raindrops

Was I the only one who started out reading this to the tune of 'part of your world' and then received the best surprise ever?

This is happening in an hour and 20 minuts, guys! Make sure you make it, or the regret will haunt you for the rest of your life!

Braids will be there, of course! Characters might have seen her putting up posters and handing out flyers around the three cities.

Sorry, I completely forgot about this thread. I've never done commissions before but I'm willing to try, and I'll add info about them to the first post once I've figured things out! For now, I come bearing art. Sketches first: A thing I really really ought to actually buckle down and finish! And, because my FC are running an event, a poster I made for it! (The full art for the poster is here, but it's super sketchy)

See, something like this I'd consider a case-by-case basis thing. I can understand someone sending a polite tell with 'hey, you do know that it's keepers who have fangs right?' or something along those lines. It's something that could be a mistake easily enough, and personally if I had made a genuine mistake like that I'd want to know about it. I can see it getting annoying after a while, but it's also the kind of thing you have to expect when you give one of your characters the traits of another race/clan. You can't really expect everyone to have read your character's backstory. Of course, it becomes a problem when they aren't polite about it or when they don't accept that it's a deliberate choice on your part rather than a mistake. There's a difference between being helpful and correcting people just to sound superior.

There is a cap on how much of each stat a single item can have, but you can keep adding materia despite that - once you unlock advanced melding (I think it's a level 30 crafting quest? but don't quote me on that) the game won't stop you from adding materia even if they won't do anything. Failure destroys the materia and carbonized matter but doesn't do anything to your equipment, so don't worry about that. (If you're going for the 'I got this' achievement, you'll want to use it to burn up all that level 1 materia that you have. Also I think you may be able to use the 'cowl' equips for it, so you only have to rely on the RNG for one materia rather than 3.) And iirc if you're adding materia to an item that doesn't already add that stat, you can actually go through quite a few before you cap it out.

I'm curious to see how that works out myself. I need to see what the actual items look like in use and on characters before I make a decision, but hell, it could look like it fits in with some of the other outfits. I'm not terribly familiar with Lightning, but the elezen female starting outfit has a similar design feel to me. I'll have to wait and see, but I'm sure a looooot of people will be wearing them at first. But I would just see them as having poor fashion sense IC. :lol: For me it's both an art design issue (I'm a little sore that they didn't do anything to make the items fit into the world better - character outfits updated to fit Eorzea in the same way the classic class outfits were for the artifact equips would have been perfect) and the fact that I am familiar with those characters. It's the same reason I wouldn't play with someone whose character was named 'Cloud Strife' and it could well be a personal thing. But I don't think that makes me, or them, better or worse as an RPer. I'm not refusing to play with them because I think I'm better, it's just because I personally wouldn't have fun doing it and they probably wouldn't have as much fun playing with me as they would have playing with someone who liked the equips or the name. The aim of RP is to have fun, so making someone feel obligated to stop having fun for someone else (whether it's someone demanding that NOBODY USE THOSE EQUIPS IN RP EVAR or someone demanding that YOU HAVE TO PLAY WITH THEM NO MATTER WHAT BE NICE) is always going to be doing it wrong.

Nobody owes anyone else RP. Backing off from playing with someone because you don't want to isn't being a jerk. It's not even necessarily having high standards. It's just not wanting to play with someone. Similarly offering constructive criticism isn't being a jerk as long as you're not a jerk about it. Making an example out of them, demanding that they shouldn't play the way they do (there's a difference between this and constructive criticism) or telling others that they shouldn't play with them etc? That's being a jerk. 'Elitism' in RP, to me, is deciding that your time and enjoyment are worth more than other people's and that you have the right to dictate how people behave in their own environment. It's, when they way you play doesn't mesh with the way someone else does - perhaps you write paragraphs and they like one-liners, or maybe they're bad at spelling and the mistakes bother you, personally I don't think I'll be RPing with anyone who uses the FFXIII equipment during scenes because that drags me right out of the game (they're not inherently bad because of it, it's just personal preference) - not being able to step back and just not play with them. And it's also, when someone does step back and not want to play with you, demanding that you are owed their time and using scare words like 'elitism' to demand it. Not everyone's going to mesh well. There's going to be disagreements and sometimes the answer to those disagreements is for both parties to be happy playing separately from each other. 'Elitism' is not accepting that and demanding that there is one perfect way to play and that that perfect way is your way, whether you're championing writing ten paragraphs a time or the idea that absolutely everyone should be willing to play with absolutely everyone else. In my FFXIII equips example, I'd avoid starting a scene with people who were using those items. If they were interested in playing with me (or if they had a really amazing character I desperately wanted to play with - this happens!), I'd explain that those items make it difficult for me to get into a scene and ask if they wouldn't mind using something else when playing with me. If they're cool with that - hooray, we've compromised! If they're not, we go our seperate ways and nobody's worse off. That's not elitism, that's adults deciding how to spend their limited free time.

If you have an android/iphone (or are willing to emulate an android on your computer) then there's the software token. There's been some problems with it but you have nothing to worry about as long as you remember to make a note of the emergency password (so you can remove it easily if something does go wrong). If you genuinely can't get a token or use the software one, the best you can do is to use a strong password and never use the same password in multiple places (most accounts that get 'hacked' are people who've used the same password and email combination on a forum they've forgotten about - these forums tend to be forgotten, so they're not up to date security-wise) and to change passwords on a semi-regular basis. Sorry for taking this off-topic, but I think it's important to know.

Oh no! That's terrible. Do you know what's happened with your account/have you talked to customer service at all? It might be worth taking a shot at getting it back rather than dropping money on a new key and having to work on a new character.

Yup. People kept deciding it would be funny to drag stropers over to me while I was mining constantly the other day. I never left stealth but was constantly getting bad breath'd. Status effects all over the place. Unless they've patched that at all in the last few days, aoe's hit you when stealthed and stealth just keeps monsters from attacking you directly.

You should never, never drag mobs over to gatherers (or anyone else, actually. Sometimes even players in combat classes have to run off to take care of something at awkward times and stand somewhere that's normally safe but where mobs can be dragged to). People have been doing this a lot to me recently as a form of griefing, because even in stealth mode AOE attacks still hit and gatherers have pitifully low HP. It's a bannable offence (called MPKing, monster-player-killing) and I personally report anyone who does it to me if it's not an accident. Even if you were doing it without malice, if you're deliberately dragging monsters over to them (and it IS obvious when it's deliberate) you'd be indistinguishable from the people who are doing it to deliberately disrupt people.

I'd argue that they're not making the pool of players any smaller - the only people who are paying to be carried are likely people who wouldn't be doing this themselves anyway. It might be diluting the pool, adding a lot of people who don't know how to handle endgame content, but as far as I'm aware Coil can't be duty finder'd for (I think, anyway?) so if you don't want a player who was carried through Titan in your group then you can identify players who can't keep up with you and not group with them again fairly easily. Honestly I'd argue that if anything the ability to sell runs and make money off them, at a point when it's quite difficult to make money ingame without playing the auction houses of having a craft at 50, may well serve to convince more people to try and master that content so that they can sell runs. And maybe having their awesome relic weapon will be motivation for people who were carried to learn how to use it. For Titan specifically there's also the issue that due to current issues that fight is literally near-impossible, regardless of skill, on some ISPs and in some areas. My ISP right now is an enormous arse and isn't particularly fond of allowing me to get out of AOEs because it thinks FFXIV is a P2P program, no matter how quick I am. I really don't want to be carried through, but this means my plan for Titan right now is that I'll have to memorize the entire thing and do it from memory. Kind of a pain.

While I personally am not sure how I feel about buying/selling HM runs - I don't think I'd ever want to be carried through anything, but I've not reached the HM primal fights yet so I can't pretend to be an expert wither way - it's not against any rules. I am concerned that the audience for being carried, at least so early on in the game, does probably overlap with the audience for buying gil (the 'I want this right now' types) and so that this will probably encourage people who might have bought gil anyway to go ahead with it, but that's not actually any wrongdoing on the part of the guilds doing this. (Though it does make it somewhat dangerous to do - Square are currently investigating a lot of players who've crossed a certain gil threshold too quickly as part of trying to track down gil sellers and buyers. No doubt most of them - people who make their gil through market trades that are logged and easy to track - will be found innocent and let go. But if, as is probably how HM runs work, you've received a lot of empty gil trades for a large amount each time? That starts to look very suspect, especially if those trades are from known gil buyers. It's not the fault of the people selling HM runs, but it does put them in a very, very risky situation.) The selling isn't the big problem here as far as actual ingame things go, it's the sabotage. And for the most part, it looks like the accusations of sabotage are untrue, at least toward these particular players (I don't doubt that there are some incredible arses who enjoy ruining other people's fun). They're based entirely on what appears to be a joke (a dreadfully unfunny joke made in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless) made by one of the members about doing this to drive up demand for paid runs. In all of the fuss surrounding this mess - and there has been an awful lot of fuss - I've not seen one person come forward to mention any member of this FC sabotaging their run. The other big problem, and the reason this got so out of hand, is the handling of it on Reddit. The mod in question deleted the thread in which people started discussing what was going on and in doing so essentially kicked a hornet's nest. What could have been discussion turned into people furious that they were being censored/information was being kept from them and desperate to find out 'the truth'. Since it's come out that the mod was also letting their FC see deleted posts from the Reddit (largely regarding exploits), it's safe to say they have been abusing their power anyway and should probably be un-modded. But really that has little to do with FFXIV proper. (Unrelated: I'm not sure why people here are being so hostile toward the FFXIV reddit - I have my problems with Reddit as a whole but for the most part the FFXIV one has been nothing but civil toward us. Hell, they've even been getting excited about our events and turning up and behaving! That's more than we get from the general FFXIV community.)

Given what I can afford right now. I might donate a little more later, depending on how things go. I wish you all the best with this, and even though it looks like you're not going to make your target I hope this helps you. It's absolutely ridiculous that so many insurers don't cover this stuff.

Try not to make your character during US peak hours, if you can avoid it. Character creation is usually closed at those times, no matter what the server. If you're impatient, there IS an RP community on Faerie, though I've not participated in it too much. Some other servers might have their own small groups as well if you look around. But I think that Balmung and Gilgamesh should open up later on.

Braids' sense of self-preservation could use a little work, in that she doesn't have one at all. She isn't used to battle and is still kind of terrified of the idea. Her low sense of self-worth means that she doesn't like being relied upon, out of fear of letting people down and causing problems for them, which causes problems when you're a healer (and thus kind of need to be reliable). She hates expressing anything negative at all, which means that she doesn't have any real outlet for anything that upsets her. Losing memories of a Warrior of Light who was an enormous part of her life has also done a number on her, both mentally and emotionally. Emotionally, she's paranoid about losing or forgetting people who are close to her as well as about forgetting more about herself. Mentally, you can't really forget a person who was such a massive part of your life cleanly, so she struggles with the mental equivalent of 404 pages every now and then. It doesn't help that she's not got the vastest base of knowledge to begin with, having lived in a cave until five years ago. The racism and xenophobia of Gridania and the Wildwoods has made her afraid of Wildwood Elezen and very wary about being in the shroud or around people from the shroud. She's bitter about this, not that she'd ever express it (because of the aforementioned dislike for expressing negative things).

I drew a very quick thing for a friend. Her character is adopting all the pets and I figured this needed to be illustrated because adorable.

It's highly likely that more than a few of the compromised accounts are the result of people getting hold of Riot's password databases a little while ago. A lot of people may well have used the same password for FFXIV and never changed it, under the assumption that the people who got Riot's data could only get into their account on there. 'Hacked' is something of a scary buzzword, but if you use the same password in more than one place then it's scary easy to compromise your account. People get hold of the databases of old forums all the time, and then sell the lists of usernames and PWs on to companies like our gold sellers. Then the sellers check all the different name/email/pw combinations in various places to see how many match up. Sadly, enough usually seem to to make this profitable. But that's largely off-topic. The good news is that this will probably slow down after the 30 free days are over. People aren't going to continue to pay subs for their compromised accounts, after all, so after the first 30 days there's going to be a much higher barrier to the gold sellers getting in. There'll likely be some still, but in more manageable amounts. And if FFXI is any indication, chances are that SE are/have been collecting information right now and plan to do mass bannings at some point in the future. They like to let these things go on long enough to get to the cause and to put together a huge list of suspects, so that they can deal with them all at once in a short period of time, to avoid people finding ways around it. For now, the important things are to use a secure, unique password and the authenticator if possible and to not interact with gil sellers in any way other than blacklisting them. Even sending them a 'stop doing that' message could potentially false flag you (and since they're being controlled by bots, they won't see it anyway). You don't get in trouble or anything, but if they look at their records and see that after someone offered to sell gil you were sending them a Tell then they're going to have to investigate that - at best you'd just be wasting their time.

The only big problem I see with allowing arcanists looking to become scholars to queue as healers is that there'd need to be some sort of check to make sure that they ARE geared/statted to heal. Pre-scholars should absolutely be allowed to queue as healer but there needs to be a way to stop arcanists who only intend to DPS from queueing as scholar to dodge queues. It'd be a short sighted as hell thing to do (dodging queues to create a group that is likely to wipe) but I don't doubt that there would be people who tried to do it and it'd be doubly frustrating for people who then have to go back and tackle the DPS queue again. On a side note - I'm on Faerie right now and will likely be transfering to Gilg to be with friends when the option opens. I'm only level 30, but I'm always happy to rerun old dungeons if anyone needs help with the story quests and I'm a healer, so you can stand in my very fast queue with me. I won't always be able to run a dungeon immediately, obviously, but if you need help and we're on the same server then drop me a line.

I don't know much about private servers! I was talking the official ones, and the EU ones to be specific. Not sure if the US ones were better or worse. In short, there were an awful lot of trolls there. I remember giving up after the eighth or ninth person to go *GRABS UR TITS* before I ever actually found an RPer and going to a non-RP server with a friend to play privately instead.

I don't believe, though I'm not much further in, that you ever have a 'main' city, really. I'm fairly sure your GC can be changed later on and even that doesn't seem to determine it completely. After you do all your travelling I'm pretty sure the story has converged and you get the same main plot quests no matter where you are. Once you've been to all three cities you can use the airships to travel between them for 200 Gil. You can also walk/chocobo between Ul'Dah and Gridania (you need to go through the central shroud to the south shroud, to eastern thanalan, to central thanalan (I think) to Ul'dah, or in reverse order to go the other way). You can also get a ferry between Limsa Lominsa and Vesper Bay for 200 Gil, which'll come in handy soon enough. The Aetherytes and Teleport are also an option, if a rather expensive one. Personally I have the three city ones set as a favoured destination for the discount, and use my chocobo to get around as much as possible to save money.

If WoW is anything to go by, an official RP server won't change that at all. I have my problems with Gilgamesh but a lot of people will have made friends there by now and a lot of good arguments were made in favour of a shared server - mainly that it means that players don't have to make two different characters or choose between RP and very serious play. Given how the game is very built around levelling one character in everything rather than individual characters in a few things, that's a big plus. We're not going to get the current servers made official - there ARE two very big communities on them who would likely be vocally against that. An official server would be nice in a very, very long-term sense (I am talking in months if not years here), but a lot of people may well have put down roots already now it's been two weeks.

There's a level 20 one in Ul'Dah - the one that needs three pairs of breeches - that leads to an extended contract. It also awards incredibly useful Diremite Webs, which are nice because there's always a level 50 farming the banemites that drop them on some servers (and while they have the right to do that/I'm sure some of them are very nice, nearly all the ones I've seen have responded to a lower level character trying to farm anything at all with a flurry of quite nasty tells). I prefer 'Don't Sash Me' myself for the amount of EXP/rewards you get compared to effort put in for a HQ produce, since you can make cotton cloth HQ pretty much effortlessly by level 20 and a HQ turn-in nets you 30000 Exp and something like 700 Gil on top of those precious webs, but that's because I've not really been using my leves so I can afford to burn them on non-extended contracts.

Unless I've been getting the wrong sort of dungeon gear, you can't affix materia to dungeon things. This is the benefit of the crafting classes - the things they make aren't quite as good by default but they can have materia attached to them, making them occasionally potentially more powerful (iirc it was mentioned that HQ crafted gear with good materia would normally be better than dungeon gear at the same level) and also meaning that they can be customized according to your playstyle. As a conjurer, I've found my crafted stuff + materia worlds better than mage-class dungeon stuff of the same level for working in parties, just because I can customize it for maximum healing/spell speed when my damage output isn't a big deal so the int bonus from most dungeon mage gear is worthless (dungeon mage gear can be nice for soloing, though!). That said, as far as I've seen (it might change with the super super high level stuff, I've been trying to keep my crafting and gathering classes at the same level as my main, so between that and connection issues levelling's been a little slow) the difference in stats is a minor one if you don't care about cutomization. I like to keep both my crafted gear and dungeon gear either on hand or with a retainer just to play dressup.