Check out the hottest topics from the past week of the FFXIV general forum.

Did anyone else hear that?

Whatever I heard, I can't really put the sound into words -- try puckering your lips, pressing out your tongue, filling your cheeks with air and then blowing outward -- but oddly enough, the unpleasant sound happened right around the time the Patch 1.15b notes were posted on The Lodestone. Not exactly shock-and-awe on Yoshi-P's part, was it?

I normally don't include HRT threads from the same day, as this feature is intended to be a recap of the previous week's discusions. By next week though, most of this will be old news, and there's too much good stuff here to talk about. Well, maybe it's not "good stuff," but at least it's interesting. This week I'm highlighting Yoshi-P's letter, a discussion about losing physical levels and a clone of SE's new FFXIV Players' Poll.

And now, the links:

Title: Letter from the Producer, III (02/17/2011)

If only today's patch had been half as fulfilling as Yoshi-P's letter! Once again, the producer scored a home run with his candid nature, his explanations of development team operations and his absolute brain dump about upcoming changes in FFXIV. If I were him, I would have stated in the letter that quests weren't happening in this update, because he originally implied that they would be. I get the feeling though that he understands the need to hustle, and I was very intrigued by his discussion about changing the dev team's workflow on quest creation. Being a content/design manager myself, I fully understand how vital optimizing your procedures can be. That said, I'm still very sad about not having quests to complete this weekend. This game won't really be Final Fantasy until it has quests.

Title: Hard Work Lost? The Potential Removal of Physical Levels

In the current FFXIV Players' Poll, a topic discussed is the potential of removing physical levels -- an idea that rubs this OP the wrong way. However, most replies in this thread are by people who disagree with the OP, stating that physical levels are not only somewhat useless, but they also hinder process in several aspects of the game. Personally, I've never really understood the purpose of physical levels. Getting to 50 doesn't seem that difficult -- I'm at level 34, and I'm far from being hardcore -- so what's the point? I'd rather have class-specific stats and abilities that change depending on my job.

Title: FFXIV Players' Poll the Second-The Battle System

Kudos to this poster for replicating the new Players' Poll so that we could get a sampling of results! As expected, none of the answers here really surpise me. If anything, the only shocker to me is that spamming 111111111111 during battles is on equal footing with weaponskill and magic animations -- I'd rather say goodbye to the buttom mashing before worrying about how pretty my weaponskills look. In a couple weeks, it will be interesting to put the results of this secondary poll against the results of the complete poll. We'll get a good indication of how the desires of the ZAM community match up against the wants of players elsewhere.