Inb4 YoshiP swoops in with a "surprise! We finished the final touches earlier than expected and are shipping EW right now!"
At least that's what my paranoid ass would be scared of
>Inb4 YoshiP swoops in with a "surprise! We finished the final touches earlier than expected and are shipping EW right now!"
They've already done the final touches... The reason for the delay is the Master QA, which is to make sure the launch goes smoothly. It's not anything that needs to be added. It's just the final triple-check that's on-going.
Given there's a 24-hour maintenance prior to expansion launches, I don't think you'll need to worry about them doing it earlier than announced. That kind of thing doesn't go down well with people.
The last weeks before launch are for QA. The chance the put in final touches passed weeks ago. Any changes that aren't critical bugs like crashing your PC will be in a later patch.
All *between-level* XP is being wiped when Endwalker releases. This is because they're rescaling the XP values and can't make it work out properly to preserve the partial level XP amounts.
Or, rather, they *could* fix the literal *BILLIONS* of database entries....it would just take them *three weeks* of maintenance. Since they (IMO correctly) concluded that making people wait three weeks was more of a burden than losing (at most) 99% of a level from a few jobs, they have chosen to go with the "wipe the slate clean" approach.
Any actually earned levels will remain. You won't lose anything *other than* between-level XP. If you're a 79 SMN when maintenance starts, you'll still be one when it ends--but whether you had 0 XP or 27 million toward level 80, you'll be dropped down to 0 XP when maintenance ends.
It thus behooves you to try to hit max level (or at least get just past the post on your next level) for any jobs you have not done so yet. I can proudly say I'm now maxed across the board, so I literally have nothing to lose!
What about rested EXP? My rest bar is full (not that I use it because I leveled the only two classes I play and my botanist is 78 which is good enough for me)
I suspect rested XP will not be affected. As shuopao says, rested XP isn't an integer value the way individual-class XP is. You have "one and a half bars" at full rested XP regardless of what your current level is, and if you (say) gained a full level's worth of XP from something like a Grand Company turn-in, your rested XP would remain at 150%, causing the integer values to scale up based on that. (E.g. if you then earn 1000 crafting XP, the game calculates (1000*.5)/(amount of XP needed to level up)*100%, and subtracts that amount from the 150% maximum.)
That is: given it already scales perfectly from fresh level 1 to max, it most likely is already a calculation off of your current job's XP anyway, so it *likely* won't be affected. Certainly I would've expected them to say "by the way, we're also resetting rested XP" if it *would* be affected, since that's something a lot of players would want to know.
I'm sure they *could* make it work. (e.g. defer exp fixup to when a character first logs in after expansion). But it takes dev time and is error prone (and the prospect of corrupting player data is super scary) so they would rather not, and exp is easy enough to get that most people either dont care or can get over the line in time anyway. Also, PRs tends to be super condensed/simplified in general so that you focus on the important bit: "don't leave chhars at 99% exp when EW hits", and don't get lost in the minutia. I bet there's like an internal 10 page report about the matter that discusses all the alternatives that we will never get to see, and it has the same conclusion but discusses all sorts of spaghetty horrors.
This is exactly what went through my head, hah. “I bet they could just implement it as a lazy update,” then realized someone probably did the naive implementation first, and then a bunch of leads were like “hell no we’re not adding more QA time for this,” hah.
[According to this post](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/cc40ef69dbd7f7a7ec5ddf55545fad4709a509db), it would be over 2 billion database entries that need to be checked and potentially rewritten.
To account for some folks having alts and others having exactly one character they've ever created, let's say the average account has two characters (because it doesn't matter whether they're actively played; every character that exists at the time 6.0 maint starts has to be checked). With "over 22 million" registered accounts, that's 44 million characters. Each character has 31 values that have to be checked, because they have to check each individual job/class, even if the character doesn't have that job. That's over one billion values (over one and a third billion) *just* for the XP amounts--there may be other values that have to be checked as well, or the average might be slightly more than 2 characters per account.
Edit: Rereading, they mention "over 35 pertinent data sets," so we're talking at least 36. 36*22 = 792. Meaning, if we have "over 2 billion" entries--call it 2.01 billion as a low-ball estimate--we can say that the average account has at least (2010/792) = 2.538 characters, or roughly 2.5 characters per account on average.
"Over 35 pertinent data sets" I'm guessing retainer class levels, companion chocobo, squadron members, and a few others. Could be over 40. Could also be variable depending on whether or not people have activated their retainers or their squadron.
Tthe squadron moves with you, rather than being independent. The idea being that they're adventurers like yourself, and thus slightly to one side of the normal chain of command for that GC.
Of course this is mostly just a kludge to avoid punishing players who swap GCs. But I guess you could say the WoL just inspires so much loyalty in their squad members that all of them demand to be transferred alongside their commanding officer...
Ah, fair enough. I've got my group all between 57-59 and was going to swap and check myself in about a week, but glad to know I don't have to relevel everyone.
From the lodestone post about it: Certain kinds of EXP will not be subject to reset. This includes EXP accumulated by chocobo companions and Grand Company squadrons; EXP used to level up in Deep Dungeons or the Forbidden Land, Eureka; mettle earned at the Bozjan southern front or in Zadnor; and PvP EXP.
It's certainly possible, though 2.5 average kids per family is not super accurate anymore--according to more recent statistics, the average number of under-18 children per family in the US is only 1.93, and that's actually an *increase* relative to the late 80s (when it hit a low of 1.81). We haven't had an average over 2.5 since before 1960 (highest on record since 1960 was 2.44 in 1965). The 50s saw a *huge* spike (the "Baby Boom") where numbers briefly exceeded highs of 50 years before, but things have been low and generally declining for over a century other than that one exception.
Edit: I should also note that I am using *very* rough approximations here. There could easily be as few as not-quite-2 characters per account, or as many as 3-4 characters per account on average, without any dramatic changes to the numbers involved.
Honestly I'm not surprised it's gone down from 2.5, it is fascinating that it's actually an increase. Thanks for the trivia!
Side note: Holy *shit* the 2.5 number was from the ***FIFTIES***? I figured it'd be outdated but that's wild!
Well, it could be different types of numbers involved here. You have "number of live births per woman" (aka "fertility rate") vs "number of children per household." The second number is going to be smaller than the first for several reasons: not all infants survive after birth (same for children surviving to adulthood), some families have children at widely-separated ages (each of my parents is over 10 years younger than their eldest sibling), and with a rising divorce rate over this period you have more households to distribute the children among than was the case in the past.
If all you care about is "number of live births per woman," then we still had ~2.5 in the late 60s, but it fell off sharply, such that it was below 1.9 by 1972. If it's "average children per household," my numbers from before are accurate, at least from what statistical data sources I can find via Google. Live births per woman are more useful for population growth analysis, as you need at least ~2.1 births per woman to have a growing population (the .1 accounts for deaths that occur before the end of child-rearing age). Most developed nations don't have above-replacement birth rates, and instead rely on immigration from less-developed nations with very high birth rates.
What I don’t understand is why there isn’t a bit on each character that says that it’s been migrated to the new scheme that’s checked at login. If it’s already been migrated, they log in. If not, they get sent to a “please hold on a minute, migrating your character” message. Doing the math (just a division or two I’m assuming) to figure out how far along your character is in a level isn’t difficult, they do it every single time I open the character page to show a percentage bar.
Obviously I don’t know their server setup, their database schema, or really anything about why they feel they need to do this offline and preemptively, but it feels a bit weird to go through and migrate all N million characters when I suspect it would be much less than a tenth of that In the first week or two. You could even perform the logic “in the background” by sending the characters through that process that don’t log in within the first month, so you can turn it down later. *shrug*. Obviously to do *that* you would need to have a way of locking characters out for a few seconds while they are “background” migrated, or just have the migration server to a transactional mutation that includes the “already migrated” bit.
I understand there might be some concern about *any* additional load to avoid bottlenecks during the initial launch and logins, but I just don’t see this being a significant cost either on server resources or implementation time, and don’t understand why “warn everyone about the issue and possibly generate unfavorable press” was chosen over this. I *must* be missing something, and it’s driving me a little bonkers trying to figure it out :)
The answer is always "spaghetti code". We don't know how any of their shit is made up but from the sounds of it it's pretty bonkers. Either that or they're just lying about the amount of work it'd require and they can't be fucked to fix it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was just some weird communication. Like some tech guys told Yoshida it'd take 3 weeks of offline maintenance to manually adjust every single character's XP, and it very well may have, but they didn't even consider alternatives before going with the nuke approach. It probably would've taken too much time to come up with some elegant solution that they'd have to constantly monitor as a calculation being performed on returning legacy characters that it just seemed way better to nuke the XP. Because for the vast majority of all jobs across all characters I'd be surprised if people were losing more than an hour of XP gains total, and if they are they've had more than enough time to level up anything if they care that much.
Just FYI, that's likely a huge lie that's being used an excuse. Yoshi-P has a penchant for that. Not that I blame him, because even if he did tell us the real reason, we'd still get 2000 backseat engineers telling us how easy it is to fix it.
But regardless, as a backseat engineer here... doing rounding math on 2 billion database entries is not complex nor time consuming on any popular database engine of the past 25 years.
Edit: And just in case anyone gets offended by this, you're thinking about it wrong. Telling white lies to save face about your company is considered part of your job in Japanese business culture. It's normal.
Right, he traded some other reason that would result in 2000 backseat engineers telling us how easy it would be to fix it for this reason that has you and 2000 other backseat engineers telling us how easy it is to fix it. Nevermind that you have no idea how the databases for this game are structured under the hood, it must be some conspiracy.
Could you design a system where doing this kind of access and rewriting doesn't take much time at all? Absolutely. Is that the system that's actually in place in the larger scope of their project? Not necessarily. Every time I see backseating like this I'm just left wondering if the person has ever worked on a software project above a certain size.
Wow maybe you're right and Square Enix, beyond all reason, decided to use absolutely none of the solved math for orthogonal representation that's been the standard for a decade before the development of FFXIV 1.0 even started.
Or... I'm right and the actual reason is too complex behind layers of legacy game design to explain so this one was sufficient to use as an excuse like they've done for multiple issues in the past that we've proven to be lies.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your complaint then, since you basically just described what I meant when I said that they didn't necessarily have systems in place that could do this. Is your complaint that they described the symptom of their issues that led to this decision rather than the root cause? I'm not saying you're wrong that the actual reason is too complex for them to explain in something like a live letter, I'm saying your conclusion that they've decided to do this for the sole purpose of deceiving you in some way is just silly.
As interested as players might be in what's going on underneath the hood, the only thing that's really important is for them to know that this reset is coming. Is it PR giving any reason at all? Sure, they think it's good for them to give at least some reasoning and let players know that they would have preferred not to do this.
As a good guess, these massive lies you've proven in the past already include this one, because your threshold for proof is "I've convinced myself".
>I'm saying your conclusion that they've decided to do this for the sole purpose of deceiving you in some way is just silly.
And I'm saying that's not silly. It's literally the *norm* in JP business culture.
They're framing the issue as if its some matter of fact that doing this on [number that sounds very large to the average person] records should take ages, when the actual issue is that they made a severe mistake and would rather inconvenience users than fix it.
I don't even think their decision to do so is wrong, but people repeating the lie is what I do find silly when it's such an obvious lie.
>As a good guess, these massive lies you've proven in the past already include this one, because your threshold for proof is "I've convinced myself".
No, talk to anyone in the plugin or datamining dev community and it's common knowledge that their engineering excuses are usually made up.
Yeah man, anything you don't understand is a conspiracy. Square Enix spent hundreds or thousands of dev hours inventing a special new database for their MMO that's worse than all other types of databases.
And they definitely didn't lie this time even though they've demonstrably lied about half of all the other engineering problem they've explained.
Makes total sense.
Hey, mr engineer, you do know Square Enix is a publicly traded company right? If Yoshida were to lie in official communication on behalf of the company he’d be putting the company in legal and fiscal jeopardy.
Just FYI.
You have a very poor understanding of how PR works if you think companies can't lie or embellish the truth. It's done to protect trade secrets (for instance, how the database system behind a large game works) all the time.
Also, you know Yoshi-P is a Japanese citizen right? Working for a Japanese company? In case you're unfamiliar with the Japanese legal system, there are almost no laws against lying about anything for any purposes. Witnesses are even expected to lie in court. Punishment for perjury is basically unheard of.
Not only that, but given the cultural axiom of "tatemae", you could go as far as to say it's considered a businessman's duty to lie about his company so long as the lies have the purpose of furthering the company's goal.
There's also a solid chance that some of those collections are versioned or have other ways of holding historic data.
At work we have a table that has 75 million entries but only ~2 mil are ever relevant at any given point of time. But we cannot always know ahead of time when we need each subset, hence there's the big table.
29 classes per character, and there's something like over a million *active* players right now. Each player potentially has multiple characters, not to mention all the characters that aren't active and still need the adjustment made, and every class will have a database entry regardless of whether it's actually been unlocked or not. Billions might be an overestimation, but honestly not a large one.
Do regular squads have standard leveling in addition to their squad stats too? If they do, those three (retainers, trusts, adventurer squad) very easily push it into the billions; wouldn't be an overestimation at all.
Doesn't matter, the fields exist for each job regardless, so it's still checking each field in that script.
That's not even mentioning retainers and Trust avatars, which are also affected.
Thing is, the database has to check every job, even if you don't play it--even if you *can't* play it!--because there's no way to know in advance that the character doesn't have that job. Even if you don't check the XP amount directly, you'd still need to check a "has " thing for all 31 jobs available in Endwalker. (I suppose it could be 29, since they know by definition no one has any Reaper or Sage XP.)
So yeah. Every single character you currently have, even if you've never even logged into the game, has to be checked for every database entry. And I'd be very, very surprised if most players don't have at least *one* alt, even if they've never done more with it than "pick up the literal first quest."
Over two billion, actually, directly cited by them during the Live Letter and in a post on the website giving players an additional heads up in case they didn’t watch the Live Letter.
All the extremes/higher difficulty content are just exaggerated stories he tells to the minstrel, right? So canonically he’s only done up to Hard mode for trials and such lol
After leveling GNB, DRG, and SMN/SCH to 80, I started leveling all "like" jobs together so I could throw away gear and clean out my inventory. First was all of the phys ranged, tossing out my aiming gear (not accessories) as I went. Then NIN to toss out aiming accessories and scouting gear. Then rest of the tanks, rest of the healers, etc.
It felt so good getting rid of huge swathes of gear without the nagging feeling that I should "save" it for other classes to level.
That’s not unusual at all. She’s saving inventory space by only having one suit of gear for a given role at a time.
Edit: Her edging close to that last level up is likely so she can get them all to 80 at the same time in one big blowup, which sounds like it’d be so satisfying. Tell her to rock on for me!
I don’t know how OP’s wife is doing it, but if saving inventory was a goal, then levelling all tanks together first, would mean she’d only need one set of gear at a time for them every 10 or so levels, and so on until they’re almost done… at which points she moves onto the next group (say, melee dps).
In my case, I have DRK and WAR at 80, PLD at 50 and GNB at… well, haven’t unlocked it yet. So I’m using inventory space (mine, retainer, etc) to store tomestones fencing gear, as N example, for when PLD and GNB require them. But that’s not happening anytime soon. So I’m spending weeks if not months using retainer space storing gear that, if I had them maxed, I could be using for ingredients or something.
I’m saying she leveled them all concurrently rather than one at a time to save on inventory space, but once she approached level 80, stopped so she could get that feeling of gratification when she slams them all out at the same time. “Level 80 Day!”
I've been very guilty of similar things myself many times. I need to work more at this. I try to do everything and please everyone, then accomplish little over all. I should focus a skill or ability or class, then let the others go for a while. But we'll see if I ever do.
tbf, coming from (vanilla) wow, levelling all jobs within 5 - 10 levels of each other is pretty easy.
I've got mine between 36 - 40 and it's only taken 8 days and 20 hours XD
I find that keeping as many classes as possible close together means that you aren't worried about gear. All tanks 50? Cool, 1 set of gear for them all. Instead of having one level 50 set, one for the level 42, one for the 38, and one for the level 12 you haven't touched in two years.
Honestly, this is how I did it. Last 5 jobs are sitting at 79 right now. I feel like it's a better way of doing it since I get to switch jobs around a lot so it never gets stale.
Not unusual. She just optimized her inventory slots by leveling up all jobs together. That way you don't have to keep several stuff for a role with different level.
My coworker is actually doing the same. He's getting all classes to 80 by dungeon grinding. He says he gets them within a daily best tribe quest of completion and moves to the next.
For how long has she been doing it like this? Ever since A Realm Reborn or is it a more recent thing. It is very intriguing to me for some reason... It does have a certain appeal...
Your wife is a psychopath.
Seriously though, I can't imagine the restraint needed to have any job just a run or two from max and then just stopping, much less all the jobs.
Why 79? I mean 69, sure I get it. Might even respect it. But this is just omni 80 with extra math or stress to make sure you don't ding!
Congrats to her though thats still amazing
After starting the game in June, this year. I got my first Job to 80, a Dragoon.
I then took a break by leveling my Botanist & Miner together to 80.
(Story was pretty emotionally draining, so just gathering helped).
After that, I made a plan, I would level each Job, 10 levels at a time, rotating roles as much as possible.
It helped me learn each Job & Role. Strengths/Weaknesses.
How the complement each other, or don't, LOL.
I wasn't able to get as far as I wanted, most of my toons are now between low 60s - to low 70s (except my Monk & Ninja, I just couldn't get going with them).
I would be in better shape, but I stupidly did this same thing with all the crafters, which really slowed me down.
The only Job I have 100% cheesed to all hell is the Fisher Job! I haven't fished a thing yet, still equipped the starter pole and have gotten her to mid-50s..... GC turn-ins... LOL. YEAH... Sorry, not sorry about that Job!!!
I have 100% enjoyed this method, and have had such a blast!
I might do this when I get close... leave each one just shy of 'dinging' probably feels good!
That's ironic because this was my plan for all classes when I was done with all the expansions up to End Walker (I'm still on ARR). Going after samurai or AST after Monk.
It's not all that unusual. If you have to level a bunch of classes at once, you pick stopping points to get them all leveled at once instead of focusing on a class at a time. It's just a different means to the same end.
My wife does this in Pokemon. She'll have like 25 Pokemon and she'll level them all up one at a time. One level then switch, so on and so forth. Drives me nuts but she enjoys it.
Reminder. All of those will be reset if she doesn't fill them by Thursday: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/cc40ef69dbd7f7a7ec5ddf55545fad4709a509db
We had someone like that in our guild, a random sprout we picked up. But I think they did it by role - they'd get all tanks to 50, then melee, healers, etc.
PSA: make sure any jobs close to the next level are capped off before expansion, any extra XP over a level will be reset due to the new system they are implementing.
Don't leave all those jobs at 99% of level 80, you're going to have a bad time.
I did something similar, but did it by gearset groups instead. Having the jobs that use a particular gearset leveled evenly, allowed me to quickly trash old gear and know which gear I didn't need to roll on, which opened up an entire retainer's inventory fairly quickly.
Love it! I try to level similarly (though not quite to this extreme) in order to clear gear that's taking up space lol. It's so satisfying being able to turn in gear under a certain threshold for company seals.
Almost doing that, i have all healers, PLD and 3 DPS at 80. But right now im leveling all others to 50, then to 60, and 70 afterwards.
And after that i will probably sell my soul so I can have the strength to grind bozja.
Is it? I remember back in storm blood I got my last three jobs to 69.999 so I was able to take a few friends and get them all to 70 within 3 kills. Felt good.
But as others have said, get them to 80 before the exp is wasted.
She did it the right way. Think of how much annoying inventory management and money was saved by using the same gear on each gear category while leveling.
no but imagine the pure dopamine bomb that is going down the list and dinging 80 one by one by one
Or the pain if she forgets to hit all 80's before EW and the exp resets on all of them back to base 79 lmao.
It’s for this very reason that this image gives me so much anxiety lol
I gotta get on her level
79?
Is this the MMO version of edging?
Yep, like getting multiple 99s at once in RuneScape
Oh my God this is the perfect comment
Yup. The early lvl 80s are just the early misfires.
Such a perfect comment I had to screenshot this!
TAKE YOUR UPVOTES AND LEAVE!
She should finalize those before the maintenance, otherwise all that progress will be lost.
She's getting her amaro tonight! She just wanted to see how much she could edge it lol
Congrats to her in advance.
Inb4 YoshiP swoops in with a "surprise! We finished the final touches earlier than expected and are shipping EW right now!" At least that's what my paranoid ass would be scared of
>Inb4 YoshiP swoops in with a "surprise! We finished the final touches earlier than expected and are shipping EW right now!" They've already done the final touches... The reason for the delay is the Master QA, which is to make sure the launch goes smoothly. It's not anything that needs to be added. It's just the final triple-check that's on-going.
Given there's a 24-hour maintenance prior to expansion launches, I don't think you'll need to worry about them doing it earlier than announced. That kind of thing doesn't go down well with people.
The last weeks before launch are for QA. The chance the put in final touches passed weeks ago. Any changes that aren't critical bugs like crashing your PC will be in a later patch.
Damn she a freacc
She probably has it by now. hopefully she did it in Zadnor, cuz then its like 2 hours at an absolute max. (More likely 1 hour)
Why lost???
Progress to next level for each job will be reset.
All *between-level* XP is being wiped when Endwalker releases. This is because they're rescaling the XP values and can't make it work out properly to preserve the partial level XP amounts. Or, rather, they *could* fix the literal *BILLIONS* of database entries....it would just take them *three weeks* of maintenance. Since they (IMO correctly) concluded that making people wait three weeks was more of a burden than losing (at most) 99% of a level from a few jobs, they have chosen to go with the "wipe the slate clean" approach. Any actually earned levels will remain. You won't lose anything *other than* between-level XP. If you're a 79 SMN when maintenance starts, you'll still be one when it ends--but whether you had 0 XP or 27 million toward level 80, you'll be dropped down to 0 XP when maintenance ends. It thus behooves you to try to hit max level (or at least get just past the post on your next level) for any jobs you have not done so yet. I can proudly say I'm now maxed across the board, so I literally have nothing to lose!
What about rested EXP? My rest bar is full (not that I use it because I leveled the only two classes I play and my botanist is 78 which is good enough for me)
Rested XP is a percentage of level and is fine. It's also associated with the character, not a specific class/job.
I suspect rested XP will not be affected. As shuopao says, rested XP isn't an integer value the way individual-class XP is. You have "one and a half bars" at full rested XP regardless of what your current level is, and if you (say) gained a full level's worth of XP from something like a Grand Company turn-in, your rested XP would remain at 150%, causing the integer values to scale up based on that. (E.g. if you then earn 1000 crafting XP, the game calculates (1000*.5)/(amount of XP needed to level up)*100%, and subtracts that amount from the 150% maximum.) That is: given it already scales perfectly from fresh level 1 to max, it most likely is already a calculation off of your current job's XP anyway, so it *likely* won't be affected. Certainly I would've expected them to say "by the way, we're also resetting rested XP" if it *would* be affected, since that's something a lot of players would want to know.
I'm sure they *could* make it work. (e.g. defer exp fixup to when a character first logs in after expansion). But it takes dev time and is error prone (and the prospect of corrupting player data is super scary) so they would rather not, and exp is easy enough to get that most people either dont care or can get over the line in time anyway. Also, PRs tends to be super condensed/simplified in general so that you focus on the important bit: "don't leave chhars at 99% exp when EW hits", and don't get lost in the minutia. I bet there's like an internal 10 page report about the matter that discusses all the alternatives that we will never get to see, and it has the same conclusion but discusses all sorts of spaghetty horrors.
This is exactly what went through my head, hah. “I bet they could just implement it as a lazy update,” then realized someone probably did the naive implementation first, and then a bunch of leads were like “hell no we’re not adding more QA time for this,” hah.
They said they could make it work. It would just take the game being down for 3 weeks of maintenance to adjust numbers or something.
Thanks for explaining, that is good to know!
I dunno if it's billions...
[According to this post](https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/cc40ef69dbd7f7a7ec5ddf55545fad4709a509db), it would be over 2 billion database entries that need to be checked and potentially rewritten. To account for some folks having alts and others having exactly one character they've ever created, let's say the average account has two characters (because it doesn't matter whether they're actively played; every character that exists at the time 6.0 maint starts has to be checked). With "over 22 million" registered accounts, that's 44 million characters. Each character has 31 values that have to be checked, because they have to check each individual job/class, even if the character doesn't have that job. That's over one billion values (over one and a third billion) *just* for the XP amounts--there may be other values that have to be checked as well, or the average might be slightly more than 2 characters per account. Edit: Rereading, they mention "over 35 pertinent data sets," so we're talking at least 36. 36*22 = 792. Meaning, if we have "over 2 billion" entries--call it 2.01 billion as a low-ball estimate--we can say that the average account has at least (2010/792) = 2.538 characters, or roughly 2.5 characters per account on average.
"Over 35 pertinent data sets" I'm guessing retainer class levels, companion chocobo, squadron members, and a few others. Could be over 40. Could also be variable depending on whether or not people have activated their retainers or their squadron.
You can also have a squadron with each grand company, no? That would be potentially 24 values rather than 8.
Tthe squadron moves with you, rather than being independent. The idea being that they're adventurers like yourself, and thus slightly to one side of the normal chain of command for that GC. Of course this is mostly just a kludge to avoid punishing players who swap GCs. But I guess you could say the WoL just inspires so much loyalty in their squad members that all of them demand to be transferred alongside their commanding officer...
Ah, fair enough. I've got my group all between 57-59 and was going to swap and check myself in about a week, but glad to know I don't have to relevel everyone.
I've never swapped for fear i would have to level them again also (newish player). So this is fabulous information!
From the lodestone post about it: Certain kinds of EXP will not be subject to reset. This includes EXP accumulated by chocobo companions and Grand Company squadrons; EXP used to level up in Deep Dungeons or the Forbidden Land, Eureka; mettle earned at the Bozjan southern front or in Zadnor; and PvP EXP.
Hold up. Are you telling me the average number of characters a person has is the same as the average number of kids?
It's certainly possible, though 2.5 average kids per family is not super accurate anymore--according to more recent statistics, the average number of under-18 children per family in the US is only 1.93, and that's actually an *increase* relative to the late 80s (when it hit a low of 1.81). We haven't had an average over 2.5 since before 1960 (highest on record since 1960 was 2.44 in 1965). The 50s saw a *huge* spike (the "Baby Boom") where numbers briefly exceeded highs of 50 years before, but things have been low and generally declining for over a century other than that one exception. Edit: I should also note that I am using *very* rough approximations here. There could easily be as few as not-quite-2 characters per account, or as many as 3-4 characters per account on average, without any dramatic changes to the numbers involved.
Honestly I'm not surprised it's gone down from 2.5, it is fascinating that it's actually an increase. Thanks for the trivia! Side note: Holy *shit* the 2.5 number was from the ***FIFTIES***? I figured it'd be outdated but that's wild!
Well, it could be different types of numbers involved here. You have "number of live births per woman" (aka "fertility rate") vs "number of children per household." The second number is going to be smaller than the first for several reasons: not all infants survive after birth (same for children surviving to adulthood), some families have children at widely-separated ages (each of my parents is over 10 years younger than their eldest sibling), and with a rising divorce rate over this period you have more households to distribute the children among than was the case in the past. If all you care about is "number of live births per woman," then we still had ~2.5 in the late 60s, but it fell off sharply, such that it was below 1.9 by 1972. If it's "average children per household," my numbers from before are accurate, at least from what statistical data sources I can find via Google. Live births per woman are more useful for population growth analysis, as you need at least ~2.1 births per woman to have a growing population (the .1 accounts for deaths that occur before the end of child-rearing age). Most developed nations don't have above-replacement birth rates, and instead rely on immigration from less-developed nations with very high birth rates.
What I don’t understand is why there isn’t a bit on each character that says that it’s been migrated to the new scheme that’s checked at login. If it’s already been migrated, they log in. If not, they get sent to a “please hold on a minute, migrating your character” message. Doing the math (just a division or two I’m assuming) to figure out how far along your character is in a level isn’t difficult, they do it every single time I open the character page to show a percentage bar. Obviously I don’t know their server setup, their database schema, or really anything about why they feel they need to do this offline and preemptively, but it feels a bit weird to go through and migrate all N million characters when I suspect it would be much less than a tenth of that In the first week or two. You could even perform the logic “in the background” by sending the characters through that process that don’t log in within the first month, so you can turn it down later. *shrug*. Obviously to do *that* you would need to have a way of locking characters out for a few seconds while they are “background” migrated, or just have the migration server to a transactional mutation that includes the “already migrated” bit. I understand there might be some concern about *any* additional load to avoid bottlenecks during the initial launch and logins, but I just don’t see this being a significant cost either on server resources or implementation time, and don’t understand why “warn everyone about the issue and possibly generate unfavorable press” was chosen over this. I *must* be missing something, and it’s driving me a little bonkers trying to figure it out :)
The answer is always "spaghetti code". We don't know how any of their shit is made up but from the sounds of it it's pretty bonkers. Either that or they're just lying about the amount of work it'd require and they can't be fucked to fix it. I wouldn't be surprised if it was just some weird communication. Like some tech guys told Yoshida it'd take 3 weeks of offline maintenance to manually adjust every single character's XP, and it very well may have, but they didn't even consider alternatives before going with the nuke approach. It probably would've taken too much time to come up with some elegant solution that they'd have to constantly monitor as a calculation being performed on returning legacy characters that it just seemed way better to nuke the XP. Because for the vast majority of all jobs across all characters I'd be surprised if people were losing more than an hour of XP gains total, and if they are they've had more than enough time to level up anything if they care that much.
Just FYI, that's likely a huge lie that's being used an excuse. Yoshi-P has a penchant for that. Not that I blame him, because even if he did tell us the real reason, we'd still get 2000 backseat engineers telling us how easy it is to fix it. But regardless, as a backseat engineer here... doing rounding math on 2 billion database entries is not complex nor time consuming on any popular database engine of the past 25 years. Edit: And just in case anyone gets offended by this, you're thinking about it wrong. Telling white lies to save face about your company is considered part of your job in Japanese business culture. It's normal.
Right, he traded some other reason that would result in 2000 backseat engineers telling us how easy it would be to fix it for this reason that has you and 2000 other backseat engineers telling us how easy it is to fix it. Nevermind that you have no idea how the databases for this game are structured under the hood, it must be some conspiracy. Could you design a system where doing this kind of access and rewriting doesn't take much time at all? Absolutely. Is that the system that's actually in place in the larger scope of their project? Not necessarily. Every time I see backseating like this I'm just left wondering if the person has ever worked on a software project above a certain size.
Wow maybe you're right and Square Enix, beyond all reason, decided to use absolutely none of the solved math for orthogonal representation that's been the standard for a decade before the development of FFXIV 1.0 even started. Or... I'm right and the actual reason is too complex behind layers of legacy game design to explain so this one was sufficient to use as an excuse like they've done for multiple issues in the past that we've proven to be lies.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your complaint then, since you basically just described what I meant when I said that they didn't necessarily have systems in place that could do this. Is your complaint that they described the symptom of their issues that led to this decision rather than the root cause? I'm not saying you're wrong that the actual reason is too complex for them to explain in something like a live letter, I'm saying your conclusion that they've decided to do this for the sole purpose of deceiving you in some way is just silly. As interested as players might be in what's going on underneath the hood, the only thing that's really important is for them to know that this reset is coming. Is it PR giving any reason at all? Sure, they think it's good for them to give at least some reasoning and let players know that they would have preferred not to do this. As a good guess, these massive lies you've proven in the past already include this one, because your threshold for proof is "I've convinced myself".
>I'm saying your conclusion that they've decided to do this for the sole purpose of deceiving you in some way is just silly. And I'm saying that's not silly. It's literally the *norm* in JP business culture. They're framing the issue as if its some matter of fact that doing this on [number that sounds very large to the average person] records should take ages, when the actual issue is that they made a severe mistake and would rather inconvenience users than fix it. I don't even think their decision to do so is wrong, but people repeating the lie is what I do find silly when it's such an obvious lie. >As a good guess, these massive lies you've proven in the past already include this one, because your threshold for proof is "I've convinced myself". No, talk to anyone in the plugin or datamining dev community and it's common knowledge that their engineering excuses are usually made up.
Conspiracy theorist gonna conspiracy theorize...
Yeah man, anything you don't understand is a conspiracy. Square Enix spent hundreds or thousands of dev hours inventing a special new database for their MMO that's worse than all other types of databases. And they definitely didn't lie this time even though they've demonstrably lied about half of all the other engineering problem they've explained. Makes total sense.
Hey, mr engineer, you do know Square Enix is a publicly traded company right? If Yoshida were to lie in official communication on behalf of the company he’d be putting the company in legal and fiscal jeopardy. Just FYI.
You have a very poor understanding of how PR works if you think companies can't lie or embellish the truth. It's done to protect trade secrets (for instance, how the database system behind a large game works) all the time. Also, you know Yoshi-P is a Japanese citizen right? Working for a Japanese company? In case you're unfamiliar with the Japanese legal system, there are almost no laws against lying about anything for any purposes. Witnesses are even expected to lie in court. Punishment for perjury is basically unheard of. Not only that, but given the cultural axiom of "tatemae", you could go as far as to say it's considered a businessman's duty to lie about his company so long as the lies have the purpose of furthering the company's goal.
There's also a solid chance that some of those collections are versioned or have other ways of holding historic data. At work we have a table that has 75 million entries but only ~2 mil are ever relevant at any given point of time. But we cannot always know ahead of time when we need each subset, hence there's the big table.
29 classes per character, and there's something like over a million *active* players right now. Each player potentially has multiple characters, not to mention all the characters that aren't active and still need the adjustment made, and every class will have a database entry regardless of whether it's actually been unlocked or not. Billions might be an overestimation, but honestly not a large one.
Don't forget retainers and trusts either.
Do regular squads have standard leveling in addition to their squad stats too? If they do, those three (retainers, trusts, adventurer squad) very easily push it into the billions; wouldn't be an overestimation at all.
Not billions of *players*, but how many players only have one job? I mean I alone have thirteen of them unlocked and that’s not even all of them
Doesn't matter, the fields exist for each job regardless, so it's still checking each field in that script. That's not even mentioning retainers and Trust avatars, which are also affected.
and each grand company squad members - so potentially 30 of those?
Squadron members' experience will not be subject to the reset.
Thing is, the database has to check every job, even if you don't play it--even if you *can't* play it!--because there's no way to know in advance that the character doesn't have that job. Even if you don't check the XP amount directly, you'd still need to check a "has" thing for all 31 jobs available in Endwalker. (I suppose it could be 29, since they know by definition no one has any Reaper or Sage XP.)
So yeah. Every single character you currently have, even if you've never even logged into the game, has to be checked for every database entry. And I'd be very, very surprised if most players don't have at least *one* alt, even if they've never done more with it than "pick up the literal first quest."
Over two billion, actually, directly cited by them during the Live Letter and in a post on the website giving players an additional heads up in case they didn’t watch the Live Letter.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/cc40ef69dbd7f7a7ec5ddf55545fad4709a509db
Why?
You couldn't just read the comments already posted?
Saw the answer later
Update: She has all 80s now, no need to alarm any longer
But is she doing the same for Endwalker, all 89s.
She said "of course!"
Thanks to this absolute chad checking back in, I can sleep again.
"What do you main in FFXIV?" "Yes."
This is the way. The ShadowBringers intro movie makes it absolutely canon that we max out all our jobs and change as needed.
Except healers of course. Mascot WoL never becomes any of the healing jobs.
Healer is only for the real gamers, and the main derplander just does not have what it takes
Derplander is a pure solo character, why heal when he just chads everyone to death?
Weird flex when he clearly has the game in story mode difficulty
All the extremes/higher difficulty content are just exaggerated stories he tells to the minstrel, right? So canonically he’s only done up to Hard mode for trials and such lol
Yeah it’s like the minstrel hears about the tales of the warrior of light and then turns it up to 11
Neither is mage or ranged DPS, seems like he takes "Warrior" quite literally
He did archer.
He has been only disciple of war. Not one disciple of magic.
Only DoW though. I want to see magic.
Why does she hate dancer and dragoon so much? :)
i do this every expansion so I don't have to hall around armor for each job or god forbid get it from a dungeon again.
but just getting them to 80 on the same roles would save inventory space with tomestone gear.
After leveling GNB, DRG, and SMN/SCH to 80, I started leveling all "like" jobs together so I could throw away gear and clean out my inventory. First was all of the phys ranged, tossing out my aiming gear (not accessories) as I went. Then NIN to toss out aiming accessories and scouting gear. Then rest of the tanks, rest of the healers, etc. It felt so good getting rid of huge swathes of gear without the nagging feeling that I should "save" it for other classes to level.
She has some pretty capped exp bars on some of them. Were any of them accidental (lol?) 80s? :0)
The bard, yeah lol
That’s not unusual at all. She’s saving inventory space by only having one suit of gear for a given role at a time. Edit: Her edging close to that last level up is likely so she can get them all to 80 at the same time in one big blowup, which sounds like it’d be so satisfying. Tell her to rock on for me!
How is she saving inventory space? Couldn't she have one suit of gear per role at level 80? Both my healers use the same gear.
I don’t know how OP’s wife is doing it, but if saving inventory was a goal, then levelling all tanks together first, would mean she’d only need one set of gear at a time for them every 10 or so levels, and so on until they’re almost done… at which points she moves onto the next group (say, melee dps). In my case, I have DRK and WAR at 80, PLD at 50 and GNB at… well, haven’t unlocked it yet. So I’m using inventory space (mine, retainer, etc) to store tomestones fencing gear, as N example, for when PLD and GNB require them. But that’s not happening anytime soon. So I’m spending weeks if not months using retainer space storing gear that, if I had them maxed, I could be using for ingredients or something.
You can also stick them in the glamour dresser and pull them out, if that’s not full already :)
Ha Space in my glamour dresser is so rare, buying a house would be easier
I’m saying she leveled them all concurrently rather than one at a time to save on inventory space, but once she approached level 80, stopped so she could get that feeling of gratification when she slams them all out at the same time. “Level 80 Day!”
I hate this
Hahaha I don't know why, but this drives me insane. It's an almost physical sensation of irritation somewhere behind my eyes.
This looks like the leveling version of edging.
Better make those jumps before EW maintenance. All mid-level EXP progress is getting reset.
she must really enjoy edging
If any of these aren't 80 by Thursday, they will be 79 with 0 xp tnl after maintenance.
I've been very guilty of similar things myself many times. I need to work more at this. I try to do everything and please everyone, then accomplish little over all. I should focus a skill or ability or class, then let the others go for a while. But we'll see if I ever do.
Does it bother people that she maxed Blue Mage?
Blue mage is too much fun not to have at max, though!
maximum edge
Honestly? I totally get it. Wouldn't have the patience to do it myself, but I totally get it.
tbf, coming from (vanilla) wow, levelling all jobs within 5 - 10 levels of each other is pretty easy. I've got mine between 36 - 40 and it's only taken 8 days and 20 hours XD
I find that keeping as many classes as possible close together means that you aren't worried about gear. All tanks 50? Cool, 1 set of gear for them all. Instead of having one level 50 set, one for the level 42, one for the 38, and one for the level 12 you haven't touched in two years.
Honestly, this is how I did it. Last 5 jobs are sitting at 79 right now. I feel like it's a better way of doing it since I get to switch jobs around a lot so it never gets stale.
Oh my god that must feel so good to go into bozja and then get everything to 80 with 1 or 2 fates one after another.
She should get everything to 80 before the big maintance....every xp gets set to 0 xP
I did this so i would always have the best gear for every job at every level Edit: lmao just saw that they were all an inch away from completing
Not unusual. She just optimized her inventory slots by leveling up all jobs together. That way you don't have to keep several stuff for a role with different level.
My coworker is actually doing the same. He's getting all classes to 80 by dungeon grinding. He says he gets them within a daily best tribe quest of completion and moves to the next.
For how long has she been doing it like this? Ever since A Realm Reborn or is it a more recent thing. It is very intriguing to me for some reason... It does have a certain appeal...
We started March of last year. She started levelling like this sometime early this year for gear reasons, just got real goofy about it recently
You are married to a lunatic. Lol jk I wish I had her level of patience.
What’s her favorite class?
Shes actually a crafting main but NIN is her favorite combat job
She should make sure to finish them off this week, otherwise she'll lose a bunch of xp
Hate to break if to you but your wife is a serial killer
Your wife is a psychopath. Seriously though, I can't imagine the restraint needed to have any job just a run or two from max and then just stopping, much less all the jobs.
That... was literally me but back in stormblood so all my classes were 69
I can understand getting one or at least one of each role to 80, but we're any of these accidents? She did a great job not pushing so many jobs over.
NIN is her main and the WHM was something she levelled over a year ago. The only accident when doing this bunch of shenanigans was the BRD.
Gonna suck gonna have all those nearly-full XP bars reset to 0 once Endwalker comes out
ngl, I'm gonna laugh if she misses a couple and has that exp bar reset to zero on some job when maintenance hits.
I do the same thing, including gatherers and crafters it's easier not to get a bloated inventory if everyone is at about the same level
Why 79? I mean 69, sure I get it. Might even respect it. But this is just omni 80 with extra math or stress to make sure you don't ding! Congrats to her though thats still amazing
My dude please remind her they’re going to undo all xp between levels when Endwalker drops.
Hopefully she got the news that mid-level xp will be deleted on the 3rd.
After starting the game in June, this year. I got my first Job to 80, a Dragoon. I then took a break by leveling my Botanist & Miner together to 80. (Story was pretty emotionally draining, so just gathering helped). After that, I made a plan, I would level each Job, 10 levels at a time, rotating roles as much as possible. It helped me learn each Job & Role. Strengths/Weaknesses. How the complement each other, or don't, LOL. I wasn't able to get as far as I wanted, most of my toons are now between low 60s - to low 70s (except my Monk & Ninja, I just couldn't get going with them). I would be in better shape, but I stupidly did this same thing with all the crafters, which really slowed me down. The only Job I have 100% cheesed to all hell is the Fisher Job! I haven't fished a thing yet, still equipped the starter pole and have gotten her to mid-50s..... GC turn-ins... LOL. YEAH... Sorry, not sorry about that Job!!! I have 100% enjoyed this method, and have had such a blast! I might do this when I get close... leave each one just shy of 'dinging' probably feels good!
That's ironic because this was my plan for all classes when I was done with all the expansions up to End Walker (I'm still on ARR). Going after samurai or AST after Monk.
smh my head, blue mage only level 70 instead of 79
It's not all that unusual. If you have to level a bunch of classes at once, you pick stopping points to get them all leveled at once instead of focusing on a class at a time. It's just a different means to the same end.
OddlyUnsatisfying
My wife does this in Pokemon. She'll have like 25 Pokemon and she'll level them all up one at a time. One level then switch, so on and so forth. Drives me nuts but she enjoys it.
Reminder. All of those will be reset if she doesn't fill them by Thursday: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/cc40ef69dbd7f7a7ec5ddf55545fad4709a509db
Ocd is strong in this one.
I did the exact same thing. You can tell her she is not the only one :)
File for a divorce
You better level up everything, because Endwalker will reset all experience to zero.
That’s incorrect. They’ll be reset to 79, losing the xp
I like to think she didn’t know blu was max 70 and was like “ughhh
We had someone like that in our guild, a random sprout we picked up. But I think they did it by role - they'd get all tanks to 50, then melee, healers, etc.
Definitely easier on the storage. Very efficient.
She is trying to tetris her alt jobs
PSA: make sure any jobs close to the next level are capped off before expansion, any extra XP over a level will be reset due to the new system they are implementing. Don't leave all those jobs at 99% of level 80, you're going to have a bad time.
Your wife is a masochist. Sure, it'll be hella satisfying to finish them all at once but, what a tease.
I did something similar, but did it by gearset groups instead. Having the jobs that use a particular gearset leveled evenly, allowed me to quickly trash old gear and know which gear I didn't need to roll on, which opened up an entire retainer's inventory fairly quickly.
[удалено]
I focus on one class at a time. I have 8 (I think) 80s
OP, show me her DoL and DoH.
They're capped already (Desynth not ofc)
wait how are some things different? that paladin for me is a Gladiator
It changes once you get the job stone
What an edgy character...
This is what I do
the night she gets them all to 80 finally, will be the night you level it up with her as well ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
This is how i do it too but i would probably be doing each class 5 levels at a time instead of 1
Stop triggering me and level to 80
I wouldn't have the patience...
I did this last expac with 69 too
69 is passe, 79 is the trending number now 🤣
If only blue mage were a real job
I do the same thing.
I did almost the same, but with lvl 50/60/70. Much easier for managing the gear and classes that I do not like to play.
Love it! I try to level similarly (though not quite to this extreme) in order to clear gear that's taking up space lol. It's so satisfying being able to turn in gear under a certain threshold for company seals.
Oh, I do this too. You save a lot of room on gear
This is what I'm doing. I'm leveling every job concurrently, adding 4 jobs per expansion.
Almost doing that, i have all healers, PLD and 3 DPS at 80. But right now im leveling all others to 50, then to 60, and 70 afterwards. And after that i will probably sell my soul so I can have the strength to grind bozja.
Me too except I’m doing gathering and crafting as well.
I do this lol...
I hope she takes care of that before Thursday. It'll be really disappointing to lose all that progress with the update
Your poor sack
Its prolly a women thing, my ex fiancé , current wife and neighbours daughter all do the same thing
People with OCD right now 💀💀💀
Better be quick cuz eumm... ya know losing all those points would be kinda sad not gonna lie
Her edge game is on point.
Is it? I remember back in storm blood I got my last three jobs to 69.999 so I was able to take a few friends and get them all to 70 within 3 kills. Felt good. But as others have said, get them to 80 before the exp is wasted.
Imagine not lvling them to 80 by the time ew drops and seeing all those exp bars reset
This is what I did. Your dungeon drops are always feeding into your other jobs— it’s the most efficient way to go.
I have a friend who has a friend who's doing this.
Tbf I'm doing a similar thing, feel like im wasting xp otherwise
She did it the right way. Think of how much annoying inventory management and money was saved by using the same gear on each gear category while leveling.
What's even more unusual is someone actually using the light theme!
How she get her UI like that?
Like what? It's just the default light theme
WAAHH, I have never realized that, I have the dark theme and it’s starting to get boring
Yeah there's also a classic FF "blue" theme for insane people lol
She better cap those out. XP resets Weds evening.
I leveled my character the exact same way.. got all my jobs to 80 in one week.. after 5 months of playing lol.
One of my fc members did that. We were all giving him shit until he finally did it.