Respecting time and lack thereof

Warning: Rant follows... you might want to skip this post.

I did a quick calculation and figured that we just blew through the equivalent of 1-1 1/2 man-months worth of work with the two ZNM failures last night. Counting time we spent on the other pops, farming zeni, etc., we basically spent in total over 200 hours between everyone participating in the event...


And virtually nothing to show for it =/


Try telling any project manager that you blew through a man-month without any progress and see what their response will be. I'm starting to remember one of the things that got me frustrated with FFXI the first time around when I quit... also why I've been avoiding doing any NM hunting at all, or trying my best to stay out of any endgame activity (though I've been failing that recently)


One thing that really bugs me about FFXI is that SE does not respect peoples time. Time is one of those irreplaceable things that, once it's past, you can't get back. Money you can spend or lose, but still earn more of. Food is simple, you eat, then once you're out, you go buy more. Time on the other hand, is something everyone has limited amounts of, but the game is set up in such a way as to waste as much of your time as possible in the name of profit.


Let's take a look at the recent things that SE has added that are designed to waste time


Nyzul weapons
Putting a static group together so that you can climb from floors 1-100 isn't exactly the easiest thing to do. SE claims that the average player is supposed to be able to obtain the mystic weaponskills. Their concept of "average" isn't exactly what I had in mind...


In an ideal case, you'd climb from floors 1-100, obtaining your weapon along the way and assuming that every single run is successful, you'd require 10 hours of climbing. Add in another 250 WS points, and assuming that you can find someone to SC light or darkness once a minute, that's 11 hours of "work" spread over 20 days (5 floors per day)


A more likely case for the average player who does not not have a Nyzul static, and can only go with a few pick-up groups is that they obtain a weapon through luck, and then try to unlock the weapons. Current reports say that it's between 12,000-15,000 WS Points to unlock a weaon at around floors 0-5. Rounding that down to 10,000 WS points, that's 2000 light skillchains. Let's say that you can do 1 light every minute, that's 33 hours of doing nothing but skillchains to complete just one weapon.

ZNMs
So, besides the fact that we can get wiped out at a moment's notice due to virtually not fault of anyone involved, the whole ZNM structure is designed to waste time as well. Let's see, we have...
1. Time spent taking photos. Alright, this is actually good compared to the time wasted looking for randomly dropping pop items in Sky. Takes about 15 minutes to get 24 photos assuming you use two cameras, but this benefit is quickly destroyed by...
2. Time spent turning in photos. Yup. You only get to turn in 10 photos per hour. In between, you can do whatever you want... which basically involves... well, doing nothing. Given travel time between places and setting up to do other stuff, do you really think you can do anything else? If you wait too long to turn in your photos, chances are that they would have moved on to another mob.
3. Time spent "climbing the tiers". The way the ZNM system is set up is that for every Tier IV pop you want to do, you need to do 3 Tier IIIs, 3 Tier II's and 3 Tier I's. In theory this would mean that we would be able to spread the fighting around and fight various NMs for different drops, but in practice, this means that we spam the easiest possible Tier I & II fights in order to progress towards Tier IV. Additionally, the 3-1 ratio means that on average, we'll end up with a ratio of 3:1 lower tier drops compared to Tier IV. This means that quickly, we'll be spending most of our time simply farming the lower tier pops for the right to pop tier IV and throwing their drops away. We already see this happening... Nobody wants the Beast Slayer sword from Cheese Hoarder, or the Insect Ring from Chigre, but we still do those in order to farm pop items for Tier III & IV

Anyway, that's just a rant about the more recent things that have been added. I'm pretty sure that we don't need to talk about the other SE-designed time-wasters like Limbus, Dynamis and NM pops.


I just want to say one last thing about time and respecting people's time. We have many scheduled events where people know the start/gathering times, yet still show up 20-30 minutes late while making the group wait for them to get to the location and change jobs. Please try to remember that there are other human beings there waiting for you, not NPCs in a video game. Showing up on time shows that you respect their time, as does being prepared for any event. Finally, when you're doing something, please pay attention. With many of these events, we've been doing them for months, doing the same thing over and over again. It can be boring or routine, but you should at least give your friends the courtesy of paying attention to what you and they are doing.


Tinnin - Analysis of what went wrong
As far as I can tell, in both cases last night, things fell apart once both of our tanks died when Tinnin used two highly damaging TV moves back-to-back. I can think of two reasons for the failure.

1. Healing not fast enough
2. Someone was "drawn in" and triggered a 2nd TP move back to back

For the first case, I'm really not seeing a good solution to the case where Tinnin does two TP moves back to back. Our mages are already casting Cursna *before* Tinnin doesNerve Gas, and we have mages also casting cure at the same time to try to get HP up as fast as possible. White (and Blue) magic casting time means that our tanks have about 1-2 seconds of having low HP. Most of the time, this is okay since shadows will protect them, but when the mob does two TP moves back-to-back that deal heavy damage and ignore shadows, they're going to go down.

One possibility is... keep a 3rd tank ready in the background, not in range to be taken out with the first two tanks, but ready to step up and grab hate if both main tanks go down. This would likely be very hard and might require Invincible to stop Tinnin from chasing mages.
Another possibility is to have a Dancer ready for instant emergency cures in the tank party. Curing Waltz IV can heal about 700-800 HP, and is instant with no cast time. It's a risky proposition and would require split second timing to pull off, but it might be able to keep one tank alive in the case of back-to-back TP moves. Steps could also be used to lower magical defense for the BLMs, and to keep TP up. Dancers do not actually need to hit the mob to use Steps, so giving the mob TP isn't an issue.

I think the real key to winning is to prevent the two "back-to-back" TP moves. Why this happens is quite well understood.
1. Everyone in the alliance has hate building up. The PLDs have more hate than everyone else, but the BLMs and healers are building hate right behind them.
2. Tinnin does a TP move that wipes out 3/4 of the HP of the PLDs. Taking damage reduces their hate level to below that of other members of the alliance
3. Tinnin changes targets to a helpless BLM or healer. Tinnin draws the person in and immediately uses a 2nd cone or AoE TP attack. This wipes off another 3/4 of the HP of the PLD before any WHM can cast cure. Since 3/4 + 3/4 = 6/4, the PLDs die and we wipe.

So, to prevent this from happening, we just need to keep hate on the PLDs. We can do this in two ways...
1. Push the hate line higher... Frodorn & Cronus are already doing their best to do this. The only thing more I could imagine is to have all our melees sub THF and Trick WS's onto them. Wu is already doing this, but having everyone do it would help more
2. Reset hate for mages. No matter how high the PLDs set the bar, Tinnin is going to do a TP move that will hit them. To prevent this from triggering a "draw-in" event and wiping everyone, mages who think they have a high amount of hate can log off, and come right back on with their hate reset. Logging off takes 30 seconds, and another 30 seconds to log back in, so you won't be out of the fight for that long. Additionally, everyone really needs to be aware of how much hate they are pulling, both healers and nukers.

So... yeah, hope the next time we come up for Tinnin we won't wipe again >.<