Things wanted for next expansion?

Playable moogles

On a more serious note; I'd like the story to be more focus on us, the warrior of light, rather than regional events. Also, make gear feel more impactful.

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Originally Posted by kikix12

Because there are countless fast-paced MMO's out there and extremely few slower paced. And FFXIV is a good one to be slower paced seeing as Final Fantasy series is known for ATB bars, among others. You know...a slow-paced turn-based style of game.

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I agree. I actually feel FFXIV is too fast as-is; it's virtually impossible to type in combat, which is a real shame, as that was a routine feature of FFXI. I don't mind the speed of ARPGs and such when I play them (Diablo 3, Path of Exiles, what have you), but I don't want it in a supposedly-social MMO.

As I indicated above, though, I do want XIV to be more involved: it needs more of a mental component. Generally speaking, the slower a game is, the more thought it should require; FFXIV is in this awkward place where it's moderately fast, but utterly mindless. I think this mindlessness is what inclines people to want a faster experience, since it's easy to get bored. If it stays at its current pace, or slows down a bit, we need to see additional high-level strategy introduced to occupy players in other ways.

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Originally Posted by AdventZero

PLD to get a slow cast high cost battle raise so that if my healers go down and there's no SMN/RDM present I can help get them back up. We already have DPS that can raise in a clutch moment, so I don't think letting one of the tanks, the "holy magic using tank" even for that matter, be able to raise would cause any problems. And it wouldn't "over power" PLD either, since if your in a good team it won't be needed, but the option would be nice to have all the same. Also, I miss raising low level people I find K.O.'ed around the game world on my PLD. :/

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I can see the 5.0 patch notes now... "New Tank Role Action: Battle Raise"

Not that I'd be necessary opposed to every tank getting this, but it would really shred the lore for WAR in particular.

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Originally Posted by AdventZero

PLD to get a slow cast high cost battle raise so that if my healers go down and there's no SMN/RDM present I can help get them back up. We already have DPS that can raise in a clutch moment, so I don't think letting one of the tanks, the "holy magic using tank" even for that matter, be able to raise would cause any problems. And it wouldn't "over power" PLD either, since if your in a good team it won't be needed, but the option would be nice to have all the same. Also, I miss raising low level people I find K.O.'ed around the game world on my PLD. :/

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This, so much this.
It makes perfect sense for Paladins to be capable of raising people.

Not so much for the other two tanks though...

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Originally Posted by Ayer2015

Playable moogles

On a more serious note

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You've lost me.

-At least the ability to choose any color for character customization.
-Ability to upgrade to a bigger apartment.
-Aqua and Canals with tokens to get items rather than pure RNG on not only drops but rolling on said drops.
-Fix ARR unspoiled nodes so Blessed Harvest works on ALL items on them.
-Please let us dye EVERYTHING. I hate now the class-specific stuff can't be dyed, as well as dungeon gear.

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Originally Posted by Mixt

snap

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Dark Knight using a zombie raise on party members = Michael Jackson's Thriller Video! 83

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Originally Posted by NorthernLadMSP

A new healer and a new tank.

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Provided they actually balance the current tanks first of course

Main story of ARR remaster, 288 quests is too much for a obrigatory content. I don't want to buy skip potion, nor any new player.

I like a lot of the suggestions that I see. So far it seems that the biggest one (least from what I read) is the expansion of the character creation. Would make sense considering how many new hair styles we have gotten that can be added to it (least the older ones).

Some other things that would be nice to see is: Adding tattoo's over what we got just for the face to the rest of the body, adding cuts/scars/marks where we want, body hair where we want, and numerous other changes. I am sure that they say it would take time and resources but that is why they can out source to people who have experience in messing with textures and help them out.

As for the faster paced combat, there are other games that do so but it wouldn't be changing up FFXIV combat as much as people may think. The change to 1.5 like I said earlier might be a bit much sure but the change to 2.0 GCD wouldn't seeing as how ninja (I believe monk) and other classes that get an increase to skill speed (that and there is materia for it already) is part of the game and makes combat slightly more interesting even at high level (compared to the likes of playing a tank or healer or even DPS without that buff).

Just to double check, my ninja without melds and having haton activated reduces it from 2.37 to 2.02. Monk is 2.37-2.01so the change isn't that big if they wanted to make it a permanent thing. Unless I am looking at it wrong but I do agree it needs to feel more involved.

All I want are the Magnai side quests...
And new healer/tank classes...
And Viera...

More character customization options. By which I mean more faces, hair types, and extra accents on a playable race-basis would be lovely.

We don't need a new race, and I don't want one if they are going to give us something like another hyur with a couple animal accents. Especially not Viera; they can keep that in XII and FFTA with the rest of the Ivalice races that they won't be bringing over XIV to be playable and just let them make a cameo appearance in SB's 24-man raid like the rest of them. If the feet/heels are an issue, I can totally foresee the devs cutting back on even more new gear and designs just to focus on feet armor for the new race. No thank you. At least new features for existing races aren't going to require nearly as much (or any) redesigning.


And they need to be smarter about content-releasing. I'd like a variety of content that is reasonably updated, not something new every other patch to run ad nauseum because it practically invalidates everything else that came before it; narrowing options for character progression. On top of that it ends up being something we've been doing since ARR with a different coat of paint.

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Originally Posted by Ruinfeild

If I remember correctly the GCD is about 2-2.5 seconds. Lowering this to about 1.5-2 seconds would help greatly in getting more skills off cool down and meaning more actions per minute.

Allowing us to create our own combo's (such as what they give us in PvP) would be appreciated or working on the macro system so those who want to make our own macros to copy what is given in PvP do not have to worry about the extra .5-1 second wait per action in the macro for it to off.

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This will never happen:

1) It updates movement every half second. So at most you can be 500ms behind and still operate

2) Combat status is updated every 3 seconds (also known as the server ticks), so your hp, status effects, and so forth are aligned against this.

Because the game is global, the maximum theoretical latency is about 266ms given no routing or bufferbloat.

The reason "regional" servers exist at all, for any game, is because 266ms is too much when the population center of places like Japan and Korea allows for latency of 15ms, and no routing nonsense by intermediate ISP's. Any game that was designed for Korea or Japan, tends to perform horribly in North America.

You only get to pick 1:

a) Tiny regional servers, low latency. Enjoy having servers of 32 players glued together by lobbies/hub worlds and finding out that everyone lives within 3 miles of each other, because the game is otherwise unplayable.

b) Large global servers, high latency. Enjoy exploring large worlds with thousands of players, but in order for all players to not get an unfair advantage over each other, all commands are time synced to 3 seconds to allow even players in Russia, Brazil and Australia to play on servers in Japan and California.

If unmetered, high-speed, low-latency internet access were available to all, you'd still see MMO games regionalized because game developers would, in the interest of security and availability, put all the "rendering" clients in their own data centers and stream it as video to the players. But until such time everyone has usable gigabit internet at home, this is a pipedream.

The "GCD" is 2.5 seconds because that is simply how it's represented. Skill Speed/Spell Speed can move this bar, thus it's not actually aligned with the server's time step, but actually against the game clock measured in microseconds. So when your command arrives at 5:01:05.825, and it sends a update command at 5:01:08.000, it is still processed in order that it arrives. Players are not locked against the exact same GCD. The server simply updates everything every 3 seconds with what it knows right now. That's why casters are able to land casts after a baddie is dead, because the command arrived after it was dead, but the game client animated it as though it was still alive.

It's not unreasonable for the game developers to improve the macro system so that it actually sends commands as a "package" of commands to be executed one after the other when CDG/oGCD is ready, however this largely takes a lot of skill out of playing the game, which is why you'll likely never see it as anything but single-second aligned for the player. Now... allowing us to "program" the AI companions (eg the Chocobo, the Squadron, maybe even the Retainers) combat would be a welcome thing, as they could actually be fine-tuned to be less stupid. However at present they basically trade off raw hp sponging for stupid. Like in Stone Vigil, they chase Isgebind around and thus eat every single AOE. In Halitali they all run straight into the fire at Tangata, and into the lightning water at Thunderclap Guivre (but are immune to this one.) These are things that would normally straight up kill bad players.

Basically this is all stuff I've already posted over the years, but anyway:
- Full RGB color picker for hair/eye color.
- Add a basement to the apartments.
- Planters for apartments that are equivalent to outdoor plots to allow seed crossing.
- Or better yet just instance housing so everyone can have a permanent house of whatever size they feel like buying, like it should have been from the start.
- Add the other three egis.
- Add more pet glamour systems. More egis, more fairies, additional turret styles, maybe weapon-independent swaps for RDM floaty crystals. Put all this in a normal UI interface.
- Start adding rare and desirable drops to open-world mobs. This would be a good source for those glamours I just mentioned(i.e. 0.1% chance for any node mob in Azys Lla to drop a node glamour for turrets).
- Clean up the 2.0 zones, like making the creeks in Northern Shroud something you can run around in.
- As long as I'm making wishes, rebuild the entire game world to remove hard zones entirely and make it open like most games of this genre.
- Remove the login requirement from the launcher to patch.
- Collapse the secondary stats instead of moving the goalposts for what X amount of one does every new expansion. Have new gear in a new expansion start out giving very little and ramp it up over the course.
- Add gathering crits that do something like give extra items, or upgrade what you gathered(say you're at the iron ore node, crit, and get a cobalt ore instead).
- That "must be in town to glamour plate" thing that was put in place? Get rid of that nonsense. What are you trying to do, nickle and dime me to death by making me warp back to town to change jobs and then warp back to whatever I was going to do? We also need far more glamour plates.
- Don't do a third copy & paste of the content/plot structure.
- Don't be afraid to make all leveling and dungeon(including ongoing level-cap ones) gear recolored or pure cloned versions of stuff we already have. Save your effort on unique sets for endgame content.
- Don't include previous items as ingredients in any new synth. Or alternately, find another way to start reducing item bloat.
- Dial back the numbers of gathered items needed for a secondary mat synth. I'm getting one piece of lumber from four logs, seriously? Have I been chopping down the most worm-eaten garbage logs on the planet and I'm only finding sound wood in the pile by sheer dumb luck?
- Retroactively remove the rubber item from all shoe synths, deleting the rubber item itself optional.
- Remove all grades of dark matter, make self-repairs cost gil directly.
- Restore the Sprint cooldown to 30 seconds.
- We need a kojin body suit like the HW tribes had. The existing armor you can buy isn't turtley enough for me to make a gag out of wearing it while leveling NIN.
- Get us some proper boxing gloves as a PUG/MNK weapon glamour.
- Remove flight from the marid mount. I enjoy silliness as much as anyone, but that's gone quite all the way through and out the other side of ridiculous. It doesn't even look like it's trying to fly, it just sort of works its legs once in a while but otherwise hangs there in a fairly static fashion.
- In whichever expansion the time comes for us to assault Garlemald, really try not to go with the obvious low-effort concept of "oh lol here's the Opposing Ideological Faction that wants to help you, which you will aid in taking over the throne". Do something interesting that really hammers home the point that we're invading a hostile nation and have to overcome resistance the entire way to the capital.
- Or better yet flip everything on its head and do something crazy like find a way to play it that Garlemald has been right all along, occupations aside.
- Don't restrict use of learned abilities while synced.
- Add undersized DF(but not roulette obviously) queuing.
- Remove all glamour restrictions.
- Save yourselves some grief and cut back on the server checks and pointless item data; strip out the block for item signatures for example, and only have us download our item list at login instead of every time we zone(keep a running tally instead). Similarly only do a full retainer data download the first time in a login session, then stick to the barest checks needed to confirm the item we're manipulating exists properly.
- Retain crafting state on disconnect. You already do this with Triple Triad matches to keep people from quitting a failed hand, put this in place so we don't get screwed out of our materials.
- Allow us to fold during Triple Triad matches. Either because something comes up and we need to get moving right now or because you can tell you've already lost a hand by your second or third card, we should be able to bail on the game.
- Highlight minions, mounts, and orchestrion scrolls in the market board or any NPC inventory to indicate that we already have that one.
- Make the "You're not the right job to equip this, buy anyway?" warning popup optional.
- Add UI locks for both your hotbars' and the chat tabs locations. I.e. I don't want to be able to accidentally drag them and have to reposition them(again and again and again).
- Fix UI position memory. There seems to be some degree of grid snap, such that things like where I keep my item window are a few pixels off-screen to the right.
- Allow us to specify permanent map markers for our own reference. 10 would be the minimum, but you could effectively make it infinite and still keep down the number of UI entities to just one by making it a single transparent overlay that we "draw" marker icons onto.
- Give player macros access to all in-game icons. Let us use custom ones too.
- Add the option to disable FATE music. And ideally, one to let it activate but only when you join the FATE. Additionally, include an option to disable FATE auto-joining and always require hitting the sync button.
- Add support for user addons, and we'll fix any UI things anyone doesn't like ourselves.
- Don't auto-boot people that get disconnected during Deep Dungeon content.
- Make timed gathering nodes a respawn, not a limited window.
- Remove three-per-day restriction on old expansion beast tribe quests. I.e. you'd only be able to do three kojin, but could burn all 12 of your dailies on the moogles or sylphs if you wanted.
- There should never be a time when there isn't a GATE active in the Gold Saucer. Try to have them overlapping too(and ideally add several new ones).
- Add traditional casino games to the Gold Saucer, poker, blackjack, roulette, slots, etc.

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Originally Posted by Ruinfeild

Battle system (faster paced):

It has remained the same for the most part since ARR other than the increase in skills but that isn't what I mean. Compared to some other MMO's out on the market, FFXIV feels slower paced which works well for this game but for people who have stuck around long enough, can begin to feel dull and boring. Even when playing numerous classes I find myself start to either become bored or fall asleep during dungeons, raids, primals, etc. If I remember correctly the GCD is about 2-2.5 seconds. Lowering this to about 1.5-2 seconds would help greatly in getting more skills off cool down and meaning more actions per minute.

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Nope, we need harder content on progression. If you think those content are boring you can try the end game raid and come back to tell us the gcd is slow.

To beat a dead horse some more: bette4 more in-depth character creator/customizability...

Better male glamour!!

Make gear last longer then a patch

Class balancing not, some classes are awesome and others are good enough to clear -_-

I would love it if a system is in place that when your in a cross world party you basicly move to there server temporarily so if your helping your friends you can appear to them and help guide them or hang out [and in a way to stop people from hunting or killing rare things such as fates have it to be where only citizens of that world can hurt them / collect rewards]

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

You only get to pick 1:

a) Tiny regional servers, low latency. Enjoy having servers of 32 players glued together by lobbies/hub worlds and finding out that everyone lives within 3 miles of each other, because the game is otherwise unplayable.

b) Large global servers, high latency. Enjoy exploring large worlds with thousands of players, but in order for all players to not get an unfair advantage over each other, all commands are time synced to 3 seconds to allow even players in Russia, Brazil and Australia to play on servers in Japan and California.

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Or.... (c) don't excessively rely upon server-side execution of every action. Latency is 'felt' in FFXIV (and FFXI before it) far more than any other title I've ever played. This is something SE can change, and it's of particular importance since a key reason for GCDs in the first place is to minimize the feeling of latency. They're failing in that regard with FFXIV because of their network code. Making this change could also ease the amount of data transmitted between client and server, which could potentially allow SE the ability to reduce the actual GCD.

Also, I should point out: FFXIV is a cooperative game, far more so than FPS titles or most ARPGs. There's absolutely no reason to implement a GCD for the purpose of player parity across a variety of internet connections, let alone a long one. Indeed, it's not even effective at this: players in Russia can't play on NA servers, nor even can people in central Europe, without noticeable latency-related issues arising. The GCD is a requirement because of the huge amount of data transferred; it eases the load on the server to cap the number of commands to be communicated and processed within each GCD time interval. It's the server capacity that really dictates how long the GCD is. SE could likely lower it to 1.5s, or even 1.0s, if they wanted to - but they'd likely need to either upgrade their servers, or diminish the amount of work done server-side. Hence, my suggestion above.

What would I like to see in 5.0?

—Removal of glamour restrictions (e.g., job AF gear staying locked would be fine, but other things might as well be unlocked at this point...bikini tanks are a thing, so why can’t you have armored healers? This includes removing gender locks).
—An actual revamp of the Glamour system (i.e., an actual Glamour Log, and not a convoluted system like the Glamour Plates...if they are to stay, revamp them: make them functional outside of city-states, add more plates to the 10 we have, and expand on the storage of both the Armoire and the Glamour Dresser...and add a Dresser as a craftable housing item, pls).
—Expand the current character creation system (e.g., more options in terms of faces, hairstyles, body types, face paints, etc.).
—Removal of the resistance down debuffs (i.e., looking at you, piercing).
—D A N C E R.

Remove gear from normal mode raid or make it same ilvl than previous bis gear and make ilvl jump 20 ilvl instead 30 ilvl every tier. Old bis gear should be entry level gear for next savage tier.

Character creation, more sliders not just boobs for females... It's time they added more options to beards for men, dated facepaints and aura horns seperated from the faces. This is all very simple but they want to make it sound super complicated. Games aren't as limited as they used to be and SE should keep up.

Very mild QoL change to add on: could auto-run please function like every other movement key and move forward relative to the camera position, rather than which way the character is facing? It's rare I run into the behaviour, but it's always jarring when I do.

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Originally Posted by NorthernLadMSP

A new healer and a new tank.

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This Guy. This guy gets it

- Character Creation improved
- Free Company largely improved (alliance between companies, real exclusive content [not airship management], more bonus, Ishgard when ?, etc.]
- At least 1 new tank job and 1 new healer job.
- Need a new difficult 4 man content (not PotD), or why not try 6 man (kind of evolutive living trial/ real evolutive dungeon)
- New areas : Cave (impossible to fly), Jungle (impossible to fly), Desert...

Some of these have been mentioned already but at the top of my head I'd like to see some of these:
- Color wheel / or more colored dyes
- Ability to dye more than one part of a gear piece.
- More Open world things to do.
- Queue as "Fill" for Duty Finder allowing you to fill any role that's needed.
- Add NM's in dungeons with unique special drops
- New healer and tank
- More community world events maybe have some kind of City Siege happen. (ex. Beseiged)
- Grand company Rank Increases / add new ones (Garlemald , Isgard)
- More achievement rewards

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Originally Posted by Ruinfeild

Meaningful dialogue: (This is the video about the Light house raid) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DzUK3q2yAM

What Zelpa brings to light is that for the most part, whatever you choose doesn't really matter. Either the outcome is the same regardless of what you choose.

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What the heck Zenos, I wanted to join you. I agree with everything you do why wont you let me join you? T^T

How much of your people must I kill until you accept me?

a new standard song for the flying mounts that will come. never liked the HW song and the still stuck with it...
relic quests wich starts earlier (best thing would be right with 5.0) with more steps strayed over the smaller patches to stay on a relevant item level (like it was in 2.x)
new exclusive stuff for fisher desynthesis.
new feast of famine like quest for big fish.

i think my expectations are low... can't wait for the disappointment...

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

Or.... (c) don't excessively rely upon server-side execution of every action. Latency is 'felt' in FFXIV (and FFXI before it) far more than any other title I've ever played. This is something SE can change, and it's of particular importance since a key reason for GCDs in the first place is to minimize the feeling of latency. They're failing in that regard with FFXIV because of their network code. Making this change could also ease the amount of data transmitted between client and server, which could potentially allow SE the ability to reduce the actual GCD.

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A MMORPG is required to rely upon server-side execution of every action because otherwise players can just roll over other players and monsters in PvP and PvE content by turning nagle off. That is what happened in Mabinogi.

The server has a timestep. The sever queues everything received, sorts it into half second timesteps, and sends player "update movement" steps every half second. Meanwhile it updates player stats, and the results of actions every 3 seconds. So a 2.5 second GCD is 5 timesteps on the server at microsecond precision to allow spell speed and skill speed adjustments. If the client commands could be trusted we wouldn't have a bot problem at all. So that is why everything is done on the server.

And believe me, some companies have already tried and failed at the "render everything in the data center" already.

http://iphome.hhi.de/eisert/papers/sigmap07.pdf

And nVidia is also still pushing this cloud gaming stuff http://www.nvidia.ca/object/cloud-gaming.html

The reason FFXIV is "laggy" at all has more to do with the nature of the north america internet. Korean and Japanese games aren't routed half way across the world, thus they don't experience anything like North America does. The fact that FFXIV works at all with the current choreographed battle dances is something of a miracle. Games with better "real time" play, simply don't work in North America because the NA's internet is rubbish-tier compared to Japan and Korea. All NA internet is good for is watching cat videos.

I want several things next expansion:

Jobs:

1.) Dancer (Melee Healer) (Tessen Weapon) (Japanese Themed)
2.) Blue Mage (Magical Tank) (Gunblade Weapon) (Steampunk Themed)

New Race:

1.) Viera (Has two very distinct tribes) (One a teenager looking tribe, the other the regular tall viera)

Zones:
Somewhere in these zones will be the Thavnair City-State (Cherry Blossom Forest?), and the real Sharlayan City-State (Proper Jungle?)

1.) Wasteland (The burn) (W/ Grey Sand like in *spoiler*)
https://blenderartists.org/uploads/d...739da30ed8.jpg

2.) Proper Desert
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iekiv4xrxZM/maxresdefault.jpg

3.) Proper Jungle
https://img00.deviantart.net/0466/i/...80-d9e69h6.png

4.) Cherry Blossom Forest (Pink trees forest)
http://samurai-int.sakura.ne.jp/blog...inokashira.jpg

5.) Underground Railroad Zone
https://orig00.deviantart.net/c922/f...er-d6arlcb.jpg

6.) Highland Zone with train tracks all around, and a huge bridge in the middle splitting the zone in two.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WCCIMBWI-HQ/maxresdefault.jpg

Enemies:

1.) Technological Advanced enemies (FFXIII & FFXV as inspiration?)
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/...20140221141914
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/...20140221113706
http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2...ian_FFXIII.png
2.) Assault Carrier (Random Attack vessels similar to FFXV, that drops off garlean enemies.)
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TJ8MtmPw310/hqdefault.jpg

Expansion Gimmick

1.) Campaign (Special Fates/w different color maybe orange? that are in the zone to fight against the garleans to reclaim zones in their control. A Campaign happens randomly every (30 minutes to an hour) in new zones and even old expansions zones like Ishgard, Ala Mhigo, and Doma to bring some life back to these zones. For completing these campaign battles you get many special perks such as increased exp for killing monsters in these zones/dungeon of the zone, special items that can be bought from vendors of the area like minions or rare items, prices go down, tomestone gains increase, and you can unlock a mount after alot of campaign battles. It'll be like the MGP of the open world.

To see where a campaign happens there will be a special headquarter where you can go to talk to the NPC to see where the current/next campaign battles will happen, and if you are afk in this zone you will receive an alert saying when a campaign has started. Campaign messages are also received if they begin in a zone you are in, and the music changes when entering the campaign fate.

When you attain a certain rank in campaign you will be able to receive campaign messages anywhere you are via a unlockable linkshell that you can buy with campaign points. Of course there will be a filter incase you don't want to see campaign messages.

-Note: Campaign battles would be a way to encourage people to go out to the zones.

Besides the expected additions of story and blahblahblah

1) Graphical updates
2) Expanded character customization for EXISTING Races, so no new race because of this. (A free fantasia with expansion would be appreciated too...)
3) New Jobs... no specific... but I feel like we should either get:
1 Tank, 1 Healer and 1 "Physical Ranged DPS"
-OR-
2 "Melee DPS" (one to share maiming gear with DRG and one to share scouting gear with NIN) and 1 "Physical Ranged DPS"
**additional bonus points if one or more new job inflicts blunt dmg so they can be buddies with MNK.

More summons for Summoner. The addition of Demi Bahmut was really cool but we really need to stop focusing on this one primal and start adding in new ones.

Updating the egi for Summoner so they actually look more like their primal counterparts and contribute more so we don't end up forgetting they exist when fighting. The summon and summoner should be working together and supporting eachother and not just the Summoner doing all the work while the ego make only a few minor contributions.

Changing some of Summoner's stand alone spells into egi spells. Basically, allow us to temp summon a new egi like King Moggle Mog to replace both Physic and Resurrection for a strong single target regen spell and instant revival spell that both take a good decent chunk of MP to use.

Arithmetician as a new job class that's an upgraded version of arcanist that relies on an upgraded version of Carbuncle. Basically, like Alphinaud, except our Carbuncle functions purely as a Tank and we support them but actively using spells to upgrade our Carbuncle's powers over time in battle, changing their color with each upgrade and them gsining access to new abilities and spells/skills. Rainbow Carbuncle!

- More character customisation options.
- Less focus on 'unisex' gear and hairstyles. So much of it is designed with a feminine or androgynous aesthetic in mind. In short? More masculine looking hairstyles/glamour for male characters.
- A Gunblade based job.
- A Geomancer job along the lines of how those seen in 'The Swallow's Compass.'

Search option when pulling up the FC member list.

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Originally Posted by NolLacnala

Provided they actually balance the current tanks first of course

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Did I stutter? No, not provided they achieve some imaginary perfect level of balance. I'm tired of people using this as a clutch to try and shift the new jobs to even more DPS jobs.

Whew a doozy.

1. Better character customization AND Viera.
2. Removal of all gear restrictions except AF gear.
3. Ishgard housing.
4. Docile open world mobs. I am tired of literally everything wanting to kill you 100% of the time. Make some of them peaceful. Make some of them aggressive only in certain weathers.
5. Rancher DoL. Catch open world mobs and bring them back to a (probably) instanced area where you can raise them and get mob drops like leathers from them.
6. Remove certain cross-class skills from cross-class system and replace them with things that are actually highly more optional (Rampart/Esuna/Swiftcast/etc).
7. Hunt syncing.
8. Beastiary.

Something new to spend grand company seals on. I've got something like 2000 ventures because I had to do something with it.

Maybe unlock some of those higher ranks, too.

• Upgrade of the bad coding and servers
• More content at launch
• A new healer and tank, no dps until perhaps 6.0
The battle system, well i highly doubt they will do anything to significant if at all

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The reason FFXIV is "laggy" at all has more to do with the nature of the north america internet. Korean and Japanese games aren't routed half way across the world, thus they don't experience anything like North America does. The fact that FFXIV works at all with the current choreographed battle dances is something of a miracle. Games with better "real time" play, simply don't work in North America because the NA's internet is rubbish-tier compared to Japan and Korea. All NA internet is good for is watching cat videos.

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A couple things.

Firstly, don't disparage the NA quite so much. Japan and Korea are tiny countries; of course their internet performs better. Distance is a killer for internet quality. There are problems with NA's infrastructure, but to call it 'rubbish-tier' is a vile combination of arrogance and ignorance.

Secondly, your comment about FFXIV's lag, and your attribution of this lag to NA's internet quality (or lack thereof), is kind of a cop-out. Ultra-low latency will, of course, 'solve' the problem of inefficient netcode - but blaming lag on people not living within a country the size of Montana and not having first-rate internet is a lazy sort of excuse, rather than a solution. Imagine if a new FF expansion releases, and is accompanied by an inefficient graphics engine requiring a 1080 Ti for solid 60FPS performance. Would it be fair to tell everyone running into problems that oh, well, the problem's your graphics card - and if you want to spend $3000 on a Titan V, you'll get some of the best visuals around? Ridiculous.

Companies are obligated to build their game around the resources their average customer will have. That's true for the graphics engine, it's true for the control scheme, it's true for the player skill level, and it's true for the netcode. SE shouldn't be awarded a get-out-of-jail free card for building its netcode in a lazy fashion that begins breaking down as soon as someone hits a little bit of latency. Within this set of constraints, companies must also balance a variety of other concerns: their infrastructure limits, game fairness concerns (i.e. anti-cheating measures), etc. It's challenging, no doubt about it - but in my book, companies don't get to more or less ignore the user experience impacts of their netcode decisions. I find it astonishing that anyone would suggest this should just be accepted by people. It's very poor customer service, and makes for a poorer game experience than we could otherwise have. Which is why people request changes to this every so often.

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Now for a concrete example of the sort of simple change SE could make to improve everyone's life. Let's examine what happens when I try to exit my house. I right-click on the 'Exit' door, and expect to see a very predictable response: a confirmation screen asking if I want to leave the estate hall. But wait! I have 300ms latency with the servers. So actually, there's a delay between my right-click, and this menu of options appearing. And a similar delay between when I close the menu, and when I can start moving / see the UI components again.

There is absolutely no reason for a delay here. This is an example of where the Client can - and should - anticipate a positive server response. The menu snap-up should be instant. If I cancel out of the menu, it should instantly return my character to a usable state. The server isn't going to say 'whoa whoa whoa, wait, I don't think you right-clicked that door...', so why not allow the Client to anticipate the response for a snappier user experience? The server's only role should come when a meaningful option is selected: when someone tries to leave the house. When THAT button is clicked, it makes sense for the Client to hold off on an assumption of success. After all, you wouldn't want the graphics engine to start clearing out texture assets and loading the residential zone if the server comes back and says hey, wait, the player's position was 15 yalms from the door, they can't exit from there. But the dialogue option itself? Exiting it? Those calculations shouldn't involve the server in the slightest. It shouldn't even receive a notification! It shouldn't care until - and unless - someone presses the confirmation button to leave.

Similarly, suppose I interact with my Junkmonger NPC. Did you know that the Client has to receive server authentication before displaying the Junkmonger's wares? Why? The only involvement of the server should come when someone tries to buy or sell something: the rest should be client-side. I should be able to view the Junkmonger wares, even if I'm in a state where I'm completely lagged out, neither sending nor receiving to the server. There's no reason to place this load on the servers. None. It creates a sluggish-feeling user interface, one in which my latency determines the basic responsiveness of NPCs.

Let's not forget either that this places an undue load on FFXIV's servers. They really should be used only as necessary, so as to maximize the capabilities of the hardware. Why are they having to field little requests from clients to open a NPC menu? Shouldn't they just receive an 'FYI' notification? And suppose the server receives this FYI from a player character across the manor, say, someone who is cheating: that's fine. It'll do a position check based on character location when, and if, someone attempts to buy or sell an item. Before that, why should it concern itself with a potential hack that lets a player uselessly view an NPC's inventory from afar? That's harmless enough to not be worth the effort.

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These might seem like small things, but they really add up. It's a large part of why FFXIV just feels generally... sluggish. And SE needs to improve it. It's not just me saying that. They've got all the tools available, there are virtually no downsides, and plenty of upside. Or, y'know, they can just blame NA, and its "rubbish-tier" internet.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

Companies are obligated to build their game around the resources their average customer will have. That's true for the graphics engine, it's true for the control scheme, it's true for the player skill level, and it's true for the netcode. SE shouldn't be awarded a get-out-of-jail free card for building its netcode in a lazy fashion that begins breaking down as soon as someone hits a little bit of latency. Within this set of constraints, companies must also balance a variety of other concerns: their infrastructure limits, game fairness concerns (i.e. anti-cheating measures), etc. It's challenging, no doubt about it - but in my book, companies don't get to more or less ignore the user experience impacts of their netcode decisions. I find it astonishing that anyone would suggest this should just be accepted by people. It's very poor customer service, and makes for a poorer game experience than we could otherwise have. Which is why people request changes to this every so often.

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What the poster was asking for was essentially a single player experience in a MMORPG which would be impossible without literately sitting within a few miles of the data center. So "what resources are available" would be asking SE to build server shards in every city with at least one player, and then somehow managing to make them all communicate with each other at 0 latency. It's literately impossible in a MMO context. If the games were being rendered in the data center and the player simply got a video stream, that would actually generate even more data, but it would "fit" within the current assumption about how the internet is routed and optimized presently.

Call it net neutrality, call it greedy ISP's unwilling to upgrade their infrastructure, but MMO games are not what ISP's prioritize. NA is a mashup of different networks, and those with the deepest wallet can pay for fast lanes by bypassing the last-mile ISP's, but at some point you have to ask yourself if it's worth moving to a city with a carrier hotel so you can lease an office for $5000/mo and paying 10,000/mo for a DS3 just to shave 20ms off the latency from the local ISP's. I once asked about this when I was considering moving one of my clients servers, and the cost in the SF area was closer to $1000/mo while the cost to move it here was closer to $10,000, without including the transit bandwidth cost itself. Now consider that a DS3 is 45Mbits, or the same as a VDSL2 line which at most costs $150.

As to the other half about "anticipation", again you're kinda missing the issue. When was the last time FFXIV was "hacked" ? Recall the Ungarmax event from 3 months ago. THAT is why the client-server checks everything. The typical communication the game does is "client asks for something" -> "server figures out if it's legal and sends the results" -> Client updates. Repeat every 500ms. You can do this in this style of game because you have a 3 second window to update everything but player movement. What happened that allowed Ungarmax to be used outside the command mission was literately the server seeing it as a valid command because the command missions are literately the exact same instances as when they're run with player created parties. So somehow the developers didn't check this command, because presumably they thought it was only available in command missions.

Other games have been wrecked by allowing the client to send tainted data and not checking everything. Sure you might get a snappier UI if you allow for it. The behavior of the game client<->server communication is not that different from V1.00, and quite honestly we need to move past "SE's netcode is rubbish" yes it looks a bit inefficient, but we're talking about maybe 32 bytes per packet. What prevents the game from operating at, say 250ms windows instead of 500ms, is that it would make players on Dial-up/ISDN,wireless(eg 3G) and satellite connections in places with no wireline access impossible to play. Australia is one of those places where the last mile is often with wireless cell phone tech, not wirelines.

FFXIV is not going to be the game that gets ISP's to upgrade. Youtube/Netflix was the last thing that got ISP's to upgrade anything, and they optimized in the direction of downstream, and putting cache servers in the data centers of ISP's to reduce their own costs. We're still playing catchup as Twitch streamers now require that connection to be symmetric. Good luck streaming anything on a Gigabit-downlink and 2Mbit uplink. Ipv6 came out, and nothing happened. ISP's horde IPv4 addresses like Taxi companies horde taxi licenses. Artificial scarcity instead of upgrades to prop up the value of data.

I want a cute furry race ala Ivalice Moogles or Hummingways. But I know we're just going to get another human with animal ears with the Viera... :(

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Originally Posted by Kye

I want a cute furry race ala Ivalice Moogles or Hummingways. But I know we're just going to get another human with animal ears with the Viera... :(

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I'd have thought Ivalice moogles would be a good candidate for a beast-like playable race. Not only are they cute and similar in anatomy and proportion to the existing race, it'd be fitting for a game based on Final Fantasy fanservice to have the series staple as a race. They've since been deconfirmed so that's been thrown out of the window.

Unless we get something like Hummingways or Burmecians out of the blue I'm just resigned to the fact that the devs are just going to stick random animal ears on a human and call it a new race.