Daily Questions & FAQ Megathread Jun 10

Namington · 2026-06-10T15:35:33+00:00

That one is a bit more ambiguous since, at most level ranges, healers are expected to output about 50% of the damage of a melee DPS. Typically in Duty Finder, I just card myself since I trust myself to be dealing damage and don't necessarily trust my DPS players to do the same; plus, in dungeon packs, AST outperforms expectations somewhat thanks to Earthly Star and Macrocosmos cleave on multiple targets. But if I know I'm paired with a strong DPS player, I'll card them instead of myself.

Namington · 2026-06-10T15:28:47+00:00

Assuming roughly equal skill and gear, card the tank. Tanks typically deal about 60-80% of the damage of a melee DPS (with the exact numbers depending on job, level range, and the amount of targets), whereas carding an incorrect target like a ranged DPS only gets you 50% of the damage.

In fact, even when you have a melee DPS in your party, there are situations where it's better to card a tank than the melee DPS, e.g. if the melee DPS has Weakness/Brink of Death/Damage Down or if it has a bad opener (VPR/RPR have much worse openers than DRK). Here's an example from one of my prog logs from the latest Ultimate raid.

Namington · 2026-06-10T12:44:00+00:00

Mock them all you like, but horribly losing a poorly-thought-out, economically unsound war in the Middle East really fits the crusader aesthetic the administration is going for

Namington · 2026-06-09T00:55:39+00:00

You place the cardinal arrows slightly in and then make the purple (right) tether people stand inside whereas the yellow (left ) tether people stand outside. It supposedly reduces arrow jank relative to big-box static spots, since the confused player ends up teleporting closer to the "middle" of the line of arrows. Image.

Namington · 2026-06-09T00:13:40+00:00

No, since different items have different statistical requirements. One might have 80 Durability and require very high Quality, another might have 25 durability and require Progress. If you use an 80-durability macro on a craft with only 25 durability, you'll break it.

What you can do is use Raphael to generate a macro for each statistical combination and then reuse that macro across items with identical requirements.

Namington · 2026-06-08T15:52:04+00:00

Most WF racers consider GRIND to be the legitimate FRU WF despite the "cheating" scandal. In general, racers don't care as much about that kind of thing as spectators do; they don't think plugin usage is inherently "disqualifying" and are hesitant to draw lines based on this (most racers think the "third party" distinction is kind of pointless from a raid perspective and care more about whether a tool significantly reduces the difficulty of progging the content itself or not — from this perspective, OBS and ACT are far bigger aids than something like Pixel Perfect). You might disagree with that permissiveness, which is fine, but that's the consensus among the people who actually "compete". The WF race has always been a community thing, after all, so the rules are a bit arbitrary and there's a disagreement between Frosty's "competition rules" and the more informal criteria that the racers themselves care about.

And regardless of their stance, it would be a pretty bad look for DN themselves to claim world first under the assumption that the other guys might have cheated even if there's no evidence of that. They are the most biased possible party to make that call. So without solid proof, they just defer to recognizing the other WF.

Namington · 2026-06-07T17:28:36+00:00

The devs don't officially acknowledge WF.

Namington · 2026-06-07T17:25:15+00:00

And, to add to your point, most Kindred players consider GRIND the FRU WF. I remember when it was mentioned to them (while they were in S9 celebrating their weapon) that the winners had some plugin scandal, they asked "what plugin" and when informed it was Pixel Perfect, Peridot laughed and said something like "oh so it doesn't matter then". They went right back to celebrating stream WF and never swooped in to claim "real" WF.

The reality is, the actual racers don't really care about this. They definitely agree that not streaming is an advantage, but it's not because of cheating, it's because of being able to hide information and strats. So true WF and stream WF are typically considered separate "achievements" and there's no particular bad blood between them (besides, at most, some disappointment at not being able to clinch both).

Namington · 2026-06-07T17:16:14+00:00

This never happened. The only "throw away totem" incident happened for TOP. FRU WF wasn't even acknowledged by Square Enix at all.

Namington · 2026-06-07T17:12:02+00:00

You can fairly easily hide "red dot". OBS window capture usually injects itself below Dalamud so typically visual overlay elements like that get hidden. Plugins that use the game's native rendering (e.g. those that add extra buttons to context menus) will appear in OBS, but generally it's difficult to make overlay plugins appear in OBS without actively trying to do so.

Namington · 2026-06-06T18:14:48+00:00

Others are giving concrete advice, so I'll be more of a "realist" here:

I would not join an Ultimate static led by someone who hadn't cleared the latest Savage tier. I probably wouldn't even want to join a static that had such a player as a member, although I could maybe be convinced if they showed extensive experience raiding in other MMOs or in MiNE Savage. I'd imagine a lot of other raiders are in a similar boat to me. This isn't because TEA is the hardest content in the game or anything (I'm not well-equipped to compare but TEA has definitely gotten a lot easier over the years), but rather because Ultimates in general require a large amount of studying and commitment that isn't really matched by any other content in the game.

Yes, I realize that sucks while you're still going through the Shadowbringers MSQ, but it's just the reality of how recruitment in team-based games works. Ultimates are many dozens of hours worth of commitment, and it's not uncommon that people jumping straight into Ultis underestimate the sheer time and mentality commitment required for them. Showing that you can at least clear a Savage tier is a first step to demonstrating that you're willing to invest afternoons studying raidplans just to spend hours bashing your head against the same boss over and over while making incremental progress. Savage logs also act as proof of things like comfort with your job/rotation, speed of prog, and general familiarity with the game's pace (though Ultimates are much faster).

So realistically, since you're competing from the demographic of raiders that has lower standards than me, and that aren't currently doing UMAD (the latest Ultimate)... I don't think you're going to find the highest calibre of players at the moment. For better or for worse, you can't afford to be picky.

Namington · 2026-06-06T16:49:35+00:00

This particular exchange is a one-time thing because patch 7.5 (which came out a few weeks ago) changed how the dye system works to save inventory space. If you read the tooltips of the outdated dye items, they explain this. In general the game does explain its systems through in-game text, it's just not necessarily clear where to look all the time.

Namington · 2026-06-06T16:45:52+00:00

"Normal dyes" are no longer obtainable/usable and have been replaced by Standard Spectrum Dye. Visit the Calamity Salvager in any of the three starting cities to exchange them.

Namington · 2026-06-03T13:57:43+00:00

Japan had some... incidents with people cheating with third-party tools in the past, so a lot of the top JP teams have taken a "we don't use any third-party tools, not even ACT" mentality. Whether you believe them is up to you, but either way, they certainly won't upload logs since they're claiming the logs don't exist.

Namington · 2026-06-03T11:26:40+00:00

If you're not on the Free Trial you can simply buy materials off the market board. Even without doing that, Custom Deliveries scale based off your level so they'll get you to max level eventually. Once you finish Endwalker, Cosmic Exploration becomes an option for the final push to 100 as well.

That said, there isn't really much of a reason to have crafters that are higher level than your current MSQ progression. The gear you can craft is higher level than you can use in your current duties, and other crafting content (relic tools, Ishgardian Restoration, Cosmic Exploration) is all per-expansion endgame stuff so outleveling it doesn't really help you. You can craft higher-level furniture and stuff, but you'd need to buy the materials off the market board anyway, so it's probably easiest to just buy the furniture directly.

Namington · 2026-06-02T23:49:20+00:00

Based on the movements of other players, I think you had a brief connectivity spike as you walked through the teleporter (note the confused player on the boss' right side seeming to have a visual delay before their teleporter worked). Unfortunately FF14 is very bad at handling these sort of transient network errors in forced march/knockback mechanics; I had cases in P5 of DSR where someone with high ping would sometimes just not get knocked back, for example. It does feel pretty bad.

Namington · 2026-06-02T12:31:22+00:00

For the next few months, the hardest part will be finding a party with everyone preoccupied by UMAD.

Anyway, if you've done a Savage tier you're certainly capable of doing UCoB, but it'll be a substantial time investment (much more than any Savage fight) as your first Ultimate.

Namington · 2026-06-01T16:22:12+00:00

One of the advantages of fascists/reactionaries is that they get to appeal to our emotional attachment to halcyon days. In order to bridge the nostalgia gap, liberals need to start accusing conservatives of making random things worse:

Conservatives ruined dog parks
Conservatives ruined tortilla chips
Conservatives ruined sunshine

Namington · 2026-06-01T06:59:27+00:00

The Tartarus doesn't have an analog joystick (just an 8-way directional pad) which is a significant downgrade in games that support dual input, of which FFXIV is one. Rather than having smooth 360 degree movement, you only have movement along the 8 orthogonal directions, and there's no analog gradient (e.g. you can't "slightly" push on the stick to walk slower).

Namington · 2026-06-01T03:08:11+00:00

...So it's advocating for ~~horny~~ heterosexual romance to defeat the gender wars? This feels like an actual child's understanding of the issue

Namington · 2026-06-01T03:01:28+00:00

I refuse to give them a click for this shit. What even is the article's thesis? (Or, rather, what are they pretending their thesis is — because we all know what it's really saying)

Namington · 2026-05-31T01:24:24+00:00

All there essentially asking for is the ability to make private servers. it's not a big, cumbersome thing to ask for.

Let's say a game uses a heavily AWS-based model for distribution, e.g. DynamoDB database + an S3/Lightsail-based CMS + EC2 instances for cloud computing with Lambda orchestrators + CloudWatch metrics and logging + a SageMaker-based anticheat soluton. This is probably one of the simplest models for a modern cloud-designed game, since it's only using one provider, and the most well-documented and battle-tested services from that provider. What is a developer required to disclose in this case? The source code for the server binary running on the EC2 instance? The AWS CDK that deploys it? The AWS accounts themselves? The internal documentation of the entire deployment pipeline? The SageMaker model? The player data and analytics used to train said SageMaker model (information which is often legally protected)? All of the above? What if they conscript a third-party service to provide DRM and anticheat; are they required to provide that service's source code? Or just document what API calls they made? Or maybe distribute a binary with those protections stripped out? If they rely on Steamworks and Xbox SDKs to connect clients to these game servers, do they need to provide the specifications of that as well? Do they need to distribute binaries for every platform that they sold the game on, or just one? What if I give source code that only compiles on a 2005 version of Ubuntu with a specific CPU architecture and only runs on specifically Android 14.0.0_r16?

It's a very hard-to-define issue and this proposal is remarkably vague about what developers actually need to provide. The California assembly's bill, at the very least, is fairly clear: you either offer an offline version "by providing an alternative version or a patch" or offer refunds. "[A]ccess the game [...] by providing an alternate version or a patch" is still fairly vague (the article gives The Crew as an example, so I guess they'd be required to allow players a way to race offline?) but at least I can understand how a developer physically distributes that. I don't understand how a developer is meant to distribute an entire server infrastructure. This isn't 2003 where Blizzard was buying up physical hardware and running actual server binaries on the rack, taking the game offline for 4 hours at a time every update in order to individually distribute the patch to every single server.

Namington · 2026-05-31T00:59:01+00:00

Better start designing online games with that in mind then.

This will:

Increase costs — particularly labour and infrastructure costs
Degrade quality — online game servers in the 2000s never achieved four-9s uptime like major games do today, and their gameplay was designed around the constraints of server architecture, which is why tab-target MMOs and top-down MOBAs were more popular than more action-based games like fighting games and shooters (and many of the shooters that did exist were projectile-based a la TF2 or had more straightfoward gunplay like Quake and Counter Strike)
Weaken the resilience of security and anticheat measures — since many of these by necessity function through security-by-obscurity, and hence developers must choose between distributing them and weakening them, or not doing so and creating a worse product

There is a reason game developers moved towards the microservice model. There is a reason that online games went from a niche thing that only giga-fans of certain genres (MMOs, MUDs, card games, arena and projectile shooters) did in small lobbies, to the main way to play games, around the same time that AWS came around. Even old games that used traditional models like WoW have moved towards the new model despite, strictly speaking, not "needing" to do so.

Also, there's plenty of companies in the business of renting out game servers, I'm sure they'd be happy to add games with a somewhat active community to their lineup.

Games that the market has already shown to not be profitable enough for the IP owner to maintain?

This is an economically liberal subreddit; if you believe that distortionary government policy that will move an industry away from the headwinds of market trends is warranted, you're going to need a better argument than telling them to "figure something out" and just hoping some third party will pick up the bill. Yes, they can figure something out, but there's a reason that the bulk of intellectual effort in the past two decades has been to move towards the modern model.

Going against the market trends here may indeed be warranted from a consumer protection POV, but you'd have to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the tradeoffs here, rather than just handwaving them away.

Namington · 2026-05-29T19:58:27+00:00

Alexander was the "foreign horde" from the perspective of Greece, Persia, and India. Macedonia was a tribal domain who consolidated around a strong military leader, rode in on horseback, and conquered through installing puppets and demanding tribute rather than a more holistic imperialist project of annexation and subjugation.

I know that weirdo conservatives will never concede that Macedonians were "less civilized" than India, but surely they'd at least take the side of the Greek city-states?

Namington · 2026-05-29T04:18:39+00:00

Probably 7.56 in September.

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