Mahjong is the most depressing mini game you've added to XIV

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Originally Posted by Bacent

Yeah, that's why you're having fun with it. It's a lot easier to play against NPCs with fixed difficulties. I've been queued up with random people who are actually at the point of them being ranked. I'm still at Novice. But this game is going to push a LOT of people away from playing with others, due to having to sit around for 40+ minutes when they could be doing more with their time, more so with achievements being out of their reach once only the 'good' players are left. That's what happens when you force achievements into a mini-game that takes an ungodly amount of time into a game that you can only get said achievements with other players.

You can enter TT tournaments with NPCs and still get achievements/rewards from it. Why the hell did this have to go against the grain?

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So why not play against NPCs and see if you enjoy the game better after you've gotten some experience with the gameplay? And I sat around for roughly that timespan, didn't consider it a waste because I was enjoying myself. If people enjoy the game and have something to work towards, they'll consider it time well spent, I feel.

I can sympathize that you want the scroll, and perhaps they'll open up different ways to get some stuff you'd like. The game itself however is enjoyable in my opinion.

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

I gave up on it. I thought mahjong was just matching squares, I don't know what this is.

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That's Mahjong Solitaire.

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Originally Posted by SturmChurro

10-15 min matches I could see, but 45 min to an hour? No way! At least the card games are relatively quick!

Whatever, it's not for me and I'm not a collector/achievement hunter, just adding another one I won't get close to finishing. :P

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To quote the rules directly: Each game has a time limit of 120 minutes, after which the game will end automatically.

As well as there being 'eight hands' per game. Each hand lasts about 5-8 minutes. So times that by 8 and you get how much of a HEAVY time sink this is.

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Originally Posted by SDaemon

So why not play against NPCs and see if you enjoy the game better after you've gotten some experience with the gameplay?

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It's more enjoyable in a sense with NPCs. You can quit out when you need to to do other stuff. With this you have to choose to spend +/- an hour on a single game, when you could be doing many other things (Including me working on saving for the brand new shiny 2,000,000 MGP mount). But can you argue that many people will keep playing, and it won't just be swamped with people who have been playing this game for ages, or simple remember the rules better? I have dual monitors, and I keep the rules open on my other monitor to try to keep on top of things, but I'm a horribly forgetful person.

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Originally Posted by Bacent

and I've been told by a few of them 'you lose almost all games you play'.

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To be fair, all things being equal that's true of any game with more than two players. Unless you're way better than your opponents, the more players the more likely someone else will win.

(Frontlines frustrates me for the same reason. By design you lose twice as often as you win.)

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Originally Posted by Bacent

You start at 1500 points, and you slowly gain them if you win, or you lose them pretty damn quickly when you have a loss. The one time I came in second place I gained 9 points. The first time I get 4th place, I lose 29 points. This is beyond depressing if this is just an inkling of what kind of BS I'm gonna have to see just to try to get one damned item.

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Isn't it impossible to lose points until your rank is high enough? The official rules said so:
https://i.imgur.com/sYaDyID.png

I'm a huge fan of Mahjong, but I understand that the length of the game can be intimidating to new players. You must be very lucky to complete a game in 30 minutes. In my experience, on average, one game lasts about 50-60 minutes. The last game I played was completed in 90 minutes.
I think the solution is to let the players choose between full match and half match. The caveat is playing a half match only gives/takes half the points of a full match.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

To be fair, all things being equal that's true of any game with more than two players. Unless you're way better than your opponents, the more players the more likely someone else will win.

(Frontlines frustrates me for the same reason. By design you lose twice as often as you win.)

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This is a game that many people have more skill in by default. A lot of cultures have Mahjong in some form in their history, and many players have played it long before XIV attempted to add it into the game. You can already tell this on day one when people have gotten up to the 5th rank or higher (Lower numbers for higher ranks), and when you're stuck against just those people what's actually to keep someone playing?

First and second place get rewarded in this. Third and fourth get points taken away, with fourth getting the heaviest loss.

Why can we ONLY do anything ranked against players, and not attempt anything ranked with NPCs, like how we can in LoV and TT? NPCs have their own skill levels. They have NPCs with their own skill levels too, but in those matches you HAVE to play against 3 NPCs. Can't have any mix besides a 1-3 PC/NPC or a 4-0 PC/NPC ratio.

It'd be better if they could let us rank up somewhat from NPCs and just give people a cut off point score/ranking wise. But nope, the game will soon be populated by only people who know almost all of the ins and outs of the game.

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Originally Posted by CodingSession

Isn't it impossible to lose points until your rank is high enough? The official rules said so:
https://i.imgur.com/sYaDyID.png

I'm a huge fan of Mahjong, but I understand that the length of the game can be intimidating to new players. You must be very lucky to complete a game in 30 minutes. In my experience, on average, one game lasts about 50-60 minutes. The last game I played was completed in 90 minutes.
I think the solution is to let the players choose between full match and half match. The caveat is playing a half match only gives/takes half the points of a full match.

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I'm talking about the personal player rating, where you start off at 1500. You can start losing points right away. I got second once for 9 points to my rating, then I got third once for -9 points, and then fourth once for -29 points. I got lucky when I got second point, against 3 other people who had a similar level to me skill wise. But those other two games I had people who had 5th/6th ranking.

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Originally Posted by Bacent

It'd be better if they could let us rank up somewhat from NPCs and just give people a cut off point score/ranking wise. But nope, the game will soon be populated by only people who know almost all of the ins and outs of the game.

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I think that was a given. It would be dead within a couple weeks, with only a niche group playing it no matter what.

I agree its disappointing to lock music behind ranked games. It would have been better to have it behind a wins / games played achievement.

However, I've spent today learning it and it's not bad. There's some excellent threads and guides on reddit. Just know its gonna take at least an hour of your time.

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Originally Posted by Tigerlilley

I agree its disappointing to lock music behind ranked games. It would have been better to have it behind a wins / games played achievement.

However, I've spent today learning it and it's not bad. There's some excellent threads and guides on reddit. Just know its gonna take at least an hour of your time.

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I know how long it's going to take. But that doesn't make the fact that this game WILL dye off with people who aren't that interested in taking huge massive chunks of time with not much of a return on anything, and the main players WILL only be people who know this game down pat. On day two I was playing against people who know this game, who have played this game for YEARS. The ONLY time I had proper fun with it was when playing against people who were actual novices like myself, and not against players who are already in the ranked system for the game.

And it doesn't change the fact this is the ONLY mini game in XIV with a ranking system that DOES NOT let you play against NPCs for any kind of rating at all. Like I've said, if it were an achievement for winning X times or such (Like they've done with Lov/TT achievements), and NOT rating based, I'd be much more ok with this.

I'm missing 11 orchestrion rolls, all of them are in the last two patches for XIV I believe. I've run dungeons 50+ times for a drop during the quiet hours to work on my collection. This is something I CAN NOT WORK ON due to 1) lack of people queueing for Mahjong during hours I prefer to work on my collections, I.E late at night. If I queue in the day, I mainly get pitted against those that are high up on rankings already due to knowing the game for years due to culture/ect. 2) You get nothing for losing besides being FORCED further from your goal with loss after loss, there's nothing in between.

I know of spending countless hours on side content. I worked on getting my Racing Chocobo to max Pedigree before the heavy EXP bonus they added after ages. I didn't AFK race like 99% of the people who wanted to get it done the 'easy' way. Time is NOT an issue.

While this is some degree of skill involved in mahjong, there's still a rather significant amount of luck involved as there is with most games of its nature.

I think it would be fair to make the rank penalties a bit softer when you frequently have little to no control over your losses even if you're playing as safe as possible.