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Unnamed Mercenary

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  1. 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)
  2. 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.)
  3. For the most part, there are many Discord servers that exist already that have largely superseded users' wants for a forum.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).
  4. 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.
  5. 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!
  6. 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)
  7. Per creator request, this FC listing has been archived to the Chronicles forum. /staff
  8. 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.
  9. 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 Numbersâ„¢. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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!)
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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
  15. For the most part, people use ((double parentheses)) to denote out of character text while actively RPing. Personal stances vary quite a lot of how often a person may choose to use it, but most everybody is fine being on the receiving end provided it's not being used for [unintentional] metagaming. (As in, don't typically use it to announce your character's internal thoughts or motivation unless you're trying to work out some sort of OOC resolution or need some type of outside clarification as a player, but not as a character). The thing about RP in FFXIV is that it's not super consistent. While there's a ton of RP that goes on, people all have their own stances on power level, where their character fits into the world (general NPC, Warrior of Light, Proper Name NPC, etc) and you'll find it's more like having a bunch of sliding scales in terms of other things like "lore strictness" or high/low fantasy elements. Especially if you ever get into something like combat RP, but it can also be things like "I RP by typing short, quick replies" vs "I do paragraph RP with longer more thought out posts" and other things. Walk-up RP is another thing that can vary quite a lot. Some RPers will let people know if they're open to walkups by putting a message in their search info. Or they'll enable the RPer status icon or make a move to include others, but it's not always a given. It can be discouraging to have the first experience (or a few) not go as well as you wanted, but you're just as welcome to an open/public RPing space as anyone else and I wouldn't worry about light/medium/heavy RP styles in those circumstances.
  16. Between the World Visit system and Cross-World Linkshells, you can pretty easily play/chat with your friend. The only added bonus of being on the same world would be if you wanted to have characters in the same Free Company or World-specific Linkshells. I think you may also have some misconceptions about roleplaying in an MMO. It largely works the same way as forum-based RP, just in smaller/faster posts (usually). It's more similar to say, roleplaying over Discord or other fast-chat/instant-messager style layouts, but with the bonus of an avatar and animated emotes/settings. While a lot of the RP advertised directly on the RPC tends to be more of the social kind, that's partially because everyone has their own preferences on how combat RP should work and it's not always as easy to manage it in a "there is no GM/DM running things" style that's walkup/random/stranger friendly. Which is a bit of a combat-RP issue in general, as it does get more complicated in terms of what you can down, power levels, "player consent" etc. But for example, the Grindstone RP Battle tournament has been running since the game launched back in 2013 every single week. You can find them every Saturday night at 10 EST/EDT (depending on daylight savings) by Fesca's Wash (Central Thanalan @ Balmung). And their typical combat RP is mostly a form of "bigger /random roll wins" for first to 3 wins RP Battle format. This isn't to say that other forms of combat-RP don't exist, but more that if you're looking to freehand everything without /random, you'll generally find that people don't always do that with strangers and typically won't do it unless they trust the other people they're RPing with. As for RPing inside a dungeon/trial/raid, you can, but I don't typically see this happening as most gameplay aspects are usually kept separate from people's RP for the most part. I've done a few in-character dungeon runs with premade groups, but I can't recommend using the Duty Finder to fill in spaces. (That's typically what we see people griping about or making reddit callout posts).
  17. Hello! As you may have seen, we've had a few site layout/data adjustments that have popped up this month! Perhaps the most notable is that the imported calendars and relevant feeds have been removed from RPC and replaces with a new events import block on the sidebar. Due to the number of events, the website software was unable to handle importing the data and instead would fail to load. If you ever got a HTTP Error 500 page, it was the calendar importer timing out. (And even then, it failed to import anything after the first 100 events in the feed). To replace the imported calendars, I've since added a new custom built block that grabs data from Erah'sae's community calendars directly. This is powered by the new community calendar API and has brought RPC some much needed stability. You should see events displayed in your local timezone as before, but please let me know if that's not working! (If it fails, it'll likely default to either our server time of American Eastern Time or to UTC). The old imported calendars have been removed as they weren't getting any new data and I've opened up some new RPC Community calendars based on datacenter instead. All of the calendars will display in the main page's sidebar. Feel free to continue putting events in the general RPC calendar or make use of the datacenter-specific ones! Other site changes include opened up some new datacenter-based sections for Primal and Aether. You can now select Primal or Aether as options for Clubs and Linkshell Hall and Free Company Hall have had their navigation bar entries updated to include tag based filters for them as well! Feel free to move your content from the "Other" category/prefix over to the new "Primal" or "Aether" ones if those fit your server needs. Overall, there are still a few more changes I'd like to make down the line to further improve the site's experience. Most notably, adding the light version of Carbon theme we currently use as the default, so that we can enable switching between light and dark modes without having to scroll down to the theme switcher. As always, if you encounter any site issues or have any additional feedback, please let me know here in this post, or in the Requests and Feedback forum if you'd prefer to bring something up more privately. https://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/forum/39-requests-and-feedback/
  18. Truth be told, gil is mostly useless in this game for general gameplay. You'll easily accumulate enough for repairing your gear through playing the game as normal and after that, it's really only used for teleports or if you want to attempt to buy a house, which moreso depends on your home world's availability. I've seen some people amass a fair amount by reselling NPC vendor items on the market boards because people don't really go to check who sells what. And crafting/gathering materials that are in medium/high demand usually sell pretty alright too. Otherwise for casual gil earning, treasure maps with friends/FC members/(even random parties) is a good way to get some gil and possibly some rare things to sell too, if you're not looking to get into some extreme crafting/gathering and market play.
  19. With the World Visit system, your home server really only dictates where you can have your FC and home world Linkshells. Since Balmung and Mateus share the same datacenter, Crystal, you can travel freely between them and also to other worlds in the same cluster, as RP can be found in some of them too! Both should be somewhat EU friendly as they're pretty populated, but if you're looking for something more EU-centric and at more normal hours, I'd recommend also checking out Omega, which is where I believe most EU RP can be found in the European datacenters.
  20. Welcome! The RPC's calendar is one resource, but only shows things from people who use the RPC. I'd also check out the community calendars by Erah'sae, which handles a lot more events and is curated by google forms and calendar feeds for servers and datacenters. They've grown so large they actually break the RPC's calendar importer and we're working on a new method to pull in upcoming events!
  21. Our SSL certificates for HTTPS connects expired and failed to auto-renew correctly. I've manually regenerated them, but it seems that some of the site cache didn't quite like that. You may notice a warning on your browser about the site being insecure, but this is just because the caching we use for site images doesn't perfectly match the site name and they're not playing nicely right now. *shakes fist at AWS* The actual site's security results can be found here: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ffxiv-roleplayers.com I'm hoping to get the issue resolve so we get our fancy green lock icon back and no more browser warnings, but do not currently have an estimate.
  22. While making a character on the more RP-focused servers has its benefits (linkshells and free companies), it's not really required for a good RP experience anymore. You can make use of the World Visit system to just hop over to one of the more RPer-populated servers without having to fight the character creator limits. So if your goal is RP on Balmung and Mateus, you could make a character on Goblin or somewhere else that's nice and open on the Crystal datacenter and then just visit over to RP. Between Discord and Cross-World linkshells, most of the other restrictions are all gameplay related (like FC buffs on home world only, or retainer access, etc).
  23. You'll find people spread across a lot of worlds. With the World Visit system that was introduced during 4.X, you can easily hop between the worlds on your datacenter, so trying to make/transfer a character into Balmung or Mateus isn't quite the issue it was back then. A lot of people have moved over to Discord in lieu of forums like the RPC, which makes finding people a little more difficult when not being quite as...advertised. Some good resources for Crystal-based RP would be the Balmung Roleplay Network discord https://discord.gg/bnBSTeU and general use Crystal RP one https://www.crystalroleplaying.com/discord
  24. Hello! I'd recommend making a character in one of the Crystal data center worlds, specifically on Balmung or Mateus where the bulk of RPers tend to be. Other datacenters and worlds do also have RP, and if you're currently on Primal, I think the bulk tends to be on Hyperion. You can freely move between servers, but things like Free Companies (aka guilds in other games), world-only Linkshells (chat groups), and some other things don't operate the same between your home world and a visited world. For basic RP though, things in /say or /emote or /party chat will all work fine. The RPC website itself does not have a discord as we're primarily a hub, but there are many groups that do that you can find here on the site! For general Crystal data center, https://www.crystalroleplaying.com/discord is a good place to start for a general group. Or places like the Balmung Roleplay Network https://discord.gg/bnBSTeU or Mateus RP Hub https://discord.gg/mateusrphub . More can be found in our Free Company Hall, Linkshell Hall, and Club sections, although these are maintained by players and there may be some inactive groups listed.
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