The Mog Log: A little more conversation

Well, gee, not much has happened since the last time we did a community spotlight in this column. Except maybe for that little VanaFest thing, and huge drops of new info on Final Fantasy XIV, and the beginning of the latter's beta testing. So, yeah, slow month all around. This should be a pretty short column, I might just start talking about my favorite beers toward the end.

All joking aside, a lot has been happening, and it has produced more than a few diverse opinions. The immediate response to the VanaFest announcements for Final Fantasy XI was covered a couple weeks ago, but there's still the specifics to be hammered out. After all, it's hard to take in server merges, level cap raises, massive content drops and new add-ons all in one go. Not to mention that we do still have another game coming in the not-so-distant future, one that's shaping up to have an interesting positional aspect to gameplay. So let's take a look at some of the noteworthy talk from Final Fantasy's webwide community.

A rose by any other name would be xXx_rose_xXx
There's a side to Final Fantasy XI's upcoming server merges that hasn't gotten quite as much press time -- the fact that the people being merged don't have a lot of control in the matter. And by "a lot," we really mean "any." Which servers are being merged in isn't up for discussion. That means that there are going to be characters who find their names ripped away and changed whether they like it or not, something that Pet Food Alpha's FusionX isn't terribly happy about.

On the one hand, I can certainly understand the frustration. The flip side, of course, is that there's no way Square-Enix could have handled this that would have been fair to everyone. Someone has to lose the name, and it's not fair to the merged players to make it an ornate process. You could even look at this as the most fair way of ensuring who keeps what name, by making it wholly arbitrary and outside of player negotiation and control. (Remember, kids, "fair" does not always mean "likable.") It's still worth considering, however, and it's an unlucky turn of events for the players being merged into a new server.

The Mod squad
Final Fantasy XIV probably won't have Windower.

But our demands of UIs are increasing, and thanks to games like World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online supporting a robust modification framework we expect quite a bit out of the gate for a game. This thread is a discussion of what might happen in terms of mods -- whether they'll exist, be sanctioned, and most worryingly be necessary for endgame participation.

The last one is pretty easy to answer: no.

I can think of perhaps one mod that's ever been necessary for endgame activities, and that was shot down by Blizzard as soon as the first expansion dropped. Mods are there to make life easier; when they're making life just plain livable, it's time for adjustments. Given the much more icon-heavy and presumably information-heavy setup in FFXIV, I think many of the problems Windower was created to address won't be present in the game from the start.

That being said, open-source mod development isn't terribly likely. But Square could always surprise us.

Metal Gear Not-Quite-So-Solid, or the plight of the sneaky WHM
Most of my high-level experience in FFXI has been as a caster, either RDM or WHM, and so I'm very familiar with the complete unreliability of two skills that may as well be core class features. I'm proud to say that I don't recall ever dying due to a Sneak or Invisible drop, but that includes a few just-in-time alcoves that I happened to locate.

There's a bit of a debate here about whether or not the spells should be as variable as they are. On the one hand, there are purchasable items which do the same thing, and making the spells more reliable would undercut the value of Silent Oil and Prism Powder. On the flip side, it's argued that not needing to purchase items is one of the advantages a caster has over other jobs, and it hardly seems fair that it's gimped due to items that exist elsewhere with little connection. While I imagine less insta-death aggro sneaking in FFXIV, it's an interesting discussion to consider, and it's going to be telling to see how similar effects work in Eorzea.

FFXIV on the go?

With the advent of more and more mobile apps, it seems like the perfect opportunity for Square to offload some of the more tedious maintenance portions of the game into a simple click-fest on your iPhone or Droid. (I'd prefer a Droid version, because that's the phone I actually own, but I'm not going to demand developers cater to me. I'll just whine if they don't.) Of course, by the same token, there are players who hate the idea that developers might take that as permission to create more tedious portions, or make it a de facto requirement that you load the app up on your lunch break so your plants don't die.

The thing is, this is not exactly a new idea. Square did this already, after a fashion, for Final Fantasy VIII. It was a little less of an issue at the time, since no one outside of Japanese players or die-hard American fans owned a PocketStation, so the chocobo mini-game was a bit less vital. It also didn't unlock anything particularly interesting in the game. I wouldn't be totally surprised to eventually see an app devoted to raising chocobos or the like, however.

Don't worry. It's okay you're not testing.
To which I can only respond no. No, it is not okay.

Not okay at all.

In all seriousness, we forget that the first round of testing doesn't so much have bugs as it is one sustained bug with occasional patches of gameplay. And I do try to fit in at least one discussion that's a bit toward the amusing side. This one fits the bill.

Mollified by VanaFest
I'm far from the only person who had rather high hopes going into the celebrated event, but I do seem to have taken a bit of an extreme viewpoint. Thayos posted an article before the event that actually informed one of the first columns I wrote, so to see his reaction to the announcements as a whole is certainly interesting. They're not a hundred percent happy, but they're largely positive.

Initial rush of irritation aside, I'd wager that most of the community is -- and should be -- fairly happy about the overall scope of what's coming for FFXI. For those of us a bit less pleased, well, there's always the sequel coming out.

That's all the community highlights we have time for this week. (Or, if you prefer, that's all the ones I could chase down and write about until my hands got tired, Scott Adams-style.) As always, send any links, questions, or requests to transfer enormous sums of money out of Nigeria to Eliot at Massively dot com. Next week will be another chance for me to go through all of the questions I've gotten, so by all means, flood the mailbox.