Chocobo digging hit with a sledgehammer

[Ksandra]

Smally logged off completely. So did Deger (on the same team, so, not a surprise).

Popopoy and Amcyore (another team) are both hanging in Rabao.


Palmery still logged on on port jeuno, no clue if active.

I hate those guys. Maybe they're going to revise the changes once these RMT diggers quit completely. Either that, or they figure that those who are serious about digging will raise their own chocobo to specialize in it.

This is exactly what I think. SE was a bit dumb with this update. Originally chocobo breeding was supposed to come with the update along with the digging changes. SInce they held back the breeding part, they should have held back the digging change too.

I am not going to get too upset about it until I see how the chocobo raising effects this.

[Fhqwghads]

Even if they add a chocobo you can raise that does something miraculous like extend digging time to 5-6 hours, I won't be that happy about it. First off, digging already takes an insanely long time to level, so adding another time-sink to it is just stupid. Secondly, anything we can get, RMT can get too. Is SE so short-sighted that RMT won't raise their own digging chocobos and go right back to business as usual? Of course this all hinges on whether or not they do add a digging chocobo that has the ability to ignore fatigue to a huge degree.

How happy are people going to be if they spend all that time to breed a digging chocobo only to find out it extends time by something stupid like 5 items dug up? Personally I'm just going to wait until stuff on AH is sold, and then deactivate my content ID's until this shit is fixed. I'm not paying to play a game where I have to earn in-game currency in a manner that I don't enjoy, and of all the things I've done over the years, digging is really the only way I enjoy earning gil.

[aurik]

SE could have solved the issue by increasing the size of the dig pool + banning dig bots.

Instead they will just effectively ban everyone.

[NimrodofLakshmi]

I've always been curious about chocobo digging... But now doesn't seem like a good time to start.

[Norelco]

SE could have solved the issue by increasing the size of the dig pool + banning dig bots.

Instead they will just effectively ban everyone.

Aurik, we don't know if they are bots for certain. I have sent tells to Deger and Smally, and although it took them a few minutes to answer me they still answered, in English. They were probably canned responses though. "Can I help you?" And when you ask a question they say "Yes" or "No", and that's it.

That's all really GMs can do when they they confront someone on botting. And arguing that they are on 24/7 will just get you a smart-ass remark from the GM that long playtimes don't necessarily mean they are RMT.

Before the RMT diggers came around, you would see the same 10 diggers in those zones most of the time anyway.

[Catrina]

Here are my results from 2 digging outings in the desert of about 10 stacks each.


Pebble - 13
zinc ore - 15
Iron ore - 9
Coral frag.- 5
Bone chip - 34
Giant femur - 17
DS ore - 2
Gold ore - 3
Mythril - 1
W.scales - 3
P.stone - 1

TOTAL: 103 (give or take, I may have miscounted by 1-2 over or under)

Fails during that time: 76 (again, give or take)

Result: 14.9 stacks for me. It took me about 15 mins total to dig those items.


After that I got 5 stacks of empty pool. I'll tally my results every day, I'll post with what I got in a week or so. Anyway, did any other A10 get similar results? What about other skill levels?

[Raineh]

I just dig up outside alzabi

8 pet logs
4 ebony logs
plus a bunch of other crap with 15 stacks of greens

Not so bad today......

Btw is there anywhere in toau you can buy greens?
Going to suck if i have to go jeuno every 30mins ;/

[Raineer]

wasnt there something about chocos you raise having an effect on digging? maybe all the diggers will have a better success rate when breeding starts. and theyre trying toget rid of the botters in between? who knows.

Wait, so you mean a tactic where the game is nerfed in a slight way but ALAS square has the answer and it's for you to wait around a few months for them to release a program which will take you a few months to complete, and in the end you'll be ALMOST satisfied so you hangaround for more.

ok i'll stop now lawl

[aurik]

SE could have solved the issue by increasing the size of the dig pool + banning dig bots.

Instead they will just effectively ban everyone.

Aurik, we don't know if they are bots for certain. I have sent tells to Deger and Smally, and although it took them a few minutes to answer me they still answered, in English. They were probably canned responses though. "Can I help you?" And when you ask a question they say "Yes" or "No", and that's it.

That's all really GMs can do when they they confront someone on botting. And arguing that they are on 24/7 will just get you a smart-ass remark from the GM that long playtimes don't necessarily mean they are RMT.

Before the RMT diggers came around, you would see the same 10 diggers in those zones most of the time anyway.

Anyone who is on 24/7 for 12 months doing the exact same thing 100% of the day isn't a legitimate player.

Most likely they are a bunch of computers running dig scripts that are occasionally monitored by a few employees.

[Fhqwghads]

Wait, so you mean a tactic where the game is nerfed in a slight way

If by "slight" you meant "massive" then you're on the right track. Chocobo digging wasn't hit slightly, it's been stomped on. The maximum anyone can dig now is ~100 items a day. That's RL day, not in-game day. For those who aren't familiar with digging, on average you get 3 decent items out of every 100. By "decent" I mean a couple gold beastcoins, and maybe an adaman or gold ore at somewhat high digging skill. This means that it will take, on average, 4 days to get 1 stack of gold beastcoins, which currently sells for around 180K on my server. Add in the little extras, and you'll probably earn maybe 350K every 4 days.

Now to put it into perspective, to get to a decent level (let's say level 8, A20) it takes somewhere around a full YEAR of digging around 2-3 hours a day, 3-4 days a week. That's a huge investment of time for an incredibly low amount of gil thanks to this update. SE basically bent every single high level digger over, and rammed them. Personally I don't appreciate it one bit, especially since they didn't bother sending flowers or taking me out to dinner first.

So people now speculate that you might be able to raise a chocobo to get one that can dig better than a rental chocobo. There are so many unanswered questions though:

-How long will it take to raise a chocobo that can dig? Is it going to be another 3-4 month timesink where you have to crossbreed with others and get super-rare eggs?
-How long will your personal chocobo stay around?
-Will special chocobos let you dig up more than 100 items before you get fatigued? How many more items?
-If they don't let you dig up more items, will the items you dig up be nothing but the cream of the crop in the zones you dig?

There's just too many variables, and too many opportunities where SE can fail miserably, and piss off the people who've spent years to level digging by providing abysmal results from chocobo raising. Look at how pathetic this update was for 90% of the end game community. SE's track record is piss-poor, and my hopes of them producing some sort of miraculous chocobo to get diggers right back where they were before this fucking stupid and breaking change was made is about nil.

I sent them a bug report on this as well, because as far as I'm concerned, chocobo digging is 100% broken. Of course, I got the typical canned response, and noticed that the maintenance didn't address jack shit when it comes to digging. I am on the fence as far as quitting goes, and with all the posts I'm reading about the update and how it's basically adding nothing to the game beyond token fluffy eye candy, I'm tilting further and further towards quitting. It pisses me off to no end that all the time I spent digging has been rendered virtually useless.

[Raineer]

If by "slight" you meant "massive" then you're on the right track.

Yeah I know it was slaughtered, I should have made my sarcasm more obvious. Fishing was slightly nerfed with fatigue (to me I didn't mind at all), digging was destroyed.

However, what's your option? The fix isn't released but oh look it will be, and it's your job to raise your chocobo correctly for what you've been told will help you be as effective as you were before....whatever keeps you on the hook for a few more months.

It's similar to nerfing TP gain but releasing Haste gear like Homan (poor example but w/e) so you can spend months questing/farming Limbus, whatever you want to call it, just to strive to get back where you were before the nerf.

[Not Kuno]

Fishing v2

[Fhqwghads]

If by "slight" you meant "massive" then you're on the right track.

Yeah I know it was slaughtered, I should have made my sarcasm more obvious. Fishing was slightly nerfed with fatigue (to me I didn't mind at all), digging was destroyed.

However, what's your option? The fix isn't released but oh look it will be, and it's your job to raise your chocobo correctly for what you've been told will help you be as effective as you were before....whatever keeps you on the hook for a few more months.

It's similar to nerfing TP gain but releasing Haste gear like Homan (poor example but w/e) so you can spend months questing/farming Limbus, whatever you want to call it, just to strive to get back where you were before the nerf.

I couldn't agree more. I have zero faith in SE at this point. I imagine the way it will play out is like this:

-Must obtain a very rare egg.
-Then have to raise the chocobo just right, targeting whatever stat extending # items dug before fatigue sets in will be based off of, breed it with someone else's chocobo that has the same sorts of stats.
-Have to raise that chocobo now

After all of that, I will bet money, considering past history, that the "extended item" digging chocobo will maybe dig up 1/3rd more items. Yay. An additional 33 items or so, for months of work.

Or maybe you repeat the above steps, targeting a chocobo that digs up higher quantities of rare items. Let's take past history and say you dig up 25% more rare items. That means out of the ~100 items you can dig, somewhere around 27 of them will be rare. That might not be so bad, but it still doesn't even come close to approaching what the old digging system could do if you spent enough time per day digging.

The only thing that SE still has as a wildcard is the "special" items that can only be dug up by certain rare chocobos. If those special items are worth 500K or more, then maybe, just maybe, digging might be viable again. BUT, keep in mind that's only after you raised a bad-ass chocobo. And what about people who've spent all that time getting to high digging levels? If someone invests the time to get rare chocobos that can dig special items, and are on even ground with someone just starting to dig (meaning the newbie diggers can dig up just about the same number of special items) then you're still back to square one where anyone who spent time leveling digging has been fucked over.

Like I said, I just have no faith in SE doing anything right anymore. Whichever program managers and game designers were around when RoZ and earlier were released are obviously long gone. The people who work there now have no fucking clue what the player base wants, and continuously throw out table scraps to keep people hanging on to this game of perpetually disappointing expansions and updates.

The only thing that was keeping my interest in the game was the fact that I had a pretty steady source of income from digging to keep purchasing some of the best gear out there for my character. Now that's gone, and as a subscriber of this game, I'm almost gone too.

[Dryhus]

I just dig up outside alzabi

8 pet logs

That's what you use to knock them out after they uncharm and bite your face, right?

[genome]

Personally, I like the change. RMT bots were a vicious plague and kept taking away all those resources from everyone else 24/7 getting all zones pretty dug out. It makes it more like a fun activity that everyone can enjoy a bit each day, like say the way it is with ENMs vs RMT-monopolized NMs.

I agree it definitely changes the way people can use it, you can't really just decide to do that exclusively for long periods of time to make lots of gil anymore, but before you still had to compete for long enough with other people until others got discouraged enough to leave a zone just for you (for the good areas). I know all the names of other A10 diggers and where they go on my server, that's not a good thing if you think about it.

It is also kinda nice for me personally because I also always felt a little sense of loss for all the times I didn't dig at all, knowing everyone else was getting all those goods... This change turns it away from obsession into a fun diversion you can do each day, like using NPC, using XP ring, doing ENM, doing assault. And then relax and move on to various other fun activities in similar moderation.

It is very different from the changes from fishing because they actually made fishing unfun (and now you can't even talk with people while fighting with a fish, so not exactly a leisurely distraction anymore). Chocobo digging is still as easy and relaxing, and if you just need a couple of simple items for a recipe, that's a quick guaranteed way to get them anytime (bone chips, elm logs, zinc ores, giant femurs, iron ores, etc). Btw I don't think the elemental ores supply in particular will be affected, knowing how that works.

[Fhqwghads]

Well, anyone who is A20 or higher probably can sorta-kinda live with the change (depending on how much you depended on digging for income.) If you can dig elemental ores up every time the cycle comes around, and you have another source of income then you'll be ok, and can have the attitude you have towards the change.

Those of us who sunk countless hours in it for the sole purpose of making it our "craft" are the ones who will never view this change as likable. The way people like myself earned gil has been obliterated.

Also, keep in mind that anyone who wants to try to level digging at this point is so screwed it's not even funny. With the maximum items that can be dug up in a 15 hour period, or JP midnight, or 24 hours, or whatever ridiculously long cool-down it is, it's going to take people longer than a lifetime to dig to A10. It's simply impossible at this point. Of course, as I mentioned earlier there's still the new chocobo raising wild-card, but I seriously doubt it's going to be the holy grail of digging. It's just not like SE to do something like that. I'll just sit on the sidelines and wait and see, I suppose. Not much else I can do (already filed a bug report and Comments & Suggestions.)

[Forge]

Personally, I like the change. RMT bots were a vicious plague and kept taking away all those resources from everyone else 24/7 getting all zones pretty dug out. It makes it more like a fun activity that everyone can enjoy a bit each day, like say the way it is with ENMs vs RMT-monopolized NMs.

I'd rather have more RMT and this fatigue taken away, because before the patch i could make a ton more money with RMT diggers in the zone then without them and with a fatigue in effect. 20 mins to basically dig out 1 zone is not a "fun activity". Being able to dig through about 7 different zones and making 500k-1mil is more fun to me than having a 15 stack limit and having too choose the best area to profit in for the day. Hell with the restriction of 15-20 stacks you have to know where all the other diggers are even MORE then before the patch.

For those of us who are A10 and close to it, this is a slap in the face, and for those players that are just starting Chocobo Digging they have my sympathy because no ones getting to A10 soon on 15-20 stacks a day... It's bad enough that it took forever to reach a level where i am able to make profits on par with regular crafts. This "digging fatigue" is just SE bullshitting their way around the real problem of RMT Diggers. SE needs to get some balls and start banning the accounts that are on 24/7 digging the same path or in the same area (all of you know who they are) and stop fucking it up for the rest of us who are legit.

[/rant]

[aurik]

Don't listen to Genome; if SE decided to cut his balls off he'd think it was an ok change.

As it is, SE is saying "we forbid you to enjoy this activity more than 1 hour per day" WHY?! Because people automate chocodigging? Way to fuck over EVERYONE because a few people are cheating, rather than ban the people that cheat. SE shouldn't be in the business of legislating what we can or can not do with our in-game time.

[Forge]

lol aurik try 30 mins tops ><

[aurik]

lol aurik try 30 mins tops ><

I'm /wait10, it takes me longer. Truly, I am a "casual digger" and this balls fatigue shit would STILL impact me because when I do (maybe once every 2-3 weeks), I dig 30-40 stacks in a matter of hours.