Q: Why did Kerb quit XI?

Disclaimer: This is a rant. Purely opinion. If you don’t want to read it, hit the little back button. In fact, if you dislike me and are still reading my entries, I must ask, “Why?”. Unsubscribe, delete your bookmark. Worry about yourself. I’m not going to waste time “defending” or justifying myself. I don’t have to. This is not “Q_Q’ing” because I’ve already put my money where my mouth is… far away from Sage Sundi’s tiny, wrinkled penis. This is merely informative. I will apologize in advance for the shitty formatting/grammar and stream of consciousness which will most likely be disorganized.

By the way, I’ll try to finish up and publish the last few dat mods I was working on before I uninstall the game.

A: So… yeah. If it wasn’t obvious, I quit FFXI. No, it was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. I’d been looking for a good time to quit for months. In all honesty, I should have quit a long time ago, when things started to go south, but I stayed for friends and entertainment. I suspect that a very large % of FFXI veterans are in the same boat. There comes a point where you’re just not having any fun whatsoever, and every login is a chore, but you have nothing better to do. Then you realize that even doing nothing is better. Let’s see… first, the game itself:

PS2 Limitations – Fuck that. The game is a port. Everyone knows this. A really, really shitty port. What other MMO can’t even run in a window without a third-party program? What the fuck is up with “shadows” in this game? A top of the line PC seven years after launch can’t even run the game at a constant 30fps with shadows on. I will give SE credit for the gorgeous textures and maps. Even years later, they still look great. Technically the game is shit, but artistically it’s amazing. Also… 30fps? Come the fuck on; I’m not running on a VGA TV. No hi-res textures… this puzzles me. Don’t they realize how much money they could have made by selling a HQ texture pack for $30? Come on… any idiot with VRS and Modelviewer can stick a 1024*1024 texture on a model and it’ll work perfectly fine.

Those are the real PS2 limitations. In addition, there are “PS2 Rimitations” which are complete bullshit excuses for dev laziness. Can’t add more than 6 macro lines? Bullshit. Can’t add more models? Bullshit; there always seems to be room for new event models. 8 faces and 2 haircolors for each race is fucking pathetic. Only half of them even get used, anyway. Two of the hume F models look like they’re hiding cocks in their hotpants. “Windowed mode” isn’t shitty because of limitations. It’s shitty because SE only needed to barely pass it off to get a “Vista Certified” sticker on the game box. I’m not even going to list all the features which can’t be added due to “PS2 Rimitations”.

Basing a game around a console at the end of its life-cycle is incredibly short-sited. The PS2 could barely run FFXI when it launched. Why keep the same limitations for years? Obviously, SE could have restricted certain features while maintaining PS2 support, but that would take more than the bare minimum amount of work required! No offense to PS2 users, but it’s a 10-year-old console. How can you not have a PC capable of playing the game by now? You could find one on Craigslist for $20.

21+hr World Spawns and Bots – Who thought these spawn timers were a good idea? According to SE, they expected people to just “happen” across the spawns and be too stupid to figure out intervals. Seriously? Of course people were going to figure out the spawn times and camp them. In addition, FFXI’s claiming system is incredibly simplistic. First action = claim. This is nice when you’re not competing for pops, but falls apart quickly with competition. It used to be that the person with the lowest latency won the claim, then SE implemented claim delays… which traded the “best latency” system for the “best bot” system. This wouldn’t have been so bad if SE gave two shits about stopping botters, or gave their GMs any tools to stop them. 40 claims in a row against 100 people “isn’t proof” that you bot, but putting a linkshell URL in your bazaar is a bannable offense.

The botting problem begs the question… why even have these world spawns if they’re so easily exploited? The players have been asking for more instance-type fights for years. One of the major duties of MMO developers (Yes, they have actual duties! Regardless of what some fanboys would like to believe, the devs exist to serve their customers, and are doing it for money, not charity and warm feelings! The only thing the community owes them is a monthly fee.) is to observe how their community utilizes content and react/adjust said content accordingly. After years of complaints from every region, they still insisted on keeping world spawns, because apparently some dev has a hard-on for them? Or because it would take effort to change them? I believe it’s the former, because SE chose not to fix the world-spawn issue even before they turned insanely lazy.

Effort:Reward Ratio – Come the fuck on. It puzzles me how badly SE keeps screwing this up. Why are so many easy-to-obtain items better than difficult ones? Why do the easiest mobs drop the best items? Vrtra is the hardest wyrm yet has the worst drops. Zilart kings are a complete joke yet are still heavily camped because they drop irreplaceable items. King Arthro ranks a “1″ in kill effort, yet yields a “9″ drop. Umbral Diabolos drops nothing 99% of the time. Oh, and let’s not forget the relic/mythic weapons that are worse overall than stuff you can buy on the AH.

I recently popped on BG to read about the latest patch, and holy fuck… FFXI gear officially jumped the shark (or is it “nuked the fridge” now?) with the 50+ augments. Apparently they decided that having the random number generator determine your drops was too much work, and it’d be easier to just have it determine the gear! Have fun soloing a weak-ass mob and either wasting your gil or matching/beating the gear others spent months obtaining. Might as well just make everything drop (2% of the time, of course) a random item with random stats, for as much as SE cares about balance.

Speaking of effort… why does it seem that “effort” is usually nothing more than repetition while praying for a drop? Nothing outside of PW is really difficult to kill; you just have to keep repeating the kills ad nauseum until everyone who’s kissed enough ass gets the drop, then wait a few months until the new recruits need the item and repeat those boring kills again. There’s no challenge in winning a fight. The only “challenge” is on your patience in repeating it. The funny thing is how many utter noobs think that they’re awesome for farming HNMs. It’s so easy to be “good” because most situations don’t really require any skill. Durrhurr holding Khim or Tia or whatever for 30 minutes at 100% is sooo difficult. The former uses a TP move every five minutes and the latter sleeps, for fuck’s sake. The mobs have no A.I. whatsoever. Not even simple scripts. Rage timers are a joke. They should be halved. Why don’t all world pops have rage timers? I’ve seen 5-hour Tiamats in 2009. There’s no real incentive to be a better player when being mediocre will get you through 99% of the game. Most of the challenge is manipulating others into helping you.

Sidegrades fail. Why is some Zilart gear still better than the newest gear? How many fucking endgame harnesses do you need with nearly identical stats? How many gloves do you need with literally 1-stat-point differences? Why the fuck do I need to carry seven neckpieces just to play a mage job efficiently? Nothing ever gets replaced, just supplemented. This makes it nearly impossible for a new player to jump into endgame and ever catch up, because they have to do 12+ different events just to get all the different situational pieces. Of course the tiny stat upgrades could be explained by the fragile game engine where increasing a single stat by 10% can double your damage output. The funny thing is, that for all the sidegrades at the top, there really isn’t much decent mediocre gear. Either it has defense only, defense and a useless token stat, or awesome stats. Nothing in the middle, just like mob difficulty.

Mages and Job Balance – Black Mage has not received an update since… before NA launch. It probably never will, because it was overused back in the Zilart days. Gotta love the legions of giant-sword noobs (including the devs, obviously) who are still butthurt over being left out of those awesome 8k/hour manaburn parties years ago. Why would you make it possible for jobs which use no MP, use no ammunition, and aren’t particularly vulnerable to attack to deal the most damage? Isn’t the entire point of a nuker to be a glass cannon? What’s the point of a glass cannon when the other jobs get buffed into steel naval guns?

Another major problem with nuking classes is that it’s so hard to set yourself apart. The difference between an average melee and a godly melee is 300% or more. The difference between an average BLM and a godly BLM is… maybe 20%? At most. A spell that does 1000 damage to a level 75 will only do 1040 damage to a level 1 mob, yet it’ll do 400 to anything endgame made since 2004, since apparently magic was so overpowered that it had to receive a straight nerf. Oh, and gotta love that cumulative resistance that makes the weskit/seraweels BLM do more damage than the full Morri BLM who landed their spell 10ms later. AND YES, JET SERAWEELS ARE FUCKING GIMP.

And then… along comes Scholar. “Yay, let’s add a hybrid job that can outperform a specialist at its main duty!” There was no reason to even add more jobs with WotG; 18 was already too many. Why even have so many different DDs with minor token differences? White Arts should have gone to WHM, Dark Arts should have gone to BLM, Helices should have gone to RDM, and Storms should have gone to SMN. Speaking of storms… where are the tier II spells? Oh, wait, those would have actually helped BLM out, so they weren’t added. Instead, SCH got more self-buffs.

Of course BLM wasn’t the only broken job. Take your pick… all the pet jobs? PLD was buffed so hard that it’s nearly impossible to die to anything or lose hate anymore. Even so, some linkshells suck so hard that they need 3+ PLDs to not wipe, so I guess the game still isn’t easy enough. Even with all the tanks dead, it’s still difficult to wipe if you don’t suck. SAM and 2hr jobs in general… lol. I’d love to see SE devs run an auto shop. Spark plug burned out? Stick a fucking jet engine in the trunk. Then of course you get the 2hr bandwagoners. Oh, but not you! Yeah you! You’re special! You always wanted to level a 2h job, mhmm *wink*. And you, over there! You always loved PLD, and just never got around to leveling it! Just a coincidence that it got buffed recently!

Oh, and fucking hexaguns… why? They’re useless. Do SE devs even play their own game? There’s literally no situation where hexaguns will outparse normal guns. In fact, one of Corsair’s primary job abilities, Quick Draw, is entirely dependent on the damage rating of the gun and ammunition you’re using. Why would you ever want to sacrifice DMG for a slightly lower delay? Delay doesn’t matter at all if you’re meleeing for TP, and even when shooting for TP, you’ll parse higher with a Martial Gun due to the increased WS damage or accuracy. Quit adding new fucking hexaguns. I shouldn’t complain about COR, though, as it’s one of the few balanced jobs in the game.

I can’t decide whether or not the job change system was a good thing. On one hand, it’s nice being able to play all the classes on one character, but on the other hand, it causes a lot of problems. For one, the devs don’t really care much about balance, since people can just change jobs when they see something shinier than what they currently have. People tend to gimp their jobs when they have 5+, as opposed to taking pride in just one. Not to mention leveling high-demand jobs just to get in a linkshell. Also, of course, the constant whine for MOAR JOBS when over half of them are the same shit with different AF quests. SE’s job system is the ricer kid with five spoilers and neon lights and spinning rims and a green windshield on their fucking 1994 Civic.

Gil and Crafting – Ugh. Gotta love forced reliance on the market just to be competent. If you’re not extremely lucky or a gilbuyer, you have to spend the vast majority of your first trip to 75 just making enough gil to cover the basic essentials… or gimp it. I can count the number of items that one can earn at the level they’re available pre-75 off the top of my head. For the rest, you’re forced to use the AH. To use the AH, you’re forced to spend over half of your game time just making gil. Not so bad on your Nth job, but for little nublets? Even ammunition and food can be prohibitively expensive for casual players.

The game economy wasn’t always so bad. Sue me, but I actually enjoyed the 2005 “hyperinflation” period. Yes, everything was expensive to buy, but you could  make a killing by selling. Crafters made profits on NQ synths back then. I made millions upon millions just NQing weskits and HQing scorpion harnesses. Too bad a bunch of dirt-farming fucktards had to whine and get the market nerfed! SE took their usual “lighting a cigarette with a cruise missile” approach and destroyed crafting, low-level NMs, mining, etc. Dragon talons and behemoth horns now drop off of approximately 60% of the mobs in the entire game, to the point where their NQ synths aren’t even worth desynthing and their HQs only break even. Venomous claws went from a couple per day to over 20… bye-bye harness profits. Other crafts share a similar fate. Have fun doing 50+ synths just to make the same amount of gil a farmer makes. And, of course, they can’t let you do multiple synths at a time… due to PS2 limitations! Hitting the same buttons then watching the spinny crystal over and over takes skill.

Crafting died not only due to oversaturation of materials, but also due to oversaturation of crafters. It’s just too damn easy to get 100. In my opinion, this directly relates to gear sidegrades. Instead of adding better gear to the game over the years, and adding more, increasingly harder craft levels, SE decided to sidegrade everything and stick all the new crafts in the current 100 levels. If crafts were increased to 120, 130, etc, there would be new opportunities for rejuvenation: high levels would again be able to profit from leveling fast, and low levels would see the vice-grip on old synths lifted and also help fill the demand for base ingredients. Also, rare ingredients would make it possible to gain a niche in the market. But no… we instead of keeping the economy active and fluid, SE decided to just nerf anything that makes gil so that (most) everyone suffers equally!

Oh, and let’s not forget spending 150,000GP for a lamp-post that does absolutely fuck-all. Not to mention GP in general… did they just choose the synths at random and assign GP value based on NPC value? Is it that fucking hard to dedicate one unpaid intern to assigning realistic recipes and values? FUCKING TURTLE SHELLS??!?! Gods help you if you attempt cooking GP, too…

Crafting wasn’t the only gil source to be nerfed. See a low-level NM wandering around? That’s because the drop is either worthless or R/EX. Don’t bother. Wanna go mining? Better hope you get orichalcum or khroma, unless your smithing is high enough to synth adaman, because the ores are damn worthless. Even BCNMs are so oversaturated that they’re barely worth the time spent, usually. Wanna grow some plants in your mog house? Much like real life, expect to be banhammered if you have more than 5 of them!

I’ve never seen a game so thoroughly based on currency. Even relics, which are supposed to be some culmination of skill or something, are just a matter of extreme amounts of gil. Artifact Armor takes more effort to obtain when you remove the gil aspect, which half of relic owners do by RMT’ing it. Or pretending they dug it up in Altepa. Or kissing ass to get it for free and then not utilizing it intelligently. It’s so fucking rare to see a 100% legitimate relic. I’d even consider the people who make a noob linkshell just to farm themselves coins as legitimate; at least they’re only taking advantage of stupid people.

And lolmythics. They almost got them right. SE was so fucking close to getting them right, but failed on two counts. First of all, the laundry list of prereqs is cool, in my opinion. It forces you to actually go and do those things yourself, and takes real effort. Even the T5 Zeni pops aren’t that bad. Droprate is way too low, but meh. Then, of course, they had to fuck it up with alexandrite. Who the fuck decided that it was a good idea to require massive currency for mythics? What is so hard to understand? For every player who acquires that currency honestly, there are 3 or 4 who acquire it dishonestly. 30,000 alexandrite? A good Salvage group won’t even get that in a year, total… let alone divided by the members attending. The second mythic fuckup was that most of them simply aren’t that good! Martial gun > Death Penalty… except maybe for a few extra damage on Quick Draw… woohoo?

Why the fuck are they so afraid to make anything better than HQ elemental staves? …other than augmented HQ staves? the BLM relic was bad, but at least it’s good for the fuckwits who want to melee with it (don’t get me started on him… ever heard of equip macros or the Sleep line of spells?). The mythic actually tries to be a caster weapon and still fails. Even the fucking Pandemonium Warden staff falls short. What is so hard about making a better weapon after 5-6 years?

Random (tee-hee) Fails -Everyone is a slave to the Random Number Generator. No amount of skill or finesse will earn you 90% of the drops in the game, because they’re fucking random and obnoxiously rare. You can lose 20 million or make 40 million crafting under the exact same conditions. Oh, by the way, every little crafting trick you do is a placebo. Nothing but skill level matters at all. Your gods are dead, babies don’t come from storks, and he chose Scylla. Gone 10 runs with no speed belt? Some noob, somewhere, has gotten 2 in a row and sold both of them. See that awesome STR+2 Ratt+5 ACP earring? He got it on the first try, and only has WHM and BRD. You’re up to 50 tries with nothing. See that augmented weskit with INT+6? You’re going to get Divine Magic +2… but keep trying in the hopes that one day, that unloving Random Number Generator will favor you.

Chocobo racing and all the little games like it: why does SE waste so much time developing them? They inevitably aren’t very fun, aren’t liked by the community, offer poor rewards, and waste a shitload of dev time. How many months upon months did they work on Chocobo Racing and Maze Mongers? I’ve never seen more than 3 people participating in Chocobo Racing at one time. The betting system is stupid; you can’t win any money unless other players place bets, but you can certainly lose it. Races have no control, and are extremely randomized. You can’t even give simple text commands during a race. On top of that, you can’t fucking leave a race cutscene until it finishes. Even chocobo raising is a pain in the ass. Just getting a decent one to ride is pretty easy, although it takes over a month. Getting a perfect racing chocobo that can actually win past the first tier takes absolutely perfect planning and several months of tweaking with those damn NPC races.

Maze Mongers was fun for a bit. Make mules, farm runes, build “mazes”, and kill bosses for some “decent” gear. Then… they nerfed 45-marbles mazes to only give 12 marbles! Because weeks of mindless grinding really needed to change into months of mindless grinding. I haven’t paid much attention to it since, because there aren’t any new unique rewards. 30 minute merit parties, or whatever bullshit they’ve added, aren’t my idea of fun. The worst part about MMM is that SE seems to be proud of it, and stated that they’ve spent months and month of work on it. Nice priorities. Oh, and why the flying fuck is it called Maze Mongers? Someone needs a lesson in what a maze is. It’s not a static tunnel with a fucking map.

Absolute Virtue… has convinced me that one of the devs, who is related to the CEO and thus can’t be fired, and has never touched a female or felt joy in his life, has authority over the final product and keeps cockblocking the damn mob despite the protests of his co-workers. I refuse to believe that an entire team would support that shit. Creating an impossible mob wouldn’t be that bad… if it was a random world pop with no loot pool. This shit not only requires a ton of work to pop, but also has very good drops, which insinuates that you should be able to fucking kill it.

SE apologists love to assert that it is killable, and we all just fail for not figuring out how. Sorry, but no. It’s been killed three separate ways: wall of justice, locking abilities via Wynavs, and zerged. Wall of justice was obviously an exploit and I have no sympathy for the people who got cockslapped for trying it. Wynavs were, as far as we knew, the correct way to do it… although it seemed no one could figure out exactly how to trigger them. Then those were nerfed to not work at all. Year later, its HP was lowered to the point where it could be SE+BW zerged… then, a week later, it was patched to be immune to that… You cannot fucking kill a mob that uses Benediction and Meteor at will. Even if you survive and damage it, it will just decide to nullify your efforts by full-healing itself. There’s obviously supposed to be some gimmick which either locks or weakens it, which either is bugged and doesn’t work, or is as hard to trigger as the Goblin Drink recipe before it was released, and gives even fewer clues. There are literally zero clues to AV’s weakness, unless they’re hidden in some cryptogram you have to decipher from NPC speech, or in the hex code of a random dat file somewhere.

AV represents everything wrong with SE and their game. It’s not the mob itself, but SE’s attitude towards the community over it. Ask a question about it and you get a bullshit answer about stopping the regen. It’s bad enough that they screwed up so badly, but they show no remorse and all but laugh in the face of their paying customers for being unable to answer a riddle without clues. They’ve gone as far as to stop acknowledging questions about it entirely. This is not the proper way to thank the people who pay your salaries so that you can put fermented soybeans on your table and used panties in your vending machines. SE is the little brat on the elementary school playground who has all the nice toys, but won’t share them. When they do share, they pitch a fit and take all their toys home if another child doesn’t play with them the right way.

Pandemonium Warden is nearly as bad. At least it’s killable… if you have massive numbers of competent (good luck finding those) players and the will to keep farming pops. However, SE again showed that they’re the little brat with all the toys and no social skills. Some gaming media criticized them for making a mob that takes so long to kill, so what do they do? Nerf the mob to be more realistic? Sorta. They had to be spiteful, however, and give it a fucking 2 hour time limit, making it nearly impossible to screw up, even once, and still win the fight. Nice! That’ll show the evil community who keep making things hard on poor widdle SE. That’s not even considering how fucking long it takes to farm a pop. Nice game design… farm mobs that can be killed with 6 people for endless weeks or months, to get a pop that requires 36+ to even have a chance at killing. Also, don’t forget the main problem with ZNM, besides the T4 drop rates: Sarameya drops are 20 times better than the other two mobs combined.

WotG and Campaign – Fuck this expansion. First of all, I will admit that I loved the cutscenes, and the storyline missions are awesome. Lilisette is fucking adorable and the missions are very well-written with great cutscenes. One of the few regrets I’ve had with quitting is that I won’t be able to finish the WotG missions. However… most likely no one will be able to finish them until 2011 at least, at the rate they’re released. It really sucks that the awesome story-writers are held down by the shitty developers.

For the expansion itself… meh. The concept was fucking stupid. Sorry, SE, but time travel is incredibly cliché, and WotG time travel isn’t even executed well. There’s practically no interaction between the past and present outside of a handful of scripted quests. The disk only shipped with 300mb of content… what the fuck is that shit? Most of the zones are barely modified versions of the “present” zones, and the “new” unique past zones are the same old textures yet again. I mean, we all love cermet… right?

Another problem is that, if you paid attention to the storyline pre-WotG, the Crystal War was hyped up to be extremely fucking epic, with events that changed the course of the war, and massive battles with everything on the line. I wanted to see Karaha-Baruha summon a Fenrir the size of 20 behemoths and wipe out the entire Yagudo army. I wanted to see Korroloka collapse. I wanted to see San d’Oria burn and confront the Shadow Lord with seventy-two legions of demons. What did I get? Some light-hearted fetch quests, retcons of the game’s timeline, and… campaign.

Campaign is a fucking joke. What is the point? You’re forced to spend hours upon hours fighting the same shit over and over again just to keep max rank, which doesn’t seem to serve a purpose other than some “decent” sidegrade gear. Yet. Of course, they’ll probably make the endgame event require rank and Allied Notes. Only certain jobs are particularly useful for it, and pretty much everyone has to /DNC and melee to get any benefit. Almost no points for casting Raise, so be prepared to waste your own points getting RR constantly, and eating the dirt for a while if you ever die without it. At any time, a mega-boss can come along and one-shot you, then camp your corpse. Apparently, now you can get like a 1% chance at a single byne bill per 30 minutes of campaign… woot! The only nice thing about it is that a lot of the gimps who used to seek and then ruin the XP party now just go solo campaign for 3k/hour instead. COBRA SLOPS ARE FUCKING GIMP, TOO.

Square-Enix – How do you fuck up so badly, over and over,  whilst being bombarded with suggestions on how to improve? Of course, it’s their first MMORPG. That was a great excuse for the first 3-4 years. However, they haven’t shown any signs of improvement. In fact, their customer support is only getting worse. When running a pay-to-play MMORPG, your community is, in theory, your greatest asset. SE gets somewhat of a free pass due to the massive fanbase they’ve built up with their offline games. Unless they start microwaving kittens, people will still buy SE games. See: FFXII. Even if they microwaved kittens and puppies daily, some diehard fans would rationalize it. Not to mention that, once you’ve played for years, it’s very difficult to stop, no matter how much SE walks over your face. I’ve been disgusted with SE for years and only just now managed to stop feeding them my money.

Still… what have the done right? It’s easy to list SE’s wrongdoings…

First of all, failing to work with the community. I think I’ve covered this extensively enough. Taking over 3 years to implement simple suggestions, nerfing things which harmed no one, boosting things that didn’t need boosted, etc. For fuck’s sake, they deliberately provoke and spit in the faces of their paying customers with shit like AV. They won’t fix it because there’s no financial benefit in fixing it. They used to present timelines for updates, then scrapped those after failing to meet them by over a year. How long have summoners been waiting for the new avatar they were promised? Not like it matters, because it won’t fix the job, but it’s a matter of principle.

Too many people whining about the XP grind? The logical thing to do would be to add alternative means of gaining XP, like quests, crafting, etc… but nah! Much easier to just lower the XP required and add mobs that die if you sneeze on them! If only they added enough camps for all the level 75s, which is now everyone who’s been playing over a month, to merit!

Too many people whining about Promyvions? Even though they’re not that hard, and are actually fun? Nerf all of CoP to the point where it’s a fucking joke, then make every expansion after it even easier, with pushover missions! I wouldn’t be surprised if even those get nerfed in the future, because apparently Alexander is soo fucking hard. Think they’ll ever put more “dungeon crawl” missions into the game? Doubt it. Kinda puzzling how the give in so quickly to whining about things that are winnable, but won’t fix things that aren’t… hmm.

Speaking of CoP and XP nerfs… why did they take so long to add Level Sync, and why did they add it outside capped areas? It would have been great back when CoP was introduced, if all it did was allow you to wear your 75 gear at 30. It’s awesome for BCNMs and stuff. It’s fucktarded for XP parties. Before level synch, you fought the same mob types for 5-10 levels at a time. Now you fight the exact same mobs in the exact same camp for 20-30+ levels at a time. As if each 75 job needed even less meaning.

Botters get free reign. The only time I’ve ever heard of claim-botters being banned was when they were fucktards and used that bot that warped them on top of the mob. GMs are completely incompetent and don’t even seem to have a standard set of rules to operate by. Skill-less zergling idiots are allowed to hold mobs at 99% for 45+ minutes as long as they Bio2. You can MPK as much as you want as long as a GM isn’t watching at that exact moment and you don’t talk about it. The defnition of griefing depends entirely on which GM you get and what kind of mood they’re in. I do applaud the Salvage Dupe bannings, but they didn’t go far enough at all. Most people only got a slap on the wrist and got to keep their duped gear…

To combat RMT, SE has taken every effort to cover up the symptoms without ever attacking the root cause, and even making that cause worse! We’re supposed to be impressed by their monthly banning numbers… too bad that those are mostly free trial accounts which don’t matter at all because they’ve served their purpose long before being banned. Some of their amazingly effective anti-RMT measures have included: nerfing BST so that we can’t MPK the farmers, putting a 1mil cap on deliveries to annoy the fuck out of normal players and force RMT to spend 5 minutes trading instead of 4 minutes sending, nerfing any craft recipe (or anything in the game) that generates a bit of profit to NPCs, nerfing fishing multiple times, and a plethora of sincerely-apologized-for inconveniences! Why not aleviate the demand for gil by making it more reasonable for casual players to obtain, and removing ridiculous gil requirements for shit like relics and mythics? Or even, ya know… making quests reward you with a non-pitiful amount?

Now, apparently, legit players are getting banned in mass numbers by SE’s automated STFU program! Credit card rejected? Banned even after you add a new one, until you call them! Like to garden on multiple characters? Banned. Access your account from multiple IPs, or just multiple cards, or pay for multiple accounts? Psh; that looks like RMT. Banned! Now I see that they’re requiring NA customers to use a certain type of credit card or they won’t be able to pay for the game… which should produce some great entertainment after the billing cycle! Oh, speaking of billing, gotta love those double charges, right? I think I’ve been overcharged around $150-200 over the years. Of course, you can’t do anything about it. SE won’t fix it, and if you try to stop payment, you’re perma-banned with no recourse. Well… actually, every ban is without recourse. Gotta love the irony of banning gardeners with 10+ mules or multiple accounts even though they pay the highest monthly fees.

Remember when you were paying $13 per month and getting updates with lots of content every 1.5-2 months? Remember when expansions got finished in a year? Now you’re still paying $13 per month and getting updates every… 4-5 months? Updates with practically no content. They put a /bell chart and dedicated multiple paragraphs on the last update notes page to fucking bells. New quests and missions actually get their own “teaser” pages now… because I guess we’re supposed to be surprised by them? If they’re going to put half the effort into the game, they should charge half the fees.

I quit before the moogle queefing, but let’s review ACP: Aldo doesn’t realize that his sister’s alive even though she only lives 15 minutes away by chocobo. They, or their ghosts, or some stupid shit have bad dreams that there’s a giant (gasp) crystal out to destroy the world by matching its resonance frequency or something. To stop it, you must kill a bunch of beastmen, which are about level 20 and conveniently spread out throughout each of the 3 parts of the “basic” world. Yay, because I really wanted to do a fetch quest with about 1/10 the depth of the rank 5 mission I did in 2003. After that, you must go kill about a hundred level negative-fifteen mandragoras, then make a party and kill some pushover beastmen after getting the Mark of (Sundi’s) Seed smeared all over your face/ass/whatever. If you’re masochistic, like most of us who played so long, you can keep repeating this quest about a hundred times in hopes of getting an awesome earring! After that, you get to climb Delkfutt (I <3 CERMET) at level 30, and then kill the evil crystal. Hope you don’t fail, because then you get to climb again! Afterward you get what you really paid $10 for, which is a pretty good body piece. It lets you select your own stats, because SE has given up and trying to make gear themselves. The whole experience takes about a day if you don’t count repeats that you force yourself to endure. The cutscene quality is about on par with the rank 1-6 nation missions. Remember all that cool shit that ToAU/WotG cuscenes had? Yeah, you need to pay more than $10 to see it, I guess.

Next, I guess you pay $10 for a hat and $10 for something else. Maybe a subligar. “Expansion scenarios” need to die in a fucking fire. Remember when you got awesome shit like the Serpent Generals quests… for free? Well, they don’t give good rewards, so most people never tried them. Just trust me that they’re cool. Now you get to pay $10 for each new quest line! SE is taking a page out of EA’s book and trying out the microtransaction system that everyone fucking hates.

FFXIV – It’s pretty obvious that the FFXI fees are going towards FFXIV’s development. That’s the only explanation for the dev team being destaffed, updates coming at a snail’s pace, and the lack of any sort of effort being put into the game. Some even believe that SE’s actively trying to get rid of FFXI players so that they can downsize or shut down the servers. I’m paranoid, but not that paranoid.

To “fix” FFXIV, in my opinion, SE would need to make some massive changes. First of all, appoint a real community interaction team with real pull over the developers. The current team which posts “Sorry we fucked up” on lolalla and occasionally gives interviews about… holiday events… has to go. The game needs to integrate common modern elements like quest XP, a customizable UI (won’t happen, lolconsoles), and some fucking instanced dungeons. There need to be more upgrades and fewer sidegrades. In fact, gear swapping is fucktarded and shouldn’t exist. The economy needs to be more forgiving and less condusive to RMT. There shouldn’t even be a need for bots. Fewer, more balanced and unique jobs, and more content before the level cap. Focus on your strengths… storytelling and atmosphere. Fix your fucking failures.

I will most definitely not be playing XIV. It’s the same company, same clueless people, same shit with slightly better graphics. In 5 years you’ll just be complaining about PS3 limitations, anyway. The game’s still gonna run like shit on PC and probably not incorporate any standard MMO features that XI was lacking, because SE view themselves as gaming gods who are above learning from others. I don’t see them learning from their own mistakes, because from a business perspective, they didn’t make any mistakes. FFXI was wildly profitable and held a lot of players despite its flaws. However, even if all the flaws were fixed, I probably still would not play, due to the shit I’ve gone through with XI. There have been good times, and I don’t necessarily regret playing, but I wouldn’t go through it again. Starting XIV after quiting XI would be like starting crystal meth after quitting heroin.

Community – The community is pretty damn good for an MMO… probably because most of the kiddies get scared off by the grind and the rest won’t play a game without PvP. There are a lot of tards, but nowhere near games like WoW. Not even going to dignify the undescended-testes Jaja fucks, who are probably still stalking me and jacking off with a carrot up their asses to everything I do, with their own paragraph, since they’re a small minority and probably don’t even realize how humorous they were. However… what the fuck is up with the “durhurr everyone bots” shit? Sorry; I never botted. SF never talked about botting, although I’m sure a few did. Why does it seem like half of the community doesn’t care anymore? Or even encourages it? Look how many linkshells won’t even accept members who don’t bot, or pay $5000 for a super-special one. Good fucking job; you just wasted nearly a year’s tuition worth of money on cheating to obtain five-year-old pixel gear in a dead game. What a winner! By the way… ridills are ghetto k-clubs, adaberk is (purple and) easier to get from Odin if you don’t suck, Dalmatica is gimp as fuck, and Dring doesn’t exist but wouldn’t matter even if it did exist because PLD is already overpowered without it. Oh, and since this is the part of the post where I really piss people off: Dat mods that consist solely of recolors fucking suck. Those are called “practice” yet about 80% of FFXIDats submissions are just blue things turned red, or red things turned green. There. I said it.

I’ll never understand why people still bother with kings. Looking back, I don’t know why I ever bothered with that shit. I really don’t know why I bothered trying to claim, when nearly everyone without a bot just pretended to not be tabbed out. Same shit for Ixion and Sandworm: no one tries. I don’t get why I bothered with much of anything. People who sucked ass and didn’t put any effort in, skipped events, afk’d, didn’t know how to target a mob and cast sleep on it, all got ahead faster. Just whine and cry and make yourself a victim and you’ll get sympathy! For bonus points, pretend you’re leaving! Only five or six people pulled that act in the past year, so it should still work a few more times! Don’t want to play a certain job? Just intentionally suck at it! I hope most of those were intentional. I’d be shocked if half of the “endgame” linkshell ever bothered to read forums, research upcoming events, or tweak their gear and macros. Fuck, even learn to walk behind a sight-aggro mob. Why bother when there’s no penalty for being a bad player, only for disturbing the peace? Standards get lower and lower the more the game dies. Even the good players tend to get corrupted and lazy. I don’t blame them, though. It really sucks that the good players get dragged down by the bad. Hell, I got lazy too. There’s no point putting in effort when the same things can be accomplished through politics.

I’m not naming names and pointing fingers here, but for fuck’s sake, the amount of backstabbing, clique-forming, ass-kissing, and butthurt drama in this game would put any high school soap opera to shame. We used to be able to get along and work together for common goals, until everything went to shit and every fucking thing anyone said was political fodder for someone else. Most players know more about bullshit gossip than the do about game mechanics. I’m sure that, as the designated linkshell scapegoat, this was somehow my fault. That’s what you get for refusing to play politics. To this day, I’m probably unaware of some random shit that was blamed on me or some pathetic cuntrag(s) who plotted behind my back. Some fucking bottomfeeders picked on Jowah to get at me, which is cowardly beyond cowardice. You literally cannot get any lower than that, and deserve less respect than an inert flu virus. Past favors and friendships get forgotten so quickly when a shiny fake object is dangled around. If I’ve offended you, good. You know who you are.

I was “kicked” uhhh officially twice? I think. Plus a couple times as a joke. Too spineless to talk shit to your face equals too spineless to actually kick, so both times I swallowed my pride and did the “sit, beg, roll over” routine and went through the motions and formalities and hours of text cut-and-pasted from notepad to get “back” in, not because I particularly wanted to, but because of… I dunno, some sense of duty. Plus, I had nothing better to do, and it was fun playing with the people who didn’t suck. I’m still disgusted at myself for stooping so low as to bow my head to those I had no respect for, though. Sorry if I hurt any butts for finally leaving of my own will and robbing you of the chance to finally finish what you started. I should have gone last year when account prices were better.

Anyway, for as spiteful as this may post may sound, It’s done and over with. I’ll forget the shitty people, and they’ll keep burning effigies of me, and the ice caps will keep melting. I’m not allowing comments. If you’ve got shit to say, keep saying it behind my back like usual. That way I don’t have to raise my blood pressure responding to it, and you don’t have to be truthful or accountable! Win/win.