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Specific criteria for Legacy was pay for at least three months of service between Feb/March (not sure which) 2012 and Oct 2012. That could be any three months - so if you paid for March, quit until August, then paid for September and October, you qualified. 30 day free trial months did not count, nor did any of the pre-fee months many folks played after game launch.

Yeah, the schedule is nice, and makes it seem like we'll get an April-June release...which is perfect for me, seeing as Storm Legion might be losing it's freshness by then :P

I'm only worried about the ps3 betas though, so I actually have a bit of waiting to do either way...

Sadly no, mum is still unfortunately, the word. My sticky will be updated (the "Notice to those who get invited to the Alpha/Beta" one) if/when that changes.

Unless it shows off some critical flaws and makes people turn away before even giving them a chance to fix it. Phase 4 they are lifting the NDA, which is also an open beta so everyone will get a chance to see what it's like before they buy it (or resub if they're 1.0 vets).

NDA is in place so that SE are the only ones who control what the public sees of the game until its ready for launch. This is a standard MO for any closed beta.

I can't imagine a large amount of people saying that falling damage sucks though, unless people really hate jumping/long falls that much

Yeah, it'd suck in most cases, but there's something about falling damage that I'm totally used to.

Though I guess since I'll be playing on the ps3, it'd be a hassle if my analogue stick accidentally moved/got stuck :P

What do you mean? The party finder worked really well, but no one used it. It was a bit confusing to navigate and was implemented late, but JP players always used it, and I got invites often if I was playing during JP prime.

Of course, this "Duty Finder" is vastly different than the one in 1.0, as it is cross-server, and much more specific.

Sheesh, you're pretty critical, aren't you? Ahem, anyways, a cross-server dungeon finder won't be too bad, though I suspect that it wouldn't be needed if they didn't have so many servers heh

That easy to explain away eh? :P

Seems that's easily explained away, so back on topic I guess? If there is one...

Given the fact that They've already done a pretty good job of displaying the 'flaws' of the Alpha in their own videos I'd say that sort of reasoning is moot, even though I understand it.

Perhaps it's my experience with the poor 1.xx versions but from my standpoint, SE has already screwed the pooch in terms of expectation. Showing the progress of things broken, even in the new version, to how well they listen and get it fixed is probably more important then worrying about a flawed alpha product. Those too timid or fickle to look twice have already given up on FFXIV by this juncture. And I lothe to admit it, but even our most negative of onlookers here are looking beyond the flaws and anticipating fixes.

Hmm...I'm wondering if 10 servers would actually be enough at launch, due to the ps3 people being added too, and more people deciding to give it a try haha

Ahh, missed that part...sounds good to me. Rift ended up launching with 40+ due to congestion, and that was only with NA and EU countries, which is why I was worried, but maybe they have better servers than Trion?

Yeah, that's why I'm concerned with the amount of servers. We'll be having the entire world stuck on 20 servers...seems like a small number haha

And wasn't this the one with the auto translator as well? Or was I imagining things in the original beta?

Yes, we all know, it's been stated a hundred million times, and if I could I would insert the dead horse smiley right about.... here.

Did you try to use it Ostia? I mean.. did you? I'm not giving them a handy here. It worked and was patched into a game where previously we had none, in a game that had already admitted their failure and tried to appease the current player-base while developing a revamp to a system they already admitted was flawed.

So, you're point is what? They shouldn't have done it? Screw it guys, why bother, right? Terrible logic is terrible.



Not really sure what you're trying to say here. If I may ask, how much did you play 1.0? I'm trying to figure out where your anger comes from so we can work through it together.

And you've just explained why they had to scrap the existing game engine and rebuild. They did the best they could with patches, but when you're unable to even patch in a "mediocre" LFG system to your code, it's a sign that the underlying guts of the game are just bad.

Ha! I thought that was taken away for some reason. Time to overuse it!

I never used the LFG tool because I was living in Japan at the time and during the times I played about 99% of groups were "JP onry". I have to suspect that the 1.0 engine might have caused some of the lackluster with the LFG. They couldn't get a proper mail system set up because of the horrible coding of the crystal tools engine. I don't want to sound like a 1.0-apologist but you have to admit that Yoshida was given a crap engine with an off-the-wall design and told, "make it work!".

I'm getting a degree in programming.

I can believe it.

SE was slow to update this crucial piece of the games UI in addition to some of the nusiance things like the auto-translate mentioned or text commands for searching.

But in my opinion the search tool in XIV was, in certain ways, better than the tool they had in XI. It enabled you to search for people looking to do similar activities rather than just people with certain jobs, level ranges, areas, etc... Not that those aren't important. I certainly agree if SE had implemented both the party search and group finder correctly to begin with more people might have used it.

People were expecting flags over your head that indicated you were looking for a party (ie. XI). What we got was a tool which grouped you based on activity and type of job requested. Even after SE added the search tool above and beyond the group finder people still didn't use it. Maybe because it was too complex for users to understand. I certainly think it could have been designed better but good or bad... right or wrong... the players chose not to utilize it. I will say that JP seemed to use it effectively to assemble parties. I often found parties with JP players because of it.

I sincerely hope SE is able to combine all of these elements into a single user-friendly party search tool. Likely what we will get now is an auto-group/dungeon finder tool.

You don't have to buy it, it's true. Just as a background, my entire family is programmers and engineers on the male side. We deal with moronic user-base all the time, especially seeming the bulk of the customer base lies in production.

There is a gigantic gap in mindset between someone who is a software developer for any reason, and those who are software users, and that's not defending the poor UI of FFXIV in any means. But poor coding does has a cascading effect on future developments of a program. It's not something you can just cut and paste out easily. There was plenty of problems in the source coding of FFXIV's program. Their entire menu system was built on a very strict template that was very difficult to pull the work-around they did have. (And they produced quite a few.)

Yoshida actually did a good job of explaining this in an interview that is fairly recent. (I should keep a log of these somewhere as they would be really useful to cite.) In the end, FFXIV 1.0 was a coding nightmare (to the point that you could expose the code in some conditions.) For the effort it would take to fix the code, they could have made a new server-side client, and that's exactly what they did.

Also, Behests? Wrong game.

The bulk of what we got in 1.xx, with the exception of the Seventh Umbral Storyline was content that was in production before release. This means the Chocobo Escorts, and Hamlet Defense systems were already working according to the original design and were just modified with balance. Ifrit, was actually initially designed on the old coding. Moogle Fight, Garuda, and fights beyond that were only in the initial stages of development at that point and could be heavily modified. Aside from the BLM Zerg method, which got patched, Garuda was heavily praised by the endgame community. (As was a lot of fights in the Seventh Umbral Era storyline.)

But there was always a catch: They did well with what they had.

A lot of the long term players understood how crippling the engine and server side coding was. It took them quite a bit to get to the point where we had something remotely resembling an Auction house, and how they actually had to create the work-around was really telling on how bad their search engine was. (Each search was essentially an isolated system.) Paired by the fact that was almost no data archiving whatsoever - again, the whole thing was a mess and a nightmare, and that's just what a layman in the simulation field can tell from the user-client side.

So yeah, for me, it's not believable, the evidence of it is fairly obvious to me. You can disagree, but it would be like disagreeing on who's a sitting elected official. Denying reality rarely is a successful practice (Though sometimes a profitable one.)

You win sir. Here's a

^ Just a slow day on the information super highway.

Lol I was reading that with the spoiler hidden and was wondering how many points were on the stick that was stuck up your butt. You got me