Tag: Square Enix

Fixing Final Fantasy XIV’s Alliance Roulette

Did I ever say that I love Final Fantasy XIV? I have written about my HUD and keyboard/mouse/gamepad gameplay and its cheating problem. Let’s rant about something else in this post: the alliance roulette.

What are roulettes?

Roulettes are the daily content of Final Fantasy XIV, there’s a leveling roulette, a trial roulette (bosses), normal and alliance raid roulettes for the main ones (main story quest, export, Lv50 to 90 roulettes are a thing too).

This content is usually ran right after the reset (at midnight Japan time), some of the content is harder to tag like the frontline roulette (PVP) if not tagged close to the reset.

Bonus experience, tomestones and other bonus are given for running a given roulette making this the main daily content that people will do every evening they login (during the European timezone).

Sadly, many players that play the alliance roulette tend to focus on the Crystal Tower raids. They do so by lowering they Item Level to match these levels:

For the rest of the raids here are the requirements:

My solution

The current maximum level a job can be is 90 and it’s really easy to attain a high Item Level with tomestones equipment. With each update to the game the requirements change for the expert roulette thus making the requirement item level higher.

So how about we scale based on the current character level?

For the ARR raids your character needs to be Lv50 with an item level between 50 and 90. The Crystal Tower is the only raid that can be queued until Lv60 (and is required to progress in the game main story quest).

Starting Lv60 we have access to the Heavensward raids if the character has an item level of at least 175. Since the game main story quest tends to give more experience it’s easy for a player to be over 60 before gaining access to the Void Ark so we cannot force Lv60 players to have unlocked the Heavensward raids yet.

But I think we should enforce it based on the player progression through the following criteria:

  • Did the player finish Heavensward main story quest?
  • Is the current selected job Lv60+?

If it meets those two conditions then we must enforce the minimum item level of 175. But this limits it only the the Void Ark, what about the rest ?
Starting Lv62 the player will be required to have unlocked the two other raids and also have the required item level to play the whole set of raids.

When the player reaches Lv70+ we apply the same rules.

But the HS/STB/SHB/EW raids are TOO long…

For some those raids seem too long or even too hard. Yeah Rabanastre, Ridorana and Orbonne can be quite challenging but if your play them often enough you’ll learn those raids.

To this day I still see people failing basic mechanics in the Crystal Tower or stop fighting to reach the door before everyone (mentor tanks do that very often).
I posted this rant last year:

This does show multiple players just leave the encounter while the door is still closed.

Dear producer Yoshida

Please make changes the alliance roulette so that we can do more than just the Crystal Tower. Other raids can be very fun and refreshing so we should be able to play the whole content of the game.

You said that you want player to discover and learn about the other Final Fantasy games through Final Fantasy XIV but how can we do that if we cannot queue for any raids?

The only time we can be lucky is when the mog tomestone events is active but that still doesn’t guarantee anything.

So please make alliance roulettes fun again.

Conclusion

I am not expecting anything to change anytime soon but I will be doing something and will be giving my feedback about this to through the appropriate means in the game. I want my voice to be heard and the only way I can do that is to speak.

I must also acknowledge that I’m acting like a total armchair game designer in this post but if this isn’t fixed I think it will hurt the game in the long run.

The cheating problem of Final Fantasy 14

It’s weird that we can disagree on what’s cheating and what’s not sometimes, so I guess this is just my opinion.

Following a discussion I found on reddit and after listening on Discord to someone justifying using those third party tools to know the target’s moves in advance and even getting “help”, I can’t really believe that people are defending the use of those tools.

While some do claim that it improves the accessibility, I think that it solves the problem in a bad way.

Let’s talk about one tool in particular first.

What is Cacbot?

As described on GitHub it’s an ACT overlay that provides raiding tools for Final Fantasy XIV. Presented like that it doesn’t seem like much until you start looking at the screenshot below:

Cacbot taken from a YouTube video

On the middle of the screen there’s a notification and an order to avoid the next action the boss will do: Get out of front.

It can’t be made more obvious than that. Notifications and automatique callouts are accompanied with a bell sound or whatever is setup.

On the top left we have a timeline of actions:

These actions have a countdown on the right so you know what will happen and what to expect.
It does other things too and it’s not the only kind of tool that I would call a cheat.

The game’s stance on third party tools

A post was made on the Lodestone about third part tools. Basically third party tools are strictly prohibited, they say they will suspend and permanently ban repeat offenses. Do they really ?

Well let’s say that they did ask players to not push in this video:

In the case of ACT, it permits users to graph the DPS and other numbers, how different is that to typing the numbers manually on a calculator?
Yoshida argues that there’s no end to such a conversation and he’s right.
The whole video is interesting on its own so check it out.

The part where basically players shouldn’t push it is during the harassment part. Players shouldn’t be judging and discussing other players numbers. Player shouldn’t discriminate based on numbers shown in a third party tool.

On my part I can’t defend parsing because at some point we all meet a very toxic player telling you how to optimize your damage output. If the analytical tools like DPS meters were used only on a personal level, with no DPS shaming, then I don’t think these tools would be an issue.
Some great analytical tools exist such as xivanalysis that helps you improve your rotation. But like the music says one brings shadow, one brings light…

But what about the Cacbot tool mentioned above? Well to me that falls in the category of cheats since it appears to be able to display a timeline of actions that a target will take.
This does affect my experience too and I do not consent playing with cheaters.

No running anticheat

Final Fantasy XIV has taken the approach of not running a classic anti-cheat with the game and that’s ballzy. Any other game would be running along with some kernel driver monitoring the game or some sort of other implementation just to make sure the players are playing by the rules.

Not having to deal with the down sides of an anti-cheat is great as it doesn’t impact the game’s performance.

Conclusion

Cheaters sicken me.

If you need a third party tool to do the callouts or you do callouts based on that tool then you shouldn’t be bothering with the game. Especially if you suck at it with cheats.

Don’t defend the use of the Cacbot, it’s like having a wallhack in FPS. You know what’s coming. You know how it’s coming.

And don’t you dare talk to me about how you hate spoilers if you have a precise timeline for each and every action the boss is going to do. You are the one spoiling the fight and you are affecting my game with your cheats.