Gonna rant about FFXIV since I'm bored. You've been warned.

So I had a think about the state of FFXIV at the moment, and I decided that I'm actually sort of angry about it. I'm actually not angry about the game being crappy though, I'm angry about Square Enix themselves and the way they've been dealing with it. Specifically how god damn long it's taking them.

I was a pretty strong advocate for SE's chance to turn this game around at the start of this year, I knew it was a big task but I was certain they could slowly fix things as time went on. But recently even I can't support them anymore. The big problem here is speed. This is what I can't get my head around. I've tried to think it over again and again but I simply cannot imagine what the hell is taking them so long to fix and add tiny things that would improve the game several times over.

The last "real" patch was 1.17, back in April. It's now June. That's 2 months since anything of any substance whatsoever was added to the game. It wasn't even that substantial as I recall, a bunch of mid-range NMs and a few more sidequests. Unless this magical "mid-June patch" is something completely amazing, introducing all the different things they've teased in the past few months (new battle system, auto attack, job system, materia system, dungeon/raid system, companies) all at once (and I really doubt we'll see half of that stuff in this upcoming patch). It's simply going to be too little too late.

I don't understand how they can spend months with an entire dev team programming something I'm certain I could implement all by myself in under a week. This so called "battle system overhaul" we're supposedly waiting for is really just a bunch of tweaks to the system plus one major mechanics change which is auto attack.

That major change though, I could add to the game myself in under a week seriously. Attacks by the client are already commanded by the server after you make the request by prssing "1". All you need is a timer on the server that sends that "swing sword" to you automatically every X seconds based upon the weapon, as well as performing the damage calculations it would be doing anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if this could be implemented in a day.

The rest of the battle system changes are just tweaks to the numbers and algorithsm that go on invisibly behind the scenes. For the most part it's just changing numbers or a few conditional statements. Here, allow me to fix the battle system by making it more like FFXI:

• Make abilities send their usage request to the server without bothering to check stamina: 10 minute job.
• Change the server to not bother checking how much stamina someone has: 5 minute job.
• Hide the stamina bar on the client since it's not needed any more: 5-10 minute job.
• Decrease TP given by attacks. Add a negative multiplier somewhere: 10 minute job.
• Make TP moves stronger to compensate. Again, could be done with a configurable multiplier. Or you could change the base damage number on each ability manually: 5-30 minute job.

And there, just one programmer made a major fix to the battle system in barely a single day's work.

There's so much stuff in this game that could be fixed by tweaking a bunch of numbers and algorithms on the server, yet is somehow taking months to fix, it's quite stupid. The hard parts are already done: network communication, server-side clustering and load balancing, server-side battle processing engine, enemy AI routines, client 3d rendering engine, etc. They have a fully working game engine here, the hard part is done.

I appreciate that creating 3d models and art assets, motion capture, cutscene creation, translation and localization, new zones and things like that takes time. That said, I'm pretty certain a single art guy could be pumping out a big NM or a new armor set every week, and then consider they're likely to have a whole team of them. Although the lack of content is a real problem with this game right now it's just not what I'm most annoyed about. I'm annoyed about all the small things in this game that could be patched up quickly to help get the game going more smoothly. Here's just a few I can think of:

• Chocobos. Why exactly is this taking so long? Because they think chocobos should have some other purpose that they didn't even think about yet? Who cares, just put them in the game and add your new fangled gimmick later. They already have animations and 3d models for this, they literally just need to add a "Chocobo" status effect that makes you run 100% faster and have the client render anybody with this status effect on top of a chocobo. Why exactly does this need to wait over 9 months to be added!? It would take a couple of days to get working together with the art assets with a couple people, maybe a few more days to add renting NPCs and localizing them and stuff.
  
• Full-screen alt-tab. Why is this still broken? It's not some kind of anti-cheating thing like they tried to pass it off as in FFXI, because they let us play windowed. I've written this kind of code myself. It's a bunch of API calls to DirectX to make it prepare the video card for rendering to, and admittedly it can get pretty complex. But you know what? You'll already have this stuff already written into a function that's called when your game is first started! All the game needs to do is call the function again once it gets focus again. This isn't rocket science. Instead of killing the game if the DirectX handle is lost, you simply disable all graphics rendering until Windows sends you focus again, at which point you call the API function and then re-enable rendering. This is seriously an hour or two fix at most.
  
• Linkshell management. Where is it? Why is it not here? Why can't we set a message of the day and why can't we break pearls of people not online? I could understand slightly somewhat if they simply don't have the time to design and implement a new UI window for the linkshell menu. So why exactly can't it just be some text commands!? Nobody is going to begrudge the game if you have to type a text command to break someone's offline pearl. This shit would take an hour to add, I cant believe this still isn't in the game after 9 months. And why can't you talk on multiple pearls even though you can equip them!? The chat channels are already numbered, why the hell can't we just type /1 /2 /3 instead of /L to type a message on a particular channel!?
  
• Player searching. The server already knows where every single person on the server is, what jobs they're on, and what they're doing. I appreciate this one would take longer due to the UI that would need to go with it, but would this seriously take so long to implement? Just copy the text command parsing code you used for FFXI's /sea function, and have it dump the results into a scrollable list like the one that appears on the item search counter. A programmer or two could have this added in a week surely. Add another player state "looking for party" like in FFXI, just re-use the already existing /afk code, and you've got yourself a workable grouping system.
  
• The armory system. Honestly I blame most of this problem on the two "basically the same" mage classes, and I know they've come up with the "job system" for this. But it shouldn't have taken so long to get here. You want to stop people levelling all the jobs just for their good abilities and making everyone a bunch of self-sufficient identical hybrids? You make it cost 2 or 3 times more action points to equip abilities that don't belong to your class. That way you have to really think hard about whether it's worth using another classes ability. How long would it take to implement something like this? About 5 minutes.
  
• Content. I didn't want to touch on this too much, because things like new zones/dungeons etc do take a hell of a lot of time and resources, which is why this stuff is usually kept for expansion packs and stuff. But come on, it wouldn't be that difficult to add a bunch of "end-game" stuff, anything, to keep people occupied with while they wait. Add a bunch of HNMs on top of the first three you added 6 months ago. A small art/3d team could come up with one every week or two surely? Then another team can make some new armor and weapon models for them to drop. You could even reuse, resize, and recolor models for a lot of them. Just so you could add something to the game instead of months of nothing to do except exping.

This stuff shouldn't take 9 months. Not with a development team of 100 people, seriously, internal re-structure or not. This is my main gripe, how long it's taking. I could deal with the game being crappy. Like a lot of us here, we've dealt with it for almost a year now if you include beta. But they've been so slow and barely adding or fixing anything, and staying radio silent for so long that even an advocate like me just can't put up with them anymore.

It's infuriating to hear about them "planning" "examining" and "looking into" stuff still. They had time to do that stuff back in December/January! Seeing a forum post detailing what they're "planning to do with the battle system" 5 months later is deciding to join the party after everyone already went home. We all complained about "Tanaka's Vision", but at least he had one. I worry here that the new producer lacks it and that's why everything is taking so long to implement. I imagine they must be spending half of their time each week just arguing on how they think they should do things and then backtracking on it and restarting from scratch after reading all the confusing misaligned opinions all over the official forum.

And then there's this recent radio silence. What's going on here? Why so quiet? Outside of some terrible Q&A on their forum, and a bunch of roleplaying lore foreshadowing nonsense that ultimately amounted to nothing, we've heard almost nothing from them. If they had anything interesting to show off they'd be showing it off and talking about it. Once upon a time I used to refresh the Lodestone every day at work at 10AM because that's when they'd post new topics on upcoming news and features for the latest patches.

But recently we've had barely anything. At first I thought they might be holding out for some kind of big E3 reveal, but that's come and gone. Either the patch isn't close to being done yet or they've got nothing worth showing. No sane person could possibly think their radio silence strategy is a good idea. People are getting fed up and leaving due to having no content for months (and practically nothing to do but EXP for 9 months), so they should be trying to hype people to keep them interested, but we're not seeing that and people are slowly drifting away.

I actually want to be wrong. If the new patch turns out amazing I'll quite happily come back here and ridicule myself. But if this patch they've made people wait months for is anything short of amazing it'll be the end of them.

I agree, especially with the chocobo bit. It simply doesn't make sense to me not to at least allow rentals and then add any other twist to them after the fact. Assuming, their gimmick revolves around personal mounts.
Especially with all the heat they've received since beta regarding lack of transportation modes.
The painful bit about it is, the longer they hold back on implementing it- whatever their silly special gimmick they came up with -will instantly be harshly criticized by the community. People will scoff, "you made me wait 9 months for this?!"
At least in 11 you got something, then it was improved upon over time. But I wonder if it was only well received because they simply didn't alert anyone whatsoever that they were going to implement something or were even considering it.

They did add a lot of quests, but only low level ones for the most part. I don't understand why they didn't make a series of quests with a chaining storyline with increasing difficulty for high level players. Like mini missions.
Make silly achievements for lodestone if you do them.

I'm still skeptical that the tweaked battle system and plastering a completely different job class system over an existing one will work harmoniously. The foundation for a healthy class and battle system just isn't there. It isn't there because the system that was put in place and ultimately what the game is built around wasn't well conceived. In fact, the system that was given to us isn't even the original one. That one had to be immediately replaced when they realized no one found it entertaining at gamescon. As if they had absolutely no market research, and I'm very inclined to believe they hadn't.

I'm also very perplexed at the sudden lack of information. Or why they even bothered to perform the q/a's. How do you expect people to launch questions about the battle system if we know nothing at all about it? And what purpose did it serve to lump gathering classes in there if you have absolutely no intention of making changes to it? If they wanted just to gauge player's feelings on gathering classes, why not just pose that question.

Like you, I was certain we were waiting for some sort of e3 revival reveal. A teaser trailer, a week of build up on lodestone - nada. Maybe they're waiting for this upcoming week because they didn't want anything over shadowed by e3? Who knows, but they could have been hyping their changes all this month. If it's coming very soon, I doubt they are making massive fundamental changes at this time. They could have thrown up some info that wasn't written in flowery roleplay language and heavily photoshop filtered thumbnail sized screens.

Anyho, sorry I'll stop for now. I didn't intend to hijack your rant with a rant of my own ><

hey wasnt i getting ridiculed for hitting this point a few months ago.

SE pretty much stole our money with a piece of trash with the final fantasy tag on it and then slapped us in the face with the support theyve given it.

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I agree with everything Ket said basically, why the fuck is it taking them so long. I'm not a programmer or developer or w/e but even I saw how easy it is to re-skin something- I used to re-skin my FFXI summons and pets all the time and it took me maybe 1-5 minutes to do it depending on how creative I wanted to be. So why then were all the baby NMs the shitty same old skins? I don't understand SE right now lol.

Also note on the armory system, i'm actually one of the people who love the fact you can put anything on any class basically, but 100% agree that you need to make the cost of it alot higher. If I wan't to put cure III on my pug, it should probably cost anywhere from 6-8 AP IMO, instead of 3.

Also I think that to continue the synergy with the current game they need to continue adding more "classes" so that "job"s can be added on top of them. If anyone keeps up on official forums the mods said that currently 1 job goes on top of one class. I think that is stupid because then certain jobs get auto fucked out of the picture until new classes are added to put the jobs on top of. For instance BLM, WHM, and SMN are all lore-wise and ability wise tied to conj. But they can only add one job for conj, so what the fuck happens to the other 2? The job system is apparently just a traditional job slapped onto a class through quests; it could work if you added enough abilities and made them hard and time consuming to get (since you won't be lvlng a job up, IE a r50 glad is gonna automatically turn into a r50 pld ) but its retarded that you'll have to lvl up a class just to play the job you want. That is why currently i'm lvlng up LNC, because pug won't = any job I want and lnc will most likely be DRG (although it probably won't have a wyvern considering that SE has been so retarded and can't seem to implement a pet class)

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TL;DR

but I agree.

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Take my hand, brave adventurer. We face this dungeon together - with FRIENDSHIP!

Yah, I agree that the mage situation is causing problems with them tying them to new jobs. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to cap both THM and CNJ, in case THM ended up not being a mage job I liked after they re-did things.

I also agree that the game is pretty crappy right now, and things are taking too long. I think that they have coded out the hard part of the game. The internal structure, the client/server stuff, the graphics. All they need to work on now is the actual game-play aspects of it, which still take time, but aren't that bad.

E3 came and went with no information about FF14, and that really annoyed me. I think that may be the nail on the coffin for me. We'll see how this update is in a few weeks, but if it's nothing short of spectacular, then I may call it quits. I certainly don't want to pay a monthly fee for the game, as it is now.

They announced that they're thinking about doing a 3rd MMO, and I'm curious if they're just gonna let this one train wreck, steal the game engine from it, and then just build a new "FF" game system on top of it.

Either way, I'm annoyed. Maybe I'll just spend the next 6-8 months trying to get into better shape IRL before giving that star wars MMO a shot. At least they're making sure they got their ducks in a row before they release it.

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Ok guys I understand and agreed where this is going but would their lives and family lives being affected from earthquake could lose their motivation?

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PS3 Friend list name: Pantherxx Wii code 1629-0463-4657-0263 (revised 9/28/07) Steam ID - Pantherxx010 62BLU 75PLD Reactived 7/5/10 I dare you Click this!

It's such a shame. We really came together as a community in a large way. Very proud of everyone. So many people ready to give CKD its rebirth. We were primed for success, but Eorzea never really materialized.

We need to resign ourselves to the fact that this game is now no longer deserving of our patience. Even a good patch isn't enough, because they've shown that they don't have what it takes to run this MMO correctly, and we simply can't invest time and effort again toward a company that will probably continue to betray us. We have better things to do.

What boggles my mind is the contrast between FF11 and FF14. I wonder what "a day at the office" is like for the FF14 devs. I mean, we know they aren't completely oblivious, since they admitted their game sucks and they said they'll leave it free. I feel like that's the last thing they actually did, then turned off the lights, shut their doors, and gave up.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Panther, while I sure Japan is still in a state of disarray, I'm skeptical about morale being such a dramatic attributing hindrance to them being slow to put up lodestone posts an such. It doesn't really help the fact that the game was in the same state and behavoir prior to the tragedy.
I think it's more an issue of wanting to put up the face that they are doing modern things that the public expects with mmo such as open lines of communication, yet they dearly want to hold unto their past means and keep very hush about everything. The end result is something that doesn't quite gel right.

Although, I do admittingly feel sorry for them for constantly getting their work bashed left and right by consumers. Especially on the japanese forums who feel quite possibly everything is in immediate need of redoing. Like all the maps, the music, the designs, etc. The other logical sense of me though stops short and blames them for completely ignoring consumer input or not otherwise even seeking it early on.

For Whisp and a few others, I too was expecting some sort of revival of FF11. Perhaps this was naive of me to assume it would be something similar to it. Using the FF11 races certainly wasn't helpful either. Afterall, they wouldn't run two concurrent mmo with the same premise, yet that's what everyone wanted and expected. I also have a strong feeling that this game was designed far too heavily to market to the Chinese. It ended up putting awkward barriers that obviously didn't appeal to the rest of the world. Stupid things like the japanese version having everything labeled in chinese kanji which no one can read. If they were smart, they would have dropped the China deal and reduced the dependencies created for it like guild level leveling and surplus.

I am dissapointed that it isn't the same fun as i came to expect in 11. I do think its a bit harsh to say we've been betrayed by SE as a company lol. Afterall, most of us has the ability to play beta or read all the bad impressions it had made on the net. We all bought and continued to play the game in hopes that it would get better. Despite no one really liking the foundations the game was built upon.
I don't blame the game for sucking, when I already knew it sucked even before I purchased it. And I garnered at least some small scale of entertainment from it, it just wasn't the longevity of entertainment I would have hoped for.

Anyho, sorry for my long rant again. I really came in here just to note that a new letter from the producer is coming out either tomorrow or the following day and it is to include a video.

I wish they acted sooner with the updates. They won't be able to bring people back, and they are losing more daily. They are being TOO QUIET about the release date and details for the "june" update. They also need to hire Ket, because I believe he could single handedly fix this game in less time than their entre team.

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It's definitely fair to say they betrayed us. We dedicated months of our lives on faith that they would deliver on their promise to produce the real FFXIV, and they've done nothing at all. I'd love to have that time back. If an acquaintance of mine promised to be there for me if I dedicate even a day of my time and then was a no-show, I'd be pretty upset. We're talking 6 months.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

The big question will be, "What now?" I know that a lot of us went dormant in the months/years before this game was talked about. I'd only poke in on the forums every half a year, or so. I'd hate to fall back into that habit. I know a lot of us having some cross-communication going on Steam, and there's some Minecraft and Terraria talk and such.

Maybe the game will kick ass come June. Unlikely, but worth hoping for, I suppose. In the likely scenario that it doesn't, however, we'll have to come up with other reasons to keep talking. haha.

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It's just really, really, disappointing. FFXI was such a great game/experience, and after waiting so long for another one, it really sucks to see them totally botch it. I feel like it's too late now. Even if they do somehow turn the game around and manage to make everything okay, I don't think the subscriber base will be there. I wonder if they're even planning expansion packs for this game?

lol

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I guess we can all play star wars (old republic?). I never played a non Final Fantasy MMO, but that one looks kinda fun. I refuse to play WoW or Rift ever.

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At this point Im trying to think of another game we could all enjoy. Its really dissapointing to see the game still in this state. Im not going to repeat everything that was said, I dont need too, I think we all know the issues here.

I just dont understand SE. I dont understand them at all. I mean, I never understood them, now... this is a whole new level of stupid.

Im slowly realizing that SE is pretty much one of the most horrific MMO devs out there. They dont understand that MMOs are not stand alone games. They are a living breathing world that changes day to day. If they dont want to put in the work it takes to run an MMO, then fuck off and stop pretending you can.

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COBRA KAI DOJO NEVER DIES
RIP Shiloh

thats great j haha

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

FRET NO MORE, YE SAND-BLISTERED WANDERERS! THE AGE OF AVIAN ADVENTURES IS UPON US! BASK IN THE REVERIE OF THE LORE OF EORZEA! THE DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT AT SQUARE ENIX CO LTD HAS RELEASED THE FOLLOWING HIGH QUALITY PHOTOGRAPH TO OUTLINE THEIR STRATEGY REGARDING CHOCOBO RELEASE INTO THE WILD LANDS YOU KNOW AND LOVE!

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

lol whisp

Producer letter and video are up now on lodestone
can find it here

Not sure if Ket is still keeping up on those. Basically the 1.18 patch is no longer mid june release. Sounds like maybe end of June or early July.
-mages will not have autoattack
-new battle animations are coming in a follow up patch 1.19
-abilities will be adjustable through gm and quests. Such as reducing timers and ap cost.
-active/passive mode will now adjust while moving (i guess they mean the animation wont stop you when switching)
-stanima bar is gone.



They claimed in the past that the autoattack speed is greater than that set in ff11. But to me watching this video, it seems painfully slow. I think this might put off quite a few people.

I noticed that some of the abilities had their own little countdown clock built into the icon, thats a nice touch. Some of the new animations look nifty. The lancer one that makes a ghost image of gungnir in particular. I think some of the outfits are new?

Kioko - Thanks for answering my question.

Ultimaj - You just made my day lol and where the hell you been!

Whisp - LOL!

/rant on

I do feel that SE betrayed as this game should had not been release until all good stuff are there or have good god damn timeline update patch than fix fix fix fix fix or little little little shitty patches.

/rant off

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Whelp game is dead folks IMO, that "tremendous in size" patch just looks like abunch of shit to me that could of been done in a week, and they still need to delay it. SE is so-fucking-stupid. Btw Kio its says battle classes only will have auto attack- mages are battle classes.

edit: actually let me take that back abit: if these "raids" are along the lines of a blizzard scale raid such as the new firelands coming out, then sure 3 ish months to release a patch like that is acceptable and would explain the delay. However when I think of an XIV raid, I can't help but expect it to be tam-tara deepcroft copy and pasted where they've doubled the size of the mobs and you must kill them all to receive a treasure chest at the end which contains 95% of the time a water crystal.

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god lol

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

This would be acceptable if the patch was coming next week. Another 2-3 weeks from now is gonna kill it.

I totally agree Madi. The raids will probably start at an aetherite, and you kill mobs as you explore the narrow paths of a bland underground cave and kill puks - only to recieve a weak reward. It will mimic leves and behest with higher level mobs.

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i dont believe in hell, but if im wrong, i imagine it to be a never-ending cycle of LQs

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya