Why does this patch feel rushed like when the game was released?

[Kopuno]

Not 50, but <3 this patch! Restored alot of my faith in SE (well, for the most part) Although I can see people not liking change after being in a sweet spot for so long. Specially after it makes things more complicated to achieve things that were much easier accomplished at the begining.

[Betelgeuzah]

Rushed, what?

There's few bugs to be found, everything is functional.

Some features are meant to be complemented by later patch additions.

Nothing in this patch is rushed. Everything works according to the big picture.

The only flaw is that the patch didn't come any sooner.

[Jennestia]

This patch most definitely wasn't rushed and it was stated that 1.18 is the start of everything and refinements as well as more additions and etc will happen through 1.20 and beyond as this first set of changes is very large in scope -- It pays to actually read what Yoshida and the reps write about.

[Malakhim]

This was the rough first draft patch. Expect balancing and more content in 1.19 and beyond.

Assuming we don't all grow old and gray before then...

[Jabo]

1.18 never should be the perfect patch.
It was the start of a series of patches. Especially if major things are still in the pipeline (Stats, Class System, Materia)
People can't expect 1.18 to be the answer of ALL the balancing problems.

We have to wait. A least till 1.20 or whenever they finish their end summer outline.
That's were things start to get serious.

[Raikki]

Please explain this bit to me, I have not done any gathering leves yet but I'm used to avoiding agressive mobs in my levs. Iron lake has always had Kabolds for it's leve area for Botany at least.

It's a lot worse than the Iron Lake kobolds, by far. There's a mining node for "Mining Treespeak" that's trapped directly behind an Ixali (rank 48-ish) encampment. There is no way to access it other than running directly through at least half a dozen Ixali (no matter how you try to approach it), and the node is within their territory so they will not deaggro you. Even if you have a rank 50 combat class to switch to and dispose of the Ixali (you need to kill at least 5 of them), there's nowhere safe to stand to tap the node without being interrupted by a respawn (they respawn very fast).

[Airget]

I'm assuming SP is messed up since you were supposed to solo with leves and thats not really possible at the moment.

Gathering leves are messed up because they send you to spots packed full of 40+ agro mobs

Hate is messed up and people are having problems taking down the major NMs

there are still issues with the game freezing or disconnecting and you get booted from a raid if you do.

mp seems unbalanced (this is understandable since they said they would balance out the game)

While I fully understand the difficulties of implementing a new system there is no real excuse for sticking a bunch of high agro mobs right where a gathering leve is supposed to be done. All that shows is that they didn't consider that when creating the patch which essentially means it is rushed. I realize people will say "give them time, 1.19 is the fix-it-all patch" but honestly, its been almost a year. The quality of patches is continuously disappointing. So please in the future, just postpone release for a month and fix things. the little things DO matter and do effect how people perceive the game.

You have to keep in context of how much they worked with for patch 1.18, it's not as simple as other patches so errors are to be noted. Think about it, with a game changing concept like "Auto-battle" do you think it would be wiser to hold off releasing it while people are still using stamina or to release it with bugs so that people can adjust to auto-battle and give input.

Say they decided to delay this VU by 2 week, you would have the following things happen
-People losing faith in the game
-People still annoyed by the mp and "over-nerfed" feel of mages
-Mob placement

However since the patch is released they can look on the forums and analyze where they can fix things such as if they relook at mages and see they made MP cost to high they can fix it, and all the complaints about high level mobs in gathering areas should be fixed soon as well.

For this game at least for this patch the best move was to release it once it was ready and fine tuned to the best of their ability. The rest comes down to unforseen bugs or issues. Changing auto-battle is a huge change effecting a wide variety of concepts such as mob difficulty, abilities, animation and weapon delays. Consider how many mobs are in the game, all the abilities needing new recast timers and mp tweaks, and all the weapons that needed to be tweaked to "delay".

Just need to give them time never know it's possible that this week they may patch things up a tad to fix some notable issues since it would be a mistake to wait til 1.19.

[Seif]

Not enough staff and no leader that can demand more from the team.

6 months to build new gear?! Seriously? How do they manage to put more gear in XI with all the new content with a whole lot more of variables to work with?

Don't give me that HD graphics excuse I've seen entire character models built within a week with competent 3d modelers and I'm sure SE workers are some of the best in the industry.

Compared to XI gear in XIV is multiple times easier to make because the 3d models are just scaled copies of one another whereas in XI Galkas and Tarutarus had actually different 3d models because of their tails and ears. In XIV only 2 gear sets need to be made and usually the female version is almost the same.

I understand that the battle tweaking takes a lot of time but I'm constantly surprised by how little visual tweaks the patches bring.

Even the potato sack-gear could be easily made to look better with a more interesting texture and some 3d sculpting to the normal map to make the surface more individual.

XIII-2 is being made with a lot of the assets from the previous game and rest of the staff is doing only a few PSP games. Can't you please utilize the 3d modelers a bit more?

The landscape doesn't need to be completely turned upside down at once but at lease seeing that you're working on it would go a long way to boost the confidence in this game's future.

Having said that I really like the new quests. It feels like the first time there's content that doesn't feel cheap and the new music tracks are really good addition to the game.

But the 3d modelers really need someone to crack a whip on them to make them work at least on a decent speed. Optionally if I'm completely wrong and there's only one 3d artists working on this game I'd really suggest hiring more.

[Jennestia]

6 months to build new gear?! Seriously? How do they manage to put more gear in XI with all the new content with a whole lot more of variables to work with?

When you make a comparison like this you can't ignore the obvious - A lot of XI's new gear are modified versions of older gear. For example, the Nebula gear set is the same model as the Errant gear set; The Alcide's Harness is the same as the THF Job Specific Armor, Dragon Harness, the Brand New gear set from Voidwatchers are modified versions of the Assault Breastplate (been around since 2004), the Iggira BLM JSE gear (been around since 2004) and a modified Denali armor set, which been around since 2006.

Basically they take old models and reformat them into something new, which is what most MMORPG developer does including Blizzard -- They don't build from scratch most of the time. Also remember that XIV's armor sets are varied based on materials used, which means created multiple copies of the same armor to have a different look or texture, which you normally can call easily without making a new model, but XIV's armor are just more than a head, body, hands legs and feet piece, they're multiple pieces thereof.

Don't give me that HD graphics excuse I've seen entire character models built within a week

Prove it. Show us said Character models, with full animations implemented, to the highest graphical standard PC allows that was created in a simple week along with their documentation proving that was started on Monday, and completed on friday, because I've seen them take months to years and I actually work in this industry.

There's a reason the player model is the most detailed and NPCs tend to be less detailed you know, and it's not laziness I can assure you.

[Forbin]

It's a lot worse than the Iron Lake kobolds, by far. There's a mining node for "Mining Treespeak" that's trapped directly behind an Ixali (rank 48-ish) encampment. There is no way to access it other than running directly through at least half a dozen Ixali (no matter how you try to approach it), and the node is within their territory so they will not deaggro you. Even if you have a rank 50 combat class to switch to and dispose of the Ixali (you need to kill at least 5 of them), there's nowhere safe to stand to tap the node without being interrupted by a respawn (they respawn very fast).

someone obviously never played FFXI and never had to sneak/invis harvest.. dieing @ Mt. Zyhlom with no real easy way back.. BOOO HOO! it makes it fun.. figure it out.