FFXIV: Feature Appreciation – Mount Roulette
While I know this is supposed to be dev appreciation week for Blaugust, and I’ve written a post to that tune, let me also drop a feature appreciation post. FFXIV in particular is amazing about introducing quality of life updates with expansions and regular patches. Sometimes a feature starts out barebones, and then turns into something amazing as its fleshed out a few patches later.
We’ve had the mount (and minion) roulette system for a while now. You press a button and it summoned a random mount that you owned – this was neat! But it wasn’t until lately when this system became ultra cool.
For one thing, the team added the ability to search for mounts and minions. This was a bigger deal for minions, honestly. If you’re like me, you have hundreds, and a search is almost required to be able to find anything you need.
They also added a way to find a mount/minion you just recently obtained but have never clicked on. A little green dot goes a long way, especially if you just got a super cool new mount and you want to find it really fast.
Then, there’s the Favorite option. Right-click any mount/minion and set them as your favorite. This marks them with a star and plays directly into the roulette system.
Because now there’s an option for the mount roulette to be smart enough to only pull from your favorite mounts! And putting it all together, this is amazing!
You have complete control over your favorite list – adding to and taking away from at your own interest. Tired of seeing the same pony pop up all the time, unfav it for a while. Or fav some mounts you haven’t used in a while and get something a bit more fresh with roulette.
I feel this is one of the best ways a MMO can handle the concept of introducing a slew of really cool mounts, prompting players to collect them, and anticipating that players want to use a number of them. It sure beats dragging a bunch of mounts to the hotbars.