1.19 Brings New Bugs, Lower Stability

Only Square Enix could hype up a patch for more than *six months* and repeatedly delay it for amost *three months* after the previous patch, and then launch it with this many beta-level issues, ranging from increased client instability and freezes to much-hyped quests and abilities not working.

• Mouseover on certain items killing the client.
• Unable to join Grand Companies, who were offering the big "content" addition to this patch with the addition of a questline leading to mounts.
• Market Wards that are broken, freezing up as you try to enter, and then not allowing you to log back in after you're stuck having to force quit.  Still waiting for a hotfix on that.
• New DirectX issues causing crashes on some systems.
• Opening the map causing crashes in Gridania on some systems.
• Patcher freezing partway in, and requiring you to force it closed and reboot.
• Macros broken due to various name changes to items and skills, as well as random changes to macro syntax.
• Hermes shoes not appearing in new character's inventories.
• Tutorial freezing up for approximately seven minutes before continuing.
• Certain abilities, like Fast Cast, simply not working.
• Final Fantasy XIV Config, required to adjust things like controller and graphic settings, no longer working on some systems.

So what do we have?  The prime source of new content inaccessible to some players, some genuine improvements, some new, game-breaking bugs and more instability in an already unstable client (keep in mind, basic things like alt-tabbing in fullscreen and UAC still crash the game).  And with this update, FFXIV finally cracks the double-digit mark for updates since March 3rd - Rift having double the major updates, and *seven times* the overall amount of significant patches.

Amusingly, yet another story broke today, reported on several news sites today quote the Square Enix CEO as reiterating that Final Fantasy XIV's abysmal showing "greatly damaged" the series as a whole.

Really, this is news?  The only people it's news to are the rabid fanbase who insist that "better" means "quality" or "fixed" or "acceptable".

One Year Later: (Very) Basic Features FFXIV Doesn't Yet Have II

With 1.19 dropping soon, but the one year mark almost three weeks behind us, I felt it was time to showcase a few more cases of FFXIV lacking very, very basic features.  One or two of these will finally be changed with 1.19, but most will not - and keep in mind, we're well beyond a year into the game's lifecycle, having released September 21st, 2010.

• Can't abandon guildleves from the Journal menu.  Even more peculiar, the function is there: you can abandon other quests from the same menu, but move down a space to Guildleves, and it disappears.

• Drag and drop functionality.  We still can't drag and drop actions.  Changing an action's location requires going Menu > Actions and Traits, then manually clicking a spot, then clicking each individual action to place it.

• Saved action bars for each job.  And in a similar vein, your action bar for a given job is not saved.  In other words, switching to a new job (one of the most touted features of FFXIV) requires you to manually redo your actions bars every single time.  The only solution is to make a macro, and it requires four or five full, ten line macros just to change.  And that brings us to...

• Instant macro commands.  Made a full macro to change jobs?  It'll still take you close to a full minute as you wait for each individual line to be executed.

Buttkick set to action slot 1. (two second pause)
Facepunch set action slot 2. (two second pause)
Etcetera.

It gets better.  If you're switching to a job with fewer actions, you need another set of macros to wipe the previous set of actions.  For example, your L50 Pugilist might have actions on action bar 3, but your L20 Lancer doesn't need that many, so you make a Lancer macro that only fills the first bar.

The problem is that your Lancer macro can't switch actions in the first line, because you have far less action points.  Since you have two more bars as Pugilist, and the game randomly decides to save actions from those lines, you need another set of equal macros to remove *the entire bar* first, pushing the process well past a minute long, just to change jobs.

And keep in mind you have to do this for everything, even crafting jobs.

• No /assist command, or any way to target someone else's target.  Want to figure out what mob is hitting your healer?  Want to assist someone in trouble with their mob?  No can do, buddy!

• No way to adjust how widgets react.  The number of bars and widgets you can adjust is very small.  You can't adjust anything that not standard (for example, you can't permanently move the "sell" menu that comes up after selecting an item to vendor to somewhere more convenient, it automatically resets), firstoff.

But it gets worse.  Say you like having your party menu in the upper left corner, as is standard for MMOs (WoW, PSU, Rift, so forth).  You can move the box up there, but the problem is, it scrolls *up*, with no way to change it so it scrolls downward.  What that means is, if it's too high up, you can't see the members of your party beyond the first one as it scrolls offscreen, with the only alternative being to move the box to the middle of a 1080p resolution.

Basically, if you only have one or two party members, instead of the upper left, their HP box is in the middle!

• No mouseover tooltips.  They finally added more icons to the minimap, but the problem is, there's no indicator of what's-what, and you can't mouseover to figure it out.

• No adjusting chat tabs without digging through menus.  Most MMOs allow a simply right-click on a chat tab to change how it functions.  Not FFXIV: you must go Menu > Configuration > Chat Tab to change things.  And better yet, you can't add your own customized tabs, you're limited to four pre-defined tabs, and you can't even attach all four to the same bar.

• Disconnecting still causes you to be removed from and fail various quests.  I mean, really?

• No mouseover info, for anything, be it tooltips or map information.  Similarly, no right-click functionality for things like buying and selling.

• Almost zero in-game configuration options.  You can't adjust your controller in game, and graphic settings are almost non-existent outside of the "Final Fantasy XIV Config" program.  Basically, to change even the smallest settings, you need to log out and quit the FFXIV program entirely (you can't even run the two programs simultaneously), boot Config, fix your settings, quit Config, then reboot FFXIV and see if the settings are now as desired.  If not, the process repeats!

• And finally, another big one: no overlapping menus.  Want your inventory open while you search for items and make purchases, so you can compare?  No can do.  Want your action palette up while you do your macros so you can match it up?  No dice there, either.  Want your retainer's bazaar window open (bazaaring being a function for buying and selling with the retainer) while your inventory and their's is open, so you can track, compare, and price items?  Nothing.

Of all these issues, the only one 1.19 will fix is the guildleve abandoning aspect.  Yes, as of 1.19, we'll be able to use a feature that's already existed in-game for months on the other half of the questlog, because that's the kind of change that should take months, to apply existing code to existing quests.

Is this acceptable a year into the lifecycle of a game that was started in 2005 from a team of highly skilled professionals working for one of the most lauded companies of the gaming world?  Absolutely not.  Better games made in a shorter span than a year have had these features, and better yet, Square Enix is working from an *existing base*, none of this is ground up, it's body work on a vehicle that already runs.

Comparing Post-Patch Fix Timetables Between XIV and Rift

The developers have been saying they would pick up the pace of patching post 1.18, and the fanboys have been shoving it down the throat of the internet.  1.18 has released, and what do we have to show for it so far?  Let's compare it to Rift's activity since their most recent major patch, 1.4.


FFXIV, since last major patch, 1.18:
1.18 (July 21st)
Minor Version Update (July 27th)
1.18a (August 8th)

(Verifiable at Square Enix's FFXIV Patch List)


Rift, since last major patch, 1.4:
1.4 (August 3rd)
1.4 Hotfix #1 (August 3rd)
1.4 Hotfix #2 (August 5th)
1.4 Hotfix #3 (August 9th)
1.4 Hotfix #4 (August 10th)

(Verifiable at Trion's Rift Patch List)



Within roughly the time it took Square Enix to release their first minor "Version Update" (a two-line bug fix), Trion delivered not just a major patch but four hotfixes, two that each individually matched the almost three week later XIV follow-up (1.18a) in scope (Hotfix #3 and #4), making the other two just insult to injury.  The first XIV patch after the major 1.18 (claimed to be the start of an avalanche of updates through a much quicker update schedule) was almost a week later; Rift's first post-1.4 patch was later that same day.  It should be noted that XIV does have an (apparently static, unchanging) event coming up, but it should also be noted that during most of this time, Rift had a worldwide event with multiple phases with changing quests occurring during this same time period, the second such they've done (XIV has yet to do any progressive events).

Essentially, it took Square Enix literally three times as long to deliver what smaller, inexperienced, financially lacking Trion did.  It should also be noted the previous major FFXIV update, 1.17, released April 14th, more than three months prior.  In literally under half the time it took to go from 1.17 to 1.18, the previous Rift update, 1.3, occurred June 22nd, six weeks prior to 1.4.

I ask again: does this really look like a company with tons of financial backing and a decade of successful MMO experience dead-set on turning XIV around?

The "New Team" Myth

It's been a long standing argument in the Square Enix community that FFXIV's team is a "new team", only working on the game since January.  Therefore, the rationale goes, it's okay the updates have been slow, because it's new people getting used to someone else's code and just getting accustomed to the game.

The problem is, Square Enix never said it was a "new team": by their own admission, it consists of most of the original team, with a few changes at the top level.  The idea that it's an entirely new group is an inaccuracy that the community picked up and ran with without verifying.

More precisely, what we're dealing with is a reshuffling, or, as Square Enix's President and CEO refers to it, a "restructured" team.  In his letter, he never once refers to it as a "new team", and goes on to mention that we "welcome several new leaders handpicked from other projects to work with the existing talent [emphasis added] on FINAL FANTASY XIV."

Nine positions changed, four of them filled with existing members of team.  The other five were legitimately new to the project, and installed in leadership positions.  It is of note, however, that one of these five new leaders worked on the Crystal Tools engine FFXIV is built on, implying some immediate familiarity.

In total, we have four completely new individuals - out of over a hundred total members on the development team (in January, current producer Yoshi-P roughly estimated it to be around 130).

Practically speaking, it's the old team, with a few fresh individuals acting in leadership positions.  Most of the leadership - and particularly the grunts - have been here and working on the game since far earlier in it's development cycle.  With the support of Square Enix's CEO and the simple facts to go on, let's put that tired old myth of a "new team" to rest.