Eureka : If I can't see it, it shouldn't hit me...

[Rongway]

Fynlar, you're missing the point. Nobody is asking for things not to break. Let's say the entity limit is 50. We're not saying, "I want to see the 50 nearest players and my seven party members, and the boss, and the adds."

We're saying, "Please show me my seven members and any hostile targets. Then fill the remaining slots with players, on a space-available basis."

This is a reasonable request.

[Gamina]

What makes this even more frustrating is the situation I found myself in last night. When you are in the 144 instance at some stage its gradually winds down and no new people are added.

Last night I found myself in an instance with only 25 players total on the search list. Having done "By Numbers" all day with much death me and my party were loath to head over and join in but of course we did.

What a difference!! Because there were only at most 25 of us we saw every portal and killed all bar one... including when he spawns two by some careful LB use. When the one garm did spawn we could easily see it next to the boss. See all the AOE puddles the boss sends out as well as dodge the dragons voice.

If the problem cannot be rectified by more enhanced priorities being chosen by the players in what loads (so healers can select to see their party wheras dps want mobs to have priority)then the number of players in an instance should be reduced.

[Alleo]

Again, when you cram a crapload of players in one space and they're doing more than just standing around in a town, things will break. Yes, it sucks. Deal with it or do something else. It's shit when my hunts don't appear on the screen either, but there is only so much that can realistically be done about this.

Or we can post that either SE solves this or stop using battle systems that dont really work..NMs are kinda the heart of Eureka because otherwise its just deathly boring. Not being able to see the boss, not being able to target it or any members of your group is horrible. I was healing NMs yesterday and it was not a nice experience..I could not heal that good, when I wanted to rezz I needed to play the game of "where are you?" and even if I stood next to them, saw their body, my skills often did not even work or I was not even able to click on their name on their list. On the first day we did not manage to do the bear NM because we had some wipes where people pulled the bears into our group but also because we were not able to even see a lot of the adds..the same with the Number NM...I was standing near the add, yet I could not see it..Hunts at least have mostly simple attacks..these NM spawn adds and one hit aoes..there is a big difference here..

If your battles cant handle this than make instances with less people and NM bosses with less HP..Problem solved..but putting 144 people in an instance and then change nothing is just bad..

[Tridus]

Again, when you cram a crapload of players in one space and they're doing more than just standing around in a town, things will break. Yes, it sucks. Deal with it or do something else. It's shit when my hunts don't appear on the screen either, but there is only so much that can realistically be done about this.

You do realize that this is a problem any massive scale online game will have, and that most of them solve it better than XIV does, right? It's not like this is some mysterious thing that nobody's figured out. Server load scales exponentially as you add people to a small area in a game like this.

You don't solve it by randomly having things vanish from a client's data stream, only to have them randomly reappear later. Frankly, that kind of code wouldn't make it to production in my office. It breaks the combat system and isn't fit for release.

What you can do is when you reach a certain load, start lowering the field of vision on other players so now you have fewer of them in any given client's data stream to deal with (Rift did this, under extreme load I'd have a much shorter field of view when it comes to other players, but it wasn't random). You can simplify the data you're sending about the other clients. You can prioritize which things need showing, which is kinda important since if the entire point of the thing in question is the NM, having the NM vanish but showing some random other player instead is completely pants on head backwards.

Countless similar things have happened in the past (and will continue to happen in the future), with "Raubahn EX" and "Pipin Savage" being another couple of recent infamous examples. Put a shitload of people jamming on one target to try to get their story instance done, things end up breaking. You can either contribute to the problem, keep jamming on that target yourself, and insist that they should have "better servers" to handle the flood of players... or you can just acknowledge it for what it is, go do something else for a while, and come back when the flood isn't as massive.

Those are not the same thing. Those are congestion on the instance server causing handoff issues due to too many instances being spawned. This is too many players being in one spot and the server being unable to keep up with the amount of communication between every client in that area about every other client in that area.

They might *look* similar to a non-developer, but they're not connected at all in a technical sense and are handled in very different ways.

The problem with that is you can pretty much only do that by creating fights that are so unrewarding that no one will bother with them. What then?

Most of Eureka is unrewarding fights that you grind out. They don't seem to mind that. That said, 50 players wouldn't have nearly the same level of problem that 100 has, because the load as you add clients isn't linear. Two groups of 50 fighting two NMs on opposite sides of Eureka is significantly less server load than one group of 100 fighting one NM.

Was normal and expected for me. Maybe I've just been in the game longer than you have?

No, your expectations are clearly just low. When it's been a known limitation for this long, you factor the limitation into your content design, or you fix the limitation. When you do neither of those, we have a word in the industry we use to describe what you're doing: Incompetence.

I'm not blaming the players or the devs for this, actually. It's just part of the infrastructure. Neither group has full control over that.

SE has full control over SE's infrastructure. The "devs" themselves may not, but they're part of SE, and SE does. At some point, it's the producer's job to go to management and tell them that fixing the netcode needs to be prioritized in order to do this type of content. If management says no, than it's the producer's job to change their content plan to accomodate what they actually can build.

Except it isn't fixed, because like I said, I still run into invisible hunts. Hence why it was of no surprise whatsoever to hear issues popping up in Eureka too.

Ixion still does this, yeah. Which is exactly why it's absurd that they designed Eureka this way. They should know better. They need to provide reasons to split players up around the entire map to make the numbers in a given Eureka instance work. They did the exact opposite of that. Barring that, they need to shrink the cap on instance sizes until it's a number the server can handle.

Known limitations are not an excuse for bad design. If anything, they make it even worse. Unexpected issues happen. That's the reality of software development. There is no excuse whatsoever for exceeding known limitations and having things break because of it. And yeah, fighting NMs feels broken. The mob I'm fighting vanishes, making it impossible to fight. Trying to heal my party ranges from frustrating to impossible. The combat system flat out doesn't work under these conditions.

They knew it would happen because it's been happening under the same conditions for quite a long time, and they chose to do it anyway. They get to wear that.

[Fynlar]

Fynlar, you're missing the point. Nobody is asking for things not to break. Let's say the entity limit is 50. We're not saying, "I want to see the 50 nearest players and my seven party members, and the boss, and the adds."

We're saying, "Please show me my seven members and any hostile targets. Then fill the remaining slots with players, on a space-available basis."

This is a reasonable request.

People have requested it for years with hunts, yet I still have other players loading before hunts do. Whatever it takes to get this done apparently is beyond their power to do.

Therefore, I'm not understanding why people continue to be surprised at things like this.

[Tridus]

People have requested it for years with hunts, yet I still have other players loading before hunts do. Whatever it takes to get this done apparently is beyond their power to do.

Therefore, I'm not understanding why people continue to be surprised at things like this.

You're mistaking "beyond their power" for "hasn't made it to the top of the priority backlog of things to fix."

It's very much within their power if they want to invest the time and budget into improving it. We're not talking about warp drive, here. They need to dedicate the resources to it, and they haven't. That's it.

[TheLittlestLala]

They should do what Guild Wars 2 did and cull people by replacing their model with a generic one.

[Singularity]

They have done something like this before. Originally the problem with S-rank hunts disappearing was much worse than it is now. They solved it by giving S-ranks absurdly high draw priority. This is why you can see an S-rank from halfway across the zone if there's a clear line of sight.

[StragoMagus]

They should do what Guild Wars 2 did and cull people by replacing their model with a generic one.

I’m sure they can implement it somehow since they have this option in their mobile/Steam app: FF Möbius.

[MoroMurasaki]

Fynlar, you're missing the point. Nobody is asking for things not to break. Let's say the entity limit is 50. We're not saying, "I want to see the 50 nearest players and my seven party members, and the boss, and the adds."

We're saying, "Please show me my seven members and any hostile targets. Then fill the remaining slots with players, on a space-available basis."

This is a reasonable request.

Exactly this, couldn't have said it any better.