December 2023 Version Update

Seems that they already did, I just can't find it (or maybe he also meant they will, which they absolutely will if they didn't already)

I suppose on Asura during some NA/JP primetime there was congestion, so some truth to it, but that's not the reason the initial goal wasn't going to be met. They won't address the latter part, but hopefully they learn from this one on the next iteration what not to do.

Hahahaha, learn, right.

Lets set up a timed event, with objectives that take a long time in an area that can only be occupied by 6 instances and all the objectives are player specific.

"oh noes congestion, how did we not see that coming" (On day one, like literally everything)

"A long time" means longer than it takes to just kill it and move on, Stan You do it in 2 minutes. Room temp IQ bois take the full half hour.

Yes, thats what myself and others have more or less been saying for the last 4 pages when we've been saying the reward and bonuses arent worth the effort. That is literally what this means:

My point was that is just how things are likely to be going forward with basically everything we get from them, not just this event (and it's been heading this direction for a while). If we're expecting them to give content that interests or engages this group (which probably, on average, are at a much higher completion level than most of the playerbase), then we are going to end up disappointed. It simply takes too many resources and appeals to the minority of players. Whatever they do is going to be driven by what appeals to the majority rather than the dwindling endgame player base, so it's probably reasonable to just expect this type of thing when they announce new stuff in the future

Endgame crowd gets those juicy, amazing master trials!

Those are so good. That by itself is just so awesome for the endgame crowd, share with the new guys, let them have everything else, it's balanced that way.

As a tech manager for a multi-billion dollar credit card processing company. If my numbers were off that bad I would be fired.

You might want to consider finding another company if they'd fire you for making a single mistake.

I had a co-worker drop millions of rows (basically the entire contents) off a table and he faced absolutely zero repercussions. I once set an entire database to read-only, which *** up no fewer than 5 business applications for hours, and nobody even gave me a stern talking to.

In my experience, most companies are made of human beings who recognize that the employees are human beings who make mistakes, and you develop relationships and a reputation within the company so they don't immediately drop you if you make a mistake, they treat it as a learning opportunity for the future and coach you to be better in the future.

Michael Bolton: “i musts put the decimal in the wrong place, i always make such mundane small mistakes”

I have to chuckle at this because I can relate to people going through similar things when telling me about their own stories. The thing about IT is that mistakes happen frequently. There's a saying that if to err is to be human, then IT workers are the most human among us. That goes for programming and development, security, database management, general tech support services and more. Making a mistake is (usually) not a problem. It's how you handle that mistake and follow up on it to resolve the issue that makes or breaks a person's status within an organization. The frequency and severity of mistakes is a consideration of course, but in the grand scheme of things a mistake like this is a pittance. It's as simple as saying "we overestimated our target audience and after going through the analytics came to a more accurate number of where things should be". Correcting mistakes and keeping things running as they're expected is far more important to tech leaders than what the mistakes themselves entail.

There are of course some ^%$#@ ups that cost companies millions of dollars because a misplaced decimal opened up a vector for intruders to attack a system. THOSE are the mistakes people ACTUALLY care about. Compared to the big picture problems, everyday woopsies are just another part of working in the field.

If they were this off about the plaudits estimate, then surely they'll admit any day now that they were slightly overestimating gallimaufry for prime weapons... right?

There's a reason this movie was so popular, this ***happens all the time, every day, in massive companies.

In the real world the reason people very rarely get fired for this stuff is because it's very rarely a single person's fault, especially in giant mega-corporations. No single individual is responsible for the entire chunk of work, there are code reviews, management approvals, meetings, change management processes, etc.

As Melliny said, you get fired for a pattern of incompetence, not for making singular mistakes. Even then, you'd probably be asked to seek a different position that was a better fit for your (lack of) skills, not just sacked outright, especially if you worked your way up to that position and have history with the company.

That's my experience anyway. Maybe some companies just throw you out on your own, you make everything out of whole cloth by yourself, and if anything is (very) wrong with it you're fired. Doesn't sound like a good way to live your life, or a good way to retain intelligent, responsible, charismatic, honest employees. Believe it or not, good employees make mistakes too, including big ones.

Their estimates were bang-on for that. They said "Some of the most motivated groups will be done by the end of the year".

Maybe they underestimated us a little bit.

Omen was use it or lose it at launch, the entry KI stacking bit wasn't added until later.

Yoshi talked about it in an interview at one point, the only reason Ody is different is they were worried about queues if people could save up for the weekend or w/e. He did say stacking moglophones was on the table in the future, though that may have gone out the window with his retirement.

There is a very, very clear pattern. *** up after *** up after *** up.

Early on in my career I worked for a company developing network appliances, I pushed a regex out w/ a negative lookahead that was hit..a lot. It basically sent all of the devices into full CPU utilization and, because it was an inline device, killed internet access for anything behind the device. It knocked internet access offline for a few dozen customers, some of which were large enterprises (they were warned about these 'beta' updates and used them anyway).

The answer was our testing sucked and we needed to improve it to catch cases like that. That and I needed to spend more time learning how regex matching works. I found out later that 2 or 3 other people had done the same thing before and no one bothered to do anything to prevent it again, so we fixed that and I didn't feel as bad. No one got fired, but we knew to prevent it from happening again and not to do dumb things with regex again.

Mistakes are another form of company paid training.
You usually don't make those mistakes again, a successor might.

I agree with you, but if the point of this event was to get everyone participating, new and veteran, it's monumentally stupid to not include any rewards for veteran players, even at the highest tier.

Certainly the requirements to hit gold tier are strict enough that I don't see them as feasible for most casual players. Gold might not require endgame player gear, but it definitely requires endgame player commitment.

I'm curious to see whether they try and improve it for round 2 or just let it quietly die forever.

Does anyone know if SCH self-sc works for the complete sc objective?

It does.

At my former job we once audited a company that was egregiously bad at this sort of thing.

A couple of "the production version of this comes with a price but also with support, you used the clearly labeled free beta instable version that we send to quality testers, so we don't have any responsibility for the damage it caused to your systems" by the contractor later, they learned a *very* expensive lesson - damaged hardware expensive.

The culprit was, of freaking course, an exec that smelled potential savings by using the free beta versions for production instead of the paid and supported stable ones.

I still laugh at it to this day.

https://twitter.com/FFXI_JP/status/1735254870515700061

Who called the congestion thing? lmao

Velner is on the payroll. He was the only one to say "lol oh jeez there's congestion we can't win" on day one.

He gave them the fake way out.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/61319-Vanabout-Congestion

Biggest Stan goes to Velner, thanks for playing.

I love some of the comments

"Event so popular we had to reduce the target by 75% to make it feasible."

Sure buddy.

Eiryl thinks SE reads the english forums lol

The RoE's would have been better if they were party based:
"You or a party member weapon skill X times in Ambuscade"
"You or a party member create a skillchain X times in Ambuscade"

It would alleviate the congestion as it would encourage partying up instead of going in solo for 3 runs to do all the goals within 3 runs.

Of course, none of that matters if majority of the playerbase doesnt do the content because the rewards are absolute ***. Yes, I said majority, they reduced the goal by 75% implying a majority of the playerbase isnt doing the content.

I was having a lot of fun updating the graph and ***talking how *** stupid it was, but they've stolen all my fun.

This came up in Discord and I'm going to trigger the Karens by saying this: XIV did group goals better. Ishgard Restoration got people to do an unpopular activity (crafting) because it had huge incentives. Not only did we unlock a new housing area at the end by building it ourselves, but you could spend your points accumulated while participating on dozens of valuable rewards. They even had leaderboards for top contributors which gave exclusive top 10/100 titles.

I believe they could achieve something similar if they were less stingy on the personal rewards. At the very least, remove the 1 per tier restriction and add some new, higher value items that people might actually want.

Alternatively, rework it in a way that has people progress the goal without having to do extra *** like deal 500 ice dmg 10 times a day. Make it a bonus on top of the rewards that they're already going in for.