Let me start off by saying I absolutely love some of the additions we got in 2.3. The game is constantly growing and give us players more and more to do. That being said as an officer of a Free Company with a medium house and 80-100 active members I'm finding it increasingly difficult to manage our Free Company.
I can boil our problems down to two categories. Gardening and Information Management. Let me explain.
- Gardening -
My Free Company initially didn't have a lot of interest in the gardening system during 2.2. There were essentially three of us gathering the materials necessary to grow glazenuts so that we could obtain the musical instruments. Outside of this there were only a few pets so there wasn't much interest.
However, with the addition of chocobo raising that has changed entirely.
Since gardening is the only way to obtain chocobo food the gardening interest has grown dramatically. This leads us to find ways to include others so that we can obtained more food to spread around. I'm sorry, but this is an unrealistic goal at best. Perhaps if both patches were spent doing nothing but growing Krakka Root we might be able to share, but that's hardly the case.
We need stable brooms to keep the new stable clean for our members so one patch must be dedicated to growing the materials necessary to create those brooms. As any who garden know this is a long process. This prevents us from focusing on making food for our members. In our case the second patch is setup created crosses for Curiel root. The hope being we can eventually cross to create Thanvarian Onions for our users who want to rank their chocobos up.
This consumes both of our patches and leaves us completely unable to produce chocobo feed for our members. It can't be said that what we are growing is a waste either as each of the patches are producing items that are in great demand for our FC.
Solutions
A) Increase the base yields for chocobo food.
B) Add another food that can be used to train chocobos that doesn't require the garden. Perhaps at a somewhat reduced EXP reward.
C) Add chocobo feed as possible rewards in other systems. Grand Company seals comes to mind.
D) Add to our personal rooms window flower pots. These can have perhaps 2-3 plots allowing an individual to grow a few plants of their own.
- Information Management -
Our leadership for some time now has found that it quite difficult to convey information to our Free Company members when we aren't personally online. We've also, since 2.3, found it very difficult to obtain useful information from our FC log. Let me elaborate.
As many people know getting guild members to log in to the forums is like pulling teeth. Some will do it, but the majority will never bother. So conveying information to our users in game is paramount to spreading important information around. We have one primary tool to do this right now in the form of the message displayed to users when they log in. However, even this method is flawed. We are given a character limit for our message, but the actual input box restricts us more than the limit. Do you realize how frustrating it is to have over 40 characters left but to be unable to add more? Especially when this is our one and only method available to us.
Secondly, even if we had our full character limit that space simply isn't enough. We need to convey a little bit more information. Perhaps a weekly FC buff schedule, perhaps a short blurb about upcoming events, etc. Our leaders aren't on 24/7. We don't have an easy way to convey more than a brief shorthanded message to our users. We could use something slightly more.
Solution
A) Give the login message the ability to use the full character limit.
B) I propose a 512/1024 character input box in the main Free Company window. This would give us enough space to convey the information we need to.
My last piece is about the FC log window. Up until the addition of chocobo raising the log was fairly adequate. We could frequently see back three days with no problem. However, with the addition of chocobo raising and the boom of interest in gardening that is now no longer the case. With all the training and gardening messages the log now no longer goes back past 20 hours. I can't tell if someone quit or joined the FC a day ago. I can't tell who tended the garden so I know who helped contribute to this batch. It's honestly becoming almost useless.
Solutions
A) Increase the log buffer size.
B) Separate the gardening log to it's own section. This is the one flooding out all the other info. When we have people fertilizing and watering the plants on two plots there are 32 individual messages added to the log.
C)
- Conclusions -
Our problems are a testament to the success you've had introducing useful and important systems to the game. All that we ask is for the ability to easily maintain our FC as these changes are added. Please consider my request, and the possible suggestions from others who come and post to this thread.
Thanks,
Tiggy.