Chapter LXVIII: Priority Preferences

This is a mechanic that would support players in several ways. It would be a configuration feature that would allow each player to set the loading and targeting priority order and mechanics since it’s a very performance impacting aspect of a game when you enter in large-scale contents.

First the loading priority. These should be the options:

a) Myself
b) Party Members
c) Linkshell Members
d) Other PCs (generic option)
e) Passive Mode Monsters (not fighting)
f) Active Mode Monsters (attacking someone)
g) Claimed Monsters
h) Monsters (Generic option)
i) Smalltalk NPCs
j) Quest NPCs ( leve NPCs, questholders, behest NPC, etc.)
k) Vendors NPC (Vendors and repair NPCs)
l) Ally NPC (battle-related NPCs)
m) NPCs (generic option)

They all would have the option ON, OFF, DON’T LOAD and the POSITION box. When set as ON they would take part of priority loading, when set as OFF they would be removed from priority loading, becoming part of its respective generic option, POSITION box to sort a priority position to that option and DON’T LOAD option to exclude that loading option, allowing the game to ignore that content.

This way the players would be able to say exactly the order of what they want to load first and last, being extremely useful in large-scale content or laggy areas.

The very same options would be applied to targeting, with exception of 3 extra settings…DIRECT TARGET DEAD, TARGET ORIENTATION and CLAIMED MONSTER ONLY. DIRECT TARGET DEAD option would allow you to direct target corpses (ON, ALLY, ENEMY, OFF options) and TARGET ORIENTATION would offer the SIDE TO SIDE (targets the next target of left or right, depending of the direction you using) and CLOSER FIRST (makes target always the closest targets first). CLAIMED MONSTER ONLY would be an option that allow you to only target monsters already claimed by your party.

I particularly approve the current target mechanics of FFXIV (it was my suggestion actually to use auto-run as trigger) so this is a nice filter that could be added here. However, here I’d change it a bit, allowing players to make up to 4 targeting filters so they could be called/changed with auto-run + directional arrow (for some reason they preferred to use the buttons instead of directional arrows. IMO with arrows it would have way less “accidents” than buttons).

The rest here would be the very same as when creating a chat log. Name it, trigger the target options on/off (same options as loading priority ones) and go for it. With them and the 3 additional targeting options it would allow players to build targeting sets way more specific than the current FFXIV targeting system, leaving the options exactly the way players need/want…including even the option of specific targeting for large-scale or laggy events.