Final Fantasy XIV's patch 1.16 goes live with a new producer's letter

@augustgrace

Local leves are the crafting ones, you are talking about regionals in respect to the kill x mobs.

The reduction to locals is due to them changing how the they work. It should theoretically be an increase overall for locals because:

* Players can now choose from among the suggested rank categories of 1–, 20–, and 40– from the local levequest accept/refuse interface.
* Suitably ranked local levequests are now more readily available.

It's kind of vague, but being able to walk up to the counter and have all Rank 1's/5's load when you were 20+ was always sad face.

@Mevan Not dumb. Just a typical massively troll.

@hami83 Is it really a total troll though? This game has been out for months and last I heard was still subscription-free because of all the problems it was having. Every story I read about the game on this site mentions cool additions paired with huge, huge negatives. Hardly any of the comments are positive, even from people who obviously are playing.

Is it really hard to see how someone might be surprised people are actually playing it? I know I am.

@Locus Sage Sundi is his name. It's not a handle or secret code.

@Locus The sidequests are intended to add small amounts of lore to the world and not as a means to level. The rewards aren't horrible if your at the level the sidequest was intended for. Although an SP reward upon completion would have been nice, its not difficult to level up in this game if you make friends. The foundation is in place now fot them to add more interesting quests.

The new targetting system is actually pretty awesome. I'm a melee who plays with a controller and targeting has been my biggest struggle which has now been solved. You can now choose to target everything, friendly players/npc's, enemies or party members. Instead of having to target through everybody to get to the mob, I now can set it to enemies and within two button presses I have targetted the mob. It's great.

Along with many other improvements, I'm very pleased with this update.

@(Unverified)

The new targetting system is absolutely horrible if you happen to be using a keyboard. You can't change between targetting systems whilst your weapon is drawn because the arrow keys merely move the currently selected hotbar icon around, so to change it you actually have to put your weapon away - you can't even change the current target selections by clicking on the targetting icon.

Don't assume everyone likes to play with a controller like you do, and frankly my friends have complained about it being annoying on a controller as well.

As for "Lore", have you actually *tried* doing any of the quests? They're FAR from what I'd consider immersive, or heck, any of FF11's quests. Mechanicswise they are almost exactly identical to faction leves except the rewards are shittier.

@Locus If the mechanics of the targeting system are the same as a controller which I think it should be then wouldn't you just have to back out of your hotbar being active and visible on the screen and then you would be able to change your target and the targetting criteria instead of putting your weapon away.
I certainly wasn't assuming that everyone likes to play on a controller and I know the keyboard controls can be pretty awkward. I find a controller to be alot of easier to use for this game but I also used a controller in ffxi as well. At least for a melee, the new targetting system is great but some mages in my linkshell have complained that they can no longer target party members in their party with up and down on the directional pad which would move up and down the party list in order which I agree is a downside.
I have only done 3 of the sidequests so far and I agree they aren't that immersive and are pretty standard-fare for a quest in almost any mmo including ffxi who had its share of kill/fetch quests which none of those quests are really that immersive either. I think they will serve the purpose they are intended for though which I think is to just provide you small snippets of lore that don't take very long to complete and are completely optional.
One of the quests I did talked about how thanalan used to be a lush forest and has since dried up and turned into a desert. Although it was only one paragraph, little bits of lore like that are more than welcome to me.

@(Unverified)

No, you can't, unfortunately. You actually have to put away your weapon and hit escape so that you're not actually targetting anything, then the arrow keys revert to their targetting system change functionality instead of changing between hotbar 1, 2 and 3.

The system is alright for melees primarily because they rarely have any reason to use anything other than the "Enemy" option and using a support ability automatically creates an exception. The problem is more clear when you're fighting in say, broken water with lots of people running around and using a party target option locks you out of performing your basic attack.

@Nenene

More like 20 steps backwards...

Of all the new quests they added, only 18 "across all 50 levels" or so I'm told, and not only do you not earn any XP, SP, or item drops from any of the mobs, but the rewards are useless crap too.

I was really looking forward to some good additional stories, with some in-game cut scenes like FFXI has for most of its optional quests. And you still earned XP, item drops, and many of the quests gave you important items to complete other quests later on, or something incredible good that sold for tens if not hundreds of thousands of gil on the AH.

@Magnux If it's in beta then why in the world did they release the game for sale at retailers at full price, as if it was a finished product??

@Naru now in 3D

They did it for no good reason and became the most spectacular failure of 2010's MMO industry. As for why... I couldn't think of reasons other than whomever was in charge was very not intelligent.