Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Class stats

This has been kinda dormant for a while, but I've been playing through a variety of games and thinking about what they don't have.

When you choose a class in Final Battle Adventure Online, it shows you what percentage of players have chosen that class. It tells you:

15% of the players online currently are Clerics.

18% of all players are Clerics.

It's not perfect, but it gives you an idea what to expect.

I've found games where a majority of the late-game content requires a six-person party, which requires a specialized tank and healer. If you found out that 40% of the players are tanks and 12% are healers, you'd probably choose to be a healer so you could get into those parties without spending an hour waiting for a healer to come on.

We'd also mention things like: "this class works best in a group" or "this class is recommended for advanced players" because the Social classes, for instance, only really work if you've got a regular group going.

1 comment:

Kazriko said...

In FF11, I mostly played Red Mage, which was in heavy demand for all parties because of the refresh spell and debuffs. With a 6-person party, you could have a slot for a support character that wasn't a Tank or Healer.

For the brief time I played FF14, I was primarily Conjurer/White Mage for exactly that reason. No wait times whatsoever on the mandatory party dungeons. There were only 4 slots in parties, so it was pretty much fixed Tank/Healer and 2 damage dealers, who tended to have hugely long waits. I used to just queue up for dungeons that I had already run a few times a day just to try and help DD's get a party going and get through the content.