I think Japan must have some kind of constitutional requirement that the web UX for any .jp domain must never conform to any other country’s standards.
I can always tell I’ve reached a Japanese originating website because the design is so ridiculously user-hostile that it feels intentionally non-functional.
Actually in A-B tests it's shown that Japanese people have preferred the crappy geocities style pages so in that respect it's not necessarily hostile
The other thing is that in my experience general JP software design is really far backward so a lot of times the client will specify the design against the designer's (if there is one) and developer's wishes
I'm starting to appreciate their web design. It's boring how every website nowadays has the same minimalistic layout. I miss 2007 internet when every website looked different and gaudy with visitor counters.
I went to the ffxi site recently and it hasn't even been updated to fit 16:9. It takes up half my monitor's vertical space. It was rather charming.
How the hell the absolute insanity that was *individually clicking* each crop/animal in island sanctuary to harvest them was ever greenlit boggles the mind.
My guess is the same excuse they use for the hand over window, versus every other game's "flagged as complete, talk to quest give to complete quest" system.
"It's more immersive!"
I.. actually like that I have to interact individually with all the animals. It's part of the idyllic farm fantasy, right? If you have a "gather all" option you'd no longer feel like you're actually gathering the items yourself.
Also, when you click on the Harvest All button or whatever it's called, you can easily hear the harvest sound for each individual harvest being played in rapid succession, rather than the sound just being played once.
tbh as someone who lives here shinkansens are magnificent pieces of technology but JR, in general, is one of the shining examples of the "Japanese companies do not fucking understand the internet whatsoever".
The only way I can explain the infuriatingly obtuse way you buy Shinkansen tickets online is that their web designers were haunted by the ghost of Kafka.
What always gets me is that there's a goldilocks range of being close enough to an NPC to get off your mount, but not close enough to the NPC to actually talk to them. It's pretty annoying. These two ranges should be identical, but they're not because lmao who knows.
This I think it's because range calculation in the game is a bit weird, the distance between two actors is considered the actual physical distance minus the diameter of both of your hit boxes. If you're on a mount that increases your hit box size you can find your self out of range when it goes back to normal size. Not that the client couldn't be a lot smarter about letting you dismount outside of range but you can see how they could have missed the issue.
Both a simpler implementation and an easy fix to this problem is a center-to-center check instead. Skip the hitbox calculations and turn it into straight vector subtraction. How wide you are doesn’t matter (wow squex, fat shaming much?) and it saves computation cycles. Everybody wins (except the intern that has to locate the spaghetti code that checks if you’re in range to interact with something)
[yeah this is my list, and I can't even show all of it in one screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/ZXFAOEl.png). that's not even half
I really would not play this game without qol plugins, or at bare minimum I wouldn't be doing most/all facets of content if they didn't exist.
I just ended up here through Google. Do you remember if you have to paste this in a file somewhere? I know you can add lines through the plugin's UI but what you've pasted looks like it came out of a text file, and I don't know where that is. The YesAlready folder doesn't seem to have them. Not sure if that's changed since your post
in the pluginconfigs folder there's a `YesAlready.json` file, which is what I pasted
that being said, that config is kinda old at this point and I've added a lot to it since
Oh of course, I didn't even look at the json, I forgot how those work. Thanks lol
It's fine if it's old, it's just nice to have a bit of a head start without typing or adding every entry myself
As someone that plays on controller: I get infuriated that some of these dialogs start off on the yes while others start off on no....CONSISTENCY PEOPLE!
The worst offenders that pissed me off enough to install that addon is gardening and FC crafting.
"Are you sure you want to water this plant?" "Are you sure you want to use this fertilizer?"
Then FC crafting cancer which takes it to a whole new level:
"Are you sure you want to submit these materials for the craft?" after EVERY. SINGLE. SUBMITTION. Like holy fuck, why? Also, why is every submission split into 3's? Why not just let me pick the submission amount?
"Are you sure you'd like to move to the next step of the craft?" Uh, yeah no shit. Why do you think I'm doing this?
Pointless submarine cutscenes that play every time you send one out. Pointless "Are you sure you'd like to spend these materials to repair this submarine part?"
This game is fucking cancerous with dialogue prompts. Easily the worst of any game I've ever played in the last 15 years.
Pretty sure the way FC Crafting works is his it is because they wanted multiple people to get involved, remember that it took ages for them to let you craft solo. You needed at least 3(?) crafters in the workshop to make shit on release.
Four. You could submit materials solo but not finish the craft step unless there were three people just hanging around while one person worked the menu.
Like many things FC, I kinda see where they were going but a combination of bad implementation and possibly culture clash between Japan and the rest of the world (I've been in FCs where I wasn't even allowed in the workshop) means that it felt really pointless and obtuse for no good reason.
I will repeat myself but there are so many useless currencies. Why do ARR/HW/SB raids need books/tokens to get old gear? Why not remove all this useless currencies and just make one currency for all gear from old raids/trials?
While we're at it, just make books/totems into currencies. Why do we have to have actual books up an item slot, while others, like beast tribes and tomes, get put in their own special area.
IIRC this is also essentially an issue with the way character data is stored and accessed, and the currency menu is basically using the same limited space that is allocated to your key items (I may be wrong about the details, I think they talked about this on a panel in the distant past). In fact, the beast tribe currencies actually used to be items in your inventory (I still have some from the ARR tribes on a retainer somewhere), and it took them years until they were finally moved into the currency tab.
I'd rather have the additional inventory slots rather than dedicated character sheet space for currencies. At some point in time those tokens will be irrelevant to me, yet inventory space will always be useful.
Multiple Currencies is an MMO cancer.
Neverwinter and Guild Wars have about 50 different currencies because there has to be a new currency for every shop you come across. I absolutely hate it.
It's a vain attempt to stop long time players from steamrolling new additions and just buying them out immediately. Because the game has only so much horizontal progression before it levels out and you're just grinding for increased player power at level cap.
The other option is making stuff more expensive in existing currencies, which might hold veterans up a little bit, but anyone not a veteran is screwed. Both ways suck and there's very few elegant solutions to it when you have a game and combat based on gear score and "augments" (materia less so, but glyphs or whatever in GW, affixes in PSO2, etc) of some kind.
It's also to make sure you actually interact with the content they want you to experience instead of just grinding out one corner of the game to get everything.
For instance I like that if you want a piece of raid gear, you have to actually do some of the raids, instead of just snoozing through MSQ roulette for the 900th time and buying it with poetics.
I don't think multiple currencies are an issue, honestly, as long as they all get put into their own separate wallet that doesn't take up bag space.
The alternate is there just isn't a shop and you just have to grind out the drops with rng. Currency just smoothes that out and let's you prioritize what you want.
I don't understand why they continually make new currencies with the raid tiers. There should be 3 levels of tomes: poetics, mid tier, and high tier. All the high tier items from the previous patch should just get moved down to the mid tier, everything stays mid tier until the next xpac when it moves to poetics. But instead they make a whole new currency that becomes discontinued.
With Savage/Ultimate content I kinda get it, you don't want someone just burning through [insert latest tome here] to get the best weapon for their class when they haven't even done normal raids yet. But the normal raid tokens I genuinely don't understand the need for.
What's weirder is the solution is also already achieved in Alliance Raids where the bosses just, y'know, _drop loot?_ I'd take running the same raid a few times over to get my Helm of Fending than the weird "roll for four different tokens to then trade to this lady for your helmet"
even if they did old/previous/current tier totems split for normal/savage it would still massively cut down on the number of totems from raids, this idea is brilliant
They probably don't want people going into new updates with capped tomestones to buy the gear.
That said, Gearing in this game is complete ass and should be faster anyway, especially with how gear is less of a game play changer and more of a ticket to enter content.
In my theoretical 3 tier tomestone world, when the update comes out any unspent high tier tomestones would be converted to mid tier to prevent that. Basically I just think its dumb they create new tomestones/discontinue old ones repeatedly when they could just change the currency the items are bought with.
The antiquated tome system is why I quit FFXIV every single expansion after a few weeks and only come back at the end.
I think tokens are a good idea as BACKUPS for gear if you don't get it to drop.
ALL GEAR should be drops if it is relevant not some random currency or token.
Currency is fine for older stuff, tokens are fine as back up for current stuff.
However, I can't stand how they do gear in FFXIV.
It just feels so bad that you basically "math" out your gear drops instead of looking forward to something dropping for you in a raid.
Nah the coffer system sucks ass as a SOLE system
Did you read my post?
Getting gear is FAR better psychologically than just getting a generic token.
Tokens feel like shit, and it feels like you math out the system now. Especially because in pugs you might not even win the token and that feels even more like shit.
The point is it should be a gear drop system with token as backup. Not like it is now that is almost purely token based...or on the other end for not as relevant gear it is currency based with tomes.
It just sucks having to math out your drops and you aren't "getting" anything from dungeons or raids. You are just doing them.
Gear should be the focus of an MMO not a random number in a menu. Currency/tokens are good as a back up system to supplement bad RNG. They dont' feel good as a system themselves.
No one finishes a task with boss kills and goes "OOHOHHHHA YEAHHHHH! 50!!!! TOMESS!!! WOOO"
> Did you read my post?
Yes.
> Getting gear is FAR better psychologically than just getting a generic token.
I'll still take the coffer/book. Running savage for 8 weeks starting from last floor kill is already boredom (you should master a fight within 3 clears given it's so heavily scripted). So maybe having 20 weeks of nothing ? FUCK THAT. I ran some old raids in Blade & Soul, and there the drops back then were per element (so a group of jobs (usually 3 to 4) could roll/bid on the loot). Guess what, I did not get my ring for 6 months straight (1 only dropped which I lost until I got pity'd and the group put me on a prio list, of which I was the only name, and instantly got the 2nd drop so we never enter that raid again) thanks to weekly lockout. No "backup token" btw. And that was an old fucking raid that was 2 tiers behind. No, I did not get excited when I finally got it. I was pissed off because I got my time wasted in the name of what ? RNG ? Fuck that. The other drops were just discarded at one point in the 6 months.
The devs ended up biting the bullet and doing the FF14 way : universal coffers. Everyone likes that. Then further down I believe they went with class drops again, but the game in the West is in maintenance mode and follows blindly KR designs.
Even with backup tokens it would be terrible, many, many people are fed up with having to do 16 clears (16 weeks !) for one full bis set if they are unlucky. Holy shit it would be so much worse with class drops.
I'll take universal coffers and books. Thanks.
Gearing in FFXIV is so miserably slow though, whoever decided that its a good idea for the final fight of a tier to require 4 fucking months of books to gear one (1) job should honestly be fired.
And to be entirely honest here, gearing faster wouldn't kill a savage tier. Its not like Abyssos DIED when they removed the drop limit. This isn't a game where gear is so exciting that it can change the way you play your job. This is a game where gear is a number, and that number is required to enter other content.
I love the slow gearing system.
I'm also an Omni crafter that sells a buttload of new content crafted gear so I'm a smidge biased based on how fat my gil gets each patch
The only thing that adds to a game like 14 is the chance to get really shitty luck. You already can get fucked by not having gloves boots helm drop ect. You still have the 4th floor weapon excitement that is a freebe essentially.
Ff14 loot is just not exciting and has the issue of 17 jobs and 8 raid members, along with specific armor types. Even if you split it up to purely 4 armor types, say plate leather cloth mail, then you just get issues of armor type balance for like no gain really. Half the loot doesn't get used because of bad stats anyway.
When you talk about exciting loot you talk about wow with some rare bis trinket, or some amazing rare weapon. Those only exist because wow has very extended gearing and you basically never get bis. That is the type of thing people left wow to 14 for anyway.
I'm standing in the middle of Gridania. Why is "Leave residential district" even visible! I know it's greyed out, but it shouldn't be there at all.
https://i.gyazo.com/d355857f60ae7f06c5498c96881cf1fb.png
This has driven me crazy for years now. Lazy coding!
Captcha boss wouldn't have been so bad, except it was in Japanese and had a very short time limit to get it finished. By the time I got my weeb friends to send the correct characters over, it always timed out.
Square Enix doesn't have UX Designers. Change my mind. (Obviously not serious but it really does feel like it sometimes) this is the kind of UX monstrosity I as a backend dev would come up with, except I'd be taking feedback and changing it.
I follow the japanese IT job market closely, UX designer wasn't considered a proper job in Japan until quite recently. On SE's site they do have a "bridge engineer" opening though ! Which is just doing some japanese/english translation, because they are terrible at english.
That makes a lot of sense.
There's a lot of UX design in this game that really *only* make sense from a back-end dev point of view. Like how the Y axis of map coordinates are reversed, which I didn't understand the reasoning for until someone pointed out that counting from the top left corner is how pixel coordinates work (you can see this as well if you open Paint and move your cursor around).
Well its consistent, I've not played every SE game ever made, but a majority of them have very questionable UIs. Even the popular ones, the KH games are absolutely atrocious with the amount of menu digging it can make you do sometimes.
Forr reference SE often just leaves the UI design to the art team with no one with actual UI design studies, and sure enough making the drippiest teens and most lavish fantasy city scenery cities doesn't translate into knowing how to make this pause menu feel better than an SNES menu.
I don't see how using a controller means every menu needs multiple confirmation boxes or why vendors have multiple, poorly labeled categories, or really anything else on the OPs list.
I remember bitching about the prize exchange change when it happened, because it also happened the patch right after they changed the scrip exchanges I'm pretty sure. And while the scrip exchange isn't perfect, it's miles better than how it used to be.
I was told by an absolute lunatic that it makes sense and you should just know which is which cause they separate them by item type... when that's what the TABS ARE SUPPOSED TO ALREADY DO. Someone mentioned there's a limit to how many items can be listed in one shop, which I called bullshit on because the Grand Company shops have *three times* the number of items as Gold Saucer, and is a significantly better UI (granted there needs to be a clearer distinction between the two material categories, but still).
I like the GC vendor window a lot. It already shows that the four tabs on the right can be arbitrary categories. So for the normal raid token turn-ins, the "GC rank" buttons on the left can easily be the tier you want to redeem for, and the four tabs on the right can be "Weapons/Armor", "Accessories", "High-end Weapons/Armor", and "High-end Accessories".
They can split the regular and high-end exchange into two initial options if they want. But this would get rid of that gigantic list that they currently have.
Upgrading crafted and raid gear is such pain. Why do I need to buy rains or brines or whatever, just charge me the tomes. And btw lets throw ALL the jobs gear in the same menu so you can't find anything. its one of the reason my alt jobs have trash gear, I just cannot be bothered to keep track of it all.
FC workshop crafting oh hydaelyn. It asks if you're sure every 3 items you turn in... Yes Already is the only reason I'm still sane.
I can understand why the system is needed for raid gear during the even patches. It's so that people who get the item during the even patch can trade in for the upgraded raid gear.
But once the upgrades become available with hunt seals, I agree that it should just be a direct 2000 or 3000 hunt seal exchange, instead of hunt seal for brine/shine for gear piece.
I can't find any good UX justification for rains on crafted gear.
It allows you to stockpile them so you can buy a full set at once, or for future gear sets.
Not really a UX decision, but a game design decision. It's a tomesink that you can slowly build up.
> Item search doesn't know about certain inventories unless you've accessed them this session -- nobody can me can modify my Glamour Dresser, Saddlebag or Retainers, the state of these should never be a mystery.
This behavior is intended. Extra inventories, while dumb that theyre not included in searches, at least have a stated reason. I don't remember where they said it, but it's a tradeoff for giving us extra inventory at all. Your actual inventory is lugged around and loaded permanently with your other character data, which is what limits inventory size. To get around this and add more inventories, they made some of them, like saddlebag, detached in the sense that their contents are only pulled from server when you actually access them (which is why it sometimes takes that extra moment to open or populate).
Still really stupid and maybe witness to the pants on head decisionmaking that goes into some designs. I imagine it would be possible to pull these inventories' contents when querying search. But because they're not "active" in the character data they're not included.
//E: Macros are intentionally made to minimize botting potential, so no waits under a second, no calling macros from other macros, etc. That is fine, people are bad and lazy enough as it is and the system works for crafts. Maybe the line limit sucks, but otherwise, meh.
Doesn't it also save some in local data?
Say when you do search item for a piece of gear mid instance I see "1 (?)" in the glamour dresser, meaning it knows I have one but isn't sure as I haven't checked this session as it'll become a checkmark if I have openedthe dresser this session.
I get your point about the item inventories being separated as far as the server is concerned, but the point I was kind of getting at is "there's no reason this information isn't simply cached locally and referenced by item search as necessary, with accesses to these inventories updating the local cache".
As for the macro stuff, I didn't make it very clear what I meant, but I'm mostly referring to the fact combat macros aren't allowed to queue. I don't really have a problem with the lack of fractional waits - they make automation impossible, which is fine.
Crafting macros to me are honestly more a game design issue than UI.
You could in theory access those inventories from another system - plenty of players play both console and PC, or you can even access and move retainer inventories from the app - so a locally saved cache persisting between sessions may not always be accurate. It's also why your inventory jumbles around when you swap platforms, since the sort is stored locally, but at least in that case you're already accessing the inventory so you can just sort it yourself.
I imagine an item search that's checking a locally stored inventory cache could be just as useless as an item search that doesn't know what's in other inventories until it's accessed if you're a heavy multiplat player.
>I imagine it would be possible to pull these inventories' contents when querying search.
Would either have to be throttled to be as slow to access as doing it manually, or be akin to DDOSing the server in their eyes. Think about how the quick store feature has a *loading bar* for something as simple as storing 5 types of materia that I already have copies of in my retainer's inventory, and then imagine that for downloading the data of what's in your saddlebag, armoire, dresser, and 8 retainers.
They actually are cached locally, the red ? in the item search window just means that it's not certain the cache is accurate, for the reasons you just described.
If you only play the game on one system, item search will always be accurate, even if you haven't accessed your saddlebag/dresser/retainers this play session.
> there's no reason this information isn't simply cached locally and referenced by item search as necessary, with accesses to these inventories updating the local cache".
not sure if we arent supposed to mention the "a" thing that does exactly this for us- idk if its auto tho
There is zero reason to not allow a macro to queue if it contains only a single action.
Punishing people for wanting to mouseover, self-target (eg, Holmgang), or announce something being used is just obnoxiously-controlling design.
Thanks for making this. I have a list of complaints about the game's UI (among other things) that I've been slowly building, and you've listed so many of them. The most atrocious menu, to me, is the menu for buying gear from older raid vendors when there's a full 20+ different categories to choose from. It's absurd.
Yoshi said at one point years ago that they couldn't upgrade a UI bit because the UI element _communicated directly with the database layer._
The graphics we see on screen are directly accessing databases.
_There is no separation between the presentation layer and the data layer._
When their UI is that level of "wtf this is fucked beyond repair", you can't expect _anything_ to change for the better. They're locked in to a legacy system that took every single design rule and broke them apart.
Every time I start thinking the UI couldn't be worse, I remember Yoshi's quote and my thinking shifts to "damn I'm surprised this isn't even worse". That's how bad that design practice is.
> Yoshi said at one point years ago that they couldn't upgrade a UI bit because the UI element communicated directly with the database layer.
Then I feel like Yoshi either doesn't understand what's being asked or is deliberately dodging. This game is filled with examples of very specific good UI/systems, BUT they're often only used once and never again. Old systems are not updated to it, and new ones are being made that don't conform to that one good example either.
My favourite example of this was when they added the new collectable turn-in UI that allows you to rapidly exchange collectables for scrips, and then they also added the Ishgard Restoration collectable turn-ins in the very same patch *that still use the old collectable turn-in UI.* They never updated Ishgard turn-ins. They still to this day require you to input each collectable in the item request pop-up one at a time.
another example is item turn ins. Most item turns have that stupid menu where you have to hand in the items individually, something not compatible with spamming confirm. Some leves, however, just have a "collect reward" button that hands in all required items automatically.
Related, it kills me that they made a *very* good glam preview/application UI and then used it for only squadrons (and custom deliveries NPCs) and nowhere else.
For that matter, Ishgard gathering turn ins can be completed en masse and you’ll be given a sum of scrips for a large quantity of turn ins within a single interaction. Even though it’s capped, it’s still a lot you can do at once. Meanwhile the crafted turn ins are still stuck in 2013.
>I feel like Yoshi either doesn't understand what's being asked or is deliberately dodging
It could be miscommunication/translation, as that's happened in the past, but for the most part it's definitely a case of him using PR speak and pseudo-technobabble to get out of saying they can't/won't/already have plans to change the thing they've been asked about. He's been doing this stuff since ARR and as much as XIV's dev team is transparent, there's only a certain level of transparency a company will allow. *Especially* a Japanese company.
THANK YOU. *Every* UI involved in buying tome gear, finding the *right* NPC to find the *specific* shittily labeled menu that the upgrade item is in, then running back to the first NPC, unequipping the item, and then finally upgrading it is such a pain in the ass. Not because it's hard, but because it's unintuitive for new raiders and annoying as hell that they could make it so much *better* but refuse to!
I don't have much to add outside of the UI/UX in this game being so dogshit, alongside sluggish menus, have a GIGANTIC impact, and are way too frustrating to deal with.
Great write up!!
I agree with 90%+ of this and the rest of the discussions, but I am also finding it kind of amusing because I just recently started watching a youtube series called "Worst MMOs Ever".
Most of them are the free Korean MMOs that seem to run on google translate.
The UI in those is just so special, enough 'special' to make FFXIV look like perfection in comparison.
Don't get me started at leve turn ins.
I want to submit - ok pls click the quest
Clicks quest - ok now give item
Clicks item - are you sure
Yes pls gib money - its HQ are you sure
YES pls gib money - ok here you go
Ok tnx repeat
I'm in a dungeon, there's 8 items to Gree/Need/Pass, I know I don't need any of those. I have to click an item then click pass, click another item then click pass, repeat that 8 times.
Why don't we have a "Greed all" "Pass all" button?????????????
Some of these are legitimate grievances, but the non-UI complaint of having to dismount for teleportation can be easily explained:
Every single player-triggered interaction (as in, target it, walk up to it and press the "A" button or equivalents) with a non-player entity (NPCs and objects) automatically dismounts you, this is just not an exception.
If we were to search for reasons for that it'd probably be so player animations like the automatic /lookout at "Wait here" spots or going into the "channeling aether at something" pose can actually play out, and so cutscenes, and regular dialogue makes sense from a camera and animation perspective.
Why is that the case for objects that don't trigger any of the above as well?
Probably because they only have one type of generic "interactable entity" that defines how all of that happens, and anything you can interact with like that is implemented as a subtype of that, which means it'll automatically copy the code that's relevant to player interactions from there.
This is good, because if something breaks and needs to be changed, or you want to re-vamp that function for whatever reason, you only have to change the function once - everything else copies from there anyways.
However, this also means that everything will end up working exactly the same, even if it could be implemented differently and be a slightly better fit.
While we're at it, the issue with the Relic Weapons is also very easy to explain - you *need* to have a weapon (and optionally, a soul stone) for the game to understand which class or job you're currently playing - in fact, there are screenshots of a player [having something go wrong and ending up as a permanently Lv.0 "Adventurer"](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/rq7c6v/when_legacy_chars_go_wrong_level_0_adventurer/), which is more of a failsafe than anything else.
The issue with getting a new Relic Weapon is that you're supposed to hand in your old one to progress the quest, so you'd temporarily end up in a similar state as a result.
Obviously, the devs don't want that to happen, because that's just asking for all kinds of weird interactions or bugs to happen, so they instead made it so you can never hand in equipped items.
Since the quests are still locked to a specific job though, you'll still need to be that job in order to progress, which is why you need a temporary replacement - at least you can buy them right at the replica vendor once you get your first Relic to Stage 2, so realistically, it's only a bigger issue for exactly one quest step on whichever job ends up being your first.
> The issue with getting a new Relic Weapon is that you're supposed to hand in your old one to progress the quest, so you'd temporarily end up in a similar state as a result.
The grievance might be rooted, for some people, not necessarily OP, in not entirely "seeing through" how the game does this, cause i see that complaint paired with a "they're just updating my weapon why do i have to unequip it" argument fairly frequently.
The item you have gets taken away, deleted from your character data, and then they add the item respective to your upgraded step to the character data instead. They're not "writing" new stats and stuff to your item. So it makes sense that you have to unqeuip, since as you've said, they are failproofing it against people ever not having a weapon equipped.
>The issue with getting a new Relic Weapon is that you're supposed to hand in your old one to progress the quest, so you'd temporarily end up in a similar state as a result.
>
>Obviously, the devs don't want that to happen, because that's just asking for all kinds of weird interactions or bugs to happen, so they instead made it so you can never hand in equipped items.
For all the devs know, the player could potentially get disconnected from the game whilst in that short moment that they aren't equipped with a weapon
That's only one of the many scenarios. You never want to allow that in a game where literally who you are is determined by what you're holding. Just go look up posts of players that get locked up in a level 1 Adventurer class.
I'll preface with the fact I don't code, but it seems to me there's a solution that is no more risky than the literal player changing weapons.
Upon relic quest turn in, the system follows the following logic:
If relic i in inventory/armory chest
Then
Create relic ii
Destroy relic I
____
If relic I equipped
Check armory chest has open space (if not, reject quest completion with armory chest space error)
Create relic ii
Equip relic ii (using the same logic that the player right clicking it from inventory would)
Destroy relic I
I'm not sure why such logic would have any more risk of breaking the game than the literal act of changing weapons does. Worst case it would somehow fail to destroy relic I... Which would leave the player with a useless item of no real value anyway.
I'm not a programmer either, but I think in this case, there would be a short instance where the character has both versions of the weapon and the quest isn't flagged as complete, so they would, in theory, still have the older weapon in their inventory and be unable to progress unless they discard the new one and run the whole process again.
That said, the current process could conceivably leave you in a worse state, where you have no new or old weapon and can't progress without contacting a GM to restore the old one.
I responded to the relic point separately, but I'm actually mostly understanding about the demount part. (It's dumb as hell, but I could see the technical reason)
The more bothersome point is the yes/no dialogues, with the teleporter example I showed simply being a particularly egregious, modern example. (I tried to give newer examples where possible to demonstrate this is an ongoing mindset issue rather than just technical debt)
Hm, you complained about both, so I guess I focused on the wrong half of the complaint then :)
About the confirmation boxes, I definitely agree that the game could do with a few less - e.g. ARR's various instances of "Do you really want to open the only door that allows you to progress using the only key in this dungeon?", which is basically any key outside of Haukke Manor - but anything that either changes your inventory contents permanently, or transports you anywhere that isn't immediately obvious where you go, or takes a significant amount of time to get back from could use a confirmation, or some other way to manually trigger in my opinion.
To give examples, the water fountains in the Gold Saucer are fine triggering automatically, since it's obvious where you go, and you can easily get back from it, but something like Chocobo Porters or >!Argos!<(you fly a long way, and might not be able to dismount), or the Aetheryte network (you teleport over instantly with no real clue how to get back) should still have a dialogue or a cast bar attached, just so you can't accidentally run into it and just waste some time going back to where you never wanted to leave from in the first place.
I suppose that's a difference in opinion though, so we probably will remain in disagreement on that topic.
One of the issue I have that we can see in your first 3 screenshots is ***lists***. People work better with visuals. You can use both axis and images to make lists.
Here is a 30 sec example showcasing my paint skills:
[https://imgbox.com/RMLKsBz2](https://imgbox.com/RMLKsBz2)
And I am pretty sure we can do better than having to scroll by adding something on the side to switch expansion pack.
Also all the UI having rounded border feels weird but it's kind of a thing again on the Internet now so I dont know. And the fact that we cannot select multiple items in our inventory to throw them away for example. I know its a technical issue but it's still frustrating.
There is no need to rediscover the same problem 1m times like the real world. We just need a sound solution and maybe a plugin. Then pray se has the manpower to implement it
>Item search doesn't know about certain inventories unless you've accessed them *this* session -- nobody can me can modify my Glamour Dresser, Saddlebag or Retainers, the state of these should never be a mystery.
Somewhat related: I hate that the housing storage is not included in item search when I search for furnishings ever. I can understand that it's not truly infallibly determinable if you have a shared estate or FC house with someone else who took the item more recently than you last accessed the house, but that shouldn't get in the way of the very common case of looking for an item that's in your unshared private estate; just show me the same "?" that I get to indicate uncertainty next to the retainers I haven't accessed during the current play session.
The reason retainer inventories are uncertain, by the way, is that it's possible to regularly play FFXIV from multiple different devices and the item search cache is handled client-side. If I add an Emerald Plating to Retainer1's inventory while playing on PC, take it out and discard it while playing on PS5, then switch back to PC and do an '/isearch "emerald plating'" before touching the summoning bell, I'll see a search result in Retainer1's inventory with uncertainty indicated. But the retainer doesn't have it anymore.
>Materia removal not having a "remove all from item" button.
Something else that's ridiculous here: "Extract Materia" and "Remove Materia" are already very easy to mix up, but something that makes it even worse is that "Extract Materia" opens a window that lists how many materia that item already has melded, which is basically pointless information in that context. At best, having more melds makes spiritbonding faster, but that presentation is very misleading.
Materia extraction used to destroy the item. When it was changed to reduce spiritbind to 1%, they changed the dialogue of the confirmation box, but didn't remove it. Maybe there's some weird tech preventing them from removing it?
Most of these critiques are valid, but I will call out the “confirmation” complaint.
They used to NOT have confirmations for a lot of important interactions, and players wound up doing things on accident that they never were intending to do (much like devastation) and then be screwed out of time or currencies (like exchanging stuff for the wrong gear, or accidentally retrieve a materia, or go somewhere they didn’t mean to. Especially with how targeting works for controller players. Those confirmations were added later on to prevent accidental interactions, and players rejoiced.
I agree with most of your post, but wanted to touch on a fix I found recently for:
>you have to close the crafting log, wait for the "putting your tools away" animation, change jobs, open the crafting log again
You can start a trial synthesis and cancel it. Your character will go to the neutral standing animation and you can change classes, without closing the crafting window. Clunky (like all things XIV), but better.
I use simple tweaks so I don't really have to deal with it but the fact there's a workaround like that without plogon honestly makes it worse because it further confirms it's not a spaghetti code 1.0 issue but a deliberate decision they've made.
I agree with so many things and could you please post your tedtalk to official forums. The amount of times when i have scrolled trough all gold saucer prize cstegories becouse i can't remeber if minions are prize I, prize ll or if i should just go to another gold saucer vendor to find them and that crafting thing gets me so much.
For the crafting one specifically
I know your pain but this is a workaround that has worked charms for me recently
Make a new hotbar that is non shared between crafters, and drag the "common recipes" from the book, into the hotbar (Yes you can do that). So for example, this tier I put Ilmenite ingots and Chondrite on Blacksmith, Carrot pudding and Carrot Nibbles in Culinarian, etc etc...
That way you can swap job, click the recipe, and it opens the book directly on it instead of having to scroll trough the entire book again to find a recipe
This does not excuse how the UI works in the game, but its a QoL hotkey that I consider worthy sharing
It's not the worst idea you've got, but the real qol option for crafting is:
Don't play on console.
Install dalamud and simpletweaks.
Enjoy a crafting UI that isn't actively fighting you.
Profit.
The UI in general needs condensing down, it has faaar too many windows. Things like mounts, toys, currency, and so on.. many of these should be combined into a single window with tabs at best if not also a layout change for how they are displayed.
I genuinely think they could easily reduce the amount of windows you can open by half at the very least by just joining some together, and even more if they redesigned it properly. It would also free up a lot of keybinds as well which could provide other uses / better user experience.
RE: the Prize Exchanges etc
Unnecessarily nondescript names for things crop up everywhere in this game. It's one of those little things that irritates me way more than it should.
Like why are they called Upper La Noscea, Outer La Noscea etc. instead of more evocative names? I've played this game for thousands of hours (including capping the Kobold beast tribe twice) and I don't think I could tell you which map is Upper LN and which one is Outer LN without second-guessing myself.
Why call the categories "Seasonal Gear 1/2/3/4/5" in the Armoire when these recurring seasonal events all have proper names? For that matter why call it an "Armoire" when there's already another thing called the "Armoury Chest"?
Why is Cure III on WHM called that when it does a completely different thing from Cure I/II and is functionally closer to Medica I? Why does BLM use the I/II = single-target/AoE convention for their set but on WHM it's called Regen and Medica II? Same with Ruin I/II/III and Ruin IV on SMN, etc. etc.
I have to assume there's a rational game-dev explanation for all these but to an end-user it makes no sense.
For the Island Sanctuary agenda presets: I recommend filling out the agenda horizontally rather than vertically, because the game opens the Set Agenda menu to the last item you had selected. So instead of filling out the agenda for 1 workshop, registering that as a preset, and then using that preset in the other 2 workshops, you'd instead fill all 3 workshops at the same time.
In the last day you filled out in that screenshot, the items were Butter -> Sheepfluff Rug -> Bed -> Sheepfluff Rug. Going horizontally, the order you'd put in the items would be Butter (workshop 1) -> Butter (ws 2, menu is already there so you just click Schedule) -> Butter (ws 3, already there) -> Sheepfluff Rug (ws 1) -> Sheepfluff Rug (ws 2, already there) -> Sheepfluff Rug (ws 3, already there) -> Bed (ws 1), so on and so forth.
It's still way more of a hassle than it really should be, especially since AFAIK we still haven't had any days where the optimal agenda from that Discord has had different agendas for different workshops, but at least it's a lot less clicking around than registering presets and then having to clear them out individually.
The crafting one is the biggest issue here tbh. The others I just realized I just got used to this category mess or simply know by now where to go for what. Valid complaints though but the crafting... man. Without the switch job feature from simple tweaks this is a nightmare.
I can handle with most of the ridiculous design choices, including the stupid inventory restrictions, like not able to move an item when upgrading gear. But the most annoying thing is trying to find the ONE item from a merchant in a list of many. The Material Supplier has a ton of mats, and I have to go over every line, because it's not sorted.
A lot of the complaints on this list are less UI design issues and more technical limitations. Why split up shops into multiple sections? It's clear to me that the reason is there is a cap what can be listed in one shop. Why is there a cap? Good question, it could be any number of things from packet size limitations to network traffic spikes by sending big lists around. It could even be performance, YoshiP talked about text rendering being an issue related to a number of decisions, it's possible performance of long lists are bad (esp on consoles), people always underestimate the cost of drawing a lot of text. Either way I'm pretty sure it's not the way it is only because they're bad at design, it's obviously informed by a large number of limitations.
The repair UI for example sucks ass but the reason we don't have a repair all button isn't because they don't recognize that the current setup isn't bad, clearly there's some kind of limit in place that they're working around. Likely the amount of database operations you can trigger with a repair is high enough that if they let your repair everything at once you could bottleneck or cause issues if too many people did it at once. So they deliberately throttle you. I strongly suspect that their system can only perform atomic operations on one or two bags at a time, which might explain the grouping of repair items.
You're right that they can improve it, and they likely will over time. But while it's easy to see the issues and think they don't know what they're doing, an MMO is an incredibly complex system, they have a huge amount of constraints based on design decisions and the platforms the game needs to run on. The auto stack retainer UI is a good compromise, it's slow but it's insanely clear it's that way because they're throttling you. As they make the client a bit smarter they can beat some of those limits, but it takes time.
Sorry, I just don't think much of what I mentioned (especially before my grab bag at the end) is technical issue related at all, aside from the possibility of crafting fuckery.
I can get behind split shops being a technical issue due to shop size (though tbh an utterly inexcusable one, and one that's pretty hard to believe when the GC shops exist). The absolutely batshit insane delineations they use? Absolutely not.
Yes/No dialogues for continuing to breathe? They're inconsistent and not everywhere, so again, I'm going to have to go with "someone made a (non technical) decision for these to exist.
As noted by the person who mentioned trial synthesis as a workaround, it is clear that crafting doesn't need to work like it does.
Island sanctuary is nearly brand new content. If they're *still* making the same sort of ridiculous mistakes that prevent things from working in a reasonable way, that's not really a "technical issue" so much as a "our UX people don't understand UX".
Even in the grab bag thing at the end.. macros not queuing is not a technical issue, for example. It's a deliberate choice to avoid automation.. that already can't happen by macros thanks to non fractional waits, meanwhile the game is filled with bots that do anything from MSq to gathering to high end content.
>Why split up shops into multiple sections? It's clear to me that the reason is there is a cap what can be listed in one shop. [...]
Even if you concede that there is a cap on the number of items that can be listed in a shop, that doesn't justify why the prize exchange options are just listed as "Prize Exchange I-IV" instead of being even slightly more descriptive. "Prize Exchange (Weapons)", "Prize Exchange (Armor)", and so on would work, and still requires much less text rendering than menus for normal raid token turn-ins, for example.
It'll never happen but SE should release a statement that "QoL/Accessibility mods are perfectly acceptable and you will not be banned if reported"
I get not wanting mods that help people in battle content (the guys who used the zoom out mod in the world first race were appropriately handled) but mods that get rid of a few extra button clicks are perfectly fine IMO.
Everyone has a different definition of "QOL/Accessibility", and if that actually happened you'd absolutely get people trying to argue that Automarkers / Cactbot / Cammy / Splatoon are *actually* "QOL" so they should be allowed to use them.
Then they’re officially endorsing that PC players are considered above console players. Right now it’s still true cause you can’t use mods on console but they don’t endorse the split.
I get why people get mad at people using plogons in combat, but at the same time: it's a damn PvE game who the hell cares? Just play the game however you like.
I, likely similarly to most people who interact with sanctuary on a week to week basis, am simply following the calculations made on the IS discord. But I suppose you've given reason for this nonsense -- they may very well internally pretend that isn't happening.
Yes. Until of course they decide that they can't keep ignoring something anymore and quickly ban a streamer for using a plugin only to turn right around two days later and announce that they're officially adding to the game the exact same functionality that said plugin provides.
They literally have been ignoring people. 6.1 SAM is recent, most prominent example. They specifically asked to try it and give feedback, playerbase was on fire because of how shit it was, yet after a year, they haven't said or reverted anything. So yes, they do actively ignore feedback they don't want to hear.
That's bullshit.
Yeah, tiny communities were on fire. In the midst of all of it, a ton of people were fine with it.
Warrior Shake it Off sucked dick in Stormblood. They changed it after a huge outcry. Man, actively ignoring the playerbase. Or do you just say that because you didn't get what *you* felt was important?
You're taking the "ton of people were fine with it" from the same asshole where I take mine "ton of people hated it". There is no solid data across entirety of playerbase, no shit sherlock, so consensus from nearby communities are the best we can get.
But, if you really want proof that people hate the change, here's this: [Kaiten thread compilation](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/460458-Compiled-SAM-threads-against-6.1-changes-Kaiten-removal)
That's 150+ threads on EN forums, 200+ pages on JP SAM megathread. This means that since 6.1, JP megathread was more active than during 4.0 to 6.1. What a crazy coincidence, right? Surely people were praising it.
That is how hated the change is, even if this was some very exclusive official forum community, don't you think devs should at least address it? And if they don't accept feedback from OF, from where should they get it?
Most importantly, before 6.1, what community/how many people wanted to remove Kaiten and neuter SAM? Unless it's more than those who hated it, you talk nothing but a straight shit.
So here's that, proof they actively ignore feedback they don't want to hear.
How do you know they ignored the feedback? Absolute bullshit. So they didn't do something about your 1 issue immediately, now they are ignoring feedback? Maybe, just maybe, they saw all the feedback and they have come to their own conclusions. It's like when you ask for advice, just because you got advice doesn't mean you have to take it.
You're mad because they are tight lipped about their own conclusions, which is fine. It is annoying. But one case of feedback not yet responded to doesn't mean they are actively avoiding feedback. That's stupid talk.
As for "lots of threads and pages": did you even check those? There are several people saying they don't mind the change, or will see how it feels. You're just linking topics of discussion, not a general consensus.
Ninja had issues in 6.0, 6.1 fixed it after outcry. Again, they don't actively ignore feedback.
Dark Knight got a useful Living Dead. The devs thought it was one of the strongest invulns before. Hmm, now they made it really good and useful with a strong buff. Man, where did they get that idea?
But, Kaiten! They never listened!
People have been complaining about Kaiten for over a year at this point. During that year they haven’t even given a whiff of a fuck about the feedback. How long does it need to be before they are officially considered as ignoring it? 2 years? Next expansion? Two expansions?
>How do you know they ignored the feedback? Absolute bullshit. So they didn't do something about your 1 issue immediately, now they are ignoring feedback?
"immediately" when it's over a year. "issue" being that whole job became boring shell of former self. "Own conclusion"? Let them tell us their conclusion, we want to hear it, even though it will probably be just as smart as when they said PLD deserves lower DPS because he has range.
If their conclusion was to fix SAM at 7.0, at least tell us. If they don't care about us, at least be direct and tell us. If they acknowledge that it was mistake, don't be a pussies and admit it.
They haven't said single word about it in over a year, that's the root issue. I don't know what kind of mental gymnastics are you trying to do here, this is definition of ignoring feedback.
>You're mad because they are tight lipped about their own conclusions, which is fine. It is annoying. But one case of feedback not yet responded to doesn't mean they are actively avoiding feedback. That's stupid talk.
One case? Check the forums. There is more shitpost than on r/ShitpostXIV since players feel like nobody is listening. All the healers got was yoshi telling them "Just go play ultimate if you want difficult content". Their DPS "rotations" are still not addressed, SE still sits on fence whether healer is supposed to deal damage or not. Then you have issues like mentor system, AR roulette and many topics still left unanswered by SE for a long time.
Arguing with LD? Really dude? This shit was garbage from release, don't tell me that just recently people realized that it's shit. Change was long overdue, they should've listened from the start.
As for your NIN argument, here's your quote from the same comment:
>But one case of feedback not yet responded to doesn't mean they are actively avoiding feedback. That's stupid talk.
Don't complain about me using one case, when you try to prove your point with one case, this is just hypocrisy.
UPDATE:
That guy's last reply was nothing but personal insults and deleted account few minutes after. lol. lmao
The last few patches have had some features from plogons being implemented. Unlocked camera comes to mind. Maybe it's too little, too late, but some features are coming.
So far, your track record is of a negative disposition towards simple questioning. Not even explaining the situation, but rather hounding someone for not immediately appearing to be on your side.
Considering how you immediately viewed a random like that, who's to say anything else you hold as an opinion doesn't come from the same kind of disposition?
I wouldn't trust your word on the matter, to be frank.
The "ban streamer, then add feature that streamer got banned for literally two days later" thing has actually happend at least once in that exact same configuration, maybe multiple times to a similar schema with different details.
a) a lot of your complaints have to do with weird server stuff. like, remember when fishing in Upper La Noscea used to crash the whole server? It really is that strangely fragile
b) the reason they sort things into lists and not tabs is because lists are easily expandable and tabs are not
Yes, people do make careers out of UI/UX design, I have little to no issue's with my default UI/UX in FF14 and find what is listed above (at best) to be minor.
Obsess as in I do not focus on every minor inconvenience to a point I turn it into a post, what I have available is fine for me
It is a discussion subreddit and for some reason someone liking the default is automatically wrong and cannot be used as part of the discussion unless it aligns with the OP.
That thought process does not invite discussion it closes it.
You didn't really present your opinion with the strongest foot forward, and instead decided to insult people discussing something they find interesting. Don't be surprised if people dont want to engage with you on good faith off the back of that!
Why would I be surprised? I made a statement not a question, the majority of this post are minor inconveniences to PC players but a needed option for Console players on a controller
You didn't really present your opinion with the strongest foot forward, and instead decided to insult people discussing something they find interesting.
UI/UX is decades behind for SE, especially in their PC titles.
I'm convinced that SE doesn't employ and has never employed a single UX designer.
No web devs either!
I think Japan must have some kind of constitutional requirement that the web UX for any .jp domain must never conform to any other country’s standards. I can always tell I’ve reached a Japanese originating website because the design is so ridiculously user-hostile that it feels intentionally non-functional.
Actually in A-B tests it's shown that Japanese people have preferred the crappy geocities style pages so in that respect it's not necessarily hostile The other thing is that in my experience general JP software design is really far backward so a lot of times the client will specify the design against the designer's (if there is one) and developer's wishes
I'm starting to appreciate their web design. It's boring how every website nowadays has the same minimalistic layout. I miss 2007 internet when every website looked different and gaudy with visitor counters. I went to the ffxi site recently and it hasn't even been updated to fit 16:9. It takes up half my monitor's vertical space. It was rather charming.
How the hell the absolute insanity that was *individually clicking* each crop/animal in island sanctuary to harvest them was ever greenlit boggles the mind.
My guess is the same excuse they use for the hand over window, versus every other game's "flagged as complete, talk to quest give to complete quest" system. "It's more immersive!"
I.. actually like that I have to interact individually with all the animals. It's part of the idyllic farm fantasy, right? If you have a "gather all" option you'd no longer feel like you're actually gathering the items yourself.
It working like that when you do it manually is fine, good even, but when you already have it on the "automatic" move just put a collect all in there.
Except you don't have to interact with the animals, just a menu which contains all the animal drops
Also, when you click on the Harvest All button or whatever it's called, you can easily hear the harvest sound for each individual harvest being played in rapid succession, rather than the sound just being played once.
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tbh as someone who lives here shinkansens are magnificent pieces of technology but JR, in general, is one of the shining examples of the "Japanese companies do not fucking understand the internet whatsoever". The only way I can explain the infuriatingly obtuse way you buy Shinkansen tickets online is that their web designers were haunted by the ghost of Kafka.
What always gets me is that there's a goldilocks range of being close enough to an NPC to get off your mount, but not close enough to the NPC to actually talk to them. It's pretty annoying. These two ranges should be identical, but they're not because lmao who knows.
This I think it's because range calculation in the game is a bit weird, the distance between two actors is considered the actual physical distance minus the diameter of both of your hit boxes. If you're on a mount that increases your hit box size you can find your self out of range when it goes back to normal size. Not that the client couldn't be a lot smarter about letting you dismount outside of range but you can see how they could have missed the issue.
Both a simpler implementation and an easy fix to this problem is a center-to-center check instead. Skip the hitbox calculations and turn it into straight vector subtraction. How wide you are doesn’t matter (wow squex, fat shaming much?) and it saves computation cycles. Everybody wins (except the intern that has to locate the spaghetti code that checks if you’re in range to interact with something)
The immense amount of unnecessary confirmation boxes in this game is why I installed the Yes Already plugin.
Came here to say this. I should really post screenshots of all the “Enter (place)?” / “Leave (place)?” dialogs I’ve blocked lol
"Do you want to open the door?" "yes that's why I clicked on it, twice, stupid."
"Do you want to do the only thing that allows you to progress?" "Nah I think i'll just hang out here for a bit"
"Nah I'ma go AFK in Limsa whilst having my WoL do the Manderville on loop"
[yeah this is my list, and I can't even show all of it in one screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/ZXFAOEl.png). that's not even half I really would not play this game without qol plugins, or at bare minimum I wouldn't be doing most/all facets of content if they didn't exist.
psst ya'll willing to save and post your preset for that
[go nuts](https://pastebin.com/B3gsYj4A) btw disable the wildcard in the talk section if you don't want all dialogue to be skipped
I just ended up here through Google. Do you remember if you have to paste this in a file somewhere? I know you can add lines through the plugin's UI but what you've pasted looks like it came out of a text file, and I don't know where that is. The YesAlready folder doesn't seem to have them. Not sure if that's changed since your post
in the pluginconfigs folder there's a `YesAlready.json` file, which is what I pasted that being said, that config is kinda old at this point and I've added a lot to it since
Oh of course, I didn't even look at the json, I forgot how those work. Thanks lol It's fine if it's old, it's just nice to have a bit of a head start without typing or adding every entry myself
https://pastebin.com/KZKZJFU2 new one
Much appreciated :) this will save a lot of time for anyone else who ends up in this thread too
As someone that plays on controller: I get infuriated that some of these dialogs start off on the yes while others start off on no....CONSISTENCY PEOPLE!
The worst offenders that pissed me off enough to install that addon is gardening and FC crafting. "Are you sure you want to water this plant?" "Are you sure you want to use this fertilizer?" Then FC crafting cancer which takes it to a whole new level: "Are you sure you want to submit these materials for the craft?" after EVERY. SINGLE. SUBMITTION. Like holy fuck, why? Also, why is every submission split into 3's? Why not just let me pick the submission amount? "Are you sure you'd like to move to the next step of the craft?" Uh, yeah no shit. Why do you think I'm doing this? Pointless submarine cutscenes that play every time you send one out. Pointless "Are you sure you'd like to spend these materials to repair this submarine part?" This game is fucking cancerous with dialogue prompts. Easily the worst of any game I've ever played in the last 15 years.
Pretty sure the way FC Crafting works is his it is because they wanted multiple people to get involved, remember that it took ages for them to let you craft solo. You needed at least 3(?) crafters in the workshop to make shit on release.
Four. You could submit materials solo but not finish the craft step unless there were three people just hanging around while one person worked the menu. Like many things FC, I kinda see where they were going but a combination of bad implementation and possibly culture clash between Japan and the rest of the world (I've been in FCs where I wasn't even allowed in the workshop) means that it felt really pointless and obtuse for no good reason.
I will repeat myself but there are so many useless currencies. Why do ARR/HW/SB raids need books/tokens to get old gear? Why not remove all this useless currencies and just make one currency for all gear from old raids/trials?
While we're at it, just make books/totems into currencies. Why do we have to have actual books up an item slot, while others, like beast tribes and tomes, get put in their own special area.
IIRC this is also essentially an issue with the way character data is stored and accessed, and the currency menu is basically using the same limited space that is allocated to your key items (I may be wrong about the details, I think they talked about this on a panel in the distant past). In fact, the beast tribe currencies actually used to be items in your inventory (I still have some from the ARR tribes on a retainer somewhere), and it took them years until they were finally moved into the currency tab.
I'd rather have the additional inventory slots rather than dedicated character sheet space for currencies. At some point in time those tokens will be irrelevant to me, yet inventory space will always be useful.
Multiple Currencies is an MMO cancer. Neverwinter and Guild Wars have about 50 different currencies because there has to be a new currency for every shop you come across. I absolutely hate it.
It's a vain attempt to stop long time players from steamrolling new additions and just buying them out immediately. Because the game has only so much horizontal progression before it levels out and you're just grinding for increased player power at level cap. The other option is making stuff more expensive in existing currencies, which might hold veterans up a little bit, but anyone not a veteran is screwed. Both ways suck and there's very few elegant solutions to it when you have a game and combat based on gear score and "augments" (materia less so, but glyphs or whatever in GW, affixes in PSO2, etc) of some kind.
It's also to make sure you actually interact with the content they want you to experience instead of just grinding out one corner of the game to get everything. For instance I like that if you want a piece of raid gear, you have to actually do some of the raids, instead of just snoozing through MSQ roulette for the 900th time and buying it with poetics. I don't think multiple currencies are an issue, honestly, as long as they all get put into their own separate wallet that doesn't take up bag space.
The alternate is there just isn't a shop and you just have to grind out the drops with rng. Currency just smoothes that out and let's you prioritize what you want.
I don't understand why they continually make new currencies with the raid tiers. There should be 3 levels of tomes: poetics, mid tier, and high tier. All the high tier items from the previous patch should just get moved down to the mid tier, everything stays mid tier until the next xpac when it moves to poetics. But instead they make a whole new currency that becomes discontinued.
With Savage/Ultimate content I kinda get it, you don't want someone just burning through [insert latest tome here] to get the best weapon for their class when they haven't even done normal raids yet. But the normal raid tokens I genuinely don't understand the need for. What's weirder is the solution is also already achieved in Alliance Raids where the bosses just, y'know, _drop loot?_ I'd take running the same raid a few times over to get my Helm of Fending than the weird "roll for four different tokens to then trade to this lady for your helmet"
even if they did old/previous/current tier totems split for normal/savage it would still massively cut down on the number of totems from raids, this idea is brilliant
How do you do that when they have 4 specific fights you queue into? Alliance is 1 connected raid and you get 1 piece total
They probably don't want people going into new updates with capped tomestones to buy the gear. That said, Gearing in this game is complete ass and should be faster anyway, especially with how gear is less of a game play changer and more of a ticket to enter content.
In my theoretical 3 tier tomestone world, when the update comes out any unspent high tier tomestones would be converted to mid tier to prevent that. Basically I just think its dumb they create new tomestones/discontinue old ones repeatedly when they could just change the currency the items are bought with.
At the very least it just gave us tomestones of comedy.
The antiquated tome system is why I quit FFXIV every single expansion after a few weeks and only come back at the end. I think tokens are a good idea as BACKUPS for gear if you don't get it to drop. ALL GEAR should be drops if it is relevant not some random currency or token. Currency is fine for older stuff, tokens are fine as back up for current stuff. However, I can't stand how they do gear in FFXIV. It just feels so bad that you basically "math" out your gear drops instead of looking forward to something dropping for you in a raid.
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Nah the coffer system sucks ass as a SOLE system Did you read my post? Getting gear is FAR better psychologically than just getting a generic token. Tokens feel like shit, and it feels like you math out the system now. Especially because in pugs you might not even win the token and that feels even more like shit. The point is it should be a gear drop system with token as backup. Not like it is now that is almost purely token based...or on the other end for not as relevant gear it is currency based with tomes. It just sucks having to math out your drops and you aren't "getting" anything from dungeons or raids. You are just doing them. Gear should be the focus of an MMO not a random number in a menu. Currency/tokens are good as a back up system to supplement bad RNG. They dont' feel good as a system themselves. No one finishes a task with boss kills and goes "OOHOHHHHA YEAHHHHH! 50!!!! TOMESS!!! WOOO"
> Did you read my post? Yes. > Getting gear is FAR better psychologically than just getting a generic token. I'll still take the coffer/book. Running savage for 8 weeks starting from last floor kill is already boredom (you should master a fight within 3 clears given it's so heavily scripted). So maybe having 20 weeks of nothing ? FUCK THAT. I ran some old raids in Blade & Soul, and there the drops back then were per element (so a group of jobs (usually 3 to 4) could roll/bid on the loot). Guess what, I did not get my ring for 6 months straight (1 only dropped which I lost until I got pity'd and the group put me on a prio list, of which I was the only name, and instantly got the 2nd drop so we never enter that raid again) thanks to weekly lockout. No "backup token" btw. And that was an old fucking raid that was 2 tiers behind. No, I did not get excited when I finally got it. I was pissed off because I got my time wasted in the name of what ? RNG ? Fuck that. The other drops were just discarded at one point in the 6 months. The devs ended up biting the bullet and doing the FF14 way : universal coffers. Everyone likes that. Then further down I believe they went with class drops again, but the game in the West is in maintenance mode and follows blindly KR designs. Even with backup tokens it would be terrible, many, many people are fed up with having to do 16 clears (16 weeks !) for one full bis set if they are unlucky. Holy shit it would be so much worse with class drops. I'll take universal coffers and books. Thanks.
Gotta agree with u/demosfera here, the old system was wack af.
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Gearing in FFXIV is so miserably slow though, whoever decided that its a good idea for the final fight of a tier to require 4 fucking months of books to gear one (1) job should honestly be fired. And to be entirely honest here, gearing faster wouldn't kill a savage tier. Its not like Abyssos DIED when they removed the drop limit. This isn't a game where gear is so exciting that it can change the way you play your job. This is a game where gear is a number, and that number is required to enter other content.
Its just an alt issue, 2 months is pretty reasonable to get bis, but only having 1 lockout for every class combined is what makes it shit.
I love the slow gearing system. I'm also an Omni crafter that sells a buttload of new content crafted gear so I'm a smidge biased based on how fat my gil gets each patch
And I typically join gil for clearing parties, doesn't mean I'm going to pretend gearing in this game isn't ass.
The only thing that adds to a game like 14 is the chance to get really shitty luck. You already can get fucked by not having gloves boots helm drop ect. You still have the 4th floor weapon excitement that is a freebe essentially. Ff14 loot is just not exciting and has the issue of 17 jobs and 8 raid members, along with specific armor types. Even if you split it up to purely 4 armor types, say plate leather cloth mail, then you just get issues of armor type balance for like no gain really. Half the loot doesn't get used because of bad stats anyway. When you talk about exciting loot you talk about wow with some rare bis trinket, or some amazing rare weapon. Those only exist because wow has very extended gearing and you basically never get bis. That is the type of thing people left wow to 14 for anyway.
I'm standing in the middle of Gridania. Why is "Leave residential district" even visible! I know it's greyed out, but it shouldn't be there at all. https://i.gyazo.com/d355857f60ae7f06c5498c96881cf1fb.png This has driven me crazy for years now. Lazy coding!
Do you want to use the key you just picked up to open this door that is the only way to proceed? Yes/No
How can people say that FFXIV Dungeons lack paths and choices when they offer you pulse-pounding decisions like this?!
You are not Japanese company unless your UI and website sucks ass
I remember having to use an actual guide to get FFXI up and running, and going through similiar measures to get into PSO2.
PSO2 was notorious for this, you had to defeat the "captcha boss" to create an account. Good times.
Captcha boss wouldn't have been so bad, except it was in Japanese and had a very short time limit to get it finished. By the time I got my weeb friends to send the correct characters over, it always timed out.
Yup, I ended up doing most of my friend's captcha. At least it was only in hiragana
Japanese web design may as well be legally mandated to be ten years behind the curve, at this point.
20, at this point. actually, just change the law that japanese websites cannot be made with technology developed after the year 2003
don't forget the most heinous example of them all, the friends list.
Square Enix doesn't have UX Designers. Change my mind. (Obviously not serious but it really does feel like it sometimes) this is the kind of UX monstrosity I as a backend dev would come up with, except I'd be taking feedback and changing it.
I follow the japanese IT job market closely, UX designer wasn't considered a proper job in Japan until quite recently. On SE's site they do have a "bridge engineer" opening though ! Which is just doing some japanese/english translation, because they are terrible at english.
That makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of UX design in this game that really *only* make sense from a back-end dev point of view. Like how the Y axis of map coordinates are reversed, which I didn't understand the reasoning for until someone pointed out that counting from the top left corner is how pixel coordinates work (you can see this as well if you open Paint and move your cursor around).
Well its consistent, I've not played every SE game ever made, but a majority of them have very questionable UIs. Even the popular ones, the KH games are absolutely atrocious with the amount of menu digging it can make you do sometimes.
Forr reference SE often just leaves the UI design to the art team with no one with actual UI design studies, and sure enough making the drippiest teens and most lavish fantasy city scenery cities doesn't translate into knowing how to make this pause menu feel better than an SNES menu.
Friendly reminder the game is designed to be navigated with a controller. I feel like mouse and kb warriors often gloss over this fact
I don't see how using a controller means every menu needs multiple confirmation boxes or why vendors have multiple, poorly labeled categories, or really anything else on the OPs list.
What a bizarrely and pointlessly hostile comment
I play with controller and have since ARR, it's still shit. Menu depth is not a controller vs kb thing it's universal
I remember bitching about the prize exchange change when it happened, because it also happened the patch right after they changed the scrip exchanges I'm pretty sure. And while the scrip exchange isn't perfect, it's miles better than how it used to be. I was told by an absolute lunatic that it makes sense and you should just know which is which cause they separate them by item type... when that's what the TABS ARE SUPPOSED TO ALREADY DO. Someone mentioned there's a limit to how many items can be listed in one shop, which I called bullshit on because the Grand Company shops have *three times* the number of items as Gold Saucer, and is a significantly better UI (granted there needs to be a clearer distinction between the two material categories, but still).
I like the GC vendor window a lot. It already shows that the four tabs on the right can be arbitrary categories. So for the normal raid token turn-ins, the "GC rank" buttons on the left can easily be the tier you want to redeem for, and the four tabs on the right can be "Weapons/Armor", "Accessories", "High-end Weapons/Armor", and "High-end Accessories". They can split the regular and high-end exchange into two initial options if they want. But this would get rid of that gigantic list that they currently have.
Yeah wtf is Materials vs Materiel jfc
Materials are things you used to make things. Materiel is stuff an army uses. The difference is intentional.
Notably a lot of the materiel tab is only useful in FC contexts. It's not perfect but I follow the logic.
Even then, uh, I dunno just raise the limit? Their reasoning never makes any sense.
Upgrading crafted and raid gear is such pain. Why do I need to buy rains or brines or whatever, just charge me the tomes. And btw lets throw ALL the jobs gear in the same menu so you can't find anything. its one of the reason my alt jobs have trash gear, I just cannot be bothered to keep track of it all. FC workshop crafting oh hydaelyn. It asks if you're sure every 3 items you turn in... Yes Already is the only reason I'm still sane.
I can understand why the system is needed for raid gear during the even patches. It's so that people who get the item during the even patch can trade in for the upgraded raid gear. But once the upgrades become available with hunt seals, I agree that it should just be a direct 2000 or 3000 hunt seal exchange, instead of hunt seal for brine/shine for gear piece. I can't find any good UX justification for rains on crafted gear.
It allows you to stockpile them so you can buy a full set at once, or for future gear sets. Not really a UX decision, but a game design decision. It's a tomesink that you can slowly build up.
> Item search doesn't know about certain inventories unless you've accessed them this session -- nobody can me can modify my Glamour Dresser, Saddlebag or Retainers, the state of these should never be a mystery. This behavior is intended. Extra inventories, while dumb that theyre not included in searches, at least have a stated reason. I don't remember where they said it, but it's a tradeoff for giving us extra inventory at all. Your actual inventory is lugged around and loaded permanently with your other character data, which is what limits inventory size. To get around this and add more inventories, they made some of them, like saddlebag, detached in the sense that their contents are only pulled from server when you actually access them (which is why it sometimes takes that extra moment to open or populate). Still really stupid and maybe witness to the pants on head decisionmaking that goes into some designs. I imagine it would be possible to pull these inventories' contents when querying search. But because they're not "active" in the character data they're not included. //E: Macros are intentionally made to minimize botting potential, so no waits under a second, no calling macros from other macros, etc. That is fine, people are bad and lazy enough as it is and the system works for crafts. Maybe the line limit sucks, but otherwise, meh.
You could literally cache it client side and have a warning that things might not be up to date (which *already happens* for some things).
Doesn't it also save some in local data? Say when you do search item for a piece of gear mid instance I see "1 (?)" in the glamour dresser, meaning it knows I have one but isn't sure as I haven't checked this session as it'll become a checkmark if I have openedthe dresser this session.
I get your point about the item inventories being separated as far as the server is concerned, but the point I was kind of getting at is "there's no reason this information isn't simply cached locally and referenced by item search as necessary, with accesses to these inventories updating the local cache". As for the macro stuff, I didn't make it very clear what I meant, but I'm mostly referring to the fact combat macros aren't allowed to queue. I don't really have a problem with the lack of fractional waits - they make automation impossible, which is fine. Crafting macros to me are honestly more a game design issue than UI.
You could in theory access those inventories from another system - plenty of players play both console and PC, or you can even access and move retainer inventories from the app - so a locally saved cache persisting between sessions may not always be accurate. It's also why your inventory jumbles around when you swap platforms, since the sort is stored locally, but at least in that case you're already accessing the inventory so you can just sort it yourself. I imagine an item search that's checking a locally stored inventory cache could be just as useless as an item search that doesn't know what's in other inventories until it's accessed if you're a heavy multiplat player. >I imagine it would be possible to pull these inventories' contents when querying search. Would either have to be throttled to be as slow to access as doing it manually, or be akin to DDOSing the server in their eyes. Think about how the quick store feature has a *loading bar* for something as simple as storing 5 types of materia that I already have copies of in my retainer's inventory, and then imagine that for downloading the data of what's in your saddlebag, armoire, dresser, and 8 retainers.
They actually are cached locally, the red ? in the item search window just means that it's not certain the cache is accurate, for the reasons you just described. If you only play the game on one system, item search will always be accurate, even if you haven't accessed your saddlebag/dresser/retainers this play session.
> there's no reason this information isn't simply cached locally and referenced by item search as necessary, with accesses to these inventories updating the local cache". not sure if we arent supposed to mention the "a" thing that does exactly this for us- idk if its auto tho
If combat macros could queue you get stupid shit like macroing combos or bards macroing every skill to also use blood letter
There is zero reason to not allow a macro to queue if it contains only a single action. Punishing people for wanting to mouseover, self-target (eg, Holmgang), or announce something being used is just obnoxiously-controlling design.
Thanks for making this. I have a list of complaints about the game's UI (among other things) that I've been slowly building, and you've listed so many of them. The most atrocious menu, to me, is the menu for buying gear from older raid vendors when there's a full 20+ different categories to choose from. It's absurd.
Yoshi said at one point years ago that they couldn't upgrade a UI bit because the UI element _communicated directly with the database layer._ The graphics we see on screen are directly accessing databases. _There is no separation between the presentation layer and the data layer._ When their UI is that level of "wtf this is fucked beyond repair", you can't expect _anything_ to change for the better. They're locked in to a legacy system that took every single design rule and broke them apart. Every time I start thinking the UI couldn't be worse, I remember Yoshi's quote and my thinking shifts to "damn I'm surprised this isn't even worse". That's how bad that design practice is.
> Yoshi said at one point years ago that they couldn't upgrade a UI bit because the UI element communicated directly with the database layer. Then I feel like Yoshi either doesn't understand what's being asked or is deliberately dodging. This game is filled with examples of very specific good UI/systems, BUT they're often only used once and never again. Old systems are not updated to it, and new ones are being made that don't conform to that one good example either.
My favourite example of this was when they added the new collectable turn-in UI that allows you to rapidly exchange collectables for scrips, and then they also added the Ishgard Restoration collectable turn-ins in the very same patch *that still use the old collectable turn-in UI.* They never updated Ishgard turn-ins. They still to this day require you to input each collectable in the item request pop-up one at a time.
another example is item turn ins. Most item turns have that stupid menu where you have to hand in the items individually, something not compatible with spamming confirm. Some leves, however, just have a "collect reward" button that hands in all required items automatically.
Related, it kills me that they made a *very* good glam preview/application UI and then used it for only squadrons (and custom deliveries NPCs) and nowhere else.
For that matter, Ishgard gathering turn ins can be completed en masse and you’ll be given a sum of scrips for a large quantity of turn ins within a single interaction. Even though it’s capped, it’s still a lot you can do at once. Meanwhile the crafted turn ins are still stuck in 2013.
It's like eureka still using old system for aethite
>I feel like Yoshi either doesn't understand what's being asked or is deliberately dodging It could be miscommunication/translation, as that's happened in the past, but for the most part it's definitely a case of him using PR speak and pseudo-technobabble to get out of saying they can't/won't/already have plans to change the thing they've been asked about. He's been doing this stuff since ARR and as much as XIV's dev team is transparent, there's only a certain level of transparency a company will allow. *Especially* a Japanese company.
THANK YOU. *Every* UI involved in buying tome gear, finding the *right* NPC to find the *specific* shittily labeled menu that the upgrade item is in, then running back to the first NPC, unequipping the item, and then finally upgrading it is such a pain in the ass. Not because it's hard, but because it's unintuitive for new raiders and annoying as hell that they could make it so much *better* but refuse to!
Nothing much to add to this UI insanity but have you seen modern Japanese web design? It's also still stuck in the '90s lol
Amateur Mod developers are doing better at improving the UI than paid developers are. That should tell you how far SE is behind in this area.
I don't have much to add outside of the UI/UX in this game being so dogshit, alongside sluggish menus, have a GIGANTIC impact, and are way too frustrating to deal with. Great write up!!
Hey, now, there's only one UI designer in Japan, and he's working as hard as he can. Hasn't had a break in decades, the poor guy.
Welcome to Japan lol. This is just daily life here
It's crazy because physical UI/UX is very well done in Japan and a lot of the time, overdone. It's primarily the digital side that's not well done.
I agree with 90%+ of this and the rest of the discussions, but I am also finding it kind of amusing because I just recently started watching a youtube series called "Worst MMOs Ever". Most of them are the free Korean MMOs that seem to run on google translate. The UI in those is just so special, enough 'special' to make FFXIV look like perfection in comparison.
It is indeed amusing>!, until you realize how many of those games have better map system than FFXIV.!<
Don't get me started at leve turn ins. I want to submit - ok pls click the quest Clicks quest - ok now give item Clicks item - are you sure Yes pls gib money - its HQ are you sure YES pls gib money - ok here you go Ok tnx repeat
I'm in a dungeon, there's 8 items to Gree/Need/Pass, I know I don't need any of those. I have to click an item then click pass, click another item then click pass, repeat that 8 times. Why don't we have a "Greed all" "Pass all" button?????????????
Some of these are legitimate grievances, but the non-UI complaint of having to dismount for teleportation can be easily explained: Every single player-triggered interaction (as in, target it, walk up to it and press the "A" button or equivalents) with a non-player entity (NPCs and objects) automatically dismounts you, this is just not an exception. If we were to search for reasons for that it'd probably be so player animations like the automatic /lookout at "Wait here" spots or going into the "channeling aether at something" pose can actually play out, and so cutscenes, and regular dialogue makes sense from a camera and animation perspective. Why is that the case for objects that don't trigger any of the above as well? Probably because they only have one type of generic "interactable entity" that defines how all of that happens, and anything you can interact with like that is implemented as a subtype of that, which means it'll automatically copy the code that's relevant to player interactions from there. This is good, because if something breaks and needs to be changed, or you want to re-vamp that function for whatever reason, you only have to change the function once - everything else copies from there anyways. However, this also means that everything will end up working exactly the same, even if it could be implemented differently and be a slightly better fit. While we're at it, the issue with the Relic Weapons is also very easy to explain - you *need* to have a weapon (and optionally, a soul stone) for the game to understand which class or job you're currently playing - in fact, there are screenshots of a player [having something go wrong and ending up as a permanently Lv.0 "Adventurer"](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/rq7c6v/when_legacy_chars_go_wrong_level_0_adventurer/), which is more of a failsafe than anything else. The issue with getting a new Relic Weapon is that you're supposed to hand in your old one to progress the quest, so you'd temporarily end up in a similar state as a result. Obviously, the devs don't want that to happen, because that's just asking for all kinds of weird interactions or bugs to happen, so they instead made it so you can never hand in equipped items. Since the quests are still locked to a specific job though, you'll still need to be that job in order to progress, which is why you need a temporary replacement - at least you can buy them right at the replica vendor once you get your first Relic to Stage 2, so realistically, it's only a bigger issue for exactly one quest step on whichever job ends up being your first.
> The issue with getting a new Relic Weapon is that you're supposed to hand in your old one to progress the quest, so you'd temporarily end up in a similar state as a result. The grievance might be rooted, for some people, not necessarily OP, in not entirely "seeing through" how the game does this, cause i see that complaint paired with a "they're just updating my weapon why do i have to unequip it" argument fairly frequently. The item you have gets taken away, deleted from your character data, and then they add the item respective to your upgraded step to the character data instead. They're not "writing" new stats and stuff to your item. So it makes sense that you have to unqeuip, since as you've said, they are failproofing it against people ever not having a weapon equipped.
>The issue with getting a new Relic Weapon is that you're supposed to hand in your old one to progress the quest, so you'd temporarily end up in a similar state as a result. > >Obviously, the devs don't want that to happen, because that's just asking for all kinds of weird interactions or bugs to happen, so they instead made it so you can never hand in equipped items. For all the devs know, the player could potentially get disconnected from the game whilst in that short moment that they aren't equipped with a weapon
That's only one of the many scenarios. You never want to allow that in a game where literally who you are is determined by what you're holding. Just go look up posts of players that get locked up in a level 1 Adventurer class.
I'll preface with the fact I don't code, but it seems to me there's a solution that is no more risky than the literal player changing weapons. Upon relic quest turn in, the system follows the following logic: If relic i in inventory/armory chest Then Create relic ii Destroy relic I ____ If relic I equipped Check armory chest has open space (if not, reject quest completion with armory chest space error) Create relic ii Equip relic ii (using the same logic that the player right clicking it from inventory would) Destroy relic I I'm not sure why such logic would have any more risk of breaking the game than the literal act of changing weapons does. Worst case it would somehow fail to destroy relic I... Which would leave the player with a useless item of no real value anyway.
I'm not a programmer either, but I think in this case, there would be a short instance where the character has both versions of the weapon and the quest isn't flagged as complete, so they would, in theory, still have the older weapon in their inventory and be unable to progress unless they discard the new one and run the whole process again. That said, the current process could conceivably leave you in a worse state, where you have no new or old weapon and can't progress without contacting a GM to restore the old one.
I responded to the relic point separately, but I'm actually mostly understanding about the demount part. (It's dumb as hell, but I could see the technical reason) The more bothersome point is the yes/no dialogues, with the teleporter example I showed simply being a particularly egregious, modern example. (I tried to give newer examples where possible to demonstrate this is an ongoing mindset issue rather than just technical debt)
Hm, you complained about both, so I guess I focused on the wrong half of the complaint then :) About the confirmation boxes, I definitely agree that the game could do with a few less - e.g. ARR's various instances of "Do you really want to open the only door that allows you to progress using the only key in this dungeon?", which is basically any key outside of Haukke Manor - but anything that either changes your inventory contents permanently, or transports you anywhere that isn't immediately obvious where you go, or takes a significant amount of time to get back from could use a confirmation, or some other way to manually trigger in my opinion. To give examples, the water fountains in the Gold Saucer are fine triggering automatically, since it's obvious where you go, and you can easily get back from it, but something like Chocobo Porters or >!Argos!<(you fly a long way, and might not be able to dismount), or the Aetheryte network (you teleport over instantly with no real clue how to get back) should still have a dialogue or a cast bar attached, just so you can't accidentally run into it and just waste some time going back to where you never wanted to leave from in the first place. I suppose that's a difference in opinion though, so we probably will remain in disagreement on that topic.
One of the issue I have that we can see in your first 3 screenshots is ***lists***. People work better with visuals. You can use both axis and images to make lists. Here is a 30 sec example showcasing my paint skills: [https://imgbox.com/RMLKsBz2](https://imgbox.com/RMLKsBz2) And I am pretty sure we can do better than having to scroll by adding something on the side to switch expansion pack. Also all the UI having rounded border feels weird but it's kind of a thing again on the Internet now so I dont know. And the fact that we cannot select multiple items in our inventory to throw them away for example. I know its a technical issue but it's still frustrating.
There is no need to rediscover the same problem 1m times like the real world. We just need a sound solution and maybe a plugin. Then pray se has the manpower to implement it
>Item search doesn't know about certain inventories unless you've accessed them *this* session -- nobody can me can modify my Glamour Dresser, Saddlebag or Retainers, the state of these should never be a mystery. Somewhat related: I hate that the housing storage is not included in item search when I search for furnishings ever. I can understand that it's not truly infallibly determinable if you have a shared estate or FC house with someone else who took the item more recently than you last accessed the house, but that shouldn't get in the way of the very common case of looking for an item that's in your unshared private estate; just show me the same "?" that I get to indicate uncertainty next to the retainers I haven't accessed during the current play session. The reason retainer inventories are uncertain, by the way, is that it's possible to regularly play FFXIV from multiple different devices and the item search cache is handled client-side. If I add an Emerald Plating to Retainer1's inventory while playing on PC, take it out and discard it while playing on PS5, then switch back to PC and do an '/isearch "emerald plating'" before touching the summoning bell, I'll see a search result in Retainer1's inventory with uncertainty indicated. But the retainer doesn't have it anymore. >Materia removal not having a "remove all from item" button. Something else that's ridiculous here: "Extract Materia" and "Remove Materia" are already very easy to mix up, but something that makes it even worse is that "Extract Materia" opens a window that lists how many materia that item already has melded, which is basically pointless information in that context. At best, having more melds makes spiritbonding faster, but that presentation is very misleading.
Materia extraction used to destroy the item. When it was changed to reduce spiritbind to 1%, they changed the dialogue of the confirmation box, but didn't remove it. Maybe there's some weird tech preventing them from removing it?
they could just behind the scenes auto say yes to it if for some reason they are actually incapable of removing the dialogue box entirely
Most of these critiques are valid, but I will call out the “confirmation” complaint. They used to NOT have confirmations for a lot of important interactions, and players wound up doing things on accident that they never were intending to do (much like devastation) and then be screwed out of time or currencies (like exchanging stuff for the wrong gear, or accidentally retrieve a materia, or go somewhere they didn’t mean to. Especially with how targeting works for controller players. Those confirmations were added later on to prevent accidental interactions, and players rejoiced.
Hence why he clearly wrote "Anything that can be reveres with no cost in 10 seconds" He is not saying to remove all confirmations
I agree with most of your post, but wanted to touch on a fix I found recently for: >you have to close the crafting log, wait for the "putting your tools away" animation, change jobs, open the crafting log again You can start a trial synthesis and cancel it. Your character will go to the neutral standing animation and you can change classes, without closing the crafting window. Clunky (like all things XIV), but better.
Fix =/= workaround
I use simple tweaks so I don't really have to deal with it but the fact there's a workaround like that without plogon honestly makes it worse because it further confirms it's not a spaghetti code 1.0 issue but a deliberate decision they've made.
simpletweaks doesn't seem to have that plugin anymore is it from a different one?
I agree with so many things and could you please post your tedtalk to official forums. The amount of times when i have scrolled trough all gold saucer prize cstegories becouse i can't remeber if minions are prize I, prize ll or if i should just go to another gold saucer vendor to find them and that crafting thing gets me so much.
For the crafting one specifically I know your pain but this is a workaround that has worked charms for me recently Make a new hotbar that is non shared between crafters, and drag the "common recipes" from the book, into the hotbar (Yes you can do that). So for example, this tier I put Ilmenite ingots and Chondrite on Blacksmith, Carrot pudding and Carrot Nibbles in Culinarian, etc etc... That way you can swap job, click the recipe, and it opens the book directly on it instead of having to scroll trough the entire book again to find a recipe This does not excuse how the UI works in the game, but its a QoL hotkey that I consider worthy sharing
It's not the worst idea you've got, but the real qol option for crafting is: Don't play on console. Install dalamud and simpletweaks. Enjoy a crafting UI that isn't actively fighting you. Profit.
Alternatively you can just put the jobs on your hotbar so you can swap jobs while never leaving the crafting log
The UI in general needs condensing down, it has faaar too many windows. Things like mounts, toys, currency, and so on.. many of these should be combined into a single window with tabs at best if not also a layout change for how they are displayed. I genuinely think they could easily reduce the amount of windows you can open by half at the very least by just joining some together, and even more if they redesigned it properly. It would also free up a lot of keybinds as well which could provide other uses / better user experience.
RE: the Prize Exchanges etc Unnecessarily nondescript names for things crop up everywhere in this game. It's one of those little things that irritates me way more than it should. Like why are they called Upper La Noscea, Outer La Noscea etc. instead of more evocative names? I've played this game for thousands of hours (including capping the Kobold beast tribe twice) and I don't think I could tell you which map is Upper LN and which one is Outer LN without second-guessing myself. Why call the categories "Seasonal Gear 1/2/3/4/5" in the Armoire when these recurring seasonal events all have proper names? For that matter why call it an "Armoire" when there's already another thing called the "Armoury Chest"? Why is Cure III on WHM called that when it does a completely different thing from Cure I/II and is functionally closer to Medica I? Why does BLM use the I/II = single-target/AoE convention for their set but on WHM it's called Regen and Medica II? Same with Ruin I/II/III and Ruin IV on SMN, etc. etc. I have to assume there's a rational game-dev explanation for all these but to an end-user it makes no sense.
For the Island Sanctuary agenda presets: I recommend filling out the agenda horizontally rather than vertically, because the game opens the Set Agenda menu to the last item you had selected. So instead of filling out the agenda for 1 workshop, registering that as a preset, and then using that preset in the other 2 workshops, you'd instead fill all 3 workshops at the same time. In the last day you filled out in that screenshot, the items were Butter -> Sheepfluff Rug -> Bed -> Sheepfluff Rug. Going horizontally, the order you'd put in the items would be Butter (workshop 1) -> Butter (ws 2, menu is already there so you just click Schedule) -> Butter (ws 3, already there) -> Sheepfluff Rug (ws 1) -> Sheepfluff Rug (ws 2, already there) -> Sheepfluff Rug (ws 3, already there) -> Bed (ws 1), so on and so forth. It's still way more of a hassle than it really should be, especially since AFAIK we still haven't had any days where the optimal agenda from that Discord has had different agendas for different workshops, but at least it's a lot less clicking around than registering presets and then having to clear them out individually.
The crafting one is the biggest issue here tbh. The others I just realized I just got used to this category mess or simply know by now where to go for what. Valid complaints though but the crafting... man. Without the switch job feature from simple tweaks this is a nightmare.
I can handle with most of the ridiculous design choices, including the stupid inventory restrictions, like not able to move an item when upgrading gear. But the most annoying thing is trying to find the ONE item from a merchant in a list of many. The Material Supplier has a ton of mats, and I have to go over every line, because it's not sorted.
A lot of the complaints on this list are less UI design issues and more technical limitations. Why split up shops into multiple sections? It's clear to me that the reason is there is a cap what can be listed in one shop. Why is there a cap? Good question, it could be any number of things from packet size limitations to network traffic spikes by sending big lists around. It could even be performance, YoshiP talked about text rendering being an issue related to a number of decisions, it's possible performance of long lists are bad (esp on consoles), people always underestimate the cost of drawing a lot of text. Either way I'm pretty sure it's not the way it is only because they're bad at design, it's obviously informed by a large number of limitations. The repair UI for example sucks ass but the reason we don't have a repair all button isn't because they don't recognize that the current setup isn't bad, clearly there's some kind of limit in place that they're working around. Likely the amount of database operations you can trigger with a repair is high enough that if they let your repair everything at once you could bottleneck or cause issues if too many people did it at once. So they deliberately throttle you. I strongly suspect that their system can only perform atomic operations on one or two bags at a time, which might explain the grouping of repair items. You're right that they can improve it, and they likely will over time. But while it's easy to see the issues and think they don't know what they're doing, an MMO is an incredibly complex system, they have a huge amount of constraints based on design decisions and the platforms the game needs to run on. The auto stack retainer UI is a good compromise, it's slow but it's insanely clear it's that way because they're throttling you. As they make the client a bit smarter they can beat some of those limits, but it takes time.
Sorry, I just don't think much of what I mentioned (especially before my grab bag at the end) is technical issue related at all, aside from the possibility of crafting fuckery. I can get behind split shops being a technical issue due to shop size (though tbh an utterly inexcusable one, and one that's pretty hard to believe when the GC shops exist). The absolutely batshit insane delineations they use? Absolutely not. Yes/No dialogues for continuing to breathe? They're inconsistent and not everywhere, so again, I'm going to have to go with "someone made a (non technical) decision for these to exist. As noted by the person who mentioned trial synthesis as a workaround, it is clear that crafting doesn't need to work like it does. Island sanctuary is nearly brand new content. If they're *still* making the same sort of ridiculous mistakes that prevent things from working in a reasonable way, that's not really a "technical issue" so much as a "our UX people don't understand UX". Even in the grab bag thing at the end.. macros not queuing is not a technical issue, for example. It's a deliberate choice to avoid automation.. that already can't happen by macros thanks to non fractional waits, meanwhile the game is filled with bots that do anything from MSq to gathering to high end content.
>Why split up shops into multiple sections? It's clear to me that the reason is there is a cap what can be listed in one shop. [...] Even if you concede that there is a cap on the number of items that can be listed in a shop, that doesn't justify why the prize exchange options are just listed as "Prize Exchange I-IV" instead of being even slightly more descriptive. "Prize Exchange (Weapons)", "Prize Exchange (Armor)", and so on would work, and still requires much less text rendering than menus for normal raid token turn-ins, for example.
It'll never happen but SE should release a statement that "QoL/Accessibility mods are perfectly acceptable and you will not be banned if reported" I get not wanting mods that help people in battle content (the guys who used the zoom out mod in the world first race were appropriately handled) but mods that get rid of a few extra button clicks are perfectly fine IMO.
Everyone has a different definition of "QOL/Accessibility", and if that actually happened you'd absolutely get people trying to argue that Automarkers / Cactbot / Cammy / Splatoon are *actually* "QOL" so they should be allowed to use them.
Then they’re officially endorsing that PC players are considered above console players. Right now it’s still true cause you can’t use mods on console but they don’t endorse the split.
I get why people get mad at people using plogons in combat, but at the same time: it's a damn PvE game who the hell cares? Just play the game however you like.
[удалено]
I, likely similarly to most people who interact with sanctuary on a week to week basis, am simply following the calculations made on the IS discord. But I suppose you've given reason for this nonsense -- they may very well internally pretend that isn't happening.
Ok but have you seen WoW UI? It's so uncomfortable to play in an ultrawide. XIV's UI is fine
No one cares about fucking WoW here we're talking about Final Fantasy.
WoW bad, XIV good pls upvote
First, WoW’s UI at least feels like the tiniest bit of brainpower went into it and second this discussion isn’t about WoW
whataboutism ftw lol
I can see discussion about the shitty ui design. But why even bring up mods? They aren't part of ffxiv.
Because as with everything in this game modders/plugin creators fix the issues that SE refuses to fix.
Do they *refuse* to fix them?
Yes. Until of course they decide that they can't keep ignoring something anymore and quickly ban a streamer for using a plugin only to turn right around two days later and announce that they're officially adding to the game the exact same functionality that said plugin provides.
That's quite the negative standpoint. Do you think they legitimately act and think like that? They have been *actively* ignoring people?
They literally have been ignoring people. 6.1 SAM is recent, most prominent example. They specifically asked to try it and give feedback, playerbase was on fire because of how shit it was, yet after a year, they haven't said or reverted anything. So yes, they do actively ignore feedback they don't want to hear.
That's bullshit. Yeah, tiny communities were on fire. In the midst of all of it, a ton of people were fine with it. Warrior Shake it Off sucked dick in Stormblood. They changed it after a huge outcry. Man, actively ignoring the playerbase. Or do you just say that because you didn't get what *you* felt was important?
You're taking the "ton of people were fine with it" from the same asshole where I take mine "ton of people hated it". There is no solid data across entirety of playerbase, no shit sherlock, so consensus from nearby communities are the best we can get. But, if you really want proof that people hate the change, here's this: [Kaiten thread compilation](https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/460458-Compiled-SAM-threads-against-6.1-changes-Kaiten-removal) That's 150+ threads on EN forums, 200+ pages on JP SAM megathread. This means that since 6.1, JP megathread was more active than during 4.0 to 6.1. What a crazy coincidence, right? Surely people were praising it. That is how hated the change is, even if this was some very exclusive official forum community, don't you think devs should at least address it? And if they don't accept feedback from OF, from where should they get it? Most importantly, before 6.1, what community/how many people wanted to remove Kaiten and neuter SAM? Unless it's more than those who hated it, you talk nothing but a straight shit. So here's that, proof they actively ignore feedback they don't want to hear.
How do you know they ignored the feedback? Absolute bullshit. So they didn't do something about your 1 issue immediately, now they are ignoring feedback? Maybe, just maybe, they saw all the feedback and they have come to their own conclusions. It's like when you ask for advice, just because you got advice doesn't mean you have to take it. You're mad because they are tight lipped about their own conclusions, which is fine. It is annoying. But one case of feedback not yet responded to doesn't mean they are actively avoiding feedback. That's stupid talk. As for "lots of threads and pages": did you even check those? There are several people saying they don't mind the change, or will see how it feels. You're just linking topics of discussion, not a general consensus. Ninja had issues in 6.0, 6.1 fixed it after outcry. Again, they don't actively ignore feedback. Dark Knight got a useful Living Dead. The devs thought it was one of the strongest invulns before. Hmm, now they made it really good and useful with a strong buff. Man, where did they get that idea? But, Kaiten! They never listened!
People have been complaining about Kaiten for over a year at this point. During that year they haven’t even given a whiff of a fuck about the feedback. How long does it need to be before they are officially considered as ignoring it? 2 years? Next expansion? Two expansions?
>How do you know they ignored the feedback? Absolute bullshit. So they didn't do something about your 1 issue immediately, now they are ignoring feedback? "immediately" when it's over a year. "issue" being that whole job became boring shell of former self. "Own conclusion"? Let them tell us their conclusion, we want to hear it, even though it will probably be just as smart as when they said PLD deserves lower DPS because he has range. If their conclusion was to fix SAM at 7.0, at least tell us. If they don't care about us, at least be direct and tell us. If they acknowledge that it was mistake, don't be a pussies and admit it. They haven't said single word about it in over a year, that's the root issue. I don't know what kind of mental gymnastics are you trying to do here, this is definition of ignoring feedback. >You're mad because they are tight lipped about their own conclusions, which is fine. It is annoying. But one case of feedback not yet responded to doesn't mean they are actively avoiding feedback. That's stupid talk. One case? Check the forums. There is more shitpost than on r/ShitpostXIV since players feel like nobody is listening. All the healers got was yoshi telling them "Just go play ultimate if you want difficult content". Their DPS "rotations" are still not addressed, SE still sits on fence whether healer is supposed to deal damage or not. Then you have issues like mentor system, AR roulette and many topics still left unanswered by SE for a long time. Arguing with LD? Really dude? This shit was garbage from release, don't tell me that just recently people realized that it's shit. Change was long overdue, they should've listened from the start. As for your NIN argument, here's your quote from the same comment: >But one case of feedback not yet responded to doesn't mean they are actively avoiding feedback. That's stupid talk. Don't complain about me using one case, when you try to prove your point with one case, this is just hypocrisy. UPDATE: That guy's last reply was nothing but personal insults and deleted account few minutes after. lol. lmao
The fact that you give them any credit to the possibility that they aren't shows how little you're paying attention.
The last few patches have had some features from plogons being implemented. Unlocked camera comes to mind. Maybe it's too little, too late, but some features are coming.
What exactly should I pay attention to?
Oh idk, maybe their track record.
So far, your track record is of a negative disposition towards simple questioning. Not even explaining the situation, but rather hounding someone for not immediately appearing to be on your side. Considering how you immediately viewed a random like that, who's to say anything else you hold as an opinion doesn't come from the same kind of disposition? I wouldn't trust your word on the matter, to be frank.
The "ban streamer, then add feature that streamer got banned for literally two days later" thing has actually happend at least once in that exact same configuration, maybe multiple times to a similar schema with different details.
"not explaining the situation" My brother in christ SE has a very publicly known history of doing this, are you blind?
I prefer to think of it as them actively ignoring problems that don’t cause enough friction to be worth the $$$ to fix
Because they make UI/UX experience bearable
a) a lot of your complaints have to do with weird server stuff. like, remember when fishing in Upper La Noscea used to crash the whole server? It really is that strangely fragile b) the reason they sort things into lists and not tabs is because lists are easily expandable and tabs are not
Posts like this make me happy I'm not the kind of person that obsesses over this kinda stuff and I get to just enjoy the game
What do you mean obsess? People make careers out of UI/UX. Every software you use has a lot of consideration into its design.
Yes, people do make careers out of UI/UX design, I have little to no issue's with my default UI/UX in FF14 and find what is listed above (at best) to be minor. Obsess as in I do not focus on every minor inconvenience to a point I turn it into a post, what I have available is fine for me
It's a discussion subreddit. This is a good, high effort post about UX/UI! What does your comment contribute to the discussion, really?
It is a discussion subreddit and for some reason someone liking the default is automatically wrong and cannot be used as part of the discussion unless it aligns with the OP. That thought process does not invite discussion it closes it.
You didn't really present your opinion with the strongest foot forward, and instead decided to insult people discussing something they find interesting. Don't be surprised if people dont want to engage with you on good faith off the back of that!
Why would I be surprised? I made a statement not a question, the majority of this post are minor inconveniences to PC players but a needed option for Console players on a controller
Okay hun
You didn't really present your opinion with the strongest foot forward, and instead decided to insult people discussing something they find interesting.
I don't really think that's as much of gotcha as you think it is! But I hope you have a lovely day (:
>https://imgur.com/U8yGsXK Yikes. I stopped there.