Please Implement Auto-Reclaim on Disconnect (90% success, 10% failure)

[Sibyll]

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I was listing PS3 because whenever anything gets brought up about something not being implemented that's usually the excuse.

That aside, I still do not see why saving Quality/Progress made on a synth along with the current crafting related buffs you have active is any more cumbersome to the servers than all the saving it does for your character every time you change equipment, meld, dye swap, glamour, change zones, trade, purchase/sell items from npc vendors, kill a mob, I could go on and on.

You could make the argument you are trying to make as to why this would overload the servers about literally thousands of other shit in the game already that causes the game to remember what state your character was in. I really think people are just making up excuses for the developers for some inexplicable reason. Have the developers ever actually said this is the reason why they can't do this? If so please link an example of a developer posting about this issue.

It sounds really asinine that the servers can't handle logging less than a dozen numerical values for the status of a craft for every player on the server (an unlikely scenario give most people don't craft let alone simultaneously) when the same server clearly has to already log far more crap for the entire server population on a continual basis.

[Alahra]

Have the developers ever actually said this is the reason why they can't do this? If so please link an example of a developer posting about this issue.

Not about this specific issue, no, but they've mentioned it for others (namely inventory space, sometime within the last few live letters, as I recall--though it might have been an interview with Yoshi). If the concern applies to one concern about server communication, it would apply to others, though not perhaps to the same degree. I'm not making excuses for them so much as trying to suggest why they may not have done this already.

There are also likely technical limitations, as the game seems to reset buffs as a general rule whenever a character is disconnected from the server. Fixing that so that crafts could continue across a disconnect would mean rewriting something that's likely foundational in the code, and rewriting code is always tricky (if you ever played WoW, you might recall Paladins randomly having the ability to summon a black Kodo mount if they specc'd 3/5 in a certain talent that had nothing to do with mounts because of some other, completely unrelated, change).

Games like this are incredibly complicated batches of code and sometimes what seems like a simple solution from one perspective ends up being anything but simple in the long run. (As another example, FFXI essentially cannot go above level 99 because of fundamentals in the code that were set some 15 years ago limiting the value of character level to two digits--increasing the level cap would require a massive undertaking as a result.)

A more likely example solution is some sort of NPC that will hold/duplicate a set of mats for us for a fee for say 30 minutes. Make it have a gil cost or some other limit so it's used mainly for big synths. The NPC could hold the mats in reserve, perhaps establishing some sort of check (not unlike a quest) to see if we've actually made the item we set out to make. If the item is made, the NPC's back up items disappear. If not, up until that 30 minutes is up, we can reclaim the items if they're lost because of a disconnect. The check would also have to watch for failure, too, of course, to prevent abuse.

[Sibyll]

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I understand coding is always tricky and requires a lot of debugging, but continuing to build on a flawed foundation only makes it harder to change later down the line. For example, the fact that dots tick down based on the internal clock of the server and not when the dot was applied (hence why all dots tick at the same time regardless of when they were applied). It's nice that Skill/Spell Speed finally give a damage boost to these, but notice that it's due to increased damage per tick and not due to getting more ticks. You can imagine getting more ticks in per application could have some very interesting interactions with classes that go off of procs, but we don't get to see interesting stat itemization because they'd rather throw a band aid on than fix the underlying problem. I'd think an expansion would be a good time to look at fixing these types of design flaws.

[Alahra]

I understand coding is always tricky and requires a lot of debugging, but continuing to build on a flawed foundation only makes it harder to change later down the line.

I certainly agree--however, the problem is that this entire game is built on a flawed foundation. It's kind of too late, and they have to avoid mucking with things as much as they can because the whole architecture sitting on top of the code from 1.0. The fact that they rescued the game at all is nothing short of a miracle, but to do so, they had to cut a *lot* of corners. Even the game's netcode is still from 1.0 (which probably has a lot to do with all the disconnect issues in the first place). Sadly, they're just not in a position where they can really do major restructurings at this time.

What was WoW crafting like? Just drop in the ingredients, and out comes a finished product? No HQ chance or failure risk?

This is exactly how WoW crafting worked, yes. There was no failure chance. Either your skill was high enough to create an item or it wasn't. If it was, you clicked a button in your recipe list, the materials were subtracted from your inventory, and you got the new thing.