Quick Launch?

[bazookatooth]

Ideally, they would make a shortcut icon that when clicked just went to the password portion and then skipped straight to character selection. Probably not gonna happen though.

[Alhanelem]

Ideally, they would make a shortcut icon that when clicked just went to the password portion and then skipped straight to character selection. Probably not gonna happen though.

They can't skip you to character selection because that's inside the game. the closest they can get you upon logging in would be to take you immediately to the FFXI screen (bypassing having to click the Shortcut button and not loading the POL main menu at all, as I described). Like I said above, there's no way they're getting rid of the dont forget your real life or ESRB messages (which everyone is sick of seeing and would love to skip since they stay on screen for like ~7 seconds each). The ideal system would be a simple launcher with an HTML page like FFXIV but as long as FFXI exists, so will POL. *sigh*

For some time after FFXI was the only thing we had, there were still other POL titles in Japan, but my current understanding is everything that used it there is now gone as well except XI, which is why skipping the POL main menu could be a realistic change (as other than accessing your email/friends list/chat, which can be accessed from anywhere in POL, the main menu has basically no purpose anymore)

Although POL has your IDs, it doesn't know anything about your characters themselves.

[bazookatooth]

They can't skip you to character selection because that's inside the game. the closest they can get you upon logging in would be to take you immediately to the FFXI screen (bypassing having to click the Shortcut button and not loading the POL main menu at all, as I described). Like I said above, there's no way they're getting rid of the dont forget your real life or ESRB messages (which everyone is sick of seeing and would love to skip since they stay on screen for like ~7 seconds each). The ideal system would be a simple launcher with an HTML page like FFXIV but as long as FFXI exists, so will POL. *sigh*

For some time after FFXI was the only thing we had, there were still other POL titles in Japan, but my current understanding is everything that used it there is now gone as well except XI, which is why skipping the POL main menu could be a realistic change (as other than accessing your email/friends list/chat, which can be accessed from anywhere in POL, the main menu has basically no purpose anymore)

Although POL has your IDs, it doesn't know anything about your characters themselves.

It would probably be possible to create custom shortcuts that automatically open the POL account log in that you want to use and automatically button through all the nonsense to get to the character selection screen once credentials have been entered. I think there are actually already third party apps that do (at least some of) this. They wouldn't have to remove the current log in process. Just add the option to create "Quick log in" short cuts. Again though, probably not a snowballs chance that SE will do it. because of reasons already listed.

[AtrixWolfe]

Person 1: Let's make it take less time to log in
Everyone else: OMG NO DON'T DO THAT

Wow guys really.... you must like spending 2 minutes to log in. Which is a real pain, if you multibox or your net drops.

There's zero downsides to logging in quickly people are so... I don't even know.

[detlef]

Might be more like:

Person 1: Let's make it take less time to log in
Everyone else: Pretty sure they've said that they can't make it much (any?) faster than it already is. It's not THAT bad right now is it?

[bungiefanNA]

The deal is that with the current system, they can't make it much faster, other than having it skip to the FFXI screen with the Play button, and removing the warning about accounts being hacked. That's 2 clicks. PlayOnline Viewer could not be removed without major backend work, and with the time limit on updates remaining, we'd rather not have them spend resources like that when they could make the game itself better.