FFXI

So the game that I've really been investing too much time into is Final Fantasy XI. I've been a player since 2004, on and off, and still enjoy it today. I used to be Agelcat on Titan, but then I quit and made a new character called Koyuki on Remora, who became Kallio on Valefor where I am today.

FFXI recently released a new expansion: Adoulin. Wow. Squeenix are really outdoing themselves. Maybe a little too much. There are still a lot of things they need to fix about the game, but who cares? New content is a better fix, apparently. And there sure is a lot of new content. Adoulin basically replaced everything from the old game. Almost all gear outside of Adoulin is outdated and rendered useless. There is an upcoming update that will supposedly bring some of it back after heated debate in the community. Mainly they are going to revamp the Relic/Mythic/Empyrean gear that a small percentage of players worked so hard to get. Months of dedication and grinding and it was almost immediately replaced as soon as the new expansion came out. I never made any of these weapons, as they literally took months or even years to make, and it made endgame content very biased, so I was happy when SE decided to equalize everything. Sure, it made bad players and new players catch up in gear terms almost instantly, and it's made it hard to sift through badly-skilled players for content that required skilled ones. But it gave a chance for regular and skilled players who don't have the time to grind out epic gear to stand on even ground. It sucks when you're as good as anyone but you don't have the gear to make you that much better just because you don't have three hours to spend every day for months on a single event to gather thousands of a certain item.

Anyway, moving on... So yeah, new content. The bad thing is, SE decided to also release their new game, Final Fantasy XIV. Bad timing, SE. Bad timing. Ever since FF14 was re-released, a lot of players have quit and moved on. Unfortunately, the new content to get the best gear requires eighteen people. Eighteen skilled people. Maybe even a couple of cheaters who use third-party programs because SE is intent on a system based on "if you don't stun this one move the whole run is over". Which might be fine, might be doable, if the servers were not in Japan. This means there is a few second delay on what is going on, and so when a monster uses an ability that needs to be stunned, by the time North American players even see the move happening it is almost done using it. Then people die because of it, and the run is over because we have a time limit of 45 minutes to kill six Notorious Monsters.

Lately, getting through the first five monsters is cake. Except if you miss a stun. But cake. On the last monster though, if you miss a stun it could be devastating. You only have ten to twenty minutes to take down this guy and if your damage dealers die there is a five minute cooldown before they are back up to snuff. That's five minutes of missing damage, which means the fight is longer, which means the mob will use more abilities, which means more chances to miss a stun. The mob will also become resistant to stun after awhile, so you can only do so many stuns before we get shut down. There are three of these battlefields as of today, called "fractures" or "inside delve," and I've managed to be in a group that has cleared one of them. Currently trying for another one, but we keep timing out or getting defeated around 10-30% health left. It's so aggravating!

Well that's enough ranting. I'll go into more specifics, like my job and my role in these fights, in another post.