Mahjong is the most depressing mini game you've added to XIV

[SturmChurro]

It can last well over an hour if everyone plays slow.

10-15 min matches I could see, but 45 min to an hour? No way! At least the card games are relatively quick!

Whatever, it's not for me and I'm not a collector/achievement hunter, just adding another one I won't get close to finishing. :P

[Bacent]

10-15 min matches I could see, but 45 min to an hour? No way! At least the card games are relatively quick!

Whatever, it's not for me and I'm not a collector/achievement hunter, just adding another one I won't get close to finishing. :P

To quote the rules directly: Each game has a time limit of 120 minutes, after which the game will end automatically.

As well as there being 'eight hands' per game. Each hand lasts about 5-8 minutes. So times that by 8 and you get how much of a HEAVY time sink this is.

Edit:

So why not play against NPCs and see if you enjoy the game better after you've gotten some experience with the gameplay?

It's more enjoyable in a sense with NPCs. You can quit out when you need to to do other stuff. With this you have to choose to spend +/- an hour on a single game, when you could be doing many other things (Including me working on saving for the brand new shiny 2,000,000 MGP mount). But can you argue that many people will keep playing, and it won't just be swamped with people who have been playing this game for ages, or simple remember the rules better? I have dual monitors, and I keep the rules open on my other monitor to try to keep on top of things, but I'm a horribly forgetful person.

[Tigerlilley]

I agree its disappointing to lock music behind ranked games. It would have been better to have it behind a wins / games played achievement.

However, I've spent today learning it and it's not bad. There's some excellent threads and guides on reddit. Just know its gonna take at least an hour of your time.

[Bacent]

I agree its disappointing to lock music behind ranked games. It would have been better to have it behind a wins / games played achievement.

However, I've spent today learning it and it's not bad. There's some excellent threads and guides on reddit. Just know its gonna take at least an hour of your time.

I know how long it's going to take. But that doesn't make the fact that this game WILL dye off with people who aren't that interested in taking huge massive chunks of time with not much of a return on anything, and the main players WILL only be people who know this game down pat. On day two I was playing against people who know this game, who have played this game for YEARS. The ONLY time I had proper fun with it was when playing against people who were actual novices like myself, and not against players who are already in the ranked system for the game.

And it doesn't change the fact this is the ONLY mini game in XIV with a ranking system that DOES NOT let you play against NPCs for any kind of rating at all. Like I've said, if it were an achievement for winning X times or such (Like they've done with Lov/TT achievements), and NOT rating based, I'd be much more ok with this.

I'm missing 11 orchestrion rolls, all of them are in the last two patches for XIV I believe. I've run dungeons 50+ times for a drop during the quiet hours to work on my collection. This is something I CAN NOT WORK ON due to 1) lack of people queueing for Mahjong during hours I prefer to work on my collections, I.E late at night. If I queue in the day, I mainly get pitted against those that are high up on rankings already due to knowing the game for years due to culture/ect. 2) You get nothing for losing besides being FORCED further from your goal with loss after loss, there's nothing in between.

I know of spending countless hours on side content. I worked on getting my Racing Chocobo to max Pedigree before the heavy EXP bonus they added after ages. I didn't AFK race like 99% of the people who wanted to get it done the 'easy' way. Time is NOT an issue.

[Junma]

Mahjong is really fun, you just need to invest a bit of time learning the Yaku, how to play defensive, WHEN to play defensive, when to push for a hand, the pain of getting greedy and dealing into someone, the bliss of rejecting easy wins for more expensive hands and paying off.

It's a shame it's not popular in western culture, our queues are dead.