I'm pretty sure that the design team never intended you to be able to use Midgardsormr to gain EXP by leaving the computer on all night, yes
True. I think people deciding to exploit some of the features of what makes up a game are just part of what comes with making a game, though. It's not like people are actively exploiting a glitch in-game during a normal playthrough (like the W-Item thing), they have to go out of their way to set up something that
clearly isn't part of normal gameplay-- leaving their copy of War and Peace on top of the "confirm" key on their keyboard overnight, lol.
There's something exactly like it in Final Fantasy VI too, at the Lethe River. Probably the people who made the game knew that that the option selection scheme for the river event could likely be exploited by a wily player who wanted to level up fast, but they put it in like that anyway because it didn't matter-- the sequence as it was set up was part of the game and wasn't hurting the experience for anyone; proof of this is that it's never been removed or altered in any of its re-releases while other issues were. Someone would have to actively be a jackass and go out of their way to juke the game at the Lethe River to take advantage of it, lol. And if someone really wanted to go that far, then that's just the way they wanted to play the game, there's no point in trying to stop them. It's like people using a cheat code. Cheat codes don't need to be removed because they don't ruin the experience of the game.. they're cheat codes, they're not part of normal play. They're there for people who want to have fun playing the game that way, and everyone else just plays normally.
Although perhaps the error here is that it respawns.
I don't think it would bother anyone if the respawning was changed to only occur after leaving the area and returning-- doing that sounds like it might be the perfect fix if you really want to get rid of that exploit. I always hated that it respawned right away myself.
Still, holding the button does create other issues - such as being able to accidentally proceed without a confirmation of action. That's usually something a design will avoid.
True but
all of the Final Fantasies are like that. Having that feature is an intent of the creators to make the experience run more smoothly for the player. Removing it may get rid of the occasional misselection, but it will make the entire game more tedious as a tradeoff. The creators of the game knew what they were doing and consciously chose to set things up that way to avoid that tedium. And everyone who uses that feature realizes that there's a risk that if they're too overzealous or not paying attention they could make a mistake. And that could happen anyway if someone was grinding and pressing "confirm" rapid-fire and looked away for a second to take a sip of their Dr. Pepper and then looked back to realize they made a misselection. I feel like giving people the choice on how they like to control their game is treating them as adults. The same as RPGs that include the optional, imperfect "auto-battle" option for people who
want to use it to zip through the tedious parts of battle.
The game does tell you how to move in the operation list by a guy on the highwind. The square button is not noted from what I recall, and it seems to me that moving that way is actually aerodynamically impossible. It always struck me as stupid. The Ragnarok in FF8 (and airships in ff9) doesn't have any similar operation either. But I am definitely removing the square button operation. I feel it is nearly certainly an oversight - and it definitely leads to further bugs.
Yeah. It's too bad it has to go but I get you here.