Well, we finally managed it. Odin has fallen.
I've had a Shadow Coat for something like 9 months now, don't misunderstand. It's certainly not the first time I've been party to an Odin kill.
While you're helping to run the show, though, it is an entirely different experience. When Remedy killed Odin, and bragged about it on their frontpage, I saw little more than the relatively menial tasks assigned to my role in my party: sing songs on bard, provide DD-party healing as SCH, beyond that, more or less stay silent.
Now I see the amount of work put into trying to keep a linkshell of 50+ people all moving in the same direction, trying to get the same group of people, more or less, into three different tiers of Einherjar wins, and executing a workable strategy in a sometimes unpredictable environment.
Helping to run a clean linkshell has helped me to understand just how dirty Remedy was, and just how lazy, uncreative, and plainly stupid most of its leadership was. Our first two Odin tries failed largely because we'd been saddled with the mode of thinking that Remedy's leadership provided, of rigid, inflexible rules compiled most off of half-heard, half-understood BG posts from posters that may or may not have had the first clue what they were talking about to begin with. They still succeeded, because they had a pair of Aegis PLDs and a host of top-tier DD to lean on. Running a linkshell, and making the improvements that I've made, I've come to see the degree to which Remedy succeeded despite, and not because of, its leadership.
This particular Odin was a bitch. The fight went smoothly for the first 15 minutes or so, and we quickly had him down to 30%, but as we gathered at around 25% for his final 10k needles move, he proceeded to crap all over us with a consecutive sleepga2, breakga, sleepga2 just after we'd all woken up, and then breakga again. it was fucking ridiculous. Cost us something along the order of 5 minutes, by my estimation, and because he was still beating on tanks and doing other nasty shit in that timeframe, we had a significant percentage of our ally in low health that was then sent critical by 10k needles.
Somehow we pulled out of it, and got back to DD even as the 5 minute warning came and went while he was frighteningly hovering in the 20-25% mark. We got him to 11%, successfully pulled everyone off of him, had 2 sacrificial rangers launch their 2hrs to bring him to 8% or so. We got the 1 minute warning as we were zerging, and the 30 second warning as a final Atonement brought him to 0, much of our DD decimated by the 9 Valkyries (as our kiting party was in rough shape, the final valk spawn coming late and being a pain, and thus we were unable to pull them off of people and keep them off for long without dying.
Drops were pretty poor, though we got Rulob his M.Body and Andraana his Shadow Coat, both well deserved. Other drops were (lol) H.Hands and A.Feet.
And we're back on our way, with T3 and T2 wins bringing in a full 36. Now if only we can start seeing some e.bodies...
Monday, August 17, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Gardening is now a ban-worthy offense
"Livid" doesn't even begin to cover it.
On Sunday, July 5th, at about 10pm Central Time, Vice Dynamis was well on its way to crushing a run of Dynamis - San D'oria. Although the AF2 drops had been something of a disappointment, and we'd garnered only a single 100 piece, we had still generated well over 200 more currency in bronze and generated over 2 million gil for each of the co-sponsors, Andraana and Arkanethered. The offshoot of our endgame LS, Paradigm, had opened up shouting to the public for its dynamis and seen a great deal of success. Our last run saw us crush Dynamis - Valkurm -- not a trivial zone -- drawing the maximum of 36 entrants. We felt like we were really accomplishing something. Here, we were in the midst of a large pull following our killing of the boss.
Over vent, I hear Miori's voice. "I'm crashing", she says, annoyed. Crashes used to be a common occurrence for her in dynamis, when she was running FFXI on an older, cheaper computer that wasn't really built for gaming. It could handle xp parties and simpler tasks, but larger events like dynamis and einherjar would choke it. She'd bought a new computer a few weeks back, though, and it ran the game like a dream. She could run around in Dynamis as though she were still in her Mog House, she said.
As we were in the midst of a fight, we acknowledged her and told her to get back on ASAP.
A bit later - it couldn't have been more than a minute - her voice registers over Vent. "I can't log back in," she says. "I'm LM-17'd"
"What?!" about four of us exclaim, simultaneously.
"I'm fucking LM-17'd!" she says, the traces of panic evident in her voice. "I can't log back in!"
"You're WHAT?!" we exclaim again.
LM-17 is the game's code for an account that has been banned. Our memories of its appearance are all-too-vivid, our shell's leadership (myself included) consisting of some of the remnants of a shell that was decimated by the 1/22 bans for duping.
Except then, there was a reason. Why on earth would they ban Miori? She's about the cleanest character imaginable.
We tried to tell her not to worry. Those in our linkshell who browse the BG forums assured her that there had been a rash of bannings lately stemming from credit card charge backs - almost all had been reversed rather quickly.
The event ends and everyone goes to sleep hoping for the best.
The next day - today, I guess, though it feels like it's been longer than that - she contacts POL's customer support via their online chat. After over an hour of waiting...
...she is told that the account has been banned due to connection with RMT activities.
They thought, and apparently still think, that her character - that she spent over six years working on, that she met her husband on, that she slaved on through thick and thin, good and bad, was a fucking RMT.
She filed a complaint, which triggers an "escalation of the investigation" surrounding her account, whatever that means.
Sometimes the word "Bullshit" is such an unbelievable understatement.
Why would anyone think this of her?
A thread at Zam.com - apparently the newly skinned allakhazam - gave some possible insight. A player posted a message telling a remarkably similar story. He had been banned for RMT, he had never RMT'd...
...and the only thing he could think of that may have triggered the action is that he has 15 gardening mules on his account that he uses to make gil.
One thing that did happen quite a bit on Miori's account was gardening. I myself had introduced Andraana to the profits of gardening a few years back. You get a few mules, you load them with flowerpots, you feed them seeds, you feed the plants crystals as they grow, and you sell off the results, getting gil aplenty with minimal effort.
I myself have twelve gardening mules, on which I grow Platinum Nuggets by planting tree cuttings, and feeding them light crystals x2 per plant. It nets me sufficient nuggets to garner around 800k in profits every two weeks.
Andraana's operation was much larger. He has 15 mules on his main, 15 mules on Ashke, an account inherited from a friend who quit the game, and 15 mules on Miori, all of which were used to grow Ice Ore, which also produces a byproduct of Platinum Leaves, which NPC for very substantial gil.
Miori is, of course, Andraana's real life wife. They met via the game and have been together five years, with twins girls that just turned two.
With 45 mules gardening non-stop he earned maybe 6 to 7 million gil per month. Almost every bit of which was used to fund his Relic, a horn that is currently at Stage 3, currently has all of the currency to upgrade to Stage 4 (he is just missing the attestation), and has a decent amount of the currency required to upgrade to Stage 5, the completed Gjallarhorn. He's been working at it on and off for years. Countless hours of planting, feeding, distributing, and selling off harvests have gone into that bloody thing.
And now his wife has been banned because the Special Fucking Task Force can't tell the fucking difference between someone who's gardening for their own profits and a motherfucking RMT.
It's always possible, of course, for the ban to be reversed. Any rational person looking at the setup they have couldn't possibly conclude that they are an RMT operation.
Andraana was able to call up the POL help desk and speak to someone on the group that handles banning complaints. He explained that he was calling on his wife's behalf and gave the guy he talked to her information.
In chatting with the guy, without being prompted, he was able to pull Andraana's own POL ID up and listed it as "another account that was involved" in the RMT-related activity.
Andraana was able to explain that that was his account, that the account that had been banned was his wife's, and that neither of them had ever been involved in any RMT. A cursory glance of Andraana's character - and the Stage 3 Relic horn and mass quantity of Silverpieces on it - should easily show that that was where the vast majority of the gardening proceeds wound up.
At the very least, Andraana was able to get his comments amended to her complaint.
Why Miori was banned but Andraana and Ashke were not touched remains a mystery.
I sent the following note to the Special Task Force via their email form on the POL web site:
Beware gardeners. S/E is apparently so fucking incompetent that they can't tell the difference between you and RMT.
On Sunday, July 5th, at about 10pm Central Time, Vice Dynamis was well on its way to crushing a run of Dynamis - San D'oria. Although the AF2 drops had been something of a disappointment, and we'd garnered only a single 100 piece, we had still generated well over 200 more currency in bronze and generated over 2 million gil for each of the co-sponsors, Andraana and Arkanethered. The offshoot of our endgame LS, Paradigm, had opened up shouting to the public for its dynamis and seen a great deal of success. Our last run saw us crush Dynamis - Valkurm -- not a trivial zone -- drawing the maximum of 36 entrants. We felt like we were really accomplishing something. Here, we were in the midst of a large pull following our killing of the boss.
Over vent, I hear Miori's voice. "I'm crashing", she says, annoyed. Crashes used to be a common occurrence for her in dynamis, when she was running FFXI on an older, cheaper computer that wasn't really built for gaming. It could handle xp parties and simpler tasks, but larger events like dynamis and einherjar would choke it. She'd bought a new computer a few weeks back, though, and it ran the game like a dream. She could run around in Dynamis as though she were still in her Mog House, she said.
As we were in the midst of a fight, we acknowledged her and told her to get back on ASAP.
A bit later - it couldn't have been more than a minute - her voice registers over Vent. "I can't log back in," she says. "I'm LM-17'd"
"What?!" about four of us exclaim, simultaneously.
"I'm fucking LM-17'd!" she says, the traces of panic evident in her voice. "I can't log back in!"
"You're WHAT?!" we exclaim again.
LM-17 is the game's code for an account that has been banned. Our memories of its appearance are all-too-vivid, our shell's leadership (myself included) consisting of some of the remnants of a shell that was decimated by the 1/22 bans for duping.
Except then, there was a reason. Why on earth would they ban Miori? She's about the cleanest character imaginable.
We tried to tell her not to worry. Those in our linkshell who browse the BG forums assured her that there had been a rash of bannings lately stemming from credit card charge backs - almost all had been reversed rather quickly.
The event ends and everyone goes to sleep hoping for the best.
The next day - today, I guess, though it feels like it's been longer than that - she contacts POL's customer support via their online chat. After over an hour of waiting...
...she is told that the account has been banned due to connection with RMT activities.
They thought, and apparently still think, that her character - that she spent over six years working on, that she met her husband on, that she slaved on through thick and thin, good and bad, was a fucking RMT.
She filed a complaint, which triggers an "escalation of the investigation" surrounding her account, whatever that means.
Sometimes the word "Bullshit" is such an unbelievable understatement.
Why would anyone think this of her?
A thread at Zam.com - apparently the newly skinned allakhazam - gave some possible insight. A player posted a message telling a remarkably similar story. He had been banned for RMT, he had never RMT'd...
...and the only thing he could think of that may have triggered the action is that he has 15 gardening mules on his account that he uses to make gil.
One thing that did happen quite a bit on Miori's account was gardening. I myself had introduced Andraana to the profits of gardening a few years back. You get a few mules, you load them with flowerpots, you feed them seeds, you feed the plants crystals as they grow, and you sell off the results, getting gil aplenty with minimal effort.
I myself have twelve gardening mules, on which I grow Platinum Nuggets by planting tree cuttings, and feeding them light crystals x2 per plant. It nets me sufficient nuggets to garner around 800k in profits every two weeks.
Andraana's operation was much larger. He has 15 mules on his main, 15 mules on Ashke, an account inherited from a friend who quit the game, and 15 mules on Miori, all of which were used to grow Ice Ore, which also produces a byproduct of Platinum Leaves, which NPC for very substantial gil.
Miori is, of course, Andraana's real life wife. They met via the game and have been together five years, with twins girls that just turned two.
With 45 mules gardening non-stop he earned maybe 6 to 7 million gil per month. Almost every bit of which was used to fund his Relic, a horn that is currently at Stage 3, currently has all of the currency to upgrade to Stage 4 (he is just missing the attestation), and has a decent amount of the currency required to upgrade to Stage 5, the completed Gjallarhorn. He's been working at it on and off for years. Countless hours of planting, feeding, distributing, and selling off harvests have gone into that bloody thing.
And now his wife has been banned because the Special Fucking Task Force can't tell the fucking difference between someone who's gardening for their own profits and a motherfucking RMT.
It's always possible, of course, for the ban to be reversed. Any rational person looking at the setup they have couldn't possibly conclude that they are an RMT operation.
Andraana was able to call up the POL help desk and speak to someone on the group that handles banning complaints. He explained that he was calling on his wife's behalf and gave the guy he talked to her information.
In chatting with the guy, without being prompted, he was able to pull Andraana's own POL ID up and listed it as "another account that was involved" in the RMT-related activity.
Andraana was able to explain that that was his account, that the account that had been banned was his wife's, and that neither of them had ever been involved in any RMT. A cursory glance of Andraana's character - and the Stage 3 Relic horn and mass quantity of Silverpieces on it - should easily show that that was where the vast majority of the gardening proceeds wound up.
At the very least, Andraana was able to get his comments amended to her complaint.
Why Miori was banned but Andraana and Ashke were not touched remains a mystery.
I sent the following note to the Special Task Force via their email form on the POL web site:
Please take note of the very quickly growing litany of furious customers who have been caught up in your most recent round of mass bannings. A relevant thread on zam.com should be trivial to find.
It appears that the only crimes of a substantial number of the victims of your latest bannings involved nothing more than having multiple gardening mules. For this you suspected them of being involved somehow in RMT.
It seems obvious that you guys have screwed up in a massive way.
Can you imagine the negative publicity that will result when it becomes widely known that your company is routinely banning users, many of whom have been playing this game for 6+ years, who have committed no violation of your terms of service whatsoever? With the pending release of Final Fantasy XIV, I would think that such publicity would very much be of concern.
This offense of yours requires immediate acknowledgment and action.
Beware gardeners. S/E is apparently so fucking incompetent that they can't tell the difference between you and RMT.
Monday, May 18, 2009
The cake is always a lie
After the recent bg drama wrt Persistence on Midgarsormr, if nothing else I'm glad to see the hypocrisy of many of those who left us for them exposed. "It's not that they bot, it's that the competition is weak," so many of them said. Right. That's why they spent $1500 on a bot, no doubt.
Call me crazy but no matter how rich I become in my life, I will never reach a point where spending four figures of RL cash on a goddamn claimbot strikes me as anything other than rank fucking insanity. I pity anyone for whom the game is worth that much; my own priorities in life, just by virtue of the fact that I play this fucking game, are already more than enough in question.
Artaxerxes is the leader of this particular mentality, and has been a force at least in part responsible for the general evolution of endgame mentality in FFXI that has come, more or less, to accept botting as part of the territory. He's a guy in his 30's who is still infatuated with the whole gangsta "you can hate me, but I won't stop" brand of justifying pathetic behavior by seeking out the like-minded. I wonder if it crosses his mind that nobody really hates him, and that the overriding emotion with regard to him is more likely than not to be pity.
Call me crazy but no matter how rich I become in my life, I will never reach a point where spending four figures of RL cash on a goddamn claimbot strikes me as anything other than rank fucking insanity. I pity anyone for whom the game is worth that much; my own priorities in life, just by virtue of the fact that I play this fucking game, are already more than enough in question.
Artaxerxes is the leader of this particular mentality, and has been a force at least in part responsible for the general evolution of endgame mentality in FFXI that has come, more or less, to accept botting as part of the territory. He's a guy in his 30's who is still infatuated with the whole gangsta "you can hate me, but I won't stop" brand of justifying pathetic behavior by seeking out the like-minded. I wonder if it crosses his mind that nobody really hates him, and that the overriding emotion with regard to him is more likely than not to be pity.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Astral Flow burn
So, there's a technique for leveling that's still something of a secret, though there are youtube videos that describe it in pretty decent detail now. There are a few reasons for it being a secret:
1) If the general population learned of it, it would be made much less possible just because everyone would be trying it.
2) The more popular it becomes, the greater the possibility is that it will be nerfed.
Now, let me state first off that I don't think anyone can make a reasonable argument that the method is "cheating". I mean, I'm sure that the dude who insists that logging hate should be a banworthy offense would probably try to argue that it was, but amongst people that don't belong in padded rooms, it's pretty clear we're not doing anything that S/E would see as being alongside the salvage duping. We utilize only existing game mechanics and nothing we do could be categorized as a glitch. It's just that we use them in a way that there's really no way S/E could have ever foreseen.
That being said, the fact that I feel the need to open with such a disclaimer should tell you a thing or two about this method of xp: it's completely and totally broken. Broken like a terrorist after fifteen minutes with Jack Bauer working on him. Broken like Michael Jackson's blackness. Broken like the drug war. Broken like Mike Tyson after a two rounds with Lennox Lewis. Broken like the verisimilitude of "The Shield" after two rounds in the ring with "The Wire". Broken in a way that the word "broken" doesn't even really begin to describe it.
Let me kick the point home with some pithy numerical stats:
Number of SMN-burns I've participated in thusfar: 5.
Amount of time spent per party: ~1 hr.
Average amount of xp gained per SMN-burn: ~44k.
SMN level progression: 16-33
COR level progression: 45-59
That's well over 200k xp for barely 5 hours work. Not limited by level, gear, or really any other factor. Although because it relies on spamming 2hrs, you can only do it once every 2 hours (and because it's an hour's work, it's really, do it, wait 1hr, do it, wait 1hr), it's still an rate that's comparable to meritpo's under IDEAL circumstances. And if you get your COR to reset your 2hrs, you can eliminate that wait and do two runs back-to-back.
Basically the strategy involves:
1) Pulling every trainable mob in Korroloka Tunnel to a holder.
2) Transferring hate over to your holder without transferring claim.
3) Forming a party that syncs to 12-16 with 4 summoners, a corsair, and a level sync designee.
4) Going apeshit with Astral Flow.
It doesn't sound like much, but when you consider the volume of mobs available in Korroloka Tunnel, well, shit adds up. And when you consider that Astral Flow can be used to do considerable damage, as a lowbie, to mobs that are of much higher level, then, you can start to see where this goes.
Now, participation in these has made a few people a bit jumpy, but as I stated, I don't think those that participate in this are going to face any punishment from S/E. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one is simply that nothing in the strategy falls outside of the intended use of any game function. I don't think that the developers intended for them to be used to this scale, of course, but in the end that's not what did the Salvage Dupers in. They found what was clearly a bug in the game's programming, and their reaction to finding it was to use it to their advantage over and over and over. Nobody could make a reasonable argument that that wasn't clearly cheating the intent of the game.
There are no bugs being exploited here, only a game design that allows for nigh unto 200 mobs to be accumulated in a single location, and for players to deliver massive AOE attacks that will accrue no hate onto the player himself. That falls into the realm of nothing but simple player innovation.
I imagine that in an upcoming update at some point in the future there will be a message that falls along the lines of "The distance that linked mobs will follow a player has been decreased."
That will be as sad day, but unlike the people whining over the fortification xp getting gimped, my only response will be to shrug and say it was nice while it lasted.
1) If the general population learned of it, it would be made much less possible just because everyone would be trying it.
2) The more popular it becomes, the greater the possibility is that it will be nerfed.
Now, let me state first off that I don't think anyone can make a reasonable argument that the method is "cheating". I mean, I'm sure that the dude who insists that logging hate should be a banworthy offense would probably try to argue that it was, but amongst people that don't belong in padded rooms, it's pretty clear we're not doing anything that S/E would see as being alongside the salvage duping. We utilize only existing game mechanics and nothing we do could be categorized as a glitch. It's just that we use them in a way that there's really no way S/E could have ever foreseen.
That being said, the fact that I feel the need to open with such a disclaimer should tell you a thing or two about this method of xp: it's completely and totally broken. Broken like a terrorist after fifteen minutes with Jack Bauer working on him. Broken like Michael Jackson's blackness. Broken like the drug war. Broken like Mike Tyson after a two rounds with Lennox Lewis. Broken like the verisimilitude of "The Shield" after two rounds in the ring with "The Wire". Broken in a way that the word "broken" doesn't even really begin to describe it.
Let me kick the point home with some pithy numerical stats:
Number of SMN-burns I've participated in thusfar: 5.
Amount of time spent per party: ~1 hr.
Average amount of xp gained per SMN-burn: ~44k.
SMN level progression: 16-33
COR level progression: 45-59
That's well over 200k xp for barely 5 hours work. Not limited by level, gear, or really any other factor. Although because it relies on spamming 2hrs, you can only do it once every 2 hours (and because it's an hour's work, it's really, do it, wait 1hr, do it, wait 1hr), it's still an rate that's comparable to meritpo's under IDEAL circumstances. And if you get your COR to reset your 2hrs, you can eliminate that wait and do two runs back-to-back.
Basically the strategy involves:
1) Pulling every trainable mob in Korroloka Tunnel to a holder.
2) Transferring hate over to your holder without transferring claim.
3) Forming a party that syncs to 12-16 with 4 summoners, a corsair, and a level sync designee.
4) Going apeshit with Astral Flow.
It doesn't sound like much, but when you consider the volume of mobs available in Korroloka Tunnel, well, shit adds up. And when you consider that Astral Flow can be used to do considerable damage, as a lowbie, to mobs that are of much higher level, then, you can start to see where this goes.
Now, participation in these has made a few people a bit jumpy, but as I stated, I don't think those that participate in this are going to face any punishment from S/E. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one is simply that nothing in the strategy falls outside of the intended use of any game function. I don't think that the developers intended for them to be used to this scale, of course, but in the end that's not what did the Salvage Dupers in. They found what was clearly a bug in the game's programming, and their reaction to finding it was to use it to their advantage over and over and over. Nobody could make a reasonable argument that that wasn't clearly cheating the intent of the game.
There are no bugs being exploited here, only a game design that allows for nigh unto 200 mobs to be accumulated in a single location, and for players to deliver massive AOE attacks that will accrue no hate onto the player himself. That falls into the realm of nothing but simple player innovation.
I imagine that in an upcoming update at some point in the future there will be a message that falls along the lines of "The distance that linked mobs will follow a player has been decreased."
That will be as sad day, but unlike the people whining over the fortification xp getting gimped, my only response will be to shrug and say it was nice while it lasted.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Project Degimpification
DRK was my first job to 75, and is really the reason I exist largely as a gimpy Elvaan mage. I knew when starting the game that I wanted to take DRK up, and chose my race because of that. I leveled it to 75 and was happy, somewhere in the timeframe of 2005-2006. After hitting 75 I joined up with Precedence, applying in a group application with my RL friends Andraana and Amatsukami, with whom I'd been playing the game since its NA release.
In this same timeframe I'd been leveling BRD, mostly to coincide with the release of the Merit abilities. Unwilling to deal with the horror of seeking endless limit parties on DRK, I leveled BRD primarily as a means to gain limit points. Also, it was a fun job to level.
I quickly found out that my DRK was not quite up to the standards of much of the rest of Precedence. Not to say that it was completely gimped: I had several pieces of Adaman gear, which was the best available at the time, and pretty decent gear swaps for TP, Weapon Skills, and Dark Magic, but Precedence was topheavy with much better DD setups and as such I found myself coming to more events than not as BRD.
BRD in endgame was not particularly satisfying nor challenging: there wasn't much gear I could really use, and there wasn't much skill involved in keeping two songs up on a party, which was all it really entailed.
At the same time, Precedence had a shortage of BLM's, which was the only reason I really ever leveled BLM to begin with. Once I did, though, I found that I loved it. It was so much more intricate a job than DD and BRD: its solo capabilities were something entirely new, and the crowd control aspects in Dynamis and other large fights were a welcome change.
Eventually, due to RL priorities (roughly the 2nd half of 2007), I took a ~6 month break from FFXI and upon returning found that Precedence had broken up and its members had moved on. I took this time to gain Sea access, level SCH, and study up on the ways the game had changed: the new available gear, the advent of zerging, and also to master the Spellcast plugin for Windower, which drastically advances the efficiency with which mage jobs spend their mp. I focused heavily on gardening in this timeframe and earned enough gil to bring my BLM to AH respectability, including a bare-bones 320/120 build and 8/8 HQ staves. I also brought my RDM sub, at long last, to 37, a necessary evil I'd been putting off forever.
I applied and was accepted into Remedy in this timeframe, focusing back on endgame activities. Once reaching SCH 75, in early May 2008, I found myself nearly full-timing SCH at endgame with Remedy, as its officers/tanks slowly warmed to the idea of a full-force AOE Stoneskin and Phalanx with realistic capabilities both for healing and nuking. They appreciated the versatility of the job.
Along the way my DRK became officially retired. The gear was too far behind, and I was focusing my merits 100% on SCH. Eventually I was able to merit my SCH to 100%, and was acquiring good gear for it, including Vicious Mufflers, 5/8 obis, Goliard Clogs, an Ixion Cloak, as well as Einherjar pieces including an Omega Ring, Morgana's Choker, and Gleeman's Cape. My HNM nuking set, pushing as close to 320/120 as I can get on SCH, is also coming along nicely: the Omega Ring and Gleeman's Cape are essential pieces to that, and I've recently acquired the necessary Limbus pieces to upgrade my SCH AF body piece to its +1 version, a necessary piece to the build. The only things I'm missing for a bona fide 320/120 build are the AF2 head (+7 elemental skill /drool) and the AF2 accessory. With Paradigm showing good success at Dynamis (3 DRK capes dropped in Dynamis Bubu on Wednesday), both are real possibilities.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. With my SCH gear inching closer and closer to where I want it, I've turned back to my first love in the game, my DRK. I realized that with my assets: an active nyzul group, a good salvage group, a decent source of gil at my disposal, a limbus group that could easily expand into omega-slaying territory, and a linkshell that's working its way back up to Odin access, turning my DRK into something of a force seemed plausible. Its gear was an embarrassment, but blowing ~2M on the AH (including 75 saved up ABC's) for some gear has punched it back up to respectability. This included Dusk Gloves, Dusk Boots, Black Cuisses, a Chivalrous Chain, a Potent Belt, upgrading my AF gloves to AF+1 (the upgrade pieces had been sitting around forever), and a Brutal Earring. I acquired a Forager's Mantle ages ago, I still had Snipers and Flame Rings x2, and the odd Heca Head I acquired from a random Fafnir with Precedence way back when.
So for the past few weeks my project has been my DRK. It's amazing how much progress you can make when you put your mind to it. A little luck also never hurt. My Nyzul group has literally gone 4/4 on Askar Bodies from Floor 80 bosses: meaning, we've fought a Floor 80 boss 4 times and gotten a damn Askar Body every time. So, even though my stated target with our Nyzul group is Goliard, the last Askar Korazin dropped to me because I was literally the last person left who could equip it. It's a very nice piece, too: Attack +12 and boosts to Double Attack and Store TP make for a great TP piece when I can eat sushi or when accuracy is otherwise not a primary concern, and it's a good WS piece under any circumstance. Of course, it's not an e.body, but what is?
I'd like to round out my hecatomb set for max WS potency, but honestly, for DRK, hecatomb is only marginally better than your TP set in most cases. Accuracy still means a great deal when it comes to Guillotine. You can't put up the gratuitous numbers, but you can put up respectable numbers more consistently.
I'd say priority #1 is getting some Homam at this point. My limbus static of 3 (myself, Andraana, and Miori) is perhaps expanding to ~5, maybe 6, and with the quality of that group should be enough to clear all Apollyon zones and take down Omega. I very much like a small group for this as it makes for more controlled fights, less organizational hassle, and a much greater likelihood of garnering drops. We also expand our Temenos repertoire, primarily for the opportunity to upgrade our AF. I still have a number of upgrades that would benefit me directly (SCH AF+1 head would be very nice, I also need BRD AF+1 hands, to think of two off the top of my head).
I'm also on the top of my salvage group's priority list for Ares feet, and 2nd on any other Ares that drops. Ares is actually only somewhat useful for DRK, but at least it makes for good WS gear.
Still, things are looking up. I'm hopeful. And Magi looks pretty damn good in her Askar body ^^
In this same timeframe I'd been leveling BRD, mostly to coincide with the release of the Merit abilities. Unwilling to deal with the horror of seeking endless limit parties on DRK, I leveled BRD primarily as a means to gain limit points. Also, it was a fun job to level.
I quickly found out that my DRK was not quite up to the standards of much of the rest of Precedence. Not to say that it was completely gimped: I had several pieces of Adaman gear, which was the best available at the time, and pretty decent gear swaps for TP, Weapon Skills, and Dark Magic, but Precedence was topheavy with much better DD setups and as such I found myself coming to more events than not as BRD.
BRD in endgame was not particularly satisfying nor challenging: there wasn't much gear I could really use, and there wasn't much skill involved in keeping two songs up on a party, which was all it really entailed.
At the same time, Precedence had a shortage of BLM's, which was the only reason I really ever leveled BLM to begin with. Once I did, though, I found that I loved it. It was so much more intricate a job than DD and BRD: its solo capabilities were something entirely new, and the crowd control aspects in Dynamis and other large fights were a welcome change.
Eventually, due to RL priorities (roughly the 2nd half of 2007), I took a ~6 month break from FFXI and upon returning found that Precedence had broken up and its members had moved on. I took this time to gain Sea access, level SCH, and study up on the ways the game had changed: the new available gear, the advent of zerging, and also to master the Spellcast plugin for Windower, which drastically advances the efficiency with which mage jobs spend their mp. I focused heavily on gardening in this timeframe and earned enough gil to bring my BLM to AH respectability, including a bare-bones 320/120 build and 8/8 HQ staves. I also brought my RDM sub, at long last, to 37, a necessary evil I'd been putting off forever.
I applied and was accepted into Remedy in this timeframe, focusing back on endgame activities. Once reaching SCH 75, in early May 2008, I found myself nearly full-timing SCH at endgame with Remedy, as its officers/tanks slowly warmed to the idea of a full-force AOE Stoneskin and Phalanx with realistic capabilities both for healing and nuking. They appreciated the versatility of the job.
Along the way my DRK became officially retired. The gear was too far behind, and I was focusing my merits 100% on SCH. Eventually I was able to merit my SCH to 100%, and was acquiring good gear for it, including Vicious Mufflers, 5/8 obis, Goliard Clogs, an Ixion Cloak, as well as Einherjar pieces including an Omega Ring, Morgana's Choker, and Gleeman's Cape. My HNM nuking set, pushing as close to 320/120 as I can get on SCH, is also coming along nicely: the Omega Ring and Gleeman's Cape are essential pieces to that, and I've recently acquired the necessary Limbus pieces to upgrade my SCH AF body piece to its +1 version, a necessary piece to the build. The only things I'm missing for a bona fide 320/120 build are the AF2 head (+7 elemental skill /drool) and the AF2 accessory. With Paradigm showing good success at Dynamis (3 DRK capes dropped in Dynamis Bubu on Wednesday), both are real possibilities.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. With my SCH gear inching closer and closer to where I want it, I've turned back to my first love in the game, my DRK. I realized that with my assets: an active nyzul group, a good salvage group, a decent source of gil at my disposal, a limbus group that could easily expand into omega-slaying territory, and a linkshell that's working its way back up to Odin access, turning my DRK into something of a force seemed plausible. Its gear was an embarrassment, but blowing ~2M on the AH (including 75 saved up ABC's) for some gear has punched it back up to respectability. This included Dusk Gloves, Dusk Boots, Black Cuisses, a Chivalrous Chain, a Potent Belt, upgrading my AF gloves to AF+1 (the upgrade pieces had been sitting around forever), and a Brutal Earring. I acquired a Forager's Mantle ages ago, I still had Snipers and Flame Rings x2, and the odd Heca Head I acquired from a random Fafnir with Precedence way back when.
So for the past few weeks my project has been my DRK. It's amazing how much progress you can make when you put your mind to it. A little luck also never hurt. My Nyzul group has literally gone 4/4 on Askar Bodies from Floor 80 bosses: meaning, we've fought a Floor 80 boss 4 times and gotten a damn Askar Body every time. So, even though my stated target with our Nyzul group is Goliard, the last Askar Korazin dropped to me because I was literally the last person left who could equip it. It's a very nice piece, too: Attack +12 and boosts to Double Attack and Store TP make for a great TP piece when I can eat sushi or when accuracy is otherwise not a primary concern, and it's a good WS piece under any circumstance. Of course, it's not an e.body, but what is?
I'd like to round out my hecatomb set for max WS potency, but honestly, for DRK, hecatomb is only marginally better than your TP set in most cases. Accuracy still means a great deal when it comes to Guillotine. You can't put up the gratuitous numbers, but you can put up respectable numbers more consistently.
I'd say priority #1 is getting some Homam at this point. My limbus static of 3 (myself, Andraana, and Miori) is perhaps expanding to ~5, maybe 6, and with the quality of that group should be enough to clear all Apollyon zones and take down Omega. I very much like a small group for this as it makes for more controlled fights, less organizational hassle, and a much greater likelihood of garnering drops. We also expand our Temenos repertoire, primarily for the opportunity to upgrade our AF. I still have a number of upgrades that would benefit me directly (SCH AF+1 head would be very nice, I also need BRD AF+1 hands, to think of two off the top of my head).
I'm also on the top of my salvage group's priority list for Ares feet, and 2nd on any other Ares that drops. Ares is actually only somewhat useful for DRK, but at least it makes for good WS gear.
Still, things are looking up. I'm hopeful. And Magi looks pretty damn good in her Askar body ^^
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Just ... wow
I'm not the sort to jump straight to diagnoses of mental illness, but this guy seems to me to be the rare sort of person I mentally fast track to "off the deep end" status. After reading the post I link to, and a few more on his blog, I simply don't see any explanation for this guy that doesn't lead straight to "this motherfucker belongs in an institution". I don't mean that as hyperbole. I mean that as, in the most literal possible sense, there is almost certainly a severe case of mental illness driving this guy's rantings.
But before I get too deep into this guy, a word on the bannings that recently took place w.r.t. Salvage duping, because it ties in. I've stayed relatively silent regarding the matter, mostly because my opinions of them are difficult to articulate and easy for those not capable of nuanced thought to misinterpret. I had a great many friends banned because of the exploit, although I never did salvage myself. The punishment seemed unfair and inexcusably inconsistently adjudicated. With Salvage in general, S/E fucked the dog to a massive degree. The insanely low drop rates of 35 pieces turn it into a massive grind, and the requirement of the acquisition of 30k Alexandrite for weapons that are only marginally superior to the top endgame equipment available constitutes evidence that the developers of the game are drastically out of touch with the player base. With that in mind, given the discovery of the duping techniques, it is understandable that so many players felt justified in getting around the system.
That being said, I feel that the players by and large got what they deserved. A reasonable person can not make an argument that the people actively involved in duping salvage items were not aware that they were cheating. There were some tragic cases of players caught up in the duping that honestly had no idea of what was going on getting banned, but those aside, the vast majority of the players who were punished were those who took advantage of the exploit as much as they possibly could, for as long as they possibly could, and felt good about it the whole way through. That's a direct affront of the legitimacy of the game. Game exploits can be categorized into venial and mortal sins, to use an appropriate analogy. In that context, when it comes to MMORPG's, duping is in fact Original Sin. It's the one thing that every MMO that has ever existed has clamped down upon with absolute authority, because it's an activity that directly attacks the very nature of the MMO formula, which is that of (time + effort + skill) = loot. If anyone participating in the duping didn't see it as cheating, they are very skilled in self-deception.
More succinctly, while I can empathize with the impulses towards pyromania, the fact remains that when you play with fire, you get burned.
Which in turn takes us to the current object of this jackass's ire, the fairly recent defeat of Pandemonium Warden by the Apathy linkshell on Remora.
For those unaware, Pandemonium Warden in his final form utilizes Astral Flow multiple times in rapid succession that for some time was considered unbeatable. In this case the Astral Flow causes his lamps (his "pets" in the Astral Flow sense) to do massive AOE damage to everyone in the area, which will with 100% certainty cause a massive wipe. Given the postulate that S/E did not design any mobs in the game to be fundamentally unkillable, this leaves only two options to win the fight:
1) There is some "trick" intended to the fight that reduces the effect of, locks, or otherwise nullifies Astral Flow and the player base does not yet know it (ala the postulated means of locking Absolute Virtue's 2hr abilities), and/or
2) S/E expects a form of player innovation to develop at some point that either allows the alliance to survive Astral Flow, or recover multiple times in rapid succession after its usage.
The player base has shown that it is more likely to discover a method to beat a mob using (2) than (1). Absolute Virtue is the best current example of this: the methods with which he's been killed have all been extremely innovative, but have all also clearly been "out-of-the-box" solutions that S/E clearly did not intend: the "Wall of Justice" and the post-nerf-Kraken-DRK-zerg being first and foremost on that list. With AV, the fact that S/E has rapidly ninja'd every means with which he's been killed is, in most players' minds, indisputable proof that AV has a (1)-category means of being defeated, and that the powers that be at S/E are insisting that the player base finds that method before they will allow any kill of AV to be "legit".
However, it's worth noting that the players that came up with and executed the innovative (2)-category means of defeating AV suffered no punishment for it, nor was the loot they acquired from AV ever confiscated. This has shown that, although they have remained adamant about insisting that AV only be killed in the "legit" method long-term, they are not directly affronted by player innovation utilizing the existing game mechanics when it comes to defeating a particular mob.
With PW, the means of killing him was most certainly in the (2) category. In order to get around Astral Flow, they had a player (a PLD/RDM I believe) cast diaga to get hate on all of PW's lamps, run them away from the rest of the alliance, and have then log out. The puller eventually dies, the rest of the players log back in, PW has no hate on them, and they recycle that pattern until his final form is finally dead.
(note that the dude's description of the kill is slightly flawed. The most egregious mistake - which causes a chuckle - is to assert that the pld/rdm gains "massive enmity" on PW via casting diaga. Last I checked, diaga did not exactly give "massive" enmity, though it a consistent description given this dude's wildly exaggerated flair for the dramatic).
In stark contrast to the various AV kills, however, S/E has given this particular kill legitimacy, and even went so far as to mention it in an article on their PlayOnline front page.
Which brings us back to this particular nutcase, who is under the opinion that the kill is not in fact legitimate and is suggesting - nay, demanding! - that all involved in the kill be banned.
The particular clause of the TOS that he is evoking in this charge reads as follows:
He then goes on to assert that:
He goes on for several pages worth of blather, but this is the lynchpin of his entire argument. On this, all depends. He goes on to explain why S/E's failure to enforce this "rule" but the fact that they did in fact enforce anti-duping clauses in the TOS is a massive inconsistency, and most of the rest of the post is largely-incoherent blathering about S/E's intention as to the meta-state of FFXI as a game as a whole, but it's incredible how somebody of this mindset will take one simple false postulate and with it, derive a ridiculous world, attacking all who have the audacity to disagree with him (which apparently, incoherently, include S/E's powers that be, who are the motherfuckers who wrote the TOS to begin with and yet went out of their way to legitimize the PW kill!)
It's such a ridiculous argument, and it leads to ridiculous places. He was challenged with the obvious fact that this argument, taken to logical extrapolations, would mean that anyone who has ever slept a mob and logged out while the mob was slept, was also committing a ban-worthy offense; amazingly, he agreed! So in a single leap of logic the object of his ire became not just the people responsible for the PW kill, but most likely 99%+ of the game's entire player base! Seriously, who hasn't slept a mob at some point and then logged hate? Yet, he followed the logic through to its natural conclusion, which is that if you catch aggro from a mob you cannot kill, your only options are to zone, or log hate (never mind that there's no specific reason to believe that zoning is a "legitimate" means of surviving unwanted aggro if logging out of the game certainly isn't, as he apparently believes).
When people have presented him with this dilemma, and pointed out the obvious fact that it's simply an untenable position, he has challenged people to explain the difference between logging hate and duping salvage items. Seriously. As if the difference between
1) An activity which took advantage of a clear and unambiguous bug that led to acquisition of some of the best possible gear in the game at a rate of up to 3x the rate that was clearly intended, and
2) An activity which takes advantage of obvious game mechanics that the developers clearly intended for players to use and which only leads to the minor consequence of avoiding a death
was not obvious!
Now, when saying it was a game mechanic that the developers "clearly intended for players to use", I'm making a couple of observations. They seem obvious enough to me, but since they're clearly what's in dispute, the argument needs more specificity. For this specificity we will make a few basic observations:
a) There are clearly conditions under which logging out to avoid death is impossible. It requires that the player be able to rest for 30 seconds, which in turn requires that the player take no damage during that time.
b) The motive for the conditions of (a) was clearly to induce a layer of difficulty to the process of logging out and prevent using it as a generic means of avoiding harm in all possible circumstances: if a BLM takes hate at Tiamat, for example, he can't just log out and avoid death.
c) However, the conditions of (a) given the other means of avoiding being attacked available in the game make it clear that the developers are either completely incompetent, or did not want to make logging out to avoid death completely impossible. 30 seconds is much shorter than the duration of, for example, an unresisted Sleep 2 spell lasts for 90 seconds, enough time to log out several times over. If this was the intent of the developers, adjusting these mechanics in order to make it impossible would be trivial: increasing the timer to something like 120 seconds, or simply making the /logout command unavailable while a living monster had enmity on you, would both accomplish this effect very easily.
All the evidence points to the fact that "logging hate" in order to remove your threat level was in fact part of the original game design and a clearly legitimate means of avoiding death.
Now, perhaps this was the means that the developers intended in order for PW to be killed, perhaps not. That's not really the argument. If it wasn't the means they intended, and they cared about people doing it the "correct" way (as has clearly been the case with every AV kill thusfar), they would do what they did with AV: ninja the method and thus de-legitimize the kill.
Still, none of that justifies my opening assertion that this dude is completely mentally unstable. Certainly the argument, such as it is, is way off the deep end, but occasionally rational people make irrational arguments.
That doesn't seem to be the case. This is the sort of person who I would estimate is actually capable of acts of severe real-world violence. Over a fucking video game.
Consider the line with which he ends the most recent post on his blog, a paranoid ranting about RMT taking over endgame on a particular server. The rant itself is not nearly as ridiculous as his logging-hate-equals-cheating fiasco, and there's no doubt that there's an arms race when it comes to the ability to out-claim a mob like Fafnir utilizing third party tools, or that there is an interest in RMT shells to participate and dominate this arena. Most have proven unsuccessful because RMT of high level HNM's requires at least a modicum of skill and teamwork, attributes RMT shells do not possess in abundance. Nevertheless the line he ends the post with is disturbing in any context:
What "other options" is this dude talking about? Certainly he's not using quitting the game as such a threat - not if a better option is shutting the game down. He certainly makes no bones about quickly resorting to threats of real-life violence with some of the commentators on his blog. He even acknowledges his violent tendencies:
He makes no qualms about his intentions, which spawn as a direct result of him feeling spurned by the FFXI community in general:
It's an amusing statement, because I doubt anyone at all outside of the FFXI fan community even knows anything at all about the FFXI fan community, but if they did, the fact that we waste hours and days and weeks and months and years of our lives on a fucking video game would, to them, shed far more of a negative light on us than the fact that some people play a bit fast and loose with the rules of that video game.
Essentially he sees two facets of people in the game:
...and him.
Never mind that the statement is factually incorrect WRT FFXI vs. Rapture. It's no secret that Square/Enix has pulled resources from FFXI onto their new project, in large amount. This does not mean that FFXI will no longer be around once Rapture is released. People still play the original Everquest, for Chrissake.
More revealing is his need to lump anyone who utilizes any enhancement whatsoever to their own game experience as lower-than-pond-scum cheaters who are going out of their way to ruin his own endgame experience. He takes it personally - all of it - and is apparently unable or unwilling to distinguish between the venial and mortal sins of FFXI. That's what's scarier than anything. He thinks that the punishment for logging your fucking hate, which if you look at it from a certain light on a certain day of the week and a certain state of mind and a certain general outlook on life you can make an argument violates the TOS (and in so doing, be spectacularly wrong), should be the same as utilizing a multi-thousand dollar claimbot to monopolize contested NM's at endgame.
That to me is the most telling aspect of his personality: this is the sort of person who sees things only in absolutes. That means that everything he does, he does with a complete, unassailable certainty. It is a state of mind not unlike that found in religious fanatics.
For some the world seems a complicated place, and the means with which they simplify it turns them into a dangerous person. To be perfectly honest, if something violent happened involving Square/Enix, the first thing I would do would be check if this motherfucker had an alibi. It's some disturbing shit.
Get him a padded room, preferably one without a means of connecting to the Internet.
But before I get too deep into this guy, a word on the bannings that recently took place w.r.t. Salvage duping, because it ties in. I've stayed relatively silent regarding the matter, mostly because my opinions of them are difficult to articulate and easy for those not capable of nuanced thought to misinterpret. I had a great many friends banned because of the exploit, although I never did salvage myself. The punishment seemed unfair and inexcusably inconsistently adjudicated. With Salvage in general, S/E fucked the dog to a massive degree. The insanely low drop rates of 35 pieces turn it into a massive grind, and the requirement of the acquisition of 30k Alexandrite for weapons that are only marginally superior to the top endgame equipment available constitutes evidence that the developers of the game are drastically out of touch with the player base. With that in mind, given the discovery of the duping techniques, it is understandable that so many players felt justified in getting around the system.
That being said, I feel that the players by and large got what they deserved. A reasonable person can not make an argument that the people actively involved in duping salvage items were not aware that they were cheating. There were some tragic cases of players caught up in the duping that honestly had no idea of what was going on getting banned, but those aside, the vast majority of the players who were punished were those who took advantage of the exploit as much as they possibly could, for as long as they possibly could, and felt good about it the whole way through. That's a direct affront of the legitimacy of the game. Game exploits can be categorized into venial and mortal sins, to use an appropriate analogy. In that context, when it comes to MMORPG's, duping is in fact Original Sin. It's the one thing that every MMO that has ever existed has clamped down upon with absolute authority, because it's an activity that directly attacks the very nature of the MMO formula, which is that of (time + effort + skill) = loot. If anyone participating in the duping didn't see it as cheating, they are very skilled in self-deception.
More succinctly, while I can empathize with the impulses towards pyromania, the fact remains that when you play with fire, you get burned.
Which in turn takes us to the current object of this jackass's ire, the fairly recent defeat of Pandemonium Warden by the Apathy linkshell on Remora.
For those unaware, Pandemonium Warden in his final form utilizes Astral Flow multiple times in rapid succession that for some time was considered unbeatable. In this case the Astral Flow causes his lamps (his "pets" in the Astral Flow sense) to do massive AOE damage to everyone in the area, which will with 100% certainty cause a massive wipe. Given the postulate that S/E did not design any mobs in the game to be fundamentally unkillable, this leaves only two options to win the fight:
1) There is some "trick" intended to the fight that reduces the effect of, locks, or otherwise nullifies Astral Flow and the player base does not yet know it (ala the postulated means of locking Absolute Virtue's 2hr abilities), and/or
2) S/E expects a form of player innovation to develop at some point that either allows the alliance to survive Astral Flow, or recover multiple times in rapid succession after its usage.
The player base has shown that it is more likely to discover a method to beat a mob using (2) than (1). Absolute Virtue is the best current example of this: the methods with which he's been killed have all been extremely innovative, but have all also clearly been "out-of-the-box" solutions that S/E clearly did not intend: the "Wall of Justice" and the post-nerf-Kraken-DRK-zerg being first and foremost on that list. With AV, the fact that S/E has rapidly ninja'd every means with which he's been killed is, in most players' minds, indisputable proof that AV has a (1)-category means of being defeated, and that the powers that be at S/E are insisting that the player base finds that method before they will allow any kill of AV to be "legit".
However, it's worth noting that the players that came up with and executed the innovative (2)-category means of defeating AV suffered no punishment for it, nor was the loot they acquired from AV ever confiscated. This has shown that, although they have remained adamant about insisting that AV only be killed in the "legit" method long-term, they are not directly affronted by player innovation utilizing the existing game mechanics when it comes to defeating a particular mob.
With PW, the means of killing him was most certainly in the (2) category. In order to get around Astral Flow, they had a player (a PLD/RDM I believe) cast diaga to get hate on all of PW's lamps, run them away from the rest of the alliance, and have then log out. The puller eventually dies, the rest of the players log back in, PW has no hate on them, and they recycle that pattern until his final form is finally dead.
(note that the dude's description of the kill is slightly flawed. The most egregious mistake - which causes a chuckle - is to assert that the pld/rdm gains "massive enmity" on PW via casting diaga. Last I checked, diaga did not exactly give "massive" enmity, though it a consistent description given this dude's wildly exaggerated flair for the dramatic).
In stark contrast to the various AV kills, however, S/E has given this particular kill legitimacy, and even went so far as to mention it in an article on their PlayOnline front page.
Which brings us back to this particular nutcase, who is under the opinion that the kill is not in fact legitimate and is suggesting - nay, demanding! - that all involved in the kill be banned.
The particular clause of the TOS that he is evoking in this charge reads as follows:
Players who take advantage of in-game mechanics not intended as normal means of game play may have their account suspended and all items or experience obtained through those means confiscated.
He then goes on to assert that:
There is only one normal game-play use of logging out: to leave Final Fantasy XI.
He goes on for several pages worth of blather, but this is the lynchpin of his entire argument. On this, all depends. He goes on to explain why S/E's failure to enforce this "rule" but the fact that they did in fact enforce anti-duping clauses in the TOS is a massive inconsistency, and most of the rest of the post is largely-incoherent blathering about S/E's intention as to the meta-state of FFXI as a game as a whole, but it's incredible how somebody of this mindset will take one simple false postulate and with it, derive a ridiculous world, attacking all who have the audacity to disagree with him (which apparently, incoherently, include S/E's powers that be, who are the motherfuckers who wrote the TOS to begin with and yet went out of their way to legitimize the PW kill!)
It's such a ridiculous argument, and it leads to ridiculous places. He was challenged with the obvious fact that this argument, taken to logical extrapolations, would mean that anyone who has ever slept a mob and logged out while the mob was slept, was also committing a ban-worthy offense; amazingly, he agreed! So in a single leap of logic the object of his ire became not just the people responsible for the PW kill, but most likely 99%+ of the game's entire player base! Seriously, who hasn't slept a mob at some point and then logged hate? Yet, he followed the logic through to its natural conclusion, which is that if you catch aggro from a mob you cannot kill, your only options are to zone, or log hate (never mind that there's no specific reason to believe that zoning is a "legitimate" means of surviving unwanted aggro if logging out of the game certainly isn't, as he apparently believes).
When people have presented him with this dilemma, and pointed out the obvious fact that it's simply an untenable position, he has challenged people to explain the difference between logging hate and duping salvage items. Seriously. As if the difference between
1) An activity which took advantage of a clear and unambiguous bug that led to acquisition of some of the best possible gear in the game at a rate of up to 3x the rate that was clearly intended, and
2) An activity which takes advantage of obvious game mechanics that the developers clearly intended for players to use and which only leads to the minor consequence of avoiding a death
was not obvious!
Now, when saying it was a game mechanic that the developers "clearly intended for players to use", I'm making a couple of observations. They seem obvious enough to me, but since they're clearly what's in dispute, the argument needs more specificity. For this specificity we will make a few basic observations:
a) There are clearly conditions under which logging out to avoid death is impossible. It requires that the player be able to rest for 30 seconds, which in turn requires that the player take no damage during that time.
b) The motive for the conditions of (a) was clearly to induce a layer of difficulty to the process of logging out and prevent using it as a generic means of avoiding harm in all possible circumstances: if a BLM takes hate at Tiamat, for example, he can't just log out and avoid death.
c) However, the conditions of (a) given the other means of avoiding being attacked available in the game make it clear that the developers are either completely incompetent, or did not want to make logging out to avoid death completely impossible. 30 seconds is much shorter than the duration of, for example, an unresisted Sleep 2 spell lasts for 90 seconds, enough time to log out several times over. If this was the intent of the developers, adjusting these mechanics in order to make it impossible would be trivial: increasing the timer to something like 120 seconds, or simply making the /logout command unavailable while a living monster had enmity on you, would both accomplish this effect very easily.
All the evidence points to the fact that "logging hate" in order to remove your threat level was in fact part of the original game design and a clearly legitimate means of avoiding death.
Now, perhaps this was the means that the developers intended in order for PW to be killed, perhaps not. That's not really the argument. If it wasn't the means they intended, and they cared about people doing it the "correct" way (as has clearly been the case with every AV kill thusfar), they would do what they did with AV: ninja the method and thus de-legitimize the kill.
Still, none of that justifies my opening assertion that this dude is completely mentally unstable. Certainly the argument, such as it is, is way off the deep end, but occasionally rational people make irrational arguments.
That doesn't seem to be the case. This is the sort of person who I would estimate is actually capable of acts of severe real-world violence. Over a fucking video game.
Consider the line with which he ends the most recent post on his blog, a paranoid ranting about RMT taking over endgame on a particular server. The rant itself is not nearly as ridiculous as his logging-hate-equals-cheating fiasco, and there's no doubt that there's an arms race when it comes to the ability to out-claim a mob like Fafnir utilizing third party tools, or that there is an interest in RMT shells to participate and dominate this arena. Most have proven unsuccessful because RMT of high level HNM's requires at least a modicum of skill and teamwork, attributes RMT shells do not possess in abundance. Nevertheless the line he ends the post with is disturbing in any context:
Square-Enix, fix your fucking game, shut it down, or I may have to start looking into some other options.
What "other options" is this dude talking about? Certainly he's not using quitting the game as such a threat - not if a better option is shutting the game down. He certainly makes no bones about quickly resorting to threats of real-life violence with some of the commentators on his blog. He even acknowledges his violent tendencies:
Why? I'm not safe around other people -- especially people I can't stand. I am probably not welcome in any of my previous hometowns, with the possible exception of where I took graduate school (and that's iffy).
He makes no qualms about his intentions, which spawn as a direct result of him feeling spurned by the FFXI community in general:
I want the general public to view the FFXI fan community in an extremely negative light.
It's an amusing statement, because I doubt anyone at all outside of the FFXI fan community even knows anything at all about the FFXI fan community, but if they did, the fact that we waste hours and days and weeks and months and years of our lives on a fucking video game would, to them, shed far more of a negative light on us than the fact that some people play a bit fast and loose with the rules of that video game.
Essentially he sees two facets of people in the game:
You've got a core of players who don't give two whits about anything but their own selves, gear, and all that other garbage. They're junk, as far as I am concerned, and they've destroyed the Vana'dielian experience so badly that I believe that to be the main reason that Square-Enix has basically gone and finally stated that they really only care about FFXI anymore to get to Rapture.
...and him.
Never mind that the statement is factually incorrect WRT FFXI vs. Rapture. It's no secret that Square/Enix has pulled resources from FFXI onto their new project, in large amount. This does not mean that FFXI will no longer be around once Rapture is released. People still play the original Everquest, for Chrissake.
More revealing is his need to lump anyone who utilizes any enhancement whatsoever to their own game experience as lower-than-pond-scum cheaters who are going out of their way to ruin his own endgame experience. He takes it personally - all of it - and is apparently unable or unwilling to distinguish between the venial and mortal sins of FFXI. That's what's scarier than anything. He thinks that the punishment for logging your fucking hate, which if you look at it from a certain light on a certain day of the week and a certain state of mind and a certain general outlook on life you can make an argument violates the TOS (and in so doing, be spectacularly wrong), should be the same as utilizing a multi-thousand dollar claimbot to monopolize contested NM's at endgame.
That to me is the most telling aspect of his personality: this is the sort of person who sees things only in absolutes. That means that everything he does, he does with a complete, unassailable certainty. It is a state of mind not unlike that found in religious fanatics.
For some the world seems a complicated place, and the means with which they simplify it turns them into a dangerous person. To be perfectly honest, if something violent happened involving Square/Enix, the first thing I would do would be check if this motherfucker had an alibi. It's some disturbing shit.
Get him a padded room, preferably one without a means of connecting to the Internet.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Absolute Virtue - "Eureka!" moment?
So, over at The BG Forums there's a post which claims the first significant progress on Absolute Virtue since the Kraken DRK was ninjad. Ever since the S/E video was released, which zoomed into the chat log when Absolute Virtue uses his 2hr abilities that showed players using their 2hrs as well, it's been speculated that using your own 2hrs after AV used his would somehow lock down his own 2hrs. Unfortunately, after much testing, and much death, no real significant progress had been made.
Until now, it seems. A player named Suteki over at JP Button claims that his linkshell had shown some success in locking AV's "Call Wyvern" 2hr - that is, getting it so he doesn't use it again - by getting their DRG to use Call Wyvern right after AV did. However, when trying it out with a new DRG, they couldn't get it to work. That interested them, and in comparing the differences between the two DRGs to see what might have caused it, they noticed something huge: The first DRG had a Love Torque equipped, and the second one did not.
The entire theme of sea, of course, surrounds virtues and vices, virtues and sins. Every jailer in Sea has a name surrounding a virtue: Fortitude, Temperance, Faith, Justice, Hope, Prudence, and Love. Each jailer (excepting Love) drops "virtues" that are used to spawn the next mob, and all jailers (including Love) drop Torques and Weapons associated with the virtue they are guarding.
Of course, the idea that these items had something to do with the key to beating AV is nothing new. Very early in the process, people tried using the different weapons in the fight, but nothing tangible ever resulted, and eventually the idea that the weapons had anything to do with the kill was discarded, and you were laughed out of the room at BG if you suggested it.
The critical flaw in this reasoning, though, is that proving that using the weapons in the fight (and by inference, the torques) did not weaken AV in any way did not prove that they were not involved at all. The possibility always existed that they were part of the equation somehow, not by themselves but rather as the key variable in a more complicated scheme. I've long thought that, given S/E's stubborn insistence that people kill AV only the "right" way and their insistence on ninjaing him every time players have come up with a way to beat him anyway, meant that the eventual solution had to have something to do with the theme of sea as a whole, which goes back to virtues and vices. In that sense, it only makes sense that the pieces of gear with the names of the virtues on them would have to be involved somehow. The problem is, nobody had any clue how, and the thoughts of most people drifted elsewhere.
The current hypothesis is this: each jailer drops a weapon that is 100%. These weapons are not that great and are generally ignored, often kind of laughed at by the player base as they have job-equipability rules that don't seem very intuitive. But because the DRG can wear the Love Halberd and the DRG in question had a Love Torque on, the thinking is that each job should be wearing the Torque that corresponds with the virtue whose weapon their job can equip.
More intricately, it would go something like this:
- Each 2hr has an associated "virtue"; when AV uses his 2hrs, he is testing to see if that is a virtue you possess
- Each 2hr has an associated job
- Therefore each job has an associated virtue
- What each job's virtue is, is given away by which jobs can equip which "virtue weapons" (note that each job can equip only 1)
- Wearing the appropriate "virtue torque" for your job and then using your 2hr in response to AV using his confirms to AV that you have that virtue, and he will move on to another, thus "locking" that 2hr
That fits in on a very nice thematic level with what Absolute Virtue says when he is spawned:
In particular, the last line: "By what principlesss art thou driven?" seems to indicate that from an RPG perspective, the AV confrontation is more of a "test" than a "fight". This would go a long ways to explaining S/E's extreme stubbornness in resisting the player base's (sometimes extreme and very innovative) means to try and kill him using the standard fight formulas. They want it to be something very different, something that fits in with the theme of Sea from an RPG perspective, not just another mob to burn down with the right formula.
Of course, even if this does turn out to be 100% spot on the money, AV will likely never be a trivial fight. For one, having jobs with the appropriate torques is not easy, as the torque drops are quite rare (but that fits in with S/E's theme of stuff requiring a lot of work; in this sense the torques make much more sense than the weapons, as the weapons are all 100% drop). Plus, they tend to go to jobs that can use them, more than jobs that have the appropriate "virtue" for their 2hr, meaning you won't see a lot of RDMs with Justice Torques running around. Still, thanks to people having multiple jobs at 75, this isn't impossible to test, and if it turns out to be correct, will almost certainly have a major impact on LS policies when distributing torque drops (since AV's drops are so prized).
For another, even if you do "lock" his two hours, that means you have to survive them once, which is no easy feat. A single chainspell/manafont is usually enough to trigger a wipe. But linkshells have proven that surviving one of these is not impossible, and of course it's not supposed to be easy.
There are still quite a few wrinkles. It doesn't fit in exactly with the S/E videos showing the developers killing AV, because that video shows the developers spamming 2hrs of multiple jobs in response to AV using his, which has led the player base into assuming that they must do the same. Because those videos also show the same players using their 2hrs multiple times during the fight, that's led to speculation that S/E was playing in "god mode" with their 2hr recast timers set to 0, or that there is a way somehow during the fight to reset one's 2hr. If it's the former, players have treated that as evidence that not even the developers, who know the secret, could beat AV legitimately, and if there's the latter, there's never been any evidence of any 2hrs ever being reset during an AV fight.
My proposition would be the former - that S/E was indeed in "god mode" during their fights - but not because they couldn't beat AV legitimately. While there are elements of the videos that clearly are trying to tell us something specific (zooming in on the chat logs at two points during the fight), there also may be elements of the video that are obfuscating the true strategy so that it won't be obvious.
Remember, S/E wanted the videos to be a hint, not a guide.
So how do you show that you lock AV's 2hr by using the corresponding 2hr without completely giving it away? You respond to his 2hrs with multiple 2hrs from various random jobs, but then run in "god mode" so that you can do this and still beat him.
Throw in the additional variable of having the appropriate torque equipped, and it's no wonder the community has yet to make any significant headway.
So, who knows, this might turn out to be bullshit, but for now it constitutes a very hot lead, and it's the first idea I've seen in a LONG time that gives me any inkling that it fits in with the story/theme of CoP.
Until now, it seems. A player named Suteki over at JP Button claims that his linkshell had shown some success in locking AV's "Call Wyvern" 2hr - that is, getting it so he doesn't use it again - by getting their DRG to use Call Wyvern right after AV did. However, when trying it out with a new DRG, they couldn't get it to work. That interested them, and in comparing the differences between the two DRGs to see what might have caused it, they noticed something huge: The first DRG had a Love Torque equipped, and the second one did not.
The entire theme of sea, of course, surrounds virtues and vices, virtues and sins. Every jailer in Sea has a name surrounding a virtue: Fortitude, Temperance, Faith, Justice, Hope, Prudence, and Love. Each jailer (excepting Love) drops "virtues" that are used to spawn the next mob, and all jailers (including Love) drop Torques and Weapons associated with the virtue they are guarding.
Of course, the idea that these items had something to do with the key to beating AV is nothing new. Very early in the process, people tried using the different weapons in the fight, but nothing tangible ever resulted, and eventually the idea that the weapons had anything to do with the kill was discarded, and you were laughed out of the room at BG if you suggested it.
The critical flaw in this reasoning, though, is that proving that using the weapons in the fight (and by inference, the torques) did not weaken AV in any way did not prove that they were not involved at all. The possibility always existed that they were part of the equation somehow, not by themselves but rather as the key variable in a more complicated scheme. I've long thought that, given S/E's stubborn insistence that people kill AV only the "right" way and their insistence on ninjaing him every time players have come up with a way to beat him anyway, meant that the eventual solution had to have something to do with the theme of sea as a whole, which goes back to virtues and vices. In that sense, it only makes sense that the pieces of gear with the names of the virtues on them would have to be involved somehow. The problem is, nobody had any clue how, and the thoughts of most people drifted elsewhere.
The current hypothesis is this: each jailer drops a weapon that is 100%. These weapons are not that great and are generally ignored, often kind of laughed at by the player base as they have job-equipability rules that don't seem very intuitive. But because the DRG can wear the Love Halberd and the DRG in question had a Love Torque on, the thinking is that each job should be wearing the Torque that corresponds with the virtue whose weapon their job can equip.
More intricately, it would go something like this:
- Each 2hr has an associated "virtue"; when AV uses his 2hrs, he is testing to see if that is a virtue you possess
- Each 2hr has an associated job
- Therefore each job has an associated virtue
- What each job's virtue is, is given away by which jobs can equip which "virtue weapons" (note that each job can equip only 1)
- Wearing the appropriate "virtue torque" for your job and then using your 2hr in response to AV using his confirms to AV that you have that virtue, and he will move on to another, thus "locking" that 2hr
That fits in on a very nice thematic level with what Absolute Virtue says when he is spawned:
At lassst the time has come...
The ssscattered fragments of my thoughtsss once again mine. Long forgotten memoriesss filling me once more...
However... these memories generate sssuffering... These thoughtsss... bring remorssse...
Tell me... for what sssearcheth thou, to travel this far? Show me... by what principlesss art thou driven?
In particular, the last line: "By what principlesss art thou driven?" seems to indicate that from an RPG perspective, the AV confrontation is more of a "test" than a "fight". This would go a long ways to explaining S/E's extreme stubbornness in resisting the player base's (sometimes extreme and very innovative) means to try and kill him using the standard fight formulas. They want it to be something very different, something that fits in with the theme of Sea from an RPG perspective, not just another mob to burn down with the right formula.
Of course, even if this does turn out to be 100% spot on the money, AV will likely never be a trivial fight. For one, having jobs with the appropriate torques is not easy, as the torque drops are quite rare (but that fits in with S/E's theme of stuff requiring a lot of work; in this sense the torques make much more sense than the weapons, as the weapons are all 100% drop). Plus, they tend to go to jobs that can use them, more than jobs that have the appropriate "virtue" for their 2hr, meaning you won't see a lot of RDMs with Justice Torques running around. Still, thanks to people having multiple jobs at 75, this isn't impossible to test, and if it turns out to be correct, will almost certainly have a major impact on LS policies when distributing torque drops (since AV's drops are so prized).
For another, even if you do "lock" his two hours, that means you have to survive them once, which is no easy feat. A single chainspell/manafont is usually enough to trigger a wipe. But linkshells have proven that surviving one of these is not impossible, and of course it's not supposed to be easy.
There are still quite a few wrinkles. It doesn't fit in exactly with the S/E videos showing the developers killing AV, because that video shows the developers spamming 2hrs of multiple jobs in response to AV using his, which has led the player base into assuming that they must do the same. Because those videos also show the same players using their 2hrs multiple times during the fight, that's led to speculation that S/E was playing in "god mode" with their 2hr recast timers set to 0, or that there is a way somehow during the fight to reset one's 2hr. If it's the former, players have treated that as evidence that not even the developers, who know the secret, could beat AV legitimately, and if there's the latter, there's never been any evidence of any 2hrs ever being reset during an AV fight.
My proposition would be the former - that S/E was indeed in "god mode" during their fights - but not because they couldn't beat AV legitimately. While there are elements of the videos that clearly are trying to tell us something specific (zooming in on the chat logs at two points during the fight), there also may be elements of the video that are obfuscating the true strategy so that it won't be obvious.
Remember, S/E wanted the videos to be a hint, not a guide.
So how do you show that you lock AV's 2hr by using the corresponding 2hr without completely giving it away? You respond to his 2hrs with multiple 2hrs from various random jobs, but then run in "god mode" so that you can do this and still beat him.
Throw in the additional variable of having the appropriate torque equipped, and it's no wonder the community has yet to make any significant headway.
So, who knows, this might turn out to be bullshit, but for now it constitutes a very hot lead, and it's the first idea I've seen in a LONG time that gives me any inkling that it fits in with the story/theme of CoP.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)