Why is the new dragoon animation so terrible?

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Originally Posted by Griller

"OMG it's going to cost so much money and be such an inefficient use of time to make a /visor animation!!!"

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Jynx used a saying, death by a thousand cuts, earlier in this thread and that same idea works in the other direction too. Video game developers famously have insane work schedules and that's no exception for the FFXIV team; Corvinoobus gave us an idea of what their schedule is like in a post not too long ago.

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Originally Posted by Corvinoobus

Mmm, well, things happen when you're working 300 hour months. This'll be corrected to Third Astral Era in 3.06. Apologies for the confusion!

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One visor animation might seem like a tiny project to us, and it is, but compound it with everything else that needs to get done and it becomes a big project. Death by a thousand tiny projects. Realistically, some of those tiny projects can't get done.

Would a smoother animation be awesome? Absolutely. Are the Developers lazy or evil for not including it? Absolutely not.

Most headgear with movable parts don't transition smoothly, they suddenly move up/down or just disappear altogether. The moving parts just aren't as big so they're harder to notice (or you know, it's something so minor and irrelevant that most people don't give a shit). The disappearing chin plate does look weird though. The "feedbag" nose of the Goblin Mask does the same thing.

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Originally Posted by WellFooled

One visor animation might seem like a tiny project to us, and it is, but compound it with everything else that needs to get done and it becomes a big project. Death by a thousand tiny projects. Realistically, some of those tiny projects can't get done.

Would a smoother animation be awesome? Absolutely. Are the Developers lazy or evil for not including it? Absolutely not.

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Yet for how busy they seem to be they still take some weird and random suggestions seriously. And that sounds like a lot more work than a proper /visor animation.

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Originally Posted by WellFooled

One visor animation might seem like a tiny project to us, and it is, but compound it with everything else that needs to get done and it becomes a big project. Death by a thousand tiny projects. Realistically, some of those tiny projects can't get done.

Would a smoother animation be awesome? Absolutely. Are the Developers lazy or evil for not including it? Absolutely not.

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Sure it can go both ways. What I'm trying to do is bring attention to some rough bits in 3.0 that were very well polished in 2.x. Is this the developers being lazy? without being in a room with them, I have no idea. But I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say (pretty confidently) that they're not.

In that case what we need is MORE developers for FFXIV as it gets bigger as a game and its user base grows. What I'm upset about is an apparent DROP (I'm not talking about anything additional, I'm talking about something that was well done before but sucks now) in quality of a game I love, despite the fact that they are doing very well financially. What this says to me is that SE is trying to milk as much as possible out of it and not allow ffxiv to cost much more to make despite the fact that it was getting bigger with 3.0.

The bottomline I think is SE needs to spend more money on ffxiv or these things may add up and turn off a lot of long term players that have been attracted to the AAA level of polish in this game.

I'm shocked to how a big deal is to some people.

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Originally Posted by Griller

In that case what we need is MORE developers for FFXIV as it gets bigger as a game and its user base grows. What I'm upset about is an apparent DROP in quality of a game I love...

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You probably haven't written a line of code in your life, and have no idea the amount of effort required to build games, products or applications.
As a developer, I think the amount of work the FFXIV team can do in such a short time is truly amazing. On top of that, the QA team must be incredible, because I've been playing for almost two years, and I can say that most of the bugs found at this point are all QoL and improvements than really "fix it today or we can't play anymore".

And you should learn a new word: priorities. Clearly if I was the development manager of FFXIV, and probably have 2000+ issues open, this would literally at the 2000th priority.

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Originally Posted by Griller

why give us /visor at all if they shouldn't give no ___ about animating it?

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Because community demanded it
At the beginning of the game there was no /visor

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Originally Posted by ignacioricci

I'm shocked to how a big deal is to some people.

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You do have to remember this isn't just any old game. This is Final Fantasy. Part of the whole brand is the quality and polish that goes into it.

Now, this doesn't mean that every single detail is going to be agonized over. But when you have one single armor set that is highlighted in the intro cinematic, it's going to be subject to a little more scrutiny.

It's not the end of the world, but it does chip a tiny little corner off of the multi-billion dollar brand that is Final Fantasy, and I think that's worth saying something about.

... and then you have to embellish because this is the internet

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Originally Posted by ignacioricci

You probably haven't written a line of code in your life, and have no idea the amount of effort required to build games, products or applications.
As a developer, I think the amount of work the FFXIV team can do in such a short time is truly amazing. On top of that, the QA team must be incredible, because I've been playing for almost two years, and I can say that most of the bugs found at this point are all QoL and improvements than really "fix it today or we can't play anymore".

And you should learn a new word: priorities. Clearly if I was the development manager of FFXIV, and probably have 2000+ issues open, this would literally at the 2000th priority.

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Way to make assumptions. I'm guessing you've never animated :(

you don't even realize what you're saying supports my point that they are at their limit with the developers they have and they will need to hire more if they want to meet the standards we've come to expect from FF. handling a ton of issues is one thing for a indie developer, another for AAA title.

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Originally Posted by Sicno

Yet for how busy they seem to be they still take some weird and random suggestions seriously. And that sounds like a lot more work than a proper /visor animation.

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We relayed your request to the development team.

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is not the same as

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We are taking your weird and random suggestion very seriously and will fit it into our development schedule.

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Take into account they are creating new minions all the time anyway, and a community request makes guiding their next project easier.

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Originally Posted by Griller

Way to make assumptions. I'm guessing you've never animated :(

you don't even realize what you're saying supports my point that they are at their limit with the developers they have and they will need to hire more if they want to meet the standards we've come to expect from FF. handling a ton of issues is one thing for a indie developer, another for AAA title.

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It doesn't prove your point. If they get 10 more developers, or 20 or 30. The will still prioritize a great amount of other more importante issues. This completely nice to have feature will end up in the backlog for months.

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Originally Posted by weighty

I guess :3 Seems abit silly though. "Let's put the servers in a terrible location and potentially lose a ton of players from bad latency! Then when we can milk as much money from players as we can, spend millions on moving the servers to where they should be :3 like whaattt?

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It should go without saying that one data center is cheaper to build than two data centers. 1.0 was an unmitigated financial disaster, so it's not as if they had tons of money laying around to just throw at building a second data center for a game that was being relaunched on a prayer and a few rolls of duct tape. They had no idea if the game was going to fly or die at that point, so why invest more than they have to? The majority of players seem to play from the NA region, so why would they put the servers in Europe? It makes a lot more sense to handle it the way they're doing. Now that the game is on solid footing, they can move ahead with it. I don't get why people can't just be happy that it's happening instead of bitching that it didn't happen sooner.

@OP - the helmet kinda looks glitched to me, honestly.

Honestly, it's one of those "Eh, whatever" issues to me. As others have said, you'll usually turn it on or off, and only you will notice. Plus, how is it simply appearing/disappearing any different from the fact that the visors used to go up or down without any cause? Or that the DRG Soldiery set had its visor disappear for no reason while the tank's Ironworks Visor would slide up and down?

I didn't expect much from this except a thread filled with square toady's telling off someone with a complaint. I was not disappointed. I have never in my life seen a group of people more dedicated to justifying questionable design decisions and head scratching execution than in this game. Do you not like receiving a quality product? Yet around here there are always a ton of folks ready to shout down anyone who wants to register some dissatisfaction, or dismiss out of hand any idea that might improve the game for everyone.

That /visor "animation" does look really awful.

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Originally Posted by mirellol

Feel free to demand quality and a /visor animation. Some of us would just rather have other things. Like new minions or sitting animations or art books so just adding my 2cents here to make it count.

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You realize that it would take longer for the 3d modeling/animating program to load up on your computer than it would be to animate the mask like all the other /visors, right?

Yeah, I love SE to death, but it was major disappointing that the visor isn't animated, especially since the AF1 set has an animated /visor.

Maybe we're making mountains out of molehills here and the animation is bugged, or they didn't realize it was missing in the live version. I'm pretty sure its a trivial fix though.

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Originally Posted by BigBossCL

Yeah, I love SE to death, but it was major disappointing that the visor isn't animated, especially since the AF1 set has an animated /visor.

Maybe we're making mountains out of molehills here and the animation is bugged, or they didn't realize it was missing in the live version. I'm pretty sure its a trivial fix though.

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I hope so. If its simply a bug then it should be easy enough to fix

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Originally Posted by mirellol

I thought you wanted a better animation than that. I'm a 3D animator so yeah. Just moving the visor piece into place is literally done automatically by the program with two keyframes. Implementing it could take a moment though.

I'm not against this request. It's pretty minor to me but I said it would be cool. I literally had a problem with some posters calling the devs lazy for leaving a thing like this out.

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I don't think they are lazy I think they are just undermanned for all the work they have. It's like they are 4 manning T13. I hope SE considers allocating more staff towards FFXIV since it is a hit now.

....here i thought someone was making a complaint about a more noticeable everyday animation related to drg combat...