I’ve been back into FFXIV. I’m slowly making my way up to 50 on my White Mage. Quite slowly: it’s my first class, and even though I was out of the game for three weeks since the launch two months ago, that’s still not blazingly fast by any stretch of imagination. I wonder whether I’ll be able to find a good FC once I’m at level cap. But that might be a topic for a different post.
The game runs really well overall. There’s some creaking along the seams and some almost-to-be-expected things that are not 100% polished yet. Every couple of days, the game becomes almost unplayable during the later evening in the crowded zones: everybody will freeze in place for 10 seconds, then scramble in fast forward as the game catches up. I blame server overloads. Oh well, I play something else on these nights or read a book (cf.: why I’m slow on my way to 50). About 50% of the time, the game doesn’t close properly when I quit and I need to kill it. The weirdest quirk, though, is this:
Not quite the definition of “spot on”.
I’m not really sure why this happens. It happens all the time, though. Not necessarily quite as extreme, but I don’t think I’ve had it happen that I got into a dungeon (sorry, duty, or whatever) in less than the “average wait time”. Doesn’t sound very average to me. Even if you assume that tank queues are instant (which looks like it) and DPS queues are no worse than healer queues (a bold hypothesis, seeing how I typically pick up “my” two dps almost instantly), that would still mean a combined waiting time of 60 minutes split among four players in that scenario. Not exactly “less than 5m” either.
I don’t know what goes wrong in their calculation, but something seems to. Oh well, I got used to it. Maybe I’ll finally finish my copy of “American Psycho” that way. Only 80 pages left.
Can you not run the instance with less than the maximum people? Can you actually do other things while waiting? Just curious, because I certainly don’t play games to sit in queues. Especially long queues.
You can do anything that does not cause you to change the size of your group (if you were solo, you must stay solo including not summoning your Chocobo, if you were in a partial group you must stay that way). This includes running around looking for FATES (public quest/world event/etc equivalent), doing any solo quests, etc, including on other classes that you are leveling. The catch is that you must be able to change back to the job you queued as within 45 seconds when the queue pops to accept the invite, and you need to be out of combat to change classes – I once cut it very very close to losing an invite I’d been waiting 20+ minutes for because for whatever reason it took nearly 30 seconds of running to get out of combat.
The dungeon finder window is minimized by default and therefore doesn’t interfere with your playing. You have to run the dungeon with the maximum amount of people (4 or 8, depending on the dungeon), and as far as I know, there is no way around that at the moment, though the developers have acknowledged that this is a limitation that should be removed eventually(tm).
It’s interesting that, as Green Armadillo noted, that while you can change your class, you have to manually switch back to accept the invite. I wasn’t aware of that. I have a secondary class (a lvl 30 paladin), but I never tried out switching while in the queue. I actually expected the finder to switch you seamlessly when you get teleported.
I have been surprised at the healer queue times – it’s actually not much faster than the queue times as DPS! It’s a good thing that I’m kind of enjoying healing on its own merits, because it’s a bit of a fail as a queue time saver.
In a related story, the other day we got a very interesting stand-in of a tank in a Duty Finder Toto-Rak. I’m betting that this person was a PS3 player without a keyboard because they weren’t AFK but they never responded to anything that we said about them. The tank would attack one mob at a time with single target abilities and beat that mob until dead as if he was solo, while leaving the three clothies (one of each type) to figure out how to deal with the aggro from the other mobs. It was like having your stereotypical escort quest NPC for a tank, running ahead to pull stuff and leaving us to figure out how to manage. It was actually a fair amount of fun, though I’m not sure if on a matter of principle we should have been unable to complete the dungeon with a tank that bad.
I’ve been surprised at the healer queues, too. I’m not sure why this is happening. There must be an awful lot of healers around.
I’ve also had my share of spectacularly bad groups, or at least players, in dungeons. It seems to get better as you reach higher levels. And, I guess, since Toto-Rak is still somewhat of a starter and training dungeon, it’s probably designed to be completable with a catastrophically bad player in your group, if the rest is on their respective balls (and nobody pulls a Leeroy).