Anniversary time!

May 16th, less than a month away now, marks the 9th year FFXI has been in service. Having only played in 4 or 5 of those years, it seems like such a long time now that it's been in service. Aside from Everquest, it's currently the longest running commercial MMORPG, and that seems impressive looking at the variety of them that exist today; Guild Wars, WoW, Lord of the Rings: Online, Rift, the list goes on.

In celebration of yet another anniversary, Square-Enix is hosting another fan art contest to match the occasion. I wish I had two things: art talent and a current subscription to FFXI (which is a requirement for submission).

The prize is unknown as of now, however, last year's prize was primarily an in-game item of little to not value, which was likely supposed to be just a status symbol.

Last year's winning entry. Click for enlargement!

Official details and rules can be read here.

Sitting Around the Mog House, Looking For Party

"{Party} {Join up?} {please}" is something I want to hear the real world equivalent right about now. Even "{Experience points} {Party} {level} {Up}?" is something I wouldn't mind. Just ... SOMETHING. Life is incredibly boring right now in the lame duck period in my college life, waiting for summer. People are too busy because they omitted their finals earlier, and school club activities get in the way of hanging out with people constantly. It sucks having to have to wait around for things to happen, when you know exactly what it is you want. The problem is that nobody else wants to do the quest you want to do.

Way before the present, you could only gain levels with people one or two levels away from yourself, or by killing monsters by yourself. It made things very difficult, because if you want to group up with other people, you had to have people almost the same level as you, and the jobs to go with it. You couldn't have six WARs gather together and expect an efficient leveling party. You needed a tank, a healer, support, damage dealers, etc, not six jobs that are the same. In the present, there's a system called "level sync" which scales down higher level players to a chosen member of the party. It scales equipment, stats, job abilities, traits, everything you have to that of the average leveled person of the chosen level.

You could have this at level 15! Too bad you'd only get about 8 defense from it.

It's very handy for being able to do a lot of things with lower level strangers and friends. Perhaps too easily. You get jaded and bored of it after awhile, since you have to lower your standards and your power. It would be handy in real life to occasionally lower your standards, but that makes what you do just ... empty.

Some People Kind Of Suck

If I've learned anything over the last few days, it's that some people need to be beaten with the sharpest side of a Morgenstern. Over the last few days, I've dealt with my roommate of two years betraying my trust on an epic level, and someone being frustrated with me because I talked to her like I always do, and how she encourages me to, which is blunt and straightforward. The latter ended in me verbally destroying him, and the former ended in her--much to my surprise--ignoring me. However, what I'm also not surprised about is how apathetic I am about the whole situation. I've lived my life catering to other people, and I've never gotten anything I really want. Last weekend, that stopped. I thought of myself and acted upon what I wanted, which in my roommate's case, was social justice.


I wish social justice was easy anywhere. In the real world, it's difficult to achieve true social justice because of people making incredibly bad moral choices. Even on-line, where people are much more opinionated and willing to open their mind about people being stupid because you can be anonymous, it's difficult. Not only can you just not care about your moral character on-line, but you can change it almost at will. Making a new character is going a little far in FFXI, but you can just up and get a name change and consider it good. More than likely, though, you're going to let somebody know, and that can lead to other people knowing, making your efforts useless. Even if you don't care THAT much, people like-minded to you will always be there to experience game content, even if you're all just a bunch of jackasses to each other.

Mugshot of Every Internet Jackass

The Internet is a very scary place. Some might argue real life is scarier--and they're right--but the Internet has real life by the balls in one category: a jackass who's a jackass to everybody is always the last one laughing, instead of being arrested or shot and killed.

Awkward Dragon

Just about everybody has that friend they love to hate. It's usually not just you, either; it's a group of your friends. It's almost like you keep them around just because you happen to dislike them so much that they make you laugh. I have one in real life, and I'm the only one of us who will dislike them to the person's face. Meanwhile, the rest of the group don't. She left campus a year or so ago, and every time she says she may come back, people rejoice on Facebook (where she announces it) and then laugh their butts off in real life and joke to each other about it.

It's really cruel if you think about it. If they weren't doing this (and instead were straight with her), she may not come back, find out she wasted thousands of dollars going to a school of people who hate her, and would instead do something worthwhile. And I'm not saying to have her not come back because I hate her (the only reason anyway), it's because it's just being unnecessarily nasty.

In the linkshell I used for social times (I also had one for game events, since most social linkshells don't do events except for 2 person adventuring) had people like that as well. The only problem with doing that sort of thing in linkshell chat (as opposed to whispering to someone in-game using the /tell command) is that when you go to the list to view whom is currently on-line, the list is lagged behind by about a minute. So someone who you didn't think was on might be on when you send a nasty message over linkshell about them. In this case, it was directed towards a member whom had a ... very hard time trying to stay alive during a certain event because he made stupid decisions (such as doing too much damage, which makes a target more likely to attack you, or standing in the wrong spot where he could be hit by attacks that effect an area, such as a cone shape in front of the monster). Paraphrased, somebody had said something to the effect of "*member* can't seem to stop getting screwed in the *expletive* by Bahamut and his {staff}."

Yeah. *HIS* staff. Image courtesy aleczan.com.

He logged in just in time to see that, said hello, and dropped his linkpearl.

I've Got Plenty of Energy; Japan Doesn't

Ahh ... Spring break. Full of beer, topless women, sand in your shorts and getting arrested.

...

Or sleeping, if you're a normal college student. That's what I did for the past two weeks; sleep, eat, sit on the Internet for hours watching my favorite gaming vlog on YouTube and sleeping some more. The only times I left the house were to help my handicapped mother do the groceries, and when I went outside on the 19th to watch the supermoon.

Contrary to my uneventful Spring break, a lot happened in the world. Japan had a 9.0 earthquake, Libya had a major revolution, and FFXI's servers had to be shutdown because of the energy crisis in Japan, which was linked to the previously mentioned earthquake, and a tsunami/volcanic eruption/nuclear meltdown (that's a mouthful, huh?). It's been shutdown since the 13th, and there's been no word yet on when it's actually going to be put back up.

The thing is, I've heard reports of people wanting to unsubscribe their accounts just because they've been down for a week--because of a national energy/humanitarian crisis in the country of their game's origin. Do they not realise that they were essentially told by the energy companies in Japan to shutdown the servers in favor of a more essential use of the limited energy they have? The infrastructure of the electricity system in Japan had been basically doing rolling blackouts to save energy, so even if Square-Enix didn't shutdown their servers, they'd be turning off for hours at a time, several times a week. What's the point if you're doing a major event, and at the boss's hit points are at 1%, and all of a sudden *BAM*, server shutdown? I wouldn't want to deal with it. Just go outside or play something else.

This is all, of course, not mentioning the whole thing about them not wanting their employees to be at work. They have families and they're worried about them, and I'm sure at least one employee had a death in their immediate family to deal with. Why aren't people on the Internet nice sometimes?

But it's strange how your personal life can conflict with the world around you, huh? I wish something would happen, and millions across the world in Libya and Japan wish things would stop happening.

If I Did Dynamis All Week, I'd be Just as Exhausted

Dynamis had to be one of the few things that took ages way back that was just exhausting to do.

Dynamis is a series of events that are parallel universes of the present time in FFXI. There's a Dynamis area for every major city, including other places, such as that glacier area I had mentioned earlier that had hundred foot high snow drifts. The alternate reality is based around The Great War, in which the opposing side, the Beastmen, had succeeded in taking over Vana'diel. As such, instead of friendly shopkeeps and children greeting you at the auction house, you're instead greeted by insanely powerful foes that would rather eat your innards as opposed to selling you merchandise, or giving you directions around town.

Don't you just want to pinch his cheeks?

During midterms week, I've begun to fry. It's not just classes, either. Even social situations are becoming too much to handle. I recently stopped going to a club on campus that I've been going to for the last two years, because people don't realise when they should shut up. There's one thing people are missing nowadays in club; tact. You know what makes a functioning group? When you don't talk about stuff that isn't conflict as though it was conflict. It makes me want to tear out my enlargened Tarutaru ears so I don't need to listen to it anymore.

Do your friends a favor. If you're going to call somebody on something they "did", then make sure it's actually worth mentioning. I'd hate to see a building go up in flames because people thought a maniac was inside causing trouble.

Never Thought I'd See Keyboard Warriors in Real Life

Keyboard warriors are terrible to encounter on-line. A keyboard warrior is someone who constantly berates people through the Internet just because they can, and try to act tough while doing it. It was really present back in the day in FFXI, and it sure as heck still exists now, I imagine. Kind of like how it happened in high school, only, people don't use keyboards anymore.

Look at those tough guys. Courtesy of kumah.org.

Even in college people are still doing it, and they're not even anonymous. It's been a huge problem in the club I attend on campus, which is just a ridiculous situation all-around. A group of freshman had swept in, guns blazing, and trying to do things "their way", and then once the excrement hit the oscillation, they complained, saying "This is just one big high school!"

I'll never understand some people. When cancer begins yelling at other cancer, calling it cancer, stuff gets really silly.