Are there any plans to make FFXIV more PC friendly?

[Wolfie]

By PC friendly, I mean things like:

• Allowing alt-tab when using full screen more
• Moving the now separate config menu to an in-game menu
• Automatic crash report after a crash
• Possible automatic game restart after a game crash/bug report is sent
• Authentication inside the game client, not in the launcher
• Skipping game launcher and starting client directly, or optimizing launcher to be faster
• Optimizing downloader and patcher; they're both fairly slow
• Partial downloading of upcoming patches in the background (features that are 100% complete and will not change) in order to make patch day go by faster (ties in with above)

These are things that have no effect on gameplay, but make the PC experience much smoother and user friendly. I know Yoshia mentioned there are different developer teams working on different parts of the game, but is there a team that works on this kind of non-gameplay related technology?

[Wolfie]

No comments on this?

[Jinko]

I would like to see all those but I don't think SE have enough PC development experience to pull it off.

Time and time again they show just how far behind they are when it comes to general programming, their art team is amazing though, but I wouldn't get your hopes up too high, perhaps in 2-3 years they might start to add these things.

[Elexia]

They already commented on it receiving further optimization.

Though:

Possible automatic game restart after a game crash/bug report is sent

I've yet to see this as a mainstream feature.

[Wolfie]

I've yet to see this as a mainstream feature.

It's not huge yet, but it's part of two very successful MMO's. And also something that's popular with a lot of other non-MMO software.

[Wolfie]

I'd like to know what the devs have to say about this.

[Evangela]

I think even the dev team still playing the game with gamepad

[Cairdeas]

Authentication inside the game client, not in the launcher
Skipping game launcher and starting client directly, or optimizing launcher to be faster

This will not happen.

The reason SE separates them is pretty obvious too.

1. It helps prevent hijacking the client with a "middle man attack"
2. It allows them to more easily use encryption over SSL and HTTPS.
3. It makes it hard to allow pirates the ability to make their own private servers. (FFXI did the same thing, yes people could end up emulating a private server eventually but they had to have a active POL account that was paid for to do it because of how the login system was.)