I’m only speaking Hypothetically, *wink* *wink*, but what would you players of FFXIV expect from a community dedicated towards Theorycrafting? And I don’t just mean Mechanical Theorycrafting, such as Stat-Weights, Data Collection and the Damage Formula – I’m talking about a platform created specifically for indepth and intellectual Theorycrafting discussions about every single job in the game.
If you’re an experienced MMO player, especially in the Hardcore Raiding scene, let me know your thoughts and experiences from previous MMO communities as well as other forums you may of been on. A few that comes to mind, a sites such as ElitistJerks, Icy Veins, MMO Champion.
I want you to tell me any ideas you have, no matter how silly or basic they are. Dedicated threads for Jobs, special weekly discussions, more simulation work, whatever it is. Post it.
Dervy does Theorycrafting 
Sounds like a great idea, I like the theory sites, i.e elitistjerks etc.
However you just have to ensure you offer something others do not, other than just being FFXIV ofc. Otherwise why not just use the main forums etc.
For example have guides but not just best rotation and opening etc but also alternatives for when required i.e. if lag is an issue or if you cant get a particular pot etc..
Likewise maybe BiS gearing but alternative gearing builds for specific fights etc?
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Yup. Those are the things I’m considering. I’m also thinking of adding a section on the site, specifically for FC discussion, World/Server Competition and maybe host “Events” for FCs/Guilds to compete in. Speed Clears, gears with limited ilvl, that sort of things.
And not only that, we definitely won’t be nazi over the type of content that players will be able to discuss. A lot of people don’t use the forums because of the lack of freedom and people getting banned left-right & center.
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Hey Dervy, things I’d like to see are topics/discussions and theorycrafting that apply to more “casual” players. A lot of players want to maximize but know that Alexander Savage is a pipe dream for them, whether due to real life restrictions or lack of desire to raid “end game” but still want to maximize stats, gear choices, rotations, etc.
Discussions about mechanics limited to hitting high dps in future 24 man raids as well as Experts and Normal modes will be interesting and fun for a lot of us.
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On WoW we had femaledwarf for hunters, to calculate out our estimated damage given factors we’d select, much like a dps spreadsheet, but allowed you to upload your character like ariyala does. Any idea if we could see something like that? ❤ from a Summoner.
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We could! I know Pandabearcat on the official forums was working on his SimFF, which was essentially him redeveloping SimCraft in WoW, for FFXIV. It kinda fell off the face of the Earth sadly.
@Arisue_Neetsha (JP Theorycrafter) has this Damage Calculation tool http://www.eonet.ne.jp/~versatile/ku-so/ff14dps.html and is coded in pure Java. Though, it doesn’t calculate Rotations or anything. It’s effective to find out what your average hit will be, but not for DPS.
But definitely, that’s something I could eventually get around to doing. It won’t be a priority however. I’d want to find a Web-Developer who can do some really cool stuff, which I can’t think of at the moment…!
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Yeah, the SimFF thread seemed to lose a lot of bumps when I stopped reporting in about the damage formula melting my brain. . .
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Considering the official forum is now banning people over open discussion of parsers, here’s what I’d say the new site should have; some of the thoughts may echo what’s already said.
Here’s definites:
1. Section for job guides. Most likely this’ll be a translation from what’s on the official forums over to the site so you may have to touch base with Aikaal, Thendiel, and Havenchild, to name a few.
2. Section for raid-specific and maybe even dungeon-specific guides (e.g. AS3, FCOB, etc.)
3. Section for theorycrafting in general. Mechanics, damage formulas, stat weights, etc.
Here’s maybes:
4. Section for general discussion. Leaving this one as a maybe, as it can be done as a chat box on the side.
5. For the job guides, make a permission for the creators to post updates somewhere on the site? Think something like WordPress and posts on the home page.
On the weekly discussion, maybe a weekly challenge could be done instead and whoever gets it done (legitimately) can earn bragging rights or whatever. Examples include: completing a dungeon in bikini armor and finishing a raid at the min ilvl.
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1) Check
2) We have a Raids Section. I’m still on the edge whether we’ll have guides on there. We’ll need to find volunteers who will write up amazing and excellent guides for the community.
3) Check
4) Check. I’m thinking of having an IRC chat as well. I could find someone who’s good with Java to make a Java IRC client on a separate page on the forums, so people don’t need to download mIRC or something.
5) Check.
For your last one, that’s something I’ll be planning for FCs. I’m thinking of having a “Ladder” system, where FC’s can compete for points per event, so they can compare e-peens. The events will have to be “Fair”, so they don’t only just appeal to the 1% of Top FFXIV players. I’ve not decided what the rewards will be however; Most probably just bragging rights for being ranked top #10.
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For the IRC:
https://kiwiirc.com/embedding
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That’s amazing! Thank you so much
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I initially got into theorycrafting when Kaeko was doing tests back in the FFXI days. When I switched over to WoW to play with friends I regularly read EJ and used that resource to help my entire raid group improve. What really kept me coming to EJ was the professional and dedicated volunteers who constantly gave their time and energy to post and discuss theory and the numbers behind said theory. Vulajin, Aldrianna, Vontre, manly, Lhivera, kavan, landsoul, Cheeky, tukez, Binkenstein, Skyhoof, leulier, Lactose, Howitzer, Pathal, Indz; these are the names that I’ll always recognize from those days. You’re honestly the only person in the XIV community I’ve found that lives up to the same standards as the top-tier WoW TCs.
I feel that in order for a TC site to be successful, you need to focus first and foremost on attracting like-minded people willing to contribute data-driven theory. Whatever makes it easier for them should take priority. The masses and casual contributors will go wherever the information is. That being said, a nice GUI with easily accessible information definitely doesn’t hurt. Even back in the days when EJ was the only place for top-tier information, plenty of other sites sprung up, and copied over mostly outdated summaries from EJ in a prettier format and got a bit of traffic from it. After all, in any TC thread where the OP was not regularly updated, newcomers would be looking at 10, 50, maybe even 100 pages of posts to read through to truly get up to speed with the current end-game meta. That could be especially brutal if you had people from 5 different classes asking you to get up to date to help them improve. Also, while I do think EJ was a bit heavy on the banhammer, there is merit to having separate threads for simple questions and advanced discussion in order to keep threads from being derailed by people asking questions that have been answered dozens of times in the middle of an insightful discussion.
Now, that’s all assuming you’re focused on TC first and foremost. MMO-C has always been one of the most popular wow sites, even back when it didn’t have very much good information on optimizing your class. On the TC side it was usually a step above the official forums, but several steps below EJ. What it did have, however, was a front page with a lot of varied, non-TC information, friendly, welcoming colors and a forum that was well moderated to be nicer in attitude than the official forums and more newbie friendly than EJ. MMO-C was also basically a 12+ hour a day job for Boubouille once it really took off, and on top of that he needed to make a deal with MLG to assist with the running and maintenance of the site until he finally sold it to curse. I personally just used MMO-C for the pre-patch data-mining, and the occasional laugh in the forums when bored, but it was the go-to for plenty of people.
I would write more, but I’ve already spent a couple hours writing this wall-o-text. If you have any questions or anything you would like me to elaborate on I should be checking back later tomorrow.
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There’s actually quite a few XIV Theorycrafters. They just don’t have the proper platform to publish their work and to really discuss it. They don’t post on Reddit because, unless it’s someone who’s already got a name for themselves, their work won’t get read until it’s been reposted 20 times and people are afraid of using the Official Forums to freely discuss what’s on their mind.
Sunny Hirose, Viridiana, Aikaal, Kenji, Hustensaft, Mr Yaah are a few notable theorycrafters off the top of my head. A few people are also making simulators, such as Relia Wylder, who I’ve been closely working with recently.
What I want is something, somewhere, in between MMOChamion and EJ. The main Job and TC discussion boards will be strict. Separate thread for “noob” questions, keep the quality of the posts and threads as high quality as they can.
The rest of the boards will be rather lax in content to attract a wider audience. Dedicated Crafting sections, as there’s a lot of TC work that even goes into Crafting, Lore, PvP, Raids, a section for Free Companies where we’ll host Server-Wide competitions and a Ladder for FC’s/Statics to compete in.
So it won’t just be a TC Site, but eventually, become a central hub of general information for a vast majority of FFXIV to come check out, get their fix, their morning “lolz” and chill, whilst cutting out any of the immature and “trash/fluff” posts.
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A “theorycrafting for dummies” section where everything one should know to understand the discussion is available (be it in the form of links to the appropriate resources or just explained there).
One of the biggest barriers for me in order to understand what people are talking about is that it’s incredibly hard to come by the basics (like what the stat weights for a given class are or what “stat weights” themselves are). There’s a lack of “basic info” and many things that “pros” take for granted (because they’ve been playing for so long that they don’t even think about it as “info” anymore, for example) that really aren’t visible for people at first glance.
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Good suggestion! I’ll take it on board!
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Hi 🙂
Do you think it’s possible to add something to know the exact accuracy for each content ? Maybe a spreedsheet or anything public to have a lot of testers, to do something like that : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1myjzB08E1gSYhgxmGyBy-8G3hFiDR1vHUCspYwQ_Sl4/edit#gid=118
Btw on SE forum, you said you had the exact numbers of accuracy for everything but you waited a bit to post them. It was weeks/months ago… Can we have those numbers now ? ^^
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I’d say forums would be the way to go. Some of the stuff on FFLogs seems interesting. I’m hoping to get back into theorycrafting as i’ve got a bit more spare time now compared to the last 6 months or so.
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I do hope this idea comes to fruition. It is needed in the FF community. I miss having a place to go for information that I can depend on, that’s presented in a professional atmosphere for serious people, & that isn’t controlled or limited “by the company”. Like many others, while I wasn’t in their tier as a player, let alone a theory crafter, I haunted EJ when I played WoW and learned so much, even when some of the math was way over my head. Any idea when this one of yours will go live?
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Well, a lot of people seem to of quit FFXIV or have taken a prolonged break from the game, especially because of the A3S wall.
Not only that, Yoshida hasn’t addressed any of the issues about the current state of raiding in FFXIV at all. If they keep doing what they’re doing, then more and more people will slowly quit the game. I do not want invest my own money for VPS’s graphic designers and give out all of my free time to create something for an audience which will be steadily declining. I don’t see the point.
I’m holding out from it for now until I can see there’s an improvement in the Raiding Scene.
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I’m really hoping they will improve the raiding scene. Alex has been a bit hit against the raiders which has been a really big shame 😦 I’m finding that my interest in the game has waned a lot since 3.0 and i’m missing the fun from the coil days. I do really like the game but I’m seriously considering taking a break once my group finally takes A3/4s down… Would be a great idea though if SE can boost the play and interest once more. All the TC stuff is so helpful to so many players!
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Me and you the same.
I’m hoping 3.2 is the patch we all seriously needed, otherwise a LOT of people are going to go on a break for a few months – I’m one of those people.
That’s why I never invested time into building that site. Waste of time and resources if this game is going to continue going to shit.
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I was involved in the WoW monk theorycrafting community for the last few years, and the death knight community before that, so I can talk about things with some expertise I think.
What I’ve seen in the WoW theorycrafting community has mostly been done on standard forum software, and what tends to happen is that most of the actual discussion and math and such happens in a single omnithread per class/spec. Typically the OP included some kind of guide as the first post when they created the thread years ago, but they’re also commonly not active on the forums anymore and the guide isn’t being maintained very well.
The big advantage of this is that the 5-10 actual theorycrafters have a big scary 200+ page thread that nobody casual is ever going to read past the first post, so their mini-community can get work done without having people constantly show up and ask them introductory questions about stat weights or whatever.
That’s the key thing, I think. A TC community with a good reputation will have, on any given day, 50-100 visitors interested in learning about the class in depth for every 1 actual expert, and another 1000 people going “hey can u help me with my dps?”. However you decide to structure your hypothetical site, there has to be some way of keeping the signal/noise ration at a level where the theorycrafters can get discussion and peer review done. But it also needs to be accessible for people who do learn and do want to do math; any kind of system where you need to put in an application or something before you can post is never going to fly.
When I started with death knight, Elitist Jerks was still fairly active and reputable, so the DK class forum there was where most of the discussion happened. The defining characteristic of EJ was the extremely strong moderation; failing to search or read the stickies was a bannable offense, so basically the 1000 casuals a day all got banned. Advantage: the environment for doing math and analysis was pretty good, so the site got a good reputation, so the devs actually kept up with the community there and used it as a source of feedback. Disadvantage: my god, that’s a lot of work for the moderators.
For monks, EJ was dying or already dead when the class was first added back in MoP, so we ended up on the MMO-Champion class forums somehow. Moderation was much less harsh there, so eventually we had to make a few more stickies than usual — notably one titled “HELP ME WITH MY DPS” — basically as a distraction to keep the noise down in the omnithreads. Advantage: way less work for the moderators. Disadvantage: MMO-C’s main site admins are on very bad terms with Blizzard because of various leaks they’ve published in the past, so to this day I don’t know if the devs even know the community exists. They certainly act surprised when we pass along well-known feedback via other channels.
Occasionally you get individual theorycrafters with their own blogs, like Theck, Sunnier, etc. Advantage: if you really know your stuff, the devs will find you. Disadvantage: the asymmetric format between posts and comments makes it harder to get actual discussion going.
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