May 26, 2011 Day#4

Quote Originally Posted by Rhomagus
The only difficult thing to find will be someone arguing to keep it the way it is...
The above quote was from my entry yesterday May 25, 2011. I have only come across one argument for not implementing an open kick system. It was made by Kilta_Firelotus in this thread:

not tpo bump the thread but you guys are kinda being pathetic at this point. They told you what was up. Deal with it. There is alot more coding involed then you might think. And also ffxi never had a remove offline member option. Only a kick from anywhere option that was abused very quickly. I'm kinda happy removing members is a bit hard. Means you need to work harder on making sure the members you add are good.

You guys are letting people bug ya. Honestly how long do you wait before a huge list of people are "inactive" a week a mnth? Preferable id wait 2 mnths and 30 inactive people before letting ppl know of a LS remake.

Here is an idea for members make a temp trial LS and a main LS. When you meet new ppl put them in the temp LS that has a few member from the main, so you get a feeling for people.
What Kilta is asking for here is discretion when choosing linkshell members. I could see this working well for a more goal oriented or themed linkshell but, for a casual/social linkshell, having an open recruitment policy is great not only for existing members but for new players as well. I've heard from a new player the other day, freshly spawned into the Drowning Wench, "I hear this game doesn't get fun until you have a linkshell". This particular player was coming back from a long hiatus playing during Closed/Open beta and the initial CE/SE release. A friend of his had promised him a spot in her linkshell so he came back. Experienced (as in players who've already played the game and are giving it a second shot) new players are cynical at the outset, along with people who have done their research. Maybe I should take this comment with a grain of salt but if the statement is true, there is word floating around out there in the internet that states "In XIV, in order to have fun you must have a linkshell."

What happens to that player if they need to take a break and when they come back, their linkshell is broken? We had an LS member the other day who was paranoid that they had done something wrong because when they came back, they no longer had a linkshell. This situation could have been easily avoided. Obviously this member had enough sense to come back to the LS website and make that statement and ask for another pearl, but I've noticed many members assume either one of two things in this situation.

1.) The current LS is inactive because everyone quit.
2.) They were booted from their linkshell.

Rarely do people think of the third option.

3.) The LS had to reform because many of it's members quit, or moved to another linkshell, or became full (128 members) and had to make room for new recruits.

The Aes Sedai Tower on Besaid currently employs the method of a "starter" LS as Kilta suggested. It serves its purpose, to a degree, but also has the added side effect of causing people to feel alienated from the rest of the group. Not all members in the Aes Sedai Tower have the starter LS so when a new player has a question, it has a high chance of falling on deaf ears. Equipping the starter LS is on a volunteer basis and serves mainly as a "Mentor" icon if you're familiar with FFXI's system. On Besaid, some players actually carry a wide variety of RP/Casual/NM hunting LSs. They don't have room for a casual LS and it's sister shell as well. What is being proposed, by many people on these very forums, is a much simpler solution.

Give linkshell administrators the ability to kick members at will.

I am willing to concede to the point of showing discretion with recruitment policies, but only in certain contextual situations. It shouldn't be forced on the entire populace as a whole especially when there is a much simpler solution available.

This is the only argument I could find against incorporating a basic remove command that is not proximity based. It is also grounded from the annoyance of multiple threads on the same topic, and not necessarily the topic itself. The only people I see "speaking out" against having linkshell options aren't necessarily grounded in the topic itself, but stem from people making multiple threads on the same topic, which unfortunately, is off topic.

Another indirect support of keeping the administration options the way they are is the idea that it detracts from other more important issues like the battle system. In fact, this point was made by Rukkirii a Community Rep:

The development team is aware of your concerns but due to the fact that their current priority is the battle system, changes can’t be made right away, but they are thinking about doing this after. In order to implement these features, they would like to first implement text commands before this.

Please continue to send in your ideas for the dev. team!
Again, it's not even really support for keeping things the way they are, but more a reason as to why things can't be done about this issue at this time. The above quote is actually from a Community Rep. We can assume, if we so choose, that she is a reputable source.

The following is from Elexia, a player, not an SE representative. We do not need to assume that this is reputable as it is not an official statement from SE staff. It does offer a hint of insight as to what might be holding up SE in regards to the implementation of a simple "kick from anywhere" feature but at the end of the day, it's only speculation. If this same point were to be reiterated by an SE rep themselves the problem would surely be a little easier to swallow.

It's a programming issue as much as it is an UI design issue, which both goes hand in hand. Just because there's separate teams doesn't mean they don't intertwine.
If it was a client side interface it would be a simple fix. It's a serverside interface which means they have to do a bit more and why there's such limitations to begin with. It's why most MMOs settle on client side interfaces.
Both of these quotes are, again, from a player, not a developer. While grounded from a logical standpoint, and related to an earlier interview with Tanaka in regards to the inner workings of the Crystal Tools engine, we can't say for sure that linkshell administration options fall under this restriction. Nor can we overlook the fact that we have many other things that have been implemented prior to such a feature such as:

1.) A /display head off text command
2.) The enlargement of monsters
3.) A color coded equipment degradation system
4.) Lowering of anima depletion
5.) Addition of exclamation points to mark quest NPCs
6.) Several new targeting modes (that still don't fix the problem of targeting things right next to you)


I'm well aware that there are many threads asking for more linkshell commands and administration options. This thread was made with an even more humble goal in mind. Many posts have been made saying something along the lines of "I'm afraid to ask for anything beyond the most basic of things, just an option to kick people from the LS remotely is all we need for now." There have been requests beyond that but this thread asks for even less.

Linkshell Options needs it's own Dev-tag.

The community is asking that this be put on a higher priority from the development team. I'm pretty confident this issue is well known amongst the community team as they've already responded to it, but also remember, that in that response Rukkirii asked us to:

Please continue to send in your ideas for the dev. team!
Telling players to stop doing so is actually not what SE wants, if I'm to assume that Rukkirii is an SE representative. I don't see why I shouldn't. If anyone can come up with a good reason as to why I should then, maybe then I'll concede that people should stop posting about it, but until someone is able to thoroughly convince me I'll continue to post in this thread, and any other thread I see that covers the same topic.