Necessary Free Company Qualty of Life Upgrades

[Tiggy]

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)

Yeah, even looking at the individual sections via the drop down list is too limited. I suggest a change be made to "FCmemberX fertilized 8 plants in Garden1" and "FCmemberY trained Bird1, Bird2, Bird3, and Bird4". That's really all we need.

- 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.

[HEC]

- Gardening -

Apart of the fact that you're mixing bed with patch - bed is the one planting spot inside the patch, patch is the whole "frame" of 2 x 2, 2 x 3 or 8 (3 x 3 - 1) beds - I do agree that strain on FC gardens went through the roof by introducing the chocobo "training" (we're not even at raising yet) and is certainly issue for the larger FCs out there. While training is a temporary, time limited taks and demand will fall over time I too would like to see some additional gardening space - either by adding at least one extra patch to each property size (thus having 2 for small, 3 for medium and 4 for large) which would help considerably and / or introducing largely requested private rooms pots (even if it wouldn't be posible to crosbreed there). Either way this should be addressed in some smart way.

[SummonerSenah]

Totally agree on both counts. My FC is not even nearly as big and yet we have the same issues.

[Tiggy]

Apart of the fact that you're mixing bed with patch - bed is the one planting spot inside the patch, patch is the whole "frame" of 2 x 2, 2 x 3 or 8 (3 x 3 - 1) beds

Fixed. Thanks.

[Sadana]

YEP.

For gardening, I think it would be better for LN soil to make things grow faster than producing HQ. Prior to 2.3, there were 2 of us interested in gardening; now there are dozens who want to know when more food will be ready. :/

I desperately need a better way to pass info to the FC population. Most do not/will not/can not use the forums (or any other website I may choose to offer) and the log in info is the only way. It's too small of a field. We could use a calendar too.

[Tiggy]

YEP.

For gardening, I think it would be better for LN soil to make things grow faster than producing HQ. Prior to 2.3, there were 2 of us interested in gardening; now there are dozens who want to know when more food will be ready. :/

I desperately need a better way to pass info to the FC population. Most do not/will not/can not use the forums (or any other website I may choose to offer) and the log in info is the only way. It's too small of a field. We could use a calendar too.

I had a similar discussion with my FC members last night. Right now there are almost no decent uses for HQ soil. It's the only one we don't use or gather at all. The only use I can really think of is to grow HQ Dzemael Tomatoes for Culinarians trying to get their i70 tool and honestly it's fairly unnecessary even for that.

[Yahavage]

Private chambers should probably be allowed little planters they can use. Might help a bit.
My FC is only small and even I'm at a bit of a loss on how I should prioritise growing things :/ at least if people could grow their own chocobo food that'd remove some of the worry about how I should be prioritising stuff!

I also like your information management suggestions. Definitely would be usefu

[Sadana]

Oh, and I agree about the history limit being too small both in the FC activity lists and the FC coffer. We had an incident recently where someone took a stack of 10 krakka from the coffer. We only had 70 for the whole FC right now. When I asked her about it, she said she used it to feed many birds (still kinda selfish, others would like to feed their birds too). I believe her, but if I had been able to see the history about this, I would feel a lot better and would have approached the subject a little differently.

[JayCommon]

Your proposition has been delivered eloquently, and I agree with all of the points you have made. +1 to OP


Personally, with the time (or gil) requirements needed to make the magicked stable brooms, it's a bit outlandish that they are a one time use item. The two main ingredients (broombush and glazenut) are on completely separate crossbreeds, and if one were to start from the beginning of the cycle it would take them anywhere from 3-4 weeks (depending on the amount of fertilizer being applied daily) just to acquire their first ones. Not to mention using two full large garden patches, which for medium housing is all we get. I say full garden patches because it would be a complete waste of your time/resources to only go for one of each. Our stable is dirty every 2-3 days, and our FC isn't nearly as big as yours. So if you make 1 set of 20 brooms it will last 3-4 weeks at most? I lucked out and bought 4 brooms the day after the patch went live for 55k each. Now they are going for closer to 250k FOR 1, because of the massive time investment needed to produce these yourself coupled with the high demand.


I just supply the stuff for my guild members who are raising their chocobo. I really want to raise my chocobo too, but as it stands I'm not going personalize the stable for my own gain when others in my FC have genuine interest. I mean....we are talking about a broom here. A broom....

[Ruethryl]

Actually.. the history for FC has been foobar period ever since they introduced housing, gardening and such have only made it worse.. if you're in an active FC that history is maxed out (likely with gardening stuff) and you can't get anything useful out of it.