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Man, they really put a full rear end mahjong game in here, and I have 0 idea how to play this, so I'm slapping tiles down at random. Sorry the couple of groups' games I ruined to get my weekly I guess.
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Mar 4, 2024 22:49
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Nitrousoxide posted:Man, they really put a full rear end mahjong game in here, and I have 0 idea how to play this, so I'm slapping tiles down at random. https://riichi.wiki/Main_Page Join us poor lost souls down in the Mahjong parlors, you know you want to!
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Mar 4, 2024 22:50
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Nitrousoxide posted:Man, they really put a full rear end mahjong game in here, and I have 0 idea how to play this, so I'm slapping tiles down at random. It’s literally one of the best mahjong simulators out there. Some people sign up, get to level 15, and then just live in the GS playing mahjong.
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Mar 4, 2024 22:57
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Mr. Nice! posted:It’s literally one of the best mahjong simulators out there. Some people sign up, get to level 15, and then just live in the GS playing mahjong. Having played a bunch of mahjong simulators, this is entirely accurate. It's really fuckin good, especially for an english client.
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Mar 4, 2024 23:02
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The rules of Mahjong: "Okay, I get this, there's plenty of other games with similar play that I can adjust." The scoring of Mahjong: "Now you're just messing with me." I've been told the scoring makes sense once you get used to it and there's ways to see the logic, but that is such a big hurdle.
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Mar 4, 2024 23:14
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It’s also the best Triple Triad simulator in existence, but that’s probably less of a surprise.
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Mar 4, 2024 23:35
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AndrewP posted:it's tempting, but I actually don't even know if the ARR skip is possible for me since I'm on the Xbox free trial beta thing. yeah if you're on free trial just keep going on, no reason to buy the game and then a skip when you have loads of content ahead of you for free, and most of it is very good dragoon is weird at low levels though (gets aoe late, combo doesn't fill out until 50, main class mechanics are deep into expansions) so if you start finding it wonky but vibe with melee, i recommend monk
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Mar 4, 2024 23:36
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ARE kinda sucks I guess but otoh I felt like a lot of EW hit harder for me by the time I got there because of the ~journey~ and I'm glad I didn't skip it. And I did it long before the edits that made it much more reasonable! e: also I'm a weirdo and don't think it actually sucks that much anyway
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Mar 5, 2024 07:00
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plenty of people vibe with ARR it's just a much more particular type of thing
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Mar 5, 2024 07:14
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The problem with 7AE is that it is both a storyline-desert and also important as a clear indication that the WoL, as well as the rest of the Scions, are not invincible ether physically or emotionally nor are they going to fix much of anything of the underlying problems of Eoreza even if they beat back one Metal Gear.
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Mar 5, 2024 07:23
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ConanThe3rd posted:The problem with 7AE is that it is both a storyline-desert and also important as a clear indication that the WoL, as well as the rest of the Scions, are not invincible ether physically or emotionally nor are they going to fix much of anything of the underlying problems of Eoreza even if they beat back one Metal Gear. Putting together a seperate team to focus on a complete rewrite of ARR would be a very good investment. Just need to do 2.0 to 2.3. 2.4 and 2.5 are fine. GilliamYaeger fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 07:31
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Hot tip to anyone who’s giving this a go on the trial, pay attention or write down what you put for your DOB and security answer question. You will need both to reset your password ever in the future. I was playing on PS5 and ended up enjoying it enough to buy endwalker + expansions that comes with 45 days. Anyway long story short, you can’t buy extra time on your PS5 directly, and I’d set it to remember my password for login 3+ months ago and promptly forgot it. To reset, you need to answer both security questions correctly, and if you decided to be a smartass like me and use a non-standard answer for the most commonly repeated security questions on earth, you’re straight up hosed later on if you don’t remember. I know this sounds stupid but considering how often you’re asked for compromising information these days, keep in mind Square doesn’t gently caress around with this stuff.
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Mar 5, 2024 11:55
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This HIldebrand questline has all the chaotic energy of a DnD 5e group after several beers.
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Mar 5, 2024 15:44
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I'm happy to see another sprout make it to one of the finish lines. 
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Mar 5, 2024 16:34
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Nitrousoxide posted:This HIldebrand questline has all the chaotic energy of a DnD 5e group after several beers. Oh the highs you have ahead of you 
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Mar 5, 2024 17:15
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GilliamYaeger posted:Putting together a seperate team to focus on a complete rewrite of ARR would be a very good investment. Just need to do 2.0 to 2.3. 2.4 and 2.5 are fine. Looking back in this thread, there seems to be a cycle of people like me coming to the game and asking "hey why does this kinda suck?" and veterans going "no its good you just have to power through this sucky poo poo". making the first thing new players do more fun, or at least SHORTER, would probably help their mega popular game get even more mega popular
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Mar 5, 2024 19:26
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If I had to take a stab in the dark, I think we might get something addressing some of that in the expansion after Dawntrail, since the devs have said once they hit 'max level 100', they want to look at alternative or perpendicular systems instead of just stacking on more and more levels.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:40
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AndrewP posted:Looking back in this thread, there seems to be a cycle of people like me coming to the game and asking "hey why does this kinda suck?" and veterans going "no its good you just have to power through this sucky poo poo". you are not at all wrong but try convincing s-e of that
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Mar 5, 2024 19:41
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They've probably had the discussion internally and neatly voted No because of the amount of raw time needed for something that doesn't contribute to present day content strength and likely draws away from it while you have empty headed content creators wandering aloud "am game dead if no new Bozja?" A remake may even be reviled by players. Cataclysm is still bemoaned to this day, including by those still waiting for a second wave of clean up and flight friendly mapping for BC instance areas(Draenei/Belt starter zones) so different crowds will tell you it was wrong to do it and wrong to not do more of it and if you interrupt my content flow there'll be hell to pay. Now ARR is pretty rusty and due for clean up but there's no casual way to reimplement and test hundreds of quest and event flags.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:48
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I mean, they have made ARR a lot shorter than it used to be. There's a list of all of the quests that used to be in ARR and 2.x and I think at least half of them were eventually cut. It's not like S-E doesn't totally get that it's a bit of an issue, but in the end the issue is not so much length, but quality, and that's harder to fix by cuts while still keeping a cohesive storyline.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:51
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One thing I would do, having played up to this point in the Xbox trial just for fun, would be to change the order of events for the opening cities to make a little more sense. Early game vague MSQ spoilers follow: I would equalize the first 3 dungeons from the starting areas to level 15 and change the order based on where you've started. And I would hold off on doing the envoy tour of the other 2 cities until you've completed the first dungeon, in order to give a little more credence to "hey, this is a capable adventurer who I am comfortable sending to represent us." instead of "oh wow you found an egg, let's send you off on an important mission." I would also do some mandatory quests in the cities as you visit them, including that city's starter dungeon, so that you can get a better sense of the city and its political situation before moving on. I think it would make the story more cohesive and would cut down on some of the doing nothing but running from place to place talking to people elements of the early game. I would also eliminate some of the side quests for unlocking basic gameplay features, such as haircuts, or work them into the MSQ, so that players don't hit level 50 without being aware of poo poo like that. it may not solve all the problems people have with the writing or general story, but I think those changes would go a long way in making ARR more palatable.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:52
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Doomykins posted:They've probably had the discussion internally and neatly voted No because of the amount of raw time needed for something that doesn't contribute to present day content strength and likely draws away from it while you have empty headed content creators wandering aloud "am game dead if no new Bozja?" I'm not a WoW player but wasn't the bigger problem with Cataclysm that the old content was no longer available while the quests assumed familiarity with what came before? Gotta imagine that in the hypothetical A Realm Reborn Reborn case they'd still maintain the overall thrust of the ARR narrative, not create a story that follows on from it.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:58
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I mean, the big issue with redoing all the ARR stuff is that it generates little to no value for existing subs. Just makes the process somewhat smoother for newbies. doing something that doesn't create value for your existing customer base seems like a dubious proposition to put in front of management.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:05
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Thinking about it a bit more they do have a lot of work already done that doesn't need redoing. You don't need to touch dungeons, trials, raids, etc. You don't need to redo zones. You can even keep a lot of legacy VA work as long as only certain characters talk(i.e certain MSQ dungeon speeches.) The primary culprits are the writing which needs to be touched up as you edit(speed up) things dramatically, quests that make good use of the zones(it'd be nice to just skip say the entire Slyph questline but then what, the tribe just.. exists, as a relic, for fun and flavor?), call in the modern VA cast where necessary for nearly a full expac of dialogue(no ARR Twins if you're doing this full-assed!) and probably do an entire rebalancing of every class's leveling skills while you're at it(simple homogenization, bury things like no AoE for Nin/Drg until 40-50, etc.) Part of the slowness of ARR is the natural slowness of the combat system, though we could leave all that off for now and focus entirely on narrative and writing that guides us through the story, zone by zone, encounter to encounter. Remember, we can't just abandon a meaningful story beat with later payoff to speed ARR up. Luckily ARR has quite a few things nobody would miss much like the corrupt crystal runaround but eventually we're cutting ARR down to "the scions go to places, fight primals, fight the empire, then events leading to HW." ... Which'd be an improvement, more likely than not. Eventually you are going to butt heads with Yoshi P himself over design philosophy and desired experience in game and story, especially if you want a leveling combat redesign or something like healer leveling to be more engaging. Hell, even modern FF14 expansions still do ARR levels of quest "combat" unless you get a nice solo duty segment. Go to a place, obliterate 3 monsters with a third of your rotation... Arguably an expac's worth of work, at least on writing and backend busywork. A small mercy to not have to make new assets with that mountain to climb. quiggy posted:I'm not a WoW player but wasn't the bigger problem with Cataclysm that the old content was no longer available while the quests assumed familiarity with what came before? Gotta imagine that in the hypothetical A Realm Reborn Reborn case they'd still maintain the overall thrust of the ARR narrative, not create a story that follows on from it. True, though WoW has such a gap between set up and payoffs that it wasn't that big an issue. It'd be inexcusable in FF14. I think Dawntrail offers a good opportunity for a shortcut to the front of the narrative load with a big fat PREVIOUSLY ON FF14 recap and an invitation to go back at any time and play it out as originally offered.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:06
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They've talked vaguely about maybe at some point in the future providing an entry point later in the story (as in much later, dawntrail or post-dawntrail), but nothing concrete and there are a lot of difficulties with it which they probably don't currently have solutions for
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Mar 5, 2024 20:15
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dawntrail's as good a place as any for a freebie boost, imo
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Mar 5, 2024 20:22
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As someone who is just starting Endwalker... For my part, while I am generally in the "ARR pays off later" camp, the story beats that continue to pay off later didn't seem to happen until the 2.x patches. It's a tricky spot for the game to be in. I know probably a half dozen people who gave up on the early game because it moved too slow. I'd argue that improving that phase of the game would help onboard more players than some expect. Also, do people have a negative opinion on the 2.x patches? That's where the game got good for me and when I finally started to connect to the story and characters.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:31
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The beginning of the 2.x patches were pretty dire. Just a half hour of busywork spread out over a few hours, literally because they needed to put something into the patches for people to spend time doing. I don't think they're too bad now that they've been trimmed. The latter half of the patches get good, when they start introducing new characters and start introducing the plots of Heavensward.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:33
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there's SO MANY quests that I'm just skimming dialogue at this point (unless it seems legit important) because I know I still have another 100+ to go and I'm just gathering ingredients for a feast or some poo poo. they should cut like a third of these. just because the quest structure is simple enough that you can add hundreds of them in the name of Story and content, doesn't make it a better game imo. everyone needs an editor. AndrewP fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 20:35
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Nitrousoxide posted:I mean, the big issue with redoing all the ARR stuff is that it generates little to no value for existing subs. Just makes the process somewhat smoother for newbies. doing something that doesn't create value for your existing customer base seems like a dubious proposition to put in front of management. Doing further reworking of ARR to make the early game experience better for new players seems like something that the devs would do, to me at least.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:47
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I may just be remembering highlights of 2.x patches like meeting Ysayle and Minfilia briefly wearing a coat instead of her usual fashion disaster.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:52
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iPodschun posted:The adding of Duty Support for dungeons from ARR to Stormblood happened during EW patches and IMO is in a similar boat for "generates little to no value for existing subs." I'm assuming dev resources were used on Duty Support rather than adding endgame content, at least. Can it help existing subs? Yes, but from what I can tell the goal of Duty Support is to attract attention from players that don't currently play XIV because they prefer more single player-oriented games. I don't know if they'll ever get to 8 person trials but I feel like Yoship has said it's coming but will take more time to implement. it's a very fine tightrope to walk, though. that it takes away resources is clear, and even being warned that it would do so going into it, people still got real mad. but the game has to also balance out being tied to a live service model and being a mainline numbered final fantasy that should always be playable as a single player experience. it's always had to do that, i just wonder where the line is where one hurts the other bad enough that it loses money. the amount of work it'd take to straight up rewrite and redesign ARR as an experience is probably the equivalent amount of work to doing a new expansion at all YorexTheMad posted:I may just be remembering highlights of 2.x patches like meeting Ysayle and Minfilia briefly wearing a coat instead of her usual fashion disaster. yeah by 2.2 things are improving and by 2.4 the brakes are officially off, but that's cold comfort to someone currently doing the titan-coerthas-garuda runaround. i hated coerthas so much, maybe it's better now that the exp curve doesn't require you to do sidequests to hit level limits. or were those sidequests MSQ required regardless? i forget
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Mar 5, 2024 20:53
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AndrewP posted:Looking back in this thread, there seems to be a cycle of people like me coming to the game and asking "hey why does this kinda suck?" and veterans going "no its good you just have to power through this sucky poo poo". They did, you're playing the shortened version.  (Original number of quests on the right, new on the left) They cut a bunch of quests from 2.0 to 2.55 back when patch 5.3 was released, it used to be longer. Some of the numbers there might not look like much, but it's significant at times with how long some of those quests could be. The ethos behind the cuts was that if a quest introduced a character that would appear or be referenced later, it couldn't be cut. They didn't just cut quests, but also edited quests that didn't get cut to make them less padded and time wasting (like a quest that has you get water from a river will have you now go to the river and interact once to get the water, when before you would have to interact three times. Once to put down your bucket, once to fill it, and once more to pick it up). Some quests were massively shortened I don't think they'll make any more changes to ARR's MSQ unless they go back and do a full rewrite and rebuild. Which I don't think would be a bad thing, but I doubt the devs want to do that when they could put the focus elsewhere, unfortunately.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:58
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It doesn't help that the first few 2.X patches are pretty heavy on a "primal of the week" plot-wise and don't have any MSQ dungeons or anything to break things up with some more involved gameplay beyond going back and forth between NPCs and talking.
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Mar 5, 2024 21:03
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absolutely inexcusable leaving the already most exhausting part of ARR that long though. why is there so little cut from that exact bit? surely they could squeeze multiple company of heroes introductions into one smaller quest. titan is bigger than three patches put together
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Mar 5, 2024 21:04
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I assume they've been adding duty support because their market research shows there are a load of FF fans who haven't tried XIV because they don't want to play an MMO, and this can get them sucked in. So probably if they have some numbers suggesting that the start is a significant barrier they might look harder at how to improve it.
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Mar 5, 2024 21:05
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Nitrousoxide posted:This HIldebrand questline has all the chaotic energy of a DnD 5e group after several beers. which is exactly why it didn't clicked for me. I'm not saying it's bad, just that kind of humor is hit or miss.
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Mar 5, 2024 21:08
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Qwertycoatl posted:I assume they've been adding duty support because their market research shows there are a load of FF fans who haven't tried XIV because they don't want to play an MMO, and this can get them sucked in. So probably if they have some numbers suggesting that the start is a significant barrier they might look harder at how to improve it. Also doing the dungeons with the story characters is better the first time imo. It was also a natural progression from squadrons, and likely a precursor to doing anything in the future with squadrons. Sounds like DT is combining them in some way? I remember reading that the way it was phrased in Japanese was vague but comments were made about this
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Mar 5, 2024 21:17
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I don't remember hearing anything about that, and to be honest I'd be surprised if squadrons didn't stay relegated to the old defunct content sludge bucket
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Mar 5, 2024 21:24
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Qwertycoatl posted:I assume they've been adding duty support because their market research shows there are a load of FF fans who haven't tried XIV because they don't want to play an MMO, and this can get them sucked in. So probably if they have some numbers suggesting that the start is a significant barrier they might look harder at how to improve it. They can easily see where people are in the story when they stop playing. They know where the pain points are, it's just a matter of figuring out what resources are worth pointing at relieving them.
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Mar 5, 2024 21:34
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