Opinions On FFXI's Life.

You didn't hear it from me, but the word on the street is that there are 3rd party programs that offer "more advanced versions" of movement speed and fishing. That's just what I've heard though.

Windower doesn't enable or allow one to do either of those things, btw.

Bunny~

Purely curious but if you don't use windower, how do you know you're parsing inline with others? And are these people you are going up against actually telling you if they are using them or not?

I know that skill is a large factor in DPS because knowing what to do and when can affect things greatly but there's certain factors that you simply can't overcome. With the forced limitations of in game macros, I can't see the difference being only 3 or even 5%.

Kinda missing the point though, Suji. It's pretty ridiculous to play favourites and endorse only a particular 3rd party program because of <insert arbitrary decision by admins here>, and attempt to act as if nothing else exists. It's good to save face, I guess, but it doesn't make those other programs any less real.
EDIT: Besides, we all know that the only reason that using Windower has become "acceptable" is due to the proliferation of it. If the FFXI Revenue Choo-Choo Train could afford to lose those users, it'd happen. But at this point, it can't, so SE overlooks it. They overlook A LOT of things, actually...

I, however, will not miss the point and stay topical so nobody can call shenanigans on my posts.
Ahem, not long.

seems like there was a few more posts in this thread a few minutes ago lel

I was only clarifying the possible implication in your comment with that fact. There's all sorts of hypocrisy with respect to where people choose to draw the line between what is acceptable and what isn't as far as 3rd party tools go.

Well yeah. I just think it's kind of overkill to have to dance around the subject when we all know they exist. It reminds me of how vehemently, defiantly, Cornelius Fudge deluded himself in to believing Lord Voldemort hadn't been revived. "He's not back!".
Anyway, that's just how to looks to me.

That's a good distinction between a tool and an exploit. It's on the level of spawning in a Kclub by saying that it's a "more advanced version" of the loot system.

Edit: Windower at it's heart is just a UI enhancement. It allows you to see things that honestly should have been included or added to the PoL UI. Being able to see the duration left on your buffs, being able to see your TP while not engaged, being able to see the MP of the other party's WHM. Running scripts to allow you to change more than 6 pieces of gear or utilize conditional gear without having to constantly look at the day/weather or have an entirely different macro progression to deal with JA enhancing gear (like leaving on SAM AF3+2 hands for the first WS after Sekkanoki). Spellcast is a more tailored macro system. While you CAN use them for less admirable things, that's not their primary function. And all of those are VERY different from disabling JA lock, movement speed caps, POS hacking through doors and walls, or bots that camp the AH to resell undervalued gear or exploit crafting systems.

The game can't have a long term future if the Dev's are forced to build content around unregulated 3rd party tools.

You do realize that the topic of this thread is the life of FFXI, be it past, future, or present. Third-party programs, are off topic regardless of which they are. Seeing as how this entire page is revolving around these programs, I'd say the thread has been derailed.

Please get back on topic.

I really don't see how Windower letting you cap your magic skills by itself is not an exploit, but I guess we're just different people. Whatever.
I would argue that since my last post talked about how the proliferation of Windower makes it hard to punish the users and is thereby directly affecting the revenue of FFXI, it is directly affecting the longevity of FFXI. I think that's topical enough.

I like FFXI and I hope it lasts forever and ever. Why back in my day you could find a Scorpion Harness vendor on every street, and you could buy the whole Scorpion Harness factory for a nickel!

Yeah honestly I don't see how this conversation was off topic. A lot of it pertains to the relation of how it interacts with FFXIs longevity.

As far as windowers impact on quality of player goes, it pretty much allows one person to play as many DD as they would like nigh maximum efficiency. Spellcast can be turned into a cure bot, the inclusion of jazerowait(anyone who actually knows what this does knows this is far more important than speed hacks, besides quality of life time saving),etc. I'd say it adds far more of an edge than any other 3rd party tool out there.

Windower doesn't do that, writing a script or using a bot does that. Skill based effects have been a cornerstone of the game mechanics since day one. The idea being that you are forced to actually play a job in order to be effective at it. What good is a burned job, right? Circumventing that mechanic takes life out of the game when everyone can AFK and cap skills overnight.

I can't see XI living to fill out Adoulin. Remember how long they took to complete some past expansions.

More players than ever were playing merely for friends and with so many quitting, there's little reason to play.

I left, and now I silently stalk forums (go me), but in the last few months, I knew less and less people actually having fun.

You can only do the same event so many times before feeling like you could macro it. Hell, Comeatmebro kinda did. Everyone I knew was either anxious to kill tojil (etc) or tired of killing Tojil.

Monstrosity was the most honest fun I had in the game in a long time, but that should have been a lot more complete (pvp, NM's, monster-group play).

Skirmish II threatened to be fun, but the event starts so slow and doing an excellent job doesn't benefit you any more than doing a decent job. It was feasible to come out of the event with every piece of gear, and a few spares, after two days, and that's while competing with everyone else interested in the new gear.

I know iLevel gear's purpose, to artificially inflate our levels, and that, if we were actually 115, the gear wouldn't look this amazing (Uk hat might be +8 all stats), but they failed to understand where the inventory crisis truly lies, and recent posts on the subject have only highlighted that: I don't mind carrying a ws set, an enmity set, etc (paladin, lol, and yeah I know how little worth the enmity set really had), what I minded was carrying gear just for a JA like Sentinel, Rampart, Divine Emblem, Invincible and paladin is kinda light on JA enhancing gears.

I know that AF4, in some fashion, is supposedly coming, but that could easily be a year off, if ever.

I actually did a bit of research after I was corrected on my misconceptions of Windower's innerworking. All you need in order to have the game skill up your magic skills for you is Windower, the Spellcast plugin, and the 5 minutes it takes to look up a script in these very forums. Give me some credit...

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Using the aforementioned, sactioned, 3rd party program and plugin to have the game skillup for you does take a lot of life out of FFXI.

One could just as easily argue that it adds life since our example player here may have been bored and wanted to play a new job, but did not want to spend the absurd amount of time that it would have required to skill up manually. Reducing tedium and enhancing fun seems like a win to me, as far as longevity is concerned.

Fair enough. Nobody likes to skillup naturally (I think I took like a month to finally cap Enhancing magic and told Healing magic to go fly a kite), but that is something that SE could have changed by now, but chose not to. They could have made skilling up a quicker, easier process, but they didn't. They could have allowed us to skillup in environments like Campaign that offered high-level targets a-plenty, but they didn't. They could have done a lot of things to actually improve just this one aspect of the game, but instead chose to continue administering the bottom-line, whatever we have is good enough mechanics.
The problem is that this toxic, tedious environment makes 3rd party programs extremely appealing (and rightfully so), but that doesn't make programs that play the game for you any less wrong.

To an extent, but MOST skills (including the dreaded summoning skill) can be skilled easily and relatively quickly by actually playing the job. Not mindlessly spamming enhancing spells, but going out with a few friends and doing things. Though, if you happen to have lost a character and are starting over with a good understanding and experience with a job, a way to quickly level and cap skills is nice.

The problem with SE brand of ignoring third party tools is that they balance content for players that use them, particularly spellcast.

There are some exceptional players out there that do amazing with Vanilla XI, but most of us are not on that level, no matter how much we want to think we are.

I honestly believe that without third-party tools, many servers would struggle to put up one good active LS.

Even just breaking it down to just windower macros, which I've never used (not spellcast, which I have used for most of my XI career), there's a not-negligible difference between an LS whose entire frontline can switch to full DT sets in one macro vs 2, or full ws sets rather than sacrificing something.

Going beyond that to spellcast, it's a big thing that a program can detected the weakened debuff, from any source, and equip gear based on that, or TP in a different set because Aftermath is up, or use different sets because Mighty Strikes is up.

I'm sure there's some truth in that, Omnys. SE really has a knack for buckling under the weight of our collective moaning.
FFXI used to take genuine effort and practice, and whether it is now because of 3rd party programs, SE reducing the difficulty levels or a mixture of the two (spoilers: it's both), the game is just not interesting. When I play a game, I like it to fight back a little; not roll over on command because it hurt my feelings after I died.

Look at what they've done to FF7 with their PC re-release. If you aren't good at video games, that's okay! You can just max out your gil and HP permanently, as early as level god damn 5!
Before you know it, we'll be getting event gear that has a 1-hour rechargable "Primeval Brew" effect, usable anywhere.

The above has some inaccuracies.

They've actually done several things to help with the skillup problem. They made parrying, evasion and guard all substantially easier to skill up. You used to be able to skill up in Campaign too but players were abusing this by holding mobs far away from the battle which meant no one could ever finish. Rather than fixing the real issue, they chose the route that would hurt everyone instead and entirely removed skillups from Campaign. They also added skillup food and all of the various items to increase skillup rate, although acquiring some of these items (such as Prouesse Ring) could take longer than if you had just spent those hours skilling up the job.

So they've actually tried to make things better but failed repeatedly to fully address the problem.

You can't use Windower and Spellcast to skillup combat skills, so those really aren't related. If they made magic skills raise that quickly, perhaps you'd have a point. The time taken to accrue skillup gear and/or food and/or gil for the food outweighs the benefits of the food/gear itself, so those do absolutely nothing (unless you are already wealthy and get lucky on the equipment). This isn't a statistics thread. Get outta here~!

You can, actually.

This is exactly my point. They've added stuff to try to make it better but did a horrible job.

Blizzard said screw it and removed weapon skill from WoW entirely.

It doesn't require the bolded things. All you have to do is make a suitably long loop that will do it for you, which can be done without spellcast and entirely using the alias and wait commands:
Then you type //eighteenhundred and afk for 9 hours of Barspell spam. Put on some refresh gear so you don't run out of MP.



And yeah, I have zero guilt about skilling up this way. In terms of 3P abuses, this is a victimless crime. No one suffers because I have capped enhancing/summoning/singing/wind/string skill. My shout groups just benefit from it when I'm on those jobs. I was capped on all these skills at 75, and it is fail on SE's part that they did not increase skillup rates to match Abyssea XP rates. With <600 people on Lakshmi at 8PM EST, we need everyone to skill up everything ASAP for maximum versatility. <_<

Most 3P programs enhance gameplay for the user without, for lack of a better term, ***-blocking anyone. There are times when SE makes events borderline impossible without unreasonable 3P aid, but that is really not the 3P community's fault. Also, people are perfectly capable of playing with in-game macros if they want (though they sacrifice quite a lot in my opinion), but I don't really see why someone that wants to customize their gear selection further should be prevented from doing so.

The more you learn about the FFXI client and it massive inefficiencies, the more you want to fly to Japan and choke someone out. There was a time when I believed that SE was doing the best that they could with an ancient code base, but now I've seen the light. They just regularly take whatever the easiest option is to accomplish their objective. FFXI was released over a decade ago and everything since the release has just been a varying degree of nasty hackery. I don't envy them by any means, but the number of shortcuts and laziness that I see in their packet structure alone has been enough to disillusion me.

So you can use Windower to automatically go from one monster to the next, thereby skilling up your combat skills without playing the game? That's horrible. That sounds like a combat skillup BOT.
It would really compliment the magic skillup BOT created with Windower, though.

EDIT: Nobody is condemning you for skilling up that way (I'm not, anyway). It'd totally do that if it were legal.

edit: Byrth beat me to it

Actually, you can.

You need a low damage weapon and something with a lot of HP and regen atmas and /dnc.

For ranged attacks, you would just make a windower alias like this

alias raspam input /ra <t> wait 3; /ra <t> wait 3; /ra <t> wait 3; /ja "Curing Waltz III" <me>; raspam

alias stopra unalias raspam

you could change the line to anything, like /input /ma "dia" <t>

Spellcast can do it like this

<if spell="Ranged" notstatus="resting" mode="and">
<command when="aftercast">wait 3; input /ra <t></command>
</if>

I see, what you meant by automatically skilling up combat skills was that you were attacking automatically until the monster was dead. The game already does that for you, so you're just using Windower to heal for you, or shoot arrows for you. So...it's playing the game for you in-part.

Yeah, and you don't even need self-healing if you're afking in Abyssea as I am wont to do.

What Omnys said. Even outside of aby, with the level of defense/pdt on SoA gear and some regen gear, it's pretty easy to survive on the same mob while hitting with a low damage weapon for hours. You can do this entirely afk with vanilla FFXI.

Windower(+plugins/addon) just lets you do it faster, especially if you're talking about weapon skills that you can skill up with Retaliation.

When they hire byrth, I can see this game lasting a good 20 more years.