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What did I do wrong?
Pendan
Member Posts: 6
I tried several times to play the open beta but never got very far. I will try to explain by describing my last attempt on Sunday afternoon.
I created a new character and decided to try fishing because had not enjoyed combat very much in previous sessions. Character creation went fine unlike my second created character a week earlier where every time I went to a new screen in the process it would take 30 to 60 seconds. I selected the sea side starting town as I was confident it would have water to fish in.
I selected one of the servers with less “ducks” or whatever the symbol was that appeared to indicate how full the server was.
I had the same problem I had ever other time I had tried to run. The screen would go black and in the lower right corner a spinning symbol was beside Now Loading for 5 minutes. After 3 minutes I had turned on the TV and started the DVR. When the game finally loaded I took the few seconds to run over to the door out of the ship hold. I then got another 5 minutes of a black screen while I watch TV some more. I did the intro to combat thing which is particularly unfun on a crafting character and then got more black screen while watching TV. I think 2 different cut scenes play at this time so about 8 minutes later I once again have control of my character. I go and click on the guy I am supposed to talk to and the rest of the clicking through the conversions goes fine and I finally reach the point I can start playing 25 minutes after character creation.
By the way on previous play sessions I had tried the esc key and hitting the skip that is displayed while loading or playing cut scenes but that did not help and appeared to make things worse so that I had to kill the game and restart from the beginning. Also when the cut scenes are playing they play smoothly. It is just the very long waits to get them to start playing that is the problem.
I think an elevator is in the room to use but I decided to run out the open doors and explore the city a bit. It takes me a few minutes to get down to sea level. Twice while running the mini map stopped updating and I could not move for 10 seconds or so. When I got near the water a fish popped up at the top of the screen so I clicked it and then clicked the fishing skill (why you need two clicks is silly but the UI is a common complaint and not my topic). The fishing process is slow and not very interesting but I catch enough fish to advance to skill level 2 in fishing while watching TV.
I then decide it is time to run out to the starting camp and the run goes fine without any pauses. Also I don’t have any problems with FPS and the software mouse also it not a problem for me at all. Mouse is very responsive and maneuverable. I have an ATI 5870 graphic card and intel i7 930 with 4 cores plus 4 hyperthreaded “cores”.
At the camp I click on the glowing crystals and get the chat text from the guy back in town. I decided to check out the NPCs in the camp and right click on one. Nothing happens but I start watching the TV for a few minutes. When I turn my attention back to the computer several minutes later I find I can move, clicking on stuff does nothing, and the Home key does not slide out the menu stuff. I turn back to the TV thinking I might have crashed. Several minutes later I again look back at the screen and I see the application has not crashed because the graphics are updating but still can’t move or do anything. I am thinking it time to kill and restart when the NPC chat opens up. It basically tells me he won’t talk to me but I get control of my character back.
I go back of to the glowing crystals and get the fishing guildleve. I scroll pops up on the top of my screen. Click it and the menu system opens up with a help option. Click on it and it says to use a skill to find fish. Use the skill and it tells me none in the area. I open up my map and see an area marked on it. I make the run over to the sea cliffs which is where the guildleve text had also said I needed to fish. I see two other players fishing but I run all over the cliff edge and never get the option to fish. I try using the skill to find fish in area but nothing happens. No message at all. I decide best to try logging out and back in to see if can get game to reset only the log out option does nothing. I can access other options in the menu and they instantly open up including the map which on open beta first weekend took 10 seconds to open up (why the server lag caused problems with map opening I thought was funny). I watch TV for a while and try to log out again. When nothing happens I alt tab which I know from past experience crashes the client and restart. Back in game I still do not get an option to fish even standing in the spot the previous player was fishing from. I see him fishing a little ways away now. The locate fish skill still does nothing.
At that point I gave up. Over an hour of play and only a few fish to show for it. This is pretty much how my play sessions went over the previous two weeks. I kept hoping one of the patches I downloaded would make things better. Sometimes all the UI would stop working except being able to run around in the world. Other times an error message would come out and force me out of game. A couple times I froze up with no screen updates and never came out. Always had several minutes for cut scenes to start. Worst beta test experience I have been a part of in 10+ years. AO was even better because if I could rubberband my way out of the city and away from all others the game could be played. Writing up a new bug report in Horizon and SWG every 15 minutes was more enjoyable than struggling with FF XIV.
Obviously some people like this game. What did I do wrong?
Edit: fixed typos
Comments
That's very strange, seems you experienced some extreme lag. I did those fishing levequests without any problem, never met such a lag or UI not working, skills not working problem....your computer is a strong one, perhaps it hasn't got enough RAM ?
6 GB of RAM
Is something eating up your resources in the background? You're computer is a fair bit better than both that I have access too, and I didn't have such extreme cases of UI lag, or the cutscene loads (all at less than15 seconds).
Eh, it could be some case of drivers causing issues. I don't really know. Whish I could help more, but I can definitely contribute that while the UI lag is a problem, it's nowhere near as severe as what's happening to you.
Definately some kind of hardware/compatibility problem, my computer didn't take nearly that long to load stuff up. Tempted to say your hard drive is spazzing out.
No other applications running and a bare minimum OS required processes active. This is a Windows 7 64 bit OS. Intel SSD boot drive and Intel SSD install drive with the game.
The cut scene loading problem was consistent with every running. Every other problem was random or unique to play session.
I ran other games like LotRO, CO, DDO, FE, and Vindictus both before and after various attempts at FF XIV without problems. Cold or warm machine reboots did not help either.
Is your ATI Cataylst up to date? (Driver's) Check FFXIVCore.com I think the Tech support Forums might have a fix
ya i think its 10.6 and above addressed a lot of the issues that ATI struggled with early in the testing phase so if you're using something older than 10.6 that would definitely be an issue.
I have 10.7
sounds like network issues. I know there were folks in alpha and beta who were struggling with a lot of network issues and had to do some tweaking. There was a network tab on the config gui to set up different network settings.
id look into anything network related as well as firewall and router settings.
try pinging the servers and see what your latency is. I think this webpage will do that for you
http://ffxiv.zam.com/en/serverstatus.html
if you want to do it manually, heres the ips
Fabul
202.67.49.96
Kashuan
202.67.48.140
Rabanastre
202.67.49.26
Palamecia
202.67.49.68
Saronia
202.67.49.82
Trabia
202.67.48.224
Istory
202.67.48.182
Gysahl
202.67.48.154
Besaid
202.67.48.252
Cornelia
202.67.48.126
Selbina
202.67.49.12
Bodhum
202.67.49.40
Melmond
202.67.49.54
Wutai
202.67.48.210
Figaro
202.67.48.196
Mysidia
202.67.48.168
Lindblum
202.67.48.238
The port should always be 54992.
*edit* I would suggest using the traceroute method. This website can do it for you, just copy past the IP's from the above list at the site and you'll see if you're having any sort of network issues to those IP's
http://network-tools.com/
if youre experiencing high latency, check this thread for tips on how to resolve that. *note* I cant endorse it, I dont use this method but if your latency is high it may be worth looking into
http://www.ffxivcore.com/topic/16433-ping-reducerlatency-fix/
They're chocobos... How have you never played FF before...
"He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living hand-to-mouth." -Goethe
Right click on computer and goto properties, click on windows experience index, what are your scores for each section?
Shadus
cmd window pings to various servers average around 175ms. Not real good but not high enough to be too worried. Never had any lost pings. No red flags from tracert.
Base: 7.6
Processor: 7.6
Memory (RAM): 7.6
Graphics: 7.8
Gaming graphics: 7.8
Primary hard disk: 7.7
dude, your hardware is fine.. in fact more than fine (but you probably know that)
anyway Im at a loss really. It sounds like you're hitching like mad and it doesnt make much sense. You're not running any sort of crazy firewall configs or unusual router settings?
Im still convinced its got to be a network issue because your hardware is fine and very current