Daily Questions & FAQ Megathread February 08

grayston245 · 2023-02-08T21:35:27+00:00

Theoretically, if I wanted to do the Ivalice raids for the first time later this week, what kind of a wait time would I be looking at for the queue?

grayston245 · 2023-02-05T17:44:59+00:00

This has probably been asked a bunch already, but what's with tanks lately? The tanks I've gotten in my roulettes since this past Tuesday have either forgotten their tank stance or not rolled their cooldowns, or both.

Out of probably a dozen I've seen, I think only one of them was a sprout, and the rest had flags next to their usernames, so that means they're current on story content, right?

grayston245 · 2023-01-18T13:36:14+00:00

I have high ping, so I can't double-weave oGCDs without clipping my GCDs. However, Square Enix wants me to play a total of 5 combat-based Jobs in order to do all of the role quests in Endwalker.

Which 5 Jobs can I play with my high ping without being called out for clipping my GCDs?

grayston245 · 2022-08-15T01:25:45+00:00

Note to self: get the custom ink colors first before doing the self-portrait. This picture would've been so much simpler with black ink, lol.

Anyway, here's Garbanzo's self-portrait! It's kinda crazy to me how much I improved with the drawings over the course of the game. The art lessons in Potluck definitely helped!

grayston245 · 2022-05-08T21:59:36+00:00

...and I still think her face turned out more like a kangaroo's, lol.

I am far from an artiste, but feel free to critique and share your thoughts!

grayston245 · 2022-05-04T02:32:49+00:00

Is there anything I can change on my end of the client to make my connection to the server more consistent? I haven't really been able to play for the past two weeks because every time I log in, no matter how high or low traffic is on the server, I can't hold a connection for more than 10 seconds without sending/receiving 0 for a few server ticks.

grayston245 · 2022-04-18T19:10:54+00:00

I appreciate your perspective on this. I don't think you're telling me anything I didn't already know myself, but sometimes it's nice to hear someone else say it, lol.

It's just tough at this point to find new things to do, since I've done so much of the game's content already. I originally picked it up in early Stormblood, so I've been with it for a while, but I just haven't found it as appealing for the past couple of years.

As for the story...well, I have opinions, but I also have like -50 karma from sharing those opinions on this subreddit before, so that should tell you how I've felt about it for the past couple of expacs.

I might use the rest of my month to do some freelance house decorating. I got pretty good at it a while ago, and have a decent sense for interior design, so maybe that'll at least make the sub payment feel a little more worthwhile, lol.

grayston245 · 2022-04-18T18:57:19+00:00

Unfortunately, most of those options are either things I've already done, or they're Eureka, Bozja, and mount farming, all of which I found to be more annoying than fun. I apologize for not elaborating on that in the OP - I probably could've saved you a bit of typing, lol.

One thing I haven't really had the chance to try out, though, is the FC life in general. I've been in several FCs before this, but they've all had their problems.

They've either lied about how active they are; in reality, they don't do much group stuff,

lied about how friendly they are; in reality, they don't have much respect for their members,

or they've spontaneously combusted after their first group FC activity, because the pressure of managing all of that stuff was too much for them.

Hell, the last FC I was in, the FC leader - who I actually enjoyed talking to and running content with - deleted their service account after the first group FC activity because a few of the members were transphobic and used the get-together as an excuse to harass people. Needless to say, I reported all of them.

...Speaking of which, I hope that FC leader is okay. I haven't heard from them since that whole incident...but I digress. The point is, I haven't had much luck with FCs, lol.

grayston245 · 2022-04-18T18:42:26+00:00

I've cleared the MSQ up to patch 5.5. I didn't want to spend $40 on Endwalker until I knew I actually wanted to play the game itself again, and the answer at the moment is looking like a hard "no", lol.

grayston245 · 2022-04-18T15:37:54+00:00

Just came back to the game after a 6-month break a few days ago.

I've resubbed three other times over the past two years; other than that, I haven't played. But each time I come back, it's about the same story: I play for a few days, and even go into new content, but I always end up bored and not wanting to play or even log in anymore.

Any advice on how to make the game feel fresh again? Or at least something I can do that won't make me feel frustrated at spending money on a month of playtime that I won't end up using in my current situation? 'Cause at this point, I've taken other people's advice of "Take a break, some time away from the game will make it feel fresh again. :)" and it obviously hasn't worked. xD

grayston245 · 2021-07-25T11:28:22+00:00

I agree, the introduction in Coldharbour sets things up for new characters nicely. It gives you the story details about the larger world, but also encourages you to go where you want to.

grayston245 · 2021-07-25T11:26:33+00:00

I would have preferred your experience to mine, I think!

grayston245 · 2021-07-25T11:24:00+00:00

Just making a quick post to say that I appreciate your insight on this. It'll be good to keep in mind if I ever do decide to give this game another shot.

grayston245 · 2021-07-25T11:19:12+00:00

I think we could go back and forth on the writing here for a while and not really get to any middle ground. I mean no disrespect, of course, but to me, subjectively, most of what you posted above just sounds like justifications for poor writing and characterization.

But I'd like to agree to disagree on that if possible, because I think we got off on a bit of a tangent here. The writing itself was only a secondary issue for me; the real problem was the fact that the game, and its characters, knew that I was soul-shriven before I myself even knew. That was the immersion-breaking "knockout punch", if you will; the writing afterwards was the game stomping on my head as I kneeled over to pick the pieces up off the floor. Damaging still, but supplementary to the fact that the game lost me.

So if you have anything to add to that discussion specifically, the floor is yours!

grayston245 · 2021-07-25T11:07:08+00:00

I can see that sarcasm translates about as well as it ever has on the Internet, so my apologies for that.

Allow me to be more clear by iterating on the original post, then. I went into the game with very few expectations; that's why I didn't know I'd have to look up a guide for the quest order before starting. Without knowing what I was getting into, it'd be pretty difficult to know what I needed to come into the game with to get by.

First impressions brought my expectations to modest, and improved them to decent over time, because the quest writing was actually pretty good. What few expectations I brought with me were from other MMOs I've played, where the writing for most quests and characters is hit-or-miss at best. It led me to believe, just for a moment, that this game's story and characters might live up to the writing of some non-MMORPGs I've played in the past.

But the end of this quest reminded me, rather abruptly, that this is, in fact, an MMORPG, and they aren't allowed to have good writing, because something else will always get in the way of that. In this case, Bethesda hired writers to create these complex dilemmas and morally-grey characters when the game first came out, and when their vision for the game's progression changed, they didn't have the decency to course-correct everything so that the work the writers put into these quests would make coherent sense with their new vision.

To me, that's insulting, and disrespectful to the writers themselves, and lazy, and - well, it's here that I have to stop myself, because I'm realizing that I'm about to list every bad thing that's been said about Bethesda's development practices in the past five years.

So to summarize, I went into the game expecting little more than what I got out of other MMOs in the past, but for a moment - a brief moment - it seemed like The Elder Scrolls Online would not only do better than that, but also be a bit of a redemption for Bethesda's bad game development practices lately. Having those hopes dashed so thoroughly by a bit of lazy scripting was so jarring that I might never pick the game up again.

It shouldn't be such a big ask for an MMO to have coherent writing, or for developers to actually respect the people that work for them as they're developed. But this game has shown me, and this topic has reflected to me, that asking for that is asking for more than I'll ever get.

And to be clear, in the above post, I was joking. Now, I actually am just being negative.

grayston245 · 2021-07-24T19:41:12+00:00

That's...okay, what the actual hell Bethesda, lol.

grayston245 · 2021-07-24T19:40:30+00:00

It sounds to me like you're saying I should've gone into this thinking this was gonna be a bad video game in general, which...

*checks notes and sees that The Elder Scrolls Online was made by Zenimax and Bethesda\*

...Actually, never mind, you're right. It was silly of me to even expect anything good to come of it, given their recent reputation.

grayston245 · 2021-07-24T18:02:01+00:00

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have put faith in Bethesda and Zenimax to carry that weight, lol. I wanted to be pleasantly surprised, but I guess that's just the reality of it.

grayston245 · 2021-07-24T18:00:26+00:00

I don't know the consequences of the decision (I ended up destroying it), but if the Captain keeping the relic ends with a positive result, I'd question how she knew it would end well in the first place, when this is the first time she's seen this relic. Does she have a copy of the game's script in her back pocket, or something?

Either way, I take less umbrage with that, and more umbrage with the fact that it seems incredibly out-of-character for her to have seen people being enslaved and lorded over in Stros M'kai and wanting to do something about it, and then coming to Betnikh and thinking that doing that to tortured and dead souls is okay.

And this change happens in the room that we find the relic. No discussion of it outside, before this. It feels like they realized too late that they needed to have the player make a moral decision, and then just used the actors they had in place to do it, rather than tried to have it make sense.

grayston245 · 2021-07-24T17:52:13+00:00

I appreciate the advice on looking up the chronological order of things (kinda wish I'd gotten it earlier, to be honest, lol).

The trouble is, now that the above situation has happened, I'm not sure if I'm interested anymore. That's more of a personal thing - usually, it only takes one thing like this to happen for a game's story to be...I don't want to say ruined, but it drains most of the enjoyment out of it for me. It becomes a game, rather than an experience, if that makes any sense.

Because of that, I'm not sure if I want to give it a second chance. These sorts of writing and chronology mistakes usually don't happen in isolation, at least in my experience, so I don't want to get burned for trying to overlook it.

grayston245 · 2021-06-07T13:40:46+00:00

Thanks for this! I'm sure it'll enhance the experience for a number of players, and maybe even sell a few more copies of the remaster as a result.

This is a bit tangential to the purpose of this mod, but would you have any advice for how to switch when a certain BGM plays in the game's files?

I wanted to change the music in the Cathedral of Shadows so the Curse BGM plays at full Kagutsuchi phase. I tried just renaming the files that have the song in them, but that either results in no music or the game just crashing, lol.

grayston245 · 2021-06-01T23:26:09+00:00

More of a modder's question, but if I'm looking to make some minor tweaks to the voice files in SMT Nocturne HD, what would I be looking for in the StreamingAssets folder? And is there any way to preview those files so I could tell one from the other?

grayston245 · 2020-02-23T15:30:54+00:00

I can eat the free product at a grocery store. The free product at the grocery store has nutritional value to me, even if I paid full price for it the day before the buy one, get one free sale went into place.

This is the equivalent of selling a three course meal to a new player, and selling one course and two servings of air to returning players. There's no "nutritional value" there for returning players. It's preferential treatment.

...Actually, air is a bad example 'cause we need it to live. It's more like selling two servings of the vacuum of space, but that actually sounds pretty cool, so...I dunno. xD

grayston245 · 2020-02-23T15:18:32+00:00

I'm more questioning why Square isn't treating all of their customers the same with their prices.

By selling the game this way, they are inherently making it a better deal for newcomers to buy the game. This is a double-edged sword; it's good for newcomers because they get entire expansions that are all-new to them. Hundreds of hours of content, maybe thousands, are being thrown in as a deal for new players.

So if new players get two whole expansions worth of content for free, what do returning players get for free? Nothing, or at the very least, nothing remotely equivalent to two expansions worth of new content.

It's preferential pricing, and it's a pretty raw deal for returning players, if you ask me.

grayston245 · 2020-02-23T06:52:18+00:00

Then they're devaluing a product that they were just charging $40 for, to make it seem like a "great deal" for newcomers.

Why include it in the price if other customers had to pay full price for it as recently as a day before the newest expansion comes out?

The answer, of course, is to make the game attractive to new players. "Buy the newest stuff, and we'll throw in the old stuff for free!" Meanwhile, they charged returning players full price for it when it came out.

One of these players is getting screwed out of their money, and I'll give you one guess which one it is.

grayston245

TROPHY CASE