Kylin

I made a request several pages back. And I come back from work to find that it has been ignored for multiple pages. I don't care if you "take issue" with my request. Enough is enough. This is not a "debate." It's a childish argument where people want to get the last word. You're seriously talking in circles. You're all making this entire community look bad, and I will no longer stand for it. I'm putting my foot down now. Call me a tyrant if you will. I don't care. This is my last warning. Stop posting here. Now. That's not open to discussion. The ONLY reason this thread is not locked is because there needs to be an open thread about the issue for new people to post questions in. That's it. Stop. Edit: The mods and I will prepare a new Q&A sticky thread for the new people. This thread has long run its course and is damaging to the RPC as a whole. Locked.

I've tried to keep my opinion mostly under wraps, but I feel it's probably high time I explain it at least through an admin perspective. I know some have questioned the decision to "allow" this split to go on. So let me explain as best as possible. I'll leave my personal opinion and predictions out of this, in order to ensure they don't influence anything in a bad way. Though if you want my personal opinion (which I had already typed out ), I have no qualms sharing it in PMs. However, for this, I'm only going to post an administrative perspective and explain why the RPC is on the path it is now. When one removes emotion from the situation, there are only two logical outcomes to this split. Either the Gilgamesh RP community succeeds, or it doesn't succeed. That's it. There's no other outcome. Balmung will remain largely unaffected as a whole. The number of current RP shells there are equal to the number that started out in 1.0. And with the game being in a far better state, the number of those shells to be retained stands to be higher this go around. This is not Balmung's game to lose, as it stands to lose practically nothing as a whole. The ONLY threat to Balmung is Square-Enix themselves if they were to pull a douche move and proclaim some other server as the official RP server. That's it. There is no other threat to Balmung's future. That said, there are two options an administrator could take in this issue. Option 1: Proclaim the site as Balmung-centric only and essentially tell people who want to go elsewhere to take a hike. Doing this would keep the RPC united on Balmung, but it would also create a devastating division within the overall community. If one thinks the "competition" between servers is bad now, I assure you it could be 5 times worse. Imagine a 2nd RPC forming and horrible proxy wars being fought on other sites ("We're the TRUE RPC!" "No, we are!!"). Kind of sounds like more of a headache, don't you think? Assuming the other server community doesn't succeed, it'll also seal their fate in never returning to a community that was so intolerant of them, thus negatively impacting the entire Rp community as a result. On the other hand, if the community succeeds, the escalated competition and and jaded anger will last for years to come. Lose-lose situation for everyone regardless of whether the server succeeds or not. Option 2: Support the "division" and keep everyone at least semi-united for the time being. In this manner, the RPC itself remains united without having to deal with the headache of a competing community. While the two servers may still be seen as "competing" in some ways, it's a very different scenario when said competition is WITHIN the RPC and thus slightly easier to control. In the event that the other server community fails, the chances of them reuniting under one server banner increases exponentially with this option, as they remember that they were supported from the start and will be less likely to hold grudges. In the event that the other server community succeeds, the competition may continue to some degree, but again, it'll still be in a more controlled environment and future forum rules can easily be implemented to stifle that competition to some extent. Logically speaking, option two is the smartest option to take. And I wish those thinking purely on their emotions could see that. And that's the option that was thus taken. With that said, I want to leave a message to both Balmung and Gilgamesh communities. To Balmung: While many of you may despise this split, know that there's nothing any of us can do to stop it. Even if I did choose Option 1, it wouldn't stop it. It would only escalate the issue further. We've already seen this with a particular linkshell that has forever abandoned the RPC because of when this issue first came about months ago. So I advise you all to step back and stop arguing. You will not change anyone's mind. Balmung's only role here should be to remain supportive and ensure that misinformation is corrected as needed (such as the false belief that non-legacy people can't join legacy servers). Continuing to argue about servers is not only FAILING, but it's pushing people further away. Should the Gilgamesh RP community not succeed in their goals, we should be there with open arms to console them and be willing to take them in at a moment's notice. We should NOT give them "I told you so" comments or anything of the like. Should they succeed? Then we should congratulate them and give them kudos for doing something that was perceived as nigh impossible. Any future issues with "competition?" We'll cross that road when/if we get there. To Gilgamesh: While the odds are stacked heavily against you, you remain unwavering in your current path. The risks have all been laid out. And no amount of debate will change anything it seems. So the best of luck in your endeavor and know that the RPC will remain supportive of you as needed. But please do try to exercise your "Gilgamesh pride" carefully. Know that the issue is still very contentious and any remark can easily offend those in Balmung. If Gilgamesh succeeds as a RP community, you should also refrain from "I told you so" in the same manner that Balmung should if the opposite were to happen. Also know that if your endeavor doesn't work out, Balmung will always be here no matter what. Which leads me to a very serious question that I hope you consider as such: IF, hypothetically speaking, the plan to establish a long-term RP community on Gilgamesh doesn't work out, what would you actually do? You don't have to answer this with a response. Just think about it in the back of your mind. Would you quit the game forever and move on to another? Would you focus more on the game itself moreso than RP? Or would you actually consider reuniting on Balmung to continue your RP? I'd rather avoid locking this thread. So instead, I'll encourage everyone to just stop posting. Hopefully that request will be respected. The only ones who should be posting on this thread any longer should be new people who may have questions that need clarified. The rest of you old folks are just chasing your tails endlessly with no hope of persuading the other party. So just...stop? Stop trying to get the last word in, all of you.

The merging of posts basically works like this: If the author of the previous post makes another post within 15 minutes before anyone else has responded, the two posts will be merged and separated by a horizontal line. This happens whether the content of the posts are the same or not. It's something that will likely be disabled in the future when the forum activity calms down post-launch.

Only mods have the ability to delete posts, and that won't be changing anytime in the future unfortunately. We recognize that double posts happen from time to time on accident and never fault anyone for it so no worries 8-) . We'll either catch it and quietly delete it, or you can edit the second post to something like "-delete this please-" and report it (we always see reported posts very easily) and then we'll fix it for you. You won't ever be penalized for accidents like that though. Edit: Also, most back to back posts get auto-merged into one post by the forum itself. So you can -usually- edit the post and get rid of the double post that way without any help from a mod.

Let's try to keep this thread civil guys. Getting tired of locking all of them :lol: I have my own views on the entirety of the topic, but I'll keep most of them out of public like this

Let me make something perfectly clear before anything devolves further. This site was created with the primary intent to unify RPers onto one server 3 years ago. We have since budged on that and, against the majority's personal wishes, threw support behind a secondary server. And we will continue to support that server as per our promise. That said, the RPC will absolutely NOT support a third or fourth server. End of story. Now, let me clarify on what I mean by "support." Any RP shell/company can certainly advertise their linkshells in the Linkshell Hall, as has always been the case. But I am not setting up a third subsection of forums, nor will most people here help advertise any third servers to newbies I'm sure, as that goes against the entire purpose of this coalition. If Rpers on Gilgamesh are unified in their decision to change to another server, fine. I can easily mod the Gilgamesh section to whatever. However, if there's no unity behind that decision (which so far there doesn't appear to be), nothing on the RPC's end will change. People can still go to whatever server they want. Nobody can stop them. But the RPC has a purpose behind its existence, and we're not going to keep taking it further and further away from that. My suggestion is to make this a decision between the already existing Gilgamesh linkshells/companies...both internally and between one another. That will paint a much clearer picture than a public poll like this will. My advice is to hold an "emergency" Gilgamesh linkshell leader meeting of some sort via a skype chat room/AIM/whatever and discuss it internally. Though you'll probably also want to discuss it with the individual members of each Gilgamesh RP shell as well. Either way, good luck.

I for one don't put much stock in polls that allow people to vote more than once. So this really doesn't mean anything to me, personally. Let alone polls posted on the lolbeta forums >.>;

SE recently issued a statement about the myriad of leaks floating about. As a result of this statement, I have removed the OP's content for now for everyone's (and this forum's) protection. I'll readd it when it's known to be safe to do so. SE's response is as follows:

That's because you're trying to link your image to an outside source (imgur). You have to upload the image to the wiki or it won't work. There's a guide on how to do this here if you're not sure how: http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_To:_Add_Images_To_Your_Wiki

The editor is so bizarre -.- Just tested it myself to confirm and it's indeed where the problem is. If you have your editor set to MyCode, the tooltips won't work. Why you ask? I have no freaking clue lol. But if you have it set to SCEditor or SCEditor Source, it'll work fine. Up to each individual if they want to change it or not. But if you do, just go to "Edit Options" in your profile and go to the drop down menu in the lower right. Then select either "SCEditor" or "SCEditor (Source Mode)."

For those it doesn't work for, you may want to give it a full day or two and see if it fixes itself after the server refreshes itself. If not, it's probably something on xivdb's end (no coding on this site was changed aside from a simple line added in to load their javascript file...which could be bugged). I also noticed that for some reason, it doesn't work for guests. It works fine when I'm logged in, but not when I'm logged out. So @Gospel... If you get time to test it, can you temporarily remove your invisible status and see if it works after that (after a page refresh)? I know there was another error with invisible users (not possible to post on their walls) so I'm just curious if the problem is connected to that.

Hmm..you may need to refresh the page. It uses javascript so if the browser is using old cookies, it may not load the file properly. If that doesn't work, you'll probably have to delete cookies.

With the sweeping changes being made to http://xivdb.com/ in preparation for launch this month, I've went ahead and implemented their tooltip support. By posting a link to either an item, ability, etc from there, the item/ability will have an auto-hover effect. The link will also auto-change to the item/ability name. See the below example. http://xivdb.com/?item/2987/Lalafellin-Tunic

Shots could be better, but here are my primary characters (and some minor characters because I felt like it):

As we're getting closer to crunch time, I wanted to emphasize a couple things. First, the August 10th placeholder date does look like it won't work. It's being guessed that beta will start back up on August 9th and last 7 days (this is mostly speculation still). Even if this is true, that only gives one day for preparing for the event. I'd rather people have time to level up and find decent outfits that they'd like to wear to the event. So the event will probably be pushed to a weekday (such as the 15th, a Thursday). This is still not 100% official though since we don't have access to the remaining timeline. Also, here are some general instructions for the start of the event that will be reposted the day prior to the event. It will also be added to the OP and the calendar event when I post that with the official date:

As Xenedra said, some may need to reset their server due to the way that changed. That should fix the problem. This shouldn't be an issue. There will probably be a few more shells pop up between now and launch, but after that the number of active RP groups will likely decrease. About 3 months post-launch, we'll be doing a roll call and removing inactive RP shells from the list, as we did in 1.0 ^^. This current layout does use a rather immense number of queries right now though, which worries me. But once I do the image optimizations, I hope to make it better in that regard. Worst case scenario, I'll have to readd the pagination system temporarily to ease server load in the meantime. I just now noticed this myself. I'll look into it --Fixed

After much labor, the new and improved Linkshell Hall is now live! Please note that the following changes take place specifically to the Linkshell Hall's main page (the directory) and is subject to more possible tweaks. The rest of the internal pages (tab system, etc) are mostly unchanged. Check out the section by clicking on the "Linkshells" tab above (or click this link: http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=15 ) :chocobo: Linkshells are now listed in alphabetical order and remain grouped as such regardless of "bumps." As a result of this, we encourage you to subscribe to the forum and/or individual threads as needed to better be aware of new posts. Also note that unread new posts will cause the linkshell name to appear bolded as well. A little green arrow will also appear next to the linkshell name if there are new posts. Thread creators can subscribe to the thread by going into the full editor and clicking the additional settings tab. :chocobo: Linkshells are now stacked in a grid-like format rather than a long list for a much cleaner look. :chocobo: Number of views and replies have been eliminated. You may still track your threads number of views INSIDE your actual post below the Basic Info sidebar. :chocobo: The linkshell's theme will now appear in the actual directory in place of replies/views. :chocobo: You may now enter a linkshell's thread by clicking on the linkshell name OR logo (previously, the logo was not clickable). :chocobo: Max logo size will be increased width-wise in the near future. Max height will remain unchanged. This change will require me to re-upload all LS logos again though, and thus will not happen immediately. :chocobo: A sort feature has been added at the top of the page. Clicking on the appropriate server will filter all linkshells/companies within that category*, making it significantly easier to find an appropriate group. Thanks to Aysun for the logo designs! Additionally, please note that you may still sort linkshells by normal means (number of views, last post, etc) via the sort feature toward the bottom of the page. :chocobo: Max character limit for Linkshell names has been reduced. Please keep the title to just the linkshell name only. Tags and descriptions (such as "free company", server location, and so on) should be kept within the primary post for cleanliness, unless you are a region specific LS or OOC based LS (such as Europa or Intermission to give examples). Linkshells using descriptions and/or unnecessary tags have been properly modified. :chocobo: For tidiness, the Chronicles subsection of the Linkshell Hall has been removed from the Linkshell Hall front page. The section can now only be accessed via the forum index. :chocobo: A new slot has been added to the Basic Info sidebar that can be used to identify the linkshell as a free company. :chocobo: Linkshell name font size has been increased from 18 to 22. :chocobo: The pagination system has been eliminated in this section. As such, all linkshells will remain on a single page rather than getting bumped to page 2,3, etc. :bomb: In progress: Possibly going to add some more visible borders to the blocks as well. :bomb: In progress: Tweaking some elements to be better centered and whatnot. *Note that server selection in the linkshell submission form has changed to accommodate this. Rather than a text field, you must now select between three choices: Balmung, Gilgamesh, and Other. We apologize to non-Balmung and non-Gilgamesh groups, but we ask that you make your server choice clear in your first front page post. We do not have the ability to support filters for every single individual FFXIV server.

Spoiler code can include one of the two following: [spoiler]text/image/video here[/spoiler] [spoil]text/image/video here[/spoil] You can only see the code in the "source mode" if you're using the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. If you're not sure what forum editor you're using (there are 2-3 of them) or how to change it, check out this post: http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/showthread.php?tid=1693&highlight=sceditor

:love: for all~ You're all amazing. While we have our share of drama and disagreements from time to time, the community always comes together in the end. Everyone ultimately wants what's best for the RPC, even if they may disagree on what's best every now and then. But we've continued to persevere through everything so far, which says a lot on its own. I sometimes hear RPers from other MMO communities mention how dramatic it is over here. To them (and I know some of them are reading), I only have this to say: Hello pot, meet kettle. The fact that some want to pretend that they don't deal with the same exact issues is hilarious to say the least. Every MMO's RP community (and even regular communities in general) has their share of drama after the initial honeymoon period. Thanks to all of you for your continued support to this community. It is because of all of you that RP in Eorzea can continue to thrive openly. Here's to years of memories yet to come! 8-)

Interesting topic of discussion. I actually had considered doing just that (locking all threads related to this topic on sight). In fact, the day prior to this post being made, I had typed up a post for the mod forums and was about to post instructions to do just that. I thought better of it and tossed out the decision though. I'll state it for the record now: On a personal level, the constant creation of these types of threads is annoying as hell to me. I see one crop up and I instantly think "here we go again..." I believe this topic is a dead horse, and everyone has very clearly stated their opinions on the issue multiple times now. I believe it's pointless to continue discussing the issue ad nauseam. To be blunt, nobody's opinions are going to change anytime in the near future until post-launch, when activity levels and styles become more apparent. It feels no different than the constant swarm of "legacy vs non-legacy" threads on the beta forums. That said, I also believe that the RPC itself should not stifle opinions or discussions of any sort, even if the topic is redundant (unless the topic is heading in a hostile direction, going off-topic, and/or other reasons we deem appropriate). As a community hub for RPers, we have to accept that different people want to discuss different things (and have different opinions on things). However...I am very much leaning toward merging all future threads about this topic into older threads in order to keep things less cluttered at the very least, and to make it clear to others that the topics already exist and have been beaten to death. My suggestion for everyone in regards to responding to this constant issue is to consistently point people in the proper direction and simply advise them to try both servers to come to their own individual decision based on their own experiences. One can take the advice or leave it, but that really is the only thing left to be said in this never-ending debate. People will go where they want to go, and none of us can force them to choose otherwise.

Yay~ You finally popped into the forums~

Moved to proper section ^^. Yeah, sorry about the confusion. I made several attempts to remove the "create an account" button entirely during the relaunch of the wiki awhile back. Unfortunately, MediaWiki (and/or just that particular template) link the login/register buttons together in the coding. So removing one ends up removing both. I'll try to look into it again though to see if I can find a workaround.

I'm in the final planning stages of this huge event but still need the following! *Live streamer person to help stream the event music in the second half of the event. This should be easy to find someone for this (heck, I could technically do it but will be super busy as is during the event). Anyone with a live stream account can handle this, but I do need a volunteer first~ *Guards (any "mercenary" linkshells wanna get hired outright? Already have a couple freelancers). This is mostly for IC reasons only, in case a brawl starts out or something. Guards will NOT have to stand around and look like statues --Signups so far: Rhostel, Shippuu's alt? *Event mods. This is the big one. I've also decided to make it slightly IC instead of purely OOC, to help with the event flow. The event mods will really only have to "work" at the start of the event and then should have no problem doing their own thing after that. I need probably 10 or so of these!

Bumping this thread as a friendly reminder. The NDA is still in effect in regards to videos and audio (from ARR, not 1.0) until phase 4. I've noticed people getting more comfortable posting links here and there and wanted to remind everyone to continue being cautious in this regard. With all the excitement for the upcoming final stage of beta, it's easy to overlook this. We don't want anyone to risk getting in trouble!

False. Most new RPers are actually going to Balmung. This is evidenced by the vast majority of active newbies here stating as such both on the forums and in the massive RPC based skype chat rooms. There was even a poll here where 85% of respondents stated they're going to Balmung, and the statistical margin of error for said poll was only about 10%. This is a dead issue. Most are going to Balmung. Some are going to Gilgamesh. Some are going to Behemoth. It is what it is. In about a month's time, it'll be 'put up or shut up' time for everyone. I have complete faith in Balmung's ability to thrive and this isn't their game to 'lose' anymore after having won it already three years ago. That said, I wish nothing but the best for other server RP groups and hope they are able to stand on their own two feet in due time. And we will continue to support them as needed when able to do so. In addition, the official RP server business has been addressed. Multiple times. Including PRIVATE correspondence between myself and a SE rep. There are still no plans in the works for this. They could still surprise us, but I think it's high time people accept how things are now and go with it. Locking thread before it turns into a server flame war like the last ones. Issue is done and over with. Everyone needs to just accept how things are and move with the current, whichever way said current takes you.