Solution to "blinking"

[Venrymel]

A point that I think exists and I'm confused nobody brought up:

Sometimes people are battling a foe with more than 17 other people at their side. Party leaders can do things to assist the targetting issue, but Targeting someone outside the alliance (which is the three parties as one) without the potential nuisance of a "blink" requires typing out their name. Typing, like any skill, is something some people are really good at and others aren't. It's that simple. You don't become a horrible person for not having a particular skill. You're just flawed like everyone else. Nobody's perfect, but as the Japanese say: がんばって＾＾。

I don't understand the problem people have expressed with <stpt> and <stal> not solving the issue. When I learned about these, I duplicated my books (SMN, WHM, SCH, RDM, BLM—I'm a mage if you haven't already guessed) so that one set had <stpc> and the other <stpt> and <..al>. The <stpc> sets haven't been updated in a while, because I have very infrequently found myself needing to target an adventurer who is not currently in my alliance (again, which includes all three parties). I have not been very involved in endgame activities, but I usually wind up using the menu list of spells or typing out someone's name with a spell (Dynamis) when they're altogether not accessible by <stal> (not to be confused with creating a macro which contains specific player names).

Point: For any spell/ability that works only on my party OR only on myself, I use <stpt>. For everything else, I use <stal>, due to the afformentioned seldom occuring necessity of targeting someone outside my alliance (in other words: any one who is not one of the 18 people in it).

I do sometimes have problems with my spells activating (as if I had used a dead macro), but as this also happens with summoning an avatar, I don't think it's the same problem. It might have to do with the order of my macros lines, I'll need to look into it. It seems to only happen when there are a lot of people and things are really hectic and my fingers are flying across my keyboard, so I really have no better idea what the problem might be. Me? Computer? Bandwidth?　かも知れない。

I wouldn't use "bad", I'd just say "less experienced". To compare life to ingame: EXP drops off at "too weak". Logically, to continue gaining EXP, you need to move on. Similarly, in life, only so many things can be learned from any one thing, but variables make quantifying that quite difficult. Nevertheless, improvement is best had through further experience, not through mulling over the same issue ad infinitum.

Insulting other players over knowledge they don't have is just plain rude. People get irritated, it happens.

Even adding a menu option to filter away blinking adds code to the game. It's possible developers don't deem blinking as important an issue, since the secondary party/alliance tags already exist and seem to negate the problem and the PS2 is nearing max capacity.

I wonder if it's possible, instead, to add an arrow to the field that is tied to the <stal> type tags. I also wonder if it's possible to alter player names' colors to differentiate between the players of extra-party alliance members; different colors for each party, so they can be located as easily as the person's (自分の) party.

This would help with WHM and SCH effects that can perform AoE on allies.

Perhaps the <stal> tags can be made to induce the same lighting effect that manually targeting anything causes.