Project Proposal
Introduction
Final Fantasy 11 is an online gaming community heavily focused around cooperation and team work.
It is quickly established in the game that an individual alone cannot accomplish many of the tasks.
These tasks may include anywhere from advancing in level, quests, storyline, or attaining equipment.
This lends itself to a close-knit community that groups together in order to accomplish these goals.
The problem
Though the game has means for collaboration, the system does not lend itself to asynchronous communication
as players must be in the system to receive and send messages. This is compounded by the fact that at best,
the system only allows for messages of a fixed length to be sent to one recipient at a time.
This has lead the community to seek out other means of collaboration.
The main means of outside collaboration is the forum. While the forum archetype works well for general discussion, it is often times difficult to utilize when trying to organize an event. Discussing time and dates is easy enough, but once that has been determined, a large amount of time is taken up in game to discuss role availability, team mechanics, and organizing. This is due to the fact that some events can be accomplished by certain group dynamics and roll-filling while others merely require a few more powerful players. To complicate matters more, many players usually have a multitude of characters at varying levels and allows flexibility when attending events, but tends to lead to more discussion and time lost. This time loss is a major issue inside the game because many players are already on a strict time schedule due to jobs, special occasions, or other in-game commitments.
Proposal
The goal which is trying to be achieved is to maximize effective game time and increasing player
happiness by reducing overhead time for event planning, gathering people based on availability,
and better group mechanic suggestions.
The System
There are a few things that would be preferred in accomplishing this system:
- Players should be able to input and track their own levels
- Weight what class or classes they prefer to play
- Flag what kind of event(s) they would like to participate in
- Denote what their time schedule is like
- Suggest a group setup based on the event and parameters constricting the event such as level, class needs, or quest completions.
This strives to allow a player to find other players with a similar time schedule with complimentary classes or goals, limit synchronous game time planning, and maximize player enjoyment by reducing the time it takes to complete a desired goal.