Random Complaint Thread. No white knighting allowed.

[Sephiroth]

I like the physical level, but they need to do something to make exp a not worthless value after playing for roughly three months. Just add something like merit points. I hate the idea of all this exp getting wasted. And I'm still not sure why they decided to make exp gains so large in relation to sp gains.

I guess because physical level requires about four times as much to rank up than class ranks. But it's still too easy. The huge gains mostly come from crafting, it's a bit more balanced for battle classes.

[CasualPlayer]

Elrina: I realize you've gotta go ahead and do you and you're long winded as fuck, that's just who you are. But often times you really make a good point and I'd like to continue reading through your debates you have with the other forum personalities. However, when I get to a lot of your posts and they're half a book long I find myself just having to skip past it.

I'm really not trying to troll you and you don't know me from Adam so you may say I don't give a fuck whether this person takes the time to read my shit or not. But I know there are people like me skipping past your posts and I think you make some good points sometimes so maybe just in the back of your mind try and shorten it up a little.

[Rivian]

Well yeah, but when you think about how the physical level goes across all classes and makes your character permanently stronger it seems like it should take a lot longer to lvl it up than class rank. I just think the exp given is way too high in proportion to SP.

But that still doesn't change the fact that it eventually becomes a meaningless value. I still don't know what SE was thinking with that, may as well leave it out altogether.

[Aratharn]

It's annoying not being able to join a party while your party is engaged (even more so if you are trying to logout or drop party)

But I guess they do that to keep people from exploiting using the crystals for mp?

Sucks when your LS is killing something and someone logs on mid-fight.

[jPuff]

It's annoying not being able to join a party while your party is engaged (even more so if you are trying to logout or drop party)

But I guess they do that to keep people from exploiting using the crystals for mp?

Sucks when your LS is killing something and someone logs on mid-fight.

This highlights a huge design flaw. As you mentioned, I realize that the purpose is to prevent people from exploiting the crystal for MP, but any system that needs to block the ability to invite during battle to protect itself is automatically complete shit. Period. End of story. Like everything else in the game it's just something they threw in without testing it even slightly to see if it actually worked.

[Sephiroth]

I think they did it to make NM fights more of a challenge. In XI linkshells would boot people from the fight team if they died and bring in a fresh player. May as well give everyone infinite HP if you're going to allow that shit.

[Alderaan]

I think they did it to make NM fights more of a challenge. In XI linkshells would boot people from the fight team if they died and bring in a fresh player. May as well give everyone infinite HP if you're going to allow that shit.

Nothing wrong with that if you're having the NM fight in an open world non instance situation. It's the same "punish everyone" instead of coming up with better challenges mindset that SE developed XIV around.

[Sephiroth]

Nothing wrong with that if you're having the NM fight in an open world non instance situation. It's the same "punish everyone" instead of coming up with better challenges mindset that SE developed XIV around.

How can anything be challenging if you just zerg it with as many people as possible? People should be rewarded for beating a difficult fight through skill, not bending the game mechanics to beat it no matter what. Then again that's all people ever did when a challenge was thrown at them in XI. Managing death, your MP pool and staying alive should be part of the challenge, it's why we have a limited amount of HP and MP. Take that away and anything becomes a case of when you beat it rather than if you have the skill to beat it.

Now what is retarded is having all of these world NMs be designed for a max of 15 members. If you're in the extra group with your LS you miss out on the fun until people leave. Why not allow one party to take on one mob in the NM party and another party take on another for example? The party leaders would have to be in the same linkshell for obvious reasons. You could then make the extra mobs in the NM party more powerful.

[Lucavi]

Played for a few days, did like 10-20 r20 leves going from 19 to 23. Then I get an Ulduah leve against Cactuars, they're arranged in group of 3.

1 Star difficulty, they each use 1k needles. Died like 2 times with many other close calls (glad I had like 1100hp) while I never went KO in all other leves before that. Design wise, it's so stupid I dont even know where to start.

Its classic, bro. It supposed to be fun! Bring back old memories of Final Fantasy! You get to see cactuars, and we all know what cactuars do!

In all seriousness, though, those cactuars drop moss which is needed for dyes, so its not all bad.

@Sepiroth: That's not the FF way, or at least, the FF-Online way. They modeled this system at trying to "fix" the flaws from the last one, and you're seeing how all of it is working out. Instead of dumping the old system and going with something completely new, they tried to simply advance XI's system, which was limited enough as it is. So yes, no more kicking people out and inviting new people in for a world-boss. Hooray.

The downside? A clusterfuck of inconvenience that starts at level 1, or whenever you first want to invite your friends into your party while getting your ass kicked. That's the problem I have with the system: they try to fix something for a particular instance (in this case, high level players, or any skilled players trying to fight tough bosses without party number constraints), and, because they never have the foresight to see what their boneheaded fixes could also break, they wind up screwing things up for the rest of the instances.

That's a terrible way to convince your fans, not to mention players of the previous game, that "hey, we fixed a lot of the problem with out last game, so come play our new one!"

[Sephiroth]

I suppose a better solution would have been to make the invite thing mob specific, so that it works on anything that isn't an NM.

[Kaylia]

The fuck does this have to do 'awesome area' or 'random minigames' (except that you can skip awesome area faster now)? Increasing the drop rate doesn't make the quests any more entertaining or diverse than before. Those things need development time, not this meaningless bullshit.

Because farming a coffer key for 7 hours was a thrilling experience? Low drop rates were not fun and will never be. Forcing the players to fight different monsters and explore different part of the area is perfectly acceptable, and does contribute to the diversity by increasing the # of things you see every hours.

Having to design half the amount of quests also increase the time you can spend to add an unique touch to certain quests. And like I said before, these quests might be diversified, but they are still extremely simple from a technical standpoint. WoW is not a technological/design feats.

Too easy? Oh gee, that's something specific to this MMO's leveling content, so let's point that out. Time to go play some WoW for the difficult leveling content.

A cactuar that has an unavoidable one shot moves is retarded, two star leves that one shot you when the 1 star is a joke is retarded. A class that can one shot enemy from far away when another can barely scratch it is retarded....but none of this is difficult.

FFXIV is braindead, unbalanced and frustrating. If there was a certain challenge like demon soul, no one would mind the frustration that come from the challenge. It it was balanced, and fun, no one would mind the lack of difficulty...however, FFXIV picked the worst out of every world and created a terrible game.

And if you had half a brain, you would probably understand that their clumsy system may not stay the same for all eternity, just like the level cap won't stay at 50. Therefore your whole argument full of 'facts' of what they will or won't do was and is full of shit. The system's maximum possible difficulty is fine for what content there is currently. Anything beyond that is completely and utterly up in the air, which is something your little mathbrain can't grasp.

Way to not address the point. They can redesign it completely, they are still going to be stuck with a laggy engine, latency, and have a fucking braindead battle system like any rpg. They are so far away from fixing the issue that annoys everyone it's just unlikely to see anything good come out of it.

Sure, a combination of gameplay mechanics and monster/encounter behaviour is what made them hard. Not just one or the other. MMO's are easy as fuck because monster strength and behaviour for basic content is pathetic. It doesn't matter if it's Bayonetta gameplay or FF1, if the enemies are drooling retards. You brought up difficulty because the mob behaviour doesn't challenge you- welcome to leveling in an MMO, don't be too surprised the 10th time you aren't challenged by basic shit.

Difficulty while leveling in FFXIV is broken (mixture of braindead content + horrible balance + gameplay far more simple than your average mmo)

The issue with leveling is not that it is easy, it never was, it's the mix of all the garbage and fake handicap you have to go through. Lack of challenge will be an endgame issue that appears at a later time because ultimately, they can't add genuinely challenging contents in a poorly designed games like this one

They would need to make a 180 degree turns and ride in that direction for a few years to ever get to a "challenging" region. It's not impossible obviously, but it won't happen. It's not worth it at this point to redesign the game from scratch, and the current playerbase doesnt give a shit about challenge, all they want is the painful content to be replaced with something they could mindlessly grind for years.

So no, you won't see challenging contents. The odds they manage to flip everything around is simply too small.

[Lucavi]

I suppose a better solution would have been to make the invite thing mob specific, so that it works on anything that isn't an NM.

I can't even think of a solution right now; the situation in question is such a quagmire. I think a lot of it has to do with the actual bosses and how tough the mechanics are, rather than the concept of throwing bodies at it. But its easier to change invite situation than it is to change game and battle mechanics.

[Dezolis]

So what was the rationale for requiring points to equip Actions, Traits and Abilities that you've already learned? I'm sure this won't matter much for those that are close to or at max rank, but this never made any sense to me. Just seems like yet another unnecessary annoyance.

[Kaylia]

So what was the rationale for requiring points to equip Actions, Traits and Abilities that you've already learned? I'm sure this won't matter much for those that are close to or at max rank, but this never made any sense to me. Just seems like yet another unnecessary annoyance.

They need to impose a maximum limit or you could equip everything from every class.

Of course, in practice, it's kinda useless since you always use the same damn thing and more room just mean more buff that you wont use for the most part.

[The Q]

another unnecessary annoyance

Pretty much answered your own question.

I'm sure the rationale was CUSTOM CLASSES MAKAN GAEMS but like EVERYTHING ELSE they had on paper they failed to implement in a meaningful and/or fun way.

[Dezolis]

They need to impose a maximum limit or you could equip everything from every class.

Weren't you limited to what spells/abilities you had access to depending on the levels of your other DoW/DoM classes anyways, sort of like FFXI was with subjobs? I guess it makes sense from a balancing standpoint if you had all classes at high or max rank and could spam certain actions, but couldn't they just lower the effectiveness or increase recast timers when they are not being used on your main character (which I thought they had done to some extent)? This just seems like a shitty and lazy implementation for what should have been fairly straightforward.

[Kaylia]

Weren't you limited to what spells/abilities you had access to depending on the levels of your other DoW/DoM classes anyways, sort of like FFXI was with subjobs? I guess it makes sense from a balancing standpoint if you had all classes at high or max rank and could spam certain actions, but couldn't they just lower the effectiveness or increase recast timers when they are not being used on your main character (which I thought they had done to some extent)? This just seems like a shitty and lazy implementation for what should have been fairly straightforward.

I'm not defending the terrible unbalanced system they gave us, I was simply answering your question about the rationality behind the ability cost system. They wanted to avoid a situation where you could be everything at the same time, and wanted people to specialize themselves in some sort of way.

Point limits is one way to do it, but that alone obviously doesnt make it balanced or meaningful as we can see. Since there is 0 synergy between abilities, you just pick the best available (strongest attack, strongest tp dump and strongest survival skills) and ignore everything else.

[Elrina]

Kaylia is right about why they did it, but they really should have just made the points apply specifically to abilities/etc. from other classes than the one you're currently on. It's stupid having to utilize those ability points and balance your own class's abilities with the "sub-abilities" you use from other classes that have reduced effectiveness.

All of this, from the invite problems to ability points issues to point re-allocation difficulties to underlying server checks is because the original design of the game, just like FFXI, was based on a theme of restriction. When they conceived of each idea, rather than consider how that feature could be used in fun and interesting ways, they considered first how they could restrict the player's use of it. Then how it might be used, and tweak it to balance with everything else. To some extent restrictions are always required, to achieve balance and prevent abuse, but it's what kind of restriction and how it actually affects you when playing the game that matters.

It's the largest and most problematic issue, and the reason that I've been so glad that the old upper management team was resigned in favor of a new one. Designing the game around ways to restrict the players isn't fun. The design should be done with an emphasis on freedom, on the sense that you aren't feeling restricted (even though you are, to some extent), and then reduced down gradually to balance out with everything else, till a solid balance is found. It's just a fundamental difference in the way the development was perceived, and it's obvious in pretty much every aspect of this entire game that they designed every feature with the thought of how they could restrict the player's use of it in mind.

The only reason I can imagine why is to maintain a level of control over everyone. Like a tyrany which is happier controlling it's citizens lives, versus the free nation who grants it's people fundamental freedoms. Both regimes can function, but one will always be a much more enjoyable place to be, and allow people to flourish and thrive much more effectively than when controlled and forced to comply.

[Lucavi]

So what was the rationale for requiring points to equip Actions, Traits and Abilities that you've already learned? I'm sure this won't matter much for those that are close to or at max rank, but this never made any sense to me. Just seems like yet another unnecessary annoyance.

Nice avatar. Yeah, without point caps, you'd equip everything.

[Sephiroth]

You can easily fill two bars with skills now anyway, you'd still be limited if there were no caps.

It seems someone left their bot running on my server next to the Ul'dah repair guy. The dude has been bouncing up and down about 5 times per second all night. I'm guessing the bot thinks there's an obstacle and is trying to climb over it but since the character isn't moving it just keeps on jumping up and down. I'd bet this is how people run through walls (often see at doblyn camps), it just climbs right over them.

I wonder when SE is going to start focusing on customer service, it's going to become the main complaint once they fix what we've spent the past few months bitching about in this thread. Especially when we start paying for this shit. You'd think a GM would appear and jail the character at the least because you don't get any more blatant than that. I've not bothered reporting it because last time I reported a bot I got an automated response.