An Open Letter to the FFXIV Development Team

Dear FFXIV Development team

At the time of writing, there is approximately one month until the release of the Shadowbringers expansion. I plan on publishing this letter approximately one month after the release of Shadowbringers. I'm doing this because I understand this last month is going to be crunch time for the development team and they will not have the time to truly take feedback to heart, let alone read the letter in their spare time. Also, I anticipate the first month of the expansion to be quite the headache with player complaints, buffs, nerfs, hotfixes, DDoS-ing, Raubahn's Wall Savage, etcetera. I don't want to release a letter of suggestions and criticism during such a tumultuous time, for both my sake and hopefully the developers who may read it.

Before I get to the purpose of my letter and the problems I wish to address, I want to make it abundantly clear that none of this is about the perceived 'balance' of the game and classes. I want FFXIV to be the best game it can possibly be. I love this game and I've thought long and hard about these problems that I wish to shine a light on. I want to seek improvements, not to new content, not to classes, but to the core functions of the game and the game direction that I feel will improve the game's quality and longevity.





With that out of the way, I'd like to start my criticism with a problem that I imagine is more simple. It could easily be something on a list somewhere that never got the development time it needed or is never high enough on the priority list to end up being changed. Currently, there is no way to tell what your ping to the server you're playing on is. However, you can easily go ping the server yourself in the command prompt if you have the server IP, which is public information. I can not see a reason why net in/out is displayed in game but something as basic as your ping is not. I, unfortunately, don't have a lot of detail to go into this complaint because of the simplicity of the problem. The only thing I can imagine preventing this from already existing is that, say you ping the server every .5 seconds. That can potentially be millions of pings a second, which could cause lag. However the servers were recently updated with the infrastructure and data centers, so I imagine in 2019 the technology is there. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of experience in networking so understanding these problems is difficult for me, but it's something that I feel the game doesn't have, that nearly every other multiplayer game does.

Speaking of servers, I can't say to know what it is, but the current server tick rate is unacceptable. Every player reading this has had that "I got hit by that but I was not standing in it" moment. That's the server tick rate, which, from the rumors I heard was in the single digits. I can't think of how many times I've done Titan EX, and if I do not immediately move out of Weight of the Land, I get hit. Again, new server infrastructure surely has enough power to up the tick rate to at least the double digits. This has a cascading effect of benefits as well. If players can respond to mechanics more easily, then mechanics can be more difficult for the players seeking out that challenge. It reduces player frustration, which increases player retention, and in general, makes the game feel better.

Simply put these network changes will simply make the game feel better to play for every player, and I feel that something like this should be a priority. One possible implementation suggestion is having a High-Quality Network / Low-Quality Network checkbox or button. I just imagine with the game removing PS3 support, 32-bit support, something like this can happen, and I feel it needs to happen sooner rather than later.





Next I want to shift toward how the game displays information. There's a dirty secret in the community called ACT, that is being used by more and more and more players. Simply put, as a developer this is inexcusable. The fact that players need to be able to read information that the game provides, but the game doesn't provide a way to properly read that information, so the majority of the hardcore and even mid-core community needs a 3rd party program is concerning. It is a massive security risk to those players. It is against the terms of service, and yet if you want to get "better" at the game, you need it. Job performance depends on player skill, but how can we measure how skillful we are without it? Stone, Sea and Sky?

The part that upsets me the most about our dirty little secret is that it displays information that already exists. I could say that this is a push to allow Add Ons but those come with risks. It's difficult to pick what to show the players behind the scenes and what not to. What players can and cannot edit. But the fact is that more and more players want to know if they are doing things correctly and there are currently no tools to do such in the game, aside from, "I didn't die and the boss did so I guess I did well."

One idea I have for a solution is a leaderboard. At the end of a successful boss kill a small leaderboard pops up that shows the damage, dps, hps, overhealing, etcetera that you did. I say you because there's a common fear that a leaderboard of some sort could lead toxicity in the community. If only you can see your dps this helps mitigate this problem while allowing players a tool to measure their performance in some quantifiable way.

There are also benefits to having a system like this outside of individual performance. Players have often wondered what the "optimal" rotation or even stats are. This would make it so much easier to test, being able to directly compare to yourself with an alternate setup. It helps finding skill / spell speed breakpoints. It helps finding what stats are good and bad. It helps casual players visibly see that they are improving and also can show them the strength they gain while leveling.

I have one more criticism to voice when it comes to numbers, and it simple. They suck. The numbers on the character sheet are almost meaningless. How much crit rating = a percentage? The information is clearly available and while we've struggled, we've roughly figured it out before, but what harm is there in showing us the value of individual stat points? How much spell speed is 0.1 cast time? How much mana regen will 2000 piety give me, versus 3000 piety? These are all things that can and should be communicated to the player.





Thank you for reading. I apologize for how blunt I am with some of these subjects. The success of this game is something that I'm genuinely passionate about. I'm not trying to come off like I'm complaining, but these are things that I believe can improve the game both now, and long into the game's future.