ArmachiA

How small is small and how big is big?

If someone calls my character a Mary Sue, which has yet to happen even when I did roll a Mary Sue in FFXI (I didn't know any better! It was my first MMO!) I would probably just ask them to explain why they think so, because it could be something as simple as "Well, my character has a lot of combat experience so they would obviously win" and THAT could be taken as a Mary Sue. Then talk it out so they either understand she's not a Mary Sue OR I understand how my character is coming across and tweak a few things. Angry? Never. Criticism is the only way you know how to get better at something. If it's constructive, I'll have an entire conversation. If it's not, then I don't need their advice anyway. ~~ On another note, I really hate when people see you chatting all the time ICy that people just assume that's -all- you do. Obviously most people here are probably involved in plotlines with political intrigue or mysterious secrets or Garleans or whatever that involves a lot of combat, but we just don't see it when were walking past taverns. I never assume when someone is constantly chatting up characters that they are just "Talking rpers" it's weird to think. All combat and plotlines are going to have downtime and some rpers have more time than others so during that downtime they are probably just chatting and hanging out. I have a few people in my FC who only appear for combat plotlines, they don't socialize at all as is their right, who I would consider "Combat RPers" but that certainly isn't the case for the majority of them - who have all gotten into combat scenarios then hung out in bars for days. Armi scored a 7 BTW but I honestly think they didn't ask some questions that would give her a higher score. SO -I- would put her at 15-20 myself.

On the subject of statics vs put togethers. Even statics are iffy. On our end, we've had a lot of people leave that we've consistently had to replace, which put us behind on progression. Alas, our SMN in one of our teams just left a few weeks ago, and our healer on another team is thinking about leaving the game entirely. Progression gets super stressful when you have to try to keep everyone together, that is for true. We were stuck on T7 for MONTHS (T6 is pretty easily carriable at this point) because we had to keep taking in new people and they would have to learn it then someone else would leave then we'de have to take in a new person and they would have to learn the fight and etc etc. We got lucky that we found some very quality replacements very quickly and were able to clear T7 within two weeks with those new people, but now I have to look around for a replacement dps because one went on deployment for 10 months and the other went to a different static and uugghh. I understand the frustration of trying to keep people together and I have a bunch of people I can in the FC who can be replacements. I can only imagine trying to do that without the resources or with a bunch of strangers every week, it would be painful. Endgame is a stressful thing, man. The thing is you really have to sit down and decide how important it really is to you and how comfortable you are with doing certain things to achieve it. To ME, I'll never go outside my FC - even though I learned the fights very quickly - I just won't compromise that. I'm way more comfortable running endgame with people I vaguely know and have pugged SCOB once ever (T6 - one shot it, though ). Figure out what you want, then do it. It's really THAT simple. Do what makes you happy. YOU. personally. Not anyone else. YOU. Because you are never going to have fun on this game and get where you want to go by sacrificing your own happiness. Ever. Figure out what you want, then figure out the options to get it. Then pick one of THOSE options. Make beleive what-if scenarios aren't solutions. Look at the actual solutions you can do, then pick the one you think is the most realistic to you. Then do it. Then pray you'll be happy once you do.

^ I agree with you 100% that FCs in FFXIV mean nothing now. Most end games are done through Linkshells nowadays. Some FCs are just made only for friends to enjoy their own housing or social chats. There are "some" end game based FCs but that's like 10% of FCs in Balmung. I don't think this is quite true, I do all my progression with my guild and my guild has a lot of different people in different progression phases. But they mostly run with each other with some outside people from three different FCs. We have: One group who can sometimes clear T8 with 4 FC members and 4 outsiders, One group who can clear T7 thats all FC/learning T8, one group who is learning T7 that's all FC, and one group who is on Twintania that's all FC. I think that some people find it much more comfortable to raid with your FC or people who know really really well. Getting into the raid game is WAYYYY easier if you already have an FC that does it and knows exactly where to put you. The big problem with FC raiding is what someone mentioned above, it's clear that some people are going to learn the fight MUCH faster than others and at that point you have to decide whether staying with your team is worth it or moving on without them. It's really easy to get frustrated by not progressing and if it's important to you, you can push people in your FC to the breaking point with your frustrations and you kind of have to find whats right for you. We've had people leave the statics mentioned above to go work with other groups because they wanted to clear faster, which is fine, but we generally like to stick with raiding "inside the family" - which includes our FC and FCs we're comfortable with. The raiding game is really hard to get into if you don't know the right people, FC or not though, that much is true.

Story time! I got sucked into 1.0 thinking it was going to be great because I had such fond memories of FFXI that I played for 3 and a half years. Everyone was very excited about the idea of having a "reunion" in a new FF game so guild members new and old started planning to come over. So I started the guild up in FFXIV - the Crimson Blades (A combination of "Night Blades" and "Crimson Pirates" that we used in FFXI) and found the RPC. We were really active on the RPC, super gung ho, ready to go. Beta was blah. Not to worry, we said! They promised Beta wasn't the finished game! Oh, but it was the finished games. We lasted a month and I WAS MAD AT SE FOR SO LONG. So long that when the Realm Reborn Alpha invite was sent to me, my fiance, AND my roommate, I didn't even want to play it. My fiance always had a soft spot for it, he was pretty convinced SE HAD to fix FFXIV or they company would lose a lot of respect and money. There was no way this could fail, he said. I, of course, laughed at him. I played Alpha for 10 minutes and shut it off, muttering something about it being too much like WoW. Then I got a Beta invite as soon as Alpha was over. My fiance convinced me I might as well play Beta so I can give feedback and try to fix what I didn't like, and I wasn't playing any MMO's at the time so I figured why not. I HAVE NOT STOPPED PLAYING SINCE. I've been playing non-stop since Beta Phase One. My guild is full of awesome and amazing people and it continues to grow each day (And we just got our T7 full guild clear yesterday!) and I've met some people on here who I just don't think I was live without. It's been a journey. Ups and downs and amazing times. Here's to many more years to come!

The truth of the matter is most rpers are going to be reactive rpers. This is why when you play table tops, there's always one person (In my group it was usually me) who runs all the games, while 5-20 people always play the games. If you don't do it, then nothing will ever get done. This could be because most people don't even know where to start with starting a story, or they just don't have the contacts to get people to play necessary NPCs, or maybe they're just shy and don't feel comfortable trying to reach out to people. I don't blame anyone for being a reactive RPer at all, because it takes a certain kind of personality type to be an Active one (It's basically Community Organizing which some people just hate). I do get discouraged when I see Active RPers stop being Active Rpers because they feel underappreciated though. There are VERY few of us, and even if we aren't showered in praise everyday, what we do it pretty vital to the community. What always makes me smile if when I see a normally reactive RPer come to me after a storyline and say they have an idea for a plotline. I'll help them with it and they run it, eventually they just start doing more and more things on their own. All because they saw a plotline I did they liked. That's the best thanks really, when you see people influenced by your own actions. Active RPing is highly stressful and requires a lot, A LOT of planning (Which I know some rpers abhor, but it is a necessary evil) and organizing and time. You're going to get criticism left and right (Which if you can't handle dooon't be a GM), you're not going to be able to know the lore 100% which means you're going to have to take liberties you may not be comfortable with. I can see why not everyone does, but those who do are doing a big favor to the community.

For us, it really means we have an overarching storyline in the FC, run by FC members, an FC Mansion for FC members to RP in freely and get to know each other, FC IC events, etc etc. For me, it's just easier to get to know people who RP who are in your FC, there's already a built in circle of people once you join after all. In this game, the existence of Linkshells have made finding outside FC RP so easy (Which is great for freelancers!) though it's really mostly about being comfortable with those people. We have an ooc LS for talking with other FCs and a lot of our members rp with allll kinds of people though. Also for us, we're somewhat insular about game content, doing endgame with the guild pretty much exclusively and such, so when people are in the FC it makes it much easier to experience the game beyond just RP. I think FCs in this game are who you want to rp with the most and who you just kind of want to hang out with OOCly. If I ever leave this game I'm gonna miss the Linkshell system. I hope other games steal it.

I personally dislike doing any stories that focus on my characters. My characters things are side plots to the bigger plots and I never want to be too much in the spotlight as an Active RPer. HOWEVER, it may be easier to start with a character arch since it can be much smaller.

Most of my experience in RP is being a GM (An active RPer as you put it ). I find there aren't a lot of these out there, and most RPers are reactive RPers. Luckily I'm an Active RPer and run an FC so my FC is very involved in lots of plots and story planning and stuff because I drive things behind the scenes. Without Active RPers there's just no plot, but stepping up to the plate can be fairly intimidating. Interpersonal RP is well and good, but you definitely need adversity and huge epic plotlines to give people something to bounce off of. I have a dedicated team of people who play our FC's bad guys and we plot stuff out all the time. Generally, in order to build suspense, our bad guys win a lot of victories in the beginning and lose later. A lot of things are deciding as the plot progressing and we try not to plan anything out too much (I.E - my bad guy character ended up kidnapped this season, which was never in any plans, but you have to be fluid), but there is an ebb and flow to stories. Villains have to hurt someone, Villains have to be villains, then you can kick their ass later. Moving the story along is a large, large post, it's kind of complicated and I could go into it forever but it may be boring. I've been doing it for about 15 years though. My advice is to try something small at first, test the water, then move to big epic plotlines. I'm comfortable currently dealing with 40 or so people, but when I started I was really only comfortable with 2 or 3. I could go on this tangent for hours, pages and pages, but i'm gonna stop now before I do . If you have any questions let me know.

Happy one year anniversary Night Blades!

I actually wrote Loki's at launch, but never got around to writing Armi's, maybe for the one year anniversary I'll actually do that. Loki Aethertide:

Monthy Update! IC: Ellion is still missing, but after months of infiltrating hot spots for information, searching through various means - including trying to find things by reverse engineering a Linkpearl (Thanks M'wanthala for that crazy scheme) and many missions to various places to look for clues, eventually the Night Blades hit on a location. It turns out not only is their glorious leader there, but also a Miqote by the name of S'ereno - who seemed to be taken because of his unusual Aether signatures. Not much is known about this man, as the only person who knows him is his friend who was also taken with him but eventually rescued by the Night Blades when they interrupted a prisoner transfer, but Loki - the interim leader - is very interested in getting her hands on him to explain a few things. The Rum And Rumble is seeing business, with a story night and a Casino night set up, The owner of the place hired a new events manager - Singer and Dancer Y'vahri, in order to help run the place which has so far proved very successful. On the not so dramatic end - there are many experiments happening in the lab in the basement. Siben Farnesworth - leader of the Development division - has a small team now to help him. The kitchen of the mansion is getting quite staffed and many people are finally able to eat a decent meal. Artifacts are being researched, mysteries are trying to be solved. People are trying not to get stabbed. All in a days work. OOC: Turn 8 is finally in the grasp for a few people in the Night Blades and we are currently working on Ramuh Ex. Team Gridania is setting up to run yet again, with many people who have yet to step into Coil2 ready to give the challenge a go! Hunt parties are being set up in the mornings - because all of us hate Prime Time hunts (Just no) and our mumble has seen to much activity we're going to have to buy more slots for people. 15 of us are getting prepared to head down to Las Vegas for fanfest. Look for us there We also got Mister Happy to say "Hoobah" repeatedly during his Twitch Stream where he ran CT2 with us. We consider it an accomplishment.

There's been a lot of talk about pushing RP away from Ul'dah, and people are actually starting to push RP into Limsa and it's starting to work. However, these threads tend to get people on the defensive about Ul'dah RP - tread carefully with your words.

Needs more Hyur. Will have both my characters soon. I'm going to avoid the summer months, yall seem to have that covered.

Val Nuhn (I'm so sorry, I can't help it >.>)

If I recall, My summoner was 35 before I went and did "Lord of Crags" and it wouldn't let me take the quest to get the Titan Egi till I did that quest (Which is 34 if I recall) THEN AGAIN this was wayyy back in September, something could have changed since then, but yes it is canon that you have to fight a primal to even get an egi.

Everytime there's a thread with Conjurer or White Mage in the title I try to tell her about it so she goes to answer. Liadan caught this one first though *Snap* Darn.

Big question: Do you have Provoke?

you can generally always get in from 2am to 6am thereabouts.

The game clerly shows that time is passing with the rebuilding of Mor Dhona and the quest lines every patch, so I think it's relatively safe to age Armi? She's 23 right now, she'll turn 24 in September. Generally, I tend to hand wave it, but it seems safe here so I may not. If that bites me in the ass and they say "Well only 2 months have passed" it's a simple enough retcon. They did do that in 1.0 though, eventually coming out and saying all the events on 1.0 happened in one years time...

(One again I speak for the Night Blades and not for any FC on the server who isn't the Night Blades) For the Night Blades, the forums are exceedingly important. Since we're large and also do endgame, saying stuff in FC about wanting to do stuff is going to get drowned out by all the chatter about how a Pirate is Free http://www.nightblades.shivtr.com/events - is our Calander that people sign up to Raid with. We have people sign up so we know they CAN go. There's just nothing like that in game. As you can see, we do a lot of raiding (Team Gridania was taken down temporarily to reschedule it), 4/5 nights a week with different people, so it's the only way to keep that organized. http://www.nightblades.shivtr.com/forum_threads/1816418?post=9697765#forum_post_9697765 - This is our Raid Schedule thread, where everyone puts their Ilvl, what they want to raid, how often, and what their schedule is. Again, just not possible in game and back the officers more aware of what people want us to set up. RP events are also posted there, discussions of plot and lore, getting people into the guild ICLY. Without the forums, we would certainly drown and I encourage all our members to join it because without it we have no record of what they want from US. And that's important. It's our jobs as officers to get people where they want to go, and we just can't without people telling us in a place where we can see it. Forums are very important for larger guilds, they're almost a necessity. We use Shivtr, I've never had a spam email from them and I've been using it for like 5 years ~~~ ON RECRUITMENT: We're actually fairly laid back. We have one major rule for getting into the Night Blades that some people might find "Elitist" which is sticking to lore - we're very into making sure no one breaks lore, but other than THAT we don't really have any set rules in place whether or not you can come in. I know some RPFC's have an approval process that can take weeks, but ours will at most take days and that's only if I have to ask you a question about lore. To date, we've only turned down one person - because their character was blatantly lore breaky and they refused to work with the officers to help make it more lore appropriate. This doesn't happen often though, as a lot of our recruitment is word of mouth - the members enjoy being in our guild, they tell others to join our guild or people enjoy roleplaying with us in the community and they decide to join us that way - so they already know how we are so it's generally not an issue. Honestly, looking through the "Big name FCs" in this game, none of them really have a lengthy recruiting process or seem that hard to get into. What great about the High Population FCs is that all the themes are different so they aren't even competing with each other and the smaller FCs seem to have very niche themes for people looking for something specific. It's pretty great, really. ON HOUSING: We have a lot of people who come hang out in the mansion of the NB (Plot 6, Ward 5 - Lavender Beds) who aren't in the NB. Some of them wait around and roleplay with us when they see us in the house (Since, with some exceptions, inside is generally considered IC). We welcome it! A few people have gotten into the NB that way, just walking in and roleplaying with us. We like people outside our FC. We even have an OOC LS for people to talk to us. Like the others said, we may not always be there, but if you see us, feel free to be like "So this is the Night blades HQ?" all in character. Maybe FCs seem more intimidating then they are? We're really just a bunch of dorks...

^ It really depends on the FC. I can only answer for my own here. Night Blades lies somewhere in the middle. We have our own plotlines that take up a lot of members time, should they choose it to, and some members pretty much only RP exclusively with other members of the FC. However, we go to Social Server events, a lot of members actively RP with people outside the FC, and we have an ooc ls specifically made because we have a lot of people outside our FC involved in our plotlines. I THINK you're going to find any FC with a plotline on it's own is like that, somewhere in the middle. There are FC's that rely on outside storylines to keep their members from getting bored, and there are FCs that just don't interact with anyone outside of it all, but I think most will fall right in the middle. Generally, I see cross FC interaction all the time - even off hand the Night Blades regularly works with 3 or 4 FCs, and rps with countless other people in different FCs. I'm pretty sure it's like that for most of them.

I use the teleports as if the Anima system still exists. 100/100 to start, the further you teleport too, the more it costs, and it replenishes one anima every 4 hours. If my characters anima stores are depleted they walk - though sometimes Armi just likes to walk anyway because she is actually really bad at controlling her Aether (She just can't get the hang of spells at this point) and she's kind of afraid one day she going to accidently teleport inside a wall. Group teleportation I've seen too, I treat is as it pretty much depletes most of your anima if you attempt to take anyone with you, and should be used sparingly.

Heavily edited screenshot I drew over and recolored to look more like a comic book page. a lot of trail and error there, but I like doing this so I'm going to be doing more.

Need to level my male alts to 50 asap for the Lightening stuff. Moonfire Fair Yukata's :3