Ins@nity Complex

Check out my Dynamis-Windurst impressions here:
http://www.fantasyworldxd.com/ffxi/

Over the years at Fantasy World we have attempted several times to provide informative and entertaining coverage of Square's flagship Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, Final Fantasy XI. Each of these attempts was poorly executed, over ambitious and updated infrequently. They failed to do the game and our readers justice.

In order to plug this whole, Fantasy World has put together a team of bloggers to create "Blog Eleven - A Final Fantasy XI Blog". This dedicated mini-site will take over all our coverage of the online game, providing news and updates while also giving amusing and intellectual impressions of the bloggers MMO experiences.

We hope you will enjoy this new site.

Check it out at www.fantasyworldxd.com/ffxi

With the advent of summer so comes an increase in my free time. What will I use that on? Learning to cook? Immerse myself in the arts? Perhaps I'll work towards world peace or curing hunger in Africa? Screw that, welcome to new, regular updates from Blog Eleven. And I'm increasing its scope! While I will try again with my updates from Vana'deil, I'm also going to talk about general MMO and FFXI related items. Like this one!

In last Friday's episode of 1UP Yours, a 1UP radio network podcast, James "Milkman" Mielke, discussed his five year obsession with Final Fantasy XI. Check out this pristine quote.

(milkman) That game over the years has evolved and venesed and it, seriously out of all the MMOs that I've played, and I've played a good percentage of them, is defiantly the deepest. You know, it still looks good today. I mean it doesn’t look like Gears of War or anything, but it still looks good. The people I've played with for the last four or five years, you know, there now, you can count on them.

I cut out a nine-minute clip from the podcast, which you can listen to below. Or you can download the whole podcast here. It's the podcast for 06/15/2007.

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Interesting huh? Take that in the groin World of Warcraft!

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Adventurer Appreciation is like the goodie bag at a kids party or the happy meal at a fast food restaurant. Sure, it's a nice gift, but it's more of a token gesture. You see dispite this nice surprise, it's hardly a bag of money found on my doorstep as a car with tinted black windows speeds away. Because you see, unless that mafia supported pipe dream comes true, I really don't fell I'm being very "appreciated".

"On May 16th, 2007, FINAL FANTASY XI enters its fifth year of service. However, we could not have made it this far without you."

Darn tootin you wouldn't. Life isn't worth living without my sexy derriere.

"It is you who brings life to Vana'diel, and for that we thank you from the bottom of our hearts."

Your welcome. Just a shame your hearts are deeper than your wallets. Anyway, after logging in and realising "what the fook am I doin in the dunes?", I stepped up to be 'appreciated'.

"We moogles have prepared some nice little goodies and gathered lots of top-secret information on adventurer activity, kupo!"

Adventurer activity kupo? Is this the geezer that’s been stalking me around and sending love letters to my mog house? Because if he is I'm giving his fluff-puff one hell of a beating. As long as he doesn’t fly out of my minuscule taru reach of course...

"Let me check my journal for your statistical data..."

Oh god... he's a math loving pasny. Wait... did he say journal? Whats he keeping in there?

"Chat Frequency: 153,964
Conversations With NPCs: 10,942"

Now I understand why people tell me to shut up all the time...

"Parties Joined: 10,942
Alliances Joined: 13"

Okay, I admit it. I'm totally a peoples person. Actually I think half those alliances were with me and my hand...

"Battles Fought: 6,499
Number of Times KO'd: 269
Enemies Defeated: 4999"

I should really give some "appreciation" to my 5000 orc carcass. I wonder where the sheep bumbing static is...

"There's your adventuring life in a nutshell! And this time, being the 5th anniversary and all, there's an extra special present involved."

Munnies?!

"Oh, just be careful you don't accidentally throw it away or anything, because you'll never be able to get another one...ever, kupo!"

/Obtained: Anniversary ring.
/Pebe is distracted by shininess.
/Moogle sneaks away.
/Pebe blinks blankly.

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So Saturday I decide its about time I revived my laughable black mage sub job, which still resides at level 32. Your sub job is meant to be half your main job ye see and seeing as my white mage is 69, I don't think it takes a mathematician to realise their is a problem. With that in mind I put up my search notice for black mage for what must be the second time this year and I manage to get a party, ZOMG! I chocobo to the citadel, we set up a camp, they start pulling and we're off. The battles are a little slow for my liking and I suddenly remember how boring black mage really is but hey, at least I'm making EXP right?

Three battles and 800 EXP later my Internet cuts out.

I stare blankly at the screen for a couple of seconds, before blindly clicking the "Not Connected" icon on the task bar. You never know right? Nothing happens so I furiously storm downstairs thinking some relative idiot had turned the router off. When I get there I find out its still on. I check the cables, the settings, everything. Nothing is wrong and yet no Internet is flowing. It's like going to have a dump, knowing you need to go, but no matter how much you squeeze, nothing comes out.

And so I had to call AOL's dreaded help line. It took hours. Maybe if these people didn't ask pointless things like "is the router on", "have you reset it" and "is the router connected to the main phone line" we might have found the problem faster. I mean, this is a premium rate phone call! Don't they realise how much I'm paying? :S

Turns out is was a mistake on AOL's end. Apparently they did something wrong by accident and shut my connection off in the process. They apologised for this customer service fault again and again before asking if I would like to take part in their customer service survey. By this point I just wanted to hit the guy and hung up.


Back to Final Fantasy XI, I get invited by Morty-pie to join him on a Promathia run with some other people. Having never bothered to get into the games second expansion (Chains of Promthia) due to its high entry level and pure effort required, I decided to check it out. Turns out the story, which involves the world's "mother crystals" being at danger, seems quite interesting. Sadly to get into that story, the game requires you to basically repeat the same mission three times, once at each of the world's craigs. One was pretty fun I guess, but by the third trip I can see it being quite annoying. Especially as its quite difficult to build a decent party to do these things.

So a Promy run. Basically once you enter the craig's inside, you have to go through four floors of monsters, which increase in difficulty, until you reach a boss battle at the end. All of this is done with a level 30 cap btw. The first two floors are easy enough, with the monsters being quite defeatable but by the third floor if more than one mob argos you, your quite well and truly screwed from both sides at the same time.

One particular mob happened to argo us and the fight was going quite well until the party's tank, a padlin, started disconnecting. Which brings us back to this posts title! Disconnection is the single most retarded thing about online games and I have the perfect solution. For five or so minutes after a player disconnects, a computer AI should take over control so that at least if you’re fighting a bad ass monster your not buggered up the creek. I mean, its stupid to punish players for an Internet problem. It's like lag in a FPS.

In fact, screw an NPC, they would be gay and stupid. You know that saying, if we were to chain a thousand monkeys to a thousand typewriters, they would eventually write the best novel ever written? Lets upgrade them to the 21st century and chain them to computers! When a player disconnects, the monkey could easily take over and play while he’s gone! Don't deny it, it would be awesome. In fact, maybe it would be more productive to put these monkeys in charge of AOL's support line to.

In fact, forget I told you all that. Patent pending, patent pending!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the padlin disconnected and so the whole party was wiped out. ^_^

Fortunately I was able to use a re-raise scroll seconds before my imminent death and we were able to recover. After the monkey the guy came back online we were able to finish the run (thanks partly to some insane running across the level from Mort) and beat the boss with ease.

So yeah, that was my first promy run. Quite fun, but I'm not sure I want to repeat the exact thing twice more. We shall see though. Maybe the story and missions after these are worth it?

Pebe (69WHM / 32BLM) out.



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Grinding is a pretty flexible term really. It’s meaning can completely change depending on who you ask. For example, Dictionary.com defines grinding as “to be or become ground”. Oh bless their little cotton socks. Let’s ask a real expert shall we?

Pebe>> If I say grinding, what is the first thing you think of?
Sputin>> …sex, dancing, some crazy tool or other…

Oh wait… wrong expert. Lets not discuss what that guy is into.

Pebe>> If I say grinding, what is the first thing you think of?
Mort>> lol
Mort>> exp pt on FF XI

That’s more like it. You see, its referred to as grinding because of how bloody monotonous it can be. Imagine sitting in the same seat with the same uncomfortable butt position being bored out of your mind for hours on end. And unlike church your paying a monthly fee for this privilege!

So why, dispite this particular "minor flaw" in the games design, does that certain other MMO have eight million subscribers? Well, its actually quite simple really. It's your friends.

Interacting and having a jolly good laugh (hip hip!) with people you actually like is what makes this gaming experience different from others. Unlike a game of Halo 2 or Gears of War, a good majority... well a few anyway, of the players aren't utter dicks.

Plus I have the added benefit of not hearing another American laugh at my posh British accent while discussing the pros and cons of doing my mum through the PC's speakers. Hail old-fashioned text chat and all that lark.

Back on the matter of hand, I'm here to discuss Statics. A static is where a group of friends agree to meet up at certain times and level together, thus improving grinding's bad image of being a lowly pig dog. Statics are a profanely good way to either:

A) Have a brilliantly fun and easy levelling experience
or
B) Piss of all your mates.

Luckily for me I can achieve both things simultaneously. I'm just that talented!

But in all seriousness, when in a static moods can easily swing from left to right and back to left quicker than the views of the Liberal Democrats, stressing out all those involved. At the end of it you either have very good friends that actually like you or people who can just play the game extremely well.

As of today my static is down to three from its original six, meaning I'm working at a 50/50 ratio. Not bad if I say so myself. If you really want to find out who your mates are, drag them into the dunes for a couple of hours.

Pebe (14NIN / 7WAR) out.



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Welcome to the astoundingly originally named section of my blog, entitled “Blog Eleven”. It occurred to me recently that I do in fact play a tad lot of a single game, namely Final Fantasy XI, however it is only on the nye freak occasion that I actually bother to mention it.

So after much musing and an hour wearing the thinking hat, I came up with an idea. A blog (hence "Blog") about my time with the game (hence "Eleven". Genius huh?). But wait! There’s a problem. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (here on referred to as MMORPG’s or Ted) have what I like to call the “World of Warcraft” problem. MMOer’s are stereotyped as 8 million sweaty teenagers and Chinese people with bad BO who obsesses about getting the latest, greatest horse armour and giggling about who has the biggest virtual dick.

Lucky for you Blog Eleven is none of this. Final Fantasy XI only has 500,000 Chinese people with bad BO and some of our players actually take baths.

But I digress. Because I’m not your average MMOer. Oh no. I’m a relapsed asshole who likes to do things the quickest and easiest way possible, gets other people to buy him stuff and is generally lazy about doing anything which involves more effort than opening a can of beans. So it is therefore my duty as a diagnosed sociopath to inform you of my near-daily (I did say I was lazy) experiences in Vana’deil.

To start of, lets get some background sorted. I’ve been playing for…..a while…. as the tarutaru (cute and short) Pebe on the Unicorn server. My main job is as a level 69 whitemage (out of 75 levels. I’m never going to get there I tell you now) with a under levelled (means I’m even more lazy than is good for me) Blackmage subjob.

Well, I think that went quite well for a first post. Here is a random picture of my static (I’ll explain that later). Ta now.



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