Pushed to quit after 1,860 days subbed

[ko_]

There have been huge Sega logos on all of the Sonic games each time you start them. This can't compare to the demolition timer which is INVISIBLE for most of its duration.

Seriously... -_-

Everything. he missed everything ingame, he missed all housing updates. All patchnotes, all lodestone enteries... HE.EVEN.MISSED.PEOPLE.COMPLAINING. That's bigger then SEGA. And perfectly makes my point for me. Even going with your disbief.... picture someone coming to you saying Sonic is a Sony product with a serious face. How do you feel. And don't say it can't happen cause apparently The world is on fire and OP missed it somehow.

[R-Pete-G]

Hi, Ko. I went on a trip with work, and I've just caught up. It seems to be you debating with other people primarily about me, so I'm gonna have a totally chilled and very up-front reply for you. Hopefully it can reduce the need to inflate this thread with lots of back and forth.

I'll quote your most recent post for some context.

I disagree.. he missed EVERYTHING even ingame stuff, so how was SE posed to fix his current issue? THATS what I'm talking about tho. How did he miss it ALL. He missed the text at log in, he missed millions of people talking about it ingame, he missed everything so he would've missed whatever you are mentioning too. Cause he missed it all. 1000 days and NEVER heard of the timers? Come on man.... SE can't fix user error. They just can't.

So, as other people have pointed out, one of the points of my thread was to say that essentially the auto demolition feature could be harder to miss. I know in your opinion it seems that it isn't, and that's cool. But it'd also be cool if you could - just for a minute - suspend your disbelief that other people might miss it. I mean, "millions of people" may have been talking about it, but I don't interact with all of them. I don't spend a lot of time idling in cities reading chat, I never really read the forums before now, stuff like that. Even if there's a 1,000,000,000 to 1 chance that someone could miss it, there's still going to be 1. Maybe that's me, it's possible, so we shouldn't pretend it isn't.

Next up, now that we know it's possible, we consider how much blame you can associate to that. The position you're coming from is that, as a player, you should be reading more external resources (and by external, I mean not in the game client), or speaking to all the NPCs to glean all the information (and we already established that the demolition info is behind a third-level dialogue option on an NPC with a misleading title). You know what? That's also cool. If that's your opinion on what makes me a bad player, then I can't stop you thinking that. If you want to think that I'm the most ignorant player you've ever met, I really don't mind. Can't stop you.

But the crux of this conversation is about the consequence of that. Using your example of someone going into a raid, that person totally should be reading up and making an effort. If they don't, however, what happens? They get kicked. They get criticised. They probably won't make it into any raiding FCs or Statics. But they still - and this is the really important part - don't have any risk of their Job levels being deleted. No matter how badly they play, no matter how much of a terrible Black Mage they might be, they still get to keep being a level 70 Black Mage because they worked for that.

Now, housing is a weird exception because there's an upside to demolishing a house, that there wouldn't be to taking someone's job levels away. Houses are finite - my house gets demolished, someone else gets a chance. I get why that exists. But the thing is, that system is not - and never was - designed to be a punishment for people who hadn't read enough Lodestone or Launcher articles. It's not a knowledge-check to see if you deserve to keep your Private Estate by being well-read. It's meant to take something away from someone that they've lost interest in, but the game isn't clever enough to gauge someone's interest. It has to use a metric to estimate that, and that metric is a specific kind of in-game activity involving that house.

What we're saying - at least, I know for sure I'm saying, and others seem to get it - is that if Squenix is going to use a specific metric for gauging your activity in something, they should really communicate that better. Ideally, when you start using the feature. Would that remove all possibility of user error? Nope. Someone could still forget, but you can't forget something you don't know. Someone could actually lose interest, but they'd do so knowing the consequences. And considering this is the only instance in the entire of FFXIV that I can think of where actual content gets permanently deleted without your interaction, surely you can agree that it's a bit odd that one of the severest consequences in the game has less messaging and in-game Active Help text than most other features.

[R-Pete-G]

As for all the "WHO DOESN'T KNOW SONIC IS SEGA?" comments, let's be real. I have elderly family members who think Internet Explorer literally is the Internet. We've all seen someone's mum, aunt or grandmother walk into a video game shop not knowing what game plays on what console, asking for "the Zelda boy on Playstation" or something they only half understand. Just pretend I'm the silly grandad who muddles through FFXIV and doesn't really get any of it, if that helps. It's still a massive leap to say that the game shouldn't be clearer - at the bare minimum, as clear as it is most other places - when it's going to delete your stuff.

[ko_]

As for all the "WHO DOESN'T KNOW SONIC IS SEGA?" comments, let's be real. I have elderly family members who think Internet Explorer literally is the Internet. We've all seen someone's mum, aunt or grandmother walk into a video game shop not knowing what game plays on what console, asking for "the Zelda boy on Playstation" or something they only half understand. Just pretend I'm the silly grandad who muddles through FFXIV and doesn't really get any of it, if that helps. It's still a massive leap to say that the game shouldn't be clearer - at the bare minimum, as clear as it is most other places - when it's going to delete your stuff.

first of LOL. Second I'mma making a reply post to the one you left me. So give me a few.

[Raskbuck]

I disagree.. he missed EVERYTHING even ingame stuff, so how was SE posed to fix his current issue? THATS what I'm talking about tho. How did he miss it ALL. He missed the text at log in, he missed millions of people talking about it ingame, he missed everything so he would've missed whatever you are mentioning too. Cause he missed it all. 1000 days and NEVER heard of the timers? Come on man....

Well, let’s dissect it step by step then.

1. The only time the game notifies you about housing demolition is when you enter a housing ward for the first time. More often than not, this information is given to you when you are a low level sprout. Let’s not forget that there is a side quest that takes you to the housing area; so it is possible for OP to receive that information when it was not relevant to them. Don’t forget that they said they were not able to obtain a house until much later (presumably several years). For me personally, it would be understandable for a player to forget some information given to you when it was not relevant. It would be like learning a Lv. 60 BLM rotation at level 10; you would likely forget some things.

2. There have been some cases of players not receiving an e-mail regarding their house demolition. A GM confirmed earlier in the thread that SquareEnix makes sure that the e-mails are sent, but they have no way of knowing if the player has received it. There have been some cases of people not receiving their housing demolition e-mails, both on here and on other sites like Reddit. To me, that would also be understandable if OP missed the information.

3. The housing demolition timer only appears when your house is 15 days away from being demolished. Even if OP checked the timer before then, they would have no way of knowing that housing demolition was a thing unless they actively searched for demolition information outside of the game (and why would you?).

4. I’m not sure what you mean when you say that millions of people were talking about it. Almost nobody talks in the game outside of Free Companies, linkshells and the Novice Network. We don’t know if OP was in either of those groups, and even then, we cannot guarantee they even talked about the topic in the first place. It would be an assumption at best.

5. The information about the housing demolition was given in an old patch note from a previous expansion. First off, it’s possible that they don’t read the patch notes in the first place, and secondly, even if they did, it wasn’t until recently that OP obtained a house and promptly lost it.

6. The housing demolition information can be accessed only by talking to the housing caretaker in-game, which is not only away from everything, but you would have to go out of your way to talk to him to obtain the information. Again, why would OP have done that if they didn’t know the demolition was a thing in the first place?

So I’d like to ask you, what do you get by blaming the OP in such a way? I know you are not suggesting that the system is perfect, but the way you come across is that you are downplaying the lack of in-game information by placing all of the blame on OP. All we are suggesting is that the system could use some improvements, and that was the sole intent of OP’s post. Perhaps they could have worded it a bit more diplomatically, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of things that can be changed about housing in general.

Obsessing over placing the blame on OP is preventing heartfelt feedback from flourishing, as these attitudes seem to suggest that everything is okay the way it is because OP was the one at fault here. Let’s not be dense about it.

[Erudito]

I find it rather odd that any type of notification about housing demolition, item reclaim or otherwise does not happen in-game, alongside the email notifications. Giving us in-game notifications on top of email would make such incidents happen much less often.

I wonder why its was not designed this way? It makes all the sense in the world if you play the game and are fixed on other content to get reminders about this stuff.

[Penthea]

Everything. he missed everything ingame, he missed all housing updates. All patchnotes, all lodestone enteries... HE.EVEN.MISSED.PEOPLE.COMPLAINING. That's bigger then SEGA. And perfectly makes my point for me. Even going with your disbief.... picture someone coming to you saying Sonic is a Sony product with a serious face. How do you feel. And don't say it can't happen cause apparently The world is on fire and OP missed it somehow.

Why are you so obsessed with OP? Most people are now talking about how the presence of demolition in the game needs to be far clearer and you just keep saying "BUT OP...!!!!!!!" It's like you're covering your ears and shouting OP over and over again, while the rest of us are actually discussing what is obviously poor ui design.

[ko_]

Why are you so obsessed with OP? Most people are now talking about how the presence of demolition in the game needs to be far clearer and you just keep saying "BUT OP...!!!!!!!" It's like you're covering your ears and shouting OP over and over again, while the rest of us are actually discussing what is obviously poor ui design.

Cause it's his actions that started this thread and I explained this already. I'm already writing a reply to him asking one question. If you can't see what my point was then I got nothing. I explained it for who knows how many pages.

[ko_]

But the crux of this conversation is about the consequence of that. Using your example of someone going into a raid, that person totally should be reading up and making an effort. If they don't, however, what happens? They get kicked. They get criticised. They probably won't make it into any raiding FCs or Statics. But they still - and this is the really important part - don't have any risk of their Job levels being deleted. No matter how badly they play, no matter how much of a terrible Black Mage they might be, they still get to keep being a level 70 Black Mage because they worked for that.

Now, housing is a weird exception because there's an upside to demolishing a house, that there wouldn't be to taking someone's job levels away. Houses are finite - my house gets demolished, someone else gets a chance. I get why that exists. But the thing is, that system is not - and never was - designed to be a punishment for people who hadn't read enough Lodestone or Launcher articles. It's not a knowledge-check to see if you deserve to keep your Private Estate by being well-read. It's meant to take something away from someone that they've lost interest in, but the game isn't clever enough to gauge someone's interest. It has to use a metric to estimate that, and that metric is a specific kind of in-game activity involving that house.

What we're saying - at least, I know for sure I'm saying, and others seem to get it - is that if Squenix is going to use a specific metric for gauging your activity in something, they should really communicate that better. Ideally, when you start using the feature. Would that remove all possibility of user error? Nope. Someone could still forget, but you can't forget something you don't know. Someone could actually lose interest, but they'd do so knowing the consequences. And considering this is the only instance in the entire of FFXIV that I can think of where actual content gets permanently deleted without your interaction, surely you can agree that it's a bit odd that one of the severest consequences in the game has less messaging and in-game Active Help text than most other features.

My only issue with goign to SE in your case is simply you were ingame for 80 plus days after the fact. You NEVER thought to go to your plot? at all? If you didn't then the only thing that comes to my mind is if it didn't matter then why does it matter now? It clearly didn't matter the 80 days and it didn't matter the 45 days before that. Even if I say ok, you didn't know. You never once thoguht " Let me check my house" Cause even if you just walked in there for a few seconds that would've saved everything even if you knew that or not. So from my end it just looks like you never checked on it - cause if you did it'll be here- and it never matter until you randomly checked and find it's gone and now you want to quit? Thats why I called foul. And why I say nothing we can say for SE to do would change your case. I'm not trying to bag on you, I'm just lost.. cause you mentioned you are quiting over items you didn't care to check for 45 plus 80 days. It looks -off-.

With that out the way the title to your thread is a big iffy. Cause it's going to be HARD for people like me to look at your playtime and go - Oh he didn't know.- People have looked and said - HOW?- cause when you post things like " I'm invested" and then go to say " I didn't know about this even though it's a huge hot topic" looks like you're trying to blame SE for user errors. Cause yeah, SE have ALOT to fix - if they cared- about their housing system. But yeah. that's why I was where I am, I just can't get past that cause it makes no sense to me.

[Penthea]

Cause it's his actions that started this thread and I explained this already. I'm already writing a reply to him asking one question. If you can't see what my point was then I got nothing. I explained it for who knows how many pages.

I see your point. You don't see ours at all. We are discussing ui design and you're harping on about OP over and over and over...

We know what happened to OP is very eyebrow raising. OP admitted this himself. No one is saying otherwise. But it does highlight the fact that demolition is more or less a hidden mechanic in the game, and new players would be especially vulnerable to this bad design. But I don't think you care about this at all. You care about showing everyone how stupid you think OP is. The quality of the game just doesn't enter your mind. You want to ridicule someone, not discuss the game.