In Demand

There are days when you do nothing at all. Time trickles by a drop at a time and you find you've spent the entire day on your own, with barely a peep out of the ls. Invariably on those days you are sat wondering what to do barely able to motivate yourself at all to do anything even though you know there are about 10 different things you COULD be doing none stimulate you enough to actually make the effort and go out and do it.

Then there are those days where you just can't get a second at all to yourself. LoL not that this is a bad thing, but quite unexpected and a bit of a pain in the neck if you have set up to do something fairly complicated and inventory dependant, such as crafting.

Last Wednesday was one such day. Having nothing to do I had decided to embark on a bit of crafting, in my spare time between events I had accumulated 5 stacks of bone chips to turn into scorpion arrowheads, all I needed was the time, motivation and a lot of on-site crafting as scorpion claws do not stack.

I cleaned out all my inventory and wandered off to the Crawler's Nest as DRG/WHM. Iz and his friend even came out to help, I was there for all of 30mins before I got a /t from Samuraisoldier asking if I would be interested in doing a Nyzul Isle run floor 95-100. Pondering I was, SURE why not! Lets go. At that point he didn't have the 6 people required for the run, so I thought cool, I can stick around and do more crafting. Nooooo.

3mins after the /t from Sam, I get a /t from Coejus saying would I be interested in a quick BC fight. Considering I thought it would take a little while for Sam to get the 6 people together for Nyzul I agreed, only to slope back to town and empty my inventory from crafting. So much for THAT idea! LOL

One quick Superman style change and voila! I am WHM.



1 hour later, voila BRD for Nyzul.



3 full job changes in less than 2 hours. It's exhausting! The more jobs you have at lvl 75 the worse your congestion in your storage spaces becomes. I am maxed out in my moghouse, my mogstorage, my moglocker and my gobbie bag. I don't even comprehend those who haven't upgraded their gobbie bag to 70. It would drive me insane. I am struggling as it is currently and I only have about 9 slots free!

Quotes out of Context - 6 & 7
These two compliment each other so well I just couldn't bring myself to separate them, I am so bad. Teeheehee. Of course, in keeping with the theme of being out of context they are not related AT all.





But I digress! LoL
Back to the matter at hand. Zipping off the the bc which I found to be The Buried God out in Beadeaux_S, I thought it would be a breeze. Error, Error! Never ever assume anything will be quick in Final Fantasy unless it's your death, in which case it will come far swifter than you desire.

I felt terribly embarassed that I held up the Nyzul group for an entire hour doing this bc with Coejus! Of course, I have to turn down Coejus for a lot of things when he asks, either the timing is just not right or I am knee deep at events. This is one of the few times I could say yes and so I did.

This is Coejus! His hobbies are hat collecting and sitting in people's laps. He is a really really cool guy, although beware his mewp mewps !! They are addictive and will ensnare you in their cuteness before you are aware of it. His tarutaru-ness will inviegle it's way into your concious mind and you will be forever addicted.



As a side note, I have to say going in the past is one of the few times I enjoy taking Chocobos. They are not expensive and very easy to obtain with Allied notes which are equally easy to earn. Plus! They look SUPER cool!



This Past SCNM fight is not one I have done before, I was quite pleased to be experiencing it first hand I thought it would be great to get some relevant action experience for when I took Versus to do the fight.

It is a very small BC zone, with a super shiny Quadav, and his 4 minions 2 BLM and 2 WHM. The set up was predominatenly mages, with SMN, RNG and BLM being the main damage dealers, a BARD, SCH and WHM as the main healers, 2 PLD and I think maybe 2 DD? I can't remember, I remember Coejus being there SAM lol as he had to peel an imp off me as we were huddling against the corroded gate.

It is extremely easy to kite the main NM in this fight around a small patch of wall at the top and on the left of the bc area, while everyone else takes out the Quadavs in Supertank mode. Meaning you have your PLD aggro everything and kill things one at a time while they all beat on him, it really was not hard to keep Aable alive and once they were dead even the main NM wasn't hard as a straight tank fight.

Hate was re-established pretty quickly after each reset and it was just whittled down until death. As it appears with all these fights, once the "aura" of each NM vanishes, they actually become very easy. The auras are often incredibly debilitating, gravity from the Yagudo, slow from the Quadav and flash from the Orc, along with a huge boost to its defense.



Most of the fights seem to be endurance and survivability until you can get rid of the aura then bring out the big guns and mow down the mob before it reapplies its aura.

This was a very successful run with the silly hat and the GA dropping. Some very satisfied customers left LOL and I got a new snazzy title to boot. I can't wait to do this with Versus, I think we should be able to handle it quite easily.

Controversial Conflictions

Quotes out of Context - 4

My journey to work in the mornings is fairly simple. Considering my habits in game, my work life is really compatabile with my virtual existance on EST instead of GMT. I set off around 11:30am, and work till 9pm, get home and log on, it works out brilliantly.

Today was one of those days that just makes me roll my eyes. This is pretty indicitive of every single weekend I work at the moment (and I work all of them), it drives me insane, so finding it happening on weekdays is less than thrilling.

I have to take 2 trains to get to work most of the time. An overland train from The Back of Beyond to The Outskirts of Civilization, and then I switch to the Underground to get into central London and into work. All in all takes about 45mins if the trains are being kind. Today I reached the change in my journey only to find that "The Jubilee line has been suspended between Waterloo and Finchley Road" apparently due to a power failure at Green Park. Much grumbling ensued, LoL fortunately it is very easy to correct my journey at that point, and I just hopped on the District line for two changes to the same destination.

While waiting for the train, an announcement boomed over the tannoy explaining that the line had been suspended due to... a signal failure. Ok. Story has changed again.

Board the train, and get yet a different reason "A serious passenger incident". So three different reasons as to why the line is closed and there are delays, possibly correlated, possibly not. Who knows which is the truth and what the bigger picture is here, all we are getting is a series of confusing and potentially conflicting dribbles of information that affect your journey.

I am sure after regailing you with the facinating tribulations of trying to get into work, you are starting to wonder, umm.. whats the point? HA there is a point, it's sharp and stabbity and finely honed.

Well, maybe not! But I can relate it to the furore that has been going on in game over the weekend. I am speaking of course about the rather direct action taken by SE over the now infamous "duping" ploy in certain end game bc's.

For the uninitiated, although honestly I don't know why now considering how much gossip there has been on the topic, the duping ploy was a method of duplicated ANY drop, be it a humble water crystal or a piece of 35 gear from Salvage. The three zones affected were Salvage, Nyzul and the Sandworm bc's. Through a rather complicated system of disbanding and reforming the parties you could trick the game mechanics into replicating gear, cells and treasure drops which has been monopolised by the end game community under a veil of secrecy so that SE wouldn't find out and fix it.

Well, I say a veil of secrecy, it had purportedly been reported to SE, but I am sure it was one of those "yeah, there's this.. thing.. that's wrong with the thing" kind of reports, where you aren't entirely sure. If you have ever worked in IT you know exactly what I am talking about. Those calls that you dread where someone calls and is as generic as possible for a problem that could be 1,001 things, and you end those conversations with an irrational desire to poke the eyes out of kittens.

So, operating under some supercilious moral imperative that "if you know then you should do, and if you don't then you obviously aren't deserving" whether through a desire to just fast-track getting gear or in an effort to gain a large amount of money, many end-game players used this kink in the programming to their own benefit.

Now a lot of the furore over this has been particularly virilent. We have the Holier-than-thou crowd that you would usually associate with religious santimony, who are quite happy to crow and laugh as the mighty are felled by SE for cheating. Then on the other side you have those who got caught and burned decrying SE for being poor programmers, opening loopholes that obviously should be exploited if they are there and it wasn't my fault, it was their's for not forseeing this kind of attitude. Personally I think both are as bad as each other, there are no black and whites in situations like this.

SE seem to have been fairly indescriminate in their bans, selecting those who they can dicernably recognize as exploiting the loophole and then assigning a punishment dictated by what ever arbitary conditions they have set amongst themselves.

Yes as a community this is shocking, but one can't help but feel that is the point. If you are going for a particular aim, you start with an object lesson and let the fear from that become a forerunner for you, enabling you to exploit that. In the case of SE, this is a very direct object lesson on cheating. These are not RMT, they are the people you know day in day out, they come to your events, you talk to them, you heckle them at the AH. They are your friends and fellow adventerers and now they are gone.

Now, my feelings tend to be, if you cheated you shouldn't be surprised if this happens, but it is such a grey area, complicated by the fact that 2 people who I think the world of got caught up in it for experimenting with the glitch on a water crystal. They didn't get permanent bans, but they did get a 3 day suspension for it which was upsetting.

I can rationalise why it happened, but I don't have to like it, I also don't think that SE are unjustified in their actions on this matter, this was a fairly clear cut case of the players exploiting a glitch that is inevitable in a programming project on the scale of an MMO, in a way that was unfair and exploitary rather than coming clean about it.

It is all about how much information you know about something, it alters your perspective every time. It changes how you think, feel and react to a situation. London Underground have a passenger charter that states if your journey is delayed for 60mins or more, you are entitled to a refund for your trip. A passenger incident is outside their domain of control and therefore null and voids that agreement, but a signal failure is entirely their own fault.

Shifting the blame after getting caught is a childish response, over reactions are inevitable but just as despicable in either extremes, gloating over someone losing their access to FFXI is not funny even if what they did was wrong, and for those who wish to say "It's SE's fault for not making it me proof", grow up.



On to brighter things!

Ring and Iz have been leveling their Black Mages together, kind of. LoL, it seems a more comical affair rather than any really productive leveling effort, whereby they have come together maybe twice that I can think of to gain meaningful exp, rather than just death or disaster in one form or another. It is quite entertaining.

I was invited along, but honestly, I don't really want to level BLM right now, I am quite happy to leave it at lvl 40 for the time being. I could have gone along as RDM, and up till level 40 I did tag along on one of their runs, but again by the time I hit 40 any urge to level RDM had somewhat dwindled and I was back to wondering whether I should save up for the next stage in Gungnir, my Marduk imperial wootz ingots finally, or could I possibly entertain the notion of leveling another job.

Running around farming on my various jobs, which I do quite a lot, I was struck by the ridiculousness of not having THF to do this on. To all accounts and purposes it would be certainly more productive of my time BUT and this was a fairly big stumble in my thinking, I didn't enjoy leveling thief. I got it to lvl 15 under duress simply because I had decided I needed some form of TH in my farming, but I left it there 50exp from lvl 16 quite happy to abandon t he job.

So it is with some puzzlement that I have taken it up again. LoL and am kind of surprised to find that I am enjoying it as well. I don't know why, logically nothing has changed, just my attitude and I again, don't know why. It isn't like I have had an ephiphany of understanding or any dawning of great wisdom. Most peculiar.

I am lvl 26 now, lol I have been running around with ThazCat in various zones and a variety of jobs for Kitty level syncing down to my level. We tried out Fields of Valour, a first for Thazienne and a fantastic way to level up if you can spend the time and effort getting a page.

LoL we have had somewhat mixed results, the chests proving a deadly temptation as I failed to notice Thaz dying as I lay entranced by the appearance of a brown casket OOPS. Heheh. Although generally it has been quite successful and a LOT of fun in the process it is slower than some of the jobs I have leveled, and I do spend a great deal of my time soloing on the job more than being in a party.

Balance

A lot of the arguements and conversations that go on over at the BG forums seem to revolve around a cyclic repetition of "you are wrong, I am right" that sucks the intelligence out of you just for reading it, never mind engaging it.

Some people just will not be told, regardless of how right or wrong they are there is nothing else but their opinion and there is no room at all in their way of thinking for anything else at all.

I find these kinds of people extremely frustrating to deal with. Although I also know better than to try and argue with them as well, you might as well be dripping water from a pipette to put out a furnace than explain rational and reasoned thinking to these types of people. The former would be far more productive.

Now, I can understand the notion of doing something one way because you know it works. Experimentation is a difficult thing to know when to do and when to play it safe, as an Ls Leader my own whims suddenly become subject to the fact that I am also responsible for everyone else as well. Questions need to be addressed before you just plunge in. Can we do it, do we have the man-power, or the technical skills to pull this off, can we afford the exp loss, is it worth our time.

I tend to err on the side of caution a lot of the times because I am not just toying with my own exp and time, but everyone elses as well, which means that when it comes to the linkshell, I will be more conservative MOST of the time. I have been know to throw caution to the wind and just trust in blind faith that the ls can carry it through. Winging it like that is so exciting, the ls pulls together because you have the trust that they will unite behind you and achieve the goals you have set out.

Now we have been doing End Game for a long time, the same fights over and over in the same way pretty much with some tweaks here and there. When we first started I was 1 WHM and we had PLD/WAR on Byakko. Now its PLD/NIN and NIN/DRK and far more cure back up, lol I wouldn't ever want to put that much stress on 1 mage for a fight like that, I know it was mind numbing when I did it, but it DOES hone your skills.

MP Conservation, timing and judgement brought together to win. It is when you start becoming blase and casual about things that you lose, when you really really REALLY shouldn't be doing. There is little excuse for people these days to fail fights against certain end game mobs, it isn't hard to research out the basics of the fight, and while nothing can beat raw experience you should be able to adapt fast enough to a changing battlefield to cope with the quirks of a fight that you never read about.

You do need a strong leader for that, it is too easy to lose a fight with 20 voices all chiming in contradictory information turning your ls into a Push-me-pull-you that unravels at the seams and you are suddenly all dead and your WHM is having to home-point to come raise everyone.

There is more to running a linkshell than just throwing your members at a mob, it is a multi-faceted role that requires you to be patient, durable and innovative. It also requires you to be a rock regardless of the turn of events. You are in a position where people will hate you and idolise you. Neither of which are an easy mantle to wear both as damaging and open to chiping away at your humanity to make you vulnerable and bring you low.

MMMmmmmmm

So, today is only going to be all about the Moblin Maze Mongers which I had a chance to (very briefly) try out at Fan Fest '08, and slightly more time to try out in game now they have finally gotten over most of the speed bumps that let players use it with any degree of regularity.

BUT, before I digress! Since I have two for you today, I am going to start with this beauty!

Quotes out of Context - 02



OK, now that is out of the way *grin* (Q manages to provide both of the quotes for today LoL)

On to the MMMmmmmmm's. So! Moblin Maze Mongers. New ingame event introduced by SE to tantalise our tastebuds. The trial of it at the Fan Fest was lukewarm at best. About 5mins of effort for a bit of a confusion with a weird selection of jobs to achive the target, which was to kill 1 nm.

The live demonstration was hilarious for all the wrong reasons. First off it broke when they were trying to zone in, so it took about 15mins of surreptitious fiddling to finally get into the maze, with a fantastic "The hand of darkness is preventing you from entering" which sadly they have lost for the general release.

Then the PLD they had walking around doing the demonstration took on a triffid and got flattened, so they got to talk about the remainder of the demonstration with a dead hume in the foreground. LOL a resounding success.

So after that rather limp introduction, my enthusiasm for it was also equally limp. But, as is inevitable with these new additions to the game, someone in the Hive wants to try it out, and I get roped in along the way LOL! Not entirely unreluctantly I have to add ^.^

If you have never started it before you have to go have a natter with 2 goblins in Muckvitz's Junk Shop in Lower Jeuno. Goldagrik and his/her/it's companion Chatnachoq. Goldagrik will provide you with your first maze pouch, and a few basic runes to kick things off with and have a little bit of a play with which SE have had the blessed intelligence to make a key item and NOT something hogging even more space in your inventory.



Having used your precious items and stashed them in your key item pouch, you are just left with the Maze Tabular, which is your building board for creating your maze. As it currently stands there are only 3 voucher types. These dictate the specific goals of your maze, 01 being OBLITERATE ALL to win, 04 is a synthesis run and 07 is an NM run. The numbering suggests there is plenty of room for SE to add a variety of different objectives and goals to the mazes if they want to. After selecting the goal of your maze, you move onto what is IN your maze and this is where the runes come into play. There are 100's of these as far as I can tell, as drops from the chest at the end, or purchasable from Chatnachoq for marbles gained from completing your objectives, like a finite game of tetris you can squash as many or as few of these runes into your tabular as you can squeeeze onto the board to make your maze like a walk in West Ronfaure or an attempt to solo Einherjar Tier III as a lvl 10 THF.

After you have spent 10mins going... "But how do I rotate the pieces?" you can take your completed tabular to the pothole that serves as the Moblin Maze shopfront bizzarely set in the floor of the chocobo stables in Lower Jeuno. First thing that struck me when they announced this was, "wait.. this is .. a tunnel, underground... and under Lower Jeuno is definately Port Jeuno.. so where is this tunnel leading to?" Followed rapidly by the realisation that while other servers may not be particularly busy, Odin has a thriving populous and so the lag in doing anything around this one single target is going to be horrendous.

I am not wrong. You have to spam trade your item to the pothole constantly to get anywhere, and you get tantalised with it negotiating only to find out someone was half a second faster and beat you to it. Since it is a very slow loading time it is kind of frustrating and you do tend to stand around for 10mins twiddling your thumbs while the party leader attempts to get you in.



Once in, your timer starts immediately, you have the chance to fiddle around in a rather pleasant open grotto airly lit and actually rather idyllic in tone. In one corner lurks the moblins who will take you into the maze or sell you temporary items.

It is worth remembering that you only have 30mins to complete the objectives in here just like with Nyzul, and equally just like with Nyzul it is prudent to get your items and get started without gawping too much at the pretty scenery or you are likely to run out of time and fail your objective, particularly with some of the harder settings for the maze.

Even with 6 people it can be quite a challenge on the harder settings. We did a few on the basic settings killing T mobs for about 30exp. They seem squishier than regular mobs to be honest, except the elementals who seem infinately more resiliant. I have not seen how they fare versus magic damage though so I don't have a definitive opinion on this. But just from watching them take down Manticore and greater birds, it is easy to see that these usually high HP mob types were taken down a lot easier than you would have expected for something of the equivalent difficulty outside of the maze. I did win a rune that made everything in the zone IT to the party, and we tried that out. The mobs were considerably harder and we did end up running out of time.



So after getting buffed up and ready to go in, you visit this chap who sends you deeper into the maze and you can begin to wander around. It's the same well lit, airy open cave type inside the maze, and lets be clear here. Maze is a VERY loose term for this. LoL it's not a maze in the traditional "hedge maze" sense with winding paths and booby traps and dead ends, false corners and changing walls.



LoL, I only remembered to take a SS of the first map, but this is what the zone looks like in the first arc.

It is just an inside zone with a series of challenges to overcome peppered with mobs along the way. There is a LOT of space inside between the mobs, I have to say I thought when I watched the demo at fan fest the zone looked different to what I remember seeing in the maze. So possibly there will be different zones coming up? But for now it seems to be the same map and area. There is a passage to a second map on the far East side in the little wriggle that looks like a colon, but that is just a large circular room filled with even more mobs.

If you do get elementals, it will be the elemental corresponding to the day you went into the maze, but it is not always guaranteed you will get them, it can be just two mob types as well. Since we weren't specifying what exactly we wanted in the maze I presume you just have a preset basic list that the maze can generate from. It is MUCH easier when you don't get elementals LOL I have to add.



I love how everything is called the same in this particular tab, we only did the kill everything in your path setup, which is full of "Maze Lurkers" which is the default name of any mob you get in the zone. Lurking with INTENT! *giggle*

INTERMISSION!
*elevator music*

Quotes Out of Context - 03



Q on top form in the last few days *chuckle*

One of the grand delights of doing events is hanging around with your friends, having a laugh (usually at someone else's expense, we heckle a LOT in Versus, if you aren't getting heckled it is more than likely you are not fitting in) as well as doing our events. Events have just started up again in Versus, as I gave the ls 2 weeks off over Christmas.

Now, I know this is a bit unusual, most ls' don't suspend their events or give their members "half-terms" or "ls holidays". But I think it is a productive incentive. It keeps people interested and eager to come to events, you don't feel beaten down because you get a refresher every now and then, and remember how much you enjoy doing events lol and it lets me do something else OTHER than events.

I love hanging out with my ls! It is SO much fun. Hilarity ensues with great regularity, particularly if you happen to send a classic mis-tell to party chat in the middle of Limbus /grin!

Quotes out of Context

So, I finally join the ranks of those who have aquired the Tidal Talisman and its in-game counterpart. A very sweet present from Mr. Ringthree /big grin. SE said they intentionally designed the in-game item to look dowdy and a bit plain, non-descript if you will. Certainly the colour scheme lends itself to that with the soft browns and simple edges, however they have released screenshots of other pieces of gear with the same model but different skins looking far more ornate and interesting.



It is a bit of a strange item to be honest, you can't get away from the fact that it IS a gimick to sell on the necklace that comes with it, it's still cool though. LOL, or mayhap I am just easily amused, it is handy as a quick hop to Jeuno if you are in a hurry, every 2 days or something like which is the recharge on it. Sometimes you wish these use once a day items actually had some realistic reuse schedule like once a day. That would be practical. Every 24hours. Not every 64hours. How many times have you only needed to go to Jeuno once every 40hours when exping around lvl 25-40.

Since I am leveling DNC at the moment I fully know what it is like zooming back and forth between Jeuno and my home point in Windurst, yes yes, I know, I could set my home point in Jeuno for the duration of my time leveling DNC to 40, but UGH. Jeuno might once have been the hub of all activity, but the introduction of Whitegate put paid to that and now Jeuno is no longer the most accessible place.

Sure you can warp to it from Whitegate, at a cost. True if you regularly exp 1 silver imperial piece isn't much and you can always take your chances with the random warp taru and his lottery landings outside Jeuno but you have to airship in to anywhere else and while the airship only lasts 3mins if you miss it it is 11mins for another to show up, which is a substantial amount of time sat around twiddling your thumbs gazing into the waters of Jeuno and wondering if they have flotsam issues.

I love being in Windurst, 300g to Whitegate, OP warps right outside the moghouse (finally! That jog was a pain in the neck previously) Convenient access to the maws if it is needed, the only convoluted path is Jeuno. But it is still more of a point from where I can get everywhere quickly than Jeuno. The biggest problem with Jeuno is that there is no Wildcat warp to Whitegate. Now before you all get up in arms, yes I know, SE have finally said they are going to implement the Lure Of The Wildcat warp from Jeuno in an upcomming update, so we might see yet another shift in the population base back to Jeuno. Me? I will still be living in Windurst, with the convenience of access to my moglocker, mog house AND most importantly my mog locker.

What I do find interesting about this body piece is that it finally has a bit of flashy interface, around the actual talisman itself more associative with the furnishings in your moghouse than your gear. Not only does it have the glint on the neckpiece itself, but the graphic for it in your inventory is an icon of the pendant, not a body shaped icon as you would expect which took me by surprise. Possibly as a way to be distinctive in its means and intent to be not really something that serious, more a bit of frivolity or should we go more rampantly speculative and possibly go with the idea that it is a test, a trial to see exactly how such enhancements work within the game, if it does cause any additional graphical lag and such as a possibility towards more gear coming out with similar kinds of enhancements.



Hellzfury, Dragoon extraordinnaire, short-ass hume and all round goblinhumper brought a bunch of his friends from real life into the Hive (CoveredInBees) right about the time his participation in the game began to wane due to the constricts of real life (booo). Ehrii, Raider, Majorshoes and a few others have been getting to grips with life in FFXI and all the fun of leveling your first job to 75.

Most of them are now at the same point in their game career where certain progression hurdles must be overcome such as the genkai quests and most importantly, your AF fights. We have been running around in dribs and drabs getting coffer keys, hunting down the chests and blobbing nm's for the various pieces they all need over the last few days. I have to say I am LOVING the new respawns on coffers for AF. We had the unfortunate instance to have a chest snaked from us by a rather enterprising Taru right after Raider died to a horde of orcs and we were waiting for her to unweaken so she could pop it.

With the new improved coffer respawn only being 5mins for AF and maps (I have never actually seen how it works on gil and items, I am presuming some kind of character block that prevents you from opening any more coffers for 30mins?) it wasn't long before it recharged and we could finish up in Davoi scurrying away with our loot of 2 coffer keys, 2 bits of AF and the PLD AF mobs defeated.



This guy is WAY easier to kill in the present than in Campaign! LOL.

Finally, I have decided to install a new and ongoing bit of fun into my blog. Quotes taken out of context, delightfully wicked soundbites that in the shape and form of whatever it was we were doing at the time made perfect sense, but taken outside their original intent and just randomly thrown out into the wider world you suddenly get some delightfully entertaining or just plain bizzare moments to play with.

Quotes Out Of Context - 01

Obligation

How far is our obligation to others in FFXI?

This is not an unsusual or poor question to ask, after all we are part of a larger community here, this is not World of Warcraft. Final Fantasy has elements that allow the player to progress on their own, even Beastmaster is a job that encourages you to level by your own. It is just that the emphasis is primarily on team work.

How hard is it to work together, communication is vital as well as being willing to pull your own weight. It is facinating watching large scale events, they quite often can be less effective and more chaotic than small scale events where you can't hide your laziness in the group. The need to pull your own weight rather than slack off and expect someone else to do it is much more immediate.

Also I believe a certain level of responsibility comes with your job. You don't level a WHM to be a damage dealer, or a DRG to be the healer of your party. The odd varitations come more into play if you are doing something solo, such as campaign, random bc's or some such other activity in which a more esoteric combination is not really an issue.

Ok admittedly it doesn't hurt to play with conventional wisdom, if we hadn't done that we would never have ended up with NIN/DRK and PLD/RDM. BUT! That doesn't mean that all weird combinations work! You don't show up to events as WHM/WAR there is no point, similarly you won't show up to an exp party as DRK/BLM, its just not relevant to the situation. There is no real application for it.

All this rambling does have a point, inevitably I do get there. I was in an exp party, nothing wrong with that other than its randomness as I did get a blind invite from the COR while lurking in Jeuno as DRG/WHM. LOL trust me, that really doesn't happen that often. I am almost always BRD or WHM in parties so the rare opportunities I get to do something on DRG other than farming I seize (This does not mean that going melee to Einherjar is any less crappy, I need 1 med. that I carry with myself anyway on mage jobs, and about 7 different things on a melee job to be considered well prepared BLEH)

So, blind invite whoohoo, from a corsair, with 2 bards, and a red mage, sooo I was wondering a little here, we seem kind of heavy on the support jobs, but corsair is a decent enough ranger type of job and we ARE going to birds, so ok ok pretty good and I had them scoop up Ringthree on SAM for our final job. You can tell this isn't going to be pretty can't you.

On paper, this looks like a sexy setup, ok you only have 2 dd to do the primary damage BUT, those two dd are a samurai and a dragoon who love playing their jobs and so strive to be efficient and excel at what they bring to the party. Then we had 1 bard who came /whm, another who came /sch. Now admittedly there was a mix-up and they didn't realise that there were 2 bard in the party but it did make pulling very hard work as they were constantly getting slept. A red mage and the corsair came /war.

Ok, slightly peculiar but hey we can swing with it, I've been in odd setups before and they have surprisingly worked. The two buffs the corsair decided to give us were a ranged acc roll, ooookay.... and chaos roll. Fair enough. NEVER cast any rolls on the mages the entire party. Far too preoccupied with how much damage they could do against a Dragoon and a Samurai.

Now, when you know a party is being parsed, you cheat. Hedge the bets so you can stack them in your favour, it is not unexpected. This person, who I don't really want to name, was OUTrageous in their cheating. Using food, but making sure they never pulled hate by only using weapon skills at 5%. Since ranger weaponskills are 1 hit, you get a huge spike damage to assist you on the parser and the kill shot. Now you could call this just general grumbliness on the part of being a dragoon. I am not about to use wheeling thrust in exp, and all my other weaponskills are multi-hit, so if I ws at the end of a fight, I am always going to lose out on damage on a parser, showing up an inherant flaw in these devices. But it is a bit of fun and gives you more a representation of average damage rather than perfect damage. However, I am not the only job with strong end game weaponskills that are multi-hit. ^.^ Haha!

The rolls they cast were beneficial only to themselves really, and not really anyone else in the party, sure they gave us chaos roll, but they didn't bother with anything for the struggling RDM, who was patently not used to this kind of mass carnage exp party. When asked about it, their only response was "What's the point when it isn't needed?"

Indeed what is the point, it WAS necessary and at what point were we just there for them to come 3rd in the parser and try and out damage 2 seasoned melee jobs for the sake of saying "Oh I play corsair different from everyone else". There was no sense of team spirit or co-opreation and while we were making decent exp, it really wasnt a fun party. Just kind of sad that you knew not everyone in the party was pulling together to make it amazing.

So at what point should we be thinking about the other people we are working with as well as our own goals?

Knee-Jerk Reactions

How do we contain ourselves to not have a knee-jerk reaction? Is it even possible or is it something so basic in human emotion, a primal and uncontrolled need for the first initial reaction to be over the top, angry, emotive and completely irrational. Heavens forbid that we might apply some common sense to a situation when it threatens us, why would we want to do anything so foolish.

Square Enix has announced that they are closing down the World Transfer service to Odin. This is due to chronic overcrowding finally reaching a point where it is affecting the service and performance of the server.

This isn't an unknown problem, SE have said before I think about a year ago, that Odin was overcrowded. They didn't seem to take steps to do much about this at the time, applications for transfer to the server remained open despite it already being a snug fit. Now we are at a point where we are at over capacity.

Not only are they shutting off the applications to Odin, but they are re-offering to transfer people from Odin over to other servers for free. Perhaps you are tired of the constant competition for everything on Odin, or have basically burned every bridge you had in the community and want to start afresh, what ever your motivations people do transfer servers. Some find it much more beneficial and possibly good to get out of the previous environment others just fold up their bags and quit.

This move does seem a shade peculiar to be honest, they have just offered it and now they are offering it again almost immediately after. Essentially it is an extension of the transfer service in a desperate gamble to thin down the ranks accompanied by a strong-arm hussle that if it doesn't work they will consider other options including but not exclusively, physically splitting the server into 2 or forcing people to transfer to different worlds.

I can understand the need to deal with the over crowding, but considering this isn't exactly a new problem, definately an issue acerbated by SE's own inability to deal with the situation in a timely manner, I do think that threatening Odin's player base seems a little over the top.

The response from the other servers player base on the forums smacks more of smirking gloating more than anything. As if to crow how low the mighty have fallen. They wouldn't be so jumped up to offer comment if it was happening to their server, considering the peculiar nature of how much Odin intermingles within it's linkshells rather than being xenophobic. I can't imagine being forced to move somewhere else or having my friends moved away or split up.

It would be devastating to my linkshells and the sense of community and family that we have worked so hard to build up. It is a rare feeling to be a part of and I know how unique it really can be, how hard it is to achieve without the usual backbiting and general nastiness that surrounds end game linkshells.

I already know of people, people who I would be devastated to lose, talking about quitting if SE did actually act out on its threats to do such a thing. It would definately feel like a punishment. I don't know if I would quit over it but I don't know that I would be happy with it, I wouldn't want to play as much for a good while. I have spent such a long time where I am, I don't think it is an entrenched view of inflexiblity or an opposition to change. You don't just throw away your friends on a whim.

The thing is, the situation would have to be completely unsalvageable before I could ever see SE taking such drastic steps. While they aren't afraid of the unpopular decision, this is a shade beyond that. It would be a huge undertaking and affect a lot of people. The reaction of some of the longer members of Odin are base and disappointing, the suggestion we should just kick off server transfers and other such people is pandering to the lowest common denominator in intelligence.

All I can say to those people is grow up. You don't immediately single out a group of people as a target to blame because things aren't going your way, nor should anyone looking in condemn us for not all transfering off Odin enmass just to fix the problem. It wasn't a problem of our creating, merely one of circumstance and lack of reaction.

*sigh*