Provide a warning about garden crops dying during extended server downtime

[AzhiDahaki]

A pop up screen about the maintenance was up for about a week but it was posted on lodestone almost a month prior. So there was plenty of notice if anyone took the time to check. But they rather say it all SE fault.

It is SE's fault for having a bad mechanic in their game. No player should have experienced this issue, its simply an example of a bad design that should be fixed. A warning would at least acknowledge the bad design and help people avoid the consequences of it.

[AzhiDahaki]

Notice of this maintenance went up well over a week ago, didn't it? And haven't we had enough maintenance periods by now to have figured out timers continue to tick while servers are down?

Who's "we"? There are plenty of new players to the game, not to mention old players gardening for the first time in the lull before SB, and in any case, this recent downtime was unprecedented in recent history in terms of its length.

[AzhiDahaki]

I had FC members who are in charge of gardening contact a GM regarding their expired plants due to maintenance and were reimbursed their original seeds. This is usually a one time fix and can take up to a week to happen.

Interesting, the GMs were unable or unwilling to do the same for me, even though I've never had any items restored before.

[Hasrat]

Who's "we"? There are plenty of new players to the game, not to mention old players gardening for the first time in the lull before SB, and in any case, this recent downtime was unprecedented in recent history in terms of its length.

It's up to every player to be aware of maintenance. Hell, I see it as an announcement in the chat tab literally every time I sign in. It even pops up with the entire warning message every time you play from the launcher well in advance of maintenance. What more do you expect SE to do to communicate that servers will be down?

If your complaint is more that "But gardening should have been paused so I wouldn't lose my stuff," I see that as a completely unreasonable expectation. Leve allowances still accumulated, beast tribe allowances, map allowance, squadrons still ran their missions, ventures still completed. Why should one singular feature on a timer have taken any precedence?

[AzhiDahaki]

...If your complaint is more that "But gardening should have been paused so I wouldn't lose my stuff," I see that as a completely unreasonable expectation. Leve allowances still accumulated, beast tribe allowances, map allowance, squadrons still ran their missions, ventures still completed. Why should one singular feature on a timer have taken any precedence?

Did you even read my OP? All I'm asking is for a warning about how downtime will affect gardeners. Everyone sees the downtime announcement tabs when they log in-- that's my point. If you're going to include warnings about weddings etc., you might as well add something for gardeners, too. Gardening is different from beast tribe allowances etc. in that you must maintain crops every day to keep them healthy, and some (like thav onions) could not have possibly survived the most recent maintenance, which is really not a reasonable thing for players to expect to happen-- nobody in my guild was sure when I asked them if my plants would survive the downtime, and I got mixed answers because this is not common knowledge.

I don't know why people are being so defensive for SE in this thread. All I'm suggesting here is a warning to help players avoid this highly frustrating issue.

[Dustytome]

If your complaint is more that "But gardening should have been paused so I wouldn't lose my stuff," I see that as a completely unreasonable expectation. Leve allowances still accumulated, beast tribe allowances, map allowance, squadrons still ran their missions, ventures still completed. Why should one singular feature on a timer have taken any precedence?

All of those are completely different. Your retainer doesn't eat the venture and not complete it because there was maintenance. Your squadron doesn't toss your seals in the garbage and tell you they skipped the mission because of maintenance. These aren't things where if you are locked from interacting with them, possibly weeks worth of daily tending results in having to start over. They already have the timer for housing demos offset by maintenance, I see no reason they can't deal with the plant timer too.

[Hasrat]

Mostly just taking the piss, mate.

More serious answer, probably the reason they don't mention gardening along with weddings is gardening is still all in-game assets. You've mostly just lost time. Gil and resources, sure, maybe, but replaceable, so it's just a matter of time spent/lost. But bonding ceremonies are a feature players actually have to pay for, and would thus stand to lose real money if they failed to consider maintenance. And having paid money for the service and being unable to receive what they paid for in such a situation, could potentially open SE up to legal action (but that's just my uneducated guess).

I can respect you lost your investment (and maybe I'll actually feel it if/when I ever need the Onions), but, if you weren't sure how crops would fare, why not err on the side of caution and just not risk it? What would you have lost if you just said "these might die during maintenance, maybe I'll wait to plant them"?

[AzhiDahaki]

I can respect you lost your investment (and maybe I'll actually feel it if/when I ever need the Onions), but, if you weren't sure how crops would fare, why not err on the side of caution and just not risk it? What would you have lost if you just said "these might die during maintenance, maybe I'll wait to plant them"?

For one thing, as any gardener will tell you, I would have had to interrupt any planting cycles I had ongoing-- so by doing that due to downtime, I would have lost potential inter-cross seeds. Then of course there is the time lost when no crops are growing.

In my case, I simply didn't think about how the downtime would affect my crops, at least initially. I'm a busy human being with a lot on his mind. Even as maintenance got closer and it dawned on me that this might be an issue, as a long-time gamer and someone who expects quality from SE, honestly, I felt confident that they wouldn't possibly screw me over in this way, so I felt I didn't need to "err on the side of caution." If I was a dev concerned about good gameplay, I wouldn't want my players to have their in-game enjoyment compromised by this sort of uncertainty, and certainly by the consequences I personally have experienced. Not to bemoan my situation, but I've had no urge to play FFXIV at all since my garden died-- it really takes the wind out of one's sails to lose items that take many weeks to cultivate due to something that is out of one's control.

Server downtime is usually announced far in advance-- I'll be the first to give SE credit for that. Though just today, the Japanese servers experienced unannounced, emergency maintenance. So as a player, how am I supposed to feel about a game mechanic that is subject to not my own gameplay, but SE's decisions regarding when to take servers down? I think the calls in this thread and others for modification to gardening mechanics (specifically, during extended downtime), are completely justified from a gameplay standpoint, and I support them, but all I'm asking for is a warning. Such a warning would certainly have helped me, a new gardener, avoid wasting seeds I'd spent weeks cultivating.

[Lexia]

It is SE's fault for having a bad mechanic in their game. No player should have experienced this issue, its simply an example of a bad design that should be fixed. A warning would at least acknowledge the bad design and help people avoid the consequences of it.

Have you looked around at the game? That lot of places in the game, 2./3.0 was built on top of a broken system known as 1.0 which you can still see parts of to this day. So will never see a perfect or even near perfect running game.

[Lexia]

Interesting, the GMs were unable or unwilling to do the same for me, even though I've never had any items restored before.

That a a one time thing, which I heard that feature is no longer offered anyways.