Chocobo Racing

[BRP]

I'll repeat myself, since when was riding a chocobo 'fun'?

Anyway, its not only the bots. The game's movements are programmed on client side and I don't think they want to revamp that for one area of play.

[Jeryhn]

This statement is incorrect. Chicken > Fish by a landslide.

You are incorrect.

There is only one option we have to settle this.

http://www.itm-si.de/grafik/2003/yugioh.jpg

It is time to d-d-d... d-d-d-d-duel!

[Septimus]

If they allowed for manual control, everyone would whine that the JPs have an inherent advantage because of their lower latency. (And anyone who says otherwise is a lying sack of shit.)

[Khamsin]

They wont allow us realtime control of our chocos because of connection speed and cheating... but why not allow it in some private race mode when its just against your friends for nothing more than bragging rights?

Sounds very typical, they identify a problem and instead of thinking to work around it, they allow themselves to be crippled by it.

Because they're designing the entire racing concept around not allowing manual control. This means the controls, mechanics, etc. of racing are built around this idea, to make it fun and interactive without direct manual control of your movement. To allow manual control in private races would mean redesigning the gameplay mechanics of the race.

Unless, of course, they're lazy. If the racing was just simply watching your chocobo run and all you could do was hit a button for nitro boost once every couple minutes, then they could just tack on manual control for private races without redesigning anything and just switch it off for public ones.

But, if they're desiging this the right way, the entire design itself will be centered around alternative input, specifically giving you things to do to influence the outcome of the race to compensate for the lack of manual control. e.g. say the racing was something like the chocobo raising care plans, only you set certain behavior patterns on how to navigate certain obstacles in the race. Part of the strategy might be to change your plan and priorities for various behavior patterns at key points in the race (sorta like AI scripting for bots in a botwar kind of thing) so that when your chocobo encounters an obstacle, he chooses the quickest path through/around it. If they did something like this, then allowing manual control in private races would be totally changing the entire fundamentals of the race, and not something easily done.

[Matricide]

I'll repeat myself, since when was riding a chocobo 'fun'?

Anyway, its not only the bots. The game's movements are programmed on client side and I don't think they want to revamp that for one area of play.

if theyre not gonna fix fleetool/posing theyre sure as hell not gonna waste their time to fix it for choco racing.

[JoOeetheplatypuS]

Its impossible to please MMO players, seriously.

[Khamsin]

Its impossible to please FFXIFlux, seriously.

It is possible to please MMO players, just not all at once.

[FFXIFlux]

Its impossible to please MMO players, seriously.

So SE chooses not to try? Seen a lot of people quitting lately. ToA has failed.

[Jeryhn]

Its impossible to please MMO players, seriously.

So SE chooses not to try? Seen a lot of people quitting lately. ToA has failed.

Guess we can't be so lucky to see you go then.

[JoOeetheplatypuS]

Its impossible to please FFXIFlux, seriously.

It is possible to please MMO players, just not all at once.

No company has succeeded so far. If you think WoW keeps everybody pleased, LOL.

[Priran]

Its impossible to please FFXIFlux, seriously.

It is possible to please MMO players, just not all at once.

No company has succeeded so far. If you think WoW keeps everybody pleased, LOL.

I think you missed that part

[Aodh]

- Since players use different connection speeds, racing will be controlled automatically to keep things fair.

In order to prevent cheating, we have decided not to allow any timing-related controls during the race.

Ok, but really why not "allow" it and just leave a bot monitoring the zone for abnormalities. Be like that feather where the only way to get it is to POS.

- By selecting riders (NPCs) with their own sets of tactics, players can devise plans that best suit their chocobo's abilities.
- Not only does a player select a rider, they can also use items or provide equipment for a chocobo before the race to increase the chocobo’s abilities.

So like Plinko on the Price is Right, you pick a place to start and see where it lands... Sounds challenging.

Really, it's becoming more and more apparent that Choco-racing will amount to little more than a thing to start, then go AFK and come back to see if you won. The connection speed excuse is like saying "We're removing Skillchains because people on a slow connection aren't able to WS in time". (Brought back a bad memory of someone who played a BLM on Titan, over Satallite... 9 second latency.)

All that being said I'm really interested to see how they impliment it to be fun, given that everything they're hinting to amounts to a combination "pissing contest" with a /random thown on top.

[FFXIFlux]

Its impossible to please FFXIFlux, seriously.

It is possible to please MMO players, just not all at once.

No company has succeeded so far. If you think WoW keeps everybody pleased, LOL.

Ya know, I sorta wonder if easier XP thanks to signet, rings, XP required change, more XP for lower level mobs and ToA gimp mobs etc. is due in part to WoW's very easy XPing system. Of course the thing SE doesn't realize is that the ONLY thing to do in FFXI *is* to XP. FFXI's PvP is a joke, new areas for raiding get added at a snails pace and they're like dynamis, 100% yard trash with no real boss. Chocobo raising/raceing are like goggles in an acid spill, they do nothing.

Since Limbus came out FFXI has gotten a new expansion which gave us assaults (interesting but everyone is sick of them long ago), ISNM (same), Hydra and Cerberus, and a bunch of gear that are sidegrades. WoW has gotten, what, a bunch of dungeons each with several challenging and bosses that for the most part drop gear upgrades.

WoW is by no means a perfect game but it's player base is increaseing while FFXI's is decreasing for what I think is an all too obvious reason. Go go king camps 2+ years later.

They wont allow us realtime control of our chocos because of connection speed and cheating... but why not allow it in some private race mode when its just against your friends for nothing more than bragging rights?

Sounds very typical, they identify a problem and instead of thinking to work around it, they allow themselves to be crippled by it.

Kings are a good example of SE's problem solving failures. Everyone wants it instanced, but instead they add claim delay which still has mobs popped claimed half the time because the game doesn't handle 100+ people packed into a small spot of aery, and they add frenzy mode to make it harder to hold them and abuse their retarded pop window.

I swear, the developers must have to kill themselves if they admit they fucked something up by actually fixing something.

[JoOeetheplatypuS]

Its impossible to please FFXIFlux, seriously.

It is possible to please MMO players, just not all at once.

No company has succeeded so far. If you think WoW keeps everybody pleased, LOL.

Ya know, I sorta wonder if easier XP thanks to signet, rings, XP required change, more XP for lower level mobs and ToA gimp mobs etc. is due in part to WoW's very easy XPing system. Of course the thing SE doesn't realize is that the ONLY thing to do in FFXI *is* to XP. FFXI's PvP is a joke, new areas for raiding get added at a snails pace and they're like dynamis, 100% yard trash with no real boss. Chocobo raising/raceing are like goggles in an acid spill, they do nothing.

Since Limbus came out FFXI has gotten a new expansion which gave us assaults (interesting but everyone is sick of them long ago), ISNM (same), Hydra and Cerberus, and a bunch of gear that are sidegrades. WoW has gotten, what, a bunch of dungeons each with several challenging and bosses that for the most part drop gear upgrades.

WoW is by no means a perfect game but it's player base is increaseing while FFXI's is decreasing for what I think is an all too obvious reason. Go go king camps 2+ years later.

FFXI is also 3 years old. WoW is like 1 and was kind of destined for success. While the MMO genre is not popular in Japan its more popular in america (ffxi was pretty much japan's 1st real MMO.) Blizzard is blizzard and thus it would sell a ton. Also, at the same time WoW is adding new content its limiting the content and making it so that old content is useless. MC and BWL will be nothing when the level cap hits 70. FFXI also does a lot more than just raids and PvP, its not as singly focused. WoW would never add chocobo breeding in a complex, deep manner as it is in FFXI. They give you and item and poof you have a horse. The fact is if endgame is all you care about FFXI is not right for you, its a great game do to its breadth of content. Its not all just a means to get more powerful and pwn n00bs.

And just wondering, if you're sick of assaults, have you competed all of them or is it just the concept that you're sick of? Ditto ISNM.

[Charla]

FFXI's PvP is a joke

We have PvP?
Better yet: we want PvP??

new areas for raiding get added at a snails pace and they're like dynamis, 100% yard trash with no real boss.

Anyone up for omega/ultima?

As for the rest, yes we all know kings and their loot are the best example of what's wrong with the game. Go try a game with no gear at all (look out I mentioned CoH again) if you don't like the problems with gear-based progression.

[Hyjynx]

Because they're designing the entire racing concept around not allowing manual control. This means the controls, mechanics, etc. of racing are built around this idea, to make it fun and interactive without direct manual control of your movement. To allow manual control in private races would mean redesigning the gameplay mechanics of the race.

lol way to over think it.

Here's a simple example:

We can already ride chocobos, no question about that.
Add a simple sprint command based around the ballista sprint concept.

Make 2 random tracks that start off on a leveled path and branch off into random parts with places to fall off and mess up if you arent careful.

Make the "starting point" just some random bar going across the track and have it disappear after a quick (non cutscene) countdown at which time participants try to get from point A to point B without messing up too much.

Result:
People going there with their friends to fuck around and doing much of:
nub1>LOLOLIBEATYOURASS
nub2>NUWAIILAGGEEDDD LAG I TELL YOU
nub3> LAWL LETS DO IT AGAIN :D
everyone> HOKAY!


Unless making a new zone or adding a command to increase movment speed on a chocobo is "redesinging" the game, I dont see why there would be a problem.

1)I dont believe it if you guys say you havent raced your friends trying to get places on choco before for shits and giggles.
2)People get to fuck around and have fun.
3)POS.exe? Who cares you dont win anything cept the right to be an ass with your friends.

Life doesnt have to be as difficult as we make it out to be, and it's usually more fun when we dont. The same applies here.


[edit]
let me state for clarity that I'm not saying they should do away with the system they came up with. I'm only advocating a "special" mode or option for a private race that works in this fashion.
Maybe my desire isnt shared by many but I'd love to race my friends on a dedicated circuit talking smack the whole way.

[Ksandra]

I for one am glad we can't control them. Even if they had a program to "catch" the botters during races you know that it'd be a long drawn out process after you already lost the race and the person would only get banned for 72 hours and come back and do it again etc.

For once imo SE did somethign right in preventing botting. Also, no botting + long time to train chocobo + equipment for chocobo + everything else = less likely rmt will get involved.

[Kyreth]

Its impossible to please MMO players, seriously.

So SE chooses not to try? Seen a lot of people quitting lately. ToA has failed.

Have they gotten rid of you yet? Geez, "Flux" is the right name, you make me feel like I need something to cure the squirts reading anything you post about FFXI.

Fact: If there was direct control during the race, someone could, would, and frequently cheat- and even if they didn't, we'd have sore losers screaming "HAX!" everytime their bird lost (carefully trained, of course by repeatedly urging it to beak-rape it's owner, cause it reminds them of Daddy).

I imagine careful training and care will be the big pointer towards a winning chocobo, and I hope tracks challenge more than raw speed and endurance- that a chocobo trained to be bright and smart has opportunites in racing as well.

I'd be amused as heck if they started studying stuff like cockfighting for ideas on how to set up a well-trained bird (other than the fact that we're not going to be seeing a pair of chocobos with steel spurs on their feet ripping each other to BBQ heaven).

[Khamsin]

Because they're designing the entire racing concept around not allowing manual control. This means the controls, mechanics, etc. of racing are built around this idea, to make it fun and interactive without direct manual control of your movement. To allow manual control in private races would mean redesigning the gameplay mechanics of the race.

lol way to over think it.

Here's a simple example:

We can already ride chocobos, no question about that.
Add a simple sprint command based around the ballista sprint concept.

Make 2 random tracks that start off on a leveled path and branch off into random parts with places to fall off and mess up if you arent careful.

Make the "starting point" just some random bar going across the track and have it disappear after a quick (non cutscene) countdown at which time participants try to get from point A to point B without messing up too much.

Result:
People going there with their friends to fuck around and doing much of:
nub1>LOLOLIBEATYOURASS
nub2>NUWAIILAGGEEDDD LAG I TELL YOU
nub3> LAWL LETS DO IT AGAIN :D
everyone> HOKAY!


Unless making a new zone or adding a command to increase movment speed on a chocobo is "redesinging" the game, I dont see why there would be a problem.

It is redesigning the game, if the game didn't already have that capability. Your example doesn't work because adding a command to change the speed of your chocobo temporarily doesn't require them to put chocobos in or allow you to ride them in the first place. It's already there, so giving you a temporary speed boost just requires them to change one variable briefly. A better example would be, if they were going to add a command to let your chocobo fly. There's currently no flight (or even jumping) in the game yet, so to add such an ability would take some extensive redesigning.

If they make the races in such a way that is incompatible with manual controls (e.g. choice selection, and watch a CS, etc.) then to change it so that you can be in control of your chocobo would require a whole new setup for the private races. Public races would be setting your jockeys and parameters and watching the CS, private races would be riding your choco freely around the zone, and they'd be totally different from each other. This means they'd need to put in some serious time coming up with a whole new system just for private races, rather than simply setting a switch that enables or disables manual control.

If all you want is to be able to freestyle your chocobo in the zone that is used for racing and pretend you are racing, then that would be easy enough I'm sure, regardless of what system they have for public racing. You could even do it yourself right now by replacing a zone .dat with the Chocobo Circuit. Just don't expect the game to let you use special abilities or keep track of winners for you.

[FFXIFlux]

FFXI is also 3 years old. WoW is like 1 and was kind of destined for success. While the MMO genre is not popular in Japan its more popular in america (ffxi was pretty much japan's 1st real MMO.)

It may be among the first Japanese made MMORPGs, but it's certainly not the first Japan has experienced. EQ had a large Japanese population early on, so did Lineage and I'm sure every other MMORPG as well. With mobs popping on server up and maintenance being done early morning, the Japanese and Euro guilds were being handed all the NMs in EQ, it was actually quite annoying.

Also, at the same time WoW is adding new content its limiting the content and making it so that old content is useless. MC and BWL will be nothing when the level cap hits 70.

And Sky and Kings have been something since the cap went to 75, merits got added, stun and flash got added? The difference is that stuff will and already has been added post BWL/MC. What has FFXI gotten since RoZ? LOLSea?

And just wondering, if you're sick of assaults, have you competed all of them or is it just the concept that you're sick of? Ditto ISNM.

The only assault I like is Breaking Morale and that got old fast. The majority of the rest are clearing yardtrash for 33% of normal XP-party XP, or running around, or going AFK while the SMN runs around opening chests. Either way theres nothing I want from assault. I got an ebulliant ring figureing hey, resist paralyze, all right, stack that with dalmatica and things will be good... yeah... or not. I'm not even going to bother getting the resist petrify, sleep or resist charm items.