which type of guild (free company, I mean) I want to join.

Of course I forgot to make a good "victory picture", so this will have to do.

Of course I forgot to make a good “victory picture”, so this will have to do.