Alleged FFXIV open beta (AKA Squeenix fails at the internet)

[Azisien]

The interface complies well to keyboard-only. My prowess with it is improving.

I wish the game wasn't so damn laggy though. I hope that's just a beta thing. And I don't mean true high ping lag, just....the whole experience is sluggish. Scrolling, combat, whatever.



Though this dandelion murdered me yesterday and it was a total lag kill.

[Krylo]

It is sluggish. The interface is also sluggish. Requiring entering menus just to say... interact with an overworld object.

Kind of ridiculous. Not having trouble figuring out the interface isn't the same as thinking it's not dumbtarded, mind.

Edit: And now everytime I go to the next section of my treasures of the main quest it tells me its unable to load.

[Doc ock rokc]

Server: Besaid
City Limsa Lominsa
Name Damion Moriarty

Try to find me ...i'll need the help

[POS Industries]

I've finally gotten the hang of the silly UI and begun halfassedly making some progress with this game. I can safely say it's not something I'd pay actual real life money for or anything but it has its upsides. Granted, said upsides aren't particularly related to gameplay but man the visuals sure are nice.

The Gridania opening scene was the first I'd really felt like I was playing a FF game since I started with this. I'm told Ul'Dah is quite stunning in that department, as well, but I have yet to try it out.

[Krylo]

I'm able to teleport across to all the beginning cities with my miqo'te, Khaela Altari. If anyone wants to get to other cities to take more leves or whatever you can contact me when I'm on.

[Julford Hajime]

Sorry, I think I'm gonna drop out of this Beta thingy. Classes start tomorrow, and my roommate just got me to sign up for WoW again, so I'll probably be playing that for the foreseeable future anyway.

Plus, this computer lags to unplayable levels with TF2. I doubt it could play FFXIV anyway >.>

[McTahr]

Couple hours from a finished download, mostly just to diddle around with the beta. I'd actually give it more than a cursory effort if not for the fact that I'm in Physics Hell with two jobs. An MMO addiction right now would kill me.

[Krylo]

Hey guys, I figured out how to get rid of the biggest pain in the ass in the game (equipping/changing classes being a forever issue).

Macros.

Now before anyone's a smart ass about it, I kinda figured this was possible ages ago but never bothered actually trying to until tonight when it finally wore on me enough. Regardless, I'll share how to do it with you folks so that you don't have to suffer through until it finally annoys you enough (or until the beta ends).

First, write down the names of your equipment, with caps, and your abilities (or remember them, if you are slick like me).

Then hit home to bring up your main menu, then go to config, and then macros. Open one up, name it whatever.

The necessary commands for class switching are /equip and /eaction. The former equips gear, the latter equips actions to your bar.

Format is /equip [slot] "[item]"

The slot we would care about for switching classes is 'main', though you can do head, body, etc. if you'd rather type a command to equip something than navigate the labyrinthine maze of menus.

For actions the format is /eaction [location] "[command]" [main/sub]

The location is where on your bar you want the action (2-10, the action for slot 1 equips automatically), and main/sub is your main hand or off hand. You don't have to put anything there if you are equipping the ability to your main hand.

Here's a screen shotted example of my marauder's:



Once you're done up to that point all you have to do is press ctrl (or alt) to bring up the macro bar and select your macro from it/press the proper button (pressing up/down on the keyboard will cycle you through the, up to, five macro bars for each button).

It would be nice if they could do something like this automatically for us, and maybe they will by/sometime shortly after/three years after launch, but for the time being this makes the most annoying part of the game much more palatable and it only takes a couple seconds to set up.

[Azisien]

In their efforts to make something fresh and new they put us back to early 90's mudding.

And then took a few years back still. I uninstalled for the remainder of the beta and I might revisit this game in a few weeks, or months.

[Krylo]

I'm kind of surprised by that.

I kind of figured this would be your game, given how much you love Mass Effect's inventory.

But for serious: there's a ton of mucky interface problems, but I wouldn't say it's back to early 90s mudding. It's nothing like Diku/CircleMUD or GodWars. And certainly nothing like Gemstone. Which is kind of unfortunate.

But there are a ton of things they did right. Like the crafting system. I've never actually enjoyed crafting before, but adding an element of strategy to crafting instead of just 'click and wait' like every other MMORPG currently hovering about is nice. The exploratory crafting system is kind of neat too, and if there wasn't menu lag I'd probably spend hours on that alone--and I did kind of peg you as someone who'd love that as well.

Not to mention having to strategize whether to do standard, rapid, or bold crafting depending on durability, odds of success, etc. if you want to get the best leve rewards (and a chance at getting better equipment). You even have to take into account the current quality of the piece, as the higher the quality the more difficult the crafting becomes (high quality items present you with a higher failure chance, and failures tend to cost more durability/give less progress) which makes it more complex as you want to start with Rapid or Standard (probably the former), but you don't want to go too far with them and miss your chance to increase the quality with Bold.

Speaking of crafting: White orb = slightly greater than normal chance, yellow orb = better chance than white, Red orb = extremely poor chance, and I'm not sure if clicking at the right time during a multi-colored orb will give you better/worse chances or if it's just the standard. It's pretty hard to test that, what with the slight menu lag and what not. I'm guessing lots of people don't know that, but there it is.

I also find the stamina bar in combat adds a level of interactivity to combat without making it complicated to the point of unintentionally nerfing an entire subset of the classes (see AoC and melee combos) or obnoxious and boring (ala Warhammer's first five levels where you just spammed 1). The fact you get your second ability, literally, right after the first actual fight probably helps with the not being too boring thing, too.

That said, I totally get just uninstalling and giving up. It does have a lot of problems.

For starters, it is total bullshit that even after altering the ports I have had to go to fan sites for the last 2-3 patches. The patcher has apparently gotten even worse since the opening of Open Beta, which is retardiculous.

Then, once you get in, the menu lag is atrocious and really brings down the awesome that crafting COULD be, as you're waiting 5 seconds every time you move to load up a menu. And the sloppy mouse controls certainly don't help with this at all. The same goes for shopping. Menu lag is annoying as piss there.

Of course, thanks to macros and text commands, you only really have to deal with the menu lag for those two things (I type /equip [body part] [eq] for basically everything), but the fact that you have to make macros and learn text commands for a modern MMORPG is pretty ridiculous. I'm guessing this is actually where the 'back to 90s mudding' thing comes in. And even this is kind of annoying because the menu lag affects the chat box sometimes.

Then you have the complete and utter lack of in game help that makes it hard to figure out how to equip things, what stats do what (I put off statting my mage for like 5 levels because I had no idea what INT/Mind/Piety did. I had an idea of what they did but not which stat did what), etc. And the tooltips are just atrocious. I mouse over the poison icon when it says I've been poisoned. "Losing HP over time". How much HP? How much time between damage taken? How long is it going to last? None of these simple, yet important, questions are answered. And I still don't know what effect, if any, having broken equipment has. The tool tip for it is in japanese.

And even combat, which I like, isn't perfect. Sometimes characters will just refuse to do something you tell them to for no obvious reason, and there's no animation or on screen read out about it. Just a little something in the chat box... and even if you happen to read that, it more than often doesn't help because it doesn't tell you why you're not being allowed to attack. It's relatively rare, but frustrating as piss when i happens.

Combine that with the whole '16 quests every 48 hours' thing and it's easy to see where someone would walk away.

Personally I keep waffling on whether I hate it or I love it. On the one hand the atmospheres and graphics are amazing, and I love the crafting and the combat is amongst the best I've seen on an MMORPG. On the other hand all of that awesome stuff is stuck behind their completely shitty interface.

I think if I were to describe FFXIV in metaphor, I'd call it a gold nugget buried in six feet of shit. There's a real treasure in there, but you have to be willing to dig through a lot of terribleness to get to it.