45:00 A great example of a simple community detoxifying feature is the salute button in Deep Rock Galactic. Just having a button to play a small animation and say a catchphrase that translates to "Yay, we did it!" or "I believe in us!" or "We're the best!" does wonders for morale.
On a lesser example, I absolutely abuse the "Thank you" command in Space Marine 2. When I see it, it's a tiny happiness spike, but it is a palpable tiny happiness spike.
45:00 oh hey that's me! Camera missed out on my ralsei cosplay smh "Why it's Rude to Suck at Warcraft" was a big help in shifting how I handled my own struggle with frustration in games, especially team-based competitive ones like Dota. Managing that level of salt has always been difficult for me even outside of gaming, and that video sort of deconstructing where those frustrations were coming from played a big part in my growth. I'm proud of where I am now with that.
It's a testament to Dan's writing that even without the freedom to edit out the occasional bad take the presentation still works really, really well. And as a XIV player, it absolutely does happen in XIV! It just involves less slurs most of the time. :P
The wildest part of "it happens in 14" is that I hear hundreds of "Tales from Duty Finder" type stories of these horrible troglodytes that lose their shit over suboptimal play or violently rebel against things like "wall pulls in dungeons" and... I dunno if I'm lucky or more socially intelligent and able to defuse those situations before the blow or just blind to it, but I never see it. Or maybe I just got old and stopped caring and thus the problem never registers in my memory. Or maybe I'm just trigger happy and as a tank main I just commissar the problem children from the duty? I dunno. It's something I think about every time this comes up, and I'm thankful I don't have to deal with it!
Absolutely. The difference is *purely* that explicitly judging people on their play in in-game chat is actively moderated against, which means that in low-stakes content that's randomly matchmade anything outside the norms will generally be tolerated with the bare minimum of politeness until the content ends, where in higher difficulty content with in-game lfgs the backlash is, mostly, a silent disband of the group. The devs are pretty forward about that all being intended, and it does make for a more easygoing community for the most part, so it seems like a pretty "valid" solution to toxicity.
I think the take is bad because it conflates completely different games for completely different audiences on different platforms by different developers and released in different years. Comparing the relatively low to mild toxicity of FFXIV to WoW or ToonTown is kind of a bad take. Because, yes, it *does* happen in FFXIV, but you really have to look for it. The argument is like saying that Dan Olson is like Asmongold. Technically both online video game personalities, but the comparison is completely unhinged to anyone who knows even an iota about either person.
The healing thing reminds me of Call of Duty 4s discussion around the perk juggernaut. For those not in the know: call of duty 4 had a perk system where you could select effects to apply to your character. I'm particular there were 2 that became highly contentious; Stopping Power and Juggernaut. Stopping power increased weapon damage by 50% Juggernaut increased player health by 50% Going by the numbers both of these perks effectively counteracted each other. In actually gameplay, most weapons would translate to either needing one less (stopping power) or one more (juggernaut) attack to win. The playerbase at the time hated you if you ever used juggernaut. Now there was actually a third perk, double tap, that increased fire rate by 50%. Fun fact: because damage is not continuous and measured in instances of discrete damage, double tap would actually win faster than both stopping power and juggernaut in majority of scenarios. But no one used it.
If I remember correctly, nobody bothered using Double Tap because it increased fire rate without dampening recoil to compensate. This made you more likely to miss shots while also running through your ammo faster than normal, effectively rendering the increased damage potential worthless. It was one of the least popular perk-a-colas in Zombies for the same reason
Don't forget the one that dropped a grenade on your corpse when you died (martyr?) that one was a good way to get banned from servers. I once ate a ban because I was about to throw a grenade when I was killed, dropping it at my feet and it was assumed I was using the verbotten perk.
what people really hated is that you HAD to use one or the other. if you dont have SP juggernaut players are annoying AND SP players kill you dead and vice versa
When he was discussing the malleability of the ideogroups I was thinking “Man I’d kill to hear what he’d think of Logimen in Foxhole”, and then the next guy snatched the thought straight out of my brain, wild
The aside on elden ring is so fucking true. I can't help but see this in a lot of online games. "Monster hunter now" has a lot of forumites who will just straight up leave your lobby if you carry the bone gunlance because it's known for being a weapon only bad players use, which consequently means that those players are better off picking a weaker weapon that will possibly make them lose an encounter because it's easier to find lobbies that won't passive aggressively leave the hunt after it's started. It's rude to play bone gunlance A really funny other example I could think of was when I submitted a schematic I made of a piece of code in the game mindustry where I had 3 processors calculating a different part of a visual demo, and people in the comment section was telling me that this is not how it's supposed to work. Because apparently there was a schematics community and a defacto rule there was to always use the highest processor available so your schematics always run as fast as possible. My distributed multi core system was mocked for being bad, when looking back at it with an IT tradeschool degree under my belt I was actually making a microservice system that was very scaleable, easier to build and more modular.
On the question of systems meant to reduce toxicity: In league of legends theres an honour system where you give a player on your team a +rep at the end of a game. Over the course of the year you get levels in it and if you get the max tier you get a free skin. If you have a high honor level and recieved a rep in the last game it displays on your player banner when loading into the next game. Supposedly on the korean server at higher ranks players use the system to indicate if someone played poorly essentially turning the system into a badge of shame.
Similar in dota, they added a way to 'tip' players ingame with a little currency they can spend on stuff, but it is almost entirely used sarcastically :D
in a gdc presentation on the same topic, there was a case of chat being disabled in favor of symbol pings to reduce toxicity. players started spamming "?" on others they though were playing badly
RUclips channel Pirate Software told the story about how Dawngate did this exact thing right. Leveling up your account enough to reach Ranked was deliberately designed to be an unplayable slog, but +rep votes would give you boosts to your account EXP and give you more of Dawngate's version of runes. Account progression was balanced such that in order to access Ranked and all the games' features, the most efficient way to get there was to be kind. Good behaviour was rewarded with tangible player power, instead of a teacher's pet skin.
Dan "Sword of Danocles" Olson is fantastic. Watched the original at least twice before, but the live reading adds a lot, including the little update tidbits. Thanks for the upload!
the frog farming shit was wild, man. People have this wild idea of what it entailed and what kind of monstrous people would frogfarm. They assume anyone who did it, Knew What They Were Doing And Were Doing It Maliciously. I joined a frog farm group for like 10 minutes, because I was curious why my group finder was filled with these groups. I had no idea what it even was, but after about 10 minutes I was like 'hah, weird. well that was a fun novelty.' and left. Then I killed trash in heart of fear for a little while because i was a blood dk, and blood dks were really fucking good in remix. Then the cloak nerf happened and I lost a whole bunch of stats, and everyone was being nasty shits about it. What a weird time
In FFXIV there are abilties that deal guarunteed critical hits, and mid way through Endwalker these were changed to have extra damage when under an effect that boosts crit rate. This was entirely because Warriors, who rely on guarunteed crits for their burst damage, were being excluded from parse groups because their presence would hurt the raid damage of Dragoons and Scholars. The developers changed how a mechanic works because of community toxicity.
Fantastic video, especially the Q and A portion at the end. As an FYI, I think the anti-toxic mechanic in the MMO mentioned in the Q and A session was from Hellgate: London.
I just realized I experienced this recently with Pokemon Nuzlockes. For my first one I’m doing right now I’m actually not honoring deaths at all and instead playing in a way such that every fight is deathless, and just save scumming. I do this because what I’ve really found to be fun watching nuzlockes is the encounter and boss battle planning, especially when using the wiki to look up encounter tables and gym leader team comps, using species clause, and playing with the hardcore ruleset. I feel like I’m playing it more like a puzzle game, and I had someone get rather mad at me in a youtube comment section for daring to call it a nuzlocke Hell what this REALLY reminds me of is people getting mad at anyone who eats steak slightly well done rofl. Is eating the ultimate free play?
Fuck man that really is a essay idea. Is food instrumental or free form. There are good arguments for both and steak is a fantastic example. He'll you could even get into it culture wise. Like how in "western style" food often is treated very delicately and often only given in small proportions at the highest quality, vrs say like dim sum where the best spots will load you to the brim with food. Weird to think about, I'll definitely have to right that down
This was a great panel to see live! Glad I can revisit it. One of the best things I did at PAX, easily. (shout out to the kind stranger who danced with me in our seats during the pre-show music)
a point against the "This doesn't happen in ffxiv" crowd. At the launch of Dawntrail, the difficulty of instanced content took a half step up. mechanics weren't new per say but were happening about 1.25X times faster than in previous expansions causing a lot more failed boss pulls and party wipes in normal content. This sent a good portion of the NA community up in arms because it was social practice that you cleared any normal content in 1 pull. 2 if there was someone new in the party. So people would leave. people would give up. the game wasn't kicking folks. The instances had more than enough time on them to fail over 10 times and still clear but socially it was unacceptable to a good number of people.
There is a big difference between leaving an instance with a bad group without saying anything, and staying in the group but typing up a hateful storm (which is what WoW players more commonly do). I get the point you are trying to make though ofc FFXIV isn't perfect. I will say as someone who has played a ton of both that it is really hard to compare to 2 in good faith. WoW is significantly worse in terms of toxic interactions.
@@djbcubed Nah they're much the same, but due to the way FFXIV is moderated and language filtered people are just more sly with their toxicity and people just read this as the game being 'non-toxic' when it's not. Frankly, I'd rather a guy type up a storm when he's mad so that I can react/report him rather than him be passive-aggressive and just leave unannounced. I've generally got worse vibes from people on FFXIV than on WoW (and it's incorrect to state that people don't type up a hateful storm in FFXIV, they do, they just do so in a carefully worded manner to avoid getting moderated).
@@djbcubed The comparison isn't fair from systems and players perspectives. There are potential pushiments that condition FF14 players to "play nice", be it through leaver penalties, or a swifter ban hammer on toxic interactions. If you take away these mechanics, I guarantee FF14 will turn into a cesspoll the same way (or worse, given how repressed for toxicity people are in FF14) WoW has.
I had this exact experience when I came back to ffxiv last year. We zoned into a trial that was required for the MSQ and everyone was super nice and said hello etc. Then we wiped once and ppl lost their minds and started insulting each other it was pretty funny. We killed it the second pull.
I think the point of the "this doesn't happen in FFxiv" comment is that we often are unaware of these social contracts in these games. FFxiv, like any other game, has a meta and players are encouraged to play the meta or else they're throwing. I'm sure there's much more about final fantasy, but this is one I can think of off the top of my head.
I have an anecdote aligned exactly with the last question. I made a spreadsheet for the Slayer skill for my ironman: the Ironman gamemode requires me to collect everything myself, so maximizing the amount of herbs and gold I get from killing thousands of monsters over the course of the skill is of high interest. When someone asks in the clan chat "hey, I got assigned Trolls, what do you guys think: skip task or do it", the response is usually "eh, it's a chill task, why not" or "prob a skip tbh". My response is "If you use Ice Barrage (aoe) and two alts to aggro them on two different servers, you can tag them all on one server, kill them, and hop to the other one while they respawn. If you do this, it's a pretty mediocre task that you might skip. If you don't, it's much much worse and you should definitely skip unless you're almost out. Trolls are solidly the best of the bad tasks at only a few thousand herb xp per task." There are people in my clan (who from my perspective have probably never skipped a slayer task in their life) who say "that's basically cheating!" and... honestly? From one perspective, using two alts for a gamemode where You Stand Alone is TOTALLY cheating (the game actually penalizes an ironman's slayer xp by half if they have alts help but it's still worth it because you can finish the task faster and go back to good tasks). On the other hand, there are so many game environments like wilderness bosses where using alts and world hopping is absolutely mandatory no matter what account you're playing.
absolutely cracked up at the entire 'it happens in final fantasy too' section, especially cause I was watching while in a normal raid in ffxiv having played ffxiv for a long ass time, I can confirm: it does it is a bit mitigated ingame by some pretty on top of it moderation, but as anyone who knows why there's jokes about the burger king crown can tell you, it doesn't quash all of it and then theres the out of game stuff. yeesh.
Yeah it's wild to see the contrast between the 'lol are you even trying' crowd and the 'lol tryhard' crowd within the same game. As tends to be the case when a community is split between the two ends of a spectrum I find myself in the middle doing my own thing with like-minded people and not giving a shit what either of them think. My guild in wow casual-moded Karazhan throughout Burning Crusade and had an absolute blast doing it. Our raid nights ranged from one-shotting every boss in a night to 15 wipes in a row on Shade of Aran because people were saving up their best jokes to drop during the flame wreath cast to distract other players so as to blow the raid up because it was funny.
To the person that asked if there were any mechanics that disuaded toxicity, there was another failed MOBA like dawngate called strife. where while you were in lane it didn't matter who last hit the creep for gold. Both players in lane received the same amount of gold. It also had a mechanic where if your character was out of combat and in lane, they would regenerate health and mana after a while. SO even if someone was getting harassed badly they weren't put out too far behind, but it also meant they couldn't fight as effectively, so harassing was still a viable option to do. Thankful Deadlock has the gold haring mechanic which hould help take the sting out of laning.
Honestly I think that flaunting achievements is something inherently fundamental to human nature. Even games that are ostensibly non-combative, like Animal Crossing, still see people find a way to compete in other ways (I have rarer flowers than you, I have more money than you, etc.). Granted in those games it’s a much smaller minority than something like, say, WoW or LoL where joint teamwork is vital to some types of content, but it’s still there and speaks to the fact that even in an environment that actively inspires cooperation and lacks any consequences for not being “competitive” this type of behavior still arises. It reminds me a lot of bullying in Japanese schools. In places like America kids may be picked on for their clothing style or hair color, etc. but even in Japan where almost all of that is controlled for, students find reasons to pick on and ostracize people for increasingly inane reasons, such as eye color, height, way of speaking, etc. up to and including just arbitrarily picking someone out. It really makes you lose faith in humanity…
I don’t think that it’s human nature, just the result of cultures that encourage us to compare ourselves to each other by creating standards in beauty, productivity, etiquette, etc.
I subscribe to Dan's patreon and it's truly wonderful to not only to see how a video comes together slowly, but also to get those smaller videos he mentioned and see hius thoughts on things that are perhaps lower stakes than Qanon or NFTs
This essay hits home with me as a Destiny/Destiny 2 player. Most classes get locked into certain roles in high-end content. That role may vary based on the raid/nightfall, but Titans have an interesting outcome where the most recent raid really negates the viability of the three subclasses that usually have the most useful supers. The classic dps move (thundercrash) fails because it requires boss contact and that's fatal. The other big dps option requires a continuous ground path, but the dps phase is on a floating disk. And the big support/buff option of the ward of dawn bubble takes up a lot of space, and warlocks have a better option for that anyway. So they (bungie) created a situation where the only real dps phase viability for Titans is to just run a bunch the meta guns.
Dan needs to make a video about the Warcraft 3 campaign and whether "Arthas did nothing wrong" or not, it's the perfect triangulation of Warcraft, right-wing weirdos and narrative.
Not sure if you've seen it, but GiantGrantGames has a (very lengthy) video on Warcraft 3 that goes into that a good bit. It's really well-made, highly recommend it!
as a WoW player this was a great panel, but also as a 'casual' CoD player I feel this even more: in recent Cod games, you could unlock numeroud camos for your guns via playing certain ways with your weapons. often these would force you to do sub optimal builds (like putting all the range buffs you could on an SMG to try and get long shots on it) or strategies that might annoy other players (melee kills, camping etc). but the most egregious thing you could possibly do in these games when grinding for these goals, is NOT PLAY the objective. the amount of vitriol that would come over the coms or the amount of temamates that would just leave because I wasnt constantly capping the flag but focusing on my kills, is innumerable. "why queue for Domination if you arent going to cap flags?!" they would rage. well you see, my fellow player, in Domination, since the objectives dont move,I can plan and anticipate where my opponents are and makes getting achievements like 3 kills without dying easier than running around TDM where enemies are around every corner. I dont care about my win rate. I can have a decent K/D ratio most matches but i dont play enough to be 'pro". but damn if I wanted that sick prestige camo, the sweaties are going to have to deal with me hiding behind a door with a shotgun so i can get 5 kills from behind without dying lol.
Thus proving why rewards in team games need to be structured around things that are beneficial to the team as a whole. Otherwise people with weak empathy are driven to optimize for themselves.
@@MarcusTheDorkus As a former Destiny player, I don't think a side objective with no negative externalities exists. 'X kills with weapon Y'? Well, what if I'm terrible with weapon Y (coughTheMountaintopcough). 'Win X games'? Well, the speed of games is nearly as important as your winrate, so you should play in ways that win/lose quickly and avoiding dragging games out. Not to mention, trying to minimise the impact of side objectives on a player's teammates tends to result in exceptionally boring side objectives. Plus, as frustrating as it is to get dropped on a team with a bunch of people who are 'only here to do dailies', it's not like people need an excuse to turn every game into Team Deathmatch.
I really like this. I play video games but I hate score counters, time limits, rankings, ratings, and competitive multiplayer. I don't care about winning, I just want to have fun, and I guess I was born without whatever makes competitiveness fun. Sports, board games, none of them appeal when it's about winning instead of about having a good time. And I understand that those are synonymous for some people but they are completely unrelated for me
Regarding RPers and 'hardcore players' coming together, there a meme/idea in the FFXIV community that the most hardcore players of the game aren't the endgame raiders, but rather the people heavily invested in fashion and home decoration, because, if you want access to everything, you need to be an endgame raider and also involve yourself in a dozen other systems vying for your time.
Speaking of goals aligning with role players and raiders, I am sort of in a similar situation in a game I play. I won't name it because it is, as the kids call it, cringe, even I think it's cringe. But the point is, I care about the story, the lore, the collection, my guild finds it weird but they tolerate it, and that is mainly because to get into more of the story, get more of the achievements, get rare cool items, I need to level grind, I need to upgrade my gear, I need to join endgame raids. So at the end of the day it's all the same. I might spend more time than the average player on completely meaningless task that unlocks small extra bit of dialog or nets me an achievement, but then I get back to grinding and join the raids just the same
Incredibly hilarious to see all the comments on that WoW video about "this doesn't happen in FFXIV" because the whole way we do dungeons in that game is ritualized. The tank pulls every single trash mob that's required to get to the next boss, and then the DPS players burn them down using all their strongest attacks (with long cooldowns) before the tank and healer get overwhelmed and die. You will get talked about (directly calling it out doesn't usually happen but you will be the subject of a lot of discussions your party members have with friends) if you don't grab everything as a tank unless you're in one of the few dungeons in which doing that is quite difficult (Mt. Gulg comes to mind and even there you will attempt it at least once unless the healer forbids it).
Doma Castle's first pull. You're right, and it's actually painful for people like me with OCD & adjacent neurodivergent conditions - it inherently feels "wrong" (dysphoric) to not goldilocks/middle-ground each pack of mobs in a pull. I get a lot of anxiety from my resources yo-yoing. It's deeply unfun. I prefer sprouts & fellow casuals & dread anyone with an Ultimate title/weapon. There's a strange cognitive dissonance when I confront players that optimal play inherently equals shifting the overton window to 'anything less than efficient = subpar; below average'. Which, as Dan Olsen rightfully points out, citing ivy league social science over decades to support his evidence - is a feedback loop that literally accelerates the lifespan of the game into late/end stage as well as speedruns every participants' personal enjoyment of the game. These are simulations of society, and when optimization, efficiency, and speed are normalized as self-evident + value neutral - play transitions into labor. Most people don't enjoy labor, they enjoy the fruits of their labor. Those of us who labor irl more than those of us who mostly labor in-game get incredibly frustrated with each other. Social pressure has hands. But so does this: every guy who photoshops color-coordinated censor bars on names in chat to post on r/TalesFromDF whine about having their time wasted. When PF & Discord; this whole community of fellow whiners already exist, right there. Hell, pre-forming to speedrun daily roulettes (don't these guys have statics??) would have the environmental benefit of unclogging the queue & server congestion for literally everyone, including themselves. But they'll insist on repeating this feedback loop because it's a social practice that affirms the instrumental practice (and it's bullying; projection: they know that if they pre-form with like minded individuals they'll risk being torn to shreds by their own brand of "constructive criticism" & "helpful advice". This pretty much all stems from their emotional insecurity of being a victim to this behavior themselves. Repeating the cycle.) In short: it's straight up addiction. They are chasing a high in order to avoid an emotional pain.
I'm a (mostly retired) veteran of DS1 pvp. Learning tech was very much encouraged, including all exploits to easily kill bosses. This is because the object of the game is *obviously* to master manipulating the engine in order to beat a human opponent in pvp. There are two more good reasons why hard-swapping became popular: 1: It *hides your loadout from the opponent*. Sure, you could off-hand that great club, but you will be fat-rolling and your opponent will know why. 2: The most powerful tech in DS1 is arguably the weapon moveset swap, and this requires a hard-swap (during a roll) to set up. The way all these different tech branch off each other and reconnect to create new strategies is every bit as good as if it was intentional.
I will say, I wish he dug into theory for why emergent social philosophies form because that could be productive for the health of some of these games. For example, understanding the cause of the deviation between wow’s knowledgable/high skill social expectation against the mentioned OSRS item swapping and prayer flick accuracy or having an efficient elden ring build. Both games are fairly described as instrumentally driven games but they incur drastically differing social constructs which tends to be the interesting bit, for me at least. Personally, I feel these examples deviate due to the communities’ perception of a concept of “intended play patterns,” however there is an even more complex relationship with a given player’s time investment. In WoW I believe it’s socially unacceptable to do things which potentially waste *other* player’s time and so, there’s a very heavy expectation placed on performance and knowledge, which is a bit more nuanced than the original presentation. In light of this, it’s interesting to note that in that context, your own enjoyment of the game is going to be mediated by what you must do within the game to help achieve OTHER player’s goals. For example if you’re the only person in a dungeon going for an achievement, no matter how effectively you got that achievement, you would likely feel absconded as a result of the dungeon format. Similarly even in roleplaying which is described as a form of free playing, the player must opt in to actually role playing, because if they don’t legitimately roleplay while standing in goldshire surrounded by roleplaying guardmen and innkeepers, they’re likely removed or ignored. With respect to wow, I wish this exact conversation was taken more seriously because inevitably many of the more toxic and seclusive behaviors of players seem to emerge from a construct within the video game itself, or any given video game for that matter. With the ability to extract what systems or mechanics birth less desirable social *responses,* systems and rules within games can be adapted to better socially engineer the game. As it stands, from my personal experience with the game over many years, WoW tends to be incredibly difficult to comfortably enjoy with other players, and is easier/more reasonably enjoyed as an individual with a relatively isolated experience, though inevitably lived out through partied scenarios. Tl;dr there’s a very interesting interplay of expectation induced into the player base which forms out of SOME construct in any given video game. Digging into what constructs incite specific sentiment towards social norms would have been really cool. P.s. Instrumental play, from my perspective, seems so categorical that it seems to be a failure to label all forms of play under a single coin due to the mentioned variety of social outcomes of the presentation. It’s a bit like calling all religion, just religion. Within instrumental play there seems to be expertise driven play, mathematical efficiency of time investment play, perception of intended mechanisms play, (wow skillful group content vs. Eve/OSRS/Frog farming vs. roleplay/not using summons/drinking games) and even potentially more. I feel like digging into that information could be really meaty and actually increase the enjoyment of games with said understanding.
i think there was a strat in either dark souls 1 or 2 where you would spam this weak healing spell and the opponent would rush in to punish, then you switch over to this powerful AOE(wrath of gods) that had a similar animation, normally ppl avoid rushing in when seeing the animation because they know wrath of gods, but convincing them ur just spamming heal annoys the opponent so they let down their guard and rush in to the AOE.
genuinely amazed that there are apparently a lot of folks who refuse to believe that ffxiv has instrumental play issues??? like just off the top of my head: - basically all aoe damage scales with the number of targets, with it being better than single-target attacks at two mobs, and so if you are a tank and you don't pull as many mobs as is feasible, people will yell at you or ragequit. if you're playing through the game for the first time as a healer and your tank pulls every mob right up to the boss gate and they die, it's considered your fault, and people will yell at you or ragequit. i have had to heal for multiple friends during stone vigil because the way that party finder queues are trained to do that dungeon is insane, - having perfectly optimal gear is a huge clout symbol. generally the best weapon in any particular expansion is going to spend at least some time being 'that annoying as fuck relic weapon that requires you to grind a bunch of old content and a bunch of new content over the course of an entire expansion' and i during the course of savage raiding have absolutely felt compelled to go through that entire process just to have the technically best weapon so that i can join in with random groups. and of course the absolute best gear is obtained through completing the savage raids, so you better make sure you grind out the slightly easier ones a bunch until you have the perfect gear for your slots. and make sure it's all melded properly too. and i'm sorry you're not even pentamelding your crafted gear, how dare you, - ROTATIONS. high-level play is based around stacking debuffs for huge damage windows, which means you need to play your class in a way that isn't just optimal in a vacuum, but also perfectly lines up your play with everyone else's. and how do you do that if you're playing with strangers? why, you go to the balance and look up The Rotation for your class, and then you go to a training dummy and you practice that rotation for a couple hours until you've got it down, of course! and if you're not using your debuffs when you should, people will yell at you or ragequit! - boss strategies! this is one that world of warcraft has kinda solved by just, having addons that tell you what you're supposed to be doing at any specific time. in ffxiv, though? if you're grouping up for a boss, you are expected to know The Strategy for every phase of it, to the point that people will put in little keywords for exactly the strategy they expect from you in the group finder listing, and if you have a different method or don't know that one, people will yell at you or ragequit. if you start your own group finder and list a different strategy than people expect, no one will join it. i even had to be quietly told about the group finder being the only way to actually find parties, after spending a couple hours waiting in a queue only to find that literally no one is willing to play with players that they can't vet. later, i found out that in fact the addon that tells you what you're supposed to be doing at any specific time exists, it's called cactbot, and it's an open secret that despite using it being against the terms of service, plenty of people will use it anyway - hey y'know warcraft logs? that external website in the original video that is just all about monitoring your performance and separating players by skill level? now open up that website and scroll right down to the bottom and click the link that says 'final fantasy xiv'. participation in this system is so expected that i have been in parties that have kicked people for having grey parses (bottom quartile of dps in that boss), because clearly they're not good enough to beat the boss on their own and they just got carried by their team, despite the fact that _they did clear that boss_ - oh god so fucking much else. if you're a drk and one of the healers isn't a whm? you'll be asked to switch classes or leave. if you join a group and ask a question about a strategy they're advertising? you'll be kicked without a word. if you're in a post level 30 dungeon and you haven't done all your class quests and you queue up as an mrd? people will yell at you. if you're hearing people talk about drk and whm and mrd and don't instinctively know what they mean by that? people will talk to you like you're an idiot. there is literally a system where the game puts a sprout next to your name to indicate to experienced players that you haven't been playing this game for hundreds of hours and are probably gonna need some extra guidance, and when i googled to double-check what the requirements for that were, one of the first results i found was a forum thread titled 'mid-level sprouts should play better' and like. when i was playing ffxiv, i was unemployed and passionate enough about the game to regularly spend twelve to sixteen hours a day doing nothing but playing through and obsessing about it, and so i could afford to spend the time and effort it takes to learn all this lingo and grind out purple parses and dive through discord servers to find out what on earth a ccw fgs is, and i wish that more people had experienced savage raiding because it's genuinely some of the most fun i've had in a game! but i genuinely can't imagine what the experience is like for the ffxiv equivalent of the gummy wolves, the two nights a week guild that isn't spending the other five nights and seven mornings grinding out the fight anyway, and it kinda feels like that's because that group doesn't exist. you either devote yourself completely or you get pushed away and never touch it
That's why I don't think Starcraft 2 is a strategy game. Its just problem solving; timing and occasionally positioning and micro, which might as well make it a shooter.
I just wish people would be nicer to each other and try to maybe take the game less seriously and just make friends in mmo's. There are still people like that to be fair but the % of players who are up each others asses for every little thing and or just seem to be playing because the game is = to heroin to them makes me really sad. I played a lot of wow back in the day and quit after cata, came back last year had some fun but i quit again this year and will not be going back. I met some cool people but the more i got to know them/the more people i met and talked to the more i realised even the cool ones are pretty nuts these days. I don't think it's rude to suck at warcraft, i think you have to be at least a little nuts to play it at all these days, and this is some kind of mass psychosis going on or something.
To my fellow ff14 players here : While it was already questionnable before that; the reaction to Dawntrail showed levels of bad faith arguments and all over sheer toxicity (including the more or less openly transphobic harassment of a trans voice actress, complete with doxxing ofc) from certain parts of the FFXIV community prooves that we have no claims to be better than WoW players. The Dawntrail release was a disgusting time to be in FFXIV spaces on social media, and it should inspire us to rethink the way we interact with people about this game, both inside and outside the game.
I'm sorry, is the "git gud" crowd bitching about people beating them in a game? Sounds like a skill issue? Mad cause bad? Like, can you not just... Chase the healer? And hit them while they're casting their spell?
"Git gud" is actually a capital-G-Gamer term, and when I say that, what I mean is that it's a deeply conservative term. They want to feel superiority not because they have become superior, but as a reward for what they have already decided or been told is the correct course of action. If anyone proves them otherwise, especially through direct confrontation, then their opposition isn't "doing it right" somehow.
@@Argusthecat That's just one lens of it, and the most toxic/viral so that perspective gets all the press & the healthier applications of the simulacrum get buried in all the drama surrounding the former. It's the bootstrap thing all over again: awful advice towards others; excellent advice for yourself. When self-oriented, "git gud" is a motivation to engage in critical thinking & problem solving skills. I highly recommend it for self-help & coping through struggle/adversity. But it's the opposite of good mentoring when it comes to others, because you have to establish a lot of rapport in order for it to be a good-faith conversation rather than a confrontational, argumentative, outside pressure stacking on top of already-overwhelming underlying pressures. The human brain simply stalls on computing logic when emotional. It's putting the cart before the horse to deliver it as a social expectation rather than a scientific process. They're two opposing forces, when it comes to motivation & inspiration.
48:43 wait, people go to cons with goals? people don't just show up without any cosplays packed or autographs to seek out and instead just Vibe in the Loud Zone for 2-3 days?
USF4 Elena is _right there_. Or everyone bitching about fighting shoto/rushdown/grappler/zoner/whatever. FGC might be sane enough to have a twitter account dedicated to making fun of these people, but that also means we have enough people scrubquoting for it to be a viable source of content.
Very apt name, as this is wrong. While many MMOs value instrumental play more now, instrumental play can still be accessible and welcoming. FF14 has a good attitude towards it while also still allowing a lot of space for free play. I also don't think that this is what Dan is communicating, and I do not think you watched the video
TLDR; people hate when you waste their time in an online video game -- especially when we live in an era where there is an overload of information on how to better yourself at said video game.
I think you're conflating shared time with your own time. You choose to play an MMO, so when you're doing content with other people (raids, dungeons) you're SHARING your time, vs. solo content (delves, questing, some crafting). You choose who you spend your time with, and you choose what you consider to be a waste of time. You're also missing the point of the video to the extent that I don't think you watched it, as different forms of play have different values. Instrumental play values "bettering" yourself, whereas free play doesn't have that goal. The elimination of free play in WoW, or at least the extreme scarcity of it, I think has a big impact on WoW's communities, cultures, values, etc. It's still a social game, and when you only value a specific form of betterment, that social attitude seeps into everything
The phrasing 'better yourself' (instead of something like 'play better' or 'gain knowledge/skill') is, if not telling, at least indicative of one of Dan's wider points, which is that people cannot countenance that their own moral judgements are not objective and are not shared by other people of equal worth.
How is it a waste of time if you're having fun. If you lose, that's only a waste if it's boring to attempt. If it's boring to play why are you playing. If I fail to eat a whole pie at once guess what I had pie and get to eat more pie on another attempt. If you consider suboptimal or failing to be a waste of your time because the only thing that gives you any satisfaction is winning with a dopamine loot drip that's not a game that's a pavlov response.
The idea that people should be allowed to do the bare minimum and be allowed to quite frankly waste others people's time is indeed very rude. If you show up to a group and have done zero research and rely on others to show you to ropes, don't you think that's kind of disrespectful? There's layers to this discussion.
Na the hypothetical gnome rouge at the beginning is 100 times more based than you min maxers. Games are about creating your own enjoyment, not cowtowing to others
@@abrenmam I mean it depends. Me personally I don't mind people being bad or unoptimal in FFXIV when I do story content, after all it is both required to finish the plot, and the queues are open, as long as they are giving the fight an honest try and not being obnoxious about it. But once you get into harder content that you have to go out of the way to find groups, they will put in very specific expectations of what they are looking for, and you join one knowing you won't agree to what they are asking upfront, that is not "refusing to kowtow" that is just being an asshole
It doesn't have to be all or nothing. It should be possible for people to give ~80% of an optimal play so we can avoid optimizing the fun out of the experience. There is a reason the original doom had so many difficulty levels and that kind of mentality is lacking in both the design and play of may multiplayer games.
I'll bite the bullet and say ofc - is it not true from the other end?: are you not wasting MY time by speedrunning me through all the set pieces & narrative experiences I pay a monthly subscription for, and has an inherent shelf life? "bare minimum" from skilled players is to let the unskilled players cook so that the skill gap in the overall playerbase doesn't dramatically flatten to a curve, shortening the lifespan of the game on an entropy level. It's social science. YOU have to play nice, too. That's going to require some handholding as the bigger, more experienced player. Handle it. It's not difficult. It's part of the game. Until the game dies.
@@abrenmamAt the same time, they can create their own fun from another room. Not everyone can play together well. The person who wants to speedrun Mario isn't going to be playing with the person who wants to use the Guitar Hero controller to control Mario.
oh hey, I was there for that!
Really, what did you think of the presentation? I hear the presenter feels a certain kinship with James Rolfe...
I was bummed to miss this, but I was at least able to score some sweet stickers
I don't believe you ...
Loved you on Leighton Night!
What was the name of your diablo podcast and is there a backlog still online?
45:00 A great example of a simple community detoxifying feature is the salute button in Deep Rock Galactic. Just having a button to play a small animation and say a catchphrase that translates to "Yay, we did it!" or "I believe in us!" or "We're the best!" does wonders for morale.
On a lesser example, I absolutely abuse the "Thank you" command in Space Marine 2.
When I see it, it's a tiny happiness spike, but it is a palpable tiny happiness spike.
It helps that the whole design of DRG doesn't take itself too seriously, so players generally don't either, enjoy it as just a game and chill out.
@@J_Stronsky You would think not, but ask the community how they feel about mining gold.
Dota 2 has the tipping feature. It was at first this concept. Then it became "toxic", tipping enemies and teammates if they messed up.
45:00 oh hey that's me! Camera missed out on my ralsei cosplay smh
"Why it's Rude to Suck at Warcraft" was a big help in shifting how I handled my own struggle with frustration in games, especially team-based competitive ones like Dota. Managing that level of salt has always been difficult for me even outside of gaming, and that video sort of deconstructing where those frustrations were coming from played a big part in my growth. I'm proud of where I am now with that.
It's a testament to Dan's writing that even without the freedom to edit out the occasional bad take the presentation still works really, really well.
And as a XIV player, it absolutely does happen in XIV! It just involves less slurs most of the time. :P
My first thought when he said that was the shit-flinging at Wuk Lamat's VA :'D
The wildest part of "it happens in 14" is that I hear hundreds of "Tales from Duty Finder" type stories of these horrible troglodytes that lose their shit over suboptimal play or violently rebel against things like "wall pulls in dungeons" and... I dunno if I'm lucky or more socially intelligent and able to defuse those situations before the blow or just blind to it, but I never see it. Or maybe I just got old and stopped caring and thus the problem never registers in my memory. Or maybe I'm just trigger happy and as a tank main I just commissar the problem children from the duty?
I dunno. It's something I think about every time this comes up, and I'm thankful I don't have to deal with it!
Yeah, mainly about Tank Stance or in the higher level Extreme trials. Those ones cannot succeed without following Hector strats, basically.
Absolutely. The difference is *purely* that explicitly judging people on their play in in-game chat is actively moderated against, which means that in low-stakes content that's randomly matchmade anything outside the norms will generally be tolerated with the bare minimum of politeness until the content ends, where in higher difficulty content with in-game lfgs the backlash is, mostly, a silent disband of the group.
The devs are pretty forward about that all being intended, and it does make for a more easygoing community for the most part, so it seems like a pretty "valid" solution to toxicity.
I think the take is bad because it conflates completely different games for completely different audiences on different platforms by different developers and released in different years.
Comparing the relatively low to mild toxicity of FFXIV to WoW or ToonTown is kind of a bad take. Because, yes, it *does* happen in FFXIV, but you really have to look for it.
The argument is like saying that Dan Olson is like Asmongold. Technically both online video game personalities, but the comparison is completely unhinged to anyone who knows even an iota about either person.
this dude killed nfts by himself, absolute legend
He is an absolute legend yes, but NFTs were already dying of their own shitness before Line Goes Up. He covered their crash in value in the doc.
oh god the zoom out and it’s Just Dan I love it
But copyright still exists and our culture still is imprisoned by enclosures so... Close but no cigars
Nfts were doomed from the start. While Folding Ideas did a great video he "only" explained why they were doomed to fail.
Tell me more.
15:22 "As you can see in this meme I found (on my harddrive, after I made it in photoshop)"
That line still goes hard, I love the whole sequence
13:35 new content about Elden Ring begins. 22:36 Dan's favourite comments from the original video. 29:30 Q&A begins.
You are a legend
The healing thing reminds me of Call of Duty 4s discussion around the perk juggernaut. For those not in the know: call of duty 4 had a perk system where you could select effects to apply to your character. I'm particular there were 2 that became highly contentious; Stopping Power and Juggernaut.
Stopping power increased weapon damage by 50%
Juggernaut increased player health by 50%
Going by the numbers both of these perks effectively counteracted each other. In actually gameplay, most weapons would translate to either needing one less (stopping power) or one more (juggernaut) attack to win.
The playerbase at the time hated you if you ever used juggernaut.
Now there was actually a third perk, double tap, that increased fire rate by 50%. Fun fact: because damage is not continuous and measured in instances of discrete damage, double tap would actually win faster than both stopping power and juggernaut in majority of scenarios. But no one used it.
If I remember correctly, nobody bothered using Double Tap because it increased fire rate without dampening recoil to compensate. This made you more likely to miss shots while also running through your ammo faster than normal, effectively rendering the increased damage potential worthless. It was one of the least popular perk-a-colas in Zombies for the same reason
Don't forget the one that dropped a grenade on your corpse when you died (martyr?) that one was a good way to get banned from servers. I once ate a ban because I was about to throw a grenade when I was killed, dropping it at my feet and it was assumed I was using the verbotten perk.
what people really hated is that you HAD to use one or the other. if you dont have SP juggernaut players are annoying AND SP players kill you dead and vice versa
When he was discussing the malleability of the ideogroups I was thinking “Man I’d kill to hear what he’d think of Logimen in Foxhole”, and then the next guy snatched the thought straight out of my brain, wild
WOW a Q&A segment where you can actually hear the questions!!
The aside on elden ring is so fucking true. I can't help but see this in a lot of online games. "Monster hunter now" has a lot of forumites who will just straight up leave your lobby if you carry the bone gunlance because it's known for being a weapon only bad players use, which consequently means that those players are better off picking a weaker weapon that will possibly make them lose an encounter because it's easier to find lobbies that won't passive aggressively leave the hunt after it's started. It's rude to play bone gunlance
A really funny other example I could think of was when I submitted a schematic I made of a piece of code in the game mindustry where I had 3 processors calculating a different part of a visual demo, and people in the comment section was telling me that this is not how it's supposed to work. Because apparently there was a schematics community and a defacto rule there was to always use the highest processor available so your schematics always run as fast as possible. My distributed multi core system was mocked for being bad, when looking back at it with an IT tradeschool degree under my belt I was actually making a microservice system that was very scaleable, easier to build and more modular.
On the question of systems meant to reduce toxicity: In league of legends theres an honour system where you give a player on your team a +rep at the end of a game. Over the course of the year you get levels in it and if you get the max tier you get a free skin. If you have a high honor level and recieved a rep in the last game it displays on your player banner when loading into the next game. Supposedly on the korean server at higher ranks players use the system to indicate if someone played poorly essentially turning the system into a badge of shame.
Similar in dota, they added a way to 'tip' players ingame with a little currency they can spend on stuff, but it is almost entirely used sarcastically :D
in a gdc presentation on the same topic, there was a case of chat being disabled in favor of symbol pings to reduce toxicity. players started spamming "?" on others they though were playing badly
RUclips channel Pirate Software told the story about how Dawngate did this exact thing right. Leveling up your account enough to reach Ranked was deliberately designed to be an unplayable slog, but +rep votes would give you boosts to your account EXP and give you more of Dawngate's version of runes.
Account progression was balanced such that in order to access Ranked and all the games' features, the most efficient way to get there was to be kind. Good behaviour was rewarded with tangible player power, instead of a teacher's pet skin.
Oh shoot, would you look at who got caught leaving comments before the video ended
Plays bad, gains free skin, pisses off tryhards. Can't win more than this
The world is a better place with Dan in it.
Always a treat to listening to Dan talking
Dan has a great narrator voice and a good deal of charisma when performing live
Dan "Sword of Danocles" Olson is fantastic. Watched the original at least twice before, but the live reading adds a lot, including the little update tidbits. Thanks for the upload!
Heh, Funger :)
"Sword of Danocles" 😂🤣😂
the frog farming shit was wild, man. People have this wild idea of what it entailed and what kind of monstrous people would frogfarm. They assume anyone who did it, Knew What They Were Doing And Were Doing It Maliciously. I joined a frog farm group for like 10 minutes, because I was curious why my group finder was filled with these groups. I had no idea what it even was, but after about 10 minutes I was like 'hah, weird. well that was a fun novelty.' and left. Then I killed trash in heart of fear for a little while because i was a blood dk, and blood dks were really fucking good in remix.
Then the cloak nerf happened and I lost a whole bunch of stats, and everyone was being nasty shits about it. What a weird time
In FFXIV there are abilties that deal guarunteed critical hits, and mid way through Endwalker these were changed to have extra damage when under an effect that boosts crit rate. This was entirely because Warriors, who rely on guarunteed crits for their burst damage, were being excluded from parse groups because their presence would hurt the raid damage of Dragoons and Scholars. The developers changed how a mechanic works because of community toxicity.
Fantastic video, especially the Q and A portion at the end.
As an FYI, I think the anti-toxic mechanic in the MMO mentioned in the Q and A session was from Hellgate: London.
The one that was mentioned by Thor was from the long defunct MOBA Dawngate.
I just realized I experienced this recently with Pokemon Nuzlockes. For my first one I’m doing right now I’m actually not honoring deaths at all and instead playing in a way such that every fight is deathless, and just save scumming. I do this because what I’ve really found to be fun watching nuzlockes is the encounter and boss battle planning, especially when using the wiki to look up encounter tables and gym leader team comps, using species clause, and playing with the hardcore ruleset. I feel like I’m playing it more like a puzzle game, and I had someone get rather mad at me in a youtube comment section for daring to call it a nuzlocke
Hell what this REALLY reminds me of is people getting mad at anyone who eats steak slightly well done rofl. Is eating the ultimate free play?
Fuck man that really is a essay idea. Is food instrumental or free form. There are good arguments for both and steak is a fantastic example. He'll you could even get into it culture wise. Like how in "western style" food often is treated very delicately and often only given in small proportions at the highest quality, vrs say like dim sum where the best spots will load you to the brim with food. Weird to think about, I'll definitely have to right that down
Dan Olson is such a nice and funny guy. I love to see his live panels.
This was a great panel to see live! Glad I can revisit it. One of the best things I did at PAX, easily. (shout out to the kind stranger who danced with me in our seats during the pre-show music)
a point against the "This doesn't happen in ffxiv" crowd. At the launch of Dawntrail, the difficulty of instanced content took a half step up. mechanics weren't new per say but were happening about 1.25X times faster than in previous expansions causing a lot more failed boss pulls and party wipes in normal content. This sent a good portion of the NA community up in arms because it was social practice that you cleared any normal content in 1 pull. 2 if there was someone new in the party. So people would leave. people would give up. the game wasn't kicking folks. The instances had more than enough time on them to fail over 10 times and still clear but socially it was unacceptable to a good number of people.
There is a big difference between leaving an instance with a bad group without saying anything, and staying in the group but typing up a hateful storm (which is what WoW players more commonly do). I get the point you are trying to make though ofc FFXIV isn't perfect. I will say as someone who has played a ton of both that it is really hard to compare to 2 in good faith. WoW is significantly worse in terms of toxic interactions.
@@djbcubed Nah they're much the same, but due to the way FFXIV is moderated and language filtered people are just more sly with their toxicity and people just read this as the game being 'non-toxic' when it's not.
Frankly, I'd rather a guy type up a storm when he's mad so that I can react/report him rather than him be passive-aggressive and just leave unannounced. I've generally got worse vibes from people on FFXIV than on WoW (and it's incorrect to state that people don't type up a hateful storm in FFXIV, they do, they just do so in a carefully worded manner to avoid getting moderated).
@@djbcubed The comparison isn't fair from systems and players perspectives. There are potential pushiments that condition FF14 players to "play nice", be it through leaver penalties, or a swifter ban hammer on toxic interactions. If you take away these mechanics, I guarantee FF14 will turn into a cesspoll the same way (or worse, given how repressed for toxicity people are in FF14) WoW has.
I had this exact experience when I came back to ffxiv last year. We zoned into a trial that was required for the MSQ and everyone was super nice and said hello etc. Then we wiped once and ppl lost their minds and started insulting each other it was pretty funny. We killed it the second pull.
I think the point of the "this doesn't happen in FFxiv" comment is that we often are unaware of these social contracts in these games. FFxiv, like any other game, has a meta and players are encouraged to play the meta or else they're throwing. I'm sure there's much more about final fantasy, but this is one I can think of off the top of my head.
I have an anecdote aligned exactly with the last question. I made a spreadsheet for the Slayer skill for my ironman: the Ironman gamemode requires me to collect everything myself, so maximizing the amount of herbs and gold I get from killing thousands of monsters over the course of the skill is of high interest. When someone asks in the clan chat "hey, I got assigned Trolls, what do you guys think: skip task or do it", the response is usually "eh, it's a chill task, why not" or "prob a skip tbh". My response is "If you use Ice Barrage (aoe) and two alts to aggro them on two different servers, you can tag them all on one server, kill them, and hop to the other one while they respawn. If you do this, it's a pretty mediocre task that you might skip. If you don't, it's much much worse and you should definitely skip unless you're almost out. Trolls are solidly the best of the bad tasks at only a few thousand herb xp per task."
There are people in my clan (who from my perspective have probably never skipped a slayer task in their life) who say "that's basically cheating!" and... honestly? From one perspective, using two alts for a gamemode where You Stand Alone is TOTALLY cheating (the game actually penalizes an ironman's slayer xp by half if they have alts help but it's still worth it because you can finish the task faster and go back to good tasks). On the other hand, there are so many game environments like wilderness bosses where using alts and world hopping is absolutely mandatory no matter what account you're playing.
absolutely cracked up at the entire 'it happens in final fantasy too' section, especially cause I was watching while in a normal raid in ffxiv
having played ffxiv for a long ass time, I can confirm: it does
it is a bit mitigated ingame by some pretty on top of it moderation, but as anyone who knows why there's jokes about the burger king crown can tell you, it doesn't quash all of it
and then theres the out of game stuff. yeesh.
Yeah it's wild to see the contrast between the 'lol are you even trying' crowd and the 'lol tryhard' crowd within the same game. As tends to be the case when a community is split between the two ends of a spectrum I find myself in the middle doing my own thing with like-minded people and not giving a shit what either of them think. My guild in wow casual-moded Karazhan throughout Burning Crusade and had an absolute blast doing it. Our raid nights ranged from one-shotting every boss in a night to 15 wipes in a row on Shade of Aran because people were saving up their best jokes to drop during the flame wreath cast to distract other players so as to blow the raid up because it was funny.
I love getting to see things like this, but I’m so bad at finding them. I’m very happy folks put this together!
To the person that asked if there were any mechanics that disuaded toxicity, there was another failed MOBA like dawngate called strife.
where while you were in lane it didn't matter who last hit the creep for gold. Both players in lane received the same amount of gold. It also had a mechanic where if your character was out of combat and in lane, they would regenerate health and mana after a while. SO even if someone was getting harassed badly they weren't put out too far behind, but it also meant they couldn't fight as effectively, so harassing was still a viable option to do.
Thankful Deadlock has the gold haring mechanic which hould help take the sting out of laning.
every bit of Dan is welcome in my life
Super happy I got recommended this because it revealed to me that PAX west did a drag show and it’s the most recent video on this channel right now!
Honestly I think that flaunting achievements is something inherently fundamental to human nature. Even games that are ostensibly non-combative, like Animal Crossing, still see people find a way to compete in other ways (I have rarer flowers than you, I have more money than you, etc.). Granted in those games it’s a much smaller minority than something like, say, WoW or LoL where joint teamwork is vital to some types of content, but it’s still there and speaks to the fact that even in an environment that actively inspires cooperation and lacks any consequences for not being “competitive” this type of behavior still arises. It reminds me a lot of bullying in Japanese schools. In places like America kids may be picked on for their clothing style or hair color, etc. but even in Japan where almost all of that is controlled for, students find reasons to pick on and ostracize people for increasingly inane reasons, such as eye color, height, way of speaking, etc. up to and including just arbitrarily picking someone out. It really makes you lose faith in humanity…
I don’t think that it’s human nature, just the result of cultures that encourage us to compare ourselves to each other by creating standards in beauty, productivity, etiquette, etc.
37:57 ngl was NOT expecting a shoutout to logis in foxhole but that's an awesome connection
I subscribe to Dan's patreon and it's truly wonderful to not only to see how a video comes together slowly, but also to get those smaller videos he mentioned and see hius thoughts on things that are perhaps lower stakes than Qanon or NFTs
Complains about Blizzcon convention lines. Becomes the best reason to be at a PAX in a decade.
I literally only went there because of him and I live in Seattle, lol
Interesting to see this as a live format.
That final pull back from the camera is grand. Thank you for it camera person.
"We were all lying" Wow. The pull is impossible to resist. You will look it up. Sooner or later. And I don't know how to feel about that.
Cool to see some more examples! Great talk.
I've already watched the original video five times. And yet I'm here, watching this. That's how compelling this script is.
This essay hits home with me as a Destiny/Destiny 2 player. Most classes get locked into certain roles in high-end content.
That role may vary based on the raid/nightfall, but Titans have an interesting outcome where the most recent raid really negates the viability of the three subclasses that usually have the most useful supers. The classic dps move (thundercrash) fails because it requires boss contact and that's fatal. The other big dps option requires a continuous ground path, but the dps phase is on a floating disk. And the big support/buff option of the ward of dawn bubble takes up a lot of space, and warlocks have a better option for that anyway.
So they (bungie) created a situation where the only real dps phase viability for Titans is to just run a bunch the meta guns.
Babe wake up, PAX live recreation of my favorite youtube video of all time just dropped
i loved his video essay on folding ideas and love that he updated with current wow.
It's funny bc I was playing an Elden Ring challenge run while playing the original video.
Really interesting thank you.
love the slow zoom out at the end, very cinematic
Dan needs to make a video about the Warcraft 3 campaign and whether "Arthas did nothing wrong" or not, it's the perfect triangulation of Warcraft, right-wing weirdos and narrative.
Not sure if you've seen it, but GiantGrantGames has a (very lengthy) video on Warcraft 3 that goes into that a good bit. It's really well-made, highly recommend it!
What a great introspective.
Poggers over froggers
I really resonated with that Toontown rant
Frog groups were a thing back in regular Mists too
How am I the first one to comment on this video? Great job by Dan, as always. Excited for the next Folding Ideas, whatever it may be!
38:00 Foxhole Logistics Strike mentioned.
Parasocially love ya Dan
as a WoW player this was a great panel, but also as a 'casual' CoD player I feel this even more: in recent Cod games, you could unlock numeroud camos for your guns via playing certain ways with your weapons. often these would force you to do sub optimal builds (like putting all the range buffs you could on an SMG to try and get long shots on it) or strategies that might annoy other players (melee kills, camping etc). but the most egregious thing you could possibly do in these games when grinding for these goals, is NOT PLAY the objective. the amount of vitriol that would come over the coms or the amount of temamates that would just leave because I wasnt constantly capping the flag but focusing on my kills, is innumerable. "why queue for Domination if you arent going to cap flags?!" they would rage. well you see, my fellow player, in Domination, since the objectives dont move,I can plan and anticipate where my opponents are and makes getting achievements like 3 kills without dying easier than running around TDM where enemies are around every corner. I dont care about my win rate. I can have a decent K/D ratio most matches but i dont play enough to be 'pro". but damn if I wanted that sick prestige camo, the sweaties are going to have to deal with me hiding behind a door with a shotgun so i can get 5 kills from behind without dying lol.
Thus proving why rewards in team games need to be structured around things that are beneficial to the team as a whole. Otherwise people with weak empathy are driven to optimize for themselves.
@@MarcusTheDorkus As a former Destiny player, I don't think a side objective with no negative externalities exists. 'X kills with weapon Y'? Well, what if I'm terrible with weapon Y (coughTheMountaintopcough). 'Win X games'? Well, the speed of games is nearly as important as your winrate, so you should play in ways that win/lose quickly and avoiding dragging games out. Not to mention, trying to minimise the impact of side objectives on a player's teammates tends to result in exceptionally boring side objectives. Plus, as frustrating as it is to get dropped on a team with a bunch of people who are 'only here to do dailies', it's not like people need an excuse to turn every game into Team Deathmatch.
I've watched Dan's video multiple times (many of them but I mean this one) and yeah sure I'll watch it again here.
I really like this. I play video games but I hate score counters, time limits, rankings, ratings, and competitive multiplayer. I don't care about winning, I just want to have fun, and I guess I was born without whatever makes competitiveness fun. Sports, board games, none of them appeal when it's about winning instead of about having a good time. And I understand that those are synonymous for some people but they are completely unrelated for me
Regarding RPers and 'hardcore players' coming together, there a meme/idea in the FFXIV community that the most hardcore players of the game aren't the endgame raiders, but rather the people heavily invested in fashion and home decoration, because, if you want access to everything, you need to be an endgame raider and also involve yourself in a dozen other systems vying for your time.
I'm just happy he showed a nice shout out to Mikey
The tension of free play and instrumental play seems related to Goodhart's law, but I can't quite put it into words
I hope that someday I can have enough confidence in a topic to answer questions about in real time as well as Dan does.
Speaking of goals aligning with role players and raiders, I am sort of in a similar situation in a game I play. I won't name it because it is, as the kids call it, cringe, even I think it's cringe. But the point is, I care about the story, the lore, the collection, my guild finds it weird but they tolerate it, and that is mainly because to get into more of the story, get more of the achievements, get rare cool items, I need to level grind, I need to upgrade my gear, I need to join endgame raids. So at the end of the day it's all the same. I might spend more time than the average player on completely meaningless task that unlocks small extra bit of dialog or nets me an achievement, but then I get back to grinding and join the raids just the same
fantastic stuff
17:09 me lobbing fire bombs at the Capra Demon over the fog gate in DS1's Undead Burg
Incredibly hilarious to see all the comments on that WoW video about "this doesn't happen in FFXIV" because the whole way we do dungeons in that game is ritualized. The tank pulls every single trash mob that's required to get to the next boss, and then the DPS players burn them down using all their strongest attacks (with long cooldowns) before the tank and healer get overwhelmed and die. You will get talked about (directly calling it out doesn't usually happen but you will be the subject of a lot of discussions your party members have with friends) if you don't grab everything as a tank unless you're in one of the few dungeons in which doing that is quite difficult (Mt. Gulg comes to mind and even there you will attempt it at least once unless the healer forbids it).
Doma Castle's first pull. You're right, and it's actually painful for people like me with OCD & adjacent neurodivergent conditions - it inherently feels "wrong" (dysphoric) to not goldilocks/middle-ground each pack of mobs in a pull. I get a lot of anxiety from my resources yo-yoing. It's deeply unfun. I prefer sprouts & fellow casuals & dread anyone with an Ultimate title/weapon.
There's a strange cognitive dissonance when I confront players that optimal play inherently equals shifting the overton window to 'anything less than efficient = subpar; below average'. Which, as Dan Olsen rightfully points out, citing ivy league social science over decades to support his evidence - is a feedback loop that literally accelerates the lifespan of the game into late/end stage as well as speedruns every participants' personal enjoyment of the game.
These are simulations of society, and when optimization, efficiency, and speed are normalized as self-evident + value neutral - play transitions into labor. Most people don't enjoy labor, they enjoy the fruits of their labor. Those of us who labor irl more than those of us who mostly labor in-game get incredibly frustrated with each other. Social pressure has hands.
But so does this: every guy who photoshops color-coordinated censor bars on names in chat to post on r/TalesFromDF whine about having their time wasted. When PF & Discord; this whole community of fellow whiners already exist, right there. Hell, pre-forming to speedrun daily roulettes (don't these guys have statics??) would have the environmental benefit of unclogging the queue & server congestion for literally everyone, including themselves. But they'll insist on repeating this feedback loop because it's a social practice that affirms the instrumental practice (and it's bullying; projection: they know that if they pre-form with like minded individuals they'll risk being torn to shreds by their own brand of "constructive criticism" & "helpful advice". This pretty much all stems from their emotional insecurity of being a victim to this behavior themselves. Repeating the cycle.)
In short: it's straight up addiction. They are chasing a high in order to avoid an emotional pain.
I'm a (mostly retired) veteran of DS1 pvp. Learning tech was very much encouraged, including all exploits to easily kill bosses. This is because the object of the game is *obviously* to master manipulating the engine in order to beat a human opponent in pvp.
There are two more good reasons why hard-swapping became popular:
1: It *hides your loadout from the opponent*. Sure, you could off-hand that great club, but you will be fat-rolling and your opponent will know why.
2: The most powerful tech in DS1 is arguably the weapon moveset swap, and this requires a hard-swap (during a roll) to set up. The way all these different tech branch off each other and reconnect to create new strategies is every bit as good as if it was intentional.
I will say, I wish he dug into theory for why emergent social philosophies form because that could be productive for the health of some of these games. For example, understanding the cause of the deviation between wow’s knowledgable/high skill social expectation against the mentioned OSRS item swapping and prayer flick accuracy or having an efficient elden ring build. Both games are fairly described as instrumentally driven games but they incur drastically differing social constructs which tends to be the interesting bit, for me at least. Personally, I feel these examples deviate due to the communities’ perception of a concept of “intended play patterns,” however there is an even more complex relationship with a given player’s time investment.
In WoW I believe it’s socially unacceptable to do things which potentially waste *other* player’s time and so, there’s a very heavy expectation placed on performance and knowledge, which is a bit more nuanced than the original presentation. In light of this, it’s interesting to note that in that context, your own enjoyment of the game is going to be mediated by what you must do within the game to help achieve OTHER player’s goals. For example if you’re the only person in a dungeon going for an achievement, no matter how effectively you got that achievement, you would likely feel absconded as a result of the dungeon format. Similarly even in roleplaying which is described as a form of free playing, the player must opt in to actually role playing, because if they don’t legitimately roleplay while standing in goldshire surrounded by roleplaying guardmen and innkeepers, they’re likely removed or ignored.
With respect to wow, I wish this exact conversation was taken more seriously because inevitably many of the more toxic and seclusive behaviors of players seem to emerge from a construct within the video game itself, or any given video game for that matter. With the ability to extract what systems or mechanics birth less desirable social *responses,* systems and rules within games can be adapted to better socially engineer the game. As it stands, from my personal experience with the game over many years, WoW tends to be incredibly difficult to comfortably enjoy with other players, and is easier/more reasonably enjoyed as an individual with a relatively isolated experience, though inevitably lived out through partied scenarios.
Tl;dr there’s a very interesting interplay of expectation induced into the player base which forms out of SOME construct in any given video game. Digging into what constructs incite specific sentiment towards social norms would have been really cool.
P.s. Instrumental play, from my perspective, seems so categorical that it seems to be a failure to label all forms of play under a single coin due to the mentioned variety of social outcomes of the presentation. It’s a bit like calling all religion, just religion. Within instrumental play there seems to be expertise driven play, mathematical efficiency of time investment play, perception of intended mechanisms play, (wow skillful group content vs. Eve/OSRS/Frog farming vs. roleplay/not using summons/drinking games) and even potentially more. I feel like digging into that information could be really meaty and actually increase the enjoyment of games with said understanding.
Ah, I see that Dan ended with the same phrase that I use to conclude all my favorite interactions.
i think there was a strat in either dark souls 1 or 2 where you would spam this weak healing spell and the opponent would rush in to punish, then you switch over to this powerful AOE(wrath of gods) that had a similar animation, normally ppl avoid rushing in when seeing the animation because they know wrath of gods, but convincing them ur just spamming heal annoys the opponent so they let down their guard and rush in to the AOE.
The generative AI response was really good. It's way more diplomatic than what I would say which is "They like it because it helps them lie."
Moby finally embraces spare ribs.
I cant believe I missed this...
genuinely amazed that there are apparently a lot of folks who refuse to believe that ffxiv has instrumental play issues??? like just off the top of my head:
- basically all aoe damage scales with the number of targets, with it being better than single-target attacks at two mobs, and so if you are a tank and you don't pull as many mobs as is feasible, people will yell at you or ragequit. if you're playing through the game for the first time as a healer and your tank pulls every mob right up to the boss gate and they die, it's considered your fault, and people will yell at you or ragequit. i have had to heal for multiple friends during stone vigil because the way that party finder queues are trained to do that dungeon is insane,
- having perfectly optimal gear is a huge clout symbol. generally the best weapon in any particular expansion is going to spend at least some time being 'that annoying as fuck relic weapon that requires you to grind a bunch of old content and a bunch of new content over the course of an entire expansion' and i during the course of savage raiding have absolutely felt compelled to go through that entire process just to have the technically best weapon so that i can join in with random groups. and of course the absolute best gear is obtained through completing the savage raids, so you better make sure you grind out the slightly easier ones a bunch until you have the perfect gear for your slots. and make sure it's all melded properly too. and i'm sorry you're not even pentamelding your crafted gear, how dare you,
- ROTATIONS. high-level play is based around stacking debuffs for huge damage windows, which means you need to play your class in a way that isn't just optimal in a vacuum, but also perfectly lines up your play with everyone else's. and how do you do that if you're playing with strangers? why, you go to the balance and look up The Rotation for your class, and then you go to a training dummy and you practice that rotation for a couple hours until you've got it down, of course! and if you're not using your debuffs when you should, people will yell at you or ragequit!
- boss strategies! this is one that world of warcraft has kinda solved by just, having addons that tell you what you're supposed to be doing at any specific time. in ffxiv, though? if you're grouping up for a boss, you are expected to know The Strategy for every phase of it, to the point that people will put in little keywords for exactly the strategy they expect from you in the group finder listing, and if you have a different method or don't know that one, people will yell at you or ragequit. if you start your own group finder and list a different strategy than people expect, no one will join it. i even had to be quietly told about the group finder being the only way to actually find parties, after spending a couple hours waiting in a queue only to find that literally no one is willing to play with players that they can't vet. later, i found out that in fact the addon that tells you what you're supposed to be doing at any specific time exists, it's called cactbot, and it's an open secret that despite using it being against the terms of service, plenty of people will use it anyway
- hey y'know warcraft logs? that external website in the original video that is just all about monitoring your performance and separating players by skill level? now open up that website and scroll right down to the bottom and click the link that says 'final fantasy xiv'. participation in this system is so expected that i have been in parties that have kicked people for having grey parses (bottom quartile of dps in that boss), because clearly they're not good enough to beat the boss on their own and they just got carried by their team, despite the fact that _they did clear that boss_
- oh god so fucking much else. if you're a drk and one of the healers isn't a whm? you'll be asked to switch classes or leave. if you join a group and ask a question about a strategy they're advertising? you'll be kicked without a word. if you're in a post level 30 dungeon and you haven't done all your class quests and you queue up as an mrd? people will yell at you. if you're hearing people talk about drk and whm and mrd and don't instinctively know what they mean by that? people will talk to you like you're an idiot. there is literally a system where the game puts a sprout next to your name to indicate to experienced players that you haven't been playing this game for hundreds of hours and are probably gonna need some extra guidance, and when i googled to double-check what the requirements for that were, one of the first results i found was a forum thread titled 'mid-level sprouts should play better'
and like. when i was playing ffxiv, i was unemployed and passionate enough about the game to regularly spend twelve to sixteen hours a day doing nothing but playing through and obsessing about it, and so i could afford to spend the time and effort it takes to learn all this lingo and grind out purple parses and dive through discord servers to find out what on earth a ccw fgs is, and i wish that more people had experienced savage raiding because it's genuinely some of the most fun i've had in a game! but i genuinely can't imagine what the experience is like for the ffxiv equivalent of the gummy wolves, the two nights a week guild that isn't spending the other five nights and seven mornings grinding out the fight anyway, and it kinda feels like that's because that group doesn't exist. you either devote yourself completely or you get pushed away and never touch it
Damn you can hear the groan in the audience after I brought up Foxhole to him at 37:57
The idio-culture question hits hard for me having gone for insane during the last 2 phases of classic lich king
warcraft players when someone wants to have fun (NOT ALLOWED)
(ITS NOT IN THE META TO HAVE FUN)
Dan Olson 🎉🎉❤❤
He's really inteligent and articulate
Love dan
Awesome
That's why I don't think Starcraft 2 is a strategy game. Its just problem solving; timing and occasionally positioning and micro, which might as well make it a shooter.
I just wish people would be nicer to each other and try to maybe take the game less seriously and just make friends in mmo's. There are still people like that to be fair but the % of players who are up each others asses for every little thing and or just seem to be playing because the game is = to heroin to them makes me really sad.
I played a lot of wow back in the day and quit after cata, came back last year had some fun but i quit again this year and will not be going back. I met some cool people but the more i got to know them/the more people i met and talked to the more i realised even the cool ones are pretty nuts these days. I don't think it's rude to suck at warcraft, i think you have to be at least a little nuts to play it at all these days, and this is some kind of mass psychosis going on or something.
lmao this was great. video games truly do exist in the real world?
Nice!
Dan is/was aware of Foxhole
Algorithmic punch!
The next best thing to the Dan Olsen AI video is probably Jimmy McGee's "The AI Revolution is Rotten to the Core"
Oh hey, I’m the one that asked that question! :D
Thanks for the recommendation!
He should speak publicly more often
Let's go
why it's rude to suck at Webcraft***
To my fellow ff14 players here :
While it was already questionnable before that; the reaction to Dawntrail showed levels of bad faith arguments and all over sheer toxicity (including the more or less openly transphobic harassment of a trans voice actress, complete with doxxing ofc) from certain parts of the FFXIV community prooves that we have no claims to be better than WoW players.
The Dawntrail release was a disgusting time to be in FFXIV spaces on social media, and it should inspire us to rethink the way we interact with people about this game, both inside and outside the game.
I'm sorry, is the "git gud" crowd bitching about people beating them in a game? Sounds like a skill issue? Mad cause bad?
Like, can you not just... Chase the healer? And hit them while they're casting their spell?
"Git gud" is actually a capital-G-Gamer term, and when I say that, what I mean is that it's a deeply conservative term. They want to feel superiority not because they have become superior, but as a reward for what they have already decided or been told is the correct course of action. If anyone proves them otherwise, especially through direct confrontation, then their opposition isn't "doing it right" somehow.
@@Argusthecat That's just one lens of it, and the most toxic/viral so that perspective gets all the press & the healthier applications of the simulacrum get buried in all the drama surrounding the former. It's the bootstrap thing all over again: awful advice towards others; excellent advice for yourself. When self-oriented, "git gud" is a motivation to engage in critical thinking & problem solving skills. I highly recommend it for self-help & coping through struggle/adversity. But it's the opposite of good mentoring when it comes to others, because you have to establish a lot of rapport in order for it to be a good-faith conversation rather than a confrontational, argumentative, outside pressure stacking on top of already-overwhelming underlying pressures. The human brain simply stalls on computing logic when emotional. It's putting the cart before the horse to deliver it as a social expectation rather than a scientific process. They're two opposing forces, when it comes to motivation & inspiration.
its so funny how much souls players scrubquote.
I don't blame the player base for this, it is a fundamental flaw in the design of something that is supposed to encourage freedom
You are a frogfarmer
First
48:43 wait, people go to cons with goals? people don't just show up without any cosplays packed or autographs to seek out and instead just Vibe in the Loud Zone for 2-3 days?
noob
dang, the FGC would eat elden ring pvpers alive.
USF4 Elena is _right there_. Or everyone bitching about fighting shoto/rushdown/grappler/zoner/whatever.
FGC might be sane enough to have a twitter account dedicated to making fun of these people, but that also means we have enough people scrubquoting for it to be a viable source of content.
in fighting games, "cheap" is a compliment. at least, it is to me
Takeaway: MMOs are inaccessible, toxic, and hostile.
Very apt name, as this is wrong. While many MMOs value instrumental play more now, instrumental play can still be accessible and welcoming. FF14 has a good attitude towards it while also still allowing a lot of space for free play. I also don't think that this is what Dan is communicating, and I do not think you watched the video
TLDR; people hate when you waste their time in an online video game -- especially when we live in an era where there is an overload of information on how to better yourself at said video game.
I think you're conflating shared time with your own time. You choose to play an MMO, so when you're doing content with other people (raids, dungeons) you're SHARING your time, vs. solo content (delves, questing, some crafting). You choose who you spend your time with, and you choose what you consider to be a waste of time. You're also missing the point of the video to the extent that I don't think you watched it, as different forms of play have different values. Instrumental play values "bettering" yourself, whereas free play doesn't have that goal. The elimination of free play in WoW, or at least the extreme scarcity of it, I think has a big impact on WoW's communities, cultures, values, etc. It's still a social game, and when you only value a specific form of betterment, that social attitude seeps into everything
The phrasing 'better yourself' (instead of something like 'play better' or 'gain knowledge/skill') is, if not telling, at least indicative of one of Dan's wider points, which is that people cannot countenance that their own moral judgements are not objective and are not shared by other people of equal worth.
And people wonder why WoW is only half the size it was.
Your second most recent video is roleplay how did you miss the point of this video that hard to say something that hypocritical
How is it a waste of time if you're having fun. If you lose, that's only a waste if it's boring to attempt. If it's boring to play why are you playing. If I fail to eat a whole pie at once guess what I had pie and get to eat more pie on another attempt. If you consider suboptimal or failing to be a waste of your time because the only thing that gives you any satisfaction is winning with a dopamine loot drip that's not a game that's a pavlov response.
The idea that people should be allowed to do the bare minimum and be allowed to quite frankly waste others people's time is indeed very rude. If you show up to a group and have done zero research and rely on others to show you to ropes, don't you think that's kind of disrespectful? There's layers to this discussion.
Na the hypothetical gnome rouge at the beginning is 100 times more based than you min maxers. Games are about creating your own enjoyment, not cowtowing to others
@@abrenmam I mean it depends. Me personally I don't mind people being bad or unoptimal in FFXIV when I do story content, after all it is both required to finish the plot, and the queues are open, as long as they are giving the fight an honest try and not being obnoxious about it. But once you get into harder content that you have to go out of the way to find groups, they will put in very specific expectations of what they are looking for, and you join one knowing you won't agree to what they are asking upfront, that is not "refusing to kowtow" that is just being an asshole
It doesn't have to be all or nothing. It should be possible for people to give ~80% of an optimal play so we can avoid optimizing the fun out of the experience. There is a reason the original doom had so many difficulty levels and that kind of mentality is lacking in both the design and play of may multiplayer games.
I'll bite the bullet and say ofc - is it not true from the other end?: are you not wasting MY time by speedrunning me through all the set pieces & narrative experiences I pay a monthly subscription for, and has an inherent shelf life? "bare minimum" from skilled players is to let the unskilled players cook so that the skill gap in the overall playerbase doesn't dramatically flatten to a curve, shortening the lifespan of the game on an entropy level. It's social science. YOU have to play nice, too. That's going to require some handholding as the bigger, more experienced player. Handle it. It's not difficult. It's part of the game. Until the game dies.
@@abrenmamAt the same time, they can create their own fun from another room. Not everyone can play together well. The person who wants to speedrun Mario isn't going to be playing with the person who wants to use the Guitar Hero controller to control Mario.