Redesigning and Overhauling the interface.

[Builttolast]

PS2 Limitations can answer just about every question in this thread.

just about everything wrong with the way the game plays can be attributed to that relic piece of hardware. Way to keep with the times SE.

[miokomioko]

FFXII's GUI is everything SE wished they did with FFXI's but are too busy/undermanned/underpaid/et cetera to go back and fix.

They added graphic sprites such as "Zzz" for sleeping mobs in ToAU, I wondered why they couldn't go ahead and add that to sleeping players as well. Toss in some... Purple bubbles, dark blotches over the eyes, greyscale statue look, little thought clouds with "..."s. Most basic status effects aside from the obvious and detectable (charm, paralyze, dead, etc) could have alwats used a simple sprite or color haze to help alert healers. I'm leaning towards the concept that they didn't do so just because they want players to communicate and talk to eachother.

However, I wouldn't be too surprised if something like this fell into a random upcoming update similar to how they adjusted claimed mob colors and battle music, and piss everyone off since it's not an update note about more multi-hit weapons.

I don't think we'll ever see a huge SE-sanctioned overhaul of the entire UI because, almost 5 years later ,everyone is pretty damn used to it as crappy as it may be and the improvements resulting from the considerable amount of time/money/energy would be somewhat minimal conveniences.

[Toksyuryel]

I'm still waiting for my on-screen clock during timed events like every other game in the final fantasy series has. You can talk about "PS2 limitations" all you want, but even the SNES FFs had this feature.

[PetriW]

While the screenshots look nice they are imho flawed and misleading. They lack a) the log, b) your party, c) your alliance, d) buffs.

A suggestion for a new UI should (imho) at least include:

Show hp/mp/tp/status of all members of you current party.
Show hp/mp/tp of all members of your alliance (status would be nice too).
Multiple customizable chat views, think chat on left side, combat spam on right side. (the current mixed 8 chat lines is an atrocity)
Current buffs/debuffs with duration. Maybe recast timers too.


I like to have a lot of info on screen, I know I'm probably an exception but if your UI suggestion doesn't include the above you miss even the basics.

[ringthree]

the lack of a visual representation for status effects is something that's always bugged me about ffxi. not only do most other MMOs have them, most other final fantasies have them.

I would love for this one thing. And it would actually be helpful, e.g. if a mob is dia'd you won't have to wonder why your sleep isn't landing.

[ronin sparthos]

I'm still waiting for my on-screen clock during timed events like every other game in the final fantasy series has. You can talk about "PS2 limitations" all you want, but even the SNES FFs had this feature.

Timers for BCNMs
Timers on status buffs
Timers on Food
Timers in Salvage
Timers in Einherjar

Kinda wondered for the longest time why these timers weren't built into the user interface for obvious reasons.

That along with not being able to view players current job merits.

[Amele]

Looks like a flash game... Awful.

Primary issue is the font choice (both face and size) and excess unused space. - alot of that could be fixed very easily. the important part is windowed, draggable, and minimizable features (i.e: linkshell/say/combat log etc). didn't one of the existing third party tools do something like this once upon a time? The zone name across the top is only annoying because it's wasting space - but it's wasted space in the current UI too so it's technically an improvement. (and would look less annoying if more information were kept on that top bar than just the zone name..)

the basic ideas behind some of the proposed changes are really good though.

If you need to read the instruction manual or ask an online forum how to perform the most rudimentary of tasks, or you need to use a calculator to find out something as elementary as how much accuracy your character has, then there is something very wrong with the UI.

If you think XI is bad you should do a 14 day trial in eve-online

[Rhianu]

Most basic status effects aside from the obvious and detectable (charm, paralyze, dead, etc) could have always used a simple sprite or color haze to help alert healers. I'm leaning towards the concept that they didn't do so just because they want players to communicate and talk to each other.

There are many things players should have to communicate with each other about, but status effects should never be one of them.

Hell, if forcing players to communicate is what the devs want, they should just get rid of all the 3D graphics and menus entirely and turn the game into a text-based MUD.

[Kabbalah]

If you think XI is bad you should do a 14 day trial in eve-online

IIRC, the conceptual scope of EVE Online is humongous on a scale that SE could never hope to reach. Hence, the GUI will reflect the complexity of the game itself.

FFXI is not a complex game. It is, in fact, a very simple game with some very simple concepts, and almost all of them are connected to combat: the player is responsible for one, maybe two, characters at once. How hard should it possibly be to know how much HP your wyvern or summon has? (Note that the PUP's ability to track almost every aspect of his automaton is about as complex as I wish my DRG's ability to keep tabs on his wyvern was.) How hard should it be to know how much ranged attack you have, or how hard it's going to be to hit a mob with a ranged attack? Why can I not keep track of my magic defense, considering how important it is to endgame? The idea that some of these very simple, very important, ideas are not measured on-screen is an oversight that simply can't be tolerated because it adds a level of annoyance that attempts to pass as complexity. It's like your doctor giving you a bunch of documents that give you clues about your blood pressure and expecting you to figure it all out on your own, rather than just, you know, telling you up front that you're in danger of suffering a fucking heart attack.

Oh, and there's also the GUI's shortcomings at projecting a sitrep, but that's been done already, and emiko's icons have more or less ensured that it is no longer a problem. As others have said before, if you're playing a game that revolves around combat and the damned GUI is incapable of giving you a situation report in less than 5~10 seconds, the GUI sucks, period.

[Raji]

Personally, I think that SE should just hire the Windower devs to go in and give the interface a badly needed overhaul.

[shukuffxi]

Slightly relevant derail: A long time ago I had a JP friend who was talking to me about Accuracy, and said something along the lines of "Well I have capped skill + 4 merits in dagger, and i'm wearing +42 Accuracy, for a total of ### [I don't remember the #, he was in his 50s on THF), and the amount of total Accuracy I need for <insert mob he was fighting> is about ###", as in, he calculated his Skill, Accuracy gear, and merits, and had a target # of accuracy he required to hit the mob consistently.

Would it be possible to build a Windower plugin around this, if that's an actual way to calculate your accuracy? It would require people to do the work to find out the accuracy to hit certain mobs, and it would have to detect your Skill/Acc/Food/JAs/Buffs/Job (1H/2H/H2H/R.Acc), but the end result would just be like, when you target a mob, it would just display next to it's HP "B+". On a rating scale, B+ would be like say 85% Accuracy or higher, on the targeted mob, with your current setup. This way we could sort of have a "visual representation" of our accuracy. Sounds like a huge amount of work, i'm no programmer or anything, just a random thought I had while looking at this thread.

[Amele]

IIRC, the conceptual scope of EVE Online is humongous on a scale that SE could never hope to reach. Hence, the GUI will reflect the complexity of the game itself.

the world is humongous yes; the interface is a piece of crap (worse than XI's; it's a minimalist interface with 80% of actions in context menus for click on object and the other 20% either on unlabeled hotkeys or unlabeled buttons on the UI, oh, and those unlabeled buttons have context menus. some of which spawn windows with options and unlabeled buttons (that have context menus)).

One of your key navigating tools is actually a context menu tied to the label of the name of the system you're in. and no, it's not marked as a button and doesn't do anything when you mouse over it, just when you happen to right click it.

common questions in new player chat (a channel you get autosubbed to for the first thirty days of play):

How do I move my ship?
How do I fire my guns?
why don't my new guns work?
Why can't I refine my ore?

there basically isn't a manual and while the tutorial is alot better than it was when I started, and this UI design is putatively intentional (they wanted analytic players who were willing to fight through it - it's designed for economy of action not ease of use.) but it sure as hell made me appreciate XI's system of (largely) flat menus and easy to remember text commands.

and you only control one ship (or one gun in a starbase) at a time, and you have fewer things to do than any given player in XI - max of 8 guns, max of 16 defensive modules, no ship has all 24 slots, most of the best items are actually passive, so it's rare to run a ship with more than about 8 or 9 'spell/ability/etc' things available to it, + movement.

[Amele]

Slightly relevant derail: A long time ago I had a JP friend who was talking to me about Accuracy, and said something along the lines of "Well I have capped skill + 4 merits in dagger, and i'm wearing +42 Accuracy, for a total of ### [I don't remember the #, he was in his 50s on THF), and the amount of total Accuracy I need for <insert mob he was fighting> is about ###", as in, he calculated his Skill, Accuracy gear, and merits, and had a target # of accuracy he required to hit the mob consistently.

Would it be possible to build a Windower plugin around this, if that's an actual way to calculate your accuracy? It would require people to do the work to find out the accuracy to hit certain mobs, and it would have to detect your Skill/Acc/Food/JAs/Buffs/Job (1H/2H/H2H/R.Acc), but the end result would just be like, when you target a mob, it would just display next to it's HP "B+". On a rating scale, B+ would be like say 85% Accuracy or higher, on the targeted mob, with your current setup. This way we could sort of have a "visual representation" of our accuracy. Sounds like a huge amount of work, i'm no programmer or anything, just a random thought I had while looking at this thread.

It isn't worth it really; you would need to build a representation of the accuracy provided by -every- piece of gear in the game, split by 2h and 1h, + find a way to grab skill (which isn't normally resident in memory to my knowledge, client fetches it when you look at the screen) and then also build a representation of every mob in the game (I'm working on that one, it's really just every mob family + each nm).

honestly, it's easier to just work it out on a case by case basis yourself when you need it. (/c is your friend here. normal and low evasion is 10 accuracy higher than the target's evasion and will be 80% accuracy assuming the target is EM.)

[Oulanbator]

and then also build a representation of every mob in the game (I'm working on that one, it's really just every mob family + each nm).

Hmmm I think there is a little confusion here.
You don't need to know anything about monsters to display the accuracy. Accuracy can be displayed as a base stat like Str or Atk. It would probably be a number between 300 and 500 for lv 75s.

It seems you are trying to represent the accuracy percent.
However this stat is the result of your stats, debuffs affecting you ( like blind or dex down), monster's lvs, stats, buffs or debuffs etc etc...
Since this stat is a result, it can be obtained by simply parsing the chat log.

Nothing proves you'll have the same accuracy on to exact twin monsters because of randomization.

[Amele]

Hmmm I think there is a little confusion here.
You don't need to know anything about monsters to display the accuracy. Accuracy can be displayed as a base stat like Str or Atk. It would probably be a number between 300 and 500 for lv 75s.

It seems you are trying to represent the accuracy percent.
However this stat is the result of your stats, debuffs affecting you ( like blind or dex down), monster's lvs, stats, buffs or debuffs etc etc...
Since this stat is a result, it can be obtained by simply parsing the chat log.

Nothing proves you'll have the same accuracy on to exact twin monsters because of randomization.

someone asked for a hit rate calculation, which involves knowing the evasion of the monster too. (B+ means 85% etc)

and you have the same hit rate* on two identical monsters because hit rate calculations are probability to hit and don't vary (they express the likelihood that the random number will return a favorable result.)

most melee at 75 have an accuracy between 297 and 410~ by the way. accuracy in excess of ~420 is abnormal, hard to get, and typically only necessary for lurkers and level 90+ evasive hnm.


*as you stated 'accuracy' is just a stat. but the original request was for hit rate.


edit: and we certainly can calculate expected hit rate before it happens. I can tell you that someone at level 75 with 334 accuracy against a level 81 gcolibri, will have an expected hit rate of 63%. (note that 334 accuracy is nearly naked.)

[byte]

I don't know if this has been mentioned already but you are wrong about not needing "Trade" in the main menu. It's impossible to trade to an NPC in your new design because you need to click on a target to bring up the mini menu but clicking on an NPC makes them talk.

[Pikarya]

JP's in specific, and most of the remaining users in the world with PS2's aren't giving them up anytime soon to move to X360/PS3/PC. So yeah, PS2 limitations as said above, and a billion times before. Old game with shitty development team is shitty.

[Kabbalah]

Hmmm I think there is a little confusion here.
You don't need to know anything about monsters to display the accuracy. Accuracy can be displayed as a base stat like Str or Atk. It would probably be a number between 300 and 500 for lv 75s.

See, here's where SE boggles my mind with their oversight. {Magic} Accuracy is probably one of the most important stats in the game; connected to accuracy is dexterity, weapon skill level, flat accuracy bonuses from equipment, set bonuses, songs, rolls, and food, and percentile accuracy bonuses from stuff like sushi. You'd think the designers would think it a good idea to actually say, "This is what your total accuracy is," but nope.

Would it be too difficult to insert an accuracy rating right underneath the attack rating and maybe an evasion rating right underneath the defense rating? I doubt even the PS2 would lumber underneath the stress of OMFG! two extra lines of text on the equipment screen.

SE can't blame everything on PS2 limitations. Sooner or later, the damned system is going to be totally extinct (already, it's nigh-impossible to purchase a standard PS2 or hard drive brand-new, for example), and then SE is completely out of excuses. They're either going to have to cut that albatross off their neck or just stop FFXI altogether, because MMOs are constantly moving forward and updating, yet here we are, bitching about an interface that hasn't changed since its inception.

For example, what's going to happen in another 3-5 years when this generation of consoles is totally obsoleted? Will there be some sort of overhaul in the near-future, or are we going to be saddled by a bunch of seven-year old artifacts? I mean, seriously, the 360 version of FFXI still has POL on it, even though XBOX Live is so much easier to deal with. But in 3-5 years, is FFXI still going to be online and ready to go, or is SE planning to make FFXI go the way of Earth and Beyond?

[Builttolast]

Harsh, but true. Legacy equipment has to be updated, and support for said equipment only lasts so long. But I expect the status quo will not change.

[Tymon]

more like console MMORPG is shitty in itself.

It's not even ps2 limitations it's console limitations, you can have all the mods you want but it fucks over a huge amount of people that can't add them.