Skipping cutscenes in MSQ Roulette

[Raiya]

Please by all means post your video of you doing this and see how well the GMs take it.
It was originally meant to get it done, sure. But with the new changes to the system it's obviously made to allow people to view the story unpressured. I think the amount of impact and the desired effect were achieved and this old content requires at very most a way to run it in a premade party and being allowed to skip the cutscenes.. but as it is, don't like it? don't do it.

What video are you talking about exactly? I don't post video's lol!

Deliberatelly bypassing a cutscene that has been specifically designed to be non skippable looks a lot like an exploit.

Exploit's are usually bugs in the code that result in significant unfair advantage like Ungarmax, this one doesn't as it's hard to justify calling something an exploit when its something that literally involves turning your internet off and on again.

Funny thing is, there's a lot of people, like myself, and almost every member of my FC, that started to run this roulette MORE after the change. All the salt and drama of speed-runners vs. CS watchers was stripped out in one fell swoop, and it's now a braindead easy source of exp and level 50/60 tomes for gearing alt jobs and characters. If the rewards once all jobs are at 70 is lackluster, then just skip it, it's not like there's 6+ other, FASTER roulettes to run for tomes-OH WAIT.

I have a multimonitor PC so I can just play another game on the other monitor but generally I only do the prae to lazymode level my Aura alt these days, that being said the 2.0 MSQ was badly designed and really in the medium to long term at least they should have broken up Praetorium into 2 parts at least as that one you spend more time afk than actually doing anything! XD

[Krotoan]

What video are you talking about exactly? I don't post video's lol!

Let me be more plain in my language:
If you were to show proof of you closing the game to skip the cutscenes to a GM you would be punished. It is very much circumventing a restriction they put into place.

Exploit's are usually bugs in the code that result in significant unfair advantage like Ungarmax, this one doesn't as it's hard to justify calling something an exploit when its something that literally involves turning your internet off and on again.

There is no exact definition of a game Exploit. However generally it's agreed upon that it's causing the game to act in a way the creators did not intend, usually for the players benefit. Just because you say it's not a big enough advantage doesn't negate the fact you are causing the game to react in a way they didn't intend.

[Iscah]

Exploit's are usually bugs in the code that result in significant unfair advantage like Ungarmax, this one doesn't as it's hard to justify calling something an exploit when its something that literally involves turning your internet off and on again.

It's an exploit because it takes advantage of the way the game works, allowing you to break out of a cutscene that is clearly intended to lock you in place for its entire duration.

Within the game itself, there is no way to get out early. The cutscene has been made unskippable for the exact purpose of locking everyone down for the same period of time.

In normal gameplay you arrive at the trigger point, which tells the game to start playing the cutscene. It ticks off that progress flag. You have been shown the cutscene.

By disconnecting your Internet or closing the program, you've gone outside of the game in a way that the devs cannot control or prevent. When you log back in, you are exploiting the fact that the game does not recognise that you should still be watching the cutscene at a fixed pace, and thus is not able to hold you in place - because the "watching cutscene" status is itself the method of holding you.

You can get technical about whether you're exploiting a bug within the game itself or the way it interacts with other programs/network connections, but you are undoubtably taking advantage of a flaw somewhere to do something that the creators of the game did not intend to be possible.

And my dictionary, which I didn't look at until just now, defines 'exploit' as to "take advantage of for one's own purposes".

Argue the definition of a computer exploit if you like, but it's certainly exploiting the programming in a broader sense.

[Paladinleeds]

In normal gameplay you arrive at the trigger point, which tells the game to start playing the cutscene. It ticks off that progress flag. You have been shown the cutscene.

By disconnecting your Internet or closing the program, you've gone outside of the game in a way that the devs cannot control or prevent. When you log back in, you are "exploiting" the fact that the game does not recognise that you should still be watching the cutscene at a fixed pace, and thus is not able to hold you in place - because the "watching cutscene" status is itself the method of holding you.

Could Square Enix therefore change cutscenes to be "ticked off" after completion (at the longest level language cutscene per cutscene), rather than before. That way if you disconnect, it restarts the cutscene automatically? And if a new cutscene is tripped, the old one ends automatically and you're pushed to the new one? Could that potentially fix it?

[Iscah]

Could Square Enix therefore change cutscenes to be "ticked off" after completion (at the longest level language cutscene per cutscene), rather than before. That way if you disconnect, it restarts the cutscene automatically? And if a new cutscene is tripped, the old one ends automatically and you're pushed to the new one? Could that potentially fix it?

Potentially, but it would have the reverse effect and be a problem for someone with genuine disconnection issues - they'd still be locked in the cutscene after everyone else was finished.

It's also down to how much work they're willing to (or can afford to) actually put into it. Neither unskippable cutscenes or auto-scrolling text are new features added just for this situation. Changing the way the cutscenes are flagged could be a lot of work, especially when simply locking everyone into simultaneous cutscenes has exactly the same effect when the program is being used as intended.


If someone did genuinely disconnect and logged back in to find everyone else still in the cutscene, they don't have to rush into the next battle just because they physically can - they can stand and wait, or arrange inventory, or desynth stuff, or all the other things we used to be able to do while voluntarily waiting for the one person watching it. (I still have screenshots somewhere of a dance party while waiting at Ultima...)