FFXIV - Likes / Dis-likes (Changes)

Client stability is greatly improved but not perfect. I've crashed twice in four days, which is sure as hell better than twice an hour in beta.

There are no new jobs and no new equipment that weren't already in beta. (Although there likely are at higher level.) NPCs selection of items and equipment to sell has not changed since beta.

Cities and areas that were unfinished and off-limits in beta are still unfinished and off-limits. However, some other field areas are now open and some dungeons/caves are better populated. A large patch likely added more content at the high-level range, as the cap at beta was level 30 and it's now 50, but nobody's gotten there yet.

An infinite exp bug has already been discovered and not yet patched.

There are enormous problems with the combat system. Mobs don't register that you've claimed them, or believe they're claimed by someone else, allowing them to kick your *** while you can't fight back. There's a bit of voodoo involving running around and disengaging required to fix it every time.

Group invites are buggy and often don't go through. The invite system has crazy requirements: neither person can have anything claimed or be in combat mode, or being attacked, and you must be close to one another.

Group combat is odd. If the leader isn't alive, present, and close by to fight the mob, you'll be unable to claim it and will receive no exp or loot when it dies. (Although it will still aggro you and you must fight it.)

UI lag is not greatly improved, although slightly better. It is still all "server side" and that likely will not change. It may improve as lag gets better overall, but I doubt the client will ever be as responsive as FF11 because the server is sanity-checking all operations, likely to prevent bots and hacks.

Walking lag / user position updates are not as bad as beta but still suck. If your "R" goes much above 400, you and other players will start to "bounce" around when you walk, which is annoying in an otherwise beautifully smooth game. Lag times of greater than 1000ms are common in crowded areas like camps.

The economy is insanely unstable but better than I assumed it would be at launch. Most people seem to be bypassing the Retainer system entirely and just idle bazaar'ing the good stuff. Nobody wants to manually search through hundreds of Retainers selling zone trash. Everyone thinks they'll have to make an AH but I'm not so sure... they could get away with this system once the economy establishes itself better.

The bug with gamepads not reconnecting is still there. This is a big problem with wireless gamepads that turn off due to inactivity after a few minutes. If they do, the game won't recognize them again until you completely restart.

The account sign up and pay methods are cryptic as all hell and poorly translated. It shouldn't take 25+ steps to register a product and give them money.

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Bottom line:

It's a fun game. I played the hell out of it all weekend. But the experience so far is pretty much working around one high-profile bug after another. It's extremely frustrating and still seems like an alpha or beta product.

The game is improved stability-wise since beta, but otherwise is a nearly identical experience with more people. As predicted, the "golden patch" that people assumed would come with release never came.

I thought the said the menu would come client side at or near release?

I don't know why, but I kinda chuckled when I read that. Your wording is always superb.

Anyone else not able to move or even rotate the camera for a good minute after you return from a death? I know there is some lag at crowded camps, but my weakness is nearly gone before I can even rotate my camera. It's rather irritating.

i can't move or camera rotate after any 'blink' in a crowded area. It sucks

More as I think of it:

The amount of characters on-screen is limited and lower than FFXI. This is a problem because there is no /target command or any associated <t>, etc, macros. If you can't see a person or a mob, there is literally no way to target or interact with them/it. This results in a lot of blind /say stuff, like "Step 10 feet over here by the south firepit/lamp post/shrub/dead taru, and let's hope we can see each other."

There are no /commands for anything really. There is no /search, there is no /invite, nada. Everything is done through menus and manual targeting. (Although there is still no way to search even through that.) This is a big problem when you consider the above.

The character limitation also makes the whole retainer bazaar tougher to work with. Combine a poor targeting system, with no targeting commands and a laggy software mouse, and it really gets frustrating.

yeah i noticed that too. Any idea as to why thats an implimentation. I see alot of "WoW" decisions in the game, which some of it is helpful, but others not so much.

/tell is flaky. It will sometimes fail and tell you the person is offline even when standing right next to you. There is no /reply. There is a cntl-r, but it only cycles through people you've already sent a tell to, not people that have sent a tell to you.

Group members will often permanently lose their nametag above their heads. When this happens you lose the ability to target them. It usually won't come back on its own and requires everyone to log out or break party.

I haven't experienced any of that. Im having a hard time trying to find a place to report bugs as i see them.

Hopefully they will fix some of this stuff by official release on thursday because if they don't ffxiv going to crash and get 10x worse with all the new people signing up I can only imagine the lag on thursday night..I'm sure most of you won't be able to logg on due to crowded servers like how ffxi used to be lol.

yeah, thing i noticed is, once i get out to the rank 10 areas, i have almost no lag. All my lag is trying to load EVERYONE and my vid card chokes so i get major lag.

Namely I'm disappointed with the targeting bug and the fact that such a glaring problem was remedied in beta, only to reappear in release. I think they may have tried to remedy it since now it only requires you to unlock the target then simply attack again. (Previously you had to take off the target entirely in order to even fight it.) While its no excuse for the problem its a small (if even intentional) step in the right direction.

I can't say I've come across the party leader glitch that you have. I was doing leves with a party for at least 4 hours yesterday without a hitch.The client crashing seems to be extremely hit or miss. I have only crashed once, but I later discovered it was due to Windows Update. While in other cases I have people I know that can't seem to play for more than a couple of hours without some sort of crash. (Case-in-point my BF's desktop likes to go kaput at random.) The party invite issues I've come across but it was brought to my attention it only happens in areas that are heavily populated. As soon as I walked away from the camp, party invites functioned normally.

As for the Market Wards problems, I credit that to overall human stupidity more than anything else. The simple fact that each ward has 5-6 areas? Yet you see 90% of retainers shoved into a single area, and virtually none in any other section. Common sense would dictate that if a market is crowded, its more than likely that whatever you're selling will be lost among the masses already there. Personally, I rarely visit the wards for this very reason and just bazaar what I have. If I walk into one and see that many retainers, I find it discourages me from even looking around. It just feels like a waste of time.

I'm also disappointed with the fact that none of the new character creation content previewed at TGS was introduced at release. :3 SE can be such a tease.

Other randomness:

JP players are getting pretty shafted this time around. The retail price for collector's edition is $110-130 and regular edition is not much less. Subscription fees are also higher than NA.

All voice acting and graphical menus are in English ONRY, including cutscenes. If you're JP, I hope you like subtitles.

BWAHAhAhA after 15+ years of anime finally, VINDICATION :-P

Srsly, that sucks for you guys. Is the NA market that much larger than the JP market?

Its pretty disappointing that everything that is in FFXI has been thrown out for FFXIV, with the exception of character models. They have a very refined experience already established and they selectively took a few things and threw everything else away.

The /commands not being there is very sad. I was happy that /map existed in the open beta. It wasn't there during closed iirc.
The server side menu/UI system is so laggy. Its a huge turn off.
No f-keys to target party members.
No search.

Lack of auction house is a very big issue for me. I can understand trying to AH gear that isn't 100% having wear and tear etc. That can be a problem. But trying to go through 100s of bazaars which take 30+ seconds to load... its just not going to happen.

Not being able to map the arrow keys to the camera? WTF. Although I am happy they kept the auto-run, 3rd/1st person view buttons.

this this this and more this....

Also, a word of warning: all content is region-locked, including all registration codes and payment methods. Do not try to use any codes from a region different from your SE account. It won't accept them, and SE won't help. This is because the price points are very different by region and they want to eliminate work-arounds. (No NA game codes on EU SE accounts, no JP codes on NA SE accounts, etc.)

Good news is, you can select your language of choice in the XIV config utility. The game display/input language is not tied to SE account type, like it was in XI.

Bad news is, if your beta account was from a different region, and you want your character name from the correct region for release, you're screwed. You need to make a new SE account from the proper region and lose your char name. SE support is unwilling to help with this. It appears that you can import a game from the region that matches your SE account and use that, but if you do, you potentially lose all customer support forever, and may "lose the ability to login at random times and without warning." (According to the support email they sent me when I asked.)

WoW has durability on armor/weapons and has an AH. It just won't allow you to AH anything not at 100% durability. I can understand SE wanting to try something new to make their MMO stand out more, but let's face it, the AH system is just too good to ditch. The retainer system really is just a tedious version of the AH. It's basically an AH with no auctioneer. All the stuff is there, but you have to manually sort through it, find which one fits your budget, then pay the person who brought it there. Kinda like a less organized flea market.

I am disapoint.

I cannot stand the lack of camera controls via the arrow keys located next to the number pad... Is there a way to fix this? Camera operation was so "second nature" in 11 but having to use 2 hands vs a thumb to simply look around is a HUGE disappointment which I hope they have the common sense to fix.

To the larger point, it seems like many of the UI systems and commands that worked so logically in 11 just aren't in 14 yet. It seems like SE just made it a point to intentionally avoid having the 14 and 11 UI crews collaborate. Others have noted it but menu lag, lack of commands, lack of search function. I mean the game just isn't finished.

The game is truly beautiful and there is much potential improvement over 11 but until it becomes as easy to navigate and play as its predecessor, I think many (including myself) will hold off on the switch to 14.

I thought there was an F key targeting system for parties? I saw one for F9 to toggle through party member in your keyboard config. Unless I'm wrong tho :o

I tested f1-f8 which did nothing, ill try f9 when i get into the game later.

Leves seem to be a different system. If you're in a leve you won't experience it. I think the "this mob spawned just for your leve" code takes precedence and fixes the problem.

If you're in an exp grind group though, and the party leader is outside the "sub-zone" you're in (across an invisible zone line, so their status says ????/????), you can't claim mobs. You can attack them, but it will say "You cannot claim this when leader isn't here" and will get no exp or loot when it dies.

The group bugs don't seem to be bugs. You always get a message, (Ex: "You cannot join this group while you/they have a mob claimed") which implies it's by design. But if so, it's a really terrible design to not allow any group invites, disbands, or other actions if a mob is in any way engaged or you're not next to the party leader.

I've noticed that ???/??? occurs if you are just a few feet beyond the person. When we were exploring and i'd get slowed down by a mob movement, the people in my party would go ???/??? when they ran out of mini map range, then i would get the number when they slowed down and i caught up.

XIV doesn't have hard zone lines. Instead, it seems to use a load balancing or "shared truth" style MMO design. Rather than have a certain zone box responsible for everything in that zone, the server back end "floats" by general region or by who is where.

Trouble is, the pseudo-zones don't appear able to talk to one another for group info. So if you're in a different pseudo-zone than your group mates, you'll get ????. Sometimes this can be a distance of only a few feet. It depends on factors outside of our control.

Damn I haven't gone out to see if that happens yet. I'll have to see how much of a pain in the butt it can be.

In regards to the party invites, I have to agree that it is very stupid that such specific conditions must be met in order to fight/invite/disband. Hopefully that will be adjusted at some point.

I'm skeptical of this simply from us running around and exploring together. I understand that ideology, but I view as more of a bug than zone issues.

No matter where we are the macro zone, if you go outside of mini map range, the party member details go away. So unless the psuedo zone is relative to your immediate area, i dont think thats exactly how its working.

You can tell where the pseudo zone lines are by looking at other players running around. Their names fade and dissappear as they cross the pseudo-zone line into another zone (the character model still is fully visible and runs away though).

Likes: Crafting system, Battle System, Graphics, Music, Character Development, Retainer system*, Storyline and Gil accessibility.

[*I think the retainer system alone is bad, but I think when the Auction House is introduced it will be a really good idea]

Dislike: Lag, Enemy evasion rate, Reply feature being retarded, Bugs

Basically I like the majority of the game, but a few things need to be ironed out, and I'll be very happy. I was also a tad disappointed they didn't add any new jobs for retail but It's not too bad. Once they add more I'll be really excited to try them.

I forgot about the reply feature. While it doesn't really bother me that you have to hit the spacebar before doing so, it IS annoying that you can't use the CTRL+R function in response to a tell that another player initiates. It isn't until you type out the name and send a reply first that the CTRL+R functionality kicks in. I forget it at times and its irritating to have to type to the entire name, especially if you're in a situation where you need to reply quickly.