Just give us a list of what addons we can use.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

Spoken like someone who has absolutely zero clue into what goes into getting world first.

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Think what you like, I was around when MMO's were born. I may sound like an old man yelling at clouds, but I remember figuring out an encounter for weeks with no clear because we wanted to do it ourselves. If you have something telling you all the answers to all the basic building blocks, you haven't figured anything out, you're just looking for the triangle hole for the triangle piece.

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Originally Posted by Roth_Trailfinder

I’d like to say that add-on users are a small minority; but while reason suggests they are a minority (I’d be surprised if half of the PC players use them, reducing the most that could be to 25%) reason does not suggest how large or small that minorty may be.

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Based on the downloads numbers of all these third party programs, we'll looking at well over 300,000 players using at least one of them. While a minority, it's hardly small considering the active character numbers (not actual players) was estimated to be 1.7M as of 6.1.

You are vastly underestimating the impact if even a small fraction of those players quit the game if every single third party tool was somehow banned. At just 20% of the aforementioned 300k, SE is looking at a near 10M loss, annually.

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

Your point being? Again what parsers tell the player is what said player would eventually figure out.

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Putting a little too much faith in people if you believe that. I've carried groups that could not grasp Hydaelin's Form mechanics and died to them every single time throughout multiple deaths and wipes that I just legitimately stop rezzing them all together, it's not worth it. Hell, even with 3rd party tools, I've seen people fail despite bots explicitly telling them what to do. It would be comical if it wasn't so sad how common it is.

I'm not saying that I approve of 3 rd party tools, but some people legitimately can't figure stuff out no matter how much time or effort is given.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Based on the downloads numbers of all these third party programs, we'll looking at well over 300,000 players using at least one of them. While a minority, it's hardly small considering the active character numbers (not actual players) was estimated to be 1.7M as of 6.1.

You are vastly underestimating the impact if even a small fraction of those players quit the game if every single third party tool was somehow banned. At just 20% of the aforementioned 300k, SE is looking at a near 10M loss, annually.

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Even better, if you look at the official ACT website, they track how many times the FF14 parsing plugin has been downloaded. That number is over 17 million. Now it's clear the number of unique users is smaller then that, people re-downloading during a reinstall or whatnot, but that is still a lot.

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

Your point being? Again what parsers tell the player is what said player would eventually figure out.

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How would a player figure out what they are doing wrong when this game gives zero feedback? Not hitting an enrage only tells you “overall damage too low”. It does not tell you who was responsible—be it a single person or multiple people—or even why their damage was low in the first place.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

How would a player figure out what they are doing wrong when this game gives zero feedback? Not hitting an enrage only tells you “overall damage too low”. It does not tell you who was responsible—be it a single person or multiple people—or even why their damage was low in the first place.

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First of all you can look at logs afterwards. Second of all are you advocating that parsers are necessary and content is designed around the idea that everyone is using them? I get it. We humans, gamers especially are self centered half brained idiots that won't be able to recognize their mistake unless something points it out with irrefutable proof. We loathe the idea of putting extra effort into anything which can lead for some to expect instant gratification for little effort. But at that point I have to ask. Why the hell we beg for harder content if in our perception we need 3rd party tools to complete it in the first place?

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

Second of all are you advocating that parsers are necessary and content is designed around the idea that everyone is using them?

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No, like, the content we have today very likely wouldn't exist without them.

The only reason the community has become skilled at this game to the degree that content like DSR is possible is because of analytical tools like ACT. The game absolutely would not have been pushed as far as it has without players on the cutting edge frequently using these types of tools to collect and interpret data.

You seem to be confusing tools like Cactbot, which actually automate portions of gameplay, with vanilla ACT/FFLogs which simply package and chart existing information in a more human-friendly and accessible way.

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

No, like, the content we have today very likely wouldn't exist without them.

The only reason the community has become skilled at this game to the degree that content like DSR is possible is because of analytical tools like ACT. The game absolutely would not have been pushed as far as it has without players on the cutting edge frequently using these types of tools to collect and interpret data.

You seem to be confusing tools like Cactbot, which actually automate portions of gameplay, with vanilla ACT/FFLogs which simply package and chart existing information in a more human-friendly and accessible way.

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So wait we'd never improve without those tools? I'm getting confused. I was lead to believe the content was designed to be beaten without a single third party tool and that includes ACT. Yet here you are telling me that players as a collective would never reach a level of doing so without analytical tools that let them pinpoint basically everything much faster than we'd do it without them? Is that how entire getting better process look like? Check the numbers, throw the log into analytical tool and do what it suggests? Now I question if I even want to reach that level

As of ACT wasn't one level of outrage coming from the fact that World First group used automatic call-out they programmed into their software?

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

So wait we'd never improve without those tools? I'm getting confused. I was lead to believe the content was designed to be beaten without a single third party tool and that includes ACT. Yet here you are telling me that players as a collective would never reach a level of doing so without analytical tools that let them pinpoint basically everything much faster than we'd do it without them? Is that how entire getting better process look like? Check the numbers, throw the log into analytical tool and do what it suggests? Now I question if I even want to reach that level

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This isn't how these tools work. FFLogs/ACT doesn't make suggestions, and XivAnalysis' suggestions are seen as virtually useless at the high-end. Most of the actual 'pinpointing' that is actually important comes from reviewing VoDs. Combat logging is more important from an optimization standpoint, where you're able to more conveniently review and share player ability timelines and statistics. Calling it a crutch is akin to saying a business using graphs to understand and improve their sales is a crutch.

Where are all of the top-end players that supposedly don't use these tools? Why aren't they coming out and making statements against them? The top players of this game, across all regions, make heavy use of programs like ACT and have done so continuously since ARR. Virtually every piece of information any player has taken from sources like The Balance or AkhMorning has been produced with assistance of these types of tools. The entire identity of the game, and the way the players play it, has been actively shaped by this for like 10 years. Content is designed and increased in difficulty around player capability. DSR was made more difficult due to the ease with which players devoured the last Ultimate. The developers couldn't even beat their own ultimate without adding additional checkpoints.

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

As of ACT wasn't one level of outrage coming from the fact that World First group used automatic call-out they programmed into their software?

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We're talking about the analytical purposes of third party tools here, not automation. That's an entirely different can of worms.

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

So wait we'd never improve without those tools? I'm getting confused. I was lead to believe the content was designed to be beaten without a single third party tool and that includes ACT. Yet here you are telling me that players as a collective would never reach a level of doing so without analytical tools that let them pinpoint basically everything much faster than we'd do it without them? Is that how entire getting better process look like? Check the numbers, throw the log into analytical tool and do what it suggests? Now I question if I even want to reach that level

As of ACT wasn't one level of outrage coming from the fact that World First group used automatic call-out they programmed into their software?

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To answer your first paragraph: Yes it does.

To answer your second: ACT and Cactbot are not the same. You can have ACT without Cactbot. I can understand the outrage over that but at the end of the day, all that it is is accurate callouts. It shouldn't be used in world first races for sure, but outside of that I don't see it being a problem as it usually benefits the entire party via the caller.

Last, since you brought this up, do you personally read through the entire log after a fight and crunch those numbers?

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Originally Posted by LianaThorne

To answer your first paragraph: Yes it does.

To answer your second: ACT and Cactbot are not the same. You can have ACT without Cactbot. I can understand the outrage over that but at the end of the day, all that it is is accurate callouts. It shouldn't be used in world first races for sure, but outside of that I don't see it being a problem as it usually benefits the entire party via the caller.

Last, since you brought this up, do you personally read through the entire log after a fight and crunch those numbers?

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No. As someone graciously informed me I haven't reach max level thus know nothing. /s

In all seriousness. I'm not a person that puts too much stock into numbers. I look at my rotation after every fight. How often did I fall out of it. Why did I fall out of it? Did I use Leylines at the right time, how should I minimize the movement next time. Many things I can notice that doesn't require me to look at numbers.

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

No. As someone graciously informed me I haven't reach max level thus know nothing. /s

In all seriousness. I'm not a person that puts too much stock into numbers. I look at my rotation after every fight. How often did I fall out of it. Why did I fall out of it? Did I use Leylines at the right time, how should I minimize the movement next time. Many things I can notice that doesn't require me to look at numbers.

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How do you know what rotation you are supposed to do?

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Originally Posted by Scaramouche

How do you know what rotation you are supposed to do?

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Umm i read my skills? BLM isn't exactly a rocket science especially not before max level.

How do you know a BRD's song rotation should be WM > Short MB > AP then? Why not MB > AP > WM, that's the order of their levels of which they are learned. Why do we need to cut short the MB portion for better result? Why don't we follow the old rule of cutting short AP instead? Oh right, how did that old rule even came to be?
How do you know AST gains the most from firing their Divination at 3rd GCD? Why not 4th? 5th? 6th? or even 1st? How do you know melee cards were more liked than ranged cards at some point of their iteration? How do you know their 3-seal Astrodyne isn't even much superior vs their 2-seal Astrodyne in real practice?
Why SMNs won't just hold their Bahamut opener up till 2nd GCD and just cast 2 Ruin IIIs to try catch up with the party's raidwide buff?
Why SAMs has to incorporate Hagakure use in their rotation? How do you even tell which from 1, 2, or 3 GCD filler rotation does more result in long run?

Yeah, try figure these out without that.

Granted... none of these matters as much in mid to low end contents. That much is true.
What isn't true is implying the same applies to the mid to high end contents. Sorry, that's just plain false. From that point, it turns from "Nothing really matters" into "Every little things matters."

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Originally Posted by Scaramouche

How do you know what rotation you are supposed to do?

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So people depend on addons for rotations now, too? Sheeesh.

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Originally Posted by Lufir

So people depend on addons for rotations now, too? Sheeesh.

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People use addons as tools to help them find which rotation is most optimal and to help them understand why. These are the rotations you find in guides. Don't be obtuse.

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Originally Posted by Lufir

So people depend on addons for rotations now, too? Sheeesh.

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When people coming up with optimal rotations using 3rd party tools like ACT to back up their work and you follow said guide you indeed depend on addon for your rotation.

I love when the best rotation is something the devs did not intend. Shows how well designed the game is.

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Originally Posted by SwingLifeAway

People use addons as tools to help them find which rotation is most optimal and to help them understand why. These are the rotations you find in guides. Don't be obtuse.

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You're oddly triggered going after every person in every thread about this topic. Who hurt you? Don't be pedantic.

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Originally Posted by Lufir

You're oddly triggered going after every person in every thread about this topic. Who hurt you? Don't be pedantic.

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This is a non-argument you're making because you have no ground to stand on. Have a nice day.

"look i found a 9 year old SE post by a community manager that no longer works for SE it must be okay over the head of FFXIV's word"

yeah that's a bit too far, it's all 3rd party tools - at your own risk.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...88/unknown.png

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Originally Posted by SwingLifeAway

This is a non-argument you're making because you have no ground to stand on. Have a nice day.

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Not everything on a forum post is an argument for your high school debate class, my dude. Maybe that's your issue.

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

First of all you can look at logs afterwards. Second of all are you advocating that parsers are necessary and content is designed around the idea that everyone is using them? I get it. We humans, gamers especially are self centered half brained idiots that won't be able to recognize their mistake unless something points it out with irrefutable proof. We loathe the idea of putting extra effort into anything which can lead for some to expect instant gratification for little effort. But at that point I have to ask. Why the hell we beg for harder content if in our perception we need 3rd party tools to complete it in the first place?

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Well, first of all—you completely missed my point. Quite gloriously at that.

You insisted that the individual will “figure it out eventually” when it comes to the mistakes they are making. I said that the actuality is they likely won’t because this game does not tell you you are ever doing anything wrong when it comes to your performance or rotation. Just like it doesn’t tell you that you are doing anything inherently right. There is zero feedback provided, so there is no sure way for you to know what mistakes you made and how to rectify them. In my 6+ years of playing, I’ve met more individuals who thought they were doing absolutely nothing wrong when it was clear that there were issues present. But the game won’t tell them what that is. Heck, it does not even tell you how to string together a rotation beyond “this button lit up after that one, maybe press it now?”.

This is not saying that add-ons are needed to clear high-end content. You are deliberately misconstruing my argument. However, they are used when it comes to formulating the basics of any job rotation all the way up to the min-max optimization level. These things weren’t just “figured out eventually”. They were calculated over hours of testing and simulations to find out what the rotation should be for this job or that. They are also used in tandem with other third-party platforms such as The Website That Shall Not Be Named and XIVAnalysis to troubleshoot issues that might be causing a roadblock in prog. A good example is figuring out deaths due to taking too much damage from a raidwide. Will this game tell you why people died outside of they took more damage than their HP pool? No. Will it tell you that you needed an extra 10% mitigation to survive comfortably? No. Will it tell you in a non-convoluted way that the NIN missed your shields and that’s why they were overkilled by 5,000 HP? Not without scrolling through a cumbersome combat log. Why do that when a third-party application can simplify the information the same way copying it into an Excel spreadsheet to parse would? You cannot reasonably expect anyone to sit there combing over the in-game combat log over using a tool that streamlines the information. And that doesn’t make them stupid, since that’s what you want to insinuate here.

Utilizing these things doesn’t make you stupid, nor any less capable of clearing high-end content. Anyone who argues that it does is foolish.

If you want to say that you are a “self-centered, half-brained” individual for utilizing additional tools to troubleshoot problems and improve yourself and the performance of your team, per your response to me, then you can do that. However, using a tool to optimize and figure out mistakes doesn’t make you one. If anything, it shows a desire to expand on your own growth when it comes to proficiency at a job, its rotation, and the content you are in. The opposite of a “self-centered, half-brained idiot”, in my opinion.


This has nothing to do with the third-party apps that automate gameplay. I’m talking about the barebones here: parsers and the programs that exist to use the data obtained by the parser (which is information streamlined directly from the game itself). If you think a calculator is cheating, I hope you never made use of one for any sort of exam while you were in school. That’s all a parser is: a calculator.

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Originally Posted by Scaramouche

When people coming up with optimal rotations using 3rd party tools like ACT to back up their work and you follow said guide you indeed depend on addon for your rotation.

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To come up with rotations, ACT is not needed, you can do the calculations per hand if you really want to, ACT in this case just does that calculating for you

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Cause I hear Gshade is okay. But that is still 3rd part.

And while we joke about the discord thing, that is a legit TOS breaker.

So we need a list of what is okay.

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Consider every addons are not ok but consider too that as long as you don't stream/talk about it you have nothing to fear.

FF14 is one of those few online game that try not to force malware on your pc to see what you are doing.

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Originally Posted by ZeraSkiratea

To come up with rotations, ACT is not needed, you can do the calculations per hand if you really want to, ACT in this case just does that calculating for you

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I'm sure people who made optimal rotation and shared them wrote every damage they dealt with each skills and calculate the damage and repeated the process every single time for every rotation they tried.

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Originally Posted by Scaramouche

I'm sure people who made optimal rotation and shared them wrote every damage they dealt with each skills and calculate the damage and repeated the process every single time for every rotation they tried.

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You can literally access logs within the game. Otherwise ACT would not work.

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

You can literally access logs within the game. Otherwise ACT would not work.

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And who calculate their optimal rotation using combat logs? I want several exemples with actual proof.

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Originally Posted by thereal_aliceanders

How about we focus on fixing the game...I know crazy idea right!

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They were the ones who said they were going to improve quality of life for the Ui and such. Lets see what they do. I am sure it will be great. Just like minecraft when they stole mods, I mean made similar content in their base game. Or Fallout where they made lower quality versions of cosmetic mods after copyright striking the creators so they could try to sell the items to people afterwards, after getting salty at modders, also after for years they would be the ones to make the game actual function half the time.

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Originally Posted by ZeraSkiratea

To come up with rotations, ACT is not needed, you can do the calculations per hand if you really want to, ACT in this case just does that calculating for you

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Spoken like someone who has no experience in that field at all, but decided to throw in their opinion and state it as fact anyway.

The majority of players who think their rotation is fine because they read their tooltips, feel it's good or haven't had any visible issues are actually doing rather badly, poor uptime, messing up their rotation and so on and will never realize it.

Going through the damage log with a calculator to determine the optimal rotations, openers and interactions is like doing open heart surgery with a butter knife.

"Indeed, we’ve only released duties that we have proven can be beaten with the game’s standard features."
-Yoshi P.

Any other questions?

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

No. As someone graciously informed me I haven't reach max level thus know nothing. /s

In all seriousness. I'm not a person that puts too much stock into numbers. I look at my rotation after every fight. How often did I fall out of it. Why did I fall out of it? Did I use Leylines at the right time, how should I minimize the movement next time. Many things I can notice that doesn't require me to look at numbers.

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> tells people to use the log to do what ACT does

> doesn't even do it themselves

Don't mind me as I don't take your advice then.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...36/unknown.png

"We don't want any of you to use any addons. If you use them it's all your risk and responsibility, we can't stop you from using them. We don't have a way to know what you have installed and currently use and we don't want to bother dealing with it. So, IF you do use them, be discreet, don't get caught."

Since the beginning of times, that was set in stone... with multiple reminders. Since the same time, the majority of the community has abided with the simple rule of "don't show, don't tell". In many cases, people that stream with any are minimal enough that they either don't need to bother with it or simply flies under the radar.

But when you CAN SEE at the very least half a dozen addons on a stream... well, I don't know about you but that goes far past the acceptability limit.

The reason they can't put on a list is, as others said, because they'd have to be responsible for spending their working time to make sure they do what they are only allowed to do. An endless discussion and a can of worms NOBODY wants to open.

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Originally Posted by rance-sama

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...36/unknown.png

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I'm at Form and Function Purist. Meaning it must modify the game and give a significant advantage. I hope that's the location the devs are at too.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

I'm at Form and Function Purist. Meaning it must modify the game and give a significant advantage. I hope that's the location the devs are at too.

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They've made it very clear that they have to be at Form/Function Rebel. That's literally the whole point of Yoshi-P bringing up a calculator and Excel as examples of just how asinine people will get when arguing about what is a third party tool. You can boil down all of these threads as "Tell me you don't know which definition of "discretion" to use without saying so."

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Originally Posted by Kolsykol

The problem with this is that addons and other potential help for disabilities can result in blatant cheating.
The truth is that you can't be inclusive towards just disabilities as a whole.
A lot of addons that would help people who are disabled would also be used for cheating by people who aren't disabled.

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It is absolutely possible to design for accessibility without trivializing difficulty in so doing. Because most folks I know who want accessibility features don't want additional information about fights, or to make the fight easier; they just want the information that's already there presented to them in a manner that they can actually perceive or interact with.

When wearing my game designer/developer hat, I firmly believe that any in-game mechanic I want the player to be able to react to should have both a visual and an audio tell.

They don't have to be blatant, of course; we have plenty of mechanics where the only difference is what a boss has raised or lowered (which hand, hand vs. tail, etc.), what marker is over a boss' head or around their weapon (four orbs or one orb), what weapon the boss is holding, what color a glow is or what element is visible, etc. But ideally, each of those mechanics should also have a slightly distinct noise, rather than the same 'weapon drawn' noise (or no noise at all).

For directional mechanics, have the noise actually accurate to the position of the mechanic. Leviathan EX does it, as do various Bozjan critical engagements, etc. I know a player with visual impairment who has no trouble with those fights because even if they can't see where Leviathan's waterspout is easily, they can hear where it's coming from.

Similarly, there are people who find the fights in the Ivalice alliance raids easier than other alliance raids because they do have some pretty good audio cues in certain fights, meaning even if you have impaired vision (bad enough that you can't easily make out subtle differences in a boss' pose) you can rely on those as a cue to what mechanic is about to happen. ("I AM THE TRUTH FROM WHICH YOU RUN!" "I AM THE LIES ON WHICH YOU SUP!", for instance. Or any of Mustadio's many, many voiced lines which are tied to specific mechanics, like "I rarely miss!")

That's an example of accessibility they could add to the game which would not trivialize the difficulty. It's not the only one, of course; there are ways to help hearing-impaired or fully-deaf players by adding visual tells to mechanics that are predominantly audio in nature, and so on. You could accommodate folks who have trouble with hitting specific keys due to nerve damage by making it possible to bind multiple keys to the same action -- thus meaning you only need hit one of like four different keys to do that ability, and can strike in the general correct area of the keyboard; it doesn't make the fight any easier objectively, but it means that player has the ability to actually hit the ability they intend to use. Things like that.

And sure, there are some things you won't be able to accommodate, but you can still do a lot without actually impacting the objective difficulty of fights.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

And sure, there are some things you won't be able to accommodate, but you can still do a lot without actually impacting the objective difficulty of fights.

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Maahhh! Fricken love the audio and voice line queues! The whole "toast text" garbage can burn in the fiery pits of Tartarus. Why we cannot move this to different location or alter the color/size of this text boggles the mind. Have never been easily able to see these text prompts and use 160 - 200% cast bar size instead.

As someone with tiny hands FF14 would be unplayable without mmo mouse. Reaching Shift + 5 is struggle, reaching Shift + 6 is nearly impossible. Anything to assist with consolidating certain buttons would be most useful. Yup!

The party window being one long list brings great feist. Why is this one specific element so un-customizable? Why do we not have raid panel for 24 man but instead three separate parties? Why can I not split the party window into two separate groups of four? Nope nope instead I must have this gigantic monstrosity near center screen and fricken huge or I cannot see it at'all. Is actually much of the easier to distinguish party health or status by looking at their character (bar above head). Can forget about the debuffs.. have learned to distinguish between different blobs of color for knowing which debuff/buff is active. I have never been capable of easily seeing the white line above them either. Just memorize instead.

Why is cooldown number so tiny? Who vetted this? I memorize this too instead, thank the twelve most are on 60 - 90 - 120 seconds.

Sadness inducing that there are existing community made fixes to 90% of my issues but cannot speak about them or install them without risking a ban. At the least not here. Yeah yeah know you can practice the whole do not tell approach which is fantastic for friends/family. Tis not so useful when someone in game asks about "How can I make this bigger?" and I must inform them that you cannot.

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Originally Posted by MiaShino

Maahhh! Fricken love the audio and voice line queues! The whole "toast text" garbage can burn in the fiery pits of Tartarus. Why we cannot move this to different location or alter the color/size of this text boggles the mind. Have never been easily able to see these text prompts and use 160 - 200% cast bar size instead.

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I mean, moreover, the toast text is only very rarely useful to actually reading fight mechanics; yes, sometimes you have fight-specific mechanics that are telegraphed in text, most notably Cutter's Cry with the "The ram's eyes burn blue." and "The dragon's eyes burn violet."

And while you can make it easier for sprouts in that fight by giving them mnemonics ("If it's violet, stay by it; if it's blue, better shoo!"), those are only useful for that fight and there are many, many, many other chimeras (or garms, or shadowcourt hounds, or...) in the game. Far better to teach them that it's the Ram's Voice / Dragon's Voice cast to watch for, and a mnemonic like "Ram means scram." to remember that Ram's Voice is the point-blank AoE you want to get the hell away from (and that Dragon's Voice is thus the donut).

But 90% of the time, if that toast goes off in battle, it's something like "Totomu has returned from his venture!" or "The <random crafted thing> you listed on the marketboard has sold for <some amount of gil>."

Which, I promise you, is not information I need mid-pull in P4S or whatever. Certainly not in large print, right dead-center on my screen. Hesperos does not care if my retainer brought back more Grade 3 Thanalan Topsoil for the FC gardens, so -- at that particular moment -- neither do I.

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Originally Posted by MiaShino

The party window being one long list brings great feist. Why is this one specific element so un-customizable? Why do we not have raid panel for 24 man but instead three separate parties?

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There are, so far as I can tell, actual (semi-rational) reasons for the alliances being separated, at least. Not least of which is that if you treated all 24 as one party UI-wise, controller users who need to be able to zip through the party list quickly to target people would be trapped in a nightmare when they needed to heal or rez someone.

But the fact that there's sound reasoning behind it doesn't make it less annoying if you need to try to select someone in a different alliance in order to rez their healer or whatever; with default bindings, you pretty much have to just mouseover and click on the person in the little alliance windows.

It is possible to make saner selection logic with KB+M even in the stock game without mods, though.

For instance, FFXIV actually lets you bind selection parameters to the scroll wheel of your mouse. As a result, I have the mouse wheel set to scroll through the enemy list, Alt+Scroll Wheel scrolls through my party list, and Shift+Scroll Wheel will go through my party and the alliances. Control+Scroll Wheel is my actual zoom in/out. Having done this for more than a year and a half, I can very quickly select precisely which target I want (though if I ever replace my mouse with something that has different scroll wheel sensitivity I will be screwed).

I find that's been useful to pick targets to heal/rez quickly, and it's also proven surprisingly useful in PvP. (The enemy team in Crystalline Conflict is, internally, apparently a reskinned aggro list and thus my scroll wheel bindings function on it, leaving me able to select a specific enemy near-instantly with the scroll wheel.)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MiaShino

Why can I not split the party window into two separate groups of four? Nope nope instead I must have this gigantic monstrosity near center screen and fricken huge or I cannot see it at'all. Is actually much of the easier to distinguish party health or status by looking at their character (bar above head). Can forget about the debuffs.. have learned to distinguish between different blobs of color for knowing which debuff/buff is active. I have never been capable of easily seeing the white line above them either. Just memorize instead.

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Yeah, the fact that party buffs/debuffs are generally fairly... compact unless you make the party list ginormous is not ideal. I admit I don't personally have a problem with it -- I actually run the party list at 80% size rather than enlarged -- but I also know that's not a universal experience by any stretch.

Were I designing the game, my accessibility approach would probably to add an additional (optional) UI widget which would show only a subset of the party list -- specifically anyone other than you with a debuff that can be cleansed (or healed to clear), and yourself if you had any debuffs at all. I feel like that would make it much easier for vision-impaired healers both to spot who they could do something for (not necessarily have to, because it would also presumably show things like weak/meaningless poison debuffs that last a shorter time than it would take you to cleanse the party), and to read their own debuffs at a larger size for mechanics where those debuffs really matter, like the Relativity mechanics in E12S phase 2.

But I will also concede that many, many games do not approach accessibility considerations at the beginning of design, and it can be a real pain to add some aspects in after the fact. And even when you do try to approach it from the beginning, it takes time -- and you still won't manage a good solution to every scenario. (Moreover, you can't come up with a good solution to every scenario, not without potentially nerfing the game difficulty in someplaces. Accessibility that eliminates unintentional challenge -- e.g. "your UI sucks if the player has impaired vision/colorblindness/whatever" -- while preserving intentional challenge -- i.e. fight design and whatnot -- is a tricky balance to strike.)

I mean, even in my own case, it was specifically the fact that I made a gaming friend who was almost entirely deaf, and that one of my best friends in WildStar had severe nerve damage to his hands, which taught me to approach game design from an accessibility standpoint. And that was well after I was no longer writing games for my day job; by then, I was only doing so in my spare time as a lower-stress (e.g. crunch-time-free) hobby.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

I mean, moreover, the toast text is only very rarely useful to actually reading fight mechanics; yes, sometimes you have fight-specific mechanics that are telegraphed in text, most notably Cutter's Cry with the "The ram's eyes burn blue." and "The dragon's eyes burn violet."

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Is somewhat of the embarrassing but had no clue this text even existed until friends pointed it out. Thank the twelve it is not used frequently! Much confusion too during my first Rabanastre run where everyone was posting in the chats to "Read the text". Uncertain why but I just cannot see it, now looking for it specifically I do see blurry text out of corner of vision. Cannot cannot cannot stress how important the audio queues in Rab were for a Mia. I would still love to be capable of moving this text, really really uncertain why this is not already feature. I hope it will become one soon-ish.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

But the fact that there's sound reasoning behind it doesn't make it less annoying if you need to try to select someone in a different alliance in order to rez their healer or whatever; with default bindings, you pretty much have to just mouseover and click on the person in the little alliance windows.

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Aye :( This is what I always must do. Have heard you can customize these windows extensively from the extended family using community made tools. Scroll helps some friends more then me, I always overshoot stuffs for reasons would rather not specify. Does assist in getting near my target though (My mom of all the people showed me scroll to target. She got the biggest hug for that!).

All I wish for is some way to customize these panels to look similar and be more easily distinguishable for me. Watching certain friends snapshot heal into other alliances brings sadness. I wonder, how the heck did you even see that they were low so fast!? :D Uncle showed me a raid hud from when he played WoW and.. well it blew the mind.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Were I designing the game, my accessibility approach would probably to add an additional (optional) UI widget which would show only a subset of the party list -- specifically anyone other than you with a debuff that can be cleansed (or healed to clear), and yourself if you had any debuffs at all.

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Must keep mine at a uummm, a crisp 130% which you can probably imagine takes up significant screen space. Because it is in "I" shape format it takes up more space then it should if it were customizable. By this I mean, I wish I could split the frames exactly as you can the target element. This would enable me to sort the party into blocks of four or two by two by two, etc. Could freely move the buff/debuff bar above each party member.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

But I will also concede that many, many games do not approach accessibility considerations at the beginning of design, and it can be a real pain to add some aspects in after the fact. And even when you do try to approach it from the beginning, it takes time -- and you still won't manage a good solution to every scenario.

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This is my biggest issue with the approach Square choses for third party tools. You are most correct, will never design the perfect UI. Which is why you do not have to. Can understand their approach but feel there is probably better solution then blanket ban. Am not willing to install these things because I do not wish to even chance losing my account for it. Seeing that so many of them would improve my experience though causes feist.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

I mean, even in my own case, it was specifically the fact that I made a gaming friend who was almost entirely deaf, and that one of my best friends in WildStar had severe nerve damage to his hands, which taught me to approach game design from an accessibility standpoint. And that was well after I was no longer writing games for my day job; by then, I was only doing so in my spare time as a lower-stress (e.g. crunch-time-free) hobby.

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Wish there were more developers out in the wild wild west of software development that were like yourself. Do not mention this kinda stuffs often because am not comfortable doing so but all this talk of plugins brought it to the front of my mind. Some of the things being said on these forums boggle the mind..

Do not see how my uncle (late 60s) using fancy UI that helps him actually be able to play a game in a PvE setting and shot call for his static is cheating. Asked him if this ever came up in other mmos and was informed yup! Buuuuut it was shut down pretty darn quickly. He is unsurprised anti-modding is popular way of thinking in FF14. He was also not surprised in slightest that downright vitriolic comments were popping up either.

Last post of the day for me! TL;DR - Can understand where Square is coming from but feel blanket banning all third party plugins is not the correct solution.