Why people still USE ACT knowing their breaking TOS ??

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Goji1639

The main issue is giving assholes information to act on. A piece of software that tells these people exactly who in the group they should unload their dysfunctional personality disorder on only emboldens them.

I do kind of want to try out ACT, but I'm not even really sure how talking about it on the forums is received. I used to play WoW and used DPS meters a lot, but WoW actually supported mods. Are mods basically broken for weeks every time there's a patch in this game?

---

To be completely honest with you, if you do install ACT, you may come upon a new fear - that you're better than most of Crystal Datacenter. Maybe.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Goji1639

The main issue is giving assholes information to act on. A piece of software that tells these people exactly who in the group they should unload their dysfunctional personality disorder on only emboldens them.

---

There's also the flip side where having that information can help you against those same assholes. It's surprisingly rare that a player who plays perfectly is going to jump into a Normal mode pug and start waving numbers around and showing off. Very often that's the medicore guy who's compensating.

I still remember the time in WoW during a raid where one guy was hurling abuse over "low" dps and demanding kicks, so I linked the meters to him and told him to be quiet. He responded with "uh, I'm like twice as high as everyone else, see?". Then someone else quietly pointed out it was the "Damage Taken" meter because he'd stood in almost everything. Never seen a guy go quiet so fast...

Honestly having bad logs is not the end all be all deciding factor for most groups with sense. Most groups are not just looking the pretty number on your page. They're also looking at deaths, your rotation, cooldown usage, raid support usage, healing, GCD uptime etc. Your number is a culmination of a bunch of different factors. You can tell why someone got the percentile they got.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

There's also the flip side where having that information can help you against those same assholes. It's surprisingly rare that a player who plays perfectly is going to jump into a Normal mode pug and start waving numbers around and showing off. Very often that's the medicore guy who's compensating.

I still remember the time in WoW during a raid where one guy was hurling abuse over "low" dps and demanding kicks, so I linked the meters to him and told him to be quiet. He responded with "uh, I'm like twice as high as everyone else, see?". Then someone else quietly pointed out it was the "Damage Taken" meter because he'd stood in almost everything. Never seen a guy go quiet so fast...

---

That's yet another issue I have with not having an official parser. You have zero options to defend players against accusations. If someone blames enrage wipes on anyone not doing enough dps all you can say is pretty much "I'm sure that's not the case, rotations looks fine from what I see". But you can't prove it. The moment you do, you risk a report because wether it was in defense of someone or not, openly admitting that you parse is a risk.
So right now the best way is to just kick said person without saying anything.
I had a recent reclear party where we repeatedly wiped on enrage and two of the tanks started to blame the healers for being "afk healers" and not doing enough dps. Sure, their dps wasn't stellar but it was completely fine. The problem was that the tank himself barely scratched 5k and one of the dps was really low aswell. Add a mistake or two resulting in a death and you have an enrage wipe. But none of us could say anything specific and we simply ended up kicking both the tank and the dps who lagged behind.
I would've killed for something to shut this guy up...
The good players are rarely the assholes. For the most part they try their best to help people who are willing to listen and are often the most patient ones of the group. They have cleared the content, they have their gear, they know what to do and only do reclears for fun or because they're in the mood to help.

Silently kicking someone might get the job done but there enough people who are insecure about their performance although they're doing fine. Having someone be able to stand up for them without inviting a report from doing so would go a long way. And pushing some people from their high horses while you're at it? Priceless.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mavrias

Honestly having bad logs is not the end all be all deciding factor for most groups with sense. Most groups are not just looking the pretty number on your page. They're also looking at deaths, your rotation, cooldown usage, raid support usage, healing, GCD uptime etc. Your number is a culmination of a bunch of different factors. You can tell why someone got the percentile they got.

---

I think the main issue I have with the whole percentile system is that it's easily skewed by factors like people not logging all of their parses, either due to not actively using ACT or wanting themselves to look better then they actually are by only uploading their best parses (I've seen people joking that "anyone can get orange" because of this).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KageTokage

I think the main issue I have with the whole percentile system is that it's easily skewed by factors like people not logging all of their parses, either due to not actively using ACT or wanting themselves to look better then they actually are by only uploading their best parses (I've seen people joking that "anyone can get orange" because of this).

---

Don't you just need 1 person per party to upload the log for the whole party to be registered? Pretty sure most parties in high-end content will have at least 1 person who will log so the actual percentile won't be that much off I think.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Videra

To be completely honest with you, if you do install ACT, you may come upon a new fear - that you're better than most of Crystal Datacenter. Maybe.

---

Unless things have really fallen off the rails in the last three or four weeks I've rarely had truly awful parties here. Yeah I've run into the less than great player that's made runs a tad more difficult but we've muddled through. I wouldn't know from a purely quantitative standpoint but bosses usually die within a reasonable amount of time IMO.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SamRF

Don't you just need 1 person per party to upload the log for the whole party to be registered? Pretty sure most parties in high-end content will have at least 1 person who will log so the actual percentile won't be that much off I think.

---

Yes, though if you're playing with randoms there's no guarantees that all of your parses are getting logged, nor can you guarantee that people aren't going to be uploading runs where you performed horribly for one reason or another. Unsurprisingly, this often includes deaths caused by people trying to greed or tunneling and forgetting to do mechanics entirely due to being too focused on maximizing their own DPS.

A lot of people use ACT, but don't actually bother uploading anything.

It's a little irksome that you're basically forced to be in a static and to regularly upload parses if you want to maintain a high percentile and avoid being judged harshly by certain individuals (Though as someone previously stated, said people probably aren't even worth knowing /associating with anyways).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KageTokage

A lot of people use ACT, but don't actually bother uploading anything.

---

Yes, this. ACT and FFlogs are separate things. FFlogs is intimately linked to ACT, but the reverse is not true at all. Heck, ACT is just a combat log application that isn't even FFXIV specific.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rilifane

.. The good players are rarely the assholes. For the most part they try their best to help people who are willing to listen and are often the most patient ones of the group. They have cleared the content, they have their gear, they know what to do and only do reclears for fun or because they're in the mood to help.

---

"Rarely", indeed. I won't say this is a golden truth, cause every kind of people and behavior are in the nature but, based on my experience, I indeed have seen more "bad" player harrasing others without proofs than good player calling out the others.
Sadly.
It's even worse when you don't even need logs/ACT to proove your point but they're not willing to listen and are in denial.

And it's really frustrating you can't tell them with these said proofs that they are actually the one causing problem. Silence, kick and blacklist is the only way.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Drakeos

Seeing streamers using these on their stream and also non raiders (group parties/dungeons) maybe ffxiv need to add their own version of parsing to remove need of addons/plugins ???

---

I've also seen a lot of people use ACT to customize their UI info a bit better, the most popular seemingly being Special Spell Timers. TBH, this is something that should be implemented in the game itself (CD/proc icons, bar timers, etc.) but as they've admitted themselves they cannot easily implement while still being console friendly. Prime example of this is the horrible repair UI that still requires people to repair every category individually.

As others have stated many times, it's mostly overlooked as harmless until someone uses it to DPS shame people. At which point the jerk being reported is still not being suspended/banned for using ACT, but for the real reason: being a jerk.

Quote:

---

people use ACT to customize their UI info a bit better, the most popular seemingly being Special Spell Timers. TBH, this is something that should be implemented in the game itself (CD/proc icons, bar timers, etc.) but as they've admitted themselves they cannot easily implement while still being console friendly

---

14s lack of UI customization is as out-of-date as their lack of parses, or other mods which improve that aspect of gameplay (also the way macros work is downright awful at times even with enough pause buffering).


I just want to be able to not have awful group, target, and raid frames. And a customizable action bar. And a vertical text and duration only list of buffs and debuffs in a dragable frame. And more options like that.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ColorOfSakura

And this is a constant thing! Black Mages that don't use Enochian, Dragoons that don't use Blood/Life of the Dragon, Monks that don't even do their positionals. Healers that never use a DPS spell, and Tanks that refuse to mitigate any damage. It's a huge problem this community has -- and its just as toxic as someone yelling at another person for low DPS numbers via a parse or something of that nature.

---

The other day I met a Black Mage that didn't know where to fit Despair into their rotation. They would legit go into ice phase once they didn't have enough MP to cast Fire IV. I'm sure their damage was probably still fine, but things like this make me wonder what else people might not know about their class.

If ACT wasn't in this game a whole bunch of players would stop playing overnight. This is speculation but I do believe that the hardcore community would be killed off too. In order to be successful, every game needs a hardcore community that develops guides, clears content quickly and gives the Devs feedback. Even animal crossing has a hardcore community.
Square is being smart about this. So long as you aren't harassing people in chat they look the other way. And if someone is going to be an arsehole in game, they'd be an arsehole regardless of ACT being a thing or not. The TOS exists to help them kick people doing that sort of shit.
To quote good old Zoof: FFLOGS is the game we play, FFXIV is just the third party app that helps us do it. (Jk)

In the end comes down, what reasons done have to not use ACT.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Barraind

14s lack of UI customization is as out-of-date as their lack of parses, or other mods which improve that aspect of gameplay (also the way macros work is downright awful at times even with enough pause buffering).


I just want to be able to not have awful group, target, and raid frames. And a customizable action bar. And a vertical text and duration only list of buffs and debuffs in a dragable frame. And more options like that.

---

Okay, I know the game has UI issues but there is a good reason for that. The original game was supposed to be more like FFXI-2 and have that sort of old school system where people had to mix and match different skills from different jobs to complete certain roles. When they revamped it they went with a system where we have to keep up a pattern of actions constantly on a cooldown using a queue. I'm going to be blunt that WoW did this way better because the system it grew out of focused on having a smaller number of strategic abilities. FFXIV they went with a longer GCD, which meant more time between actions than WoW and a need to have more actions to queue up to keep it interesting. The only problem with this is that humans only have two hands to work with and we got limited reach on the keyboard without losing the default position.

I don't think it's worth it to go into details, but this game has way too many jobs that induce repetitive stress injury and it seems like they keep finding new and inventive ways to keep making it a nightmare. On one hand, Samurai, warrior, paladin, redmage, and black mage seem fine, but then we get into Gunbreaker where it just has way too many abilities and cooldowns to fit safely on a keyboard / mmo mouse map.

And yes, maybe people have found a way to make it work, but part of game design is creating the input system for the user to use. FFXIV sort of slugs abilities onto a hot bar as you get them from levels and leaves them there unless the player sorts out where to have everything. Even if someone does provide another keybind, the player then has to rebind and learn how to use that key bind later.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Colt47

Okay, I know the game has UI issues but there is a good reason for that. The original game was supposed to be more like FFXI-2 and have that sort of old school system where people had to mix and match different skills from different jobs to complete certain roles. When they revamped it they went with a system where we have to keep up a pattern of actions constantly on a cooldown using a queue. I'm going to be blunt that WoW did this way better because the system it grew out of focused on having a smaller number of strategic abilities. FFXIV they went with a longer GCD, which meant more time between actions than WoW and a need to have more actions to queue up to keep it interesting. The only problem with this is that humans only have two hands to work with and we got limited reach on the keyboard without losing the default position.

I don't think it's worth it to go into details, but this game has way too many jobs that induce repetitive stress injury and it seems like they keep finding new and inventive ways to keep making it a nightmare. On one hand, Samurai, warrior, paladin, redmage, and black mage seem fine, but then we get into Gunbreaker where it just has way too many abilities and cooldowns to fit safely on a keyboard / mmo mouse map.

And yes, maybe people have found a way to make it work, but part of game design is creating the input system for the user to use. FFXIV sort of slugs abilities onto a hot bar as you get them from levels and leaves them there unless the player sorts out where to have everything. Even if someone does provide another keybind, the player then has to rebind and learn how to use that key bind later.

---

Are you actually serious? As a controller player I can honestly say that if you don’t have enough buttons on a keyboard and mmo mouse then maybe MMOs aren’t your game bud. I can fit every single ability on every job comfortably on a controller with many many empty slots. I feel you need to optimise a little more

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Wyakin

Are you actually serious? As a controller player I can honestly say that if you don’t have enough buttons on a keyboard and mmo mouse then maybe MMOs aren’t your game bud. I can fit every single ability on every job comfortably on a controller with many many empty slots. I feel you need to optimise a little more

---

They did a far better job on the controller than they did with the PC stuff I can tell you that. Gunbreaker is a complete headache on a gaming mouse and keyboard because even if you have the button grid on the mouse, it's really hard to rope memorize all the buttons on the mouse and you end up with a lot of skills ending up on keys that are not reachable by hand, so you have to basically click them using the default layout. I managed to fix the issues by heavily modifying the hot bar layout and keybindings, but it's ugly. There are a couple of jobs that are survivable on the default horizontal bar layout like whm, warrior, paladin, samurai, and red mage.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Colt47

They did a far better job on the controller than they did with the PC stuff I can tell you that. Gunbreaker is a complete headache on a gaming mouse and keyboard because even if you have the button grid on the mouse, it's really hard to rope memorize all the buttons on the mouse and you end up with a lot of skills ending up on keys that are not reachable by hand, so you have to basically click them using the default layout. I managed to fix the issues by heavily modifying the hot bar layout and keybindings, but it's ugly. There are a couple of jobs that are survivable on the default horizontal bar layout like whm, warrior, paladin, samurai, and red mage.

---

... what? No offense but this screams of being a "you" problem and nothing whatsoever to do with your mouse. MMO mice are typically designed where you can easily feel out the keys. For example, my Logitech 600 not only has extra bump on the two middle keys but all six middle keys are curved. It makes centering your thumb very easy. Pretty much every mouse has a similar design component and it simply requires practice to build muscle memory. It also helps that you should pick a job and build every hotbar layout in a similar fashion. My tank, DPS and Healer layouts are almost identical.

PC controllers are a breeze in this game. And that's coming from someone who started with a controller and wasn't even a PC gamer until FFXIV.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Colt47

They did a far better job on the controller than they did with the PC stuff I can tell you that. Gunbreaker is a complete headache on a gaming mouse and keyboard because even if you have the button grid on the mouse, it's really hard to rope memorize all the buttons on the mouse and you end up with a lot of skills ending up on keys that are not reachable by hand, so you have to basically click them using the default layout. I managed to fix the issues by heavily modifying the hot bar layout and keybindings, but it's ugly. There are a couple of jobs that are survivable on the default horizontal bar layout like whm, warrior, paladin, samurai, and red mage.

---

Are you using shift modifiers or anything at all? I play mouse/kb and don't even have a gaming mouse, and there are only really a few classes where I have trouble reasonably keybinding everything and needing to click. Even then it's mostly tanks and healers, which I don't play as often as dps, so I really just haven't sat down and taken the time to really organize my hotbars very well for those classes. I bind and use 1-6 and f1-f5, RTYZXFG, and three mouse buttons (I do have two side buttons, and the middle button to bind), and then I have shift 1-3 set up, and that pretty much covers me on most of the classes I care about.

Ofc I do have carpal tunnel and other issues :p so I'm usually playing with a wrist brace on and can't reach as far as some others could. I could probably have a better more usable setup if I didn't already have hand and wrist problems.

I wouldn't complain if they condensed some things where reasonable, maybe combined some abilities to one button where it makes sense, but I wouldn't actually say FF is too much worse than WoW in terms of hotbar usability. It at least has a better base UI (for hotbars, if literally nothing else) even if there are definitely some mods in WoW that give much more flexibility and a generally better experience overall.

It may or may not be telling that console players very rarely get brought up whenever the parser discussion pops up.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Colt47

They did a far better job on the controller than they did with the PC stuff I can tell you that. Gunbreaker is a complete headache on a gaming mouse and keyboard because even if you have the button grid on the mouse, it's really hard to rope memorize all the buttons on the mouse and you end up with a lot of skills ending up on keys that are not reachable by hand, so you have to basically click them using the default layout. I managed to fix the issues by heavily modifying the hot bar layout and keybindings, but it's ugly. There are a couple of jobs that are survivable on the default horizontal bar layout like whm, warrior, paladin, samurai, and red mage.

---

I think you need to work on your setup then.
I heard so many horror stories about Gunbreaker having insane amount of buttons, being a pain for your hand and that it's impossible to bind everything and the only class that requires constant clicking etc. but when I played it to 80 I didn't notice any difference to several other classes. It's all a matter of how you use your m/k and you don't even need fancy hardware for it.
Just to give you a few ideas:

• use modifiers like shift, alt. etc in addition to your regular keys
• use keys around your movement keys like A/D or Q/E and RTZFGHYXCV
• change your movement keys to something more centered, e.g. from WASD to TFGH to comfortably reach keys in both directions

I have relatively small hands so some keys are naturally harder to reach for me than most people. I currently have 3 hotbars filled and don't click anything (not even rarely used things like pots).
I know I could make it work without an MMO mouse because I have played classes with similiar or even higher amount of buttons in the past and fairly recently aswell when my mouse broke down but if you do have an MMO mouse it's extremely easy to bind everything. Pretty much everyone can comfortably use 9 of the 12 buttons, with alt/ shift that's a whooping 27 keybinds on your mouse alone.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Billythepancake

It's a very "don't ask, don't tell" rule. So long as you aren't being a jerk with your parser SE won't do anything about it. If they actually enforced it and somehow got rid of all parses the raiding scene in this game would die overnight.

---

Don't want to sound mean or anything since I don't particularly care but I will say that the so called raiding scene has harmed the game enough for my personal taste. So much so that 'balancing' has negative connotations for me now. haha

To be fair, nobody has ever 'called me out' on my DPS so it can't be that bad, but maybe I just got lucky.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Avidria

Are you using shift modifiers or anything at all? I play mouse/kb and don't even have a gaming mouse, and there are only really a few classes where I have trouble reasonably keybinding everything and needing to click. Even then it's mostly tanks and healers, which I don't play as often as dps, so I really just haven't sat down and taken the time to really organize my hotbars very well for those classes. I bind and use 1-6 and f1-f5, RTYZXFG, and three mouse buttons (I do have two side buttons, and the middle button to bind), and then I have shift 1-3 set up, and that pretty much covers me on most of the classes I care about.

Ofc I do have carpal tunnel and other issues :p so I'm usually playing with a wrist brace on and can't reach as far as some others could. I could probably have a better more usable setup if I didn't already have hand and wrist problems.

I wouldn't complain if they condensed some things where reasonable, maybe combined some abilities to one button where it makes sense, but I wouldn't actually say FF is too much worse than WoW in terms of hotbar usability. It at least has a better base UI (for hotbars, if literally nothing else) even if there are definitely some mods in WoW that give much more flexibility and a generally better experience overall.

---

Yeah I'm using shift and ctrl modifiers. The issue is really the default setup in the game for PC which is awful. On Controllers they have one bar and the ability to hold down a trigger to swap that bar with another bar, so they decided this was the way to go with the default version of the controls for the PC. Basically, we end up with Shift + (pick number) sets the bar you see as Hotbar 1 in the default setup. I don't think the CTRL+Number triggering abilities on hotbar 2 was default (some of the things I had set up ages ago before returning). Having anything bound to "7" to "=" puts them out of reach for a lot of peoples left hand due to the maximum reach of the left hand without losing the neutral positioning. Soooo...

To fix the HOT BAR I ended up having to change it to Hot Bar 1 = 4x3 and Hot Bar 2 = 4x3 to maximize the usage of the 1-6 keys, which are the easiest keys for a human hand to reach and also reasonably easy to memorize if someone is using an MMO mouse. ALT, CTRL, and SHIFT determine which vertical level I'm accessing on bars 1 and 2, and this covers most of the abilities you need since it hits 24 slots. However, Gunbreaker requires Continuation to be constantly pressed in a pattern during the gnashing fang combo so there has to be another button that is easy to reach, thus I now add a 6x2 bar on the left side that is bound to keys on the keyboard near the hand controlling the movement. F gets bound to an ability slot along with C and V. Now I've got Continuation on F, so at least I can get gnashing fang working. Amusingly, it looks like a game of space invaders down on the bottom of my screen...

https://ibb.co/j42DVjj

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rilifane

I think you need to work on your setup then.
I heard so many horror stories about Gunbreaker having insane amount of buttons, being a pain for your hand and that it's impossible to bind everything and the only class that requires constant clicking etc. but when I played it to 80 I didn't notice any difference to several other classes. It's all a matter of how you use your m/k and you don't even need fancy hardware for it.
Just to give you a few ideas:

• use modifiers like shift, alt. etc in addition to your regular keys
• use keys around your movement keys like A/D or Q/E and RTZFGHYXCV
• change your movement keys to something more centered, e.g. from WASD to TFGH to comfortably reach keys in both directions

I have relatively small hands so some keys are naturally harder to reach for me than most people. I currently have 3 hotbars filled and don't click anything (not even rarely used things like pots).
I know I could make it work without an MMO mouse because I have played classes with similiar or even higher amount of buttons in the past and fairly recently aswell when my mouse broke down but if you do have an MMO mouse it's extremely easy to bind everything. Pretty much everyone can comfortably use 9 of the 12 buttons, with alt/ shift that's a whooping 27 keybinds on your mouse alone.

---

The fact we have to modify the HOT bars so much in this game to simply get it working is bad enough when we have to also determine where the abilities have to go on the HOT bar, as they simply add them in sequence to the nearest available slot when leveling. If the placement on the hotbar were done right, it wouldn't be a juggling act where we all have to redo the setup each time we install the game. Of course, at this point if they did get it right the only people who would reap the fruits of it would be new players since everyone else would have their own setup saved. It's basically a muscle memory thing.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Colt47

The fact we have to modify the HOT bars so much in this game to simply get it working is bad enough when we have to also determine where the abilities have to go on the HOT bar, as they simply add them in sequence to the nearest available slot when leveling. If the placement on the hotbar were done right, it wouldn't be a juggling act where we all have to redo the setup each time we install the game. Of course, at this point if they did get it right the only people who would reap the fruits of it would be new players since everyone else would have their own setup saved. It's basically a muscle memory thing.

---

Are you... are you really saying that it's SE's job to arrange the hotkeys and skills in a good way so the player isn't "forced" to costumize? That the standard setup for both hotkeys AND skill arrangement should be sufficient to work with on all classes?

Everyone has different preferences, everyone clusters skills in a different way, has different hardware and different physical capabilities and limitations so of course you need to build your own setup, not just in FFXIV but every MMO. Things like fixed hotkeys with automatic and good skill arrangement might work in games like LoL, HotS and OW because you only have a handful of skills and the game's focus is a different one but for MMOs it's a completely natural thing that after gaining a couple of skills you notice which one you frequently use and how you would prefer your hotkeys, so you make your own setup. The skills are placed in the same order as you get them, how you prioritize them is up to you, not for SE to know in advance.
You have the option to costumize for a reason. The standard layout just gives you a general idea about how the UI can look like but things like differently sized and placed party windows for the different roles, hotbar settings, hotkey arrangement and general sizing and placement of other UI elements is of course completely up to you. As it should be. The standard UI and seetings work for almost nobody and that's not because it's so bad but because everyone wants it completely to their liking and their prefered settings vastly differ from each other.
I know as many people who would NEVER bind skills to A/D or Q/E as people who only use QWE for movement and bind the rest. Or people who feel completely fine using only mod keys + 1-9 while others abhor it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Colt47

To fix the HOT BAR I ended up having to change it to Hot Bar 1 = 4x3 and Hot Bar 2 = 4x3 to maximize the usage of the 1-6 keys, which are the easiest keys for a human hand to reach and also reasonably easy to memorize if someone is using an MMO mouse.

---

Wether you want a 1x12, 2x6 or 3x4 layout is purely aesthetic and doesn't affect they way you bind or use hotkeys AT ALL.
You don't have to use 1-´ for one hotbar, you can set the hotkeys whichever way you like regardless of hotbar design. I'm starting to think you have some fundamental misunderstanding about how hotkey and hotbar settings work. You're not maximiszing anything by chosing 3x4 over 1x12 or 2x6. You could put a really tiny hotbar somewhere you don't even see it and still use the skills. Some people even do that because they don't need to see skills that don't have a cooldown.

I don't get this hotbar complaint. It's a hotbar. You customize it to your preference. It's how hotbars work. The only fixed hotbars I have ever come across are for games that either have so few abilities that there's no reason to customize it (e.g. many action platformers come to mind) or for games that have lots of skills but with fixed skillslots based on game design and/or your build or equipment (Guild Wars 2 for example.)

I mean unless the real complaint is that people only want 6 to 8 buttons to press and that the game should place them on the hotbar for them in the order that they should be pressed... I guess I can see what the complaint is about? But that's not this game, nor will it ever be.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Colt47

The fact we have to modify the HOT bars so much in this game to simply get it working is bad enough when we have to also determine where the abilities have to go on the HOT bar, as they simply add them in sequence to the nearest available slot when leveling. If the placement on the hotbar were done right, it wouldn't be a juggling act where we all have to redo the setup each time we install the game. Of course, at this point if they did get it right the only people who would reap the fruits of it would be new players since everyone else would have their own setup saved. It's basically a muscle memory thing.

---

Whenever I started a new job I opened the action menu, read through all of the abilities, and placed them on my hotbar where I felt they would be best placed for ease of use and to make sense with a rotation. There's nothing preventing this from being done right from the minimum level for that job. Every single skill, including quest rewards, are shown in the action menu and can be dragged to a hotbar even if you don't know it. A side benefit of this is that you become familiar with what all of your skills do before you get them since it requires reading the tooltips and thinking about them. As I leveled up, I might make minor tweaks to hotbar placement here and there as I got experience with using the skills and found they might be used more or less frequently than expected, but on the whole, there was very little need for juggling skill placements. And even if I didn't plan ahead like this and only placed a skill whenever it appeared on my hotbar after leveling, this isn't that big of a deal. It's not like it requires moving every single skill around every time a new one is earned. It is at most shifting a couple skills over to the right one slot to fit in a new combo move or moving a couple of skills to make space for a new commonly used oGCD in an easy to reach spot, for example. If it's a major juggling process every time a new skill shows up then that's just indicative of prior bad placement of skills since no single skill changes a rotation so much that everything else gets changed so radically as to warrant that.

Also, how many times are you installing the game that you have to place all of your skills again? And even if you do reinstall it, the hotbar settings are part of what is saved locally. The only time you should have to redo all your hotbars after a re-install is if you can't access that file for some reason. E.g. a complete hard drive failure and you're installing to a new drive. And even that can be prevented if you back up your files. This fits the definition of a classic "you" type problem.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Wolfsbane706

It may or may not be telling that console players very rarely get brought up whenever the parser discussion pops up.

---

Probably because this is one of the few major MMORPGs (perhaps the only?) where computer and console are playing together.

WoW, SWTOR and RIFT are computer only. BDO is multi-platform but cross platform play is limited to XBOX and PS4 (computer remains separate). ESO has no cross platform play though there are rumors they may be working on it. When there's no cross play, then one segment having access to mods doesn't impact the game experience of the other segments that don't have the same access.

So FFXIV is in a bit of a unique situation, which is why many posters may be overlooking it. It's something I have brought up in other discussions and it's part of why I push for a parser to be added directly to the game. The hardcore raiding community is going to continue to use mods for parsing regardless of what SE thinks because it's something needed to analyze and maximize performance. PS4 players should have the same access.

I know one of the excuses YoshiP gave was that if they did include a parser there would be comments about things not matching with ACT. Not a big deal, WoW players have gone through the same thing with Recount not matching Skada not matching Details not matching Warcraft Logs not matching World of Logs, etc. I don't think it would be hard to get the community to accept a built-in parser as the "official" one since everyone playing would have it so at least that would give a consistent comparison between players.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rilifane

Are you... are you really saying that it's SE's job to arrange the hotkeys and skills in a good way so the player isn't "forced" to costumize? That the standard setup for both hotkeys AND skill arrangement should be sufficient to work with on all classes?

Everyone has different preferences, everyone clusters skills in a different way, has different hardware and different physical capabilities and limitations so of course you need to build your own setup, not just in FFXIV but every MMO. Things like fixed hotkeys with automatic and good skill arrangement might work in games like LoL, HotS and OW because you only have a handful of skills and the game's focus is a different one but for MMOs it's a completely natural thing that after gaining a couple of skills you notice which one you frequently use and how you would prefer your hotkeys, so you make your own setup. The skills are placed in the same order as you get them, how you prioritize them is up to you, not for SE to know in advance.
You have the option to costumize for a reason. The standard layout just gives you a general idea about how the UI can look like but things like differently sized and placed party windows for the different roles, hotbar settings, hotkey arrangement and general sizing and placement of other UI elements is of course completely up to you. As it should be. The standard UI and seetings work for almost nobody and that's not because it's so bad but because everyone wants it completely to their liking and their prefered settings vastly differ from each other.
I know as many people who would NEVER bind skills to A/D or Q/E as people who only use QWE for movement and bind the rest. Or people who feel completely fine using only mod keys + 1-9 while others abhor it.



Wether you want a 1x12, 2x6 or 3x4 layout is purely aesthetic and doesn't affect they way you bind or use hotkeys AT ALL.
You don't have to use 1-´ for one hotbar, you can set the hotkeys whichever way you like regardless of hotbar design. I'm starting to think you have some fundamental misunderstanding about how hotkey and hotbar settings work. You're not maximiszing anything by chosing 3x4 over 1x12 or 2x6. You could put a really tiny hotbar somewhere you don't even see it and still use the skills. Some people even do that because they don't need to see skills that don't have a cooldown.

---

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying and yes, it's possible to do. There's nothing wrong with people having preferences for their hot keys and redoing bars, but right now on the PC you have to do plenty of work rebinding hot keys to get it to act like other games in the genre. I mean doing something as simple as changing the hot bar 1 swap to hot bar 2 binding and just changing those to Shift + number to trigger abilities on hot bar 2 would be a good start. This seriously looks like arguing for arguings sake more than having a really good reason. That or we are talking around each other.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Colt47

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying and yes, it's possible to do. There's nothing wrong with people having preferences for their hot keys and redoing bars, but right now on the PC you have to do plenty of work rebinding hot keys to get it to act like other games in the genre. I mean doing something as simple as changing the hot bar 1 swap to hot bar 2 binding and just changing those to Shift + number to trigger abilities on hot bar 2 would be a good start. This seriously looks like arguing for arguings sake more than having a really good reason. That or we are talking around each other.

---

I'm curious and have no intent to argue here, but do you have some example games you're thinking of? This game isn't so terribly different in terms of hotbar setup from most of the MMOs I've played, aside from BDO which has a totally different combat style. I took a long time to get my hotbars the way I wanted them in WoW, for example, and tried out several different UI mods and layouts over the years before I found a general setup I was happy with. I've gone through several setups here too, but in general my WoW UI actually looks fairly similar to my FFXIV at least in terms of hotbar placement and keybindings.

Also I may be wrong but I think you can change the bind that swaps between hotbars? I vaguely remember needing to rebind that because I kept doing it by accident at some point.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Payadopa

Don't want to sound mean or anything since I don't particularly care but I will say that the so called raiding scene has harmed the game enough for my personal taste. So much so that 'balancing' has negative connotations for me now. haha

To be fair, nobody has ever 'called me out' on my DPS so it can't be that bad, but maybe I just got lucky.

---

Considering there are currently 220,778 character/jobs combos on fflogs that have cleared E5S. I would say that there's a reason why the game is balanced around the so-called raiding scene. Of course, this number includes some people clearing on different classes and/or alts. But even then it's a pretty big number. The idea that the raiding scene is it's own thing and an insignificant portion of the population is a little outdated.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EaMett

The idea that the raiding scene is it's own thing and an insignificant portion of the population is a little outdated.

---

I think it averages out to roughly about 5-10% of the population based on census data related to savage clears last time I looked at one of them with some servers being as high as 25% and others being as low as 1%.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mhaeric

I think it averages out to roughly about 5-10% of the population based on census data related to savage clears last time I looked at one of them with some servers being as high as 25% and others being as low as 1%.

---

I don't remember ever seeing census data checking for raiding activity other than 4th floor mounts. If you have a link I'll take it.
With that said 10% is a lot regardless.

Those are the ones I was referring to. This one was from roughly 3 years ago and counts Savage Alexander clears based off of Lodestone mount data, iirc. A bit old, I know, and the number of people with Savage mounts doesn't exactly equal the number who have cleared it, but it's a close enough approximation and I know I've seen a few others out there similar to it. This was just the one that came up almost immediately in my search.

Of note is that the JP servers are significantly higher in terms of savage mounts per active characters. I think this probably has more to do with that community being more willing to run the content for everyone's benefit rather than being an indication that they raid more than the NA/EU servers. It's a bit more of an every Miqo'te for himself vibe over here on the NA servers I think and that's reflected in the lower averages. Once we get our rewards we tend to drop out of the content more readily.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._been_updated/
http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybanc...9/497c8f0c.jpg

I'd die without the ability to customize my hotbars as I see fit!

To the original topic, the whole fun for me is getting better. Tracking my own personal dps growth quickly and easily affords me that metric.

I don't care at all what other people are doing with their dps (and I never bring it up), but I would be much less interested in the game if I couldn't track my own proficiency through hard numbers. The strive for perfection is my primary (and entirely personal) motivating factor in replay-ability. Without it, I'd just move to another game.

Not that I use them, but I think being able to see your damage is a great way to improve. I don't agree with people using stuff that calls out fights, shows hidden aoes, and stuff like that. Thats just cheating.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mhaeric

Those are the ones I was referring to. This one was from roughly 3 years ago and counts Savage Alexander clears based off of Lodestone mount data, iirc. A bit old, I know, and the number of people with Savage mounts doesn't exactly equal the number who have cleared it, but it's a close enough approximation and I know I've seen a few others out there similar to it. This was just the one that came up almost immediately in my search.

Of note is that the JP servers are significantly higher in terms of savage mounts per active characters. I think this probably has more to do with that community being more willing to run the content for everyone's benefit rather than being an indication that they raid more than the NA/EU servers. It's a bit more of an every Miqo'te for himself vibe over here on the NA servers I think and that's reflected in the lower averages. Once we get our rewards we tend to drop out of the content more readily.

---

Thanks for that. That's what I remembered, but like you said, it's been so long and it's only people who clear the final floor and get the mount which not all raiders do and some do but don't necessarily get the mounts. All in all, it's pretty hard to go by these numbers for anything more than server population.

To go back to my original point, enough people do ex/savage that it justifies the balancing. Not that savage is the only place balancing is important but you get the idea.

it's because they are hackers and are hacking the game i thought every1 new that...

how yoU doin

Tbh the "training dummy" system in XIV is really flawed. I can understand that it can lead to toxic behaivior but i think (never used it btw cause i don't raid) that raiders have to know where the error inside the group is. Guess especially in ultimate fights that is really important.

Wish they would just allow it/implement a own system and then if people are toxic etc. over dps just report them, with the actuall training dummy tests you can't improve yourself at all...don't know if anyone is using them at all...xD