synaesthetic

The problem with that is it would incorporate a great deal of horizontal progression which is something Square seems to dislike (despite loving it in FFXI for years). I think part of the reason is it's much easier to keep the game "balanced" if every time a new tier of content comes out, all the old gear becomes obsolete. It also tends to limit the amount of worthwhile content you have at any given point, which I feel is problematic. Square is trying to have their cake and eat it too by utilizing linear vertical progression and gate new content behind old content. This is not smart at all. I am really personally annoyed that I cannot attempt Turn 6 without completing Turn 5 first, or that people have to kill Titan and Ifrit EX to attempt Leviathan EX. No, Square, this is not the way to do it. They should not have made the new tier i100-115. Linear vertical progression only results in two things: disposable content and power creep. Honestly I would throw away the entire idea of "item level" in the first place. The whole "gearscore" situation is a stupid one to begin with. I know it's more difficult to design and handle, but the loot that drops from The Binding Coil of Bahamut, which is launch content as you know, should still be relevant... five years from now. When I played FFXI in 2007, where the current content tier was Wings of the Goddess, people still raided in Sky, Rise of the Zilart content that came out several years earlier. I don't understand why MMO developers insist upon spending thousands and thousands of dollars and labor-hours on developing content they fully intend to "throw away" within three to six months.

I've always said the best way to make an MMO with a vibrant, thriving economy is to make equipment fairly easy to come by, but make sure that when it breaks, it actually breaks and can't be "fixed." The best idea that I've had to solve the usual gear grind vs. consequences argument in any MMO (though this applies to themeparks in particular) is to disjoin equipment from "stats." Take this hypothetical: you have clothes, armor and weapons that you can equip and use, and these may allow you to do something and give a logical bonus. The big bonuses, though, would come from intangible things like setting talents and skills or acquiring "mods" which stand in for the idea of "gear" as a themepark MMO views it. This way you wouldn't ever need a vanity system because the concept would be superfluous and irrelevant; your clothes are mostly cosmetic. You'd get a suit of chain armor and all it'd have is a defense modifier. To get bonuses to your raw stats and derived stats you'd need to take passive skills or find mods that you can link to your character. You get a sword, and it lets you do sword attacks. You can set active sword skills and use the sword to perform those attacks. You can set sword mods to make yourself more deadly with a sword (for damage-dealers) or more defensive (for tanks). But all the actual sword, on its own, lets you do is hit people with a sword and use sword skills. Then you get into incomparables--i.e. the weapons are all zero-sum, balancing speed, accuracy and power together to cancel out. You use mods (rather than gear) to "get positive." Rambly post is rambly, but the idea is that you could make a system in which gear is both desirable and easy to obtain, and a world where everything is essentially a consumable item. There's a real easy way to do this, too; simply give all items hitpoints and whenever the hitpoints reach 0, the item is broken and suffers penalties, and if the hitpoints reach some negative number, the item is destroyed and can't be repaired. The more damaged an item is when it is repaired, the more maximum HP it loses. Eventually the item can't be repaired further and can be discarded, sold as junk or recycled for raw materials to build something else. You could even "have your cake and eat it too" by creating legendary weapons that can't lose maximum HP, but cost a lot to repair (as they're magical, exceptionally-crafted artifacts that only a few master artisans could possibly maintain) and make these drop from some big fuck-off dragon. Then you'd have both the whole "get loot and feel good about it" bit. You'd save your legendary sword for fighting those big fuck-off dragons, but use your normal sword for dispatching random highwaymen.

The timing is correct if they're trying to keep to their original schedule of a major "point release" every three months. They slipped on the timeframe with both 2.1 and 2.2, so hopefully this fairly fast half-point release means that they've finally pulled in enough money so that the SE suits take Yoshida seriously.

What exactly is "toxic" (good lord I hate that word and the context in which it's used these days) about what I said? Am I making personal attacks? Am I shaming people for enjoying XIV? No. I like this game! I play it and enjoy it (except for Titan but who likes Titan?) and I sure as hell don't see anything in my above post that even approaches slinging ad hominem attacks. All I did was list a long (but certainly not exhaustive) list of gripes I have with the game and the dev team's apparent unwillingness to learn from their competition. MMO devs as a whole seem to have a real problem with making the same mistakes that their contemporaries (and worse, their predecessors) have already made. I don't post on the official forums because I can't; I was permanently banned because a whiteknight got butthurt and asked his little whiteknight buddies to report my post when I questioned why so many people seemed to derive pleasure from denying other people enjoyment.

I don't complain about games just to be a downer. When it comes to single-player games I may offer my opinion but I won't go on about it. MMOs are a different story--if I complain loudly and long enough, the developers may realize that they need to change things up. If you were the customer of a service, say mobile phone service, and the service was "okay" but not spectacular, but no other service filled your needs, would you simply remain silent about it? Or would you complain every time your signal tanked for an entire day? @Ignacius: I really think there's a market for what you're talking about, but it's definitely not the mainstream MMO market. That sort of thing appeals to the Kickstarter indie crowd. Most MMO players don't want to deal with that kind of gameplay. How do I know? Old MMOs had those punishing and harsh gameplay mechanics, and people complained about them so much that they were changed. New games that came out didn't have them because most players didn't want them, and the developers saw they could attract far more customers if the games weren't so incredibly punishing. I know that if XIV decided to revert to 1999-2000 era MMO mechanics, I would probably quit right away. I'm not a teenager anymore. I don't have time for a game that you cannot solo in, a game where even the weakest monsters can slaughter you with impunity, a game where you have to dedicate at least a four-hour chunk of time in order to actually progress at all. I'm an adult and I have other things to do besides waste all of my day playing video games. Granted, I do spend many hours playing them (I am a gamer, after all) but I would not play a "hardcore" MMO. I bet you that most MMO players in 2014 would not want to, either. We just don't have that kind of time anymore.

Uhm, what? What does Square understand that Trion Worlds, Blizzard, Arenanet and countless other developers do not? XIV is only "innovative" in Yoshida's mind. It's not a bad game--if it was, I wouldn't be playing it at all--but it's so far behind the times it's not even funny. Square's reading out of a playbook that's eight years old, which, ironically, is the same mistake Bioware and EA made with SWTOR. Why did it take six months for us to get a crippled costuming system? Why did it take six months for us to get a chatbox transparency slider? Why can we still not send tells in dungeons? Why can we not leave a dungeon and then return to it without resetting it? Why do the dungeons have pointless timers? Why can't we invite a FC member to join our in-progress dungeon run when a random drops? Why do I have to close any active windows to accept a party, linkshell or free company invite? Why can't I access the Free Company or Linkshell interfaces while I'm in a dungeon? Why is the world so small and shut in? Why doesn't Square try to make FATEs fun instead of just required? Why is the macro scripting so limited? Where is that add-on API and support we were promised before release? Why is Crystal Tower so hilariously faceroll easy? Why can't we queue into it with a full raid yet? Where's horizontal gear progression? Why is the endgame gearing metagame so boring? Why are they gating new content behind deprecated content? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to design a fight that requires precision split-second timing in a game that's already astonishingly laggy? Why haven't you stopped running the game on toasters? Why can't we have scalar raiding at endgame instead of being arbitrarily limited to how many people we can take? Why is there virtually nothing entertaining or rewarding to do in the open world at level 50 except busy work? Why are the enemy animations desynced from the actual attacks? Why is the character creation so limited? Why is the main storyline so lazy, and why does it contain so many fetch quests? Why are we given the hopelessly-transparent illusion of choice with assigning attribute points instead of having a standard skill modifier system or talent system? Why is the attribute bonus determined by class instead of job? Why do classes even exist at all beyond level 30? Why are cross-class actions so limited? Why is every endgame boss room a big circle? WHY AM I ASKING WHY SO MANY TIMES?!?! This is because Square-Enix clearly does not understand the fundamental aspect of what makes a world-class themepark MMORPG in 2014. That's not to say it isn't fun. It is, but it could be so much more.

This is the UI setup I use. I made a new menu bar from hotbars because the nested options menu is fucking stupid. I also moved everything down to the bottom so I can see it easily while also still keeping an eye on the field. I feel like this setup is the most efficient for me. You can't see it here, but the target, focus target and enmity list frames are also just right above the hotbars and my buff bar. The party unitframe is still in the default position, and my pet hotbar sits right above my chat window. Hope it gives you some ideas. Edit: Wow, this is a really old screenshot... I am terrible about remembering to screenshot in games (or even take photos in real life).

I do this specifically to attract random RP.

Apropos of Clover's interest here--which, by the way, our first run together was a good deal of fun--I've decided to form a fourth raid group within Unity. This group, known as Dawn Shard, needs members! If any other Balmung players on European timezones would be interested in a little purely-for-fun raid group, please send me a PM. Currently Dawn Shard is still in its early formation, so we're not entirely sure about scheduling just yet. What we know so far: Dawn Shard will very likely run two days per week, most likely Tuesday and Thursday, though this is still under discussion. Each event period will be three hours long, to start somewhere between 4:30PM UTC / 9:30AM PST and end somewhere around 8PM UTC / 1PM PST. The target length I'm shooting for is two meetups of three hours each. Currently, Dawn Shard is in need of mostly everything! While I am participating in this fledgling group to help get it off the ground, we still lack even enough players to fill a full party. We were able to go with a pickup group on Monday, but we'll definitely want more dedicated Unity members as a part of Dawn Shard's regular roster! Check out our thread on the RPC for updates and more information!

April 10 2014 - An Update on Unity's Endgame Status Hi there, denizens of the RPC! Well, Unity's had some major changes happening in the recent weeks. Unfortunately, a number of members are no longer a part of Unity, and while we wish them all well, we also need to fill the spots they've left vacant! Umbral Shard especially took a significant loss and has been populated with new members who are excited about endgame progression. Astral Shard is seeking a new full-time tank, and Aether Shard is looking for both a full-time tank and damage dealer. Additionally, Unity is slowly ramping up a new group, Dawn Shard, that runs on more Europe-friendly times; the event days and times have not been finalized yet as we have only a few members currently interested. However, if we receive more interest, we'll be able to finalize Dawn Shard's roster and move beyond non-lockout content. (Please note that Dawn Shard is a less-competitive raid group and may progress differently than Astral, Umbral or Aether). Unity Raid Schedule Astral Shard Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM PST Umbral Shard Schedule currently under discussion Aether Shard Monday, Wednesday and Friday 8:30 PM to 10:30 PM PST Dawn Shard Schedule currently under discussion ~4:30PM to 7:30PM UTC (9:30AM to 12:30PM PST) (tentative) Current Unity Endgame Recruitment Needs: DISCLAIMER: Please be aware that Unity's endgame groups are not statics in the strictest sense of the word; we are intentionally over capacity on each group so that we do not have to cancel runs or seek random replacements. The Unity leadership will rotate players in order to ensure everyone gets a chance to participate. Astral Shard: Warrior Damage-dealer Umbral Shard: White Mage Bard 2 Damage-dealers Aether Shard: Tank (PLD or WAR, either) Damage-dealer Dawn Shard: 2 Tanks Healer 4 Damage-dealers

Very little data is actually sent between server and client in an MMO. Otherwise playing on dial-up or slow connections would be impossible and it's not. I raided all of BWL and the first half of AQ40 on 56k. I've played TERA over HSPA not-plus, crappy signal, around 1.2Mbps downstream. It's mostly just raw numbers--positional data, hits, misses, and renderer calls. The actual graphical data is already stored locally, which is why most MMO clients tend to be huge compared to other games. Modern MMOs tend to eat up between 18 and 30 gigabytes of hard drive space. Compare with single-player RPGs which are closer to 10.

Sliders are just modified weights and vertices applied to different polygons. We can do this quite easily and quite resource-efficiently in loads of games--see any game with a realistic physics engine, which is even more problematic than sliders since the physics stuff is calculated in real-time instead of beforehand. Non-MMO example: Mass Effect 2 and 3 use a code system to tweak the face polys and textures for your custom Shepard. Is it slower than using a predefined Shepard model? Sure it is. Is that slowdown noticeable? Not on modern hardware. I bet if I did some tests against default Shepard and a customized Shepard, the FPS would be virtually identical, all other things being equal. 3D rendering doesn't actually store anything "physical." It's continually drawing all the polygons and applying textures to them, so a face or body with sliders is mathematically and functionally no different to the game engine as one without them. Either way, sliders or no sliders, the engine uses maths to draw the picture. The engine doesn't care if the maths are slightly different because modern PCs with gaming-level GPUs can do both integer and floating point calculations at absurdly ridiculous speeds.

omg epic hat

Y'know, Clover, I might be able to do something. Because of recent changes in my life I've been waking up early and going to bed earlier rather than staying up to the wee hours of the night. I'm finding myself with a lot of time sitting around doing basically nothing during the morning hours, spending the midday and afternoon hours doing productive tasks (school, writing, etc) and either I get only a few hours to play XIV at night before bed, or I end up staying up way way way too late. I'm thinking of transplanting my playtime that happens after midnight to the early morning hours (9AM to 12PM ish, PST). I would be willing to throw my lot in with you. I'm quite flexible with every role covered... I have BLM, SMN, SCH and WAR leveled and geared (the first three at i90 average, the latter at i80 average). Bard is also leveled but my bard gear is quite poor. Helping you out with Coil and EX primals in the early morning hours would certainly be more entertaining than staring at facebook for three hours!

What's your timezone in relation to server time/PST?

I bought the evenstar pants. They look awesome. Fishnet topped stockings. Too bad the top has that weird-ass stiff-tail thing. I'll be mogging the evenstar body to allagan when I get it I'm sure. Problem is I can't have it look two different ways because you can't buy two sets of them, for both BLM and SMN... grr... Squee, a proper vanity tab would have prevented this. ><

The current version of Dropbox will allow you to take native-resolution lossless PNG screenshots of virtually anything, including cutscenes and character select screen. You also don't get a watermark. It's great.

Hey, that sounds totally awesome. I would honestly love something like that, a sort of evolution of TERA, GW2 and Wildstar, the "logical progression" of action-based, active combat MMOs. Though, to be honest, I'd prefer if it had servers with different game rules, like normal (generic MMO rules, instant heals, no large penalties for death, teleport/fast travel etc) and hardcore (heals are all slow HoTs, dying carries a harsh penalty, no teleports/fast travel)... and had a role system (tank/heal/support/damage). I legit enjoy having the role system. Lots of people do. Naunet has already mentioned that she doesn't like playing a damage-dealer role at all, which means that non-trinity games just completely lose her right from the starting gate. When you make a "non-trinity" game, everybody is just a damage dealer. I like playing a damage dealer, but I also like playing a healer and a tank and a support class. There's a reason why class-based games are so popular--because you get lots of variety in gameplay. So-called "classless" games aren't really without roles, they just don't narrowly define them and you have a bit more freedom to play around (however, there will always be builds that are utterly terrible and those that are amazingly broken). Also... not to put a damper on anyone's enthusiasm, but I don't think the tech is where it needs to be to create something like that, not to mention that something like that is so far outside the "norm" that publishers are really super unlikely to want to take a risk on it.

My biggest problem with the trinity is that the support roles got shoved out. I friggin' love support roles. Red Mage in FFXI was one of my favorite MMO experiences of all time. I didn't strictly heal or DPS, I did it all and a bag o' chips! Putting up buffs, debuffing the mobs, spot healing while the primary healer regains resources, dropping a nuke or DoTs in here and there at the end of a skillchain for a Magic Burst... I miss the crap out of support roles.

The problem I have with the removal of the trinity and making every player "responsible" for themselves basically removes the cooperative aspect of the game entirely and severely limits the interesting mechanics a raid boss can have. Your dream game would work fine in a PvP-only context. I just don't see it working very well in a PvE raiding context, not without becoming a mindless, mechanicless zerg. Actually, you should play DayZ. I think it'd be right up your alley. Permadeath, no healers, a focus on travel and exploration and methodical planning and survival.

I don't get why people like Minfilia. She's a terrible character. She's incredibly passive, does nothing, gets totally debilitated by the Standard Female Grab Area and is effectively the damsel-in-distress, which is a character trope so overused, outdated, uncreative and sexist that it just blows my friggin' mind that a modern writing team even thought it was a good idea. Thancred is the stereotypical anime/manga white-haired pretty boy. Smarmy, full of himself, annoying as all get out and thinks he's the dog's bollocks. I don't get why people like him either! Papalymo and Yda are... well, they're kinda fun. I'll give them a pass, though Yda's the standard Yuffie/Selphie/Penelo manic-pixie-dream-girl character that virtually all Final Fantasy games have... meh. Y'shtola, now she's a whole 'nother story. Classy, lovely, powerful, smart, knowledgeable and gets shit done. Clearly she is the best!

Aeriyn treats people about the same regardless of what they are. Her mind's too busy calculating magical formulae and equations to concern herself too much with these issues. She just doesn't seem to give sex or gender any real thought outside of romance, where she's clearly more attracted to females who express a feminine gender. K'airi is somewhat rude toward and derisive of men, especially male miqo'te, due to her sexual orientation and upbringing in a Seeker tribe. Eventually, she would have been eventually expected to mate with the nuhn--in fact, this pressure was exactly what drove her to abandon the dunes of her homeland and travel to the Shroud. While sex without attraction is fairly common in such a social structure, K'airi is disgusted by even the mere thought of it.

I don't even want to know why there was a snurble in your pants.

It's a difference of business models. The Korean MMO market is incredibly competitive and lucrative. It's all about extracting as much money from the players as quickly as possible before moving on to the next big title. As a result, the developers tend to throw things together in a very slapdash haphazard fashion that looks quite nice and glitzy on the surface, but has very little depth (not to mention lots of bugs that never get fixed). Most Korean MMOs rarely receive content updates, especially if they are F2P. When they do get them they tend to be in the form of either cash shop additions, typically with those RNG boxes where you have a very low chance of getting what you want, or they add the minimum amount of new areas, enemies and the like just to keep the players going for a little longer. These updates generally bring with them a host of new bugs and glitches that don't ever get fixed, while older bugs are ignored. Korean MMOs are developed quickly, QA'd without much care and shoved out to market as fast as possible in order to compete with the hundreds of other MMOs they're facing up against. These games are not intended to last longer than a year or two at the most, whereupon they are placed in "maintenance mode" and left with a skeleton crew to keep the lights on and keep the cash shop stocked, while the bulk of the development team moves on to the company's next title. Korean MMOs rarely have public test servers. They rarely interact with their playerbase directly. They generally prioritize fast profit above all else, because that is the market they exist in. If a Korean MMO developer attempted to create an MMO by Western MMO rules--that is, to create a long-term service with a loyal playerbase that plays for years, even up to a decade or more--they would go out of business instantly. In Korea, it's all about mass-production, bashing out the shiniest, sparkliest costume-jewelry bauble in as little time as possible, get it on the chopping block and start pulling in revenue before their competitors can. The Korean playerbase has very, very different habits than the Western MMO player. They don't care about lore, about roleplaying, about long-term enjoyment of the game. Part of this is due to their internet-cafe gaming culture versus the West's home-entertainment gaming culture, but most of it is the fault of the industry itself. In their haste to make as much money as fast as possible they've created an incredibly volatile market full of low-budget shovelware. This couldn't possibly be more different than the Western MMO market, where only big-budget titles using well-known intellectual properties are ever very successful. The idea that Korean MMOs are "grinders" is borne out by historical evidence. It's not just Lineage. It's Ragnarok Online. It's TERA. It's Aion. It's Bless Online. Pick any random Korean MMO and count how many layers of random dice rolling is involved in endgame gearing. We'll use TERA as an example because it's the most recent one I've played. In TERA, for endgame gear, you have these levels of RNG: - The boss has to drop the correct item. Many bosses are not guaranteed to drop any useful loot at all. The chance to drop the actually useful items is very, very low. - Once you obtain the item, you use an expensive consumable to upgrade it to masterwork. This has a 2% chance of success; this is compounded by the masterwork quality bonus, which can either be +1%, +2% or +3%. The chance of successfully masterworking and getting a +3% quality bonus is incredibly small. - Once you've masterworked your item, you have to use a combination of expensive consumables to randomly re-roll the bonuses on said item. Most of the bonuses are useless. The probability of getting all the useful bonuses on one item in one attempt is <1%. - Once you've got useful bonuses, then you have to enchant the item. Each level of enchantment has a different chance of succeeding. Once you reach +8, +9 or higher, the success rate drops so incredibly low that it's completely possible to fail hundreds of times before successfully raising the item's level. Contrast to FFXIV's endgame gearing: - The boss has to drop the item. Coil bosses drop two items every time, guaranteed. Primals drop one item, guaranteed, every time. + There are alternatives to boss drops that have absolutely no chance of failure (EX primal weapons, raid token gear, relic weapons). These alternatives are equivalent or better than the raid drops from Coil/primals. There's really no contest here. In XIV, no matter how unlucky you might be in Coil, you can still gear. You can still get i100, eventually i110 if you buy and upgrade weathered gear. Will you be exactly as optimal as if you were lucky with drops? No, but you can be close enough. In TERA, on the other hand, there have been players who have been completely stalled progression-wise because the Random Number God will not smile upon them (I was one of them). Since each attempt to upgrade costs a considerable amount of in-game currency, an unlucky player will be forced to spend an absurd amount of time grinding--and I did. I spent hours and hours and hours, countless hours, grinding the same open-world mobs for money, only to fail again and again and again. You say that Korean MMOs are not grinders, but by and large they are. It's possible that Blade & Soul isn't, as I haven't been able to play it yet. If that's true, then B&S is a freakish anomaly. FFXIV may be made by Square-Enix, a Japanese company, but it is a Western MMO. Even FFXI was a Western MMO, as it was essentially an EverQuest clone with Final Fantasy flavor and lore on top. Western MMOs can be grinders, too--they aren't immune. However, since Blizzard instigated a sea change in the MMO industry with World of Warcraft, Western MMOs have focused on accessibility ever since, with a strong development focus on reducing, limiting or hiding the grind, or simply making the grind more fun. The Korean MMO industry was not affected by this; WoW was not quite so transformative in South Korea.

Yet another thing, in a massive pile of things, that EA and LucasArts fucked up.