FFXIV Random Speculation/Question thread III: Where's my beta invite?

[betatester]

Hi everyone. I have googled for a while and cant find an answer so Im kindly asking someone to help please!
Today I received an email saying I got selected as a beta tester for ffxiv "It is our pleasure to inform you that you have been selected for the role of
FINAL FANTASY XIV Beta Tester." :D
Problem is that when I try to log in here //dev-eu.ffxiv.com/ I get the following message "You could not log in because the service account in question is not registered. If you would like to log in to the service, please log in to the Square Enix Account Management System and register the service account."
Any ideas why? Please help! Thanks.

[N84D]

Give me a fucking break. I have 6 friends, all of us who applied for the beta the very first day. NONE of us have gotten in, I'm baffled.

My group of friends that applied for the beta the first day haven't gotten in either >.<

[Gokulo]

Holy shit, I feel this is going to be a bad day.

[Cureslime]

totally random, u may have to reroll a bunch until u get lucky

Creating a character with the same name in other slots helps for the first few attempts.

Suggestion that i saw someone else making about trying to get on a specific server is to keep the same name and roll 3 characters if none of the 3 gets in just delete one and remake. The other 2 will stop you from getting on to 2 servers slightly increasing the chance of getting on to the one that you want.

Ok cool thanks. Hope there are still only 10 servers or whatever.

[betatester]

Hi everyone. I have googled for a while and cant find an answer so Im kindly asking someone to help please!
Today I received an email saying I got selected as a beta tester for ffxiv "It is our pleasure to inform you that you have been selected for the role of
FINAL FANTASY XIV Beta Tester." :D
Problem is that when I try to log in here //dev-eu.ffxiv.com/ I get the following message "You could not log in because the service account in question is not registered. If you would like to log in to the service, please log in to the Square Enix Account Management System and register the service account."
Any ideas why? Please help! Thanks.

Sorry, I think I need to wait until tomorrow! All the excitement made me stupid... can anyone confirm?

By the way, I applied first day as well, but I am sure I read somewhere that applications are not selected based in time of submission

[Dro Smoke]

Sorry, I think I need to wait until tomorrow! All the excitement made me stupid... can anyone confirm?

By the way, I applied first day as well, but I am sure I read somewhere that applications are not selected based in time of submission

Yes you have to wait till tomorrow this should be in your email you got somewhere

================================================== ===================
* The Beta Test Site is scheduled to be made available at some time
on Tuesday, July 13, 2010.
If you find that you are unable to log in, please try again later
in the day.
================================================== ===================

[roippi]

All the excitement made me stupid... can anyone confirm?

I can confirm.

[betatester]

Yes you have to wait till tomorrow this should be in your email you got somewhere

================================================== ===================
* The Beta Test Site is scheduled to be made available at some time
on Tuesday, July 13, 2010.
If you find that you are unable to log in, please try again later
in the day.
================================================== ===================

Thanks and sorry about this! it was the weird error message what confused me.

Congrats to everyone who got it, and sorry about people that didnt...

[Katlan]

Give me a fucking break. I have 6 friends, all of us who applied for the beta the very first day. NONE of us have gotten in, I'm baffled.

because random generated invites are random you know

[Fanfon]

Nah man , i applied for PC and just got my invite today.

How the hell did you get banned in the space of a few hours :/

[Zeh]

so glad it was random. I thought they were accepting from like FFXI PoL accounts, mine of which is long gone. I was like a level 60 paladin lol. as of right now though, non testers aren't missing much I think. I did 4 guild leves and killed shit till it was over. Which is fine, but I want more time to do other things. I felt rushed. Also need name suggestions for something similar to an hero. Really upset that that didn't fit.

[betatester]

so glad it was random. I thought they were accepting from like FFXI PoL accounts, mine of which is long gone. I was like a level 60 paladin lol. as of right now though, non testers aren't missing much I think. I did 4 guild leves and killed shit till it was over. Which is fine, but I want more time to do other things. I felt rushed. Also need name suggestions for something similar to an hero. Really upset that that didn't fit.

I dont think it is entirely random. They pick people based on what you filled in the survey. I dont know what they were looking for, but for example, maybe they are looking for high school students just to mention something, so people that picked / are high school students had a better chance. Same thing with "have you played ffxi before?", maybe people that have, have a better chance. Etc...

[ScootSeraph]

because random generated invites are random you know

I'm not feeling a sense of entitlement because I applied the first day, I'm feeling a sense of shit luck.

[Purrrfect]

Spoiler: show

Alright, one day after and I've had everything sink in from last night. I'll start with the good, and then the bad. Everything I've listed here has been posted on the beta forums in their respected categories:

The good:

1) Battle speed. Its faster, provided you engage the mob with weapon drawn from range and run into the mob. Standing next to a mob engaged is to your disadvantage, as you'll only get a few its in before you become tired, and then the battle speed slows down to a crawl. This also makes it very tough to chain mobs, when combined with the awkward camera targeting (corpses come first before live mobs). The speed isn't bad, but its best to party if you want to mass chain so that everyone only has to land a few initial strikes, and can spend the time moving to the next mob to stay in active mode and recharge. Its probably too soon to worry about end-game, since we'll be stringing in skills that raise TP and hopefully stamina, but for longer low level fights, you better hope your defense is high or you don't have hate.
Troof here. When doing a leve, as soon as you hit the ring border on the minimap pull out your weapon and by the time you get to hte mob you won't have issues. Also, the direction you face is of paramount importance, and it won't tell you you're facing the wrong way, it will just say out of range.

Graphics: What can I say? Gorgeous. Kuya is right with some of the facial options not showing up very well, and I think some of that is because of the soft shaders and lighting options SE employs. Some of the eye and nose shapes are going to be hard to see from a distance, and I wish they'd upgrade the facial hair for the men (looks like it was painted on), but my Hyur looked damned good in cutscenes with his piercing, empty stare, so I won't hate on it.

Environment: I was able to fall down some taller rocks and whatnot this time around, compared to Alpha, so that was a relief. I didn't spend a lot of time just auto-running to see what kind of crap would trip me up, but I'll do that when I'm at a higher level with some armor and don't have to worry about some insane crab chewing my face off. A lot of shit out there, real close to town can one-shot your face off: far more than FFXI. I don't know if its just a Beta thing; them wanting us to see a wide variety of mobs and test them, but jesus fuck.
I never fell through anything, but I did see someone who had and was running in the air. I'd imagine the higher/aggressive stuff will get moved, but the [S] zones around the towns in XI make me think that isn't 100%. I hope though.

Guildelves: I hope they do a mix of Alpha and Beta here. The timer is too punishing, combined with the lack of crafting leves avaliable. There just isn't anything to do other than spend your precious few gold (you'll have, at best, 4k when you finish the quest chain, and at least 1k of that will go towards buying starter weapons for other classes), and cash comes very slowly, at least initially. I'm sure some people are going to say that Alpha was "EZ-mode" and will hail the return of our grinding overlords, but it was nice to be able to put in a good day's work and afford a new piece of armor for my Lancer in Alpha. I looked at some of the rewards for the level 10 leves and saw one that was worth 1,100 gil, so I'm going to push to hit lancer level 10 so I can get started on those and hopefully find some armor to upgrade so I'm not getting 3-shot.
My issue with leves is that the levemobs appear to be difficulty checking incorrectly. I did all of the fighting ones at bearded rock and at 3pug/5phys every levemob was red, despite me being able to handle 2 at once. I think part of the reason it was checking red was because I selected party-level while being solo. They need to refine their checking system still to account for 2 types of levels and party size.

Crafting: I worked with botany and mining. Botany is kind of fun, but slow right now, although I don't know if its server lag or just that classic FFXI slow. I'm guessing the latter, considering so many other maneuvers were quick, especially the opening flurry of hits in combat. The actual task of "hot-and-cold" on the tree is a little annoying, but nice when you win, although I'd like more lumber and less water shards, but that's neither here nor there. Gathering from the ground is much better, IMO, because you simply click and pray for the goods, then sprint off to the next one. If they stick with how slow the process is with in Beta for launch, RMT won't be having a lot of fun, that's for sure. They also need to do a better job of integrating both the mini-map and the full-scale map with the botanist abilities. The abilities claim to tell you the general direction of the next tree, but I didn't see anything but my pretty little recast timer come up, although I did get my flee speed from my second ability. Perhaps using the arrows or the orange circle that comes with a leve would be a solution.

Now for some of the bad:

Movement: God. Awful, and I'm not just talking about what they did to the direction keys. My biggest gripe is the flawed targeting and lock on feature that was ripped right from the entrails of FFXI (just for you, Hyan). Sure, rotating around a locked on mob with the cool heroic sidestep is great and all, but what if that mob hits you once for a third of your life, and you realize its time to roll out? Better not try to disengage to get your speed back. The odds of you hitting it more than once due to server lag and seeing the delay on the feedback message is extremely high, and each time you do it, you come to a COMPLETE stop. Meanwhile the mobs in this game are equipped with close range and long range abilities, so you're either getting tailed or pelted. You finally disengage your lock and start running, but the camera sits on your chest and presto, you've not run into a cliff wall without actually being able to see it. Using the first-person view isn't much better because of the combination of the changed movement controls and the fact that the camera pans slowly to the direction you eventually want to face.

Its like SE considered having to escape from battles as an afterthought. Many games give you abilities to allow you to escape, but unless FFXIV employs some crazy forms of crowd control or hate-shedding, I can't see much escape with this current system. The masses of corpses I saw on my server strewn about seem to emphasize that point. This is one place where the controls are just too similar to an outdated FFXI movement system, especially in battle.
Not using the lock will help some of your issues I think. I never used it personally and didn't have trouble running. You also need to "have faith" when you hit the active/passive button. I did have cases where I thought it didn't register so I hit it again and did the hokey pokey for a bit, but if you just go with the gut and hit the button and keep on gettin it you should be ok. The whole stopping to put your weapon away is pretty lulz though. Also, if the mob doesn't have a check dot, don't fuck with it lol. I know it's not an option for everyone, but the game is far easier to play on a controller, not to say that they shouldn't fix the keyboard/mouse. But I think they've shown they are not going to make the mouse work like every other mmo. /sadpanda

I'll do more later - this post is long enough as is.

Huge wall, I'm making some comments in it.

[BlackheartX]

Oh yeah, I was thinking over that +focus and +response(?) stats on armour someone was talking about a while back. The 'focus' part stuck in my head for some reason then I remembered it as an now-replaced term in synthesis. Which makes me think its gear specifically for systhesis which is pretty cool. With crafting stats HQ would be less about pot luck.

EDIT: While we're on the subject of crafting I'll slap this in. It's a compilation of Blacksmithing recipes some guy made in alpha. Might be different now.

Spoiler: show

First list credits to Fredthetaru.(isn't he on BG lol?)

Details:

Metals
(B) = Brass (Still unknown) (High tier weapons)
(Bz)= Bronze (Copper + Tin) (Low tier weapons)
(I) = Iron (Iron) (Middle tier weapons)
(C) = Copper (Copper)

Woods
(M)= Maple
(W) = Walnut
(E) = Elm
(A) = Ash

Namerecipe (X/Y) X = amount made. Y = Stack

High Quality items: Can be done by normal synthesis with a high focus (nuggets for example over 60) or by "Touch Up" after synthesis is 100%.
Take care with "Touch up" since is like if you were still crafting which means you can still BREAK the synthesis and the durability GREATLY varies each try of touch up.

Note: There are materials or items parts with the same name but the base (material made) is different.
In addittion I will try to put them as suposed lvl to be. From lower to higher.

Raw Materials

Copper Nugget (6/12) [HQ = +1] (C)
1 x Fire Crystal
4 x Copper Ore

Copper Ingot (1/12) [HQ = ?] (C)
2 x Fire Crystal
4 x Copper Nugget

Bronze Nuggets (6/12) [HQ = +1] (Bz)
1 x Fire Crystal
3 x Copper Ore
1 x Tin Ore

Bronze Ingot (1/12) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
2 x Fire Crystal
4 x Bronze Nugget

Iron Nuggets (6/12) [HQ = +1] (I)
1 x Fire Crystal
4 x Iron Ore

Iron Ingot (1/12) [HQ = ?] (I)
2 x Fire Crystal
4 x Iron Nugget

Brass Nugget (?/12) [HQ = ?] (B)
1 x Fire Crystal
? x ???

Equipements parts

File Head (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
2 x Wind Crystal
2 x Bronze Ingot

Pommel (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
1 x Water Crystal
1 x Bronze Ingot
1 x Bronze Nugget

Cross-Pein Hammer Head (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
2 x Earth Crystal
2 x Bronze Ingot
1 x Bronze Nugget

Birdsbeak Hammer Head (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
? x ? Crystal(s)
2 x Bronze Ingot
2 x Bronze Nugget

Spearhead (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
2 x Lightning Crystal
3 x Bronze Ingot
1 x Bronze Nugget

Spear Clasp (1/1) [HQ = +1) (Bz)
1 x Water Crystal
3 x Bronze Nugget

Spear Butt (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
1 x Water Crystal
1 x Bronze Ingot
3 x Bronze Nugget

Axe Ferrute (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
2x Bronzo Nuggets

Spatha Blade (1/1) [HQ = 1] (Bz)
3x Bronze Ingot

Knapping Hammer Head (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
2 x Earth Crystal
3 x Bronze Ingot
2 x Bronze Nugget

Hammer Butt (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
1 x Water Crystal
1 x Bronze Ingot

Pickaxe Head (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
2 x Earth Crystal
2 x Bronze Ingot
3 x Bronze Nugget

War Axe Head (1/1) [HQ = 1] (Bz)
2 x Wind Crystal
3 x Bronze Ingot
3 x Bronze Nugget

Axe Butt (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
1 x Water Crystal
1 x Bronze Ingot
2 x Bronze Nugget

Spatha Blade (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
2 x Wind Crystal
3 x Bronze Ingot

Labrys Head (1/1) [HQ = ?] (Bz)
2 x Wind Crystal
4 x Bronze Ingot

Pommel (1/1) [HQ = ?] (I)
1 x Water Crystal
1 x Iron Ingot
1 x Iron Nugget

Axe Ferrute (1/1) [HQ = ?] (I)
2x Iron Nugget

Cross-Pein Hammer Head (1/1) [HQ = ?] (I)
2 x Earth Crystal
2 x Iron Ingot
1 x Iron Nugget

Feather Clasp (1/1) [HQ = ?] (I)
1 x Iron Nugget
1 x Iron Sand

Labrys Head (1/1) [HQ = ?] (I)
4 x Iron Ingot
1 x Iron Sand

Baghnakh Talon (?/?) [HQ = ?] (I)
2 x Iron Ingot
2 x Iron Sand

CrossGuard (?/?) [HQ = +1] (I)
1x Iron Ingot
1x Iron Sand

Baghnakh Frame (1/1) [HQ = +1] (I)
3x Iron Nugget

Axe Butt (1/1) [HQ = ?] (I)
1x Iron Ingot
2x Iron Nugget

Spatha Blade (1/1) [HQ = ?] (I)
3x Iron Ingot

Weapons

Pickaxe (1/1) [HQ = ?]
1 x Pickaxe Head (Bz)
1 x Pickaxe Shaft (M)
1 x Grip Wrapping (Undyed Hempen Cloth)

Bronze Spear (1/1) [HQ = ?]
1 x Spearhead (Bz)
1 x Spear Clasp (Bz)
1 x Spear Shaft (M)
1 x Spear Butt (Bz)

Decorated Bronze Spear (1/1) [HQ = ?]
1 x Bronze Spear
1 x Spear Clasp (B)
1 x Spear Butt (B)

Cross-pein Hammer (1/1) [HQ = ?]
1 x Ice Crystal
1 x Cross-pein Hammer Head (Bze)
1 x Hammer Grip (W)
1 x Grip Wrapping (Undyed Hempen Cloth)

Iron Cross-pein Hammer (1/1) [HQ = ?]
1 x Ice Crystal
1 x Cross-pein Hammer Head (I)
1 x Hammer Grip (E)
1 x Grip Wrapping (Undyed Hempen Cloth)

Birdsbeak Hammer (1/1) [HQ = ?]
1 x Birdsbeak Hammer Head (Bz)
1 x Hammer Grip (A)
1 x Grip Wrapping (Undyed Canvas)

Baghnakhs (1/1) [HQ = ?]
3 x Baghnakh Talon (I)
1 x Baghnakh Frame (I)
1 x Baghnakh Handle (E)

War Axe (1/1) [HQ = ?]
1 x War Axe Head (Bze)
1 x Axe Haft (E)
1 x Axe Ferrule (Bz)
1 x Axe Butt (Bz)
1 x Grip Wrapping (Soot-Black Buffalo Leather)

Labrys (1/1) [HQ = ?]
1 x Labrys Head (Bz)
1 x Axe Haft (A)
1 x Axe Ferrule (Bz)
1 x Axe Butt (Bz)
1 x Grip Wrapping (Red Ochre Buffalo Leather)

Iron Labrys (1/1) [HQ = ?]
1 x Labrys Head (I)
1 x Axe Haft (E)
1 x Axe Ferrule (I)
1 x Axe Butt (I)
1 x Grip Wrapping (Uncolored Buffalo Leather)

What type of Vagrant Story bullshit is this.

[bluestar]

the girlfriend also has an invite as from 7:37am this morning :D

[Fanfon]

What type of Vagrant Story bullshit is this.

whut?

[Edgie]

TCP/UDP Ports
The FINAL FANTASY XIV Beta Version may use one of the following ports listed below. If you are using a router, you may have to adjust your router’s settings to allow packet transfer through these ports.

UDP 55296 – 55551
TCP 54992 – 55551
UDP 80, 443

Tried that, doesnt seem to be taking it, my belkin router...

[BlackheartX]

whut?

Read the spoiler and look primarily at weapons.

[naninani]

What type of Vagrant Story bullshit is this.

Vagrant Story is probably the least bullshit thing SE has created in the last decade.