Things you would like fixed on FFXI

[Firewind]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

<stpt> and <stal> don't always work. if you hit the macro at the moment they blink it still won't get them. It only gets them while they are still loading clientside.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

I know. But I also have a very low opinion of most traditional RPG conventions.

Ugh random battles. Stupidest idea ever to persist. That shit should've died after Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG showed how much funner dungeons can be when you don't get interrupted against your will constantly.

And when you're allowed to see the enemies on the field, you either constantly fight them or constantly avoid them. Constantly engaging them isn't that different from the random encounters themselves with the exception of linking and avoiding them 50% of the time leads to underdeveloped characters and postpones the grind.

Random battles have persisted for this long because if you filled the fields with mobs prior to PS2-era games, it would result in massive slowdown. Yet to have swarms of enemies on-screen at one time, sacrifices have to be made to graphics.

I personally don't care if the battles are random or not, but I know for a fact that seeing them on the field does not make the game more fun unless it allows you to gain some kind of advantage or exploit a weakness. By the same token, high encounter rates are extremely annoying without some means to diminish them

FFXI is one of the few MMOs I've played where mobs detect you by other things besides sight, I'd like to see that expanded on in FFXIV dramatically.

I think there's a lot of things that SMT does as a series that are better than what Final Fantasy does.

Example: SMT has two types of ailments. One type will inflict ailments at random while the other inflicts them 100% of the time.

Example 2: Levelling up means very little if your attacks are resisted. The system forces you to change your strategies constantly for both normal encounters and boss encounters.

Example 3: A "Press Turn" system is better than Haste. Exploiting enemy weaknesses in SMT not only gains you a turn, but forces your enemy to lose a turn. This lessens the damage you take and increases the damage and critical hit rates you deal out. You are rewarded for remembering weaknesses rather than doing the same attacks over and over.

Example 4: Set Skills are better than subjobs. Within certain limits, let me pick skllls from the pool of the ones I've learned and allow me to customize my character that way. While FFXI's job system is very robust, even other FF games allow more freedom for character customization.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

I thought the same way about typing spells, but really with the way spellcast modified it (god only knows how, but love it) it takes very little time to type. All the capitalization and quotation marks of the game's original design make it cumbersome, but typing the way spellcast allows you to made it really quick. I was very fast, unless I misspelled, which only seems to happen on Silena. ("Sielna" is what I would type. Damn dyslexic fingers!)

[Armando]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

If you hate random battles then don't play Suikoden. The encounter rates on those games are so high it's impossible not to be overlevelled in those games .

That's a shame. I remember a friend of mine bought Suikoden III a long time ago and it caught my attention just from the character design (they know how to draw armor?! Gasp!) But the examples you brought up are kinda bad...I mean, those games feature real time combat in the same environments you explore. That's not necessarily the only way to handle a lack of random battles; again, just look at CT or SMRPG, and apparently FFXIII. I put up with random battles if the game is really good, but I still think it's asinine. I recently beat Xenogears and I just had to sigh at such an awesome story wasted on these stupid timesink dungeons.

I must be the only person who loves the gear swapping thing. I like that every piece of equipment I obtain at any given time is going to (typically, there are of course some exceptions) remain useful to me. I also prefer to optimize things. If there were no gearswaps at all in this game, just try to enfeeble Tiamat without ES. Try it.

I'm all for optimization, but there are much better ways to handle it than having the player replace more than half his current equipment for each action that needs to be optimized.

[Raydeus]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

You are not the only one Neesan.

The things I do dislike are blinking and macro unresponsiveness (along with line limitations.) The blinking part can be fixed with the windower plugin, but the macro lag not so much unless you want to type your spells (ewwwww).

[Aksannyi]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

I must be the only person who loves the gear swapping thing. I like that every piece of equipment I obtain at any given time is going to (typically, there are of course some exceptions) remain useful to me. I also prefer to optimize things. If there were no gearswaps at all in this game, just try to enfeeble Tiamat without ES. Try it. While it's true that most XP mobs don't require any of that to be taken down, those cute 25k/hr parties wouldn't exist if your melees weren't putting on extra STR for their WS, and TPing in Acc/Haste. Let's not forget your mage wearing some mp/tick gear for idle, and those resting gear sets, to keep chains going strong. People take a lot for granted in this game, a lot of what we are so good at and so easily able to take down is because we gear swap. That's part of the game's design, it's unique and I absolutely love it.

Blinking should be a non-issue now. <stpt> <stal> fixed it.

[Takelli]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

(meanwhile the mages are tearing their hair out trying to target these people who are madly blinking in and out of existence on their screen).

I never have any issue when healing people while they gear swap to do weapon skills, and so on. I don't understand why people hate having to heal people who do blink though. But yea, I do agree, do away with gear swapping. I only use the light and dark staves as a Rdm, and thats it.

Fix exp gained in campaign... I can gain tripple the amount of experiance in a baseiged at lvl 57, than in campaing. I melee for an hour, and I only gain 36 exp? WTH!?!? I heal like 50 peopel and only gain 220 exp? Again... WTH!?!?

This is more of something that I want added, than something to be fixed, but it will fix the lowr levels from having nothign to do...

Level capped events like Beseiged and campaign! Give the lower levels something to do!

[Icemage]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

So many things broken/annoying about this game:

- non-instanced HNMs. Whichever designer at Square-Enix thought it would be a good chuckle to have hundreds of people waiting around in one zone for hours on end to maaaaaybe challenge a monster that might - or might not - appear needs to be shot. And then shot some more. Then dunked in a barrel of tar and feathered. Then drawn and quartered. Death is too good for him. Seriously.

- Utsusemi being either 100% effective or 0% effective against any given attack. Good heaven above, this might not be the most broken mechanic in the game, but when nearly all tanking situations devolve down to "Can it be blinked? Yes? No?", there is a problem.

- Agree with Armando that gear swapping sucks horribly. Why bring only one piece of equipment when you can bring seven or eight for various occasions (Yes I mean YOU elemental staves). Square-Enix should have long since put a 1 minute timer on getting effects from gear, to keep people from cherry picking the best gear for any given instant and swapping it (meanwhile the mages are tearing their hair out trying to target these people who are madly blinking in and out of existence on their screen).

- Way too much level grinding. Way, way too much. Even with all the advancements like level sync and the much kinder/gentler XP curves, it takes an enormous investment in time to get any one job to maximum level (75)... and then there are 17 other jobs. Not to mention those jolly little detours for support jobs and limit breaks.

- Skillchains are broken and nearly useless except in specific instances. Not only are the skillchain combinations too picky (is it so very much to ask to be able to have skillchains available for any combination of weapons at any reasonable level?), but the benefits simply do not merit the effort any longer unless you're tackling things that are way higher level than you are (endgame). And don't even get me started on the absurdity of magic bursting now that hardly anyone does skillchains except at endgame. Almost all newcomers to endgame have to be given a crash course in how to do magic bursts because, instead of 75 levels of training on how to use them, they never ever see them in a standard XP party.

- The crafting economy is broken. The only parts of the economy that function even vaguely correctly are consumables (ammo, food, drinks, ninja tools) because there is a flow of demand that does not suffer diminishing returns. Armor and weapons never degrade/break, so after a while everyone has enough of what they want of a given item, and that item is almost never made again - and in the mean time crafters charge whatever the market will bear until that happens.

Does all of this mean the game is horrible? No - there are a great many awesome things about FFXI. The storylines, the vast amount of content, the encouragement for players to work together built into many of the game mechanics.

But it could do with a lot of changes still, and I can only hope Square-Enix has taken some of these lessons to heart when designing the gameplay for the upcoming FF14.


Icemage

[Firewind]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

If you hate random battles then don't play Suikoden. The encounter rates on those games are so high it's impossible not to be overlevelled in those games .

Though without random battles you end up with situations like in something like Elder Scrolls or Fallout where monsters will instantly detect you and chase you endlessly until one of you dies no matter how far you run (Like the Cliff Racers in Morrowind or Deathclaws in Fallout) or Neverwinter Nights where your AI party members will just charge in suicidally even if they are a Wizard trying to kill a Wyrm with a +1 dagger. I can understand fighters wanting to charge in but they can also ignore perfectly viable targets for say an archer at the back: "What? Your puny bow just hit me for 4 damage? I'll ignore this Rogue who can sneak attack attack of opporunity me for 50 damage as soon as I pass him because someone who can do over TWELVE TIMES the damage to me is hardly a threat!"

The Neverwinter Nights thing reminds me of accidentally leaving gambits on on FFXII. I've had to many party wiped causes by party members suddenly deciding to engage a non-aggressive Lv50 elemental at Lv20-something I've just stopped using them alltogether.

[Armando]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

I know. But I also have a very low opinion of most traditional RPG conventions.

Ugh random battles. Stupidest idea ever to persist. That shit should've died after Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG showed how much funner dungeons can be when you don't get interrupted against your will constantly.

[Firewind]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

* Common mob AI being incredibly simple and picking abilities at spells at random.

To be fair it's pretty common with most RPG and with certain series it's the only break that the game will ever give you *points at the MegaTen games*

[BurningPanther]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

Forget FFXI, there needs to be a way to turn that thing off.

Hey, I like his avatar. Armando, don't change a thing.


On topic:

* Fix the Cure lock that was supposed to have been fixed before but never really was.

* Just default /check notices to filter and stop the madness already.

[Raydeus]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

Hmm, if SE could go 5 years back in time and add all the stuff they have added/fixed (very recently) then I'd go with that. But considering they can't (and proof of that is they didn't go back to change Spirit's Within marketing) then there's nothing SE could fix that would make any difference for me.

There are things they could added, but nothing realistically possible or that's worth wasting on XI when it could be done in XIV instead.


But I'll try my best to contribute anyway.

So... I'll have to go with them finally eff'ing fixing the macro/command lag.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

* Summoner
* Buffs to Magic comparable in power to all the tools that your average Melee player has now, particularly regarding Magic Accuracy
* For that matter, more Mage-specific status effects that aren't Refresh.
* More hybrid-oriented gears and foods. This does not mean "give this armor minor amounts of multiple stats that each has a different function, and thus make it easily overshadowed by using multiple pieces of already-existing gear," nor does it mean making it plenty powerful/passable but then sticking an epic 12M price tag on it.
* Summoner
* But while none of the above is resolved, make it so us Red Mages don't have to build our own freaking Melee armor, for pete's sake. You don't give Blue Mages that kind of treatment!
* I hear that Bard could stand to become a less autonomous job. The one benefit to auto-attack is that you don't have to hit a button over and over again to do it.
* Pretty much everything Armando said.
* Oh, and . . . Summoner.

Probably forgetting a couple of things as well; maybe I'll add them later.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Things you would like fixed on FFXI

I am interested in this thread. I've got plenty to add, but not the time to do it at the moment. I'll be back later, unless someone else covers it.