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.
