Devs, please make job crystals in lv 31+ content mandatory.

[TaleraRistain]

In software development, and of course in other places in life, there's a concept of "low hanging fruit". These are tasks that may not necessarily have a high return on investment to the company or the system. But often these tasks are low effort and are a nice QoL for users or a morale boost for developers. This can be very nice when you're bogged down on a big project because you're getting *something* out there. I suspect this is what happened with the viera where developers put in their own time. It was nice for players but also a development morale booster when they could see how happy players were and know they had done something that was really appreciated. I'm similarly pleased when I'm not fixing a bug for my users but adjusting something they've had to make do with for years to make it easier for them.

If this alteration fits into the "low hanging fruit" designation, then I would support their work on it no matter if it's common or not. If there are factors we don't know about that make it more complicated, then I can understand having to measure the effort required against the return on investment and utilizing whether it's something that happens a lot as a factor of that analysis.

There do seem to be other places similar concepts are used, but since I've been there before, I'm not making any assumptions on that. It's not always easy or even possible to implement the same logic in one place that you have in another place. Especially if you're working on spaghetti code crafted long ago by someone else.

[GeminiReed]

Especially if you're working on spaghetti code crafted long ago by someone else.

How badly broken do you think the XIV codebase is?

From an end-user perspective the code quality is nothing short of amazing when compared to their peers. I know that's not saying much but XIV is one of the few games that achieve the stability that I expect from a paid service. I've never once ran into anything that screamed "lack of unit testing" much less lack of QA. Yes there are subtle things here and there and I take issue with many of their design decisions but functionally the game is solid.

You don't get there if adding an extra flag check causes the server to crash or if the code base is so byzantine that only the original developer can understand it. Whatever spaghetti code they inherited is long gone by now.

[linayar]

They said they did not have 1.0 codes to begin with (other than the odd codes here and there like the one that affected Endwalker's queue). The problem is they had to rush 2.0's development to release it on the PS3, so it's probably not an ideal starting place, but over time, I do think they've managed further development well enough.

The bigger issue now is they're not willing to delay new content release unless they have to, so background fixes or improvements have to take longer to fit the schedule.

Even now, with the longer patch schedule, it's to give the team a break, so they won't have more time to work on anything they want to.

[TaleraRistain]

How badly broken do you think the XIV codebase is?

From an end-user perspective the code quality is nothing short of amazing when compared to their peers. I know that's not saying much but XIV is one of the few games that achieve the stability that I expect from a paid service. I've never once ran into anything that screamed "lack of unit testing" much less lack of QA. Yes there are subtle things here and there and I take issue with many of their design decisions but functionally the game is solid.

You don't get there if adding an extra flag check causes the server to crash or if the code base is so byzantine that only the original developer can understand it. Whatever spaghetti code they inherited is long gone by now.

It doesn't have to be broken to be complicated. I work with a rock solid system that's 30 years old. It's not the easiest thing in the world to modify things because of how they're integrated together. This program might access this data structure while this similar one is not accessing it and it would take all these hours of code to add this one field.

It doesn't have to be 1.0 code to be something they did early on somewhere that worked but wasn't quite future proofed. So since I know that situation, I give them the benefit of the doubt.

[MiaShino]

How badly broken do you think the XIV codebase is?

Without access to source code can only speculate.

Engine (Luminous Engine/Crystal Engine hybrid) - Rather good! Well, mostly the Luminous Engine part. It has excellent scalability across wide range of hardware with decent multicore parity. Can tell someone with major experience worked on this. To achieve steady framerate with 24 others on screen on the aging Piledriver architecture took skill. Bloodborne choked rendering one fuzzy boss on PS4.

Engine for mmo - Can praise the engine for being stable or well designed (before attempting to integrate stoopid garbage immerse audio) but tis not designed for mmos. In same way Frostbite engine twas not designed for RPG yet is still acceptable engine. This requires new code to be written so that it can function as mmo engine and where one dev team conflicts with another.

Current FFXIV dev team - Punching waaaayyyyy above the pay grade if that is how saying goes. With code bolted onto otherwise reasonable engine that is so so very sloppy at the times it boggles the mind. It would take pages to list all examples but could!
1.) Failure to understand floating point rounding for spatial audio emitters pegging FP
units and overwhelming infinity mesh bandwith.
2.) Too many audio channels especially for ambient emitters with no option to adjust
3.) No login within engine instead handled by launcher running dated MSHTML and IE
4.) Horrible object culling often removing hunt targets two yalms away and other
players while continuing to tessellate fricken rocks fifty
yalms away.
5.) UI lifted straight from late 90s in desperate need of modernization with menu
after menu after menu enough to make EvE Online players
warm in the cheeks.
6.) Terrible awful down right diabolical latency interpolation and needlessly strict
client side sanity checking (not even fully utilized by server).
7.) No client side recovery from latency spike choosing to instead immediately drop
the connection without making re-connection attempt
(90006/90002). Will fail on spikes as low as 250ms.
8.) Poor memory scaling for mmo (though it is getting better)
9.) Pigeonholing themselves by utilizing body model bones for clothing with poor hit
detection resulting in clipping hair or altering character
proportions. 2B bottoms change booty size, some leggings make the thighs way
too thin, etc.
10.) Terribly dated character creator limited by insistence upon certain body types due
to aforementioned pigeonholing. Aion released in 2008
and that character creator bends this one over then takes it for night on the
town.

I could actually continue! Mmhmm!

System administration team - Should have been fired back in 2014 yet somehow persists. Should have been fired again during Endwalker launch.

Q/A team - What Q&A team? Seems the mainline developers also play double duty as Q&A testers... How difficult is it to spin up test environment then peg login server with artificial load to monitor stability?

This is what one neophyte coder sees when playing FF14 for perspective. I whiteness many issues that given enough time I could solve even with limited experience so there is confusion. Modders have actually addressed many issues already with no access to source using simple DX11 injection method.

Worked on many emulators for other stuffs (mostly WoW). Our small group ran into many issues FF14 dev team is currently facing. We understood how many IO requests inventory access was making. We took immediate steps to solve. It was not fun work but we had no access to Blizzard code or how the servers worked. Had to decrypt packets then approximate what their servers were doing.

Look I fricken love this game and so does much of the extended family but without major overhauls it will not last for ten years. Nope nope nope!

Vulkan support please?

[HisShadowX]

The Job system or the class system is literally a left over of the failed FFXIV 1.0. Think about it, it took years for them to remove the much hated Cross Class System.

I have done this myself where I outleveled everything but didn't do the job quests and go figure I was locked out of important abilities.

At this point to solve this issue is simple unlock the ability once you hit a certain level.

[rainichan]

The Job system or the class system is literally a left over of the failed FFXIV 1.0. Think about it, it took years for them to remove the much hated Cross Class System.

I have done this myself where I outleveled everything but didn't do the job quests and go figure I was locked out of important abilities.

At this point to solve this issue is simple unlock the ability once you hit a certain level.

The cross class system is still in the game, they just updated it so you don't have to level something else to gain the ability, you just... gain the ability at a certain level now.

Having a reminder to go do your final class quest and upgrade from class to job in order to continue in dungeons unless you're in a premade where they don't care would go far for some that it is available to do.

[Voidedge_Ragna]

If you can lock out blue mages from normal dutyfinder, you can find a way to lock out a mrd from a lv 31 dungeon. If they go with a full premade like blues, let em have at it they can run P4S w/o job stones for all i care as long as their not in anything DF related.

A more advanced goal would be to level cap these classes and directly upgrade them via quest, this would basically make it impossible to get rid of your job stone as its fused to you. This is likely way more complicated and not happening.

[Rhysati]

The cross class system is still in the game, they just updated it so you don't have to level something else to gain the ability, you just... gain the ability at a certain level now.

Having a reminder to go do your final class quest and upgrade from class to job in order to continue in dungeons unless you're in a premade where they don't care would go far for some that it is available to do.

It really isn't. There are just 'role' skills that everyone in that role gets. That's to save database space instead of making 4 different versions of something universal like 'Taunt'. It isn't really a holdover anymore so much as it's them trying to keep database bloat under control.

[technole]

Looks like the devs don't agree with the OP.