Fundamental Game Play Issues

[Sevvy]

Gonna break apart some of your concerns. Not trying to be rude, just things that you can do yourself to remedy them:

* Blinking/losing target after target gear swaps - Gear swaps are actually an improvement in this game compared to others such as the W word. No other game allows you to change gear in the middle of battle to take advantage of many stats. Of course youre going to lose target because the different gear looks different.

** Blinking on your own and losing "locked on" status - Tell me all the monsters that actually blink and do this. I bet its less than 10.

* Items being lost from the treasure pool due to inventory issues (One person lots more items than they have space for, everyone else passes, the extra items are lost) - This I can see is an issue, but its the players responsibility to keep their inventory in check.

* Cure lock - Rather annoying yes, but good healers will always preheal and the lock shouldn't take place too often

* Animation locks - I agree with you here. Instant is instant.

** Raise Delay - Again, you have to be a smart player, if you know a mob is due to TP then dont get up. If a mob is casting a ga or ja, dont get up.

* Post-Job Ability/Magic delays Cooldowns are imperative or you would have BLMs destorying everything with the same spell over and over, it would make the game much more boring.

* Engage delay Tough one to argue, I agree with you.

* Losing Items while Paralyzed - I highly disagree with you here. Being paralyzed is simply annoying but you need to have a way to take it off before you do anything. It only makes sense. S-E threw us a bone not allowing us to waste two hour abilities but you have to be smart with your items and money, just like irl.

* Ranged Auto-Attack - Agreed.

* Losing Reraise Status upon DC - I'm sure its a coding issue. Best bet is trying to have a buddy with you so they can raise as well

** Losing Cruor buffs upon DC - Agree

* Unable to Search when dead, but ability to send tells and use your linkshell - Look at every other MMO out there, its all the same. You cant do it when youre dead in any of them. Your actions are supposed to be limited when youre dead. I think this is good.

** Unable to use UI controls while charmed - How often are you charmed? I agree this is annoying and is probably atrtibuted to a design flaw, but I mean, there arent many that charm anymore outside of Dynamis.

* Tractor re-zoning us - Moving from one map to the other without you actually contolling the character actually counts as a zone. I know /follow kinda kills that, but youre character is alive and well and moving in accordance of what you want it to do.

I

[Kaisha]

Breaking apart your reply to his concerns....

Gonna break apart some of your concerns. Not trying to be rude, just things that you can do yourself to remedy them:

* Blinking/losing target after target gear swaps - Gear swaps are actually an improvement in this game compared to others such as the W word. No other game allows you to change gear in the middle of battle to take advantage of many stats. Of course youre going to lose target because the different gear looks different.

His complaint about blinking has nothing to do with the benefits of gear swapping but losing the target focus.

** Blinking on your own and losing "locked on" status - Tell me all the monsters that actually blink and do this. I bet its less than 10.

You misunderstood him. He's referring to your camera view unlocking from the mob when YOU gearswap.

** Raise Delay - Again, you have to be a smart player, if you know a mob is due to TP then dont get up. If a mob is casting a ga or ja, dont get up.

You've clearly not done later VW. They're almost non-stop AoE in all of their attacks. Granted I chalk this up to being a problem with Tractor rather than Raise. The AoE spam continues to be a trend in the new VW content also, fun times to have.....

* Post-Job Ability/Magic delays Cooldowns are imperative or you would have BLMs destorying everything with the same spell over and over, it would make the game much more boring.

He's referring to the delay of being able to not issue any actions for a short moment after every JA/Spell. The delay is the bane of every SCH's existance given their heavy reliance on stratagems. Granted the delay feels like they're part of the animation rather than an imposed limitation though.

* Unable to Search when dead, but ability to send tells and use your linkshell - Look at every other MMO out there, its all the same. You cant do it when youre dead in any of them. Your actions are supposed to be limited when youre dead. I think this is good.

You've not played many MMOs then if you really think that.

* Tractor re-zoning us - Moving from one map to the other without you actually contolling the character actually counts as a zone. I know /follow kinda kills that, but youre character is alive and well and moving in accordance of what you want it to do. I

Are you even aware of how Tractor operates? The problem with it is that it has you physically zone out and back into the same zone, but only a few feet away from your previous position. The problem is that it wipes a lot of status/buffs depending on the event/location, rendering it nigh-on useless where it would actually be used otherwise.

* Losing Reraise Status upon DC - I'm sure its a coding issue. Best bet is trying to have a buddy with you so they can raise as well

On this general subject, if they ever make RR survive a D/C, I would hope they would do the same for sneak/invis also. Fun times always had when you're trying to get around a zone without aggroing anything of a higher-lvl, just to D/C and wind up in a pack of mobs that'll just pound the living daylights out of you.

Granted that's less of a problem nowadays due to higher survivability at lvl95, but a nuisance none the less.

[Arcon]

Theory
All I can think is that would be too taxing to perform this check for all other types of communication (say, shout, party, etc) because of the sheer volume of chat. But if system resources weren't an issue, it seems they could use the "tell routine" to check if other types of chat are headed for "zoning recipients"

There would be ways around it, but I think it's a design choice that it currently doesn't work. It was probably one price they were willing to pay for not having to deal with a solution for it.

Gonna break apart some of your concerns. Not trying to be rude, just things that you can do yourself to remedy them:

You're not breaking apart anything. Every single thing you criticized was either misunderstood from the OP, ignorant of the actual problem or just plain wrong. Except for two things, which were just your opinion, but those were still disagreeing with the majority (and common sense).

Overall Camate I am disappoint.

This sums up FFXI as of late.

The only reason to leave it this way is if SE fears people will somehow abuse it from a balance standpoint to move really quickly through a daisy-chain of tractor casters. I'm not sure exactly what the benefit of that would be (maybe actually getting to the top of Tor before your stone grows dark?), but this is the only real reason I could see.

That's true, however, there's plenty of quests in the game, where key items break or get lost upon death, so changing it to that shouldn't be an issue.

To people saying these problems have existed for years, why are we only complaining now? Well, several reasons. For once, no. People have been complaining for years, just without an official forum, there was no decent way to get the word out. All of these things have been annoying the shit out of me (and everyone) since day one.

Secondly, this isn't the same game anymore. It's not the same time anymore. FFXI faces distinction. There is a lot more competition out these days, and SE is losing serious amounts of customers. They need to go with the times and look at what players want. SE needs to consider what will keep more players or get more new players playing: More pointless "content" (I use that term loosely), which offers little to no reward, or making the game actually playable. Even if they fixed it now it would be very late and they will have lost tons of customers to an unplayable game, but if they wait longer it will just get worse (for them).

And lastly, we complain because we have to. Screaming loud enough is the only thing that seems to have any kind of effect on them. And it will not, never, ever, get better until SE actually gets of their lazy asses and does what the playerbase wants them to.

It's shocking how long this game has survived with the company's current motto of "Fuck the players, we know best". Because it's wrong, they don't know best. SE doesn't know their own game at all and they've proven that, time and again. They know nothing of MMORPGs, nothing of coding (apparently) and nothing of business strategies.

This, on the other hand, proves what tremendous potential FFXI has. Despite so many sinister acts of the company, it was largely successful and still is to some degree. I still call it the best MMORPG I know, because it is, because these elements that piss us off aren't all what there is to the game. However, this underlying strength of FFXI will not keep it afloat forever. These unnecessary flaws have cost the game (and the company) dearly, both in players/revenue as in image. They don't realize how important a good image is in the MMORPG market especially. That's the reason why FFXIV will never be successful, because it had a very troubled start. It does not matter how good they will make it, this first impression pretty much killed any future prospects the game had.

And finally, SE really needs to drop the "Holier than thou" act they have going. Don't pretend to be smart, you're not. Don't pretend you're fooling anyone, you're not. What we want, more than anything else, is honesty. Don't feed us lies about why you can't implement something when we know for a fact that you can. Don't tell us you'll fix something, then you don't (like losing TP on "too far away" messages, which you said you're looking into over two updates ago (and which should also be added to OP)). Respect your players enough not to lie to them, then we can start improving the game together, in everyone's benefit.