Regarding Firmament Titles For 5.3

[Canadane]

Now, those players are going to be pushed out by the hardcore crafters again.

That, or bots. :\

[Lecru]

That, or bots. :\

Honestly it'll probably be bots. Even though I don't thnk they can 100% the crafts reliably. So the hardcore might still hold the edge

[KageTokage]

Bots can defeat legit crafters with a quantity > quality approach by just buying thousands of cheap mats then spamming a macro that barely scrapes minimum quality for several hours a day (And I already noticed some of the usual suspects on my server doing such both during the rankings and after). Which is partly why I wish they made it so that there's no cap to how much collectability/points you can get from an expert craft as it would make manual crafting even more rewarding.

I really doubt that they haven't managed to work out a logic that produces considerably better results then a macro by now, though.

[Liam_Harper]

I really doubt that they haven't managed to work out a logic that produces considerably better results then a macro by now, though.

Comments I found from a quick google search (won't post links to sites that break ToS)

"-New Crafting Solver algorithm is in the final stage of optimization.
The next update will contain 70+ crafting abilities and 80*** Expert Recipes support. It will be released in a few days.

-80*** Expert Recipes are supported.

-Thank you again, <removed> developers, for this update. As of today I managed to finish all 8 crafting classes for the 500k score achievement."

Honestly, this is beyond a joke now.

[JeffMoreau]

As someone who was also able to rank as a Top 12 in the first period:
I don't want to do this again. I don't want to sit around for hours on end flying in a circle. It's not fun, it's not healthy and it certainly wasn't what was told to us in the beginning when the rankings came out.

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

I started reading the whole thread but stopped mid way because the same arguments are being repeated again, so I'll just throw this on top of the pile hoping it will help (splitting in several posts due to character limit):

Please don't change the titles.

A. People who already got top 12 will do everything to get into top 12 again, this has been confirmed by several people here and on other platforms.

B. Players who didn't get to compete or get to top 12 were hopeful to get a chance this time and had made plans based on previous statements regarding titles and seasons. This new announcement makes all their plans crumble to dust because of A and the new bot wave that several people have mentioned already.

C. Even if it the various statements previously made by YoshiP and the team can be interpreted differently depending on the translation (something people tried to argue here) the descriptions of achievements and the item to get them objectively state what the intentions were:

Writ of Beatification
Use to gain the “Divine Ascension” achievement for Season One.

Divine Ascension
Place between 1st and 12th in the skybuilder rankings.
Title: Saint of the Firmament

Please note the absence of "for Season One" in the description of Divine Ascension.
All the achievements exclusive to the second stage include "for the second phase of the Ishgardian restoration" in their description.
It is therefore logical that the titles were originally intended to be non-exclusive, and based on these descriptions alone people have planned and expected for the titles to stay the same.

D. Crafting points might have been based on skill/efficiency, but Gathering points there's only so much you can do to be more efficient, and then it all comes down to how much time you have to spend in Diadem (and luck in the case of Fisher). It's creating a real gap between people who simply don't have time to play 24h/24 (because they work, study, or don't have the health conditions to do so) and players who can. Again, it's not ranking based on skill or knowledge, it's ranking based on personal time and health. Here's something YoshiP said about respecting people's time and health a while back.

(1/4)

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

E. It just doesn't make any sense that PvP titles based on crafting and gathering (and time and health as mentioned in D) would be exclusive, when the Feast titles are not. Sure Feast has exclusive rewards for each season, and it's often the same people at the top (coincidence?). But it's also a lot more skill based (I won't deny you need a lot of time as well) and even if you don't get to top 1, 10 or 100 you still get Wolf Collars and a title (the same for every season) if you've climbed high enough in tiers. So why should this be any different when skill isn't even part of the equation for some jobs?
(Side note: there's lots to be said about the Feast ranking and matchmaking systems and how it's detrimental to new challengers when previous top rankers still sit at the top tiers at the beginning of a new season, but that's a debate for another time)


F. As a completionist myself, I'm really against unique titles, items, emotes and achievements you'll have no chance to obtain ever again because you simply were not there at the right time with the right resources. Every single time I go in Diadem I think about how the previous Diadem achievements and Notorious Monster Slayer title have disappeared and how little notice we were given to try to get them before that.
It does make a lot of sense for Legacy achievements and titles (to show you're a veteran player and supported SE throughout these times), or for actual PvP like Feast (and The Feast Regional Championships 2018 titles) but otherwise I think there should be a system put in place to get those limited items/titles/etc some other way, the way seasonal items are put on Mog Station/FFXIV Online Store one year after their respective event, or reintroduced through new achievements and events.
I'm really happy that the Dragon Quest and Yo-kai Watch events are coming back because I couldn't get those rewards back then either because I wasn't playing the game yet or I couldn't for personal reasons. The various Moogle Treasure Trove events are also great for this reason! But I'd also love to get a chance to obtain the Shiva and Ultima emotes, the minions you get with artbooks and CDs, and all those exclusive things that we can't get anymore at the moment. I care a lot more about the in-game items/titles/emotes than the merchandising and it's just sad when you can't get them anymore because it was a limited release or you just can't afford to spend this much money on top of your subscription.

(2/4)

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

G. Some people just want titles for the glamour and roleplay. I personally want Saint of the Firmament for my AST because it fits really well with the image I have of this job and its relation to Ishgard. Saint Ascendant isn't too bad either for my case but I'm sure others wouldn't be as tolerant. I was planning to get this title for this reason and prepared accordingly, so suddenly learning this wasn't an option anymore was really disappointing.


There are tons of other arguments to be made, but I'd also like to consider why they want to introduce this change in the first place, and what could be put in place instead:

1. Keep the competition high
I think this is something that will happen either way, because now people know what the rewards are and are interested in them (something that wasn't the case at the beginning of Season One, I only started competing after the rewards were announced). And if the hardcore players already got their rewards, the people who didn't bother to try to rank up because they didn't want to compete against them will be more likely to compete in next seasons. There's also going to be tons of new players coming with the new free trial expansion and the current 50% sale on Shadowbringers.

2. Keep a steady pace for the restoration progress on each server
It's no secret that some servers (Spriggan, Twintania) were really behind with restoration (mostly due to a lower population and less interest in crafting), and I could see that being discouraging for players on those servers, and an issue the dev team would like to solve. I think it's possible some players may move their characters to less populated servers to be able to compete against less players, so this could solve part of the issue as well. It's also worth noting that during the first stage of the restoration the issue was opposite, the whole data center would raid every server for their FATEs, not giving a chance to local players to join their own restoration effort.
What I think would solve the former without creating the latter is to introduce a "Firmament Mentorship" system where once the ranking season is over and your server has finished all the restoration steps you can apply to help other servers with their progress (with a limited amount of mentors per server). The skyward points would be added to the progress bar of the server in question as well as your personal score, and you are not allowed to enter the instance when a FATE is scheduled. You just progress towards your own score (to eventually reach 500k points in every job, something some players have already achieved and others are currently working on anyway), while helping other servers with their progress, without making it impossible for local players to do their part. I can't see any disadvantage to such a system as of yet, only benefits for both struggling servers and mentors who just want to get up to 500k points and farm scrips.

(3/4)

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

3. Reward hardcore crafters for their hard work
They already got their reward in Season One, and if not they will get it in Season Two either way. Omnicrafters are also leading the Marketboard and have been making tons of profit everyday regardless of the rankings, so I think it's really time to let other, less experienced people get their chance. We're talking about a small percentage of players who are already profiting from the vast majority, it may not be as glorious and visible as a Feast title but their efforts are already rewarded in other ways.

This ended up being way longer than I wanted and given how the Diadem thread never got a reaction I have no idea if this will have any impact, but at least I got this out of my chest on a platform the dev team can read lol

(4/4)

[KageTokage]

Comments I found from a quick google search (won't post links to sites that break ToS)

Honestly, this is beyond a joke now.

I find it cute how they say "managed" as though they felt there was some kind of effort involved.

As someone who's trying to get the pteranodon legit, it seriously pisses me off that there are so many people out there are going to get it before me or already have it because of their cheating.

They can't take away the feeling of satisfaction from knowing I got through a honest effort, but they kill the other half of its value which is the prestige factor.