Ask Questions for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XLII! (Exploring Patch 4.2)

[NoboruSouma]

Will we ever see changes to hunts in general or will you only add one S per zone and a bunch of A's and B's for the rest of the expansion? Why is hunting seemingly an aspect of the game that gets no recognition at all?

While it's probably not your focus at all there's still a strong community for hunts. But while you make changes for probably every aspect in the game over the whole expansion I've never seen you make new hunts or changes at all. It's a core mechanic you seemingly lost interest in once the expansion was released and yet hundreds if not thousands participate in spawning, searching and finally killing hunts every single day. There is no official support and we rely on a third-party website to keep track of hunts.

Some hunts are also neither fun nor interesting to spawn. Please Square don't forget a part of a community in your game just because we might be the minority. It would be refreshing to see changes or additional content for the hunting community.

Adding to this:

The Hunt Community, or the Spawn & Theorycraft Community to be more clear, has given many many suggestions as to how The Hunt could be improved or how it could be made more challenging, simplified in some cases because some triggers are too heavily RNG based or any of that sort.

As Luna said, we may be a minority, and there are many who even take the work of the spawners for granted - and the time that goes into theorycrafting and testing out every last bit of a spawn is immense.

So:
Could you take some notes from the Hunt Community to make some improvements and recognize that we are in fact a part of the game?
For example: Adjust the health & strength of S Ranks to the amount of players present, or have them be scaling like FATEs do. Sprouts and New Players that run through a A or S Rank die anyway - we then explain it to them and more than once the reaction was: "Oh cool, can't wait to get to a higher level to beat them too!" - so there's no excuse naming that. More than once they even fight with us even though they don't really get a reward other than beating up a huge monster.

Make S Ranks more challenging and not a one minute or even a few seconds fight if enough players smash theirs skills on them.
We get stronger and stronger with each cycle - don't let this be a thing you just feed with new Hunts for new Areas in new Expansions and ignore it the rest of the time.

[Namikaze-Kirito]

Lately, there’s been discrimination against those who choose to play SAM for end game raiding. I had an instance where a party had removed me from an O6S weekly clear group just because of the class I choose to play even though all criteria in their party finder had been met.

Is there anything in the works to retool all classes so that they’re balanced? It’s been such a pain to go through this with each and every raid tier beginning with 2.X, and the idea of “balancing” is not living up to what you explain it to be. Just because SAM can’t buff the party should not mean that it isn’t viable for raiding. Unless you’re one of those people constantly checking FFLogs just to see where you rank, a decent party comp with good variety is more than enough to get through most content. But this game is community based, and sadly the community perception is going to discriminate against players who just want to get through content like everyone else, but can’t because of this.

[RangePup]

I'm sure it has been mentioned several times already, but could we please get a comment and action on the group who used loopholes and abused the housing system to buy up nearly an entire ward?

[Squintina]

What are the chances of a legacy server with 1.23b that would reset periodically (every year)?
Yes I know that was a "failure" and the game was once given a chance to be revived, but that was back when it was fresh in the current players' minds.

This, instead, would be for people who've joined FF14 more recently and are curious what it was like (at its best), and because we're all aware that it had issues, our expectations would be low and just "for fun". It'd be great if it was like a temporary server and based on how many achievements were acquired, it'd give real rewards to claim when the server rest. Think of it like a PVE version of "seasons".

[DarienChiba]

Some players are worried additional Wardrobe space or Glamour Plates will be purchased through Mogstation, can you briefly confirm or deny this?

[polyhedral]

Is it really that hard to tie one house to one IP address? You change the rules, they work around them, screwing over the rest of the homeless community. Or how about, just changing the entire housing situation period? It's ridiculous, and you've already deleted one home of mine for taking a break, something Yoshi P encourages us to do on the often! I'm sorry I got sick and had to live in a freaking hospital for a few months? HA!

Man, I wonder about the thought processes both players and the devs have about the housing issues a lot.

Absolutely, ridiculous and absurd.

[XiXiQ]

Is it really that hard to tie one house to one IP address?

I can answer that now. It's pretty much impossible. ISPs routinely change their customers IPs (particularly residential), plenty of households have more than one legitimate player, and a lot of players use a VPN to speed up their connection, or for security/privacy reasons. So the technical answer is no - it needs to be per service account.

[XiXiQ]

Please remove party requirements from the diadem. You can die of old age trying to get into it.

[Miscreant]

Is there any chance that you could look into integrating mouse over spells/actions more effectivly?
Currently we have to write macros to use mouse over features and because of this we are unable to queue spells/actions in the same way we would with regular ones.

Mouseovers are a great quality of life feature, but because of the inability to queue your spells/skills they can become ineffective at higher levels of play.

[Mozerlam]

Are there any plans to be able to take our Squadron Members out as a companion so we can have something else other than a Chocobo?