FFXIV "When is it coming?" Thread

[LinktheDeme]

Relic Knuckles with Asuran, Hexa with the relic maul (provided all six hits landed), and Samurai Penta with the Relic lance all returned over 100% TP, so yeah.

Shit was broken as hell, but man was it ever fun while it lasted.

Samurai cannot use the relic lance

[Eaglestrike]

even that took a long time without a good dynamis group that went often.

...it's a random drop off of almost any mob in almost any dynamis. It's luck at best and not that tough, you should be able to get a stage 1 weapon just doing one of each of the 4 base cities (all that existed early on, I believe) so it's like two weeks to almost be guaranteed a drop.

[Rokku]

Samurai cannot use the relic lance

Right, I don't know why I said that. DRG/SAM was capable of nonstop or near nonstop Penta Spam iirc though.

My bad, too early in the morning and too much NyQuil atm.

[Lucavi]

Right, I don't know why I said that. DRG/SAM was capable of nonstop or near nonstop Penta Spam iirc though.

My bad, too early in the morning and too much NyQuil atm.

Drg/Sam could bust out near-nonstops without the relic lance, as well. Double jumps + med + a potential 60 tp return per penta made for a formidable glass cannon.

I can only say formidable because back then, drgs had access to basically 0 +atk gear, and could really only "pimp" themselves on assault jerkin, Scorp harness and pcharm. The lack of gear choices just made the sobering reality for drgs even worse after they lost the only real niche they had in the game: putting out steady burst damage, then jumping the hate away.

[Vacht]

Right, I don't know why I said that. DRG/SAM was capable of nonstop or near nonstop Penta Spam iirc though.

My bad, too early in the morning and too much NyQuil atm.

Couldn't monks get 100% tp or close to it with relic knucks and asuran fists, before the tp nerf?

[Draylo]

Bet it comes out in December like most preorders predict!

[Purrrfect]

Couldn't monks get 100% tp or close to it with relic knucks and asuran fists, before the tp nerf?

I think you skipped a few posts...

[Xavier]

Whenever I see a rushed product, I always think of Working Designs, and their steadfast refusal to release a game before it was as close to perfect as possible. I loved them for that. And then I remember that this policy helped put Working Designs out of business. So I guess I'll settle for whatever the hell Square decides to release, whenever the hell they decide to release it, and just hope they learned a lot from FFXI and won't make the same mistakes twice.

[Spira]

Dec 2010 does seem likely.

The game is physically already there, as in.. the graphical infrastructure is all set in place since before the alpha tests began.

The things they're really working on with alpha testing are UI, controls, and gameplay - parts of the game that can actually be changed even after the game is released. Its better to do it all before the fact, however, which is what the alpha is helping to do.. speed up the process through feedback that point out what can be improved and general errors that exist.

People seem to keep harping on the server load thing as if its an issue. The load tests are intentional and they know just as well what should count as decent server-load performance.

Going by my personal experience with FFXI back in its heyday, discounting Saturday night peaks, I'd say the overall connectivity of the game was great. There's never been such a thing as server log-in queues in FFXI... so I don't suppose they want to start that in XIV.

And whilst alpha IS underway, there are a lot of things they can / are doing in the background even without having to receive testing feedback. The server problems are a kink that has to be resolved eventually, and its good that something like that has surfaced so early.. for which they might pay more attention to it in future tests.

Personally, I'd think a targeted late Nov / early Dec release would be likely, if SE wants to rely on the traditional spree period to help boost the games outreach.

[Vacht]

I think you skipped a few posts...

lol whoops...


anyways, wasnt FFXIII scheduled for PS2 then SE pushed it back foreversville to release it on PS3? I figured thats why 13 was so bare, because i twas ported to ps3 so late. Took too much time to make it look perty. Even my girlfriend was like "whoa..." and she hates video games for the most part.

[brand]

Samurai cannot use the relic lance

Last little aside, the polearm sam I was referring to is just the Penta Spammer. If I recall correctly, a full contact penta returned around 60% TP. This, during Meditate often resulted in 3 back-to-back strikes. People used this a lot for M5-2 among other things. I can't remember with any certainty when Meikyou was changed to give 300% on activation.

[Kirb]

From the other thread

I too design my games without consideration as to whether anyone else will be able to play them.

All sarcasm aside, I can't think of a single thing more important to a MMO than a functioning log-in server. Game could be 20 years in the making with a billion dollar budget, if I'm stuck with an error message at the character select screen it all means nothing.

I don't doubt that from a design standpoint it probably comes near the end, but if you're going to launch an alpha campaign with a fixed number of people, you damn well ought to be able to handle a predetermined volume of traffic for 4 hours twice a week. People can say what they want, first few weeks of alpha have been a mess and it's fairly evident they're nowhere close to a stable final product.

That's all very well and good but as I said, the stability of a client is not logically indicative of how complete the total product is. It's well within the scope of SE's ability to finish a release candidate before the deadline, considering the amount of resources they have. I'm not saying they will, but it's not like deadlines similar to this are uncommon in the industry, and typically, login servers are among the last core assets to be implemented.

You can think whatever you want, but alphas (betas have some semblance of polish, client or otherwise) are messy as hell in my experience, especially when multiplayer is concerned, and I think that's where people are making the mistake. People are expecting this alpha to behave like a beta, because typically those are the only ones released to the public; but honestly, this is (more or less) par for the course.

[justamemory]

added more substantial source to OP.

[Loaar]

Well, the bit you added is alot more interesting than the original OP, but it doesn't say in that edit anywhere that its due for December 2010 release.

What I am interested in is the character growth subject. It says they are planning to test the speed at which people are progressing, then wipe, implement a 2nd system and test again.

EDIT: I think this thread has run its course, I'll add my speculation to the proper thread.

[ghanima]

From the other thread

That's all very well and good but as I said, the stability of a client is not logically indicative of how complete the total product is. It's well within the scope of SE's ability to finish a release candidate before the deadline, considering the amount of resources they have. I'm not saying they will, but it's not like deadlines similar to this are uncommon in the industry, and typically, login servers are among the last core assets to be implemented.

You can think whatever you want, but alphas (betas have some semblance of polish, client or otherwise) are messy as hell in my experience, especially when multiplayer is concerned, and I think that's where people are making the mistake. People are expecting this alpha to behave like a beta, because typically those are the only ones released to the public; but honestly, this is (more or less) par for the course.

Login server has busted 3 times in the last week and a half on my current project, it probably breaks at least once per build but sometimes more. Nearly every single time it breaks it's from a different problem along the chain. Login and Authentication being busted is in no way indicative of how stable and/or complete the rest of the game is.

So once again: Login gets busted all the time on server-client or web-based games. It's nothing new.

Honestly I don't understand why people bitch at things being broken in an Alpha, it comes with the territory. For the record "beta" is usually pretty buggy and awful too, depends on when your Content Complete and Code Complete fall in the development cycle.

[loyaltrekie]

Honestly I don't understand why people bitch at things being broken in an Alpha, it comes with the territory. For the record "beta" is usually pretty buggy and awful too, depends on when your Content Complete and Code Complete fall in the development cycle.

I would agree that beta's used to be buggy but nowadays they tend to be more marketing tools then QA tools(aside from first wave closed beta). More or less most games that enter second/third wave closed as well as open beta just use it for extra publicity(open beta generates quite a lot) and very large stress testing and hardware testing across all hardware. Hardly every will you find much 'unplayable' due to crashes/bugs/etc in the late beta stage. Used to be in the past that companies actually used beta for free QA on a massive scale - but that idea has dwindled drastically for console, pc, and all genres.

[Hyan]

I too design my games without consideration as to whether anyone else will be able to play them.

All sarcasm aside, I can't think of a single thing more important to a MMO than a functioning log-in server. Game could be 20 years in the making with a billion dollar budget, if I'm stuck with an error message at the character select screen it all means nothing.

I don't doubt that from a design standpoint it probably comes near the end, but if you're going to launch an alpha campaign with a fixed number of people, you damn well ought to be able to handle a predetermined volume of traffic for 4 hours twice a week. People can say what they want, first few weeks of alpha have been a mess and it's fairly evident they're nowhere close to a stable final product.

As far as I know, you can't test if 2500 people will be able to log in to the servers at once without problems before you, you know, actually try it.

And this is what SE did. On their end everything looked good, and I'm sure they didn't expect this kind of server unstability. How can they know for sure before actually trying though? Even if the whole staff logged in at once, that's probably 200 people at best (and even then everyone is located at the same place, so I dunno what conclusions can be drawn from that). I'm sure everything was fine at that point.

But yeah, if you think that they should fix unforeseen problems before they even know about them, I think you are expecting a bit too much.

Also this part of the interview worries me a bit:

Regarding that character growth, Tanaka said to expect character data to get wiped out mid way through the alpha test. The reason for this is that they have two different patterns for character growth speed that they want to try out. Once they've gathered enough data for the current pattern, they'll wipe out the player data and try out the second pattern.

I'm sure all the testers will be saying "waah exping is too slow bring back the faster leveling Q_Q" and if SE actually listens, we'll have a game that takes 2 weeks to finish with no more content in sight. Faster is not always better... and I wish the testers would realize this.

Lol, yeah right.

[Gulkeeva]

Keeping on topic...!

Can't wait for ffxiv release, considering the upcoming changes to wow for its expansion, ffxiv will be a nice change of pace!

[Loaar]

As far as I know, you can't test if 2500 people will be able to log in to the servers at once without problems before you, you know, actually try it.

And this is what SE did. On their end everything looked good, and I'm sure they didn't expect this kind of server unstability. How can they know for sure before actually trying though? Even if the whole staff logged in at once, that's probably 200 people at best (and even then everyone is located at the same place, so I dunno what conclusions can be drawn from that). I'm sure everything was fine at that point.

But yeah, if you think that they should fix unforeseen problems before they even know about them, I think you are expecting a bit too much.

This.

Also, bear in mind all those people expecting SE to have already have perfect login servers without any decent testing:

- What is causing the server instability?

Tanaka: We have the same amount of testers in each region, but from our experience beta-testing FFXI, we figured only 50% of players would be logging in at the same time.

They were setup to deal with a certain number of logins based on historical evidence, and interest far exceeded their expectations. Combine this with normal teething issues the problem is compounded, yet it is still 100% normal for this stage of the process.

Not having things 100% before they have been tested is in no way an indication of the development stage of the total project.

[Enos]

hmmm....nice.

PLENTY of time to build a new machine

not to mention a machine 3x as fast for the same money