On Ultimate Off Ultimate

There's multiple battle design teams in FFXIV. For example, the team who made Ultimate Coils of Bahamut did not work on Ultima Weapon Ultimate (at least, I'm pretty sure this was confirmed).

Yes they had 2 different guys at the helm, also patch teams is not expansion team. Usually MMOs have an expansion in development the moment the last one hit release

Hey OP. I take it you've come from the Reddit discussion where raiders are disappointed with this announcement.

Despite the calls of "we need to take it to the official forums so we are heard", I knew exactly what would happen if the same discussion was attempted here.

The community here aren't raiders. It's pretty much as simple as that. No one who frequents these forums are going to back us up on this because no on here does Ultimate. Everyone who is a raider and has been for some time are either a) all banned from the forums or b) they don't visit here. And why would they? You can't ask for help on rotations or dps discussions because people here are anti parser as well.

I support you and I wish this thread had gone better like the discussions do on Reddit but it won't.

Sad days for the raid/twitch community who really put their all into Ultimate.

Hey I take offense to that Rockette. I have a lot of fun from forum salt is why I hang around here. :P

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

...does it matter? How many raiders have even beaten the first one, if not both?

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Does Perform matter? Just because you don't enjoy a specific piece of content doesn't mean everyone shares your opinion. Plenty of people prog Ultimate even if they are miles away from clearing because it's a long-term goal. Certainly a better alternative to doing... what exactly? Ridorana and Swallow's Compass.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

You should be worried they are going to break all the third party stuff due to ultimate raiders. Hopefully it wont be all content.

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They're talking about Cactbot, which is a different tool than ACT. They aren't going to touch parsers because they know the backlash it would have.

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Originally Posted by polyhedral

Less than 7000, out of at least 2 million players. Do the math.

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You weren't watching day one then. Xeno and MrHappy both broke 10k and maintained for several days, albeit with dips through the day. Both continued to average 4-5k, and have only dropped now that Ultimate's been cleared.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

they also worry about player's health - when they hear stories of 21 hour/day prog and forgoing sleep to down these things that makes them rethink how many these they should put out.

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Leith was meme-ing. Entropy progged roughly 12-14 hours until the last day when they were close to clearing. That's when they pulled 21 hours. That's hardly a health concern, especially it only happens once in eight months.

Sfia even went into some details on Frosty's podcast. They set up meal plans, purposely eat properly and get enough sleep to keep themselves focused. They're probably more health conscious than the majority of people whining over how "unhealthy" WF prog is.

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Originally Posted by Driavna

Still, 21 hours one single day is not healthy. As far I know the norm was around more than 12 and less than 16 per day, so not that big of a difference.

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Staying up playing a game for 21 hours every eight months isn't going to kill you anymore than going out on Years News Eve and getting hammered would. Are we going to worry about the health of party-goers now too?

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Originally Posted by jameseoakes

Also makes up most of the player base. I don't think people wanting content like Ultimate do themselves any favours hating on the bulk of the player base

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Many raiders become frustrated because the overwhelming majority of content is made for casual players. You already get virtually everything. Even Savage was watered down to better cater towards lower skilled players. Alas, that still isn't enough. People whine about Neo Exdeath and God Kefka being Savage exclusive. And they whine over Ultimate because how dare the raid community has one piece of content designed for them.

And if we're going to use the whole "well, not many people do it!" argument. PvP has been a near failure since its inception yet that hasn't stopped the devs from pouring huge amounts of resources into it; practically begging people to play.

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Originally Posted by Rockette

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I haven't been banned yet. ;-;

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

Does Perform matter? Just because you don't enjoy a specific piece of content doesn't mean everyone shares your opinion. Plenty of people prog Ultimate even if they are miles away from clearing because it's a long-term goal. Certainly a better alternative to doing... what exactly? Ridorana and Swallow's Compass.

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1. Does it matter we do not have a third ultimate fight when barely anyone has beaten the first two? Is there a large audience that is really going to be hurt by the lack of this third fight specifically. It's not "get rid of ultimate" it's "how many ultimate fights can this playerbase complete or gain value from?"

2. No, perform doesn't matter. I rarely even see it used any more in town areas. I don't think devs get that if you have musical talent, you are probably going to choose a real instrument over this, and the main benefit of music systems are non-musical people who can use macros of popular songs.

3. If they obfuscate the data sent to the server, it can affect anything that relies on that data and maybe break it. All that stuff more or less works on the same principle.

I don't do Ultimate Raids. I can't even beat Savage 3 and 4, but in my eyes, the content needs to be tuned up. Make it Coil Savage level difficult throughout Savage. Make story mode current Savage 1-2 difficulty. Swap the ilvls of unaugmented tome gear and normal mode raid gear. They should be adding more difficult content. More consistent difficulties would be good. Casual raiders get normal mode, midcore raiders get Savage, and hardcore blasts through it all to Ultimate. That would mean I'm only good enough for normal mode (if that), but then again, if I want to progress further, I should just git gud. Simple as.

So yes, I would advocate for the 3rd Ultimate in an expansion because of how it ties in to the difficulty model I suggested above.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

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I agree with everything said here. What I would love the devs to do is pour those missing resources back into raid content. I'd love it if we got the next Omega tier which didn't end with Omega himself, and then in 4.5 we get the Omega "trial" which is nowhere near on par with Ultimate, but difficulty wise would pretty much be a pseudo 5th tier to the raid (and would require completion of the raid). I feel like this would fill the hole that ultimate would leave, while also addressing the problems with having too many ultimate fights in an expansion.

INB4 people are triggered that I ask for more raid content.

The most optimistic way to put this is that they want to give groups who raid on lighter schedules, or who started partway through 4.x, ample time to clear both Ultimates before 5.0 when who-knows-what is going to happen to the 4.x ones. Then they'll have two again in 5.x and so on. (On that point, they definitely did not say they were doing away with Ultimate, just that three per expac might be too many)

Perhaps they feel like the main reason for the low clear rates isn't difficulty, but time commitment, in which case you'd want to see if there's an increase in clears during the expansion lull if the 2-3 night a week groups get enough time to put the 150-200 hours into each fight, which one might expect to be the high end of how long it might take a sufficiently skilled group to clear.


The elephant in the room is the massive gap between Savage and Ultimate though. It would have been fine if they gradually notched up Savage difficulties as originally planned, but instead we have a content layout where you have what used to be a "harder EX trial" level of difficulty, and the only next step up from that is Ultimate.

If SE wants to see more groups give it a try, decide to put in the time to clear now that they'll clearly have a ton of it, how on earth is a group of post-Midas raiders supposed to do that? Maybe they are planning some sort of in-between challenge fight for 4.5 instead, one not worthy of the Ultimate label but tougher than Savage...

Either way, they need to start working on this problem. The answer to low Ultimate participation isn't to stop making Ultimate forever, it's to give the newly grown batch of Savage raiders the stepping stones they need to make Ultimate approachable. And that may also include limiting to two Ultimates per expac. Until the 4.5x lull hits, we won't really know what the end result is going to be.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

You weren't watching day one then. Xeno and MrHappy both broke 10k and maintained for several days, albeit with dips through the day. Both continued to average 4-5k, and have only dropped now that Ultimate's been cleared.

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I watched enough the first few days to know that I personally never seen this, but then again, I personally grow tired of seeing folks fight the same fight days, weeks, and months on end. I low balled both numbers and tried to play devil's advocate, but since you brought it up, don't you think this game has more than 2 million active subs throughout the world? My point still stands I think.

I know some would like to see this game turn into an e-sports game, hell, it would make them money if that was so, but I cringe at that thought.

Like I said in an earlier comment ITT, I'd grab my pitchfork right along with ya, if I had seen even 50k people interested in watching those few folks fighting UwU.

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Originally Posted by polyhedral

I watched enough the first few days to know that I personally never seen this, but then again, I personally grow tired of seeing folks fight the same fight days, weeks, and months on end. I low balled both numbers and tried to play devil's advocate, but since you brought it up, don't you think this game has more than 2 million active subs throughout the world? My point still stands I think.

I know some would like to see this game turn into an e-sports game, hell, it would make them money if that was so, but I cringe at that thought.

Like I said in an earlier comment ITT, I'd grab my pitchfork right along with ya, if I had seen even 50k people interested in watching those few folks fighting UwU.

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No, it doesn't. The closest public census we have puts the active playerbase at approximately 600,000. The game hasn't broke over one million since Heavensward. And even then, it only ever came close. At least according to these unofficial censuses.

And I loathe the idea of this game becoming an e-sports because the devs simply have no idea how to properly cater towards that market. We needs only look at the disarray of PvP for demonstrate that.

20k+ is still more than ten times this game ever gets on Twitch otherwise barring a new patch. Even then, it struggles. Ultimate and new tier releases are the only things that garner any attention.

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

INB4 people are triggered that I ask for more raid content.

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To be fair, it seems we want similar things. As in more higher difficulty stuff. It just seems our approaches to how it should be done are different. That being said, them throwing more raid content at us isn't something I'm against. But I feel pushing up the difficulty of things (except Ultimate, that's in a good place already IMO) in the raid department would be good. But yes, let's bridge the difficulty gaps.

I'm really bummed to hear that there will not be another Ultimate in 4.0

Is it sad that this patch I have had the most fun watching other people playing, rather than playing myself?

Just to let you know, I'm not against having more ultimate at all. I welcome any content that is challenging. I just wish it was like it was in FFXI, and allowed more than 8 people to experience it at a time. I just wish my fears of elitism and toxic behavior wasn't as contagious as I've seen in the past, and currently happening because of said content. I just hope this game doesn't turn into e-sports cash driven toxic af atmosphere. I appreciated Eureka at launch a lot, because it finally felt like the community could gather together and play the same content together.

Hell, I've been through that whole end game struggle years back, and myself, don't care to go back to that lifestyle. I can't do that again, too old, maybe too apathetic. Or maybe I just don't see the rewards in this game for that lifestyle, but I can see why some people, the few that do this content, does it. It may be good advertising for SE on twitch.

I don't know exactly where the phrase "poopsocking" comes from, all I know is that someone actually did it fighting pandemonium warden in xi for 18 hours to win. I played for years without any LS being able to beat AV before I quit the game. Comparing to this game, well, I don't really know what point I'm trying to get at to be fair. At least it's winnable? Or maybe not near as challenging as it should be? How does SE include content like this, and make more people interested?

I'm not to blame for their decision, but I kinda can understand why they limit it? IDK, I really wish they'd dedicate more resources to this game also, so everyone can have their own slice and flavor of cake in game. This alone frustrates most players. Most comments I've read find it hard to understand the reasoning behind a lot of their decisions.

Maybe I'm just really salty this game isn't FFXI-2. Maybe I'm just wearing nostalgia glasses.

I personally think ultimate should have been bought out earlier in the tier. After 16-18 weeks of mind numbing savage raid, most the raid community are completely done with savage. If they bought out ucob earlier and then uwu earlier then there would be a better flow I think.

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Originally Posted by RiyahArp

Heh, you focus on that, but you missed this?

"Certain 3rd party tools allowed players to capture and show the packets sent from the servers, earlier than they should be shown. (note: They are talking about 3rd party tools calling out Gaol targets in Ultimate before they even show up on the screen). However, they don't think it was that crucial of a problem, because that phase takes place early on in the battle.

To counter this in future content, they will need to add another layer of protection. They want to change the timing and how they send the packets, and also improve how the effects/animations allow you to detect the mechanics, in order to confuse those 3rd party tools."

You should be worried they are going to break all the third party stuff due to ultimate raiders. Hopefully it wont be all content.

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This makes me sad. I was fine with easy content being reduced in order to get some content for the few hundred hardcore players, but if some of them need to cheat to get the kill then why even bother making more Ultimate fights? It's clearly too challenging to those who use a bot to help them let alone the vast majority who doesn't even try the fight. Just tune savage fights so they cater to more people.

Sigh, ok here's the secret to getting them to care about ultimate.

You forget about it, and you work on increasing the amount of players that do savage and successfully clear the last tier. If you get that percentage high enough, ultimate suddenly becomes a lot more attractive. That means less raid logging, and more building and coaching b-teams in a real raiding fc, not just statics or pugs. The only way you get more endgame is by having more endgame players.

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Originally Posted by Paladinleeds

To be fair, it seems we want similar things. As in more higher difficulty stuff. It just seems our approaches to how it should be done are different. That being said, them throwing more raid content at us isn't something I'm against. But I feel pushing up the difficulty of things (except Ultimate, that's in a good place already IMO) in the raid department would be good. But yes, let's bridge the difficulty gaps.

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I disagree tbh, I think the difficulty of omega is perfect. If you want an example of why raid difficulty should not be pushed up, look at gordias. By adding a 5th raid tier that is on maybe brute justice level (i,e, more difficult than now, but not quite gordias), it will allow a much smoother (except chardanook but thats a different discussion altogether) difficulty curve throughout the raid tier, without it becoming inaccessible, stale, and impossible to PUG.

Personally, I feel Ultimate resources could go into bettering the savage raids to make them more savage. The only fight from current savage that really gives me trouble is O8S, but that's just my opinion.

I originally felt that one Ultimate was enough per expansion.

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

I disagree tbh, I think the difficulty of omega is perfect. If you want an example of why raid difficulty should not be pushed up, look at gordias. By adding a 5th raid tier that is on maybe brute justice level (i,e, more difficult than now, but not quite gordias), it will allow a much smoother (except chardanook but thats a different discussion altogether) difficulty curve throughout the raid tier, without it becoming inaccessible, stale, and impossible to PUG.

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At the start of Stormblood they went into depth of why Gordias was a mistake. The classes had all changed, rotations were more complex. There were new players starting the game. The fights were, as described, Savage.

It took my group months to get through it. I cried at the end of A4s. Man, it felt like an achievement though. It still does, even now. But they were right. It was way too hard to start an expansion with.

After they explained their mistakes with Gordias, I also remember live letters saying that they would start Savage raids in Stormblood at a Creator level difficulty and scale them up progressively through out the expansion as players got used to new rotations and new players had time to acclimatize to the game.

They have not kept to that plan.

Maybe I'm one of few who think this but I find Stormblood savage too... vanilla. I thought the Midas tier was perfect. Not back breaking hard, but not so easy that every midcore group is gonna clear week 1.

I love the concept of Omega in terms of fight story line but both tiers in stormblood have been week 1 -2 clears for mid core groups. Then the 18 week wait until savage...

Edit: I'm worried about my group in light of this news, to be honest. There's no way people are going to stick around for long after we clear the next tier especially if we're looking at a year wait until the next expansion.

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

raid difficulty should not be pushed up

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Do people feel that O4S is substantively harder than O3S, or O8S than O7S? I'm not certain I agree, at least for non-healers (the healing difficulty definitely goes up).

Both are light on mechanics relative to past final fights (from Nael to Alexander), and they both lean hard on wombo combo dances that, once solved or guided, are fairly easy to get down and repeat. Emptiness and small Trine are the only mechanics that ask for a reaction beyond "do thing A or B", and mechanics like those exist in the third fights anyway.

I think they could get away with making the lasts fight as-much harder on tanks and dps as it is on healers, and in doing so may better bridge people into Ultimate. Clear rates would go down, but I doubt that participation would - people are more inclined to keep at it when they're three fights deep and at the last boss, than when it's just a middle fight and there's still more after.

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

If you want an example of why raid difficulty should not be pushed up, look at gordias.

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The issue with Gordias that people seem to always forget about is that the developers admitted that they screwed up and overtuned the fights (particularly A3S and A4S) for what was the current max stats, gear, and item level at the time. Mechanically, I don’t think that Gordias was “too difficult”; but the damage output was way overtuned for its time—healer and tank DPS were absolutely mandatory to clear, even with the best gear the game offered at the time.

The developers learned from their mistakes and made Midas, which I hear from a lot of veteran raiders was perfect in terms of difficulty and overall fight quality (annoying A6S gauntlet robots aside). However, the raid scene was still feeling the fallout from Gordias, so they brought it down to Creator level. Deltascape and Sigmascape are not Creator level, they’re actually slightly easier. Personally, I’d rather see difficulty return to Midas levels, or at least something between Midas and Creator, but since Savage clear rates are the highest they’ve been for all regions with Delta/Sigma, I can see why the developers want to keep Savage at the level it is now.

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Originally Posted by ErryK

Personally, I feel Ultimate resources could go into bettering the savage raids to make them more savage. The only fight from current savage that really gives me trouble is O8S, but that's just my opinion.

I originally felt that one Ultimate was enough per expansion.

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I agree with this. Instead of putting all the work into this fights maybe make the last turn of a savage run be as hard as ultimate, with the other turns getting more difficult too. The top raiders wont have much to do anyway because they beat savage or ultimate in max. 2 weeks. I dare to say that the important part is to get the other raiders and maybe midcore players to enjoy savage more.

And hey he did say that the last Omega raid will be surprising and great, so maybe instead of getting another Ultimate fight, savage raids will include a special Omega fight or something like that.

In the end they never promised to do x amount of Ultimates per expansion and they also have only so much that they can use for such fights. So for me I am fine if raiders get their content but I also see no huge problem that they are only having two of them per expansion. I just find the reasons for that a bit strange. (Like how the players are tired and things like that)

I do not particularly care for Midas, despite loving the look of the gear. A6S was a brutal floor, you had to perfect four different fights before you got to see any loot. And then A7S had the trauma of giving him a massive damage boost for a single misstep.

I just hope they drop the idea of a "brand new 2nd phase" for O12s, because that's a painful roadblock for a PUG raider like myself to overcome.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

They're talking about Cactbot, which is a different tool than ACT. They aren't going to touch parsers because they know the backlash it would have.

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That is still ACT, and still using the ACT FFXIV Network module. I told you why this is a cheat tool, before, so I won't bring it up again.

The game sends the packets unencrypted is the only reason any of these tools work at all. Any counter-measures employed would break all the parsers. Now they could compress+encrypt the packets that spawn a monster, but that packet is still being sent, and if you know the mechanics of the fight, you wouldn't need to decrypt it, just know that "something is about to happen".

I don't seriously expect the dev team to change this because it would result in lag for everyone. The proper counter-measures would require randomizing the packet id's for every instance change, and that just adds a hurdle for the parser developer, not a wall. Applying and cycling an encryption key for every instance would be a higher hurdle, but not a wall, since the same network parsers can read the game client memory so digging a key out of the memory would not be an obstacle. That comes back to "you can't trust the client"

Obviously that means they need to consider that players are cheating by using parsers and thus they should not design a boss fight by pre-spawning anything.

Or you know, they could just ban players who use these tools in the first place.

I do feel two ultimate encounters and expansion is a tad low since if we are being honest they have no real reason up the difficultly on savage fight to match earlier encounters such a Midas, even though I do think current skill level of the community has progressed greatly since then. To a degree I also like how savage more or less has a nice mid to hard core feel to it. In the end no matter what they do to players that were able to even make progress through phases in ultimate savage more or less will remain a joke in comparison and since the clear rates for current savage tier have been so high I do think SE has found a happy medium. Do think maybe three to four ultimate encounters an expansion would be the best of both worlds. Hope that makes sense.

Also please let us not turn this thread into an pro or anti parser thread.

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Originally Posted by Alleo

I agree with this. Instead of putting all the work into this fights maybe make the last turn of a savage run be as hard as ultimate, with the other turns getting more difficult too. The top raiders wont have much to do anyway because they beat savage or ultimate in max. 2 weeks. I dare to say that the important part is to get the other raiders and maybe midcore players to enjoy savage more.

And hey he did say that the last Omega raid will be surprising and great, so maybe instead of getting another Ultimate fight, savage raids will include a special Omega fight or something like that.

In the end they never promised to do x amount of Ultimates per expansion and they also have only so much that they can use for such fights. So for me I am fine if raiders get their content but I also see no huge problem that they are only having two of them per expansion. I just find the reasons for that a bit strange. (Like how the players are tired and things like that)

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The problem is they wanted an higher raid clear rate overall, ultimate was a way for them to meet the best of both worlds it also gave an end goal to pve in this game and something that it's not done often essentially gave a purpose to raid gear and motive for raiders to stay subbed.
In short you beat savage in one day then you gear up for the ultimate that comes, now they'll beat savage in one day and it's cya till 5.0 and maybe that month once 4.5 drops and believe it or not ultimate is run by raiders also for fun because those fights are good, some even got eureka 345 gear and swallow compass gear to maximise their strenght for ucob.
And frankly they've said they want to surprise us with Omgea, but I'm fairly sure the context was not about difficulty but overall feelings of the fights and the story .

I'll agree that the decision to not do another ultimate is upsetting. I haven't cleared either but progged both and from a player side don't see the release timeline as to difficult. Especially since they made the fight shorter but the same difficulty it makes the time needed to clear a lot shorter.

Ultimate over a second level 70 dungeon was great. If that's all that changes with 4.5 I'll be upset. Hopefully they just make a 5th floor difficult omega raid and that helps.

Time before an expansion usually has very little to do and if there is nothing special I'll probably unsub for a few months and enjoy some other games. I love some side content like eureka, PotD, and even diadem (it wasn't as bad as the community makes it out to be). However being able to finish a lot of the content within the first week after patch drops makes the other weeks/months just redoing content. That's why the higher difficulty stuff (Savage, Ultimate, Heaven in High) is great to fill those gaps.

The issue is just going to be what about 4.5 and beyond... Roughly July 2019 for the next expansion ugh

Combined this with my previous post not sure how to delete it.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Or you know, they could just ban players who use these tools in the first place.

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And in doing so destroy their entire raid scene.

Regardless, ACT and Cactbot are not the same program nor do they utilize the same data. Hence why most overlay add ons aren't comparable with Cactbot. The game sending packets doesn't mean both programs follow a similar module. All that aside, the devs themselves have not only acknowledged the futility in blocking ACT, they have outright admitted it's valuable for raiders all while watching the World First racers who have it prominently displayed on their twitch and/or youtube clips. 5150 was mentioned by name from the dev team. They had ACT running.

No matter how much you argue, parsers are not cheating. Cactbot, on the other hand, does step on a very fine line. Which is what actually prompted Yoshida to comment. They may attempt to break the latter, but they aren't going to touch ACT. Why? Because it and FFlogs are they only reason Savage stays alive months after its relevancy has long faded. Without numbers, you have no speed kills or players having means of calculating their improvement. Therefore, they have little reason to bother with the tier save to obtain gear for Ultimate. And that assumes they don't simply play another game.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

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I'll disagree with this. Cactbot is just a fancy ui over basic ACT and I don't see how it's cheating aside from things like goals or A11S where ACT could call out the Patten before the animation.

Right now people frequently use discord for VoiP. Someone usually has a timeline to call out mechanics from a second monitor or memory. These tools replace the burden on who calls things out. Cactbot is just timelines and triggers. I see it very similar to voice comms.

However I dislike ACT in general like yoshi. It's a great tool to get better but many in NA focus on there numbers and play less safe/consistent which you see hindering progression especially in ultimate. However it has helps so many people to get better.

Solution? Personal in game ratings after a duty. Not a DPS meter but a ranking based on DPS, mechanics, mitigation that gives you a SS, S, A, B, C, etc. ranking like classical FF games. It'd curb a lot of the need for ACT and help players grow.

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Originally Posted by Dezwaan

I'll disagree with this. Cactbot is just a fancy ui over basic ACT and I don't see how it's cheating aside from things like goals or A11S where ACT could call out the Patten before the animation.

Right now people frequently use discord for VoiP. Someone usually has a timeline to call out mechanics from a second monitor or memory. These tools replace the burden on who calls things out. Cactbot is just timelines and triggers. I see it very similar to voice comms.

However I dislike ACT in general like yoshi. It's a great tool to get better but many in NA focus on there numbers and play less safe/consistent which you see hindering progression especially in ultimate. However it has helps so many people to get better.

Solution? Personal in game ratings after a duty. Not a DPS meter but a ranking based on DPS, mechanics, mitigation that gives you a SS, S, A, B, C, etc. ranking like classical FF games. It'd curb a lot of the need for ACT and help players grow.

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Oh, I don't believe Cactbot cheating. You could argue it being a grey area though given its far more robust than simply trigger call outs. Personally, I couldn't give a damn what people use, provided it isn't something like Ungarmax, of course.

As for ACT itself. I disagree with your proposal since it only relays vague information. A letter grade lacks any details such as cooldown management, overheal and etc. Not to mention, it does nothing to help progression. If you're hitting enrage or simply struggling to push a mechanic, well, you have no way of knowing that Black Mage is contributing 3,300 DPS when they should be well over 6k. As for Ultimate. People treat it very differently. You see far less min/maxing and greed because it punishes you severely.

Question for the top raiders that happens to come here :
Since the dev apparently doesn't have enough ressource to maintain all their content, would you rather keep savage and lose Ultimate or they remove Savage and put a bit more ressources in Ultimate fights ?

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

And in doing so destroy their entire raid scene.

Regardless, ACT and Cactbot are not the same program nor do they utilize the same data.

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Originally Posted by Dezwaan

I'll disagree with this. Cactbot is just a fancy ui over basic ACT and I don't see how it's cheating aside from things like goals or A11S where ACT could call out the Patten before the animation.

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You're both wrong, and you'd know this if you actually looked at the source code. For everyone else, this is exactly how these tools work:

The FFXIV plugin for ACT is what loads data into ACT by both looking at the game client memory and the network, and in doing so creates the parser logs for fflogs that are otherwise independent of ACT.

There are several overlays for ACT that actually overlay data into the game, they do this by invoking a web browser engine (Chromium) and this is why the overlays slow things down.

The mentioned overlay cactbot, actually comes with timing scripts for every fight in the game, it works the same way as the triggers do. When some packet is fired off that indicates a mechanic that comes up, that's when it gives visual/audio cues.

You can see how these work in the source code of those plugins.

Hence Yoshi-P's comment about this. It would affect the base plugin that allows all of this to work in the first place. They're also painted into a corner about what to do about it, as these plugins are usually updated a day after a patch release once they've sniffed out all the battle mechanics and packet id number changes. Anything that would "solve" this problem would be defeated the same way. Likewise anything that actually would solve this, would solve the bots.

Expect more cactbot-like tools to keep popping up until SE finally starts banning people who use them. If that kills the raider scene, then maybe a raider scene that relies entirely on cheat tools shouldn't exist.

It's not them not having the resources, it's them hearing feedbacks about an ultimate each odd patch beign rough

Yoshida: We were originally planning to have an ultimate fight for each "odd numbered patch", but after observing the reactions from the community, there were a lot of opinions saying "Having an ultimate fight every 2 patches is too rough", so we changed our minds and thought 2 ultimate fights per expansion might be better, so i think the ultimate series will be on hiatus for now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._bad_news_for/

I think it's fine. For something that so few participate in, I'd say their time is better spent elsewhere.

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Originally Posted by Voidedge_Ragna

Theres finite resources and those fights take a lot I'd imagine. Making everyone cut back for a flashy fight 1% of players see and even less beat.

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1% of the players beat it and then sell the kills to other people for Gil or Real life money wich then brag about what they have and claim they beat it legit. If you ask them about the tactics however they quickly run out of words or stop replying.

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Originally Posted by Azper

I think it's fine. For something that so few participate in, I'd say their time is better spent elsewhere.

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I would disagree. The people that want a challenge should at least get one in a game that caters massively to softcore players, and I wouldn’t say that the people that have cleared an Ultimate and/or are progging it are happy to see it go on hiatus. Since Savage is going to stay at the Delta/Sigmascape level and effectively become midcore, I’d like a hardcore option for content.

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Originally Posted by Remedi

It's not them not having the resources, it's them hearing feedbacks about an ultimate each odd patch beign rough

Yoshida: We were originally planning to have an ultimate fight for each "odd numbered patch", but after observing the reactions from the community, there were a lot of opinions saying "Having an ultimate fight every 2 patches is too rough", so we changed our minds and thought 2 ultimate fights per expansion might be better, so i think the ultimate series will be on hiatus for now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._bad_news_for/

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I’m curious to know if this was said on the JP forums, or where it was even said. Because I haven’t seen this reasoning on the NA forums.

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Originally Posted by Reynhart

Question for the top raiders that happens to come here :
Since the dev apparently doesn't have enough ressource to maintain all their content, would you rather keep savage and lose Ultimate or they remove Savage and put a bit more ressources in Ultimate fights ?

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Rather they cut the abysmal waste that is PvP.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

I’m curious to know if this was said on the JP forums, or where it was even said. Because I haven’t seen this reasoning on the NA forums.

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Not sure if its a matter of saying. It looked like even on the NA side interest was less, and I noticed raiders breaking their taboo of waiting till 4 groups cleared for clear videos, they seemed to come out the next day after world first. My guess is that they saw participation was fewer and asked the JP to be sure.