Chocobo racing has been pretty much the same for years… or has it? It’s no surprise when info in online guides is out of date, but what about when there was never an official “update” made to the content at all? Join me as I try to unravel the mystery of what exactly changed and when in one of the Gold Saucer’s most elaborate yet least remarked-upon attractions. Is this all common knowledge and I’m an idiot wasting my time? Who knows! But I had fun.
Sources used:
Chocobo Racing WordPress: https://ffxivchocoboracing.wordpress.com/
Reddit post regarding weather info: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/36fuit/chocobo_racing_data_on_weather_frequency_and_how/
Icy Veins guide: https://www.icy-veins.com/ffxiv/chocobo-racing-and-breeding-guide
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Never paid attention to think weather had any real impact. Just never wanted to spend mgp on raising chocobo so never bothered.
I lived and breathed chocobos for a bit while trying to get my perfect max-stats bird and I never noticed this! 😮
The entire community of dedicated chocobo racers will be interested to hear this; I'll let all three of them know.
Heres the plottwist now xD Supersprintbuilds, which everyone that actually cares bout racing uses, ignores weather, so all this doesnt matter
Well yeah, if that's true then I assume that chocobos that prefer fair weather are objectively the best
I mainly did chocobo racing and breeding when it was new content so those guides did not exist.
Also we were informed back in the day that no developer works on the content anymore after heavenward days, hence only getting duty finder changes rather than new content.
Approaching the tail end of my chocobo grind with perfect grades 7, I never stumbled upon those guides… Hence why I never realized their were supposed to be rules to weather. Feeling so dumb, so thank you.^^ But I had realized that it always starts somewhat sunny.
As for what it changes… since Fair is so much more probable, it may give a slight advantage in having a chocobo which thrives during such weather. Chocobo racing may more often than not be decided by the luck of chest spawning timers, nature and order of the items inside and the quick-thinking to use them right. But things like avoiding deep water, cutting corners, avoiding unnecessary strafing (yet strafing more at 0%!), etc. all affect how your vitality fairs. And, over a "career", those slight changes may be the statistical advantage that makes the difference on multiple occasions. Weather is but another optimization thrown on top I'd say.
I love this, and I'm not even into chocobo racing and understand the random obsession
Good job looking through videos to guess when the change happened!!
This song gives me ptsd.
I stop need to get around to playing Minionmon
I wish I had the autism that made made me good at math and science and shit. Instead I got the autism that made me care about Chocobo racing mini game in FFXIV 😢
Does the weather affect something?
this will come in handy when I'll start my chocobo racing adventure… any day now
My guess is all the changes to the lighting system for Dawntrail necessitated a rework of the weather system too. They probably just didn’t remember it might affect this.
All i want is some new tracks, also idk what you mean by challenges being added in 3.w/e, i'm pretty sure that stuff was there since the start of the gold saucer.
As an avid chocobo racer, who doesn't simply play exclusively by the plebian sagolii build, I can say with complete confidence that I've never noticed any significant performance changes between fair and foul weather. I mostly use stamina based builds as I prefer to race tranquil or bloodshore, but even with my slightly more rng and chaotic item reroll build, the outcome usually depends entirely on stamina management and luck with items. So either the impact is incredibly tiny, or they removed the effect entirely without telling anyone, at the same time where they changed the system.
They made another silent change much more recently too. Back in Shadowbringer when I started the process (I was bored) you were able to run through NPC chocobos, but not run through other player chocobos. Heavied chocobos were also solid regardless of them being NPC. At some time between the last two Make it Rain campaigns though, there was a change that made it so you can't run through NPC chocobo at all, even if you are running significantly faster than them and they aren't heavied.
Not a massive change for max level chocobo since it is literally hit a button and walk away, but it made ranking up the race chocobo tedious because the NPCs could just randomly decide to walk in front of you, and you wouldn't even know for a bit because you are playing on server latency.
I get into chocobo racing from time to time. It's fun and very different from the usual round of FFXIV activities.
Most people who have maxed out chocobos, have super sprint builds, which ignore all of this. I don't even understand what the point of this is.
Maybe have different chocobo tracks at some point?
I can attest to the quality of the wordpress guide and thanks to it I have a dominant racing chocobo. As far as I've seen weather has a minor, if not negligible effect on the outcome of a race. For the record, I started playing in 4.5 and I have been doing chocobo racing consistently since. I would point out that I have never really noticed the pattern of weather in races, but I have not really paid much attention to them because weather is such a minor issue in chocobo racing.
I subscribed @ 3:04
My original guess was going to be that the changes to allow multiple weather environments in one zone in DT were to blame, but if it was 5.0… I remember there were some changes to how weather worked in 5.0 to accommodate the way players at different parts of the MSQ see different weather in ShB. If it wasn’t intentional, maybe this was a side-effect of that change.
My guess is that it's actually a bug and nobody noticed because it wouldn't have affected someone who followed a guide to the letter, and anyone who wasn't using the guide was already not using an optimal strategy, so even if their chocobo preferred foul weather, it was already not optimal and there aren't that many human players playing the chocobo racing, so you're mostly playing against NPC's that aren't as good.