Unnamed Mercenary

No, the site is not back. I'm...not sure how you made it through the login-blocker, as that's supposed to deny all connections outside of a whitelist of exceptions. While I'm running it off some hardware I have available, there are no backups or redundancy and when things break, I just roll back to the last final backup of the production site I had. (This thread will be archived when I sort out how things even got this far)

As of today, Hydaelyn Roleplayers Coalition has closed. Registration and Logins will be disabled, including to the RPC Wiki. But this is hopefully not the complete end! There are a few odds and ends to clean up and sort out, but I've been working on a small mirror site that can be used for archive purposes. (And if all goes well, ffxiv-roleplayers.com will be directed there when I have some time to sort things out and deploy the hardware.)

For the most part, there are many Discord servers that exist already that have largely superseded users' wants for a forum. It's one of the many factors that has led to RPC's decline in traffic/users/content from roughly 2016-ish and forwards. And this isn't a bad thing! At that point in time, a lot of people wanted more real-time chat and less slow posting on forums. ---- One of the main decisions RPC staff made at the time was that is was not scalable for us to try to moderate a still-pretty-active-then forum and wiki while also trying to to moderate a Discord server, which would be infinitely more active and at all hours of the day and night, so that was largely left to the existing big RP-centric Discords to do, and they did! ---- Many of the venues here have switched over to posted on the RP Calendar managed by Erah'sae, https://ffxiv-rp.org/ . (We actually pull these in on the front page, and used to directly import them before there were too many entries for the forum's calendar importer to handle.) That sort of content isn't going anywhere. The RPC just won't be one of the more front-facing sites to find it from a google search. ---- From an administrative sense, it's a very tricky thing to pass off ownership of the site domain and potentially its content. That's a lot of user data, some of which is very much private. Personally, I'm not comfortable passing it over to just anyone, especially people I don't already know well and trust. And if we had to put up donation banners on the front of the site to beg people to donate on a monthly basis, I feel like that would be worse than closing the site, as the idea of always hanging on the edge is kinda terrifying, and if we had a month where donations couldn't handle the bills, that comes directly out of my finances. I'm cool with paying off our bill from July's usage, and for whatever usage costs we'll have from August, but an extra consistently $100+ USD a month that can scale much higher isn't really something I can financially accommodate based on the traffic we currently have, and given the past history of the RPC Patreon, I don't think we'd have a consistent user base who could cover those costs. (Because we already didn't). For the wiki, there are options to try migrating that to community instances that are free. (I'm kinda considering Miraheze, but given the large size of our wiki, that may not be something they can process, and there's also the matter of user content being a bit more tricky, like if someone wants to remove a page after such a migration, content that might be NSFW or against their policies, etc). I am in talks with some community members I can trust to discuss possibly moving the RPC over to an archive-only format so we can keep historical data accessible, but that will still depend on the costs of hosting that data. (For a general estimate, one would need about 15GB of storage just for the databases, and about 150GB of storage for content images like the forum gallery/attachments and wiki, which adds up quickly on cloud hosting. The site's a bit too large for something I could passively host out of my living room, given ISPs are pretty adverse to that sorta bandwidth).

In a strictly OOC sense, a soul crystal may not have anything to do with a carbuncle, seeing as they're summoned from an arcanist's books (and a gemstone?) and not a soul crystal, which is part of how our characters unlock a job. But it should also be noted that equipping a soul crystal is like inserting a memory card with a bunch of cheat codes/saves on it. It's a tool for accessing the memories/experience of the past wielders, but it's not a strict requirement for the job itself. (My thoughts here are: someone had to initially have the soul crystal to etch that experience onto it). That said, the Black Mage quests are an excellent example for "this is what happens when someone doesn't fully understand what they're doing" when they try to use magic that the player character would otherwise access using a soul crystal. If we look at the Monk quests, you unlock your first chakra before getting a soul crystal, sort of as a mark of "this person is worth of learning the whole skillset." So if we're talking about a Summoner's (as in, capital S not lower case generic s) soul crystal, then they might have some difficulty summoning an egi, but those aren't the same as a carbuncle. The Arcanists' Guild may have some older books on the art of summoning, but I can't recall anything related to how to make/repair a soul crystal itself. We do know blank ones exist, as you get one of those when you unlocked Machinist, as it's considered brand-new and the player character is the first person to use it. But carbuncles are also weird in the sense that they take after their summoner's influence. (See: the roaming carbuncle in Mor Dhona or Tataru's attempts at being an arcanist.) So if that's the route your friend wants to go, then it could be that they believed their Summoner's crystal to be the catalyst behind summoning a carbuncle, which is otherwise generically not sentient or sapient or having any personality of its own. The ones that misbehave seem to be more of an indicator that the summoner hasn't quite mastered summoning, from my interpretation of the lore. And in that sense, a Summoner's crystal may have helped fill in some of those blanks. For a personal take on the lore, I feel like the Arcanists' Guild would recommend studying up on the basics, as that's the foundation for summoning a carbuncle. Egi's are like the leftover essence of a primal that the Echo-enabled Warrior of Light (or people around them) soaked in and formed back into -something- they could summon, which is why you don't see a lot of summoners, even after its semi-revival. And a Scholar's faerie is effectively tied to their crystal, but that doesn't quite relate to how an Arcanist casts. (This is sorta in the same vein of thought that what our character learns is not the definitive or "best" or "more accurate" version of a magic. We are very much learning City Brand <class> by <school>, effectively.) So I think you'd have some leeway here to sort out story details in a manner that will be satisfying to both you and your friend.

Hello! You may have seen some broken pages on the forums here and there, whether "this site is inaccessible because it's being updated" or other "technical issues" errors. This was a mishap on my part while getting the forums upgraded and adjusting some services on our webserver. I'm currently working on planning out some software updates for the wiki, but that software is a little more involved as our login bridge is a bit delicate. There are a couple options that can be used that I'll need to test implementing before any changes are made. It -should- be resolved now, but if you can see this post, but can't access a part of the forum or wiki, please email RPC staff at [email protected] or reach out to one of the mods on discord and they can poke me to go take a look and make sure everything is functioning as it should!

No. That's not correct. The character had said

There have been groups of Xaela who've left the Steppe in the pursuit of new lands, adventure, etc. You may like the Dark Knight and the Alexander raid quests for a couple examples. But it's also important to state that the various race/clan options we have the character creator are just 1-2 options out of many. (Like how the Roegadyn in Othard don't fall under Sea Wolf or Hellsgard. And Hyur are literally everywhere). The simplest answers for leaving are things like: "I wanted to see the world." / "I was told I needed to see the world." Trade Tribal conflict (maybe disgraced? Or needed to leave [temporarily] to find something)

Per creator request, this FC listing has been archived to the Chronicles forum. /staff

That's another project, but a lot of the research tends to flow to/from its creator too. I'm happy to discuss some of the tools in DMs, but as a front-facing staff member, I can't officially endorse any third party tools that would go against SE's Terms of Service, if you catch my drift. We've had a fair number of people come and go to/from WoW throughout the years. MMO players tend to jump around quite a bit and it's been pretty nice to see that FFXIV's got a nice mix of players from various games and communities. My advice here would be to treat it as its own thing though. This isn't an EU WoW space and we're not going to witch-hunt you for committing thought crime if you come across an ERPer or want to partake in it yourself. (Keep the forums PG-13. What you do in game with other consenting adults isn't our concern). I'd say FFXIV is generally a bit more relaxed than WoW and for the most part, it's more a case of finding other RPers with similar interests, as FFXIV RP isn't super homogenous when it comes to things like low/high fantasy, power levels, being the WoL vs a normal person, etc. This is the sorta stuff I've been considering! Since it shouldn't be too involved to have the forums push content onto a discord. I've got a few ideas on how it might be done, but it'll likely turn into a relay of sorts so we can appropriately queue things without overloading RPC's forum software or thrashing Discord's rate limits. (Similar to how people can subscribe to lodestone updates. Ideally, I'd make it so people can subscribe to get messages for new threads in events, halls, making connections, and character workshop.

This is tricky. Most of the Discord-related plugins I've seen for the website software are either like "login with discord" or "embed a discord into a sidebar" kinds of things. Back in the day, the staff largely agreed that we didn't run to run some sort of "official RPC forums" Discord as that would have been a pretty large moderation task given the nature of realtime chat and how quickly things can get heated. While I do still feel like that was the right decision, we didn't foresee users largely moving away from forums and going to Discord almost exclusively, which is what really picked up around 2017-2018. I'd definitely be interested in gathering some updated feedback on what we could do to be more Discord-friendly, since that's now the dominant platform as far as I know. We could totally add optional profile stuff like to list out a Discord username, but I'd be worried about spambots getting in and abusing that. (Especially with all the weird "I'm quitting <steam game>" ones that have been popping up all over the place. I could probably look into some sort of webhook integration so that people could get posts in certain forums relayed into discord channels. And while the same could technically be done for Discord -> Forums, that would be a bit more iffy. (And likely require a bot that has permission to read message content, which is something Discord wants to largely disable for the average bot. See: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028055 Semi-related, we've been working to integrate with the community calendars a bit more. The front page should properly pull things from Erah'sae's calendars without having to try to sync it to the forums first, which both helps cut down on load time and weird quirks like "the forum software can only import the first 1000 events in an ical feed" issues. but truth be told, most of my time/interest has moved on from RP. I've been dabbling a lot more in the "ffxiv community dev" Discord servers myself, especially for certain third party launchers that include addon support that I cannot officially endorse using on the RPC. And there, I am working on some things that are RP-friendly. I typically keep the RPC as a pinned tab and tend to refresh it multiple times a day. Even prior to becoming staff. (Although it was much more of a bustling and highly active forum between 2014-2015 before stuff like Discord got big). Back then, we kindasorta would have needed to have post limits in certain threads because they could have several replies a minute. ...sometimes by the same user. And when those were heated threads at 3am, they weren't typically going to be seen/handled until things got pretty bad. (I don't miss waking up to like 20 reports lol) But typically, I'll skim recent posts and reply when/where I can. I uhh...I can fix that if you really want them. The site moved on from "warning is the new rep" quite a while ago and I'd like to keep it that way. it's completely ridiculous to judge a person by their rep (given by other users) or post count (has no bearing on the content of their posts). I'm not quite sure why you're so hung up on Big Numbers™. People who have been active members on the site longer that most are going to naturally have some numbers to back that up. If I had the same time that I did in previous years, I'd be writing personalized welcome messages to each user like I used to. When we migrated the RPC from MyBB to IPS, one of the things I selected to not enable was easily found forum statistics and the "who's reading this thread" modules. They were often abused in the past and it led to a lot of negativity and gawking in such a way that encouraged bad behavior by certain no longer active members.

The reality is that most of the forum is pretty quiet because a lot of users have moved to Discord servers instead. This isn't really unique to the RPC as it is to nearly all online communities that saw forum members migrate to newer pastures. The RPC wiki itself has also largely fallen aside as well, given that may people swapped to using Tumblr (back in the day) or then moved to making Carrd sites. Again, not a bad thing, but just another tool to get what they wanted, and usually with less hassle as a carrd comes with a nice visual editor instead of relying on wikicode and/or html. Most of the RPC's traffic has largely slowed as the site became less of "the place to be" and more of a hub to find other places. And while that's definitely helped in making moderation less of a concern, it does give off the impression of a ghost town, which is something I'd love to see change, but I'm also not particularly active in the general RP community anymore so much as a site maintainer myself. At the same time, many of the people who did formerly bring in a lot of activity have also moved elsewhere, whether that's making their own private Discord servers or being active in new "community hub" servers. And that can certainly be appealing when those members can then decide on their own rules and staff instead of having to trust the ones where, which they may or may not get along with for any reason. It also doesn't help that Discord servers aren't really easy to find via google and Discord makes for a lackluster storage medium. (I'd love to see if others share my opinions about having channels to replace Making Connections, FC/LS adverts, and character sheets, as the endless flow of content on a realtime chat server does not make for an ideal search experience). But that is what people currently like to use, and I don't think there's much we could offer on the RPC right now that would tempt people to use the site in addition to Discord or other services. Or perhaps I'm just getting old, because I don't have the time or energy to keep up with the latest trends.

Hello! Per some requests, I've made some adjustments to the site. I've added tag searches for Light and Chaos datacenters for the Free Company and Linkshell Halls and I've also lightly restructured the Club layout to renamed Omega to Chaos and to Light as an option there too. (I've tried to move everything as well, but go check your club settings to make sure in case I might've missed you!)

Unfortunately, there's no option for that built into the game. There are options that exist within the realm of third party tools, but as those are technically against the terms of service, I can't name or link them here on the forums. But I can give you a hint that it's part of a plugin for a third party launcher.

Doman is still a branch of whatever the common Hyuran language is, which is likely the root of your frustration. Yes, they have some specialized words, but this would be better seen as being a dialectal difference and not a separate language. As the player character/WOL, you and your friends travel across seas and have no issues communicating with the locals. And the Doman refugees who came over to Eorzea likewise did not experience issues with most day to day communication. It's not a case where all the characters suddenly and perfectly became bilingual, and the WOL's Echo isn't acting as autotranslator here like it does for certain other characters (like some beast tribes, dragons, etc). So in this sense, while your character might have some jargon differences for some proper nouns and common everyday items, being Doman wouldn't normally impact their ability to communicate with others. While I don't think this is a case of mass player metagaming, I do think it may be a case if misplaced expectations, with possibly a side of people perhaps not wanting to have their characters equally struggle to communicate with yours.

Ah, in this case, yes, using quotes is usually more of a norm, but it also can vary on player. Some people don't use them in /say speech, but will in /emote due to how the text is displayed. I personally use them because I try to fit a couple of sentences in and usually toss in an action or two. And then kinda flip-flop between using /say and /emote to help give the text box a little more variety so I can track reading text more easily. (And in large events, I've made use of /echo as well just as like.... SPACER TEXT YOU HAVE READ UP TO HERE SO FAR