Mahjong Fix

[hexxxx]

I think a lot of people want to get an orchestrion roll for collection. It should be possible to get the roll for playing even against NPC.

I'd only consider lowering the orchestrion roll requirements if they remove hints. Maybe not even then. R1600 is very achievable considering the fact that you can reset to R1500 as many times as you like.

Weekly challenge log for mahjong should be removed

I haven't encountered many people who queue up just to AFK for the challenge log, but I have seen some. Most seem to realize even the time spent AFKing isn't worth the reward. I'm in favor of removing it, if only because it's practically useless whether or not you intend to play.

...as a tangent though, I think they should revise the thinking timer to a more standard system of 5s per move + an extra 15-20s per hand. Games in FFXIV move very, very slowly when even one person maxes the timer on every move.

In ranked matches, it should be important how good a player is. That's why any kind of hint should be disabled.

100% agree. The fun of mahjong is playing with people. When I play mahjong in FFXIV I can't tell where the person ends and the bot begins. I'm fine if they leave the hint system in unranked games, but it has no place in ranked. (And as Sirocco said, you can climb consistently off exploiting the bot's weaknesses. Your rating is more a reflection of how good you are at beating the bot than other players.)

There should be three queues, not two. Ranked, Advanced Ranked, and normal. Some people would like to play without all the ranking stuff.
- Normal queue should have hints on it. As its not that competitive game.
- Ranked queue should be left as it is. Hints off. Dangerous tile could be still left on.
- Advanced ranked queue should have "open hand tanyao" turned off. As it is not very "advanced" yaku. Also hints and dangerous tiles off.

The problem with adding a casual queue feature is that the ranked population is already too low; dividing players further would kill it. PvP currently faces this issue as well at higher levels, as casual Crystalline Conflict queue is very popular, but it siphons people out of the ranked queue. I would propose two alternatives:

1. Allow bots in private games. Allow players to queue into private games with 1-4 players, then populate the rest of the seats with bots.
2. Add an option to hide ranks. If you want to play games without worrying about rank, toggle off all rank display and notifications. Rank will still change per game and the player will still be eligible for achievements, but that information will be hidden unless the player wants to toggle it back on again.

(cont'd)

[hexxxx]

As for the other points, all hints/AI should be disabled outside of private games. And I disagree with removing kuitan in ranked matches, I think adding a 30000 point minimum to end the game would be better. Open tanyao is incentivized because it's all you need to win if few points change hands and the game ends fast. Having a minimum score would encourage people to attempt bigger hands than rinky-dink 1000 point tanyao nomis.

I should note here that the queue system seems to prioritize Novice over Advanced. (i.e. if 4 players queue for Novice and Advanced at the same time, they will be placed in a novice game.) Ideally, this could be fixed by disabling Novice queue for players above 1 dan. This would also make it slightly more difficult to win-trade games, as you wouldn't be able to farm rank off fresh alts past a certain point.

Currently playing mahjong give no reward at all. Besides the weekly challenge log. It should award at least a little bit of MGP for any game. Just like any other gold saucer activity.

While I agree on principle, in practice, this will give people an additional incentive to AFK. Unless AFKers are exempted from rewards somehow, this has the potential to do more harm than good.

5. Emotes used by players should be visible on the avatars during the match.

6. Add a tutorial teaching new players to play step-by-step.

7. Upgrade interface to show common assists:
- highlighting tile copies on mouseover,
- wait previews,
- furiten warnings before discarding a tile

I fully agree with all of these.

Thanks for making this topic! I know CBU3 hasn't touched mahjong since launch, but I'd love for it to become a proper place to play the game. As it stands, I can't recommend FFXIV to any mahjong players, but with a few small system changes I think the latent potential of XIV mahjong could be realized.