Fundamental Game Play Issues

[Rambus]

One thing not on the list that really drives me nuts is the delay you have after a failed spell or some items. Example, if you are timing ichi, a lot of times you have to let the mob get a free round because the game does not let you recast it right away.

About lost loot: Is there a reason why I need 4 free spots when 4 items from one monster that all stack? I even had LS mates auto lost jewels even after having an insane amount of room like 70/80.

The rest I agree with. I think it is sloppy programing or the ps2 limtation excuse.

The only one I disagree with is the Collision Detection one. It is annoying at times but I think it is silly to be ghosts at the same time.

Blinking: You said its not possible to have it so ppl dont blink. If a few people living at home in their moms basement can figure out this stuff then maybe you should hire them.

Cruor buffs: Good stuff

Tractor: lame excuse.

Overall Camate I am disappoint.

agree^

I have an idea to fix Tractor and I am sure it is cheap too.

Remove stones and time for abyssea,(no visitant status) there is NO NEED for it!

[Juri_Licious]

Ranged auto attack would be the best damn thing ever.

[Kaisha]

Ranged auto attack would be the best damn thing ever.

What's wrong with an /ra <t> <wait x> (repeat x6) macro?

Would be no different from an auto-attack for ranged since you'd have to sit still the entire time otherwise you'll interupt your aim.

[SpankWustler]

What's wrong with an /ra <t> <wait x> (repeat x6) macro?

Would be no different from an auto-attack for ranged since you'd have to sit still the entire time otherwise you'll interupt your aim.

If your goal is to shoot as fast as possible rather than just shoot without hitting a button a lot, you run into a couple of issues with this type of macro:

Rapid Shot.

Difficulty of getting the delay between shots exactly right.

[Kaisha]

So we're to assume an auto-attack range would just completely ignore the cooldown/delay before initiating any form of action right after/during an attack like it is with melee weapons?

[cidbahamut]

Because integer wait values always match the delay exactly 100% of the time. Always.
</sarcasm>

[Catsby]

being able to move and shoot would be good too.

[Byrth]

I'm pretty sure all the animation locks are just to keep us from sliding around. They prioritized graphics over gameplay.

Newsflash guys: It's 2011 and the game looks like ass because it's approaching a decade old. Let us slide around.

[Hashmalum]

More irritating issues:

1) The way that in certain situations, the camera will go into some sort of spasm, rapidly switching back and forth between two positions multiple times per second. Apparently, it's trying to get further away from a solid surface and failing amazingly at it.

2) The way that, if you are pressing up or down to change target between party or alliance members, if the player you are trying to move the cursor to is at a certain distance, the cursor will "whiff" back to where it started. (If they are close, you can target them fine, if they are far away, the cursor skips over them entirely, but there's a strange middle range where they become a sort of bizarre cursor-obstacle.)

3) Why can't we just enter numbers for our AH bid/selling price directly with the number keys?

4) Along the same lines as "Why do we need free inventory space to accept items we have partial stacks of?", I ask, "Why do we need a free inventory space to accept gil when gil never goes into our inventory to begin with?"

5) Spurious spell/ranged attack interrupts! You know, when you run up to casting range, stop, start casting a spell... then lose it for no apparent reason. The actual reason is that the packet telling the server about your character's movement was delayed slightly and received by the server after the packet telling it to start casting. However, if each packet were numbered sequentially, and the server code was changed such that a movement packet with a number lower than the packet that initiated the spellcasting/ranged attack were simply silently ignored, this problem would be solved.

Oh, and about the annoying and ridiculous way that we can chase a mob, and not hit it, while the reverse is not true... All that's required to fix that is get rid of the collision detection, which causes other annoyances anyway! You see, when you are chasing a mob, you can't attack it because you can't catch it, and you can't catch it because you keep bumping into it, but you are really bumping into where the client thinks the mob is, which is actually where it was several hundred milliseconds ago.

[Arcon]

3) Why can't we just enter numbers for our AH bid/selling price directly with the number keys?

A personal quirk of mine that's bothered me for ages. I've made a thread for that, but no acknowledgement so far.

4) Along the same lines as "Why do we need free inventory space to accept items we have partial stacks of?", I ask, "Why do we need a free inventory space to accept gil when gil never goes into our inventory to begin with?"

Also mentioned it before, it's completely stupid. I'm guessing they wanted the icon to appear in the trade slot, which is unnecessary, because you see the money traded in the number box anyway. And even if, they should check for the number of items that are being traded, not for the fields in the trade menu.

5) Spurious spell/ranged attack interrupts! You know, when you run up to casting range, stop, start casting a spell... then lose it for no apparent reason. The actual reason is that the packet telling the server about your character's movement was delayed slightly and received by the server after the packet telling it to start casting. However, if each packet were numbered sequentially, and the server code was changed such that a movement packet with a number lower than the packet that initiated the spellcasting/ranged attack were simply silently ignored, this problem would be solved.

Actually, "movement" itself isn't transmitted at all, only the position is updated. The problem is, that only happens in certain intervals, not after certain events (such as movement stopping). That is the reason why people get stuck on objects and terrain when they're on /follow, while the target they're following seems to go up cliffs. It's also the reason why casting isn't interrupted by moving, only if at the end of the cast you're in a different position than when you started, which means you can run around all you want, as long as at the end of the cast you stand in approximately the spot where you started.

So if you stop and cast immediately, chances are the new position hasn't been transmitted yet. In which case, the solution would be even simpler; just force send an update as soon as movement stops client-side.

Oh, and about the annoying and ridiculous way that we can chase a mob, and not hit it, while the reverse is not true... All that's required to fix that is get rid of the collision detection, which causes other annoyances anyway! You see, when you are chasing a mob, you can't attack it because you can't catch it, and you can't catch it because you keep bumping into it, but you are really bumping into where the client thinks the mob is, which is actually where it was several hundred milliseconds ago.

Very nicely put, shows just how stupid the system is. Unfortunately, this lag is an inherent problem to online games. Many games rely on heuristics to predict short-term movements, others perform a back-check to see if an action would have had an effect. The latter would be a decent solution for our problem. It would take an extra second to hit a mob when running behind it, but not 30 seconds of following it around, pointlessly. However, it would be quite some work to implement this, and given how lazy the dev team is, I doubt it would happen.

I don't know how I feel about removing object collision detection altogether, it would feel a bit ghosty I guess. However, something I could live with would be reducing the bounding radius around an object by half, or more. So there's still a collision detected when running straight into an object, but it wouldn't happen when just running close by it, or close into it. Also, it would allow us to get a bit closer to the mob when chasing it, which is all it would take to be able to hit it