Divisor

I'd love to get involved with a group like this! It seems right up my alley. I'm still working the kinks out with my character and I'm also kinda tunnel visioning on getting to 50 and finishing up the story before I start seriously RPing, but I'll absolutely get involved once I'm ready!

That's up to you. It's probably a better idea to wait a little while to get a better feel for the world, learn about the lore, and maybe even spectate on some other RP you see around so you have a better grasp on what you'll be getting into when you decide to RP yourself. You can absolutely do this. In fact, throwing together a character concept and worrying about the intricacies of his backstory and how I want to weave that into the game's lore is exactly how I did it. It's usually how I do it with all of my characters. Creating backstories takes time. As far as your example goes, it should work fine within the boundaries of the lore. And feel free to retcon (go back and change, for lack of a better explanation) it later or add to it as you see fit. That's a pretty commonplace thing to do in RP. Again, this is up to you. Some people like to jump in asap, others prefer to get to end-game before worrying about RP, and some jump in and out of RP as they level and etc. Whatever your comfortable with is fine, although since you're new I would suggest that you take some time to get your bearings before you try getting into stuff yourself. Just so you'll be more comfortable later. Do you know about emoting? The /emote or /em command allows you to type out custom emotes for what your character is doing. For example: /em moves over to the bar and places his hands on its surface. He gets the attention of the bartender and politely gives his order: "Just a mug of water, please." Generally this is how you'll see conversations play out. Either using custom emotes or /say, or like you said, /say and then using one of the preset emotes. Also, just so you know, in FFXIV you can type an emote and add " motion" to the end of it to just do the motion of the emote without actually emoting. For example: /soothe without " motion" would give you " tries to calm down" or something like that. /soothe motion would just have your character do the soothe animation without the text. Up to you. I see people using emotes and " motion" a lot, but they're really only supplementary. If you think using an emote will help convey what your character is doing, by all means do it, but nobody's going to scorn you for not choosing to. This is an incredible beast of a problem that a lot of RPers have. And there's nothing wrong with being at a loss for how to do this. Firstly, yes, you could ask someone OOCly via /tell and initiate some RP that way. But there are many other methods as well, and this really depends on what kind of person your character is. Is he the kind of guy who would have no issue with walking up to someone and striking up conversation? "Hey! How's it goin'? I'm John." Or is he more introverted and would much prefer to be the person someone walks up to? Maybe your character is a merchant, and could benefit by meeting lots of new people and getting their name around, so as to pull in potential customers or assistants. Maybe your character has a problem, such as a lost pet, and needs some help with solving it. Going up to strangers and asking them for help is a great way to get RP going. Remember that it all has to do with how your character would do things, although it is of course recommended that you make a character with an attractive personality, as it's always harder to play the brooding type who doesn't talk often. Being able to take initiative is an incredibly good quality to have. You'd be surprised how many people are out there who desperately want to RP, but are too afraid to start it themselves. Hopefully that helps point you in the right direction! I've been RPing for a long time, so I like to think I'm pretty good with the basics by now. If you have any more questions or even want to RP, let me know! I'm glad to help.

While I haven't done any textfighting in FFXIV so far, I do have quite a bit of experience with it as it's the only way I'll fight anyone IC (just a personal preference of mine). I also don't RP by level in any situation because I feel limiting a character's ability to their level is unrealistic. But I could go on forever about my opinions on both of those topics and the technical stuff within them. I'll generally textfight in three ways: one being complete spur-of-the-moment RP where nothing is discussed and I and the other person just have at it, two being rollduels where after each attack, both players /roll and the higher number either lands their attack or dodges/blocks it, and three being a situation where I and the other person /roll a single time before the fight starts to decide who will ultimately win, and then we RP out the fight itself like normal. In most cases I try to make an effort to discuss rules or terms OOC with the other person so as to avoid any arguments. I would imagine that here it'd be no different than textfighting in any other MMO, however I haven't seen any kind of /roll commands in the game, so I'm not sure how people will choose to handle rollduels, if they're done at all. On the subject of characters teaching each other, I'd be down for that. Textfighting is one of my favorite ways to really see how well a person can roleplay and/or write creatively. I don't know if my character would be ideal for teaching anybody, though, because he's far from masterful in any form of combat and I'm hoping to have him learn new things as he goes. If you're asking to teach people to textfight, though, I could absolutely do that. It's a tough thing to do well, and even tougher to do fairly.

FFXIV is actually the first MMO I've played in a while where tanking was actually a challenge, even in the first few dungeons and guildhests. It takes a while to get used to, but once you start getting the hang of it, I've found that it's really fun! As a sidenote, I haven't tanked as Marauder yet, just as a Gladiator, so I can really only give you tips with that. I'm also like.. 22 so far, I think? Generally when I tank, I make sure to mark mobs before every encounter so that the DPS knows who to fight and in what order. If someone is attacking something that you aren't, they're going to pull enmity from you 9 times out of 10, and it's going to be a frantic rush to get enmity back while also keeping track of the mobs that are still on you (if they haven't turned around and attacked someone else already while you were busy with the guy you just lost). When you select an enemy, if that enemy is part of a mob, you'll see a short, golden string pass between it and the other enemies it's connected with. Attacking any one of them will get them all on you. If you select something and you don't see that string, you can feel free to pull it separately and nothing else should bother you. Most recently, I've noticed a lot of roaming Gas Bombs in Halatali move around alone, so you can tag them from afar to get rid of them pre-emptively. Once I've started attacking the first enemy in a mob, I'll immediately follow with a Flash to confirm that the rest of the mob is on me. By default, at the left of the screen is a small list of the creatures in the fight. Next to their names is a shape with a given color. This is a quick way of seeing how much enmity you have with each enemy. A red square means they're attacking you, and anything less means they're on someone else. I think it goes from red square -> orange down arrow -> yellow up arrow -> blue circle. The further down their enmity towards you is, the harder it's going to be to get its attention back. I think once Gladiators get to 22 they get an ability called Provoke which will generate a large amount of enmity with any one target, so if there's a boss or a single guy who ran off to hit the healer, using that's a really quick way to get him back to you. As others have stated, there's a small bar just under a player's class icon in the party window that shows you how much enmity each person has towards (I think) your current target. Flashing or Provoking an enemy should lower everyone else's enmity at least temporarily, so it's not a bad idea to do this periodically in every fight just to be safe. Also, whenever you just start an encounter, it's a good idea to run behind the mob so that you're facing the rest of the team and all the monsters are facing just you. This makes it easier for DPS to flank them, and it's much easier to keep track of what the rest of the party is doing. It'd be a hassle if something ran up behind the healer, who's behind you, and you didn't see it until it was too late. That about covers everything I've noticed so far. Like I've said I'm only 22 so I'm sure there's a lot of stuff nearer endgame that I don't even know about yet. EDIT: Oh, also. I play and tank with a PS3 controller on the PC, and something that has helped -immensely- with doing so was learning about targeting filters. I think to get to them it's under Character Config -> Targeting Settins -> Filters. At the bottom is Filter Customization, and what these do is filter the types of things you scroll through when you target stuff with the d-pad. For example, if you enable L1 + Triangle and then filter out everything but All Enemies and Aggroing Enemies, you will only target enemies when you've pressed L1 + Triangle. If you ever wanted to know what that word above your HP is (usually it'd say Others), now you know.

I'm pretty sure what this means is that the Early Access period lasts until a couple days after launch in case some people can't get their hands on their EA bonuses code until a little later, due to retailers shipping their copies late or something. Basically this:

In my head, this sort of situation would be akeen to being trapped in a bedroom and told periodically that the door will eventually unlock if you keep trying. So I think he'd just pace around every now and then to find something that can keep his attention while he waits. Doing things like flipping through books he has no interest in, lying on the bed and tossing a ball in the air repeatedly, staring out the window, and falling asleep.

We have been having this problem aaaalllll daaaaay.

If I remember correctly one of the biggest issues with the GW2 launch was not being able to get in the same overflow as your group members. A friend and I spent a few hours trying to get in the same overflow only for us to become frustrated and give up trying to play together for awhile. Yeah, now that you mention it, I remember that being a big issue. People were put into overflows individually rather than as groups. It took them a while to fix it, too.

I learned how to fix that, actually! It's a bug with one of the Windows updates. You need to uninstall update KB2803821. (Note that this fix I found is for Windows 7.)

GW2's launch was actually the smoothest I've ever seen. The auction house was bugged out and we couldn't fully use it for like a week, but I think that was the worst part about it. I don't recall ever being kicked out for a bunch of "emergency maintenances" and I don't remember anybody complaining that dungeons weren't working. Just that they were too hard.

Oh my God, you guys. Don't do this to me. You're not even actually in, are you? You just wanted me to try again. For the seventeenth time. In two minutes. No, it's cool. At least I haven't hit the part where I sob helplessly yet. I can look forward to doing something today.

I had intended to join Intermission once I'd gotten my bearings during EA, but evidently it's full now. That's my luck. I will definitely try to get ahold of you soon! Y'know, try. Because the servers are a mess.

I don't know much about the Roegadyn, but in my experience, nothing is stopping you from making your character's personality into whatever you want it to be for the sake of being unique. In a lot of games, certain races have tropes and consistencies that each person follows, and yet in most cases I've been able to find the odd one out that doesn't really follow any of them, which is what makes that character interesting. i.e.: "I thought all dwarves had thick accents and drank all the time?" The key is to keep it realistic, because going too far out of bounds is more detrimental to your character than anything. In the Roegadyn's case, being Hellsguard and preferring cooler temperatures is pretty contradictive, but maybe your character does so simply because they've lived too long in extreme heat?

That is seriously cool. I've never seen a banner made into a gif like that. I'm jealous.

I heard somewhere that SqEnix is working on launching a new website the day FFXIV goes live. I don't know how reliable that information is, but maybe it's why the site is down now.

This sounds super cool. There could be small groups of 2 - 4 in the linkshell that get together to hunt creatures for the sake of a reward, a la your standard fetch quest (Maybe there could be a notice board for people who need certain things killed somehow?). Whether that means doing a dungeon, FATEs, or just straight hunting. I think that'd be pretty good motivation to do those sorts of things IC.

Welcome to the neighborhood. I've been into roleplay for probably eight years now, so I like to think I've got a good grasp on the basics at this point. If you have any questions about how roleplaying works or character development, let me know.

As someone who's caught up in the 3102 mess: