Chocobo during Queue - "Difficult"

[Naus]

I think some of it comes from being somewhat of a party member. The reason, I think, is that you can only have one companion. Would the SMN choose to have the chocobo out if it took the companion slot? I don't think so. So right there that would be a problem to moving them to complete companion.
Another problem of turning them into a compaion would make them, technically, usable in a dungeon. Yes there is a work around of saying that an entity with a data value of what ever the chocobo's data value is, is not allowed to appear in the dungeon.

Now you are saying, "Couldn't they do that with the current system?" It would probably require a HUGE rework of the instance infrastructure. When you zone into a dungeon you are technically in a different party than the one in the world, due to the world and the dungeons being on different servers. When you enter a dungeon you leave the world, now if you where to do that with a chocobo that would force it to despawn since you are not there for it to follow. Now when you zone back into the world it puts you back in your original party, but with the chocobo despawn it has left the party since it does not exist in the world nor does it have a persistent presence in the world.


Well that is pretty much all speculation on my part based on what I've felt of the game and somewhat complete knowledge on coding practices. I would like to end of saying I can be wrong, I probably am wrong since I have not seen the code, nor do I know their codding practices. But this is what I think is the case.

[Bigpurpleharness]

Comp Sci here, anyone who claims to know without knowing their current code is lying, as the first reply said. If you programmed the functions with that in mind it would be trivial, but when you have multiple systems relying on each other, and you never thought of it, it becomes increasingly hard. It's always possible, but being a business, it's a large cost/benefit ratio question.

[Hulan]

Except that programming does allow for going back and tweaking previous work to facilitate the new concepts. While not impossible, it's a little harder to do changes like that for physical items without making previous work wasted. That said, I'm going to repeat this: I doubt this is a problem the programmers caused, the issue was created during the design phase for chocobo companions and should have been considered/planned for then.

It was a metaphor. One that I thought at the time was quite clever, but clearly not. I am - in fact - a professional developer (though I will grant those who claim as much are a dime a dozen around here); and while I do not claim to be perfect at my job, I am very good at it. You can, of course, go back and change old code, but doing so carries its fair share of risks. What you say has merit, but you cannot plan for everything, and what is done is done. Saying that they should have seen the need for companions to not conflict with the duty finder system is all well and good, but they did not, and I find it quite believable that it is now in a state where changing it would take fundamental reconstruction of at least one subsystem to accomplish.

Making something "right" the first time requires a complete understanding of the final product. Unfortunately, MMOs do not have a final product; they continue to evolve and change. One lack of foresight early on can have rippling effects for years. I am not so quick to forgive people for slipshod code, but I also understand the magnitude of the undertaking an MMO represents. Getting everything right is nigh on impossible, and even a seemingly good design decision can have unexpected consequences. Does that exempt them from the culpability of not foreseeing this issue? Maybe, probably not. But that wasn't the question. The question was, "Is it really that hard?". And the answer to that is: almost certainly. This issue involves a lot more than just "Is the chocobo in the party?" It touches on fundamental server architecture questions that we don't even know the question to find the answer to.

[Menriq]

Comp Sci here, anyone who claims to know without knowing their current code is lying, as the first reply said. If you programmed the functions with that in mind it would be trivial, but when you have multiple systems relying on each other, and you never thought of it, it becomes increasingly hard. It's always possible, but being a business, it's a large cost/benefit ratio question.

Pretty much this. We can speculate, but without seeing the codebase, it's throwing darts in the dark.

[Valthein]

I just don't see why they don't remove the chocobo from the party list, put it in its own group say "Guardian" link everything you can do with party to the guardian slot that way you can que up. as you que and DF pops, it could do a quick check/withdraw guardian allowing you to select enter or it could phase your chocobolink like how you zone in to a city.