Snowknight26
Supreme [H]ardness
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There is no '8 hour exp cap a week.' Heck, Skizzy even linked to a thread talking about it just a few posts up..
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Final Fantasy XIV Official Release Thread
- Thread starter CannonDub
- Start date
Azureth
Supreme [H]ardness
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You misunderstand
there is no 8 hour XP cap, that's insane to hit, my friend played 20 hours this weekend and had no problem
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I have had no issue with this. So far I have a lvl 12 marauder and lvl 12 armorer. I think some people are making a big deal over nothing.
Ocellaris
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People might be making a big deal about nothing, however this highlight SE's horrible management of releasing and clarifying game information. I have yet to see a decent SE presence for communicating game details to players speaking English.
Perhaps you should have done more reading. That's not true at all.
Also, there's no question the game needs some work. But judging by the improvements we've seen since beta, I'd guess we'll have 70-80% of the major issues fixed in a couple of months.
Azureth
Supreme [H]ardness
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Maybe it's just me but I don't think any game should have "major issues" upon release.
Perhaps my diction is a bit harsh, perhaps not.
It's an MMO, and those are never as polished when launched as other games. Then again, I can't think of a MMO launch recently that launched buttery smooth.
The major issues I have are the following:
- Lack of an Auction House - This was due to an attempt to let players run their own shops. It was clear the idea was flawed, and they've are going to implement an auction house.
- Bazaars/Player Shops - Currently, you must stop moving to look at another player's shop, even if he is moving. You must also be close to him to purchase an item. There is also a good deal of lag in opening a player's shop.
- Lag - It's MUCH better than beta, but it's still there in some of the U/I. But then again, nearly every MMO opens with lag because of the insane server loads.
- Monster Density - With the whole server population in the starting zone, there's a real lack of monsters. Should fix it self as people level up.
As far as client crashing, etc. I had a big problem with it in beta, but since then I've only had the client crash twice in 4 or 5 nights of playing. (It was two or three times a night in beta).
Progress is being made so I'm happy. If they weren't doing anything to fix the issues, I'd have a hell of a different tone.
Snowknight26
Supreme [H]ardness
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You can only assume that because they've neither fixed some of the smallest bugs that literally take no time to fix nor communicated with anyone that they're aware of any issues and plan on fixing them, they actually aren't fixing anything. It's already been a week and there's only been one client update that's nothing more than some trivial issues.
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This game is GREAT!!
Only reason I'm not playing now..is work!
My GF and I have been playing solid since I picked up the CE from gamestop. Having played FFXI, I was able to show her the tricks of how FF is played. To me FFXIV is just natural to play.
I was able to attain Physical Level 20. Rank 15 Thaumaturge, Rank 10 Lancer, Rank 9 Conjurer, and I'll be upping my Pugilist soon for Second Wind.
Crafting has been solid - I have a 11 Weaver, 10 Goldsmith, 8 in Alchemy and about 3 in cooking
Gathering is gold - 11 Miner, 11 Botanist, and 4 in Fishing.
She has taken the Blacksmith/Armorsmith/Leatherworking/Woodworking jobs to split the work.
We've been keeping solid busy with crafting. You'll find that in FFXIV, there seems to be a "Rank behind" mechanic. Meaning...that from Weaving 1-10, you should only expect to make rudimentary gear and mostly materials. Once I got to Rank 11 and with guild support, I was able to craft just about everything in the 1-10 range just fine. This allowed me to make some starter gear for my War/Magic classes. But, now that my combat classes are 10, the gear I'm making is optimal rank 5 and 6, but to make Optimal rank 10 and better, I'll have to get my weaving upwards to 20, thus giving me access to Tier 3 recipes, but successfully crafting Tier 2 stuff.
My GF had a hard time with this, as she was expecting 1-10 Blacksmithing to allow her to make Rank 1-10 weapons...which isnt really how it works. She needs to get her Blacksmithing to 15 to 20, and THEN she can make gear for her combat toon. The issue obviously becomes that her Pugilist and my Thaumaturge are Rank 15...so we end up making gear way below our class levels.
I guess in the beginning its a pain, but I figure once levels slow down and you start living in your current level for a week or so at a time, that you wont outgrow your gear as fast.
As far as an AH - I have yet to see a need for one. Course...I just make my own stuff so I dont worry about what's for sale. I've sold a TON of items from my personal bazaar and my retainer. I know I have 100k gil aready...not sure if that's alot compared to others or not. I guess it will be nice to scan for items for sale when the time comes, but I guess I was never one to be dependant on the work of others to get what I need.
I found a great Linkshell with people from my old FFXI server "Ifrit", so we all share the same surname
I am totally happy with the game and all it offers so far!
Only reason I'm not playing now..is work!
My GF and I have been playing solid since I picked up the CE from gamestop. Having played FFXI, I was able to show her the tricks of how FF is played. To me FFXIV is just natural to play.
I was able to attain Physical Level 20. Rank 15 Thaumaturge, Rank 10 Lancer, Rank 9 Conjurer, and I'll be upping my Pugilist soon for Second Wind.
Crafting has been solid - I have a 11 Weaver, 10 Goldsmith, 8 in Alchemy and about 3 in cooking
Gathering is gold - 11 Miner, 11 Botanist, and 4 in Fishing.
She has taken the Blacksmith/Armorsmith/Leatherworking/Woodworking jobs to split the work.
We've been keeping solid busy with crafting. You'll find that in FFXIV, there seems to be a "Rank behind" mechanic. Meaning...that from Weaving 1-10, you should only expect to make rudimentary gear and mostly materials. Once I got to Rank 11 and with guild support, I was able to craft just about everything in the 1-10 range just fine. This allowed me to make some starter gear for my War/Magic classes. But, now that my combat classes are 10, the gear I'm making is optimal rank 5 and 6, but to make Optimal rank 10 and better, I'll have to get my weaving upwards to 20, thus giving me access to Tier 3 recipes, but successfully crafting Tier 2 stuff.
My GF had a hard time with this, as she was expecting 1-10 Blacksmithing to allow her to make Rank 1-10 weapons...which isnt really how it works. She needs to get her Blacksmithing to 15 to 20, and THEN she can make gear for her combat toon. The issue obviously becomes that her Pugilist and my Thaumaturge are Rank 15...so we end up making gear way below our class levels.
I guess in the beginning its a pain, but I figure once levels slow down and you start living in your current level for a week or so at a time, that you wont outgrow your gear as fast.
As far as an AH - I have yet to see a need for one. Course...I just make my own stuff so I dont worry about what's for sale. I've sold a TON of items from my personal bazaar and my retainer. I know I have 100k gil aready...not sure if that's alot compared to others or not. I guess it will be nice to scan for items for sale when the time comes, but I guess I was never one to be dependant on the work of others to get what I need.
I found a great Linkshell with people from my old FFXI server "Ifrit", so we all share the same surname
I am totally happy with the game and all it offers so far!
Ocellaris
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Pretty safe to assume the game is being developed in a vacuum. They will fix they problems they decide things need to be fixed and not communicate while they do this. If they do communicate their plans, it will be in Japanese and end up translated on the front page of www.ffxivcore.com a few hours later. FFXI was the same way (or at least it felt that way when I played). SE is not afraid of pissing customers off when the customers disagree. English speaking customers will continue to be considered on a lower tier than their other customers. I've even see English speaking fanboys argue that SE should absolutely *not* listen to or care about American customers because they want a true Japanese game. Pretty these type of people also like the ridiculous menu systems for simple tasks that should be one click
Developing a game in a vacuum certainly has its advantages compared to placating a whiny community. They should be able to deliver their vision of the game better without trying to be like Blizzard and dumb down and homogenize everything.
Then real downside is that they can end up working on something for years and delivering junk that people simply do not want. Look at FF13 for example, the game was disappointing for many people and not something considered to be a high quality FF experience. Also SE made some ridiculous excuses for how FF13 ended up the way it did, and people are already looking forward to FF13 Versus for a "real" version of the game.
First off, they've communicated some. Remember that it's a game that's being developed in Japan, for the japanese as the main market and NA and EU as secondary.
The difference from beta to retail was HUGE, despite less than a month of time between the two. So I'm giving them some slack.
As for the timing of the updates, Non-CE-edition retail goes live wednesday, IIRC. I would suspect the next major patch will roll out then, ahead of the "regular retail" going live.
My one word reaction of the game so far.
Disaster.
I say that with a great deal of amusement. But many people coming off an mmo like wow or age of conan, hell, even star trek online or Aion will see this game as a complete cluster f*ck of confusion at the start.
It's akin to being dropped in the middle of an alien world with little to no direction. Interesting how much of a difference a basic thing like adding quest exclamations above peoples heads is for clarity. It was a masterclass in unintuitive game vectors for the new player.
Even something as basic as chat communication seems gimped in this game. where are the text bubbles? ps3 can't handle that so a no go on a pc title?
Granted, there is no hard and fast rule that text boxes are required, but if you are going to have a chat system in a game, why create one that is inferior than previous games that have been out for Years?
Aion had the local player vendor thing going on, but there was still a functioning Auction House to streamline buying and selling items instead of being forced to sample a thousand little ghettos of shops to get certain items, at god knows what price.
Now everything I said above will probably be considered blasphemy to many here. That's fine. There are already examples of people who enjoy this quite a bit, though I feel DEEP sympathy for some poor girlfriend chained into this game to spend time with her boyfriend. I am not mad about not liking the game so far, I jumped in pretty blindly and won't blame my reaction to it for that reason.
To those who enjoy this mix of online gameplay, I hope there are enough of you to sustain this game.
Disaster.
I say that with a great deal of amusement. But many people coming off an mmo like wow or age of conan, hell, even star trek online or Aion will see this game as a complete cluster f*ck of confusion at the start.
It's akin to being dropped in the middle of an alien world with little to no direction. Interesting how much of a difference a basic thing like adding quest exclamations above peoples heads is for clarity. It was a masterclass in unintuitive game vectors for the new player.
Even something as basic as chat communication seems gimped in this game. where are the text bubbles? ps3 can't handle that so a no go on a pc title?
Granted, there is no hard and fast rule that text boxes are required, but if you are going to have a chat system in a game, why create one that is inferior than previous games that have been out for Years?
Aion had the local player vendor thing going on, but there was still a functioning Auction House to streamline buying and selling items instead of being forced to sample a thousand little ghettos of shops to get certain items, at god knows what price.
Now everything I said above will probably be considered blasphemy to many here. That's fine. There are already examples of people who enjoy this quite a bit, though I feel DEEP sympathy for some poor girlfriend chained into this game to spend time with her boyfriend. I am not mad about not liking the game so far, I jumped in pretty blindly and won't blame my reaction to it for that reason.
To those who enjoy this mix of online gameplay, I hope there are enough of you to sustain this game.
The lack of chat bubbles or quest markers is by design. I personally don't mind it, but it's a vast change from something like Aion for sure. Then again, if all I wanted to do was follow a magic arrow above my head for hours without any thought there are games for that.
Heh, if that's the case..time to find a new GF!
Agreed..my GF gave me the look of death when I was showing her Beta. She rolled her eyes when I told her I just bought 2 CE's. However...I know the power of cuteness. Once Open Beta came along, I set her up and let her have free reign over the character creation of her Lalafell. Hook...line...and sinker
Course...as stated, the easymode features of other games are missing. She was constantly asking me "what next?....what next?". Damnit woman - read your damn journal!!
(course I said this on the inside )Controls were new for her as well...XBOX360 controller solved that.
Beyond that..she has now officially played more than me. She is hooked on crafting and farming for materials. She's constantly exclaiming how beautiful the game world is. All the details that go into accessories for your character.
To sum it up - I came home yesterday with my new DOCSYS 3.0 cable modem, only to have her intercept me with a PRINT OUT of ALL the items she wants to have crafted, detailed with how to acquire the items, which profession is needed to create them, and a game plan for the evening on how we were going to get such things. Talk about a look of evil when I told her the internet would be offline for a few minutes while I swapped the modem out...
Beyond that..she's online before I get home and she's online for an hour before she heads to work (Nice being 5 min from work eh?)
TL : DR - If GF = Gamer then Game ON!, else replace GF with improved model
Ocellaris
Fully [H]
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Yeah I get that no everyone likes following the arrows and such. However this game is more complicated and obtuse than EVE Online. Things like not keeping a journal of crafting recipes are simply mind blowing.
I'm actually using the Journal in the CE to keep note of my character specific crafting trees, recipes, and bazaar pricing schema.
I'll agree with that. A list of crafting recipies is on my list of wants for the game. However, some of that is by design. In some ways I do understand what they're getting at. And that's for crafting to be more than just click, click, enter. To have crafting be an art, and to raise the "cost of entry". However, I'd still like a recipie list.
Having a blast with the game so far, I cannot stop crafting lol. Sure the game is not perfect or close to it but it sure is fun and rewarding when you make your own stuff. I don't mind the no auction house in order to have a player driven economy but they for sure need to give us some form of search option so we don't click on everyone in the market wards. Liking the game very much so far especially for a launch title. Currently at level 20 and enjoying it
Oh, I know of several places to get the information. I mean in game.
ive been playing since open beta. CE still feels like beta. but the only thing that bothers me is the slow UI. It takes forever to npc items from grinding and checking bazaars in the market. oh....i also hate running around, dont want to waste anima, lol.
other than this, i like the game. job system is great. crafting is actually good.
other than this, i like the game. job system is great. crafting is actually good.
WBurchnall
2[H]4U
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The game is so slow paced, its several decades behind mmorpg conventions in my opinion. Certain things that irk me would take a few pages to describe. For people who have played an mmorpg before, I would be happy to list a few standard conventions a lot of mmorpgs have:
A. An auction house. How do these work? You make your gear/crafted item or find an item on the ground. You decide its not useable by your class or you dont have a high enough job and don't plan to level that job for x long. You walk to auction house. You search for other items and see what the price is going for. Perhaps 200 'money-unit-name-here'. I'll sell mine for 200 as well. Two days later. Yeah! I have money!! Woot! or perhaps on a high population server were your item you made is in demand. "Woot! six minutes later, I have money!"
The Final Fantasy system works as follows. A time-consuming process of going through a list of items in your inventory. No way to just click/drag the icon like every other mmporg, then hitting sell, sell, sell etc. Pick your pirce and poof the item is no inaccessible and its on your Bazaar. This means if a character walks by you in the game world, they can choose to inspect you to see what you have for sale and possibly buy something. The issues are, there's no common established market price. Its hard to know what price to sell any item for unless you've seen it on someone else bazaar.
Initially, this doesn't sound too bad but an auction house to find a weapon about your level requires you to do the following: Search for Weapon > Type of Weapon > Optionally add level range > search. On Square Enix it involves going to the 'Wards/Market' and opening the first player's Shop. Checking what items he has for sale. Ohh, no weapons at all? Damn that sucks. Second player? still no weapons, damn that sucks. Third player, ohh rings but I dont need rings. Fourth player? crafting goods, nope not what I wanted. Fifth player? A weapon! but it would turn me into a puglist and I'm a conjurer so that won't work so well for leveling my conjurer rank will it? Sixth player? etc etc. Each Bazaar generally takes a minimum of 20 seconds to look thru, several button presses etc and you can easily look through 100 bazaars before you find the item you want if not more. Which means you'd be spending 30 minutes to find 1 item upgrade unless you make it yourself. This system is rediculously slow compared to a 5-second ah search. Like an order of magnitude slower which leaves you wondering what the game designers were thinking.
Of course, with no feedback/beta reports/bugs/suggestions forums, how can we suggest adding an AH or display our dissatisfacton with the Bazaar system?
This leads to forced crafting where you need to level up your craft skills otherwise you don't get gear....and your weak/leveling slower b/c you do less time/can only fight weaker monsters/etc.
The second issue related to the first issue is you can only repair your gear to 50% durability once its been damaged at npcs and npcs are only located in 'capital cities'. This means if your out fighting and it takes an hour for your gear to break/need repairs. You have to run back to town(which is often a 10-12 minute walk due to slow movement speeds) repair and then run back but the next time your equipment gets damaged takes 'half' the time so you only get 30 minutes of killing before you have to run back to the main-town.
There are two issues with this potentially. A. To get 100% repair, you need to level your crafting far enough to repair your current gear. If you don't have enough skill in whatever craft is responsible for your gear, you can't repair it without paying another player to repair it. You can put up repair requests in your Bazaar but it requires you to UNEQUIP THE ITEM. Meaning, to ask other players to repair to your gear to 100% you can't use it....so you can't level while asking for your gear to be repaired. See that catch-22? or you'd have to level an off-job/different job who has its own unique/seperate gear. So for a conjurer, you wouldn't be able to level a thalmage for example. Of course to buy a second set of gear, you'd need to use that awful awful Bazaar system.
There's other rediculously stupid things from a programming standpoint. Final Fantasy characters use first and last names. This is not so bad at all. However, it becomes arbitrary user-unfriendly or unintuitive when you need to add someone to your friends list.
Now, there's an age old problem that takes a 2nd grade student maybe 30 seconds to solve. "John Hopkins". How do you tell where the first name ends and the second name begins? .... Where the "space" is. How does a lazy programmer tell where the first name ends and the second name begins?
It gives you two seperate fields, one to enter the first name and then one to enter the second name.
Now when two fields are directly below eachother or beside eachother, what's the common convention to move from field 1 to field 2 without having to use the mouse? This convention that's been around since even the dos-days? The 'Tab' key. What does using the tab key do when you have just type in the first name and want to get to the last-name box righttt beside it? 'Nothing'. *cricket*. Seriously, SE? You managed to screw up the 'Tab' to switch between fields system? *sigh* /end rant about ignoring basic GUI conventions.
After some fiddling around, a user will probably find out that the Enter key switches between fields but even then....why do we have fields in the first place? Why don't we just have a single field and the first/last name is determined by where you put a space in the name and if there's more than 1 space its an invalid name and such is told to the user? Ie "John Hopkins" as opposed to enter john, click with mouse, enter hopkins.
There are a lot more examples of other small issues that leave you baffled wondering if Square Enix looked at any other mmorpgs out there. Most notably, the repair system. It really would make the game more fun and action-based if you had repair npcs in each 'camp' // non-main city so we didn't have to arbitrarily run too and from the city. Spend more time in dungeons having fun, etc?
Technically, there is 'teleport power' to avoid the cost of running but the downside to this sytem is to avoid the 10 minute run from the first camp to town and back requires 4 teleport-points called Anema. Anema recharges at the rate of 1 point per every 4 hours of real-world time passing. That means to avoid a one-way ten minute walk, you are using up 16 hours of teleport power. To avoid a two-way ten minute walk, you are using up 32 hours of teleport power or roughly a day and a 3rd.
There's also a Fatique system but I haven't ran into it yet so its a semi-mute point. Basically, you can only level so much/so fast before a negative-exp return from each monster is applied to you. The more you play, the worse the negative-exp system gets. So casual players can keep up with the hardcore players progress and limit how fast content is explored so the player base doesn't get bored/restless with no end-game content. That's great and all except when you consider that no casual gamer has the hardware really necessary to power the FFXIV client and casual player's tend not to like very grindy games and FFXI had a very hardcore playerbase over the past few years as most casual players abandoned it. So ....yeah. SE is using this fatigue system to help ... the...casual players...who happen to have GTX460-480s and overclocked iCore i7s.... You know. Those casual players?
Ahem, anyways. About the payment system. You pay more for FFXIV if you play seriously than any other mmorpg out there practically. Why? b/c they have a stat-system that is not-class-dependant. So if you playing a Thalmage and level up your intelligent/mind/vitality attributes, that's fantastic for your damage, max hp and mag accuracy. However, when you decide to level your second job, a puglist whose a 'tank', you'll find that vitality handy but the magic accuracy and max mp boost? Not so much at all. Infact, you'll almost be wanting to re-roll a new character and have your new character have vitality, dex, str. You know, so you can actually hit the monster, do dmg and take dmg. As opposed to just taking dmg which would result in poor emnity(SE's word for 'Threat'). So the base pay is basically 12.99/month + 3.00 per character. When you consider that each crafting skill has an increased chance for success and criting based of a physical stat and that for each job, different stats are most desireable, you basically need 5-characters for crafting and 3 characters for melee dps, magic dps/healing and tanking. Assuming you're actually a hardcore player and don't want to be a semi-ineffectual 'jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none'.
The sad part is if you want to use a skill from lancer to debuff a mob while your a thalmage, you'd need to level the dps class lancer using your thalmage stats on your thalmage...... to really be an effective thalmage(if that's going to be your primary job) making the leveling for lancer skills slow and painful. It won't be that painful though due to your high phsyical job level which lets you apply attributes to ...thalmage skills. (note the contradiction there since the physical level points you have likely been invested in Thalmage-key-attributes?). So really, anyone who wants to do well at his class, will basically have to level super slowly over multiple chars, multiple classes.
Imagine for a moment, if you had a Priest in World of Warcraft and you had to level a Warrior. So you'd have a bit low vality, not much str, not much agility, not much attack power, lots of intel, spirit and spellpower and be leveling your ....Warrior. Fun stuff eh? but you'd be able to cast heals on yourself as you'd have your priest skills...except...since its an off-job skill, cast times would be doubled and effects on bonus spells like fortitude would be halved in duration and effect. So you'd have like 50% effectiveness priest skills at 200% cast time. Fun...stuff? Yeah! I can't wait to level my alt-characters! or maybe I'll give up on having specific jobs for each character and paying $12.99 + 3.00 per character(x3-4 characters) = the cost of a subscription to two other mmorpgs....
I cancelled my pre-order and my friend gave me his recruit a buddy-system code so I'll be playing for the next 30 days. I've been promised the full version is better and just installed it this morning but in all honesty, I don't think I'll be willing to pay $50.00 for my next month(buying the game). I find myself hard-pressed to be willing to spend even $15.00 a month.
A. An auction house. How do these work? You make your gear/crafted item or find an item on the ground. You decide its not useable by your class or you dont have a high enough job and don't plan to level that job for x long. You walk to auction house. You search for other items and see what the price is going for. Perhaps 200 'money-unit-name-here'. I'll sell mine for 200 as well. Two days later. Yeah! I have money!! Woot! or perhaps on a high population server were your item you made is in demand. "Woot! six minutes later, I have money!"
The Final Fantasy system works as follows. A time-consuming process of going through a list of items in your inventory. No way to just click/drag the icon like every other mmporg, then hitting sell, sell, sell etc. Pick your pirce and poof the item is no inaccessible and its on your Bazaar. This means if a character walks by you in the game world, they can choose to inspect you to see what you have for sale and possibly buy something. The issues are, there's no common established market price. Its hard to know what price to sell any item for unless you've seen it on someone else bazaar.
Initially, this doesn't sound too bad but an auction house to find a weapon about your level requires you to do the following: Search for Weapon > Type of Weapon > Optionally add level range > search. On Square Enix it involves going to the 'Wards/Market' and opening the first player's Shop. Checking what items he has for sale. Ohh, no weapons at all? Damn that sucks. Second player? still no weapons, damn that sucks. Third player, ohh rings but I dont need rings. Fourth player? crafting goods, nope not what I wanted. Fifth player? A weapon! but it would turn me into a puglist and I'm a conjurer so that won't work so well for leveling my conjurer rank will it? Sixth player? etc etc. Each Bazaar generally takes a minimum of 20 seconds to look thru, several button presses etc and you can easily look through 100 bazaars before you find the item you want if not more. Which means you'd be spending 30 minutes to find 1 item upgrade unless you make it yourself. This system is rediculously slow compared to a 5-second ah search. Like an order of magnitude slower which leaves you wondering what the game designers were thinking.
Of course, with no feedback/beta reports/bugs/suggestions forums, how can we suggest adding an AH or display our dissatisfacton with the Bazaar system?
This leads to forced crafting where you need to level up your craft skills otherwise you don't get gear....and your weak/leveling slower b/c you do less time/can only fight weaker monsters/etc.
The second issue related to the first issue is you can only repair your gear to 50% durability once its been damaged at npcs and npcs are only located in 'capital cities'. This means if your out fighting and it takes an hour for your gear to break/need repairs. You have to run back to town(which is often a 10-12 minute walk due to slow movement speeds) repair and then run back but the next time your equipment gets damaged takes 'half' the time so you only get 30 minutes of killing before you have to run back to the main-town.
There are two issues with this potentially. A. To get 100% repair, you need to level your crafting far enough to repair your current gear. If you don't have enough skill in whatever craft is responsible for your gear, you can't repair it without paying another player to repair it. You can put up repair requests in your Bazaar but it requires you to UNEQUIP THE ITEM. Meaning, to ask other players to repair to your gear to 100% you can't use it....so you can't level while asking for your gear to be repaired. See that catch-22? or you'd have to level an off-job/different job who has its own unique/seperate gear. So for a conjurer, you wouldn't be able to level a thalmage for example. Of course to buy a second set of gear, you'd need to use that awful awful Bazaar system.
There's other rediculously stupid things from a programming standpoint. Final Fantasy characters use first and last names. This is not so bad at all. However, it becomes arbitrary user-unfriendly or unintuitive when you need to add someone to your friends list.
Now, there's an age old problem that takes a 2nd grade student maybe 30 seconds to solve. "John Hopkins". How do you tell where the first name ends and the second name begins? .... Where the "space" is. How does a lazy programmer tell where the first name ends and the second name begins?
It gives you two seperate fields, one to enter the first name and then one to enter the second name.
Now when two fields are directly below eachother or beside eachother, what's the common convention to move from field 1 to field 2 without having to use the mouse? This convention that's been around since even the dos-days? The 'Tab' key. What does using the tab key do when you have just type in the first name and want to get to the last-name box righttt beside it? 'Nothing'. *cricket*. Seriously, SE? You managed to screw up the 'Tab' to switch between fields system? *sigh* /end rant about ignoring basic GUI conventions.
After some fiddling around, a user will probably find out that the Enter key switches between fields but even then....why do we have fields in the first place? Why don't we just have a single field and the first/last name is determined by where you put a space in the name and if there's more than 1 space its an invalid name and such is told to the user? Ie "John Hopkins" as opposed to enter john, click with mouse, enter hopkins.
There are a lot more examples of other small issues that leave you baffled wondering if Square Enix looked at any other mmorpgs out there. Most notably, the repair system. It really would make the game more fun and action-based if you had repair npcs in each 'camp' // non-main city so we didn't have to arbitrarily run too and from the city. Spend more time in dungeons having fun, etc?
Technically, there is 'teleport power' to avoid the cost of running but the downside to this sytem is to avoid the 10 minute run from the first camp to town and back requires 4 teleport-points called Anema. Anema recharges at the rate of 1 point per every 4 hours of real-world time passing. That means to avoid a one-way ten minute walk, you are using up 16 hours of teleport power. To avoid a two-way ten minute walk, you are using up 32 hours of teleport power or roughly a day and a 3rd.
There's also a Fatique system but I haven't ran into it yet so its a semi-mute point. Basically, you can only level so much/so fast before a negative-exp return from each monster is applied to you. The more you play, the worse the negative-exp system gets. So casual players can keep up with the hardcore players progress and limit how fast content is explored so the player base doesn't get bored/restless with no end-game content. That's great and all except when you consider that no casual gamer has the hardware really necessary to power the FFXIV client and casual player's tend not to like very grindy games and FFXI had a very hardcore playerbase over the past few years as most casual players abandoned it. So ....yeah. SE is using this fatigue system to help ... the...casual players...who happen to have GTX460-480s and overclocked iCore i7s.... You know. Those casual players?
Ahem, anyways. About the payment system. You pay more for FFXIV if you play seriously than any other mmorpg out there practically. Why? b/c they have a stat-system that is not-class-dependant. So if you playing a Thalmage and level up your intelligent/mind/vitality attributes, that's fantastic for your damage, max hp and mag accuracy. However, when you decide to level your second job, a puglist whose a 'tank', you'll find that vitality handy but the magic accuracy and max mp boost? Not so much at all. Infact, you'll almost be wanting to re-roll a new character and have your new character have vitality, dex, str. You know, so you can actually hit the monster, do dmg and take dmg. As opposed to just taking dmg which would result in poor emnity(SE's word for 'Threat'). So the base pay is basically 12.99/month + 3.00 per character. When you consider that each crafting skill has an increased chance for success and criting based of a physical stat and that for each job, different stats are most desireable, you basically need 5-characters for crafting and 3 characters for melee dps, magic dps/healing and tanking. Assuming you're actually a hardcore player and don't want to be a semi-ineffectual 'jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none'.
The sad part is if you want to use a skill from lancer to debuff a mob while your a thalmage, you'd need to level the dps class lancer using your thalmage stats on your thalmage...... to really be an effective thalmage(if that's going to be your primary job) making the leveling for lancer skills slow and painful. It won't be that painful though due to your high phsyical job level which lets you apply attributes to ...thalmage skills. (note the contradiction there since the physical level points you have likely been invested in Thalmage-key-attributes?). So really, anyone who wants to do well at his class, will basically have to level super slowly over multiple chars, multiple classes.
Imagine for a moment, if you had a Priest in World of Warcraft and you had to level a Warrior. So you'd have a bit low vality, not much str, not much agility, not much attack power, lots of intel, spirit and spellpower and be leveling your ....Warrior. Fun stuff eh? but you'd be able to cast heals on yourself as you'd have your priest skills...except...since its an off-job skill, cast times would be doubled and effects on bonus spells like fortitude would be halved in duration and effect. So you'd have like 50% effectiveness priest skills at 200% cast time. Fun...stuff? Yeah! I can't wait to level my alt-characters! or maybe I'll give up on having specific jobs for each character and paying $12.99 + 3.00 per character(x3-4 characters) = the cost of a subscription to two other mmorpgs....
I cancelled my pre-order and my friend gave me his recruit a buddy-system code so I'll be playing for the next 30 days. I've been promised the full version is better and just installed it this morning but in all honesty, I don't think I'll be willing to pay $50.00 for my next month(buying the game). I find myself hard-pressed to be willing to spend even $15.00 a month.
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Pardon my harshness, but if the live game is anything like the open beta was...I'm surprised people are actually getting enjoyment out of it. It actually felt like I was having to "work" to get any minute task done in the game. I mean, killing 10 rats is bad enough but adding on a clunky interface and wonky combat that takes forever to kill anything really drags it out..A good storyline and awesome graphics can't make up for abysmal gameplay and a cumbersome ui, I'd rather watch a CGI movie.
Snowknight26
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- May 8, 2005
- Messages
- 4,425
WBurchnall, the NPCs can repair your armor to 75%. They changed it during/after the open beta.
You can also reallocate your points so your argument of having multiple characters is basically invalid.
You can also reallocate your points so your argument of having multiple characters is basically invalid.
RobotChild
Gawd
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2006
- Messages
- 773
I picked up the game yesterday afternoon, and so far I am having fun with it.
Walmart released it a couple days too early here.
Walmart released it a couple days too early here.
Perhaps I have been spoiled after years of WoW, but i found FFXIV to be incredibly tedius and clunky. Sure, the graphics are pretty, but you have to have a high end PC just to run the game at decent settings.
Make fun of WoW all you want, but there is no denying that Blizzard has all the other companies dominated in terms of polish.
Make fun of WoW all you want, but there is no denying that Blizzard has all the other companies dominated in terms of polish.
Since SLI isn't enabled yet, I'm running it just fine on an E8400 and a 8800 GTS 512. I have most of the eye candy save AA on and it runs at 1920x1200 just fine for an MMO.
Do you remember the launch of WoW? Or were you actually around for it? It was horrid. WoW is only polished because it's old. Most MMOs are well polished after 6 months just fine.
RobotChild
Gawd
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- Jul 4, 2006
- Messages
- 773
I had to patch my fresh install.
I see. Is it the same 400MB patch people had to download for the CE? I think there were some links to it on the second or third page of this thread.
Snowknight26
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- May 8, 2005
- Messages
- 4,425
Yea, that's the one, plus a couple more minor patches, so the total might be a bit more in the end.
FadedSpark
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2005
- Messages
- 7,560
what the HELL am I doing?!
I just finished the off the boat limsa lominsa quest... Where the heck do I go?! Augh. lmao
I just finished the off the boat limsa lominsa quest... Where the heck do I go?! Augh. lmao
Check your journal. The quest in your log will tell you who to talk to. Right when you get off the boat you talk to hob. After you fully completed the first quest you can do leve's, grind mobs, work on crafting or gathering job. You get main story quest at job lvl 10 and 15 so check back with the guy in the adventures guild.
This game is not a "follow the arrow" MMO. You are expected to *gasp!* read and *gasp!* explore!
cageymaru
Fully [H]
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2003
- Messages
- 21,622
Ha ha! I started my first character there also. I stood around waiting for the questgiver NPCs to load, but they never did. I said to myself, "Man the lag must be horrible!" So then I walked around aimlessly for a bit and never saw a quest arrow or something to delineate them from the others. I noticed while following other players that I wasn't lagging at all.
Then I started panicking; WTF do I do? Is this some cruel joke? My buddy logged in and I deleted that character; yes it was that stressful, and made a new one on his server. I'm following him around like a puppy as he's my official guide at least until level 15.
*Hugs blanket and suckles thumb*