"unofficial" talk of the legit ffxi windower mode.

Macro space, however, is absolutely invaluable. I hope SE has at least considered extending macro size. They give us more ways to store and put all this fancy new gear away, but when it comes to actually wearing it we're still shackled by the mere 6 lines for equip swaps.

I've never used windower. Used to play on PS2, eventually moved to PC and guess I was just used to playing under the basic setup. When I played BRD, I just got to where I could visually judge the distance for certain songs. To me a plug in for that just makes you a lazy BRD (or whatever other job)

To me, the 6 line restriction is just a fact of life that has to be overcome. Sure it would be nice to have more, but it is possible to work with it. Obviously some jobs are more macro intensive than others. I have 60 macros for my BLM but only 20 for my BST and PLD. I have to economize though and take the restriction into consideration when making macros. If other players don't have to make that sacrifice, it's an advantage to them - fair or unfair.

Frankly the whole gear swap thing has always kinda bugged me. I mean here you are fighting away at some horrible beast and in the middle of it you decide to change your pants. Kinda blows the whole illusion for me.
 
Frankly the whole gear swap thing has always kinda bugged me. I mean here you are fighting away at some horrible beast and in the middle of it you decide to change your pants. Kinda blows the whole illusion for me.


You can swap equipment in other FF's mid-battle.
 
I've never used windower. Used to play on PS2, eventually moved to PC and guess I was just used to playing under the basic setup. When I played BRD, I just got to where I could visually judge the distance for certain songs. To me a plug in for that just makes you a lazy BRD (or whatever other job)

To me, the 6 line restriction is just a fact of life that has to be overcome. Sure it would be nice to have more, but it is possible to work with it. Obviously some jobs are more macro intensive than others. I have 60 macros for my BLM but only 20 for my BST and PLD. I have to economize though and take the restriction into consideration when making macros. If other players don't have to make that sacrifice, it's an advantage to them - fair or unfair.

Frankly the whole gear swap thing has always kinda bugged me. I mean here you are fighting away at some horrible beast and in the middle of it you decide to change your pants. Kinda blows the whole illusion for me.
The current macro system encourages people to be mediocre and it punishes those who try to be the best. I shouldn't have to hit 5 macros just to chakra. Hell with the 6-line system I can't even equip my af body and relic hands, use the JA then put my old gear back on in a single macro; let alone all the +vit gear that I toss on. What does that do for most people? It makes them not care and just make a crappy chakra macro that will give them far less HP back than I do. The same goes for weaponskills, it's favoring those who don't have good gear and are too lazy/stupid to try to get the most out of what gear they have.
 
What do you need 5 for? 4 is all you need, unless you're terribly inefficient. And 2 of those 4 are just re-equipping your Melee gear.

Same applies to Weaponskills. 1 for Boost + 5 items. 1 for Weaponskill + 5 items. Then 2 to reset equipment.
 
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The current macro system encourages people to be mediocre and it punishes those who try to be the best. I shouldn't have to hit 5 macros just to chakra. Hell with the 6-line system I can't even equip my af body and relic hands, use the JA then put my old gear back on in a single macro; let alone all the +vit gear that I toss on. What does that do for most people? It makes them not care and just make a crappy chakra macro that will give them far less HP back than I do. The same goes for weaponskills, it's favoring those who don't have good gear and are too lazy/stupid to try to get the most out of what gear they have.

Or maybe the game designers made a decision to limit macros to 6 lines to force you to compromise and you found a cheat to get around it?

I can't really discuss Monk as mine is lvl 12, but taking my charm macro as an example, I have a 2 button charm marco. One equips rings, neck, waist and does the /ja and the other equips Light staff and a couple of other items. That way I can charm mid-fight without losing TP. There's some stuff on my Light Staff macro that would help me on my charm, without losing TP, but I just factor in what I think I can get by with at first and then if I have to use the 2nd button in emergency, I do it. That's the way the game is made, it has nothing to do with whether the corsette I'm swapping in is a +1 or not (it is btw).

It gets more complicated on BLM because of all the staffs and the enfeebling, nuking & healingMP gear. Now I don't claim to be a great BLM. But I still carry all that gear and manage it with 6line macros..
 
Or maybe the game designers made a decision to limit macros to 6 lines to force you to compromise and you found a cheat to get around it?
No, the six line macros are from the very beginning of the game when people didn't have all the gear that they have now. SE has been adding more and more gear to the game, very little of which is actually worth wearing full-time; so there is an abundance of gear that you'd only wear for weapon skills or for some other temporary purpose. It's more of SE's lack of understanding of how much gear people are using than it is a conscious decision to "for us to pick what we want." Almost all of the problems people are having stem from how much the PS2 is holding this game back, they chose the macro size because that's what the PS2 could handle, nothing more.

A lot of the windower plugins fix things that really shouldn't have been an issue to begin with; hell the windower itself is one of them. Draw distance, alliance MP, pathetic macro size; SE really needs to fix all of those in the game.

And skaw, I had 5 for weapon skills because my boost macro was equip af hands, wait, boost, wait, equip my melee+1 hands; so there wouldn't be much room to put on more gear so I just left it as all it does it boost. Although once I found out how the windower macros worked, that solved a lot of the problems. It's still two buttons to weapon skill, but it's a lot easier to deal with.
 
You don't need a wait between equipping and actions. Only actions and other actions. Just put your Melee Gloves in the macro that uses your weapon skill.
 
Ah, I thought I had tried that before and it wouldn't work all the time. Anyways I usually use my temple gloves in my weapon skills.
 
You don't need a wait between equipping and actions. Only actions and other actions. Just put your Melee Gloves in the macro that uses your weapon skill.

thats how i used to do it when i had alot to change, i added what was needed to the weapon skill macro and had another macro do the other gear, Worked like a charm and was the legit way.
 
lolWindowerHax

come off it people - hasn't this been discussed enough w/out getting into it again. If the SE windower lets me alt tab (and not the DirectX style), I'll use the new client w/out windower - like I already said.

People use windower because SE wouldn't fill the void. Blame SE for letting it get to the point of an awesome program with plugin functionality.
 
I've always considered the challenge of using 6 lines to mean that I either had to be willing to extend extra effort or prioritize every macro line. If you want to shortcut it, alright... but it's a shortcut... just like every other cheat, just to a different lesser magnitude.
 
I've always considered the challenge of using 6 lines to mean that I either had to be willing to extend extra effort or prioritize every macro line. If you want to shortcut it, alright... but it's a shortcut... just like every other cheat, just to a different lesser magnitude.

ZOH MAH GAWD someone who crusades against windower because it's cheating actually used the phrase "lesser magnitude"

THERE IS YET HOPE
 
The current macro system encourages people to be mediocre and it punishes those who try to be the best. I shouldn't have to hit 5 macros just to chakra. Hell with the 6-line system I can't even equip my af body and relic hands, use the JA then put my old gear back on in a single macro; let alone all the +vit gear that I toss on. What does that do for most people? It makes them not care and just make a crappy chakra macro that will give them far less HP back than I do. The same goes for weaponskills, it's favoring those who don't have good gear and are too lazy/stupid to try to get the most out of what gear they have.

I wouldn't say it encourages mediocrity. It encourages cheating. The six line limit is the same as all the other limits SE put in the game. It's our job to try and excel within those limits. The great player experiments with gear combos and makes the most of the macro space available. The cheater just gives himself more macro lines and macros everything at once. The cheater isn't the better player. If SE extends macro capabilities, that'll be great, but in the mean time, I'll consider macro size as much an intended limitation as all the rest. It's my oppinion that multiplayer online games have to be played in the format the developer creates, though I make an exception in FFXI's case for the plugin-free basic windower, which SE hopefully releases soon.
 
I wouldn't say it encourages mediocrity. It encourages cheating. The six line limit is the same as all the other limits SE put in the game. It's our job to try and excel within those limits. The great player experiments with gear combos and makes the most of the macro space available. The cheater just gives himself more macro lines and macros everything at once. The cheater isn't the better player. If SE extends macro capabilities, that'll be great, but in the mean time, I'll consider macro size as much an intended limitation as all the rest. It's my oppinion that multiplayer online games have to be played in the format the developer creates, though I make an exception in FFXI's case for the plugin-free basic windower, which SE hopefully releases soon.
It does encourage mediocrity, because not everyone is going to be willing to hit multiple buttons to perform one action so they're going to live with only using one set of gear. If requires work some people aren't going to do it, it's a sad but true fact of life and this game is no exception; hell just look at some people's gear.

The macro limits aren't an intended limitation anymore, they're either technical limits because the PS2 is shitty technology at this point or because SE hasn't figured out that people use more than a single set of gear. The limits were fine 3 years ago, but the gameplay has changed and now rather than only a handful of people change gear, you're expected to change your gear out and 6 lines isn't nearly enough room.
 
It also encourages mediocrity by making the best gear hard to get. By working harder we can achieve more, by having that given to us easily we don't distinguish ourselves.

Also.. windower macros > hitting multiple macros..

They go faster, there's no lag, there's less chance of drop. It's not just a convieniance but it's also an advantage.
 
It also encourages mediocrity by making the best gear hard to get. By working harder we can achieve more, by having that given to us easily we don't distinguish ourselves.

Also.. windower macros > hitting multiple macros..

They go faster, there's no lag, there's less chance of drop. It's not just a convieniance but it's also an advantage.

My equip macros never drop, and I use regular macros to do it on everything except THF WSing. They drop abilities sometimes, but so do my Windower and G15 macros.
 
They go faster, there's no lag, there's less chance of drop. It's not just a convieniance but it's also an advantage.

How the hell does it "go faster," when it just inputs the /equip lines for you? The same thing the stock game macros do.
 
How the hell does it "go faster," when it just inputs the /equip lines for you? The same thing the stock game macros do.

They don't function the same as regular macros being entirely created within the windower GUI and as such run by their own parameters. as a result, they don't stutter and they have instant priority.

If I hit a swap gear macro on a regular client, may take half a second for it to go off, if you do it with windower macro, it's instantly put in effect.
 
Waitwaitwait... So you're saying shitty SE programming that makes the equip macros not fire for no reason is an "intended limitation," or is it too early in the morning for me to follow this argument? Ignoring their length, of course. I just think that's an awfuly silly thing to try to argue about. I mean, if you're gonna argue that that's an advantage, so is the PS2's less-laggy menus and such. So is 360's lack of graphics lag compared to my laptop.
 
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