Why I'm mad at Final Fantasy 14 (rant)

[KisaiTenshi]

I hate it when people defend Square-Enix by saying "the game can't do that, because programming is hard," but then there's literally like 10+ other MMOs which are all capable of things like letting you whisper while in an instance, or having more than 8 chat channels. Saying it's "too much noise," or "too hard for the servers" seems like such a cop-out answer.

Again, as I'll repeat for the 2nd time. When I say "I hate that I can't look up." I'm talking about first-person mode. Why can't I look directly up? Hair clipping won't matter, because it's first person view. Your entire body is hidden--so literally nothing clips.

I also hate the response "I'd never use that feature or that Quality of life improvement--therefore it's stupid, and it's not important." Yeah, very constructive.

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Most of all, I generally dislike that people try to counter my issues with uneducated responses. I can do "everything" with an apartment, so I don't need a house? Where's my garden plots? How do I cross-breed in an apartment? Are you just trying to dismiss my complaint with misinformation, or do you care about solving the problem? What's your goal with a response? That one guy from early on said there was a 2-handed sword dps. It's Samurai, and I acknowledged that he was right, because his information was accurate. But I feel like some people are just being haters for the sake of haters. Which is more of a representation of the community than the game. Am I just as guilty as that? I'd like to think I'm complaining about valid issues rather than just trashing things for the sake of it.

"The game can't do that..." is because people often make a suggestion with no regard to how it's engineered. This is the same kind of reasoning that goes into both the chat system and the number of characters in a zone. There is no reason the client can not do X * characters or X * channels, other than that is what the engineering was designed around. If there are somehow 128 active players in all 8 link shells plus the FC, and Mentor (which has a global limit) channels, you have you have 1.4MB/sec (11mbits) of bandwidth being taken up, just with chat spam. Realistically, there's never really more than 10% of a LS people talking at once, so it's more like 133K or about 1mbit, but that's still 1mbit multiplied by all online players in those LS's. But it doesn't matter if they're saying "hi" or writing a small novel, netcode processing is netcode processing. That's just where SE decided to place a limit so that gameplay would not be impaired.

Text Chat is one of the oldest things computers have been doing since before the internet, and there really has not been any improvement in text chat since IRC's "chanserv" bots to enforce server administration rules. Twitch, Skype, Slack and Discord all operate the same way as well. You can join a channel and it consumes a small amount of bandwidth to maintain state, but if you have joined several noisy channels, your connectivity suffers, and if the channel is big enough to flood your connection you will never stay connected to it.

The limits are arbitrary yes, but you have to put a limit somewhere. If the limit was 16 channels, people would complain why they can't join 20, and so forth. Most players will never need more than two.

Likewise, this is not a first-person perspective game, the "first person view" you are seeing is just the camera moved to distance 0. However other players still see you, and if you are looking in any angle that the animation wasn't designed to have, it doesn't let you do it. I mention hair clipping because that is pretty much why you can't move your head in any arbitrary angle and the game instead moves your character's body, and why your head only tilts up and down for looking at characters different heights.


Some people on the forum just want to fight other players because they see the forum as a direct line of feedback to SE, and thus they will quickly become hostile to any QoL suggestions that are not thought out and cribbed from some other game.

One of the often repeated QoL things I don't agree with is "instanced housing", because players who bring it up are always complaining about not having a house, and thus being unable to do housing things, yet the apartments (which are instanced housing) and the inn rooms exist, and so does joining a FC and having a room in those houses.

We can not have any serious QoL conversations on the forum because several forum posters don't read the post, let alone the thread, and respond with snark and sarcasm to everyone, thus giving the entire forum the feeling that nobody is welcome here.

If players seriously want SE to listen, the attitude of the forum needs to change.

[JackHatchet]

Are you trying to tell me that if I'm in first person mode and I look up that my character's head looks up? I'm pretty sure that it doesn't. Your head turns to face your target. It has no connection to the vertical direction you're looking at in first person mode.

Also, hey, if they let me message people in a duty I wouldn't need to waste like 6 linkshells just to circumvent a screwed up system. I literally have linkshells that are designed to be one on one chat channels so I can talk to my friends while in a duty.

[AngelCheese77]

Sounds like un-subbing and going back to WoW is the best for you.

Comparing games like WoW and FF14 won't work, as one is a western game and the other eastern ... totally different crowds and mentalities are used to make them.

[JackHatchet]

I'm thinking I truly am a western MMO person at heart. I haven't really tried many eastern mmos besides Tera? And I didn't get past level 10 in that game, lol.

It would certainly be interesting to know more about the contrasts between the two themes. Without sounding too inflammatory. The only real stereotypes I hear about the eastern MMOs is that they like grinding and that they like micro-transactions and phone app stuff. (Which is why the app is apparently 4 stars popular in Asia, but 2 stars in America).

[KisaiTenshi]

Are you trying to tell me that if I'm in first person mode and I look up that my character's head looks up? I'm pretty sure that it doesn't. Your head turns to face your target. It has no connection to the vertical direction you're looking at in first person mode.

Also, hey, if they let me message people in a duty I wouldn't need to waste like 6 linkshells just to circumvent a screwed up system. I literally have linkshells that are designed to be one on one chat channels so I can talk to my friends while in a duty.

The game only moves your character's head if they have a target selected, what you're seeing is the third person camera set to position 0,0,0 in from render origin. It's still the third person camera, and thus it still has the third person rules. Try looking down when you're in the game. You won't see your feet, the game has simply stopped rendering your character. In the case with Lalafells, it doesn't even move the camera to their head, it's actually above their head. This is why it's not really a first-person view. A first-person view, you'd see your body from the neck down as well as your arms and feet. So the reason you can't look straight up, is because the camera is never placed somewhere that would make it possible. The animation that other people see never moves your head unless a target is selected, and even then, that's what it does in third person view, so in first person view, you're simply moving the camera with your character being invisible.

SE would need to actually make a true first person perspective for it to work correctly, where the camera angle is determined by the position of the eyes on the avatar's head, not the render origin, and then not make the avatar disappear when in first person view.

As for chat, some other games have IM (Instant Message) systems, but that results in a deluge of IM's every time you logoff and back on after some amount of time passes. This would have been the best way to actually make the "app" chat integrate with the game (by adding a IM system), but considering how the app is written, not likely to happen and is a large missed opportunity to do something that a third party tool can not do.

It would certainly be interesting to know more about the contrasts between the two themes. Without sounding too inflammatory. The only real stereotypes I hear about the eastern MMOs is that they like grinding and that they like micro-transactions and phone app stuff. (Which is why the app is apparently 4 stars popular in Asia, but 2 stars in America).

Capsule machines, Gachapon, Lootboxes, are something that is endemic to Japanese culture for whatever reason. Where as in North America, capsule machines are usually filled with junk for a quarter or a dollar, right next to gumball machines near the entrance of grocery/department stores. Like you can find entire stores in Akihabara that are just wall-to-wall gachapon. However Nexon is the company that is really the front-runner in how gachapon are done in video games. NA style gachapon(lootboxes) are just straight up greedy, and is unregulated gambling.

Grinding in a game is more about commitment. Early JRPG's simply had random battles every X steps, and were over quickly if you could one-shot kill everything. With newer games, and especially 3D games, you often end up wasting time fighting "cannon fodder" rather then employ any real strategy. So the best rewards come from the content that takes the longest to play/requires an actual strategy.

[Ayer2015]

So....what do you want?

Clearly they want a better raiding scene... which isn't a crazy thing to want/expect from an MMO.

[Redname]

I hate how Omega bosses have no story. Why should I care about their Joker rip-off? Oh he's not Joker. Why do you expect me to know other FF games? Explain it more for the community.

Instantly invalidates all this rant. Come back when you have some taste in games.

[Sicno]

Instantly invalidates all this rant. Come back when you have some taste in games.

This. I was almost finished reading and was ready to give her my like despite some caveats but I got to that part and I was like "NOPE!"

[AxlStream]

You do not need to be familliar with the single player games nor should you to enjoy this game. The fact this game is like... 60-70% fan service is telling. A good raid would stand on it's own and not use nostalgia as a crutch.

[JackHatchet]

I don't mind some fan-service. I like it when games have some little throw-backs. Like when an NPC screams "The Goggles! They do nothing!!!"

But look at the Omega bosses. The Omega story. It's basically some super-powered robot from another dimension that went all The Matrix on us and spawned in a bunch of virtual bosses straight out of other FFXIV games. I felt that the 'reliance' on fan service meant a downgrade in the quality of presentation. Instead of a unique build-up as to why these bosses are important--it's just "oh yeah, that Joker guy from a previous game--gotcha!" And I feel like that's very shallow.

If they were going to recycle old bosses from a FF game. It would have been way cooler and way more immersive to take that opportunity to flesh out the FFXIV universe a little bit more. Since it's all "The Matrix" style, why not have Omega pit us against virtual versions of all of 'our' greatest heroes. The good guys we'd never get to fight in canon. Pit us against the Grand Company leaders, Minfilla, or the Azure Dragoon. Heck a council fight made of a few of Eorzea's finest would have been an exciting throwback to the community without it having to draw from other games.

Going up against a virtualized cyborg Rahban would be an interesting way to explore some of his potential. Though I'd imagine those data-mined models would confuse the heck out of the community before they figured out what he was for.