What Happened Casual PT Shouts..

The applications weren't the worst part of this, it was the points systems and required participation. I get why these were in place, but it turned the game into a job and sucked the fun out of it. It also resulted in a different type of toxicity and problems.

I have issues with current content, but at least that nonsense is a thing of the past. Maybe it's just the server(s) I was on, but I feel like the community is a lot more gentle than it used to be provided you aren't being an *** to everyone.

I would honestly be 100% down for the chaos of random jobs if it didn't cause you to get locked out of a constructed-party run if you wanted to run one. The ability to fail fast and hop back in the queue for another try would be a lot more entertaining than waiting for someone to get the perfect party together after a few hours of shouting for a BRD.

I'm at least 95% certain no one would ever queue with a "good support"

You'd either sit there as zero bards joined just like now. Or have a two song no melee bard.

Wouldn't work for melee either. Randos join in "119" nq gear. Nor tanks. Nor healers. It'd just be a god damn disaster.

It works where there are distinct levels of gear. but there are a million 119 choices and 999k of them are dogshit.

"Writer's strike? You're telling me the guy that wrote, "somehow Palpatine returned" deserves a livable wage?"

Filtering jobs defeats the purpose of group finder. The idea is to facilitate groups for every job.


Adjust the content to cater to the tool:
Increase the time on moglophones from 30 to 45 minutes.


Now any reasonably balanced group can achieve a clear. There's no more anxiety about missing out because you didn't speedrun a meta comp. Now you can take whatever job you feel like playing.

Hell, make it an hour.




So we got a MNK calling themselves a tank, a GEO, and four RDMs, with one calling themselves a healer, one calling themselves support, and the other two got to 99 with only learning enspells. I'm still down for it if there's no horrible penalties for doing it (xp loss and lockouts, mainly).

If the change increased traffic, it might lead to queue spikes on high pop servers. Also I think there should still be motivation to perform even though you're almost guaranteed segs. Maybe a bonus to the gil reward based on how early you finish to keep it interesting.

Add time extensions for clearing the fetters in A,B,C. 5min each, this would cap most solo players at 30min and promote party play to full clear.

Hell people might even pop the fetter NMs instead of just doing Superman,Fluffy,Behe and Cerb.

Hell the ability to queue up for ambuscade, ody, omen, sinister reign, etc from a menu instead of everyone zoning 3 times would be huge. everyone check the ready box in a RoE type menu, "entering conflict in 30 seconds".

Totes. You and the other 5 naegling warriors gonna have a great time with no healer no support

Unless you just mean in general, that's kinda pointless to just queue without being in the zone.

Putting aside the community destroying elements of a queuing system...this game is way too complicated to implement one.

OK say you want to queue for Omen...does it bring 6 players? 12? 18? 3? Do you require a mage to do the MBs? Which mage? How does a SMN get in? Who sets the required jobs for the queue? Which boss is it going to be? If it's Kei, which strategy are the "required" jobs set by? Can those jobs complete all the random objectives, or just kill the final boss? Are they prepared to kill all the mid-bosses? Who says they have any gear at all? Which Omen bosses are going to allow a BST in? Who's going to be thrilled about having a BST pop as their DPS in their Fu fight? If you're going to fight Ou, how does the queue work? Only one person is required to have KIs?

...That's just Omen. God forbid you try to organize a Dynamis [D] through queue finder...Or Vagary. GL trying to pop Perf. and Plou. with randos, on the jobs the queue finder thought would be good, with the queue finder's gear requirements.

Wouldn't XIV's party finder system work? I don't see why not. Maybe the issue would be subjobs. But even then I'm pretty sure you could specify what subjobs are ok?

(e.g)
Open up for :
slot 1 WAR
slot 2 COR
Slot 3 PLD
Slot 4 BRD
slot 5 WHM or SCH
slot 6 taken (obviously you)

1. Instance
2. Job pref 1
3. job pref 2 (for when you're open to a whm or a sch healer for example)
3. Job lvl
4. ilvl
5. Access to instance if it's content locked

Any above criteria not met, you can't get in.

How would that be any different than shouting for a bard for an hour. That's the whole point of a autogroup system.

You'd just sit in the finder waiting for brd

The problem is there is no good reason to play tank healer and bard, and if you happen to play one of them, you're a golden god and have a group.

1. shouts/yell are bust. Mine has been blocked for months
2. Centralized area where everyone knows where to go to find other players doing content they want.
3. passive afk watch anime while you wait, like the good ol HNM days.

I got 2 BRDs capped BiS and I never see any shouts or content being advertised. I'd gladly go and do something other than the daily *** grind with them if I saw someone in need.

I meant in an already established party. This auto-party stuff is not a solution to anything unless it knew all the jobs you were willing to queue up with and we had a better gear/skill barometer than "119".

Even though I think a good ingame solution would be best I also think it's pointless to discuss it cause SE already "tried" 3 times with yell, party flag system and the search system (remember there is one?) that no one used in eons, they probably think the group finding mechanics are swell as is.

Yell only reaches people in town that aren't afk and it forces the initiator to stay in town, you even have to worry to miss a /tell when zoning. A commonly accepted addon solution would at least allow to do other stuff while looking for group opportunities.

I think i'll start going everywhere with my party flag up just to see if i ever get a single invite to anything.

I already did that, the best you can hope for is someone else putting their own flag up when they see yours followed by awkward silence, both expecting the other one to start forming a party till someone leaves the zone.
It also get's super annoying to turn the flag off everytime you want to call trusts.

Automatic tools would never be that complicated. It's meant to match people who just want to select their job and what content they want to play. If performance is a concern then forming your own groups is always ideal. Not intended for difficult content.

Wait till they find out WOW and other MMO's who came out alongside FFXI, have had this since at least 2008.

People will give any excuse to continue being toxic and not help raise the community up as a whole, so they can afk in their R30 Nyame they bought from a chinese merc.

Other games did ilvl properly so it would actually work

In 11 a pair of level 7 boots were better than some(most) 75 boots ffs.

Completely agree, but outside of Ambuscade what fits into "I need people but its not difficult content"?

-You can try and say Delve, but most only do it once when its a Monthly RoE.
-You can try and say Omen, but the vast majority are only using Omen as a solo method to gain swart and cards for new jobs. You don't even need a group to get the Boss Scales any more.

Segments? maybe.

But there just isn't much content in XI any more between "soloable" and "I only trust my static".

WoW also had a solo trial ladder system at one point. A series of increasingly difficult trials to test your ability to perform the functions of your job. Players could see each other's progress so it became the benchmark for whether or not players were 'skilled' enough to join groups for certain content.

Ultimately it was scrapped because players had dramatically high standards for mostly trivial content. Sounds familiar...

FFXI had that too though, it was called "is your rank higher than 6?"

or Sky Access.

Maat probably would have been a better comparison, but even that didn't stress being able to excel at performing your job role. The trials in WoW force you to play well to advance so you couldn't rely on other people to carry you. Getting missions done was more a matter of job depth and determination.

This isn't hard to solve, just give pt lead a UI to check which job for a slot, or if that slot is opened for recruitment.

The tougher problem is the lack of gear score in ffxi. If people using auto group constantly get under geared players pretty soon they won't use it anymore.



I thought the difference is giving players extra rewards if they enter instance with random strangers.

Using shout people would shout "r15 rema DD yagrush WHM can I have it" for sinister reign, and reject people even if they are perfectly geared for that content. Because people would aim for the B-E-S-T option available for any content, even if the requirement is much lower.

If you go with potentially less optimal option using auto group, but auto group offers extra rewards (such as points for unique items), then people are more likely to take a random stranger without all of these rema.

It's not going to solve the lack of brd/healer/tank problem of course, at least people gets compensation if they don't get overly picky with people.

You are right that without a proper gear score system this probably won't work well though.

Sure, but if you follow this then you basically end up with: DRG, NIN, BLU, BST, PUP, SMN, RNG, DNC, MNK, THF probably can't do almost any content at all. BLM, SCH, RDM only get invited to content where they're "needed" and your queue finder system is subject to both the whims of people who want to take leadership roles, which is already a problem, and the same job restrictions as the current system of just standing around yelling for REMAs. You'd end up with a queue finder looking for a 3 REMA WAR, 5 REMA BRD, 3 REMA PLD, REMA WHM, REMA GEO, and 4 REMA COR before it started a seg farm run, and if you wanted to queue as any of the 10 jobs above, you'd be SOL because the "leader" doesn't want you.

Or you end up with THF BST as DD, a SMN as your buffer, and a PUP as your tank for seg farm.

To be clear, I'm saying the reason it works for other games is because they have a very clear trifecta. You can take any tank in the tank slot, any DD in any DD slot, and any healer in the healer slots, generally speaking. In my experience, for the vast majority (or all) of the content in those games, the jobs are interchangeable. They don't have a job which is only used for certain content, jobs which are mandatory for other content, which fulfill extremely niche roles, fights which require specific jobs...etc. Sometimes the job setups aren't just meta, but actually required to be reasonably successful at the event

Having a group of players with jobs that don't mesh well (or at all) with the content your trying to do isn't as much of a big deal as finding members that want to do the content. If I ended up in a party with 5 others with weird job combos to complete ambuscade, we can job change or fight it at a lower level than intended. playing with other players and actually playing the game instead of standing in town should be the primary goal. a PUG is never going to be ideal with any system.