Dev Tracker - Discussion

What a shame.. I remember watching that as a kid and dying to get the game and play. Just goes out with a whimper. Although it was seemingly broken for a very long time as it only stayed in town at the ambuscade spot for years. I always wondered how it was done

Honestly thought he just axed it.

not ready until May, you can see how long development takes even for "simple" changes.

Flawed view.

It doesn't actually take that long, that's how long it took because they don't put any effort into it. It takes months instead of minutes because of zero appropriate management and prioritization.

There's a difference between it took 3 months, and we gave it 5 minutes after 3 months.

(You may or may not have meant it that way. It doesn't take 6 months to change a burned out light, but it may take you 6 months to get around to it.
Big difference)

I wouldn't be surprised if Fujito spends 50% of his time doing the development himself. Still pretty sad, if you think about it.

I'm excited for it. It can always disappoint, but at least what he's talking about sounds like feedback might have actually been taken.

Well we know they had 6 people during parts of TVR. People have left since then. Wouldn't surprise me if there's at most 2 or 3 people working on XI at this point if it isn't Fujito soloing the operation in a closet somewhere.

They could have kept it to Ambuscade, just make the RoE's party based instead of per-character, which made the entire thing solo based. If it cant be done directly (RoE detects party members performing certain actions), it could be done indirectly (talk to Gorpa or a new NPC and have them confirm certain goals, which will then adjust the RoE goals).

Also make the rewards not absolute *** ***.

I guess this is FFXI now.

May is an anniversary month, theres gonna be something extra.

Serious question:
Does FFXI even require a monthly update if all they are doing is rotating the ambuscade? Couldn't they just add all monsters at once and create an in-game schedule that cycles through fights every set number of days?

I.e. Ambu NPC announces the current Ambu fight and how long until the next one and what it is (something like a 4x conquest tally or every four weeks, w/e, points reset just like sparks/accolades). There's already a ROE system that tracks most quests in the game. Mirue and DI info/wins are even tracked with a similar system. Players can just use the NPC to determine which fight it is rather than a monthly announcement.

Wouldn't that be simpler than planning a monthly update when 95% of the time you're not adding or changing anything? Would be initial work up front but wouldn't need any intervention unless an update actually added something.

I don't believe they can, unless they left all the assets in and then rotated them. Right now they delete and replace so they look busy and I doubt they want to give that up.

If they don't take the game down and pretend to be busy once a month they'll have nothing to do.

Plus, of course, all the sneaky ***they ninja in can't be done without taking it down, so hands are tied (I assume).

They don't have to pretend to be busy, they've flat out said they're not doing much of anything else. If they're really interested in maintenance mode, this is the perfect thing to transition to an automatic schedule. It might not be possible to do it, but was just wondering if the effort required to delete/load every month could be eliminated. Probably not, but sounds like an easy hackathon submission

They do everything the hard and annoying way.

For masochists, by masochists...

They need an excuse to reboot the servers every month

They do add and change files in the background and add new items. I think theres a new item for the easter event too. Maybe an excuse for them to pretend they are doing something though.

Yeah other things get added in too, it's not just ambuscade

But they could add everything in for the year and just turn them on without taking the game down too, if they were so inclined.

Maybe. Not as straightforward as you might think though, since they are reusing the same chunk of space for TP moves, reusing the same range of entity indices for mobs, etc. There's not a whole lot of extra space remaining for new mob tp move names, they might not be able to fit all ambuscade's special moves in at once without also altering other systems to accomodate the larger range.

We don't really know how their codebase is set up, possible there are references back to specific mob ids / tp ids that would all need to be updated to the adjusted values once they were merged. If the instance is set up to spawn everything at once, system has to be added to change that. We just don't know enough, the way they set up ambuscade in the first place doesn't seem to lend itself to flexibility.

What's weird is that they already had a system to load different mob lists in the same zone(and continued to use it for outer rak-u and woe-p), so not sure why they did ambuscade the way they did. Besides, like Eiryl said, it gives them an excuse to do ninja fixes as needed. They probably also alter the droprates on things like flotsam/gobbiebox to make a pseudo-AH stocker.

With them talking about how they hit the max number of maps they could add and then had to add an additional flag in their code to identify an expanded map makes me think that they have done nothing but work arounds and so nothing is well organized at this point. What Thorny said makes sense when you know that they change the names of TP moves on mobs in ambu. Sure it's because of react users, but it could also just have easily been a translation error from a new intern or contributor and it was just a mistake.

Saying they do Ambu TP moves in such a way to “counter React users” implies it has no impact to the non-users.
A non-react user getting a reminder of the Lamia TP moves on wiki, learning what to turn and face for, suddenly getting charmed because they didnt turn on Raqs Balagi, which was changed from its previous name of Luxurius Dance.

No ones updated the wiki either haha

Regular user:
-Raqs Balagi charms me if I face it, ok, so I turn from Raqs Balagi.

Windower user:
-Damn, the TP moves have no names again. Guess I need to unload battlemod or wait for resources.
-Hm, the dances changed, the react file I bummed off someone last year doesn't work and I don't know how to fix it.
-Goes on whatever forum, begging for one of the few people with 100+ IQ to edit it for them.
-Several days later, maybe, has a working react again to cheat the BC instead of just doing it legitimately.

It's not exactly an even impact there. You can't actively do much about people who understand the tools they're using or how the game works in general; but it's definitely considerably more inconvenient to the average idiot than it is to someone playing legitimately. Of course, this is assuming they even change the names specifically to annoy react users, which is up for debate IMO.

or we use a bunch of pups.

or I have capped gil

lol

Thorny thinks the average FFXI player cant open React_JOB.lua in notepad and replace Luxurious Dance with Raqs Baladi.

This statement isnt even correct. When you're so deep in the trenches with your third party modifications, you forget what the actual client looks like. I dont use battlemod, nor do plenty of other players, and when the Ambu changeover went from Tonberry to Meeble, all the Elemental Warbles were Tonberry TP moves.

Source:
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/55882/meeble-ambuscade-v1/#3573937
Unfortunately the image is broken, but I'm gonna safely assume it was showing a non-battlemod altered chat log showing Meeble doing Tonberry moves, seeing as how no one disputed it.

Source 2:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/58055-FINAL-FANTASY-XI-Updated-%28Apr.-16%29
I guess SE made a mid-month update to patch "In the Ambuscade battle content, certain enemy abilities appeared incorrectly" just to appease battlemod and windower resources.

Opinion discarded.

Thats how it went, right?

Yes, I do. I think that because I see the requests spilling into every discord whenever that month or meeble month comes up.

Yes, that particular month SE forgot to update the DAT. Most months, the DAT gets updated but windower resources lag behind. This happens because they use the same section of TP move ids to represent the moves every month. Whether or not SE makes a mistake, until the windower resources are updated battlemod users will see last month's TP names(blank for IDs higher than last month's..).

I hope you aren't actually upset that I made a joke about your name being Nynja and you commenting on a NIN weapon.. maybe it was too subtle. I did bold the Nynja part, though.

Starting to think we should have taken the cellphone game, bros.

If them changing the names of moves prevents you from clearing the content, then you really don't deserve that monthly carrot.

Try again next month. React or non-user is in the same boat.

He's right. The dozens of people asking for "hey anybody has a react for this month's ambu" that pop up in all FFXI discords each month is the proof.

Sounds like a skill issue within those discord servers.

Then again, I wouldnt be surprised if most of the players on those servers play on Asura.

I mean, **most** players play on Asura, so not really a groundbreaking revelation.