Thank you, Square, for listening to the majority.

[JowyAtreides]

We may disagree that world visit in Firmament wasn't the main issue, but it was a big enough issue that SE and Yoshida himself had to address it. Them's the facts.

Not going to dispute that it was a big issue, the fact that action was taken is categorically clear on that. I just feel it was a cop-out and all it did was breed animosity to our fellow players to the point that 1. people felt the need to congest another's world (whether they helped or not) and 2. The first thought that came to people's minds was to slaughter their fellow player and not stop to think that actually, the implementation was dreadful. They knew this was a very real risk and still did it.

Really hoping they do something to change how Concerted Works pop. I missed every single one on my server because they popped while I was working or sleeping. Donating 1000 items and not getting to participate in the group stuff sucks.

Welcome to the biggest kick in the teeth of global progression content. Hated it on other games, hated the idea of it coming to FFXIV and my feelings have still not changed and it's caused me a number of misunderstood arguments on the forums (mainly my own fault, because I ramble on once I get going).

[Jybril]

We may disagree that world visit in Firmament wasn't the main issue, but it was a big enough issue that SE and Yoshida himself had to address it. Them's the facts.

He addressed something he already knew would happen.
He knew before any of us knew. So really, it's not the players fault
that we thought it was the main issue (which was part of it)
but because SE screwed up. Once the patch dropped as it was, it was
fooked before it began.

They knew this was a very real risk and still did it.

If they, you mean SE, then yes...yes they did. So it's not really the players fault
because folks just tried to get in the danged place, it was how it was implemented.
Whole thing is just a mess no matter how you cut it.

[Alucard135]

Jowy, I can guarantee you that the world visit issue, while it may not be the main problem for you personally, was a massive problem here on Mateus. For all but the last round of concerted works, people on this server couldn't even get into the Firmament for hours at a time because trolls from Balmung would roll in to spam "THIS IS NOW BALMUNG FIRMAMENT". The idea of having world-visit work for the Firmament was to encourage friends and fellowships to perhaps help each other out so that servers could all progress, but this was thoroughly ruined by trolls who would either leech rewards from the server or would lock players out of their own server's instance.

We may disagree that world visit in Firmament wasn't the main issue, but it was a big enough issue that SE and Yoshida himself had to address it. Them's the facts.

I wouldn't call it a massive problem either simply because even without world visiting, you have 9132 active players on Mateus and only 300 can participate (3.3%). So with world visiting, that number would be between 0% to 3.3% of the actual world's inhabitants. So the remaining 96.7% in that world who aren't able to participate due to the way they implemented this FATE are a significant number, which makes the implementation itself the massive problem.

[JowyAtreides]

If they, you mean SE, then yes...yes they did. So it's not really the players fault
because folks just tried to get in the danged place, it was how it was implemented.
Whole thing is just a mess no matter how you cut it.

Yes I mean SE. This is exactly what I've been saying from the start, that the implementation was the bigger problem than the world visitors (in my view).

[Ultimatecalibur]

If they, you mean SE, then yes...yes they did. So it's not really the players fault
because folks just tried to get in the danged place, it was how it was implemented.
Whole thing is just a mess no matter how you cut it.

This sounds like someone trying to push full culpability for a mess on someone when they have partial responsibility for the mess. While the devs are partially responsible the playerbase is also responsible for a portion of this mess.

If a substantial portion of the playerbase had not been so greedy as to raid other servers for their FATEs, a fair number of servers would not have had problems getting locals into the Firmament. If wanderers had not forced worlds to advance at speeds that best suited their desire to get as many scripts by chaining FATEs some of those players who missed out on the event might have actually be able to participate.

Can SE improve things? Yes, they can potentially add more Firmament instances to high pop servers and increase the frequency of FATEs (1 Fate every 4 hours over 24 hours would vastly increase the number of players able to participate), but at the heart of things this was a high pop server problem that spilled over to the medium and lower pop servers due to player greed.

[Jybril]

This sounds like someone trying to push full culpability for a mess on someone when they have partial responsibility for the mess. While the devs are partially responsible the playerbase is also responsible for a portion of this mess.

If a substantial portion of the playerbase had not been so greedy as to raid other servers for their FATEs, a fair number of servers would not have had problems getting locals into the Firmament. If wanderers had not forced worlds to advance at speeds that best suited their desire to get as many scripts by chaining FATEs some of those players who missed out on the event might have actually be able to participate.

Can SE improve things? Yes, they can potentially add more Firmament instances to high pop servers and increase the frequency of FATEs (1 Fate every 4 hours over 24 hours would vastly increase the number of players able to participate), but at the heart of things this was a high pop server problem that spilled over to the medium and lower pop servers due to player greed.

I didn't get to participate at all in the event because I had no time.
So I had 0 part of any of this and missed out. So nice assumption.

The main reason I blame SE is because of what Yoshi P said here.
"This point came up during the development of the Ishgardian Restoration, and we were aware of the risks involved in players visiting other Worlds to help."
That then should have had them open up more Firm's and do something about the FATE timer.
Even still, that leaves the progress bars. A bunch of servers are nearly done within a weeks time even post lock-down.
My server was done in 3 days and I didn't get to help.

That's my thoughts and opinion anyways. We can go back and forth on who's fault is who's
but I just hope they do better next time because a lot of people got screwed.

[Alucard135]

This sounds like someone trying to push full culpability for a mess on someone when they have partial responsibility for the mess. While the devs are partially responsible the playerbase is also responsible for a portion of this mess.

If a substantial portion of the playerbase had not been so greedy as to raid other servers for their FATEs, a fair number of servers would not have had problems getting locals into the Firmament. If wanderers had not forced worlds to advance at speeds that best suited their desire to get as many scripts by chaining FATEs some of those players who missed out on the event might have actually be able to participate.

Can SE improve things? Yes, they can potentially add more Firmament instances to high pop servers and increase the frequency of FATEs (1 Fate every 4 hours over 24 hours would vastly increase the number of players able to participate), but at the heart of things this was a high pop server problem that spilled over to the medium and lower pop servers due to player greed.

You mean to tell me that players in an MMO should not do a piece of content that gives them massive rewards so that others can have a shot at it? Good luck telling 5K players to do that and that's the smallest number of active players in a world, let alone the remaining 500K. Even now with world visiting restricted, a significant number can't do the FATE (simple math). The speed of which the content progressed is not correlated to the ability of a player participating in a content or not. Whether your world progressed slowly or quickly, it all depends solely on if you are available in the 10hrs span after the progress finishes. The dev team knew this was gonna happen. People AFK in Eureka and other worlds for boss FATEs for the rewards. What would prevent them from doing this in a zone that doesn't have an AFK timer and with a known time for the FATE to pop?

Edit: You also have the case with 2B's outfit and people still rolling on the coffer despite already having it. Imagine with this FATE where the reward actually worth it every time it's done. And let's not forget what happens with hunts.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I wouldn't call it a massive problem either simply because even without world visiting, you have 9132 active players on Mateus and only 300 can participate (3.3%). So with world visiting, that number would be between 0% to 3.3% of the actual world's inhabitants. So the remaining 96.7% in that world who aren't able to participate due to the way they implemented this FATE are a significant number, which makes the implementation itself the massive problem.

This is a bit hyperbolic. Those 9132 players on Mateus are not on and playing 24/7 and the majority of that population is unlikely to have more than a passing interest in the Firmament. If we say about 10% to 15% of active players have an interest in Ishgard Restoration we are looking at ~900 to ~1350 players on the server being interested and participating. Now not all players with interest will be on at all times, so it is likely a good idea to divide the number of interested players into Morning players, Daytime players, Primetime/Evening players and Nighttime players. Let us say 5/8 the players are on for Primetime, 3/8 for Daytime, 1/4 for Morning and 1/8 for Nighttime. During Primetime, a bit over 1/2 of the players currently on would be able to participate in the FATE on the low end and a bit over a 1/3 of the players would be able to participate on the high end. During Daytime nearly everyone to 3/5 of the interested population would be able to participate.

With world visiting it went from 900 to 1350 players per server to 8000 to 10k players in the datacenter trying to cram themselves into whichever of 8 Firmaments was about to have a FATE. During Primetime this meant that something like 20 times the instances' max population was fighting to get into each active instance.

[Alucard135]

This is a bit hyperbolic. Those 9132 players on Mateus are not on and playing 24/7 and the majority of that population is unlikely to have more than a passing interest in the Firmament.

This is where I'll stop you. People do care because of the rewards. You have a mount, hairstyle, glamours and an emote. Why do you think people already stressed the servers using the world visit? Because they wanted to get these rewards ASAP. Else why do you think low population servers progressed this fast with world visit? Because people wanted the FATEs to pop up. And that is evident when you see how slowly these severs are progressing now. And the fact that you can be on any DoL/Doh regardless of level to get the reward, then a significant majority will have interest in the FATE. They don't care about contributing to the progress, hence why they will AFK when the FATE timer draws near.

And if you're going to say people don't care about these rewards, allow me to remind you about every Eureka thread regarding the items that you can only get there and and asked for them to be obtainable another way (even though they can be sold at the MB but for high prices).

So I really doubt that 10-15% only are interested given the history we have regarding players' desire for such rewards. Maybe 10-15% would actually put the effort to farm the scripts for the rewards, but the majority would jump on the FATEs with its high return in a span of 3min without any effort to craft.

[Ultimatecalibur]

You mean to tell me that players in an MMO should not do a piece of content that gives them massive rewards so that others can have a shot at it? Good luck telling 5K players to do that and that's the smallest number of active players in a world, let alone the remaining 500K. Even now with world visiting restricted, a significant number can't do the FATE (simple math). The speed of which the content progressed is not correlated to the ability of a player participating in a content or not. Whether your world progressed slowly or quickly, it all depends solely on if you are available in the 10hrs span after the progress finishes. The dev team knew this was gonna happen. People AFK in Eureka and other worlds for boss FATEs for the rewards. What would prevent them from doing this in a zone that doesn't have an AFK timer and with a known time for the FATE to pop?

The rewards are not really massive. 500 skyscripts and a crafter/gatherer level isn't something so massive that everyone in a datacenter must get in on it when you can compare it to what a level 70 or 80 crafter+gatherer can make in an hour. What was massive was that due to world visiting a limited number could semi-monopolize the FATEs to potentially get up to 8k skyscripts and 16 crafter/gatherer levels every time the phases advanced in the datacenter.

This was a Tragedy of the Commons caused by a greedy few who wanted the new mount and other rewards as soon as possible with the least amount of work.

This is where I'll stop you. People do care because of the rewards. You have a mount, hairstyle, glamours and an emote. Why do you think people already stressed the servers using the world visit? Because they wanted to get these rewards ASAP. Else why do you think low population servers progressed this fast with world visit? Because people wanted the FATEs to pop up. And that is evident when you see how slowly these severs are progressing now. And the fact that you can be on any DoL/Doh regardless of level to get the reward, then a significant majority will have interest in the FATE. They don't care about contributing to the progress, hence why they will AFK when the FATE timer draws near.

Stop. The low pop servers are not progressing much slower than before wanderers were sealed off. Stage 3 has a much larger supply requirement than the previous 2 phases. If you compare their relative speeds servers are maintaining the same relative pace. The wanderers were more than likely taking up space more than they were actively helping. It is looking like every Server will have completed all 3 stages of phase 1 before reset on Tuesday.

And if you're going to say people don't care about these rewards, allow me to remind you about every Eureka thread regarding the items that you can only get there and and asked for them to be obtainable another way (even though they can be sold at the MB but for high prices).

No, I am not saying that people do not care about the rewards. There is a fair portion of players that are not rushing to get all the rewards day 1/week 1. Most of those currently with the new mount are those who abused the world visit system and locked locals out of the FATEs in their own greed.

So I really doubt that 10-15% only are interested given the history we have regarding players' desire for such rewards. Maybe 10-15% would actually put the effort to farm the scripts for the rewards, but the majority would jump on the FATEs with its high return in a span of 3min without any effort to craft.

You do realize that that the forums are only visited by less than 10% of the player base and that a smaller fraction of that 10% post?

Those 9.3k (active) players on Mateus contain a vast majority that do not interact with anything but the MSQ and/or daily dungeons and regularly let their subs lapse. If the amount of active players on a Mateus were spread evenly over the day and all were trying to participate very few would be able to access the Firmament as there would be over 380 players trying to cram themselves into the instance at any time. Outside the most populated servers no one currently is having trouble accessing the Firmament.