On Ultimate Off Ultimate

[Dezwaan]

I'll agree that the decision to not do another ultimate is upsetting. I haven't cleared either but progged both and from a player side don't see the release timeline as to difficult. Especially since they made the fight shorter but the same difficulty it makes the time needed to clear a lot shorter.

Ultimate over a second level 70 dungeon was great. If that's all that changes with 4.5 I'll be upset. Hopefully they just make a 5th floor difficult omega raid and that helps.

Time before an expansion usually has very little to do and if there is nothing special I'll probably unsub for a few months and enjoy some other games. I love some side content like eureka, PotD, and even diadem (it wasn't as bad as the community makes it out to be). However being able to finish a lot of the content within the first week after patch drops makes the other weeks/months just redoing content. That's why the higher difficulty stuff (Savage, Ultimate, Heaven in High) is great to fill those gaps.

The issue is just going to be what about 4.5 and beyond... Roughly July 2019 for the next expansion ugh

[Dezwaan]

Combined this with my previous post not sure how to delete it.

[Dezwaan]

Snip

I'll disagree with this. Cactbot is just a fancy ui over basic ACT and I don't see how it's cheating aside from things like goals or A11S where ACT could call out the Patten before the animation.

Right now people frequently use discord for VoiP. Someone usually has a timeline to call out mechanics from a second monitor or memory. These tools replace the burden on who calls things out. Cactbot is just timelines and triggers. I see it very similar to voice comms.

However I dislike ACT in general like yoshi. It's a great tool to get better but many in NA focus on there numbers and play less safe/consistent which you see hindering progression especially in ultimate. However it has helps so many people to get better.

Solution? Personal in game ratings after a duty. Not a DPS meter but a ranking based on DPS, mechanics, mitigation that gives you a SS, S, A, B, C, etc. ranking like classical FF games. It'd curb a lot of the need for ACT and help players grow.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I'll disagree with this. Cactbot is just a fancy ui over basic ACT and I don't see how it's cheating aside from things like goals or A11S where ACT could call out the Patten before the animation.

Right now people frequently use discord for VoiP. Someone usually has a timeline to call out mechanics from a second monitor or memory. These tools replace the burden on who calls things out. Cactbot is just timelines and triggers. I see it very similar to voice comms.

However I dislike ACT in general like yoshi. It's a great tool to get better but many in NA focus on there numbers and play less safe/consistent which you see hindering progression especially in ultimate. However it has helps so many people to get better.

Solution? Personal in game ratings after a duty. Not a DPS meter but a ranking based on DPS, mechanics, mitigation that gives you a SS, S, A, B, C, etc. ranking like classical FF games. It'd curb a lot of the need for ACT and help players grow.

Oh, I don't believe Cactbot cheating. You could argue it being a grey area though given its far more robust than simply trigger call outs. Personally, I couldn't give a damn what people use, provided it isn't something like Ungarmax, of course.

As for ACT itself. I disagree with your proposal since it only relays vague information. A letter grade lacks any details such as cooldown management, overheal and etc. Not to mention, it does nothing to help progression. If you're hitting enrage or simply struggling to push a mechanic, well, you have no way of knowing that Black Mage is contributing 3,300 DPS when they should be well over 6k. As for Ultimate. People treat it very differently. You see far less min/maxing and greed because it punishes you severely.

[KisaiTenshi]

And in doing so destroy their entire raid scene.

Regardless, ACT and Cactbot are not the same program nor do they utilize the same data.

I'll disagree with this. Cactbot is just a fancy ui over basic ACT and I don't see how it's cheating aside from things like goals or A11S where ACT could call out the Patten before the animation.

You're both wrong, and you'd know this if you actually looked at the source code. For everyone else, this is exactly how these tools work:

The FFXIV plugin for ACT is what loads data into ACT by both looking at the game client memory and the network, and in doing so creates the parser logs for fflogs that are otherwise independent of ACT.

There are several overlays for ACT that actually overlay data into the game, they do this by invoking a web browser engine (Chromium) and this is why the overlays slow things down.

The mentioned overlay cactbot, actually comes with timing scripts for every fight in the game, it works the same way as the triggers do. When some packet is fired off that indicates a mechanic that comes up, that's when it gives visual/audio cues.

You can see how these work in the source code of those plugins.

Hence Yoshi-P's comment about this. It would affect the base plugin that allows all of this to work in the first place. They're also painted into a corner about what to do about it, as these plugins are usually updated a day after a patch release once they've sniffed out all the battle mechanics and packet id number changes. Anything that would "solve" this problem would be defeated the same way. Likewise anything that actually would solve this, would solve the bots.

Expect more cactbot-like tools to keep popping up until SE finally starts banning people who use them. If that kills the raider scene, then maybe a raider scene that relies entirely on cheat tools shouldn't exist.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Expect more cactbot-like tools to keep popping up until SE finally starts banning people who use them. If that kills the raider scene, then maybe a raider scene that relies entirely on cheat tools shouldn't exist.

Perhaps, I am. Admittedly, I do not know the inner details. Regardless, SE has not banned people for almost four years and proudly endorsed World First teams who have ACT visible on their screens. They aren't going to suddenly do a 180 because of Cactbot.

[Reynhart]

Question for the top raiders that happens to come here :
Since the dev apparently doesn't have enough ressource to maintain all their content, would you rather keep savage and lose Ultimate or they remove Savage and put a bit more ressources in Ultimate fights ?

[AxlStream]

Question for the top raiders that happens to come here :
Since the dev apparently doesn't have enough ressource to maintain all their content, would you rather keep savage and lose Ultimate or they remove Savage and put a bit more ressources in Ultimate fights ?

Rather they cut the abysmal waste that is PvP.

[HyoMinPark]

Question for the top raiders that happens to come here :
Since the dev apparently doesn't have enough ressource to maintain all their content, would you rather keep savage and lose Ultimate or they remove Savage and put a bit more ressources in Ultimate fights ?

Not a top raider by any stretch, but here’s my two gil:

Ultimate fights are mostly just reused assets that have their damage scripts modified/intensified. At most, the only “new” assets that go into them are things like Golden Bahamut or last phase Ultima, but a lot of it is reused with things that already exist in the game. If the developers want to do away with Ultimate, then I would request Savage itself return to the levels of Midas instead of staying at the levels of Delta/Sigmascape. I want something challenging.

Not sure if its a matter of saying. It looked like even on the NA side interest was less, and I noticed raiders breaking their taboo of waiting till 4 groups cleared for clear videos, they seemed to come out the next day after world first. My guess is that they saw participation was fewer and asked the JP to be sure.

I wouldn’t say that’s true. The raid recruiter discords (at least the NA ones) have been active for a long time regarding UCoB and UwU groups, and not every group waited until the world first clear happened to venture in. If the developers are meaning it’s rough on the dev team to get them out every odd patch, then fair enough. I don’t necessarily like it, but fair enough. There is quite a bit of work to do on 5.0 (even though the teams that do Ultimate is a separate team) and they could use all hands on deck for it since it’s pretty well-known by this point that they’re severely understaffed. However, the phrases specifically pointed towards it being the community that said it was rough, and I would like confirmation of where this was said.

[Remedi]

It's not them not having the resources, it's them hearing feedbacks about an ultimate each odd patch beign rough

Yoshida: We were originally planning to have an ultimate fight for each "odd numbered patch", but after observing the reactions from the community, there were a lot of opinions saying "Having an ultimate fight every 2 patches is too rough", so we changed our minds and thought 2 ultimate fights per expansion might be better, so i think the ultimate series will be on hiatus for now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._bad_news_for/