Why do you want auto-attack? (discussion)[dev1022]

[gifthorse]

And funny how we who dislike auto-attack are called xenophobes and afraid of change when it's pretty obvious that auto-attack is the one thing that has remained unchanged in MMOs for many years now.

Hahahhaha. Get with the times people.

[Nuru]

If the battle system requires more tactics than our current battle system, I am in full favor.

[wind]

Think you took it out of context, not sure if it was deliberate or not to get your point across. Simply just mean our current system > new system.. ALL WITHIN FFXIV not the MMO industry. I could give a shit what another game is doing, I'm not naive enough to think that because a part of another game 'might' be implemented into this one, will mean the mechanics will work the exact same. Or that it would mean this game is conforming to them because of that one aspect.

[darkstarpoet1]

I am not trying to keep this game from changing, I am trying to keep it changing for the worse. You said the gaming industry is a business, well guess what, crappy games don't attract revenue. Automating combat is no means of improving it. Likewise, making the game more efficient can sometimes only destroy the atmosphere.

If you think automating combat is the answer to the game, then Guild Wars 2 and TERA say "hi". Welcome to the twenty first century. Tanaka was on the right track with a combat system which strived to make positioning matter and where people had to take an active role in combat. Yoshi is set to destroy the foundations of the game that even gave it a chance to compete against the upcoming rivals. Remember MMOs are a business.

The developers think WoW 2.0 is the fix the game needs, and it's not. They are completely misguided, and it's quite a shame. I already quit the game now, but I still don't want all SE's work to go to waste simply because they took the wrong approach.

to me it's like yoshi is looking at the game saying how can i get enough players to join the game to break even. these stupid revisions(arrgo indicator, auto-attack, and exclamation points over npc's) are the exact things a clueless person would do. these changes are made to try to cut as many losses as they can before they move onto another game because they have lost direction as a company and have no idea what people want anymore. they realize they can't get it fixed so they are covering it with enough band aids to get enough people here for the short term and break even overall. there are just covers over a broken game, but they are not able to get it put together.

i never thought i'd say it, but i am really wishing this game had tanaka back. at least he had a direction. if we had allowed him to finish his ideas i feel this game would have been fine, but we brought in another that seems to be worse in the case he had to come in and start over.

[Pablohoney]

Ok, a lot of you replying have missed my point:

It doesn't matter if you like the game as it is now. There aren't enough of you to keep the game afloat. Therefore it must be changed or no new players will join and the game will no longer be financially viable and it will be cancelled. You guys keep saying "RIFT SAYS HI!" and other stupid stuff like that, don't you realize that the people who are hanging around and hoping for improvements are the only people who can save this game? If you keep sending people away to other games you're just reinforcing the behavior that got this game such a laughably small player base and such terrible reviews in the first place.

[Sephr]

to me it's like yoshi is looking at the game saying how can i get enough players to join the game to break even. these stupid revisions(arrgo indicator, auto-attack, and exclamation points over npc's) are the exact things a clueless person would do. these changes are made to try to cut as many losses as they can before they move onto another game because they have lost direction as a company and have no idea what people want anymore. they realize they can't get it fixed so they are covering it with enough band aids to get enough people here for the short term and break even overall. there are just covers over a broken game, but they are not able to get it put together.

i never thought i'd say it, but i am really wishing this game had tanaka back. at least he had a direction. if we had allowed him to finish his ideas i feel this game would have been fine, but we brought in another that seems to be worse in the case he had to come in and start over.

Sorry dude, but you're full of it. Those 'revisions' are minor changes that can be made relatively quickly whilst bigger changes happen in the background. If SE was trying to 'cut their losses' they'd shut the damn servers down, they've ALREADY LOST.

Stop acting like you know anything about the design direction or progress they're making based upon the little we know. You're obviously someone who's happy to grind away in a largely pointless fashion considering your ranks, and that puts you and other players happy with the current system in the smallest minority. Look at the first player poll, people asked for radical changes en masse. Look at how many people left the game.

Tanaka drove it into the ground, Yoshida's picking up the pieces based purely on SE capital. If they didn't believe it could be repaired for a PS3 launch, we wouldn't be on a new official forum made for discussion about a game that, for all intents and purposes shouldve been shut down if all they wanted to do was 'recoup'.

You're wrong.

[darkstarpoet1]

Sorry dude, but you're full of it. Those 'revisions' are minor changes that can be made relatively quickly whilst bigger changes happen in the background. If SE was trying to 'cut their losses' they'd shut the damn servers down, they've ALREADY LOST.

Stop acting like you know anything about the design direction or progress they're making based upon the little we know. You're obviously someone who's happy to grind away in a largely pointless fashion considering your ranks, and that puts you and other players happy with the current system in the smallest minority. Look at the first player poll, people asked for radical changes en masse. Look at how many people left the game.

Tanaka drove it into the ground, Yoshida's picking up the pieces based purely on SE capital. If they didn't believe it could be repaired for a PS3 launch, we wouldn't be on a new official forum made for discussion about a game that, for all intents and purposes shouldve been shut down if all they wanted to do was 'recoup'.

You're wrong.

no just because my opinion does not line up with yours it does not make it wrong. you tell me that i am acting like i know what direction they are headed now, but yet say yourself you do not either. all i was saying is that i liked the direction the game went from xi and wow, but we seem to be drifting again in that direction. i never once said i liked the game as it was. they have multiple things they need to do to fix the game, but an aggro indicator that does not work properly is not one of them.

btw, my ranks are none of your business. i enjoy parties with my ls and have gotten my levels from enjoying time with others. it is not that i like the game the way it is.

now as far as tanaka drove it into the ground can you imagine the quality xi would have been if they had fired its director just a few months after release when it took almost a year to get a decent game out of it. did you not read the reviews it had when it was jp only for the first 11 months before it was released in the us? according to them the game was even in worse shape than this one is and it seems to have turned out pretty well. my point was we do not know what tanaka had in mind to do to fix the game and make it more enjoyable, but i would have liked to see what was planned.

just so you know i voted for radical change also, but exclamation points over the npc is not what i had in mind when i said yes.

[gifthorse]

no just because my opinion does not line up with yours it does not make it wrong. you tell me that i am acting like i know what direction they are headed now, but yet say yourself you do not either. all i was saying is that i liked the direction the game went from xi and wow, but we seem to be drifting again in that direction. i never once said i liked the game as it was. they have multiple things they need to do to fix the game, but an aggro indicator that does not work properly is not one of them.

btw, my ranks are none of your business. i enjoy parties with my ls and have gotten my levels from enjoying time with others. it is not that i like the game the way it is.

now as far as tanaka drove it into the ground can you imagine the quality xi would have been if they had fired its director just a few months after release when it took almost a year to get a decent game out of it. did you not read the reviews it had when it was jp only for the first 11 months before it was released in the us? according to them the game was even in worse shape than this one is and it seems to have turned out pretty well. my point was we do not know what tanaka had in mind to do to fix the game and make it more enjoyable, but i would have liked to see what was planned.

just so you know i voted for radical change also, but exclamation points over the npc is not what i had in mind when i said yes.

Genius post.

[solracht]

Guild Wars 2 and TERA say "hi".

You keep on mentioning this like it's relevant. I completely agree that having full control over battle is in future for MMORPGs, but there's way more to having control over combat beyond simply not having auto-attack.

The FFXIV engine has shown no hints of being able to offer the kind of dynamic combat that those two games have. Hell, we can't even move during combat while using skills, something that pretty much every single current-gen-MMORPG offers. You're way too hopeful if you think they have the tools to transform a combat system where you're tied to the ground to something like GW2 or TERA have.

Lack of auto-attack is not the reason why the combat system in those two games is going to move the genre forward. Stop acting like it is. There's collision detection in GW2's projectiles and spells, for the love of god. The battle system in this game probably lost its chance to compete with that when the engine was finished. At the very least, and for its sake, I hope it has the tools to adapt to this generation of combat systems.

Tanaka may have had the right idea (one of the few good ideas he had, in my opinion), but his programmers, whoever was in charge of the engine, and whoever had to implement the combat system, obviously didn't, or at least they didn't know how to make systems that would truly take advantage of his idea.

[gifthorse]

You keep on mentioning this like it's relevant. I completely agree that having full control over battle is in future for MMORPGs, but there's way more to having control over combat beyond simply not having auto-attack.

The FFXIV engine has shown no hints of being able to offer the kind of dynamic combat that those two games have. Hell, we can't even move during combat while using skills, something that pretty much every single current-gen-MMORPG offers. You're way too hopeful if you think they have the tools to transform a combat system where you're tied to the ground to something like GW2 or TERA have.

Guild Wars 2 has a target lock-on battle system like FFXIV with active attacks. It's the same combat system as FFXIV's present rendition, just more streamlined and less spammy.

And anyway, when the people behind TERA left NCSoft with stolen network code, they allegedly showed it to Square Enix before founding their own company BlueHole Studios. So ... technically SE could make this game TERA if they wanted to go to court for it. LOL.

Lack of auto-attack is not the reason why the combat system in those two games is going to move the genre forward. Stop acting like it is. There's collision detection in GW2's projectiles and spells, for the love of god.

SE isn't incapable of adding in the network coding for such things. They've already shown they can make collision detection between mobs and players etc (from alpha to beta) in a short amount of time. It's feasible they can improve the battle system in this way too, by making temporary colliding assets or something.

The battle system in this game probably lost its chance to compete with that when the engine was finished. At the very least, and for its sake, I hope it has the tools to adapt to this generation of combat systems.

The graphical engine is somewhat separate from the network code, although it defines the limits of certain actions. There is nothing to prevent SE from improving the active-combat system besides the issue of server-to-client latency (due to their global servers)... and also how talented their network programmers are.

Tanaka may have had the right idea (one of the few good ideas he had, in my opinion), but his programmers, whoever was in charge of the engine, and whoever had to implement the combat system, obviously didn't, or at least they didn't know how to make systems that would truly take advantage of his idea.

That's true. But dismissing the idea (which we admit to being good) isn't the best approach. Improving upon the idea is.

Auto-attack might be a huge mistake.