Provide a warning about garden crops dying during extended server downtime

[Penthea]

Wouldn't it just be more prudent to SUSPEND PLANT GROWTH rather than expect every player and every GC to dig up what in many cases are weeks worth of nurturing?

Aren't we given a week or more notice of when servers will be down for very long maintenance? Also as far as I know no plants take longer than six days to grow. I've been able to avoid plants dying while servers are down because I decided to not plant anything that I knew would have a chance of not blooming before maintenance. So unless you don't know plant growth isn't paused and/or don't bother to read the window that states when maintenance is, it is easy to avoid planting seeds doomed to die.

A warning similar to the warnings about weddings would at least help prevent players from planting seeds at bad times.

Yea ideally plant growth would be suspended but lets get real here, SE have far bigger things for devs to worry about given an expansion is around the corner. A text warning along with the warning about weddings would at least prevent some players from planting seeds they can never harvest, and that would require little to no dev intervention because it's just text.

[DragonOfTheBlackMoon]

Wow I didnt think many other people suffered from this. I logged in like 30 mins after maint was finished to see my 4 Thavnarian Onions, 3 Broombush seeds and my Jute all dead. My Almonds were all alive but in bad condition. I was flabbergasted when I was told that the GMs couldnt do anything about it. I agree with the notion that a garden stasis or freeze would be the best way to go about it. I planted my Onions way before maint and now I lost them just like that and cant get anything in return. Seriously I can understand not getting items back when you DC during a craft because players can abuse that but this is an issue far from difficult to rectify. Come on SE.

[Melithalie]

Penthea:

Thavnairian Onions take 10 days.
Blood Pepper, Broombush, and Glazenut each take 7 days.

[Blueprint]

It may be worth considering the issue to be more a matter of design than needing to implement warnings(although mitigates risk) or design new timer/suspension systems requiring developer time. At some point, someone decided to design this garden system where the most valuable, and thus most likely to be grown, items have a grow time of up to 10 days and also die the fastest if unattended for 48 hours or less. By design, this creates a high risk / high probability of the player base using a game feature that requires investment to be harmed or upset at exactly the times where game developers could have been the heroes releasing new content, improving game stability, etc.. For the game, I'm not sure there is anything worse than taking opportunities where players could be excited for change and turning it to a negative experience because of silly design issues.

Meanwhile, less valuable items are less likely to be lost because they are simply able to go longer without being tended.

[Blueprint]

Given that there are many other substantial server downtime events to come as developers bring us new content, the design could be improved by simply extending the duration the valuable items are able to go unattended, bringing them in line with the less valuable items(or to a duration developers consider sufficiently safe) while maintaining total grow time. This would require nearly no developer time, foregoes the need to develop a new system or rely on warnings and community education to avoid player upsets, and probably most importantly: help ensure that customers, the player base, are happy and excited about patch day to renew their continued interest in the game.

[AzhiDahaki]

It may be worth considering the issue to be more a matter of design than needing to implement warnings... I'm not sure there is anything worse than taking opportunities where players could be excited for change and turning it to a negative experience because of silly design issues.

Meanwhile, less valuable items are less likely to be lost because they are simply able to go longer without being tended.

I agree, this is clearly a bad game mechanic that should be re-designed. Indeed, if they were to implement a warning as per my suggestion, it would be an acknowledgement of bad design in a game so prone to server downtime. If I were a dev I would see it as an embarrassment and want it to be fixed quickly. There's no telling how many people were screwed over by this, though I'll bet the GMs have been getting many item restoration requests (such as mine, which they rejected).

[StephieRawks]

I was cross-breeding 8 jute with 8 mandrake before maintenance. I fertilized and tended all 16 crops within 1 hour before downtime, and signed back in 15 minutes before the estimated end of downtime, almost exactly 48 hours later. I found 8 dead jute crops and 8 angry, purple, gaseous mandrakes that were able to be saved, which is odd considering I fed and watered them all at the same time.

1/3

[StephieRawks]

Had they survived, the jute crop would have produced 1 mature jute each, and a 95% chance of each producing 1 jute seed via cross-breeding. In addition to losing those, I had to use 8 more grade 3 Thanalan topsoils to replant them. The *lowest* current market values in Siren are 65k gil for jute seeds, 50k for mature jute and 10k for grade 3 Thanalan topsoil, which means my losses would be valued at 1 million on Siren assuming the cheapest listings for all 3 items were in quantities of exactly 8, which of course they're not. I won't even count how much fishmeal was used on the crops so far...not because I consider the cost negligible, but partly because I don't recall how much was used and partly because it's not necessary to growth and only serves to speed the process along.

2/3

[StephieRawks]

I would greatly appreciate if SE reimbursed me with either (1) x8 jute, x8 jute seeds and x8 grade 3 Thanalan topsoils or (2) 1 million gil...but I'm not naive enough to expect that to happen. I would be very impressed with their customer service if they did though! I'd settle for them having the courtesy and foresight in the future to pause the plant timers when maintenance exceeds 24 hours or, at the very least, to add a disclaimer at least 1 day earlier than the longest-growing plant (i.e. 7 days notice if 6 days is the longest growing length, more if that changes in Stormblood) along with the downtime notice to harvest and not replant any crops before maintenance that exceeds 24 hours. SE, please make this right and prevent it from happening again!

3/3

[Dustytome]

Yeah, they're not going to reimburse anything. btw you can get past that pesky character limit by just editing the post.