[Suggestion] Consolidating Equip Macros

[Zerich]

I can see your argument but I think it's necessary to be practical about this. A large number of people use FFXI on a platform that does not support third party applications. Another group of people do not use third party applications because they are in violation of the terms of service or because they object to there being differences in the level of gameplay provided by different platforms. This will not change. Of course I agree that people can swap to using a PC or ignore the terms of service, but they should not have to, nor should their choice be considered a bad one so that people can justify using these programs.

The concept of "fairness" is pretty nebulous at the best of times but I think that it's pretty hard to claim that a third party/non-third party comparison isn't objectively unfair. It may or may not be stubbornness that causes people to use consoles or refuse to use third party programs, but that's kind of irrelevant for as long as consoles are supported platforms and those programs remain in violation of the terms of service.

It is breaking ToS, yes. That's all you've established. But you've yet to debunk the claim of "stubbornness"

Stubborn: Having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something, esp. in spite of good arguments or reasons...

[Afania]

how are they not fair? the average household in the countries that this game supports, generally has access to a personal computer. use half a brain cell with google, and you'll realize the notion of "unfair" boils down to "stubborn".

Stubborn or not does not change the fact that using windower is against ToS(and by this time, admitted by SE that it's against design intention). You're basically telling everyone to cheat or else you're stubborn.

[Zerich]

Stubborn or not does not change the fact that using windower is against ToS(and by this time, admitted by SE that it's against design intention). You're basically telling everyone to cheat or else you're stubborn.

I am not telling anyone to "cheat" or break their ToS.
I am pointing out that crying about unfair advantages, because someone plays on a console, is nothing but being stubborn.

And Rosa, no one cares about your claims on soloing IT mobs and NMs in Abyssea, most WHMs can do the same.

[FrankReynolds]

I could have sworn that this thread was about getting some of the functionality that is widely used anyways into the game in a legitimate manner. Why are we debating whether third party apps are unfair? We all know they are unfair. If they were okay in general, no one would ask SE to change anything. They would all be over at the windower forums instead.

The point is that there are some much needed changes to the basic functionality of the game and other groups have already made major inroads to fixing them. This is much like prohibition. You make something that the vast majority of people want illegal, and you don't stop it. You just make a few people rich and a lot of people suffer.

[Jerbob]

It is breaking ToS, yes. That's all you've established. But you've yet to debunk the claim of "stubbornness"

Stubborn: Having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something, esp. in spite of good arguments or reasons...

It's easy to make generalisations about people and their situations without being realistic. A mass transition away from platforms that do not support third party applications is simply not going to happen for a whole host of reasons that are often far more complex than stubbornness. It is not possible to generalise. It's only necessary to visit one of the PS2 discussion threads to see a few of these reasons, of varying validity. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with any of them, but they are there.

Once it is accepted that there will always be people with valid reasons not to migrate to platforms that support third party applications, the question of whether it's fair arises again. The very fact that things are unfair with respect to people who have no reasonable choice in terms of platform - reasonable here in the context of a game, meaning people aren't going to go out of their way to make platform changes - is one of your definition of stubbornness' "good arguments". Breaking the ToS, I would argue, is a second, though apparently not everyone agrees on this point.

[fake edit] Yes, this is getting kind of off topic so I will stop here.

[Nala]

Rosina you're the last person who should be calling any one a troll and i didn't realize whiteknight err onion was related to you.

There are methods to stream line macro execution but the methodology is still cumbersome and any mistakes made when pressing the macro's can find you in the wrong pallet and unable to execute other actions without re-executing one of the other macros in the chain.

The /set macro commands were a nice bone for consoles but still a farcry from a true equalizer. This ought to be a bigger concern for the Dev team vice many other minuscule and minute changes that they have planning. That or the whole gear design concept needs to be overhauled so that we have 1 do all be all sets and disable gear swapping all together (don't you f'n dare this is sarcasm)

[Phogg]

I am not telling anyone to "cheat" or break their ToS.
I am pointing out that crying about unfair advantages, because someone plays on a console, is nothing but being stubborn.

And Rosa, no one cares about your claims on soloing IT mobs and NMs in Abyssea, most WHMs can do the same.

Huh? Um, what? So if someone bought this game for Xbox and is watching others exploit features which both violate the ToS and have now been announced in an explicit fashion by the Devs/Reps as not being something they will look to implement/change, what exactly does "being stubborn" have to do with this scenario? Expecting the game to operate evenly across supported platforms has nothing, at all, to do with being stubborn. It clearly offers a certain segment of the player base an advantage over others.

That is about fairness, and fair play. If the game is supported on platforms that do not allow access to these third party applications, that is a fairness issue. Its really none of your business what platform people choose to play on, and has nothing to do with the underlying issue.

[cidbahamut]

Huh? Um, what? So if someone bought this game for Xbox and is watching others exploit features which both violate the ToS and have now been announced in an explicit fashion by the Devs/Reps as not being something they will look to implement/change, what exactly does "being stubborn" have to do with this scenario? Expecting the game to operate evenly across supported platforms has nothing, at all, to do with being stubborn. It clearly offers a certain segment of the player base an advantage over others.

That is about fairness, and fair play. If the game is supported on platforms that do not allow access to these third party applications, that is a fairness issue. Its really none of your business what platform people choose to play on, and has nothing to do with the underlying issue.

If it's about fairness of play then folks should be totally on board for lobbying for improvements to the vanilla client. The PC community already has access to a vastly superior experience via third party improvements. That's not going away. What we can do is encourage SE to step up its game and make improvements to the vanilla client that rival the improvements made by third party developers. It's the best of both worlds that way.

[Zerich]

Huh? Um, what? So if someone bought this game for Xbox and is watching others exploit features which both violate the ToS and have now been announced in an explicit fashion by the Devs/Reps as not being something they will look to implement/change, what exactly does "being stubborn" have to do with this scenario? Expecting the game to operate evenly across supported platforms has nothing, at all, to do with being stubborn. It clearly offers a certain segment of the player base an advantage over others.

That is about fairness, and fair play. If the game is supported on platforms that do not allow access to these third party applications, that is a fairness issue. Its really none of your business what platform people choose to play on, and has nothing to do with the underlying issue.

it's not any of my business, that's right. however, this game can run on nearly any p.o.s. pc from walmart.

[Phogg]

If it's about fairness of play then folks should be totally on board for lobbying for improvements to the vanilla client. The PC community already has access to a vastly superior experience via third party improvements. That's not going away. What we can do is encourage SE to step up its game and make improvements to the vanilla client that rival the improvements made by third party developers. It's the best of both worlds that way.

I'm not arguing the UI should not be improved. I am fully on board with that, things like displaying TP and distance, improved macros, etc., I'm all for it.

What I'm arguing is its completely irrelevant to suggest that because someone plays on an Xbox or PS2 that those end users are somehow responsible for their UI experience because they are "stubborn". Its just a stupid argument with no relevance. The fact is, two platforms which are officially supported do not have equal access to third party "improvements", which creates an issue regarding fairness.

I'm with you, the solution is to fix the UI, not act like a troll because some people choose to play on one of the other supported platforms rather than need to both repurchase the game and buy a "p.o.s. pc from walmart" when they already have a perfectly capable platform to play on.

BTW, I play on a PC so I don't even have a dog in the fight on that end, I just have an aversion to stupid arguments that do nothing to promote actually fixing the issues.