Open Beta?

[Loony BoB]

I dunno, I haven't seen anything that terrible so far. I honestly can't remember exactly how the controls worked in FFXI, but they seem easy enough to get the hang of so far. I do think that the game would benefit immensely from a few forced tutorials at the beginning, though, rather than having to do what you did in FFXI - figure it all out yourself, pretty much. Which I did, but hey, still, it would have been nice to know that I was supposed to talk to x person to get x amount of "starter cash" etc. etc.

I've played for a bit now, and I've also found that the game actually ran smoother when I increased the resolution of the window, which is pretty weird. I've done a couple of leves, figured out the menus and shortkeys/controls using the config menu... it's all decent enough. The one thing I'm struggling with at the moment is probably learning the timing of attacks and the like. It's definitely different, although I'll wait until I get more varied attacks before I judge them completely.

Also, found an enemy that killed me in one hit. Yay? Haha. Oh, that's another thing - probably mostly early stages but I find that you spend a fair bit of time looking for enemies. It reminds me of being on the hunt in the Dunes in FFXI while a bunch of people sit back waiting for you to fish something up. But you do get them eventually... the spawn rate seems decent enough.

I think I'll buy the guide for this game to better understand the mechanics behind some things, though.

[Ouch!]

I think I'll buy the guide for this game to better understand the mechanics behind some things, though.

Don't waste your money. The guides don't know anything about the game's mechanics, and likely we won't for some time. The few releases of the FFXI player's guides insisted that AGI was the stat which affected ranged damage; in fact AGI affects ranged accuracy, while STR affects damage. That's the only one example of the vast misinformation that permeated those pages.

Published guides for MMORPGs are more likely than not utter tosh and not worth purchasing. Just keep up to date with the online communities for the game (ZAM, Eorzeapedia, etc.) for the most relevant and accurate information.

[JKTrix]

So I played it for a while, at least 4 hours. Did the 'some like it hot' quest sequence to completion, and wandered around looking for other story-based events to do and came up dry.

The game has weird lag. Not like network latency lag (though I guess that could be part of it), but UI lag. I try to navigate through menus, and my input comes through almost a second later. It's almost game-breaking. Compounding on that is *mouse* lag. Just like with the menu input, when I move the mouse cursor it takes about a half second to catch up. *That* would be game-breaking if I didn't already set up my game pad to take care of most common functions.

Game crashing when I alt-tab out of full screen, eh. I think FFXI did that for a while too and I remember using a program called Windower to get around that. It's nothing new. Still annoying, but I can just play in windowed mode.

Spent most of my time as the 'buff/debuff' mage, did a little fishing (which I still don't quite understand) and poked in a couple of other jobs as well. It's neat that you can just switch jobs by holding the appropriate weapon, but the non-combat jobs just really feel like too much.

[Tasura]

I would like to have had a chance to try the beta before going back to university, but the delay/work schedule kinda killed that plan. So, hopefully the beta will still be on when I get my net working in my room. And luckily, my uni doesn't care about P2P, so that makes me happy.

From what I've seen on the FFXIV website, this might be the first game I actually pay a monthly fee for. And more than likely I'll be going Hellsguard Pugilist with a side of Culinarian.

[Loony BoB]

The mouse lag can be a bit of a pain, as can the command lag (although I felt the command lag had decreased the more I played it - my first teleport took me about 10 seconds, later it took about 5, later it took about 2). The mouse lag was annoying last night but is better today - it's apparently due to the "software mouse" being used over a hardware mouse, and hopefully it's something that will be taken care of before launch, but we'll see.

[Baloki]

[ljkkjlcm9]

The mouse lag made it so immediately I started playing trying not to use the mouse at all. But then the input lag makes it difficult to do that for instance I hit F to go into attack mode, it didn't register, so I hit it again. He stops, pulls out his weapon, then puts it away....

I'm pretty sure I would/will be spending most of my time as a fighting class. The others all seem like secondary side jobs, and the fighting ones are the main jobs. I started a 2nd character to see a different city, and she started as an Armorer, her attack was "throw stone" and did 1 damage. I had to sit there and let the NPC kill the opening enemy, kinda dumb. So yeah, when I get the full game, definitely starting as a melee class. Though, all this lag makes me wonder if it's just my computer, or the fact that it's the Beta. I honestly couldn't play this game if the full version has as much lag as I have experienced. Otherwise, I could see it as a very fun way to pass time and socialize. So if the lag is my computer, I may wait to get the PS3 version.... I have a couple weeks to decide to cancel my pre-order or not at least!

So does everyone think the lag is temporary due to the Beta? Or a more permanent fixture? (I was in the range where it would run fine on my computer with the Benchmark)

THE JACKEL

[Loony BoB]

I think it's actually vastly improved since I first played yesterday. I now get a send/receive of something like 34/975 and the framerate is frantastic - but then, I did just upgrade my PC for this game so who knows.

I definitely agree regarding the speed of entering/exiting Action Mode, but then again, if it was instantaneous then it would make it far too easy to run from battles and gain health at the same time whenever you're close to death. I can understand there actually being a reason for the delay. It would be nice if there was some king of sound/image that showed that you are about to enter/exit action mode, though, so you know that your button pressing actually got registered in the game.

[JKTrix]

Despite my complaints I'm about to log on to this game again. Will probably be on for a few hours if I can find something interesting to do. Main goal is to see if I can get to another starting area without dying.

Trix Sforzando is the character name again.

[Loony BoB]

I don't think all of the maps are available so I can't imagine there would be any way to get to another starting area. This is just the beta, after all.

[Baloki]

Yay, downloads in progress ! Only a few hours left

[JKTrix]

So I was just getting set to stalk BoB since I noticed he was on (which would be a more interesting quest than anything I'd accessed so far) and then I got a server error and can't log back in.

[Loony BoB]

There is scheduled maintenance going on - they said it would be 3-5pm GMT but I think it must have changed to 6-8pm GMT. Either that or DST amounts to the adjustment.

[JKTrix]

Makes sense. A little weird to do maintenance in the middle of the day, but that'd explain it.

Came across this site FFXIV STATUS BETA!

[Baloki]

I plan to burn S-E Headquarters to the ground for this abortion of an updater software. Seriously, Update 7/7 is something like 20kb's big and because of that you can't connect to anyone long enough to download it so just sat here for 25 mins waiting to get lucky basically :/

As for the issue I had with the error message, basically had to create a new account as it couldn't get access to create a new folder in "My Documents\My Games"...