Chocobo digging... new developments?Follow

Hello,

Before I get to what I have to say, let me give you a little background story.

I have been chocobo digging for as long as I have played this game, basically since late 2004.

When I first started digging, I wasn't very serious about it but as I did it more and more, the more I was hooked. By the time I got a level 40 job, I actually put levelling, crafting and anything else on hiatus in lieu of digging.

From that point on, any time I was in game, I was digging. Some days I would only spend a few hours, some days I would spend upwards of 10 hours a day on a weekend, but rest assured I would log time spent digging every night. Point being, I spent more time digging than I probably should have. When I was at work or not digging, I was researching how to dig better on Somepage's digging section as well as the few very secretive threads that would surface occasionally on Alla. There was a time where I thought I knew everything there was to know regarding digging.

A good solid IRL year, maybe a little more after I went on the levelling hiatus, I finally dinged A10 chocobo digging. I was pumped. In that time I had seen a lot of BS go on. RMT monopolizing every decent digging zone in the game, (some of you may remember my threads cataloguing that topic) people going head to head in fierce competitions to get zones dug out before the other guy, SE nerfing the piss out of digging, I could go on.

Years later, IE today, here we are. There have been a lot of changes to chocobo digging, including taking away our ability to dig more than 100 items per earth day as well as the inclusion of our ability to use our personally raised choco's for digging. I raised one, and it works beautifully... a large Red bird with a gigantic tank sized beak and intelligence/smarts that are maxed.

I am not exactly sure what has caused me to stumble upon what I am about to tell you. Did SE have this in the code the whole time and we just didn't know about it or hadn't reached the number of stacks necessary? Did raising a special digging bird enable this? Did SE secretly slip this in the recent updates without mentioning (very possible considering the whole topic has always been shrouded in secrecy, myth, speculation and half truth.)

I know these claims are going to rock the chocobo digging foundations as we know it, but I would appreciate if you would have an open mind and just ponder my speculations. I have toiled back and forth with this data for a while, wondering if I have lost my marbles or something was glitching... (I have actually been able to do this for about 3 months now) however I hope to get a realistic and mature examination of my findings here. It would also be nice if the NA community could be the first to prove such a discovery in an area of the game that the JP population always had a head start and more knowledge in... providing they already don't know this and their lips have been sealed.

The A10 cap as we have always taken as a hard and fast rule may not necessarily be the case anymore.

One day while digging, I noticed that it was definitely not taking me as long to start digging after I zoned in. This persisted and eventually I /clocked it to verify. Sure enough, I was now averaging a 6 to 7 second delay to dig.

I have always been a follower of the A20 > A15 > A10 progression, even though my times were always more like this A21/22 > A16/17 > A11ish. basically, my area waits are always a second or so longer than the norm but remain within standard accepted values.

We can all agree that the method of quantifying our area waits could use improvement, but I believe the standard approach is:

Zone in
/clock as soon as you can enter any sort of commands in the chat log
spam dig macro until your dig macro fires executes
/clock again asap after your macro works

Therefore, you're left with a start time and an end time, the difference between which would give you your area wait.

I present you with unedited screenshots of this happening, taken from about an hour ago.

CLICK1
CLICK2
CLICK3
CLICK4

As you can see, my area wait time hovers between 6 to 7 seconds. I am actually honestly surprised a fellow skilled digger has not called a GM on me given I typically zone neck in neck with them repeatedly in the hunt for treasure yet can always tear off before they are near being ready to rock.

Time for my theory:

It is in my opinion that this has always been in the code, as diggers we just never got to a point where someone put in the stacks of greens necessary to facilitate the A5 area wait ding.

It is also in my opinion that our capabilities go beyond A5, meaning that I strongly believe that it is feasible we could be capable of Area Wait 0.

I have always questioned as to why SE would stop it at A10 and I thought that A10 was a strange ceiling to be stopped at, but always just shrugged it off and kept on digging. Realistically, you start at such an excruciating Area Wait and Dig Wait delay bringing one of them down to 0, why not both?

I could not even begin to estimate the amount of stacks I have burned through since I dinged A10 a few years ago... but I do know that it was a sufficient amount, enough to make an A5 ding a chronologically possible theory. If that is in fact the case, I highly doubt I will ever see A0, especially given the 100 item/day implementation as well as my time left with this game is growing sparse.

I have one more little theory to throw in, to answer those who might have had this question smash them in the face as soon as they realized what I was alluding to in this post. Yes, A5 allows you to dig up items that were not possible before... and I am NOT just talking about stuff that SE has added in after the patch or stuff that your own personal bird gets with Bore and Burrow.

We were always under the impression that Orichalcum ore (and adaman ore, to a lesser extent) only comes from Rolanberry, and most recently outside Aht Urghan right?

Wrong.

Draw your own conclusions, I welcome your thoughts and feedback. I had to get this out in the open.

it seems to take longer for me to dig when i zone into jugner. longer than A10. maybe its the way it loads, i dunno.

as far as A5 perhaps it is true- i remember reading someone claiming to have it but who knows.

it would be nice to see that happen.

as far as digging up really rare stuff in other zones, it would be nice to see some screenshots.

Just out of curiosity, do you dig with Bore/Burrow bird? Because there's adaman in deserts if you have Bore. Think I found orichalcum somewhere unusual too but can't remember, it's been a while. Wiki's lists are pretty incomplete, and they list burrow items for bore and other way around.

Can't really say anything about the wait times, my wait times range wildly depending on lag. /shrug.

Very interesting...

It would be great to see the progression continue, but could you imagine what it would take now with the gimp. Probably 3 years to get to A0.

How I wish SE could un-gimp digging again. I've been sitting at A20 myself forever, and probably have over a year of digging to finally get to A10. While the botters and exploiters were a pain, the joy of digging has diminished with these changes.

Either up it to 200 or 300 (which is really only going to take you an hour), or maybe switch from stacks used to 'number of items dug'.

Thanks for the info ^^v

-Ten

The screenshots really don't prove anything since you simply could have waited to '/clock on' until you were in the zone a couple of seconds. I'm a skeptic of higher than /a10 just because it seems so natural to have 10 levels. I've been /a10 for over two years now and probably dug 2-3 times more after hitting /a10 than getting to it. I haven't /clocked in forever, but I would bet I'm over 40,000 stacks of greens easy. If it takes 10-12k to hit /a10 and I don't have it by 40k stacks I don't reckon I'll try for it specifically......

don't get me wrong.....i hope its true. But a lot of people (hi2u eruntalon) have given the 'why would I post a hoax' retort when making outrageous statements (although I wouldn't call this outrageous). A couple of things to note:

1) your wait time starts when you stop 'downloading data' not when your screen turns from black. You can actually spam echo macros and have a whole page of them before you can actually see anything on screen in some zones. This happens in some places longer than others which has made some people think they actually had different /wait times depending on the zone.

2) checking vs other diggers wont really work. If you have ever had the opportunity to duel box you know that your character shows up on your screen in a different relation to the person you are 'racing' than it does on their screen or a neutral screen. It's gonna have to be done with /clock on somehow. I don't know how you would 'prove' that other than a video and even that could be manipulated.

Of course, the greatest proof would be digging items that haven't been reported in those zones using a rental choc. But like I say, I'm at 40k+ stacks and have dug every zone often (especially on ore days) and this just hasn't happened, nor have I ever seen a SS of anyone getting an out of place item. I'm afraid until this happens that the burden of proof will be too difficult to overturn without firsthand experiance.

Nothing at all. I would expect the criticism and probably be frustrated nobody believed me :)

As of right now wiki doesn't have adaman listed in the deserts with the bore/burrow abilities. That, of course, doesn't mean anything since high level diggers are a secretive lot and probably wouldn't tell the wiki a thing. However, I'm pretty sure its one of these abilities that is the cause for adaman there, not /a5.

Something that has not been discussed is that burrow/bore may give you a reduced /wait time. This would be easy to test, just rent a bird and check your wait time vs your red birds wait time. However, if you are consistently digging at 7 seconds after zone on rented and owned birds, then we are back to square one.

Also, do you play hot and cold? Some people who are currently leveling digging are reporting decreased wait times with significantly fewer stacks if they play hot and cold. It may be a 'goblin diggeresque' myth, but if 50k stacks is required for /a5 and hot and cold is that powerful it could be a reason.

Truthfully.....I just can't believe someone has it if I don't. I had /a10 when my highest job was 38. Dinged right around the time COP was released and have dug everyday since then. I just can't fathom anyone digging more than I have. That's not to say I'm up im arms and jealous, just skeptical due to the amount I've dug personally without seeing this happen.

Left you a PM on a different matter.

out of curiousity i tried that macro today and i counted 7 seconds between my clock times.

my theory as to why is because the first clock is a delay- theres your reaction to when you can record your time when you zone. its possible that the clock was already ticking on the server and now were just waiting for a response from the server.

then theres the period of time to wait for the dig to actually work when you spam. that might account for another second.

and that last second is accounted again by the response from you to hit /clock on.

i've had an area 5 macro for years now- just on the off chance it does exist. i dont try it often but one can dream.

You're not listening to me.

Before this lower area wait came into play, I would attempt to dig up until a full 10 to 11 seconds before I was able to dig. Now this number is 6 to 7 seconds.

Also, the number of messages of "You must wait longer to perform this action" has decreased by half. So before, at A10, I used to get 6 or however many. Now I only get told that I must wait longer 3 times.

What you're saying is that I am just too slow on the draw to be able to correctly quantify an A5 area wait... but if that was the case I would (or anyone else for that matter) would not be able to do that for A10 then either. Just because you're going down to A5, that doesn't mean all hell breaks loose and we can't use some simple macro and clock tools to perform some deductive logic.

On top of that, I fire my dig macro and clock cmd as quick as humanly possible. It's not like I stand around idly waiting for a good time to push it. I hit it the moment a command can be entered. I don't type out the clock command either to execute it, I have it ready and in my past log and press the up arrow once and then press enter. There isn't as much delay there as you're indicating.

Edited, Aug 21st 2007 8:02:32am by Tankor

Ok, I will humour your point for the sake of argument, but what your lag response does not account for is that my dig macro (which hasn't been altered) has always fired off at 10 seconds after zone (which was the circumstance for a couple years) and recently being able to execute in less time now? If I had lag then, how would I all of a sudden have none now?

I was suffering from lag all that time and now suddenly it has disappeared and that is the only explanation? Must be lag. I guess that argument can be applied to a lot of topics in this game. That guy outclaimed me on an NM!! He either must be a gilseller or I must have been lagging. I would be willing to wager that those two auto-responses from the FFXI community are not always the 100% tried and true answer to all that we don't understand.

You say you used my macro suggestion? What exactly is your macro that you use(d)?

I will concede to you being correct regarding communication times between server and client having an impact on zone in time and the elapsed time till you can input commands... but this isn't what I am referring to. I am merely saying, I know what A10 is/was, I was stuck at it for two years. A little bit of lag or human response time does not account for a player knowingly being at a community accepted wait time and then suddenly it changes.

I didn't mean post the strategy I already posted, I said please post your macro. No need to get pissy friend.

All you caught from my post is one little question in the middle?

Edited, Aug 22nd 2007 7:19:53am by Tankor

I'm still awaiting confirmation on this from an official site. Not that I don't see that the probability for ori and adaman ore to be dug from the deserts, but as of current, Somepage's guide does not list these items.



That's no surprise, if I made a /wait 10 dig macro when I was A10 it wouldn't have worked even though I was officially A10... so that really doesn't mean much.

If I was to make a /wait 6 dig macro and it worked would you still consider that as A10?

Edited, Aug 22nd 2007 11:38:53am by Tankor

I finally got another one. Hot of the presses, enjoy.

click

Believe what, exactly?

I have come to the conclusion that you're not going to believe anything I say, so I have given up trying. I'm not about to jump through any more hoops for you.

The data I have concluded is there, people can judge for themselves just as you have.

PS: I find it quite amusing that every single one of your posts are rated up the moment you post them. I truly hope karma isn't that important to you that you own a rate-bot. I have taken the liberty to fix that imbalance. I hope you don't mind.

Cue the "I have no idea what you're talking about" or "someone else is doing it, not me" auto response. Every single post you make, immediately? Come on man, at least if your going to do it, make it subtle.

Edited, Aug 23rd 2007 12:01:45am by Tankor

lol actually i noticed that when i posted i saw that it listed my rating as good. it didnt start at decent. then everytime i came back it was rated to decent. obviously you couldn't stand to see that so thus you rated it down down. basically you dont understand how the karma rating system works here.

no matter- i don't understand your hostility.

why are you so concerned? i am not making you jump through hoops. you made two claims. one that area wait time might not be the hard and fast accepted rule of area 10. you made the hoops and claimed you jumped through them yourself.

you also made the claim that because of that you are now able to dig up items in other zones when in fact its really most likely due to your raised chocobo.

i never took the attitude of being pissy. you were the one who threw that on me. i just have my doubts about it.

either way i admitted that although interesting i did not see it as significant. i also admitted that i hope i am wrong about that.

Your a funny guy. I was the one who rated his last post up after he made. Yes I do camp these boards during the morning because Im at work so I saw it literrally 2 mins after it was posted. lol @ your karma bot bitching.



If you dont care then why are you rating people?



Here how about a new twist

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/Chocobo_Digging

where is ori ore? photoshop anyone?

Reading comprehension ftl?



Someone got his panties in a bunch over a joke. You could be just too stupid to use photoshop and need a buttbuddy to help you?

I may fail, but you phail at life.



lol the tool is a grammar nazi

Don't put me on glass and be a grammar nazi when you can't get things straight yourself.

lol you somepage as your digging resource?

That's fine I understand that you can't take a joke or accept the fact that people disagree with you.




Keep assuming buddy because we all know what it does.





Just for the record too, I'm a psych major, work in the mental health field, and make money playing semi-pro texas hold em so you did make a good assumption.

That's interesting.

No it dosn't but there is a limit to which you can dig specific items. ie.. Elemental ores etc..



Why not just dig in rolanberry then? Theres atleast a decent chance of getting one there, but long are the days when you can /clock and come back for it.



Interesting.

When I did my 90's stretches. (ww,leather,smith) I hoard synths. I would buy out the AH and stock up my mules. I was very supersticious sp? and only crafter on day of the crystal + full moon and averaged just about 1 skill up in ~3.56 synths.

I really think the sad part (and yes I'm here to say it) is the fact that Tankor doesn't wanna do it on a rental and hence he just started going on with the name calling. I really don't get why a 100+ gil rental is so bad, hell you're a 99+3 GS, I don't get how you won't have any gil to even show that you did use a rental to get it. Let's just end all this speculation crap and just say, while it looks "bleak", hold off on the idea of A-5 until you really show a proof that it truly exists on every area you try and dig, and use a rental and show that you ended up digging an Ori Ore in the desert, plain and simple. But of course, how can you proove someone that he's using a rental instead of a raised? well, I think Barber would provide us that info soon enough. Either way, until either 2 are given and "SHOWN" proof with, everyone will just be skeptic about it.

Ik

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

you have always gone for the more complicated answer. now the simplest answer is not always going to be the right one however it usually is.


i am very surprised you didn't rate down barberofseville for being in the same situation. having good appear next to his name automatically and for disagreeing with your theories.

then again just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to getcha.


chocobodigging posts have always been volatile karma bomb pits. back before the nerf diggers were much more secretive didn't want to share their bounty.







i go very very slowly now. its a hobby and i don't care if it takes 5 years to get the last 5 lvls.

biggest folly for any digger is to think omg i can lvl goldsmithing.

95 +3 on my mule and that was probably one of the biggest mistakes i made since opportunity cost dictates that i would have made much more money selling mats rather than hoarding mats that i dug up.

but congratulations on being 99.9.

Just be happy we're in a deflation. Now I know smithing isn't quit the same in costs but I did it back when inflation was first setting in. Determination sets apart the true "rock fiends" and the wannabes.






That's part of the reason I chimed in earlier. Im A10 and use rental birds have been A10 forever. I always dig Altepa now just because I use everything. I never once seen an ori ore, thats why I said rolanberry.

Edited, Aug 24th 2007 8:09:22am by Deadonarrival