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.