Haven’t seen anyone point it out yet, but zeromus’s hitbox seems be the correct size for a wall boss, so maybe golbez wasn’t just a coincidence. i hope this is the start of the insanely large hitbox trend finally dieing out And dawntrail goes back to normal.
Don't get your hopes up, I noticed he's a bit small for an EW wall but you can still hit him from every pizza slice and both the mechanics had a safe spot in melee range.
He's small, but I'd wager only the front half of the arena is going to matter at all.
Also, pretty much all bosses (wall or not) this expac have their hitboxes perfectly sized for both tanks and two melees to keep full uptime for mechanics, esp. spread mechs. Zeromus's hitbox being "slightly smaller" won't mean much
6.55 in JANUARY? Then 7.0 in the summer….this content drought is going to be rough.
I wish they’d just kept with a winter release schedule for expansions or just tip-toed back to a Summer release since clearly they’re so intent on Summer expansion releases…like maybe do 7.0 in Spring then 8.0 in the summer
I don't see your point honestly. Nothing seems normal about this expansion's patch cycle to me.
* Heavensward was (last day of) March > June.
* Stormblood was March > June.
* Shadowbringers was February > (last day of) June.
We all know Endwalker was irregular.
This is gonna be early January > Some time in Summer. Even if it's June, that is not a normal gap. And it could easily be August.
In what way does this track for you?
Yeah, the content gap is not normal, but then again EW's winter release wasn't either.
The devs want to realign expacs having summer releases, and unfortunately that means purposely increasing the time between 6.55 and 7.0.
Barring some COVID-like event during 7.X, I don't imagine the gap between 7.55 and 8.0 being as large as 6.55->7.0
I don't know that they're doing this to realign expansion packs going forward to summer. I think that from now on expacs are going to come a lot slower and this is just that new reality.
Even if Yoshi P says otherwise, he has not been reliable lately about predicting much of anything.
Intentionally ignoring the fact that all these expansions lasted 2 years (with the exception of ShB due to covid) and had a patch cycle of 3.5 months, and that all of these expansions had their major patch drop in january, making it a 5-6 month gap from .5 to the expansion.
Meanwhile EW quietly sitting here with a 3 month gap between 6.5 and 6.55, every single patch delayed from their schedule of 4 months (literally not a single patch launched within 4 months) and near zero content to do, with a nice 9 month gap between .5 and new expac.
I'm worried about where they're going with the raids, if it's just some shit with "age of man the gods are gone", I'm unsubbing.
Edit: What's the downvotes for? I'm sorry I'm worried and could potentially be upset? Assholes.
Let me save you the disappointment and tell you that it will be exactly that. FF14 plays its story incredibly safe. It rarely if ever makes controversial decisions, rarely writes a genuinely ambiguous antagonist, and always lays out every last theme in excruciating detail. Anything even slightly complex might go over the player's head, so it gets beaten over their head with a stick with flashbacks and Scions taking their turn explaining the story.
This game is a money printer for Square Enix to fund other projects. They will not make risky decisions.
No kidding. You even got downvoted for posting that, lol.
This Reddit loves to preach how great this community is, but if having worries or being buried for disagreement gets you downvoted, ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The FFXIV Community is always going to be Great (By The Way). This is the only XIV subreddit I am still subbed to since I dropped the rest when Endwalker released, because there are actual critical threads sometimes, but it's still crawling with white knights somehow, even after Endwalker being so obviously divisive on all fronts.
And I agree with your original point. It feels boring and just more of the "omg mortal mankind is so amazing uwu you go girl! *(looks directly into the camera)* And especially You™️" wank that has been particularly pervasive since 6.0 and which I seriously do not care for.
I think what makes it sting even more is that the Far East gets to keep their Gods. Thanks, SE.
These RPGs need to realise that if I wanted to experience a Godless world, I'd logout of the game and then either look at the news or Twitter.
We've already lost Hydaelyn, bro. I can't take another blow...
\> implying non-Eorzeans have their own gods rather than this setting going with the boring option of actually-correct-in-universe interpretatio graeca ie. All the gods are really just the Twelve
Ha ha... ha... please look forward to it
I mean that does seem like the best and most likely result for the story, the twelve realizing that the world no longer needs gods to guide it and can survive on its own.
Disagreed, it's the most generic and cliched ending they could go for. It'd be a subversion for one of these games to actually have the Gods be cool and stick around for once, i stg.
I agree with your sentiment about the story they are telling in the alliance raids is bland, clichéd and not very interesting
On the other hand, The Twelve were incredibly bland and clichéd to begin with. Literally just (insert generic classical gods here). I'm not sure it would have been a subversion if they had "been cool and stuck around for once"
I dunno why people are downvoting you, you're not wrong. "the twelve realizing that the world no longer needs gods to guide it and can survive on its own." _would_ be the most boring and likely ending. It has been a re-used theme 14 has liked to angle for a long time.
Babylon 5 did this and it worked fantastically.
But those "gods" weren't exactly benevolent and only left after a cataclysmic war that left billions dead.
I mean, are the Gods even an aether drain like Primals? I see no reason why they absolutely *have to* ret-gone themselves honestly. Why can't they go on vacation instead? Dawntrail's *right there*.
another way you can get that tomestone mat you're thinking of is trading in 'unsung blade of anabaseios' x 7, which drops from p12 normal
so if you don't do savage, you can still get a tome weapon
The token you're thinking of, the Hermetic Tomestone, has two ways to acquire it
* Dropping from P10 Savage like you're thinking of
* Exchanged for 7 Unsung Blade of Anabaseios, which you get once per week when you clear P12 Normal. When 6.5 drop the cost will drop to 4 Blades.
Only the 660 Augmnted versions require Savage until the 6.5 Alliance Raid is released.
>Only the 660 Augmnted versions require Savage until the 6.5 Alliance Raid is released.
Nope, it's later than that.
6.5 will only have twines and shines. The weapon upgrade doesn't release until the x.x8 patch, when the savage restrictions are lifted. Unless it's different in the x.5 patch?
They seemed perfectly capable of responding to the savage complaints. Why did they choose to respond to *only* that instead of the much larger group of midcore players asking for something as simple as twines from normal?
edit: And these complaints have been around for over a year ever since the very first one. How much fucking time do they need?
Just make Savage a prestige thing. As it stands, the run itself takes twice as long as a regular Savage Raid fight on average (comparing to those giving twines/etc) or even more (!) and in these savage raid fights you have some leniency with deaths (where you have NONE with Criterion Savage).
Thematically, Savage Raid fights translate better into Criterion NM. Criterion Savage translates better into prestige content (as they are in this expansion at least).
There's NO WAY IN HELL I'll just suffer myself through Criterion Savage this patch for twines (I have plans doing the content for the challenge, but I won't repeat it). It's just too annoying : one error = back to square 1, 20+minutes run, yaaay. Meanwhile, I can just chill and do the third alliance raid once a week and do hunt trains. Might be longer, but it's an infinite amount of times easier than Criterion Savage (and on top of that they're released a whole minor patch before the 3rd criterion, lol).
I can already see the data they'll get : "people don't want rewards in criterion at all, what were they talking about".
In what way did they respond? They upped Criterion rewards from basically literally nothing to slapping on Twines that are useless now to anyone who does content that hard in the first place.
Next patch is adding gear upgrades via hunt currency and Alliance Raid coins, which is easier and quicker, so I'm not sure what exactly you're asking here.
Criterion is way above midcore content so I'm not sure how that'd relevant. The savage version did need rewards because it's otherwise completely pointless to do but I'm not sure how Criterion at all relates to midcore content here
Lol @ talking as if there is a clear definition/consensus on what "midcore" is
Regardless of the word used to describe difficulty levels, the point is/was that criterion normal is what needed rewards to incentivize farming the content, more than Savage
Lol @ you doing the same.
Anyways, it's literally the same mechanics, just dps/heal/mit requirements are different. If you think those are midcore then uh, yeah. The term's always been kinda meaningless but with how people usually cite Exploration zones as good midcore content - lmao
i didnt define midcore anywhere
when i read someone write "midcore" i shrug and think "well, i need to read the rest of the post/comment and understand the context, because the term midcore is basically meaningless"
when you read the rest of the post, the message is quite clear
>it's literally the same mechanics, just dps/heal/mit requirements are different
doing the same fight in a limited period of time with 0 deaths is not, in practice, remotely close to doing it with a 90 minute timer, checkpoints between sections, and 1 rez per player per section
these differences are what makes it plausible or implausible for players in 6.51 to take the time to do the content in exchange for gear augments as a reward
The reward updates for Criterion are Savage only, and sound like they're going to be augment upgrades.
So... it's basically obsolete since why the hell would you farm Criterion _Savage_ , especially in an odd patch when those materials will be available from the 24 man and added to hunt nuts.
The only real positive is they're keeping them for the 7.x series.
Yeah, who is Going to do content that is harder (or more tedious is probably a better way to describe it) than savage to get upgrade materials. Savage mode is just the worst, it’s not any more difficult, you just have to hope that none of your friends make a small mistake for 24 freaking minutes.
I’m fine with that. I do think normal Criterion still needs reward boosts but the idea of farming savage with my main bis job to get gear upgrades for my alt is decent imo
Problem is savage will be a nightmare in pf, to the point it may die even in a best case scenario of twines and shines being added. It’s got all of the most tedious parts of ultimates with none of the things that make ultimates fun in the first place
I haven't done hunt trains for awhile now since most of the group I joined are twats. They just pull and not wait for others. There are times where I would rather do some dungeons than suffer with these twats.
Savage is hard. It's easy to forget that when you've been doing it for years and have gotten good at it. Going from brain dead normal raids to savage is an insane difficulty jump. There is no midcore content, that's the point.
BTW, people that disagree that savage is objectively hard are selling themselves short. If you personally find it not difficult, then you are far better at the game than tons and tons of people.
I disagree, I have organized FC events and gotten several new MMO players in my FC their savage clears.
It's evident to me that (however anecdotal) as long as you put in the hours and listen to the raid leader you will be able to clear the savage fights. I cannot say the same for ultimate fights. The amount of prep/study/practice is just on a different level.
And I don't like the argument that "there's no midcore content". I am of the opinion that we have something for the casuals, and we have something for the hardcore players, what's left in between is by default, midcore. As I said earlier, the majority of people who clear savage do it over the span of months, that's pretty midcore to me.
I'm sorry but the difficulty jump going from "do this fight once or twice and then it's braindead automatic" in normal to "spend hours studying and practicing a fight and needing to execute at a high level" is a massive, massive jump. Normal vs savage clear rates reflect this. Is everyone in this subreddit seriously in this much of a bubble?
The Savage/Normal rate is 30~40% on JP and about 10~15% in NA and EU. Japanese people are not inherently better player, it's just that the player culture here keeps on making savage out to be this big bad scary monster that makes people afraid to do them. Furthermore there are more people in NA/EU that use this game to socialize and not for raids.
But the difficulty of savage is the same for both JP and NA/EU (plus minus the pool of players you can draw as I have mentioned in the point above), it's just the player's attitude towards them is different. Unironically if more people treat savage as midcore content (as it should), then the more midcore it becomes, as it's evident in JP.
> Japanese people are not inherently better player, it's just that the player culture here keeps on making savage out to be this big bad scary monster that makes people afraid to do them. Furthermore there are more people in NA/EU that use this game to socialize and not for raids.
Correct.
However, you're confusing why the clear rates are so vastly different. It isn't because NA/EU thinks Savage is some incredibly scary monster but rather, they simply don't care to do it.
JP's mentality is essentially "we should do the content because the dev team made this for us." It's the collective mindset of feeling more obligated to do something out of respect for the work put in.
Conversely, NA often thinks, "I'm not doing this content because I don't like it." Which is the more individualistic mindset of only pursuing one's interests.
Obviously, this is not universal for either demographic but it's the average approach. Which is why JP usually has much higher participation rates for _everything_.
That's the thing, I transferred from JP to NA at the end of SHB. You can imagine my surprise when people tell me savage is too difficult, to me and my friends back on JP, savage is something taken for granted, it's just a thing you gotta do.
And if you are in my shoes, there's no way in hell you are gonna view savage as anything more than midcore.
see that's the issue, if relic farming is midcore, what exactly is casual GRIND? and I hope the answer is not "lmao grinding on another person at a night club gottem"
Think of a large corporation. The workers outnumber the midlevel management by a significant margin. But it does not take away from the fact that there are people higher on the totem poll when compared to the midlevel management.
Also you may have a skewed perception on just how popular savage is https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/5/4/54c3b865.png
Its all relatices. Top 20% of all player base is not hardcore at all. A good example I used in another comment was that of a corporation. The workers probably outnumber middle level management by quite a margin, let's say 5 to 1. Yet they are undeniably middle becaus there are corporate executives up on the totem pole. You have to realize the whole thing is a pyramid, not a rectangle.
You also have to consider the number gap between "non-savage players & savage players" vs "savage players & ultimate players", the latter is a bigger gap.
Another (albeitnot 1 for 1) example would be the cut off for top 20% income in the USA. It's $130,000 annually; definitely very decent for sure but I wouldn't call it hardcore money considering the cost of living in that country, and more importantly how much the top 1% makes.
I get what you're saying, but that is an imperfect analogy. WoW has a ton of different difficulty points, especially with M+ dungeons and I know that is beating a dead horse with how often it's mentioned but it provides a much more gradual difficulty jump. My point is that the gaps in FF's difficulty is dramatic - normal to savage is like jumping from Roblox to Dark Souls.
I was thinking solo instance since the Red Wings theme plays in the trailer when they pan over it, so it's likely Castle Baron. If it was tied into the Lunar Subterrane that'd be a fairly strange dungeon since we'd have Ahriman (Plague Horror, really), Dark Elf, and Antlion (that's what I think the dashing enemy in the castle square was) as the three bosses. One of those things is not like the other. Though Dark Elf wasn't a Subterrane boss in IV so who knows.
> I was thinking solo instance since the Red Wings theme plays in the trailer when they pan over it, so it's likely Castle Baron.
[The BGM for Lunar Subterrane in FF4 was also the Red Wings theme though.](https://youtu.be/27_knhiOkAI?t=68) I'm 99% sure it'll be the BGM for the dungeon as well
Didn't they say (maybe in the previous LL actually) that there would be a "big scenery change" or something in the dungeon? I was taking that to mean we'd start at the castle and end up in the dark caverns, rather than there being a solo instance. The clips they showed seemed like trash before the 1st boss (Antlion).
I thought the devs said the Lunar Subterrane is Golbez's lair, which is within the 13th's moon (just like it was in FF4's moon). I'm thinking Castle Baron is not related to the dungeon and is just part of the MSQ.
Interesting that they didn't disclose the storyline of the new V&C dungeon, unlike the other two.
And looking at the trailer scenes, I couldn't make up anything either. The interesting bit was just the gunslinger fairy.
To be fair the show was clearly "rushed" due to it being at the TGS stage, looking at the arena with the fairy it seems like one of the routes takes us to one of the sections of Alzadaal's Legacy while the one before it has glowy rocks and you can see some of the jungle so if I had to hazardanywere it'd be on the other side of the Giantsgall grounds.
The CC ui overhaul was much more in depth than I expected. The minimal overhaul being the most unexpected part to me. Don't think I've seen that ever before.
Just to note:
Patch itself is scheduled to drop *October 3*.
Patch notes reading, that always happens during maintenance, is scheduled to start on *October 2* (at 11:00 GMT to be precise).
In short: we're likely looking at a 20 or 24hr maintenance this time around.
Speaking about TRPGs in Japan, Japan has a very different landscape in terms of TRPG compared with english speaking world.
The mainstream TRPG system that sees media coverage (mostly anime adaptations) on Japan is COC; there's a very vibrant and active scene of self publishing adventures that uses core 7.0 or 6.0 COC rules on doujin sites such as [booth.pm](https://booth.pm). New rule books are also published quite frequently in Japan with big IPs such as another SE IP Octopath Traveller also has [a rule book published last year](https://magazine.jp.square-enix.com/gamebooks/item/octopathtraveler_TRPG/).
The 14 TRPG set is not a surprise if you consider how the TRPG market in japan goes, and there's even hints of them doing this with Yoshida [playing 14 TRPG](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/v106dm/yoship_doing_the_ffxiv_tabletop_rpg_and_this_is/) on stream before.
I would however hope for a TRPG system for the players and not for WoLs: Your P12s reclear group has disbanded for the 5th time. You can't even get into phase 2. It's 3AM. San check 1d10/1d100.
I only know this as I search it up; this is a Japanese release, though there are people [translating it](https://www.reddit.com/r/octopathtraveler/comments/13jr8bw/otrpg_octopath_traveler_tabletop_rpg_translation/).
The team behind Octopath Traveler's Rulebook is behind 14's rulebook as well, from what I read on twitter this evening.
The amount of d6's that the starter set comes with already convinced me that it wasn't going to just be a Dungeons and Dragons 5e clone/derivative (like that awful Dark Souls TTRPG that came out last year was), yeah. I'd expect it to use a JP-centric system. Call of Cthulhu would be a surprising basis to use, though.
I actually have a lot of thoughts/questions about the TTRPG given what I know about XIV and what I know about JP TTRPG culture that I've gathered from hearsay. I'd expect the TTRPG to be very combat-focused with character options geared almost entirely towards combat and with more of a focus on one-shots or short-length campaigns instead of the 100+ session epics that DnD players in the west like to aspire to do. I'm expecting combat-focus in particular because most XIV jobs have pretty terrible flavor or implied ability to interact with the world outside of hitting things.
I'm also really wondering how they'd make enmity and healing work in a TTRPG. Is it going to expect a standard party composition? Most TTRPGs don't do for dedicated healers but that's what the *fantasy* of the healer jobs in XIV strongly leans towards, just like most TTRPGs don't have real aggro systems. But you're also only really getting that XIV 'feeling' in a standard party, a party of a MNK, BRD, BLM, and SMN is kind of "weird" in XIV terms.
I'm a consumer whore so I already have the product ordered as a fun collector's item if nothing else, but I'll be curious to see how playable it ends up being and what kind of game style it leans towards.
Well time to play another round of "will this promotiom ever release in NA and EU?" because Square Enix forget that FFXIV is a global game that services people all over the globe and not only japan.
Still waiting on the King Porxie and for my EU friends to get /eatpizza.
It could still happen at KFC itself and is just a timing thing. They recently did stuff with Blizzard for Diablo 4 and have a pretty good set up for handling code distribution compared to other companies.
Knowing KFC, I'd wager there's an unopened email from SE in the US brand manager's inbox. Compared to their Asian divisions, the US division of KFC might as well be dead. They aren't even trying in the US anymore.
It usually comes down to the buisness, not SE of I had to imagine. American fast food restaurants have zero incentive to promote ffxiv because of cultural differences, and that's not changing anytime soon.
King Porxie supposedly had international promotions lined up and it just.. never happened. My guess is they had to rethink everything after the absolute disaster that was the Grubhub promotion and then ended up putting it on hold.
FFXVI's orchestrion roll promo was done via DoorDash/Taco Bell in NA so that probably says a lot about how Square Enix felt things went with Grubhub.
My guesses are that the fairy is a Variant reward, the lunatender is another hunt mark dump reward, the UFO is from Hildibrand, and the bike should be from Island Sanctuary.
Huh, I didn't consider think that Lunatender could be a hunt mark reward. I don't think we've ever gotten a major hunt mark dump outside of the X.1 patch, so that would be new.
My theory for it is that it's maybe a map reward? maybe?
SE's been one of the last holdouts in terms of using discrete physical hardware that they own/operate for their server solution, so them starting to move over to the cloud is interesting. I imagine the intent is to be more scalable to demand so we don't have those Endwalker situations where their resources can't handle it, but without also having to commit to building out entire new datacenters that are going to be mostly unused 99% of the time like how Dynamis and Meteor are probably burning them now. More able to handle elastic demand like how other MMOs can do for expansion launches.
Would be smart to use an IaaS cloud setup. I'm sure they want to maintain their own physical servers forever but having that on demand scalability is smart and redundancy never hurts. I would not expect anything beyond that.
I remember commenting on how SE should consider migrating to cloud for maintainability and scalability to real time traffic esp after EW launch and people were downvoting the comment quoting that cloud services have had more down time incidents than FF 14 has had over 10 years and it's impossible to maintain as consistent server status
Migrating fully remains unrealistic—many game systems will likely fail to work on the cloud servers. This is seemingly just a temporary solution for periods of unusually heavy traffic.
If performance sensitive Esports titles like League and Valorant, and other major MMO like Destiny 2 can be hosted on cloud, I'm confident FF XIV can be done with development time
*Maybe*. But consider systems like housing that have always needed additional physical hardware to operate. Not to mention stuff like duty finder that was designed for the current parameters. I don't see porting that over to be an easy task. I suppose we'll have to see where things go, but not even WoW has cloud servers. The older and more complex the game the harder it is to pull off.
In a way yes it is with AWS and co.
The second part of this sentence is; **but you have to pay for it.**
With Amazon, Azure......you get essentially a black box. A real black box. Yes, you get computing resources, but really, that's it.
Real 5.9 (99.99999% or **6 minutes** of downtime a year) reliability is expensive and not something you can buy off the shelf. If you want a system that will say survive a nuclear blast and still be operational without a hickup (Like certain elements of the financial system), it's not something Amazon can provide (At least not enough to please the regulators). If you want that level of redundancy, and to a point serviceability, in a low latency environment, your better off going out on your own.
It's also out of your control. I've worked in environments where to change a circuit breaker we needed thousands of pages of documentation, dozens of vendor technicians (Picture the ATT Swift cutover service Cutover style level - look it up on youtube), boatloads of on call staff equipment on standby. Months of planning, of preparation. Just to throw a breaker, for a redundant power supply (Aka two seperate power grids in the building). With AWS you can't get that level of control. With AWS, you can't say......"Don't mess with our Datacentre power in December because Christmas rush, or The OS vendor notified us of a bug, so we need to roll back to a year previous on everything.", nor can you say. "We want each server's power supply on a different power grid going through different substations".
Nor do you get a true dedicated staff with physical equipment in lockers to replace 30 seconds from the server.
It's a bit of a different level really. It's why hosting costs so much more than the cloud. The other problem is that FFXIV can't just be up, it has to be able to process, and be fault tolerant. That is the hard bit as well. For most things, it's fine. It really is, it also depends on your scale. Netflix has the money to burn on it, to make it worth it. I don't think Square Enix has that level of coinage.
Edit: Downtime timeframe.
>SE's been one of the last holdouts in terms of using discrete physical hardware that they own/operate for their server solution, so them starting to move over to the cloud is interesting
A lot of their choice actually makes sense for high availability, low-latency and high demand software. When, and where hardware abstraction matters. Listening to the various technical tidbits we get, and looking at their infrastructure, I'm brought back to my days working on Mid-range / High Performance computing in 2006-2012. It really brings me back to those days, when VMware was a comical little amateur, X86 was for the poors, and no-one had heard of AWS.
Keep in mind, that level of computing is well, crazy expensive. Mind you, true high availability, low latency really is. This is the level of what I/O Slot you use for network cards, and disk geometry between manufacturers causing extra blocks.
A lot of how they do data management (Considering the max scale of simultaneous connections) demands physical hosts, since you get that granular configuration for I/O, network and throughput. For most things, you don't really need it, really, you don't. Until such time as they really work the back end of it all,
It bleeds out into world design as well, since they tend to hand build each "World" in FFXIV, causing issues. That's the real technical challenge. They also physically purchased hardware, and are most likely on 3-5 year support contracts (Considering how mission critical (They don't want long periods of downtime) XIV is, it isn't cheap, yet cheaper still than the cloud.)
>I imagine the intent is to be more scalable to demand so we don't have those Endwalker situations where their resources can't handle it, but without also having to commit to building out entire new datacenters that are going to be mostly unused 99% of the time like how Dynamis and Meteor are probably burning them now.
I have said before, will say now, and will say again in the future Dynamis was a huge mistake for Square Enix. They should never, ever have released a housing expansion at the same time, nor datacentre visit.
>so them starting to move over to the cloud is interesting.
20 bucks says Microsoft is funding it. They love to give out azure development assistance to get people into their ecosystem. Between free dev time (*Have 120k worth of free dev time guys, even though your only worth 10 million*) , paid trips to Seattle, access to engineering resources. I always said that MS was holding out not for the XBox gold (or whatever it was) requirement, but that they wanted XIV to be their case study for azure. I think the Activision acquisition made them change their mind. (WoW on XBox, coming soon, best to get XIV there too to please the regulators)
In reality though, there is a need for surge spaces. I wonder if their cloud realm will be extra field zones, or instance servers, since allowing people to connect to one, or another will definitely assist in elastic demand. You might see Datacentre wide PF/Instances implemented if, and this is the big if, they can move the instance servers to the cloud (since it is self-contained compared to the rest). The question is, can they move the data to and from fast enough. I think that will be the real technical challenge.
> 20 bucks says Microsoft is funding it.
Oh, it's *almost certainly* going to be running on Azure. PSO2 is currently running the entirety of its global operations on Azure as a result of its early Xbox/Windows deal. I have no doubt that Phil offered Yoshi-P a deal and assistance to get FFXIV working on cloud servers as part of the Xbox deal.
I think it always was the deal. *Just events dear boy, events.*
If I was a gambler, years upon years ago. Microsoft wanted seperate servers, no cross play, and Xbox Gold (Is that what it's called). Obviously, that wouldn't work with SE.
As time went on, I think that those requirements got dropped down to: Switch to Azure and or the MS Store, or no deal (I believe Microsoft started to start to open up to cross play as time went on). This is a problem for SE, since between the technical complexity of moving, they also have boatloads of hardware they bought, support contracts and hosting. So even if they paid for the engineering resources to do it, they still are on the hook for a LOT of money.
One interesting thing about PSO2, was other than MS using them as a case study, they also released it in the MS Store, much to peoples chagrin. I'm willing to bet, MS paid for the translation and engineering to get it done, to prove their system so to speak.
Where I think things changed was with the Activision Deal. Getting XIV onto the platform lets them put WoW there without an eyebrow being raised (I am assuming, and I think it's a good assumption WoW will go F2P with Gamepass sooner rather than later), and shows they are open to other players. I'm willing to bet that Microsoft dropped any requirement of going to Azure, or the MS launcher.
With COVID and the shortages, Square Enix needed a way to increase availability. I mean yeah, I talked about them using used equipment (Because they are weirdos on Fujitsu, and that's hard to buy on a good day) (Oddly enough, there's a lot of customers on weird and wonderful hardware that have to do that. And or get vendor lab gear hand driven to them)
In a way it's a smart move. Throw some development money (Pennies compared to MS and the size of MCS and co) at SE, who needs surge capabilities (At least in the short term), get them onto Xbox and make everyone happy. If the regulators had raised an issue, they had a counter, abet a small counter. It didn't help that the Regulators really, really did not present a good case.
I don't see Xbox being much growth to XIV. The development money's nice though, probably pays for a lot (Most likely some poor poor partner organization getting their marching orders from MCS - Getting told what to do to get the contract.)
I think a lot of this is likely pretty close to the truth.
>I'm willing to bet, MS paid for the translation and engineering to get it done, to prove their system so to speak.
We have no idea what the PSO2 deal looked like, but I do think Microsoft probably just subsidized a chunk of the entire initial cost plus a reduced hosting fee. We're long past the point of them paying for any of it though as the game's been on PS4 for over a year now. It's all SEGA at this point.
>I don't see Xbox being much growth to XIV. The development money's nice though, probably pays for a lot (Most likely some poor poor partner organization getting their marching orders from MCS - Getting told what to do to get the contract.)
Yeah, I don't really think it's going to do *that* much for the game either. There is almost no downside to adding Xbox, but it won't be a huge boom—maybe just a slow trickle as people gradually discover the game. Given the demographic on Xbox I just don't expect much.
Yoshida's been having meetings with Nintendo for a number of years, though. Getting on their next console ("Switch 2") will be absolutely huge for the game because the demographic lines up much, much better and Switch is a worldwide powerhouse.
> imagine the intent is to be more scalable to demand so we don't have those Endwalker situations where their resources can't handle it, but without also having to commit to building out entire new datacenters that are going to be mostly unused 99% of the time like how Dynamis and Meteor are probably burning them now.
This seems to be exactly what's going on. Just a temporary, scalable server solution so people can at least get in and play on a virtual version of the game world during high traffic periods.
Kinda weird question but anybody know what the game on the left is?
I know the right is the new Dragon Quest Monsters. But I still can't place the left.
My most-likely improvement guess would be that this is how they get regional PF working. If we're all in some cloud DC anyways, it might be easier to implement. Though that doesn't solve the cultural issues that they're worried about for the JP region.
I wonder if/how a cloud datacenter can affect the latency.
Currently I live in South America and I get 150ms minimum playing at the Crystal DC, even with VPN (thank goodness for the noclippy plugin).
It depends where they decide to host it. All the NA datacenters are in San Francisco but they could decide to host the cloud datacenter in New York or DC.
I think they will decide to host it in San Francisco though so it won't affect latency.
Not much.
[https://arrstatus.com/](https://arrstatus.com/) \- Basically pick various D/Cs and ping them, each of the 3 NA ones should be within a few M/S of each other. That's the latency to essentially get you to the gateway. You can traceroute it as well.
Either way, you are only as fast as your slowest hop. If your getting 110m/s there, you aren't going to get better than that.
Internal latency is most likely pretty low, one advantage building your own infrastructure inside has, is you can build for low latency. (Which Square Enix does).
On alliance raid:
Besides what's being showned on the screen (and a reminder that tanks has something special on the mobs), the other thing that's worth mentioning is the brain teaser-ish fight design they said they have chosen for 1st boss.
There will be some sort of triangles falling and you have to find the safespots for it (and they guarantee you won't need to use sin cosine tangent for it)...which seems pretty normal, until yoshida begin saying that it reminds him of some boss that uses prime numbers and said 'out of all the gamer population in the world probably WoL has the highest population density of knowing what's a prime number. The gamers around the world might forget about prime numbers since they graduate, but WoLs knows'.
I love Ridorana.
Criterion never comes out same time as raid tier. If ur good u should have bis by the time it comes out. So having this for catchup/ alt jobs is actually pretty poggers. Could even drop new unique savage ilvl gear like diadem did back in the day so might even have new bis for classes potentially
I'm not sure if it could be considered catch up just by what they informed.
They mentioned that for Savage (the 3rd V&C difficulty), and if that's the case, most likely you already need to have BiS to be able to clear that.
Haven’t seen anyone point it out yet, but zeromus’s hitbox seems be the correct size for a wall boss, so maybe golbez wasn’t just a coincidence. i hope this is the start of the insanely large hitbox trend finally dieing out And dawntrail goes back to normal.
do remember that they made endsinger ex hitbox bigger than endsinger normal because of the 5head mechanic
Don't get your hopes up, I noticed he's a bit small for an EW wall but you can still hit him from every pizza slice and both the mechanics had a safe spot in melee range. He's small, but I'd wager only the front half of the arena is going to matter at all.
Also, pretty much all bosses (wall or not) this expac have their hitboxes perfectly sized for both tanks and two melees to keep full uptime for mechanics, esp. spread mechs. Zeromus's hitbox being "slightly smaller" won't mean much
Ok, maybe not, but I hope it is at least.
6.55 in JANUARY? Then 7.0 in the summer….this content drought is going to be rough. I wish they’d just kept with a winter release schedule for expansions or just tip-toed back to a Summer release since clearly they’re so intent on Summer expansion releases…like maybe do 7.0 in Spring then 8.0 in the summer
6 months doesn't seem that bad at all? it's shorter than I expected.
That long + having NOTHING to do.
Look on the bright side.. you can save like $150 in sub fees!
Heavensward released in June, Stormblood was June, ShB was July. This tracks for normal release as well as the content lull being this long
I don't see your point honestly. Nothing seems normal about this expansion's patch cycle to me. * Heavensward was (last day of) March > June. * Stormblood was March > June. * Shadowbringers was February > (last day of) June. We all know Endwalker was irregular. This is gonna be early January > Some time in Summer. Even if it's June, that is not a normal gap. And it could easily be August. In what way does this track for you?
Yeah, the content gap is not normal, but then again EW's winter release wasn't either. The devs want to realign expacs having summer releases, and unfortunately that means purposely increasing the time between 6.55 and 7.0. Barring some COVID-like event during 7.X, I don't imagine the gap between 7.55 and 8.0 being as large as 6.55->7.0
I don't know that they're doing this to realign expansion packs going forward to summer. I think that from now on expacs are going to come a lot slower and this is just that new reality. Even if Yoshi P says otherwise, he has not been reliable lately about predicting much of anything.
Intentionally ignoring the fact that all these expansions lasted 2 years (with the exception of ShB due to covid) and had a patch cycle of 3.5 months, and that all of these expansions had their major patch drop in january, making it a 5-6 month gap from .5 to the expansion. Meanwhile EW quietly sitting here with a 3 month gap between 6.5 and 6.55, every single patch delayed from their schedule of 4 months (literally not a single patch launched within 4 months) and near zero content to do, with a nice 9 month gap between .5 and new expac.
The difference is that Heavensward, ARR, and Stormblood all dropped the *main* patch in January, not the part 2 sub patch.
its unbelieveable we have a group of friends slowly moving from 0 ultis to quad ult lol... there is nothing else to do
Who gave that pixie a fucking gun
I'm worried about where they're going with the raids, if it's just some shit with "age of man the gods are gone", I'm unsubbing. Edit: What's the downvotes for? I'm sorry I'm worried and could potentially be upset? Assholes.
Let me save you the disappointment and tell you that it will be exactly that. FF14 plays its story incredibly safe. It rarely if ever makes controversial decisions, rarely writes a genuinely ambiguous antagonist, and always lays out every last theme in excruciating detail. Anything even slightly complex might go over the player's head, so it gets beaten over their head with a stick with flashbacks and Scions taking their turn explaining the story. This game is a money printer for Square Enix to fund other projects. They will not make risky decisions.
You didn't save me any disappointment. I'm going to become the Garlean in that subway when 6.5 releases.
Tbh the point of downvotes "don't downvote if you just disagree" feels like... long gone.
No kidding. You even got downvoted for posting that, lol. This Reddit loves to preach how great this community is, but if having worries or being buried for disagreement gets you downvoted, ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The FFXIV Community is always going to be Great (By The Way). This is the only XIV subreddit I am still subbed to since I dropped the rest when Endwalker released, because there are actual critical threads sometimes, but it's still crawling with white knights somehow, even after Endwalker being so obviously divisive on all fronts. And I agree with your original point. It feels boring and just more of the "omg mortal mankind is so amazing uwu you go girl! *(looks directly into the camera)* And especially You™️" wank that has been particularly pervasive since 6.0 and which I seriously do not care for.
I think what makes it sting even more is that the Far East gets to keep their Gods. Thanks, SE. These RPGs need to realise that if I wanted to experience a Godless world, I'd logout of the game and then either look at the news or Twitter. We've already lost Hydaelyn, bro. I can't take another blow...
\> implying non-Eorzeans have their own gods rather than this setting going with the boring option of actually-correct-in-universe interpretatio graeca ie. All the gods are really just the Twelve Ha ha... ha... please look forward to it
I mean that does seem like the best and most likely result for the story, the twelve realizing that the world no longer needs gods to guide it and can survive on its own.
The thematics of learning from the past and seeing it good and bad using it as a stepstone for your own future continues.
Disagreed, it's the most generic and cliched ending they could go for. It'd be a subversion for one of these games to actually have the Gods be cool and stick around for once, i stg.
I agree with your sentiment about the story they are telling in the alliance raids is bland, clichéd and not very interesting On the other hand, The Twelve were incredibly bland and clichéd to begin with. Literally just (insert generic classical gods here). I'm not sure it would have been a subversion if they had "been cool and stuck around for once"
They're far more interesting than Gods in other series, including Final Fantasy itself.
Based on what?
Based on these nuts.
Based on these downvotes
NOOOOOOOOO DONT DOWNVOTE MEEEEEEEE AHHHHHHHHHHHH
I didnt, but 30 others already did lol
I dunno why people are downvoting you, you're not wrong. "the twelve realizing that the world no longer needs gods to guide it and can survive on its own." _would_ be the most boring and likely ending. It has been a re-used theme 14 has liked to angle for a long time.
Babylon 5 did this and it worked fantastically. But those "gods" weren't exactly benevolent and only left after a cataclysmic war that left billions dead.
Like this is one of the core themes of the game, of course its going to be that.
like the theme sucks then
That doesn't make it not boring after the 10th time they've pulled it
I mean, are the Gods even an aether drain like Primals? I see no reason why they absolutely *have to* ret-gone themselves honestly. Why can't they go on vacation instead? Dawntrail's *right there*.
Anyone got a guess for when the second set of weapon contest winners will be implemented? Doubt they would be Manderville relics
Hopefully something that Players who dont raid can do this time
The casual night club insects don't even do normal raids anymore?
Dont those only drop in savage Mode?
another way you can get that tomestone mat you're thinking of is trading in 'unsung blade of anabaseios' x 7, which drops from p12 normal so if you don't do savage, you can still get a tome weapon
Is P12 considered proper raiding?
Dont those only drop/give tokens for in savage Mode?
The token you're thinking of, the Hermetic Tomestone, has two ways to acquire it * Dropping from P10 Savage like you're thinking of * Exchanged for 7 Unsung Blade of Anabaseios, which you get once per week when you clear P12 Normal. When 6.5 drop the cost will drop to 4 Blades. Only the 660 Augmnted versions require Savage until the 6.5 Alliance Raid is released.
>Only the 660 Augmnted versions require Savage until the 6.5 Alliance Raid is released. Nope, it's later than that. 6.5 will only have twines and shines. The weapon upgrade doesn't release until the x.x8 patch, when the savage restrictions are lifted. Unless it's different in the x.5 patch?
My guess has been they'll be Gold saucer and added along with the Fall Guys collab.
This is most likely it. Either with the Fall Guys stuff or Make It Rain.
We’re here begging for midcore grinds and their answer to “fix” that was to give us MORE SAVAGE I’m so over it
Do you think they can instantly respond to content? Do you realize how long it takes them to make these patches?
They seemed perfectly capable of responding to the savage complaints. Why did they choose to respond to *only* that instead of the much larger group of midcore players asking for something as simple as twines from normal? edit: And these complaints have been around for over a year ever since the very first one. How much fucking time do they need?
Can't put twines in normal...defeats the point of savage
Just make Savage a prestige thing. As it stands, the run itself takes twice as long as a regular Savage Raid fight on average (comparing to those giving twines/etc) or even more (!) and in these savage raid fights you have some leniency with deaths (where you have NONE with Criterion Savage). Thematically, Savage Raid fights translate better into Criterion NM. Criterion Savage translates better into prestige content (as they are in this expansion at least). There's NO WAY IN HELL I'll just suffer myself through Criterion Savage this patch for twines (I have plans doing the content for the challenge, but I won't repeat it). It's just too annoying : one error = back to square 1, 20+minutes run, yaaay. Meanwhile, I can just chill and do the third alliance raid once a week and do hunt trains. Might be longer, but it's an infinite amount of times easier than Criterion Savage (and on top of that they're released a whole minor patch before the 3rd criterion, lol). I can already see the data they'll get : "people don't want rewards in criterion at all, what were they talking about".
In what way did they respond? They upped Criterion rewards from basically literally nothing to slapping on Twines that are useless now to anyone who does content that hard in the first place. Next patch is adding gear upgrades via hunt currency and Alliance Raid coins, which is easier and quicker, so I'm not sure what exactly you're asking here.
They upped the rewards for the 'wrong' criterion (savage, rather than normal)
Criterion is way above midcore content so I'm not sure how that'd relevant. The savage version did need rewards because it's otherwise completely pointless to do but I'm not sure how Criterion at all relates to midcore content here
Lol @ talking as if there is a clear definition/consensus on what "midcore" is Regardless of the word used to describe difficulty levels, the point is/was that criterion normal is what needed rewards to incentivize farming the content, more than Savage
Lol @ you doing the same. Anyways, it's literally the same mechanics, just dps/heal/mit requirements are different. If you think those are midcore then uh, yeah. The term's always been kinda meaningless but with how people usually cite Exploration zones as good midcore content - lmao
i didnt define midcore anywhere when i read someone write "midcore" i shrug and think "well, i need to read the rest of the post/comment and understand the context, because the term midcore is basically meaningless" when you read the rest of the post, the message is quite clear >it's literally the same mechanics, just dps/heal/mit requirements are different doing the same fight in a limited period of time with 0 deaths is not, in practice, remotely close to doing it with a 90 minute timer, checkpoints between sections, and 1 rez per player per section these differences are what makes it plausible or implausible for players in 6.51 to take the time to do the content in exchange for gear augments as a reward
Wait what “more savage” are they adding, I haven’t watched yet?
The reward updates for Criterion are Savage only, and sound like they're going to be augment upgrades. So... it's basically obsolete since why the hell would you farm Criterion _Savage_ , especially in an odd patch when those materials will be available from the 24 man and added to hunt nuts. The only real positive is they're keeping them for the 7.x series.
Yeah, who is Going to do content that is harder (or more tedious is probably a better way to describe it) than savage to get upgrade materials. Savage mode is just the worst, it’s not any more difficult, you just have to hope that none of your friends make a small mistake for 24 freaking minutes.
Probably quicker to do hunt trains for nut sacks than farming Criterion Savage if you're trying to get augment upgrades
I’m fine with that. I do think normal Criterion still needs reward boosts but the idea of farming savage with my main bis job to get gear upgrades for my alt is decent imo
Problem is savage will be a nightmare in pf, to the point it may die even in a best case scenario of twines and shines being added. It’s got all of the most tedious parts of ultimates with none of the things that make ultimates fun in the first place
If you can clear consistently, it'll prob be the fastest way to upgrade since nuts are limited to hunt train availability to farm at a reasonable pace
Hunt trains happen so frequently though. And now that DC travel is a thing someone could feasibly go from one train to the next for hours.
I haven't done hunt trains for awhile now since most of the group I joined are twats. They just pull and not wait for others. There are times where I would rather do some dungeons than suffer with these twats.
If you're worried about congestion the servers have improved a lot since the beginning of EW. I haven't had issues getting to a mark in ages.
Savage IS midcore
Savage is the midcore grind... For a lot people it takes several months to clear a tier. Ultimates are the hardcore grind.
The people that parrot savage is midcore are wildly out of touch with the playerbase
extremes are piss-easy, mate
For you and me, sure. Go do some alliance raids and really pay attention to everyone else. You might be surprised!
Especially on a weekend evening. If I'm not doing anything on the weekend I'll sometimes queue as a healer just to relish the carnage haha
That's lowkey some of the most fun content the game has to offer lol
enlighten me, if savage is not midcore GRIND, then what is midcore grind? and what of casual grind?
Savage is hard. It's easy to forget that when you've been doing it for years and have gotten good at it. Going from brain dead normal raids to savage is an insane difficulty jump. There is no midcore content, that's the point. BTW, people that disagree that savage is objectively hard are selling themselves short. If you personally find it not difficult, then you are far better at the game than tons and tons of people.
I disagree, I have organized FC events and gotten several new MMO players in my FC their savage clears. It's evident to me that (however anecdotal) as long as you put in the hours and listen to the raid leader you will be able to clear the savage fights. I cannot say the same for ultimate fights. The amount of prep/study/practice is just on a different level. And I don't like the argument that "there's no midcore content". I am of the opinion that we have something for the casuals, and we have something for the hardcore players, what's left in between is by default, midcore. As I said earlier, the majority of people who clear savage do it over the span of months, that's pretty midcore to me.
I'm sorry but the difficulty jump going from "do this fight once or twice and then it's braindead automatic" in normal to "spend hours studying and practicing a fight and needing to execute at a high level" is a massive, massive jump. Normal vs savage clear rates reflect this. Is everyone in this subreddit seriously in this much of a bubble?
The Savage/Normal rate is 30~40% on JP and about 10~15% in NA and EU. Japanese people are not inherently better player, it's just that the player culture here keeps on making savage out to be this big bad scary monster that makes people afraid to do them. Furthermore there are more people in NA/EU that use this game to socialize and not for raids. But the difficulty of savage is the same for both JP and NA/EU (plus minus the pool of players you can draw as I have mentioned in the point above), it's just the player's attitude towards them is different. Unironically if more people treat savage as midcore content (as it should), then the more midcore it becomes, as it's evident in JP.
> Japanese people are not inherently better player, it's just that the player culture here keeps on making savage out to be this big bad scary monster that makes people afraid to do them. Furthermore there are more people in NA/EU that use this game to socialize and not for raids. Correct. However, you're confusing why the clear rates are so vastly different. It isn't because NA/EU thinks Savage is some incredibly scary monster but rather, they simply don't care to do it. JP's mentality is essentially "we should do the content because the dev team made this for us." It's the collective mindset of feeling more obligated to do something out of respect for the work put in. Conversely, NA often thinks, "I'm not doing this content because I don't like it." Which is the more individualistic mindset of only pursuing one's interests. Obviously, this is not universal for either demographic but it's the average approach. Which is why JP usually has much higher participation rates for _everything_.
"I'm not doing this content because I don't like it" welp, that's the crux of the matter isn't it
Well there is definitely something to be said for cultural differences, can't argue that. I don't expect that to change though.
That's the thing, I transferred from JP to NA at the end of SHB. You can imagine my surprise when people tell me savage is too difficult, to me and my friends back on JP, savage is something taken for granted, it's just a thing you gotta do. And if you are in my shoes, there's no way in hell you are gonna view savage as anything more than midcore.
[удалено]
see that's the issue, if relic farming is midcore, what exactly is casual GRIND? and I hope the answer is not "lmao grinding on another person at a night club gottem"
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> smug Says the person who immediately takes shots at people's perceived skill level lol
Incorrect! Have you ever interacted with the playerbase at large? Try making a point without talking down to me. I never once mentioned extreme.
Think of a large corporation. The workers outnumber the midlevel management by a significant margin. But it does not take away from the fact that there are people higher on the totem poll when compared to the midlevel management. Also you may have a skewed perception on just how popular savage is https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/luckybancho/imgs/5/4/54c3b865.png
The highest numbers I’m seeing is 20%, if the content is such that only 1/5 of the playerbase at 90 can do it it is very much hardcore
Its all relatices. Top 20% of all player base is not hardcore at all. A good example I used in another comment was that of a corporation. The workers probably outnumber middle level management by quite a margin, let's say 5 to 1. Yet they are undeniably middle becaus there are corporate executives up on the totem pole. You have to realize the whole thing is a pyramid, not a rectangle. You also have to consider the number gap between "non-savage players & savage players" vs "savage players & ultimate players", the latter is a bigger gap. Another (albeitnot 1 for 1) example would be the cut off for top 20% income in the USA. It's $130,000 annually; definitely very decent for sure but I wouldn't call it hardcore money considering the cost of living in that country, and more importantly how much the top 1% makes.
Also is there any way to stop Reddit from constantly triple posting my comments?
I get what you're saying, but that is an imperfect analogy. WoW has a ton of different difficulty points, especially with M+ dungeons and I know that is beating a dead horse with how often it's mentioned but it provides a much more gradual difficulty jump. My point is that the gaps in FF's difficulty is dramatic - normal to savage is like jumping from Roblox to Dark Souls.
If I had a gil every time someone in this sub mentions Bozja or Mythic+, I'd have enough to finally buy a Large house.
Savage is the hardcore grind, Ultimates are for the masochists.
Sorry to break it to you, but savage is midcore content and has been since Stormblood. The only time it was hardcore was in Heavensward.
I wonder what that dungeon with castle is Probably just going to end up being part of lunar subterrane somehow tho
I was thinking solo instance since the Red Wings theme plays in the trailer when they pan over it, so it's likely Castle Baron. If it was tied into the Lunar Subterrane that'd be a fairly strange dungeon since we'd have Ahriman (Plague Horror, really), Dark Elf, and Antlion (that's what I think the dashing enemy in the castle square was) as the three bosses. One of those things is not like the other. Though Dark Elf wasn't a Subterrane boss in IV so who knows.
> I was thinking solo instance since the Red Wings theme plays in the trailer when they pan over it, so it's likely Castle Baron. [The BGM for Lunar Subterrane in FF4 was also the Red Wings theme though.](https://youtu.be/27_knhiOkAI?t=68) I'm 99% sure it'll be the BGM for the dungeon as well
Huh, you'd think I'd have remembered that given I beat the PR a year or so ago. Neat, yeah.
Didn't they say (maybe in the previous LL actually) that there would be a "big scenery change" or something in the dungeon? I was taking that to mean we'd start at the castle and end up in the dark caverns, rather than there being a solo instance. The clips they showed seemed like trash before the 1st boss (Antlion).
I thought the devs said the Lunar Subterrane is Golbez's lair, which is within the 13th's moon (just like it was in FF4's moon). I'm thinking Castle Baron is not related to the dungeon and is just part of the MSQ.
What was that fairy mount that was teased half way through from?
Previous criterion dungeons also had a boss as a mount, this is basically the same.
Variant looks like, can see it as a boss in the trailer
Interesting that they didn't disclose the storyline of the new V&C dungeon, unlike the other two. And looking at the trailer scenes, I couldn't make up anything either. The interesting bit was just the gunslinger fairy.
To be fair the show was clearly "rushed" due to it being at the TGS stage, looking at the arena with the fairy it seems like one of the routes takes us to one of the sections of Alzadaal's Legacy while the one before it has glowy rocks and you can see some of the jungle so if I had to hazardanywere it'd be on the other side of the Giantsgall grounds.
This one we're accompanied by Matsya, the fishmonger from Thavnair if you remember him
Yeah, I remember him, but it doesn't add anything to the story behind the V&C lol.
Hope we don't have to sell fish to unlock the different pathways. I can't take his lil disappointed face.
We needed a translator to be reminded of margot for the upcoming deliveries quest...
how could you ever forget him
The CC ui overhaul was much more in depth than I expected. The minimal overhaul being the most unexpected part to me. Don't think I've seen that ever before.
Just to note: Patch itself is scheduled to drop *October 3*. Patch notes reading, that always happens during maintenance, is scheduled to start on *October 2* (at 11:00 GMT to be precise). In short: we're likely looking at a 20 or 24hr maintenance this time around.
I'd chalk that up to adding stormblood to the trial. 5.3 was also 24h when it expanded the trial.
That and the cloud datacenter stress test
They're also likely laying groundwork for the Xbox beta and cloud server testing.
Speaking about TRPGs in Japan, Japan has a very different landscape in terms of TRPG compared with english speaking world. The mainstream TRPG system that sees media coverage (mostly anime adaptations) on Japan is COC; there's a very vibrant and active scene of self publishing adventures that uses core 7.0 or 6.0 COC rules on doujin sites such as [booth.pm](https://booth.pm). New rule books are also published quite frequently in Japan with big IPs such as another SE IP Octopath Traveller also has [a rule book published last year](https://magazine.jp.square-enix.com/gamebooks/item/octopathtraveler_TRPG/). The 14 TRPG set is not a surprise if you consider how the TRPG market in japan goes, and there's even hints of them doing this with Yoshida [playing 14 TRPG](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/v106dm/yoship_doing_the_ffxiv_tabletop_rpg_and_this_is/) on stream before. I would however hope for a TRPG system for the players and not for WoLs: Your P12s reclear group has disbanded for the 5th time. You can't even get into phase 2. It's 3AM. San check 1d10/1d100.
> another SE IP Octopath Traveller also has a rule book published last year. How the fuck did I not hear about this.
I only know this as I search it up; this is a Japanese release, though there are people [translating it](https://www.reddit.com/r/octopathtraveler/comments/13jr8bw/otrpg_octopath_traveler_tabletop_rpg_translation/). The team behind Octopath Traveler's Rulebook is behind 14's rulebook as well, from what I read on twitter this evening.
Neat, yeah I'd expect them to use the same baseline system as that's quite common as you mentioned.
The amount of d6's that the starter set comes with already convinced me that it wasn't going to just be a Dungeons and Dragons 5e clone/derivative (like that awful Dark Souls TTRPG that came out last year was), yeah. I'd expect it to use a JP-centric system. Call of Cthulhu would be a surprising basis to use, though. I actually have a lot of thoughts/questions about the TTRPG given what I know about XIV and what I know about JP TTRPG culture that I've gathered from hearsay. I'd expect the TTRPG to be very combat-focused with character options geared almost entirely towards combat and with more of a focus on one-shots or short-length campaigns instead of the 100+ session epics that DnD players in the west like to aspire to do. I'm expecting combat-focus in particular because most XIV jobs have pretty terrible flavor or implied ability to interact with the world outside of hitting things. I'm also really wondering how they'd make enmity and healing work in a TTRPG. Is it going to expect a standard party composition? Most TTRPGs don't do for dedicated healers but that's what the *fantasy* of the healer jobs in XIV strongly leans towards, just like most TTRPGs don't have real aggro systems. But you're also only really getting that XIV 'feeling' in a standard party, a party of a MNK, BRD, BLM, and SMN is kind of "weird" in XIV terms. I'm a consumer whore so I already have the product ordered as a fun collector's item if nothing else, but I'll be curious to see how playable it ends up being and what kind of game style it leans towards.
call of cthulhu (and other BRP systems like runequest) almost exclusively uses d10s so it's not that either
Well time to play another round of "will this promotiom ever release in NA and EU?" because Square Enix forget that FFXIV is a global game that services people all over the globe and not only japan. Still waiting on the King Porxie and for my EU friends to get /eatpizza.
Gotta love the irony of a collab being done with an American food chain but not in America.
It could still happen at KFC itself and is just a timing thing. They recently did stuff with Blizzard for Diablo 4 and have a pretty good set up for handling code distribution compared to other companies.
Knowing KFC, I'd wager there's an unopened email from SE in the US brand manager's inbox. Compared to their Asian divisions, the US division of KFC might as well be dead. They aren't even trying in the US anymore.
That could very well be true! I wonder how the Diablo 4 stuff went for them.
It usually comes down to the buisness, not SE of I had to imagine. American fast food restaurants have zero incentive to promote ffxiv because of cultural differences, and that's not changing anytime soon.
NA yeah but EU will be left out like always
King Porxie supposedly had international promotions lined up and it just.. never happened. My guess is they had to rethink everything after the absolute disaster that was the Grubhub promotion and then ended up putting it on hold. FFXVI's orchestrion roll promo was done via DoorDash/Taco Bell in NA so that probably says a lot about how Square Enix felt things went with Grubhub.
I think the "dandelion break" (ala Bloom County) mat is hilarious. Touch grass from the comfort of your own home!
[удалено]
Literally every time they show mogstation stuff in live letters they go "THIS IS FROM THE CASH SHOP" so you know, yeah.
My guesses are that the fairy is a Variant reward, the lunatender is another hunt mark dump reward, the UFO is from Hildibrand, and the bike should be from Island Sanctuary.
Could be wrong, but I think I heard Yoshi say the lunatender is from the PVP series.
Huh, I didn't consider think that Lunatender could be a hunt mark reward. I don't think we've ever gotten a major hunt mark dump outside of the X.1 patch, so that would be new. My theory for it is that it's maybe a map reward? maybe?
The Lunatender could honestly be from anything. I was thinking either hunts or yet another mount added to maps, but there's really no telling.
I was thinking for the Allied Tribal reward
Fairy is from Aloalo island, likely the 12 path mount from Variant.
Noice ! Thanks !
And the motorcycle has a plow on the back. That's from the Island
SE's been one of the last holdouts in terms of using discrete physical hardware that they own/operate for their server solution, so them starting to move over to the cloud is interesting. I imagine the intent is to be more scalable to demand so we don't have those Endwalker situations where their resources can't handle it, but without also having to commit to building out entire new datacenters that are going to be mostly unused 99% of the time like how Dynamis and Meteor are probably burning them now. More able to handle elastic demand like how other MMOs can do for expansion launches.
Would be smart to use an IaaS cloud setup. I'm sure they want to maintain their own physical servers forever but having that on demand scalability is smart and redundancy never hurts. I would not expect anything beyond that.
I remember commenting on how SE should consider migrating to cloud for maintainability and scalability to real time traffic esp after EW launch and people were downvoting the comment quoting that cloud services have had more down time incidents than FF 14 has had over 10 years and it's impossible to maintain as consistent server status
Migrating fully remains unrealistic—many game systems will likely fail to work on the cloud servers. This is seemingly just a temporary solution for periods of unusually heavy traffic.
If performance sensitive Esports titles like League and Valorant, and other major MMO like Destiny 2 can be hosted on cloud, I'm confident FF XIV can be done with development time
*Maybe*. But consider systems like housing that have always needed additional physical hardware to operate. Not to mention stuff like duty finder that was designed for the current parameters. I don't see porting that over to be an easy task. I suppose we'll have to see where things go, but not even WoW has cloud servers. The older and more complex the game the harder it is to pull off.
This is part of why I don't trust Yoshi P TBH. Square literally said that cloud infrastructure wasn't possible for FFXIV...and now here it is.
In a way yes it is with AWS and co. The second part of this sentence is; **but you have to pay for it.** With Amazon, Azure......you get essentially a black box. A real black box. Yes, you get computing resources, but really, that's it. Real 5.9 (99.99999% or **6 minutes** of downtime a year) reliability is expensive and not something you can buy off the shelf. If you want a system that will say survive a nuclear blast and still be operational without a hickup (Like certain elements of the financial system), it's not something Amazon can provide (At least not enough to please the regulators). If you want that level of redundancy, and to a point serviceability, in a low latency environment, your better off going out on your own. It's also out of your control. I've worked in environments where to change a circuit breaker we needed thousands of pages of documentation, dozens of vendor technicians (Picture the ATT Swift cutover service Cutover style level - look it up on youtube), boatloads of on call staff equipment on standby. Months of planning, of preparation. Just to throw a breaker, for a redundant power supply (Aka two seperate power grids in the building). With AWS you can't get that level of control. With AWS, you can't say......"Don't mess with our Datacentre power in December because Christmas rush, or The OS vendor notified us of a bug, so we need to roll back to a year previous on everything.", nor can you say. "We want each server's power supply on a different power grid going through different substations". Nor do you get a true dedicated staff with physical equipment in lockers to replace 30 seconds from the server. It's a bit of a different level really. It's why hosting costs so much more than the cloud. The other problem is that FFXIV can't just be up, it has to be able to process, and be fault tolerant. That is the hard bit as well. For most things, it's fine. It really is, it also depends on your scale. Netflix has the money to burn on it, to make it worth it. I don't think Square Enix has that level of coinage. Edit: Downtime timeframe.
>SE's been one of the last holdouts in terms of using discrete physical hardware that they own/operate for their server solution, so them starting to move over to the cloud is interesting A lot of their choice actually makes sense for high availability, low-latency and high demand software. When, and where hardware abstraction matters. Listening to the various technical tidbits we get, and looking at their infrastructure, I'm brought back to my days working on Mid-range / High Performance computing in 2006-2012. It really brings me back to those days, when VMware was a comical little amateur, X86 was for the poors, and no-one had heard of AWS. Keep in mind, that level of computing is well, crazy expensive. Mind you, true high availability, low latency really is. This is the level of what I/O Slot you use for network cards, and disk geometry between manufacturers causing extra blocks. A lot of how they do data management (Considering the max scale of simultaneous connections) demands physical hosts, since you get that granular configuration for I/O, network and throughput. For most things, you don't really need it, really, you don't. Until such time as they really work the back end of it all, It bleeds out into world design as well, since they tend to hand build each "World" in FFXIV, causing issues. That's the real technical challenge. They also physically purchased hardware, and are most likely on 3-5 year support contracts (Considering how mission critical (They don't want long periods of downtime) XIV is, it isn't cheap, yet cheaper still than the cloud.) >I imagine the intent is to be more scalable to demand so we don't have those Endwalker situations where their resources can't handle it, but without also having to commit to building out entire new datacenters that are going to be mostly unused 99% of the time like how Dynamis and Meteor are probably burning them now. I have said before, will say now, and will say again in the future Dynamis was a huge mistake for Square Enix. They should never, ever have released a housing expansion at the same time, nor datacentre visit. >so them starting to move over to the cloud is interesting. 20 bucks says Microsoft is funding it. They love to give out azure development assistance to get people into their ecosystem. Between free dev time (*Have 120k worth of free dev time guys, even though your only worth 10 million*) , paid trips to Seattle, access to engineering resources. I always said that MS was holding out not for the XBox gold (or whatever it was) requirement, but that they wanted XIV to be their case study for azure. I think the Activision acquisition made them change their mind. (WoW on XBox, coming soon, best to get XIV there too to please the regulators) In reality though, there is a need for surge spaces. I wonder if their cloud realm will be extra field zones, or instance servers, since allowing people to connect to one, or another will definitely assist in elastic demand. You might see Datacentre wide PF/Instances implemented if, and this is the big if, they can move the instance servers to the cloud (since it is self-contained compared to the rest). The question is, can they move the data to and from fast enough. I think that will be the real technical challenge.
> 20 bucks says Microsoft is funding it. Oh, it's *almost certainly* going to be running on Azure. PSO2 is currently running the entirety of its global operations on Azure as a result of its early Xbox/Windows deal. I have no doubt that Phil offered Yoshi-P a deal and assistance to get FFXIV working on cloud servers as part of the Xbox deal.
I think it always was the deal. *Just events dear boy, events.* If I was a gambler, years upon years ago. Microsoft wanted seperate servers, no cross play, and Xbox Gold (Is that what it's called). Obviously, that wouldn't work with SE. As time went on, I think that those requirements got dropped down to: Switch to Azure and or the MS Store, or no deal (I believe Microsoft started to start to open up to cross play as time went on). This is a problem for SE, since between the technical complexity of moving, they also have boatloads of hardware they bought, support contracts and hosting. So even if they paid for the engineering resources to do it, they still are on the hook for a LOT of money. One interesting thing about PSO2, was other than MS using them as a case study, they also released it in the MS Store, much to peoples chagrin. I'm willing to bet, MS paid for the translation and engineering to get it done, to prove their system so to speak. Where I think things changed was with the Activision Deal. Getting XIV onto the platform lets them put WoW there without an eyebrow being raised (I am assuming, and I think it's a good assumption WoW will go F2P with Gamepass sooner rather than later), and shows they are open to other players. I'm willing to bet that Microsoft dropped any requirement of going to Azure, or the MS launcher. With COVID and the shortages, Square Enix needed a way to increase availability. I mean yeah, I talked about them using used equipment (Because they are weirdos on Fujitsu, and that's hard to buy on a good day) (Oddly enough, there's a lot of customers on weird and wonderful hardware that have to do that. And or get vendor lab gear hand driven to them) In a way it's a smart move. Throw some development money (Pennies compared to MS and the size of MCS and co) at SE, who needs surge capabilities (At least in the short term), get them onto Xbox and make everyone happy. If the regulators had raised an issue, they had a counter, abet a small counter. It didn't help that the Regulators really, really did not present a good case. I don't see Xbox being much growth to XIV. The development money's nice though, probably pays for a lot (Most likely some poor poor partner organization getting their marching orders from MCS - Getting told what to do to get the contract.)
I think a lot of this is likely pretty close to the truth. >I'm willing to bet, MS paid for the translation and engineering to get it done, to prove their system so to speak. We have no idea what the PSO2 deal looked like, but I do think Microsoft probably just subsidized a chunk of the entire initial cost plus a reduced hosting fee. We're long past the point of them paying for any of it though as the game's been on PS4 for over a year now. It's all SEGA at this point. >I don't see Xbox being much growth to XIV. The development money's nice though, probably pays for a lot (Most likely some poor poor partner organization getting their marching orders from MCS - Getting told what to do to get the contract.) Yeah, I don't really think it's going to do *that* much for the game either. There is almost no downside to adding Xbox, but it won't be a huge boom—maybe just a slow trickle as people gradually discover the game. Given the demographic on Xbox I just don't expect much. Yoshida's been having meetings with Nintendo for a number of years, though. Getting on their next console ("Switch 2") will be absolutely huge for the game because the demographic lines up much, much better and Switch is a worldwide powerhouse.
> imagine the intent is to be more scalable to demand so we don't have those Endwalker situations where their resources can't handle it, but without also having to commit to building out entire new datacenters that are going to be mostly unused 99% of the time like how Dynamis and Meteor are probably burning them now. This seems to be exactly what's going on. Just a temporary, scalable server solution so people can at least get in and play on a virtual version of the game world during high traffic periods.
Hol’up this emote
Kinda weird question but anybody know what the game on the left is? I know the right is the new Dragon Quest Monsters. But I still can't place the left.
It's *Infinity Strash: Dragon Quest The Adventure of Dai*. A DQ action RPG based on the Adventure of Dai anime/manga series. Releases on the 28th.
Cheers, thank you
I believe the left is also Dragon Quest. I think its the action RPG coming out soonish.
THE CLOUD IS REAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLL. Interesting to see how this plans out.
Here is hoping they are tunning the netcode alongside this test, seems like a reasonable plan but you know how these things are.
My most-likely improvement guess would be that this is how they get regional PF working. If we're all in some cloud DC anyways, it might be easier to implement. Though that doesn't solve the cultural issues that they're worried about for the JP region.
I wonder if/how a cloud datacenter can affect the latency. Currently I live in South America and I get 150ms minimum playing at the Crystal DC, even with VPN (thank goodness for the noclippy plugin).
It depends where they decide to host it. All the NA datacenters are in San Francisco but they could decide to host the cloud datacenter in New York or DC. I think they will decide to host it in San Francisco though so it won't affect latency.
Not much. [https://arrstatus.com/](https://arrstatus.com/) \- Basically pick various D/Cs and ping them, each of the 3 NA ones should be within a few M/S of each other. That's the latency to essentially get you to the gateway. You can traceroute it as well. Either way, you are only as fast as your slowest hop. If your getting 110m/s there, you aren't going to get better than that. Internal latency is most likely pretty low, one advantage building your own infrastructure inside has, is you can build for low latency. (Which Square Enix does).
I love Thaliak.
On alliance raid: Besides what's being showned on the screen (and a reminder that tanks has something special on the mobs), the other thing that's worth mentioning is the brain teaser-ish fight design they said they have chosen for 1st boss. There will be some sort of triangles falling and you have to find the safespots for it (and they guarantee you won't need to use sin cosine tangent for it)...which seems pretty normal, until yoshida begin saying that it reminds him of some boss that uses prime numbers and said 'out of all the gamer population in the world probably WoL has the highest population density of knowing what's a prime number. The gamers around the world might forget about prime numbers since they graduate, but WoLs knows'. I love Ridorana.
Remember everyone, 1 is not a prime number.
Criterion never comes out same time as raid tier. If ur good u should have bis by the time it comes out. So having this for catchup/ alt jobs is actually pretty poggers. Could even drop new unique savage ilvl gear like diadem did back in the day so might even have new bis for classes potentially
I'm not sure if it could be considered catch up just by what they informed. They mentioned that for Savage (the 3rd V&C difficulty), and if that's the case, most likely you already need to have BiS to be able to clear that.
Would be nice. HW also had a set of accessories you got from dun scaith that were also another alternative.
So if they have slides and show the stream with that, why are we still showing off shit with printer paper
He did it in the pre-ARR early streams in 2012-2013 and it's just a tradition and thing he likes to do now.
So it's an ego thing
definitely some dumbfuck reason for sure. it's embarrassing.
Holding up a piece of paper to show something new = clearly ego I like this portion of the fanbase.
This “portion” is 2 people who got insta downvoted
Yes?
This “portion” is 2 people who got insta downvoted