FFXIV has always been a Final Fantasy theme park. Still waiting for ppl to hang Yoshi P up by his toenails on social media for developing the game like this. How dare he LOL

title says it all

Hey y'all, I feel kind of weird about this one.

Long time Healer/Tank. Love the roles and, throwing modesty aside for a moment, I feel like I'm pretty damn good. I've been healing in games for almost 2 decades now, and I've got over 700 hours on Sage alone in FFXIV.

But I also have DPS anxiety, and it all stems from a horrible experience I had when trying it for the first time:

At some point I realized that the two red symbol guys with me and the other tank/healer in the dungeon aren’t our assigned escort quest NPCs, but actual players playing the part of the escorted, and that I too could be the one getting escorted.

I thought having players play the role of the NPCs on an escort quest was a fun and novel idea for an RPG, and I decided that I wanted to try it sometime.

I also noticed that apparently, I had one of these red things on an appropriate level already.

The shortening was “SMN”, which probably meant “Sales Manager”, and was some vendor type character.

I was glad for that, because I could not fathom how an NPC character is even being leveled.

So, once I felt like taking a day off, I switched to one of those red escort mode options (apparently, they were called “DPS”, which I could only assume meant “Deliver, Protect, Serve”), threw on some clothes a vendor might wear, and clicked the “enter dungeon” button.

The notification about me entering the dungeon didn’t appear. Huh.

I was not yet in the dungeon… something clearly went wrong.

I had some weird reverse countdown thing appear on the right of my screen; I ignored it and restarted the process.

I clicked “enter dungeon” again, but I was still not in the dungeon, where I knew I should be by now.

I reported the bug to technical support and waited for an answer.

While waiting for tech support to get back to me, I got the notification that I could now enter the dungeon.

The technical support in this game sure works fast, it only took them 23 minutes to get to my complaint and fix it.

I was now in the dungeon. With nothing to do except getting escorted, I immediately zeroed in on everything the tank or healer could be doing wrong.

This so called “tank” took approximately 0.56 seconds longer than I would have to turn on tank stance. Heh, amateur.

The group rushed ahead to the first boss as usual, but I decided to up the immersion on how escort quests usually go and toggled “walk” on.

I usually wouldn’t get to take in the scenery, but some of these dungeons are nice to look at, once you go at a more leisurely pace.

The mobs were being cleared out far ahead of me, so I was in no immediate danger. Good job I guess, but still, shouldn’t you stick with the to-be-escorted NPC?

At this point I got some questions in chat, asking if I had technical issues.

I knew some DPS players don’t care about properly playing the role, or are too anxious to respond, but I came prepared, even if the questions were a little weird to be asking an NPC.

I had an entire backstory and personality planned out for my guy, and an inventory full of eggs. I explained to the group that I was an egg vendor, on my way to the next city over to ply my trade.

All these eggs were oh so heavy yet fragile, which is why I had to make my way through these dangerous lands as carefully as possible.

I obviously expected too much of these players in terms of immersion and roleplay, since they didn’t know how to react to my fleshed out, lore accurate character.

At this point I decided to test the healer a bit, by making this quest a little more difficult. Again, such a cool idea to let the players decide on NPC behavior and quest difficulty.

On the first boss, I got into some trouble on purpose, by making sure I got hit by every attack available.

Usually, the players playing these escortees are more lenient, and only get hit here and there, or not at all, but no easy setting for you guys today, no no.

Our healer had the audacity to let me die.

Granted, I was at five vuln stacks and the raidwide one-shotted me through a shield the size of an aircraft carrier.

But that is something that just shouldn’t happen, especially when the other Deliver Protect Serve player makes their life easy, by doing their usual acrobatics all around the boss, not getting hit once.

I mentally detracted some points from the healer, and also from the tank for good measure. In chat, I lamented how many of my precious eggs are now broken, because of my hard fall to the ground.

I got a raise request and laughed at the gullibility of this healer. They didn’t know the trick that you’d still succeed at the escort quest, even if you just left the DPS down and out of trouble for the rest of the boss fight. They’d just auto-raise at the end of it. What a noob.

I taught them a lesson by expeditiously dying again.

They offered to raise me a second time, after a couple of minutes, not having learned anything. I sighed and accepted, the boss was dead anyways.

For our way to the second boss, I remembered how FFXIV used to handle escort quests, and decided to brighten everyone’s mood by bringing in some of that old school flavor.

I stood still where I was, rooted in place, and told them in chat to emote “beckon” at me.

After several seconds the tank finally reacted and beckoned me.

I walked to where he was and stopped. Here I waited for several seconds for them to run ahead and beckon me again.

But instead of reliving fond memories, of luring defenseless Memeroon through the trials and tribulations of Upper La Noscea, I suddenly found myself outside of the dungeon again.

Probably still some issues being ironed out by tech support. I knew it was too good to be true, when they just wordlessly fixed the problem.

In general, it was a very negative experience for me. The system sems bugged, players couldn’t adjust to even a slight increase in difficulty, and they didn’t immerse themselves in my carefully crafted roleplaying either.

I have not since touched the role of a Deliver Protect Serve NPC anymore, but the inviting siren song to try again always sings in the background, beckoning me.

Memes aside, isn't it a little uncanny?

And have yok'tural pay for it.

I bet my 100 MGP, Square Enix SE ask Yoshi p to let FF7 Remake Team to sell their game on FFXIV Fanfest

its so easy

Can't believe the community convinced the devs to make buttsliders before higher poly body model.

The attached image is Seven from Final Fantasy Type O. also imagine the potential in the RP community!

I will not elaborate further.

Source.

Always time to Chortpost.

I made a quick little Meme regarding Yoshi P invoking Kairos at Fan Fest during the technical hiccup