Saw this comment on reddit and thought I would share it here to discuss.
"I wanted to ask if it’s possible to create some sort of “competitive” ranking. A second ranking where certain requirements have to be fulfilled otherwise the parse won’t be accepted. Keep the major ranking now so that people don’t complain and have a competitive ranking for people that want a fair balanced competition. I have some ideas for this so maybe you could give me your opinion on this on how well it could be implemented and if you even want to do it?
There mustn’t be an AST in the group. // Prevent giving cards to only one specific person
There mustn’t be double jobs in group. // Preventing double NIN/MCH/AST
Composition must be: Two tanks/ Two healers/ Two melees/ One range/ One caster // Preventing 5 dps/solo heal/solo tank parses
Activity for each player must be above 90% // Preventing from people to go AFK to let people pad
Spamming one skill to not do correct dps is not allowed
Maybe some sort of ilvl requirement to enter the competitive rankings?"
The only part of this I agree with is standard comp of 2/2/4 (without job dupe restrictions) being enforced for things like Guild Speed and normal dps rankings (e.g. no solo heal / solo tank / super cheese hummel) with optionally another tab that allows non-standard comp. rankings.
I don’t think there’s a realistic way to enforce unpadded parses for a single role unfortunately, at least none that would exclude realistic parses afaik even if I would love (in theory) to have a way to detect purposefully cheesed parses (e.g. catered comp + single target cards only) and only count “real” attempts, there’s just too much variance in a normal fight to try to avoid it.
I would like a better way to be competitive against other groups via rankings other than Guild Speed which at the moment is the only interesting tab to me. Things I’ve suggested before would be combined healer dps or tank + healer but there’s other metrics that would be interesting to compete on. Guild Speed still needs tweaks when an FC has more than one competitive static as there’s no way to differentiate them (which probably ties into larger refactoring to support statics as opposed to FC monikers attached to characters). I’m not sure what else would be nice but I definitely would like more things to compete on against other groups rather than individuals since cheesing a whole run is harder? Guild Execution is meaningless, pretty much, and there’s no other such ranking.
I do plan to support custom statics as guilds. It’s a very complicated feature though, and I’m still thinking through how it would work. I can’t simply turn off guild validation, as then people would upload random parses to bogus statics and potentially rank more than once.
I have to build a user interface that allows the static to build up its roster, probably involving the owners of the characters needing to make accounts, claim their characters on the site, and then attach their characters to the static.
I’m still a bit concerned about abuse, e.g., people joining a static, uploading the log, getting a rank for that static, and then switching to a different static, uploading the log again, etc. I may have to put a cooldown on static switching or something to prevent this.