Why Fall Guys Will Determine The Future Of FFXIV

Fun fact: Fall Guys was made by the studio Mediatonic. They were bought by Epic Games in 2021 who just this year laid off the team who made the game in the first place while raking in bucketloads of money from their owning the IP. Isn't that fun?

Fuck corporations.

Oh my gods, one of my FC mates and I are constantly screaming (in unison) because we've accidentally run an aoe over eachother. 🤣 They'll tell me it was me following them, but my screen (and stream) shows the other way around. It's funny to us, but such a nightmare in the reality of the game. And in the Fall Guys collab, it can translate into absolute hell. I've been enjoying the event, but these issues are long overdue some fixing.

Title-wise, I don't care about them in general, so I've no intention of going for the Fall Guys one. I think a lot of people are taking this mode too seriously, title-hunting or not. I've seen videos circulating of players actually using cheats for this. Like, my dude, it's a party game, it's not that deep.

imagine how pathetic your life has to be that you bot/cheat in a video game lmao

No issues so far since my internet connection is pretty stable...hit boxes seem bigger than usual and snapshot is...what always has been.
Fall Guys, for me, is just like anything else in XIV: be aware of the hitboxes and the snapshot....something old players know how to deal with for a long time.
Now, if your internet isnt stable you'll certainly have issues, in XIV or any other MMO.
Worst in XIV because of the snapshot system.
IMO, that's all there is to it.
If there are issues in SE servers that could be solved and help the game running better for everyone with worst internet connection, lets just hope cloud servers work and solve that
After all, with the influx of new players since SHB it seems very likely the servers will be in need of an upgrade

I have run this fall guys content at this point, hundreds of times. Of those hundreds of times, I have won to date, 70 times. Of those 70 wins, 20 of them I was able to get in the last day of grinding out this event. That's 20 times, over the span of basically the entire day because it was my day off and I had nothing else to do.

I do not come from a background of running high end raid content in this game. I have been playing FFXIV about 6 months, prior to which I hadn't played an MMO in quite awhile. Years even, maybe the last time I played was BDO whose netcode and combat mechanics are very, very different. I share this exposition to say while I understand why raiders love to shout skill issue and denounce the experience that sprouts and casual players express as not being a bug, just nut up and get up, it took me grinding the shit out of this game for what I think is now 2 weeks straight consuming much of my free time to get to a place where I can fairly consistently make it to the end of the last stage unscathed, and maybe win if I don't lose a neck and neck sprint with someone on the west coast at the end.

I would also add that in my experience, if you want to be guaranteed a fast clear of each stage so you make it to the third round you basically have to ignore most of the visual indicators and run each map like you're in the goddamn Matrix, trusting you'll be able to phase through various visual obstacles and that your assumptions of the state of things on the server side are correct. Some days I am basically Neo and I consistently guess correct. Other times, things drift far astray and I feel like I have to relearn the timings, just for them to go back to how they were before later that day. Casual players could probably get a clear with this event through the first two stages on visual indicators alone, although in certain company they won't be fast enough and will probably get knocked out before they understand what went wrong. God be with them if they don't grasp the exaflares in the third round though. If they win, it'll have been by the grace of all the mechanics just stacking up such they can mostly run forward without thinking too hard.

The amount of effort required to hit that achievement of 100 wins is simply, not equitable when considering they target all audiences in the game with the fall guys content. I know you talk about FOMO and all that, but SE hasn't committed to any kind of time table for when this event will return. It could be a few months, could be a year. It could be filler between dawntrail and the next expansion, we simply do not know. So I think panic grinding for the title is not unjustified if you are big on the achievements. How can you even be sure you'll be playing the next time the fall guys event is brought back? You don't. Better comms from SE may have alleviated that but its a bit late now. It is not at all surprising that a time limited event with an absurd target to hit within that time would result in a ton of cheating.

I agree with the other commentor, the bar should have been much lower so that people would be in and out with the event, get their rewards, get their bean title and let everyone else have their turn. Now its mostly sprouts and/or casual players who are trying to compete with people like me who have grinded this event like a savage raid and take up many more slots by persisting in the event much longer as a competitors than they might otherwise, people who are on that cheating meta and seasoned FFXIV veterans with lots of high end raid experience and understanding of the shit netcode in this game.

The casual/new players then walk away disappointed or resort to cheating. Might even walk away from the game completely if this is their first time experiencing some of the worst the netcode has to offer in this game. Not everyone has an entire workday worth of free time to commit every day to grind something like this, and even if they did, it is a really big ask because of the time pressure around the event.

I will continue to grind this out for the MGP and a title I probably now can't use without someone accusing me of cheating because this has largely become a test of my resolve. I don't blame others who might have been in my position, but with far less time, for not following in my footsteps. I hope SE considers this for any future collab content, since I doubt the netcode is going to ever get a major overhaul. It might reduce engagement over time with the collab content if the achievements are more reasonable when targeting all audiences, but I think everyone will be happier for it and there won't be rampant cheating. Difficult achievements are fine and good if you're just targeting specific audiences that are about that. But this shouldn't be one of those times.

Got Queen Bean first week and the grind was brutal. I play EU to NA, so on top of already bad netcode the game has, I have extra lag. I would get hit by things I was miles away from.

In raids, I can plan my lag around mechanics to avoid getting hit due to how predictable everything is. For fall guys though, it requires a lot more reactive play especially in round 3, which is incredibly difficult in XIV.

I hope everyone talking about it leads to the devs addressing it in some way.

I highly doubt the netcode lag can ever be fixed. Xiv is SE's only money maker, and to update the servers would cost alot of money and likely take down the game for a good few months if not years. This is never happening and the netcode will be as is for the rest of its life

I have 67 wins have seen crazy players that play like bots they are really good they just memorise the faster way to cross, i dont have the time to actually compete with them so i use the leave duty trick to get a solo instance.😅

I don't think I personally experienced massive delay problems everybody is talking about except for a few split second invuln popping. Maybe it's very ping dependant, maybe it's just me embracing snapshots and server ticks and accounting for them, maybe it's because I have no combat macros or didn't mod FFXIV into oblivion, but it works completely fine for me.

I realize I’m in an insane minority as i put this event into a perspective of “similar time investment as an ultimate raid”. I got my bean title after about 40 hours first week. Those of us that do that content regularly are definitely more attune to the way the snapshotting works in this game. Fun event but things can always be better.

I hope mother Hydalyn is proud of my silly fall guys hat

It's good that this situation exposed more of the netcode issues of FFXIV. Let's hope this brings some improvements to the game, in the near future perhaps.

This was a great video and good invitation for some productive discourse! I personally really want the exclusive title (King/Queen Bean is just such an adorable pun, lol,) but it's been really hard for me to get wins. I'm tempted like anyone else to resort to mods, but ultimately decided not to.

I've heard people say that showing off the title can be seen as a sign of cheating, and while it's not entirely true I can see where they're coming from. I still get pretty tilted when I get shafted close to a win, or I get hit in round 3 lol, but I'm just going into it with a focus on learning to try and keep my stress down 😂

All in all I'm enjoying the collab, it's just frustrating getting hit, lol.

it s good that people are talking about it i hope it gets fixed if they can

Getting hit by something you passed like 3 seconds ago is annoying, but watching people run through the object at the same time and not being hit is even worse! Lmao

It will definitely not determine any future of FF14 in any way. Fall Guys event in FF14 was just that, one time event. Different type of game, which is out there for people to play. You know, the actual Fall Guys game. As for the network code issues, then obviously this needs to be looked into. Nothing new there however, pretty sure developer is aware of it, but has also other things in pipeline right now, like graphics upgrade, new DLC. Once those bigger things are done, who knows, we can hope that they will take this as their next project.

sounds like a skill issue

Imagine if I had a phone and while I typed out this comment, there was a half second delay between each key I typed. But on another brand of phone the key presses are instant. Which phone feels better to use... I love FFXIV but holy hell Creative Business Unit have to be the worst server techs period.

I haven't had problems with snapshotting like this since Titan Hard back in 2.0, going for my first relic. Ah, I remember when everyone was selling clears for that.

Comment for the algorithm but,

I disagree with you thinking the achievement wasnt a mistake. If there wasnt one, none of this would be happening. NOW with that said, if Square wanted an achievement. It should have been 5 wins. 5 is already WAY too hard 99% of the time. 100 is literally impossible and makes people literally burn out and hate the game entirely and thats why people cheat. Make shit ALWAYS accessible or dont put it in at all.

Everyone knows that title holder is a damn cheater so I’m like keep it up . Let me know who you are please. SE bout to place a newer title for your account called banned.

I haven't had any trouble running the event on all of my characters, and I don't use mods.

Couple of things, one I have noticed that for my character interacting with the game the timing is spot on and super tight - absolutely no problems for my character personally - it's more or less 99% predictable. There may be some things they could improve in terms of the delay in communicating other players' position to you. This doesn't affect my experience playing the game - but I understand how it could lead to some confusion with the fall guys event (which I don't care about and haven't touched).

In terms of expectations surrounding raw latency itself: the speed of light itself introduces 17ms of latency from the US state of Maine to California (3231 mi). There could be some latency that can be fixed with the code but unfortunately I get 70ms pinging things between two ISPs three states away (introduced obviously by network gear processing overhead and/or link congestion) - so expecting SE to have even 100ms or less latency to every player all the time is quite frankly impossible, and you have to at least double that because the players' clients need to communicate their position to the server, then the server needs to do all its processing, and then the server needs to communicate all the other players' positions back to every player. Realistically we're probably not going to get all the updates back in our homes on other players' positions much below 200ms - this is going to be a limitation of basically EVERY online game in existence. SE can probably work towards that goal though. The Cloud data center is probably also a requisite step for that.

This also means that it's impossible to completely solve issues like the one where it looks like you're winning but someone else wins because you're neck-and-neck - but you can reduce the probability of that happening to some very low amount if you can get the updates on all the other players' positions to around 200ms somehow.

Yeah... people have been calling this out since 1.0 (who remembers titan?). I'd love to be wrong, but I don't believe they have any intention of improving this.

I got all the prizes I wanted and got my one victory. I'm perfectly fine not getting King/Queen Bean XD

When I saw the clips of Fall guys in FFXIV I knew this would be brought up and I'm so happy it is. It is probably FFXIV's biggest flaw. I would love to have it brought up and eventually fixed or improved.

You should use a third-party posing tool to force your Midlander to do Lalafell animations, so he looks like one of the Beans. Woo-hoo!

How about no it won't determine the future of ff lol nice try tho :3