"I'm waiting until 7.3 to see if I'll quit"

Just saying. Why do I keep seeing this pushed later and later? First it was 7.0 and people seeing if the encounter design got any better. Then it was 7.2. Then it was Shades' Triangle. Now the goalpost has moved to 8.0.

Though to be fair I think a lot of people like Mao have already quit. So that's awesome. But it looks like the remaining people are like just trapped in this eternal red line shifting.

"I'm waiting until..." Bro just stop, just quit now lmao.

It's NOT GETTING BETTER lmao!

I'm waiting until I do no longer get my money's worth from the game, then I'll quit.
Hope this is acceptable to you.

Said 8.0 ages ago myself.

Personally, I take regular breaks and come back around when the urge suddenly hits.

If something is no longer for me or I'm no longer enjoying it, stepping away and moving on is pretty easy.

In general tho, it's not that serious OP, most people are just venting due to grievances they have with the game and whatnot. If someone isn't enjoying or getting anything out of 14 anymore (or any MMO really), they'll go. Typically without making announcements or declarations in threads or whatever. Often, not even saying anything in the FC/Guild. They just move on.

I wouldn't say it's constant exclusive redline shifting... For a lot of people it definitely is...

But some others (like myself), really have more extrinsic factors that keep people in the game regardless of the state... Like, I have friends that are doing Eureka, and even to this day I can still adore the content and some pretty good fun when hanging out on Discord.

But yes, intrinsic reasoning is just... Not there, 7.3 isn't going to fix anything... 8.0 isn't going to fix anything... 9.0 isn't going to fix anything. For me it's just going to be a light switch.. Once those extrinsic reasons have ran out (e.g., friends have stopped playing/enjoying) then I'll just unsubscribe, and let houses go naturally.

7.3 is gone add very little in terms of content. I would delay ya self to at least 7.4 and hope we get more including housing. 7.3 you will finish in 3h or less there very little being added

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Originally Posted by bic12

"I'm waiting until..." Bro just stop, just quit now lmao.

It's NOT GETTING BETTER lmao!

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I was watching the live letter through some content creator streams, and chat was going on about how Deep Dungeon saved FFXIV.

You know I'm not gonna quit. But I agree that expecting big changes is expecting something there is no precedent for in 12 years.

https://cdn.betterttv.net/emote/6438...e31681/1x.webp

leave mao out of this

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Originally Posted by bic12

Just saying. Why do I keep seeing this pushed later and later? First it was 7.0 and people seeing if the encounter design got any better. Then it was 7.2. Then it was Shades' Triangle. Now the goalpost has moved to 8.0.

Though to be fair I think a lot of people like Mao have already quit. So that's awesome. But it looks like the remaining people are like just trapped in this eternal red line shifting.

"I'm waiting until..." Bro just stop, just quit now lmao.

It's NOT GETTING BETTER lmao!

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It's literally the same thing with every expansion.

"Dude, it's the x.4 patch, the expansion's almost over, just wait for the next expansion they will fix it then."
"Dude, the expansion just launched, just give them time, you'll see."
"Dude, it's just the x.1 patch, chill."
"Dude, just wait for [insert one of your choice: exploration zone/Deep Dungeon/boutique piece of content created on a whim], you'll see."
"Dude, the expansion isn't even over until x.3 patch, give them time."
"Dude, it's the x.4 patch, the expansion's almost over, just wait for the next expansion they will fix it then."

It's literally the same cope every time, as copy-pasted as the content itself.

Funny enough this game plays great at... the end of an expansion cycle. Coming in at a x.5 set you up with nearly all the content and story while giving you like 5-6 months to do it all before next expansion. Really the only things to genuinely cling to are houses, pvp series, and seasonal/collab events...

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Originally Posted by bic12

Midlander comment

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I said 7.3, and with 7.3 looking lame, I unsubbed. Buuuut you gotta wait for it to expire big boi. Calm down big boi. Is ok big boi.

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Originally Posted by bic12

Just saying. Why do I keep seeing this pushed later and later? First it was 7.0 and people seeing if the encounter design got any better. Then it was 7.2. Then it was Shades' Triangle. Now the goalpost has moved to 8.0.

Though to be fair I think a lot of people like Mao have already quit. So that's awesome. But it looks like the remaining people are like just trapped in this eternal red line shifting.

"I'm waiting until..." Bro just stop, just quit now lmao.

It's NOT GETTING BETTER lmao!

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Personally even though I've been very vocal about the current pve we have and this since at least SHB/EW, I have also never said once that I was considering to unsubscribe. I'll do it with a heavy heart when there is nothing left for me to enjoy in the game though.

Personally I'm waiting on the direction 7.4-8.0 goes in.

My only real requirements are Wuk Lamar being benched and the first/thirteenth plotlines being advanced.

The lore and politics of the Source have become so utterly ruined by Dawntrail that nothing means anything anymore, the world has become stupid and it's characters flanderised into lobotomised versions of themselves by writers that don't know their own setting.

Jumping ship to a setting untouched by Dawntrail like a different shard is the only way of salvaging the story at this stage.

To be fair, quite a lot of houses popped on the market as of late on a lot of servers. Midgard has 697 plots that emptied in the last week. So there are people leaving. How many were from the housing freeze purge? /Shrug

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Originally Posted by bic12

Just saying. Why do I keep seeing this pushed later and later? First it was 7.0 and people seeing if the encounter design got any better. Then it was 7.2. Then it was Shades' Triangle. Now the goalpost has moved to 8.0.

Though to be fair I think a lot of people like Mao have already quit. So that's awesome. But it looks like the remaining people are like just trapped in this eternal red line shifting.

"I'm waiting until..." Bro just stop, just quit now lmao.

It's NOT GETTING BETTER lmao!

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I guess everyone has their breaking point?

More trivially, many who gave themselves a deadline prior to now have in fact stuck to it. They're just no longer here. That's consistent with the plummeting player numbers.

Unfortunately most people won't put money where their mouth is and actually quit. I only keep a sub to login every 30 or so days to keep houses locked from the rest of the community

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Originally Posted by All_Nonsense

I said 7.3, and with 7.3 looking lame, I unsubbed. Buuuut you gotta wait for it to expire big boi. Calm down big boi. Is ok big boi.

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Also even when your sub expires, you are still able to post to the forums for a little bit afterwards. You have to not log in for 14 days to lose forum privileges, sub or not.

I'm waiting until after the FFXI raids are done and then we'll see how I feel then.
Till then I'm just playing FFXI and other games in between the patches.

I will say one of my biggest complaints was hats, so I am really happy that I can shut up about that now.

Why does it even matter?

I took a few months break before picking back up into DT. I do think more players should do that, but of course the way housing is …

Some have already quit and kept to their word; in the wake of the LL there are guaranteed to be some folks who have left before 7.3 even dropped. Doesn't mean they won't return, but there's nothing presently keeping them here. The curse of the housing plot has been lifted.

8.0 is the goalpost that has been hyped up by Yoshida in previous statements, vaguely but it's been drawn attention to. You're going to see more of the same there as it will be here, but that's the way it goes. It means there is nothing left that has been exhausted that can be looked forward to or generate interest in returning or staying. A lot of voices will be making it known how long each and every one of them intend to stay, or leave and go elsewhere. The goalpost hasn't been moved; it's that no collective represents the entirety of someone's fortitude and resilience to what they perceive is mundanity. This expansion was already the straw that broke the camel's back, so now it's a trickle-down effect of how much longer can they hold on before they decide they've waited long enough for something to excite them again (which suggests they've been waiting a pretty damn long time for something that kept them there, and which is likely not coming back). That's my interpretation of the events as they stand, and I understand their anger.

That is happening 'cause people still have hope that this game will become better or some content that they want will come (e.g. housing). Then they wait and wait and it's always the same story, just disappointment after disappointment. Maybe they have a friend with whom they play maps and much talk, rp, so they want to stay for them. Maybe they have housing with a friend... plenty of things to keep someone inside.

But yes eventually people will wait 8.0, see that it's bad and then we will see posts: "how long till 9.0?".

https://i.imgur.com/4semX9j.png

I had to log in just to be able to post this. I have quit. I'm just waiting for my sub to expire.

If anyone thinks it's going to get better in 7.3, they're out of their mind. It's one of the lightest MMO patches I've ever seen.

Yeah, I don't know why everyone is expecting 7.3 to "fix the game" when no one can actually agree on what is wrong with the game to begin with.

While the forums are full of complaints that the content is too easy, out away from this echo chamber I regular run with a group of people who believe that even normal content is inaccessible to people with certain disabilities.

While the forums are full of complaints that there isn't enough content to grind, I'm a member of a dozen different Discords for the older grindy content like fishing, field operations, deep dungeons, etc.

While the forums are full of complaints about the story of 7.0 and certain characters, one of my social linkshell members (who doesn't go on YouTube, Twitch, or the official forums because she's a novelist and has no time) is a WoL/Wuk shipper. She couldn't understand the hate for a character just because people disliked the VA casting choice. Yeah, Wuk fans do exist. Just like a Pokémon, there is someone out there who ships their WoL with EVERYONE.

While the forums are full of complaints about the extended patch cycle, those of us who have been playing since 2.0 launch are all like "it has always been this way. what are you talking about?" They tacked on two extra weeks for QA, and things definitely got jacked up during COVID because no one in SE had the capacity to work from home, but the patch cycle is not substantially different from how it's been for over a decade.

All of this is to say that: If you have a specific grievance with the game that isn't Viera/Hroth hats, 7.3 probably ain't gonna resolve it.

If you're not having fun now, then let your personal house go and go take a break and come back with the new expansion like some of my college buddies will do. They'll quit for 2 years, come back two months before the new expansion drops, catch up on patch content, get a class geared for the next 10 levels, and then do the expansion with us. When they are done with the base expansion story, they quit again and go play other games while patches X.1-X.5 come out. (I was passed the FC ownership because I don't quit and I'm the anchor that holds our house down.) Sometimes specific content comes out that one of them wants to try and we'll see them hop on for a month or two, and then they go back to whatever other games they were playing or whatever other IRL thing they were doing.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

While the forums are full of complaints that the content is too easy, out away from this echo chamber I regular run with a group of people who believe that even normal content is inaccessible to people with certain disabilities.

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Anything that requires motor skills or reaction to stimuli will inherently be inaccessible to people with certain disabilities. It sucks but that's just how it is. Of course, game developers should do what they can to make their games accessible, but you can't use that as the barometer.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

Anything that requires motor skills or reaction to stimuli will inherently be inaccessible to people with certain disabilities. It sucks but that's just how it is. Of course, game developers should do what they can to make their games accessible, but you can't use that as the barometer.

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There is allegedly a third party tool floating out there that does a much better job at reducing the flash!bang aspect of the game. I have no knowledge of what it does or how its doing it, , but I know that the disabled community gave up and took matters into their own hands.

The biggest problem for me personally is that the snapshot delay on mechanics has only ever gotten marginally better. Slide casting is cool, but there is no worse feeling than seeing your character get smacked 50 pixels outside of the last attack that the game believed they were standing in. Despite this, I've cleared Savage fights by being the off tank, earning me the nickname "seven stack Katarh" in one of my statics haha.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

There is allegedly a third party tool floating out there that does a much better job at reducing the flash!bang aspect of the game. I have no knowledge of what it does or how its doing it, , but I know that the disabled community gave up and took matters into their own hands.

The biggest problem for me personally is that the snapshot delay on mechanics has only ever gotten marginally better. Slide casting is cool, but there is no worse feeling than seeing your character get smacked 50 pixels outside of the last attack that the game believed they were standing in. Despite this, I've cleared Savage fights by being the off tank, earning me the nickname "seven stack Katarh" in one of my statics haha.

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Visual clarity in FFXIV (and other MMOs) is an issue even for people without disabilities. They could easily add an option to disable non-essential boss effects without degrading the quality of the gameplay.

Snapshotting, on the other hand, is a fundamental part of the game. A mechanic will always snapshot at the same time. It's consistent and learnable. You just need to learn when you need to be where you need to be and when you need to be there, and then be there at the correct time. Without trying to be rude, that's a skill issue.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

Visual clarity in FFXIV (and other MMOs) is an issue even for people without disabilities. They could easily add an option to disable non-essential boss effects without degrading the quality of the gameplay.

Snapshotting, on the other hand, is a fundamental part of the game. A mechanic will always snapshot at the same time. It's consistent and learnable. You just need to learn when you need to be where you need to be and when you need to be there, and then be there at the correct time. Without trying to be rude, that's a skill issue.

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This is, of course, correct. But however much one develops an internal clock, it still feels janky.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

This is, of course, correct. But however much one develops an internal clock, it still feels janky.

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It's entirely subjective. Some people will like it, others will dislike it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and no one is incorrect.

To say that it's a problem that needs to be fixed (or that it's an accessibility issue) is wrong, though.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

It's entirely subjective. Some people will like it, others will dislike it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and no one is incorrect.

To say that it's a problem that needs to be fixed (or that it's an accessibility issue) is wrong, though.

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Yeah, I'd agree snapshooting is not an accessibility issue. The visual clutter, on the other hand, reflects a philosophy that places aesthetics before accessibility.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

It's entirely subjective. Some people will like it, others will dislike it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and no one is incorrect.

To say that it's a problem that needs to be fixed (or that it's an accessibility issue) is wrong, though.

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Area effect fires, I clearly stand outside of the area, still get hit. That's not a feature - that's a bug.
You might give the bug a name, you might find a way to work around the bug, but that does not make it a feature. And bugs need fixing.

When this happend to me the very first time, somewhere in a 40-50 dungeon, my immediate reaction was: "I will never raid in a game with such a bad net code". Surprisingly not: "whow what an interesting feature, let's try to find a creative way to deal with it."

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

Snapshotting, on the other hand, is a fundamental part of the game. A mechanic will always snapshot at the same time. It's consistent and learnable. You just need to learn when you need to be where you need to be and when you need to be there, and then be there at the correct time. Without trying to be rude, that's a skill issue.

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Snapshotting is due to bad network handling. I have never experienced such bad delay in a game like FFXIV. Tell me another game where my shield visually applies on the target but doesn't get calculated in damage for a round trip. Many times in this game I have completed an adloqium or landed an e.diag before a killing blow, but snapshotting made the heal calculate after the killing blow. Plenty of times in this game I am literally on top of another player in a safe spot to 'die' because the server decided I was 5 yalms back instead of where my corpse is.

Any fight that has me play memory games instead of reacting to mechanics isn't something I want to do. Show me bad, I avoid given enough time. Needing to be psychic or 'study' a fight ad nauseum because the markers apparently are there as a reminder for next time not 'avoid now.' That is how your philosophy of this netcode jank being a "fundamental part" of the game and if you don't know the fights verbatim, it's somehow a skill issue. Would that be a knowledge issue, not skill? Especially for people who play (gasp) other games where their network isn't cups and string can actually respond to fights in real time.

I understand that snapshotting is done because the fight calculates where you are standing inside the game on the server side, not on the client side, to prevent hacking. Because the game itself sips data from the client side in a continuous string, the biggest cause of bad snapshotting is packet latency or loss. (This is why a good cell phone connection with low latency can be a better connection than a cable line that is running through a degraded node.)

Unfortunately, because the data center for NA is 15 hops and ~2000 miles away from the majority of the east coast NA population, ping is often trash, and one bad packet loss = you are now dead.

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Originally Posted by Gwenkatsu

Area effect fires, I clearly stand outside of the area, still get hit. That's not a feature - that's a bug.
You might give the bug a name, you might find a way to work around the bug, but that does not make it a feature. And bugs need fixing.

When this happend to me the very first time, somewhere in a 40-50 dungeon, my immediate reaction was: "I will never raid in a game with such a bad net code". Surprisingly not: "whow what an interesting feature, let's try to find a creative way to deal with it."

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Telegraph happens. You were standing in it. You get hit. The visual effects are irrelevant.

You can blame the game instead of taking responsibility for your own gameplay but that will prevent you from ever improving at the game.

A bug is defined as software not behaving as intended, not by software not behaving as the user expects. Snapshotting is the intended behaviour. It isn't a bug.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

A bug is defined as software not behaving as intended, not by software not behaving as the user expects. Snapshotting is the intended behaviour. It isn't a bug.

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Snapshotting in general I don't see as a bug/issue, but something brought up by another poster is. If I cast an instant-cast spell (e.g. Benediction) on a target, the target should not die *and* trigger the CD on my Bene. Either I got the instant cast off in time and he should have been healed to full (not die), or he should have died and then my spell not gone off trying to heal a dead target. The fact that both conditions can occur simultaneously is a problem.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

I understand that snapshotting is done because the fight calculates where you are standing inside the game on the server side, not on the client side, to prevent hacking. Because the game itself sips data from the client side in a continuous string, the biggest cause of bad snapshotting is packet latency or loss. (This is why a good cell phone connection with low latency can be a better connection than a cable line that is running through a degraded node.)

Unfortunately, because the data center for NA is 15 hops and ~2000 miles away from the majority of the east coast NA population, ping is often trash, and one bad packet loss = you are now dead.

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Even with good ping it's inconsistent and sometimes outright offensive what the server may throw at you. Speaking as someone who does a lot of pvp, this is where you'll see the stupidest server shit you ever have had the displeasure to see in your life, but it doesn't stop just to pvp.
The things I could experience when I was playing on NA with 200ms ping and zero packet loss, keeping the same ping with a VPN but suddenly gaining 1s of GCD uptime every minute because suddenly the connection is "better" somehow. Or when I discovered that fight instances gave me over 2s of GCD delays per minute compared to housing wards on dummies that played exactly like at low ping (maybe that's how Yoshida tests ping in house to tell us that it's fine up to 200ms ping)...
And then you go look at logs people post and you notice the actual delay between cast preparations, cast registration, and damage/effect application, and it's enlightening, truly.

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Originally Posted by Uzephi

To be fair, quite a lot of houses popped on the market as of late on a lot of servers. Midgard has 697 plots that emptied in the last week. So there are people leaving. How many were from the housing freeze purge? /Shrug

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The housing owners are supposed to be considered the safe and dependable subs. The fact that thousands of houses are being vacated, and some rumors are saying over 15,000, that means they have lost close to $300,000.00 in subs per month. Loosing ordinary subs of that level can be written off as they will come back but housing subs hold on way past I’ll take a break, if they give up a house, they are in retiring / quitting territory.

The alarm has been sounded and I believe they are changing direction, but like the Titanic, their turning speed is very slow and like the Titanic, it was too late and they hit. They are tens of thousands of subs down and loosing more by the minute. The big question is if they can shore things up enough to make it to 8.0.

The critical part is getting 8.0 out at or before the 2.5 year mark from release. If they try to push for 3 years and make us wait a full year with the 7.5x content, the sub losses will become dramatic, if not unrecoverable. If 8.0 isn't December 2026 but July 2027, my 11 year sub will be let go.

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Originally Posted by Gwenkatsu

Area effect fires, I clearly stand outside of the area, still get hit. That's not a feature - that's a bug.

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It's not a bug. It's just that the way the game functions is not clearly conveyed to new players, so they often mistake it either for a bug, bad net code or them being unskilled (usually they assume the last one).

They assume it snapshots when the animation goes off, but that's too late to avoid it. Or they assume it snapshots when they actually die, but it's much earlier than that. And that's actually intentional and how it's coded.

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Originally Posted by Uzephi

Snapshotting is due to bad network handling.

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It's not, or not entirely. In most cases, the snapshot goes off when the cast bar completes, then the animation follows it. Around the time the animation goes off is when it actually carries out the process of reducing your HP or killing your character.

Regardless of their netcode, they could begin the animation at the start of the cast bar then have the animation going off align with the cast bar completion.

I also don't think it's just their netcode. Their server processes everything slowly in general. If you've ever fought the S rank Bone Crawler and seen it knock a huge crowd of players back, it takes a good few seconds to push everyone back. A few seconds is ages in a fight. The same thing happens if you wall pull Sastasha unsynced and use your AoE - it takes 3 seconds to cycle through all the enemies and apply your AoE damage. We are talking about server machines with what I would hope is a lot of cores and they intentionally take 3 seconds to iterate 32 times. I hope I am missing something, because I seriously struggle to believe this is necessary.

Their netcode is a problem though. Specifically, they use TCP instead of UDP. If you know anything about video game networking, you know that UDP is the protocol of choice for video games... so naturally, SE chose TCP. :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It's not, or not entirely. In most cases, the snapshot goes off when the cast bar completes, then the animation follows it.

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Except not even that is consistent. The majority go off when the AoE indicator disappears, if any, or the cast bar completes if not, but some snapshot slightly earlier or slightly later.

Some may even 'double' (checking at multiple points so that you're hit both if dashing out at last second and if dashing in at the last second despite that whenever the first checked would be outside the hitzone if the second were inside the hitzone at that time) by checking across multiple server ticks (ours is allegedly 24 updates per second but often feels more like ~4, though that may come down to the average ping actually being rather varied moment to moment and/or packet loss or simple desync).

And then of course you have the persistent AoEs that don't always look like obvious persistent AoEs (e.g., looking like a standard cleave, rather than a laser).

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Their netcode is a problem though. Specifically, they use TCP instead of UDP. If you know anything about video game networking, you know that UDP is the protocol of choice for video games... so naturally, SE chose TCP.

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What's funny is that the advantage of TCP should be its reliability, and yet across repeated tests over the last dozen or so years, XIV has constantly had vastly more dropped packets than WoW, GW2, etc., for me, even despite the short and straight shot to XIV's NA hub since they moved them from Montreal to Sacramento.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Except not even that is consistent. The majority go off when the AoE indicator disappears, if any, or the cast bar completes if not, but some snapshot slightly earlier or slightly later.

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True about the indicators overhead disappearing being a snapshot indicator. It's very rare that others don't align with the cast though. Doom in World of Darkness is an example of a rare exception. Anything else is likely just ping/latency since it's been super reliable for me personally.

I think there are some cases we have seen in Savage with subsequent hits though. A good example was P9S where there was a dummy cast followed by a series of snapshots during rockbreaker. But I believe each of those were their own casts, they were just casts without a cast bar (similar to when a melee DPS does an instant attack that has no cast time). Nevertheless, you could still time it (3 seconds) and pretend there was a 3 second cast bar all the same.

I've also been able to adjust my battle log to only display cast start and cast end and sometimes it will say when they are preparing an attack despite that it's not casted.

One thing that will help a bit is SE is adding cast bars above the heads of enemies so you can see them better. But it's not going to solve all the difficulties people have understand the game. It's probably one of the primary reasons players think they aren't skilled. The snapshotting gets them.