Gaspard

90k'd Queue at 1,928. FML

Likewise European. Balmung isn't really the 'North American' RP server, even if it is titled such. There's a huuuuge amount of European and other over-seas players present on Balmung. Usually, the No.1 RP servers are multi-national. And as the others mentioned, there are even active and running EU linkshells aswell as FC's. One RP-FC with huge EU focus is The Kindred, followed by the Europa linkshell (Though I'm not sure if that one is still active)

Here's a Tip: (One I follow myself) Alot of avid Hardcore games update their gaming systems constantly. Amongst those, alot of them regularly discard their old machines (Atleast by their standards) Through E-bay etc. Mind you; often times, what counts them as 'outdated' is for the common gamer still a beast machine. An example; I currently have a; AMD FX 8150 8-Core CPU, with 16GB of RAM, A Radeon HD 7800 And a bunch of hard drives from which one is an SSD I bought this whole thing for a joking 400 EUR around two years ago. The only thing I had to do is modify the case because the guy that put it together more or less was braindead when putting it together (not enough air-exhausts on the case, the whole thing was like a sealed heat-gathering cube) Long story short; Don't spend all that cash simply because you want all the parts to be brand new. you can get an awesome, albeit used gaming PC for less then half it's worth, if you only look around enough.

.............YOSHIDAAAAAA

Khadagan/Khadagun under Dotharl. Member of the Tribe though wandering Solo at this very moment

After a long ass hiatus;

I've found myself in the same dilemma recently. I think I've also found a solution to it. I would suggest going the route that C'kayah mentioned, since that is what I'll be doing. You could also simply wait for the expansion and see how big the actual bonus EXP will be for all MSQ we will get. According to the patch notes, we'll get a little boost up to level 50 for the MSQ's. So leveling time for alts may be cut short considerably. That way you can keep both your current character and the new Au'ra. The most expensive alternative (one I might opt for, not sure yet), Is to fantasia/rename two toons. My most leveled main I'll rename into the new Au'ra/Fantasia, and create an alt with said toons old name (or a pseudonym incase the game wont allow me to assume the old name). Ofcourse, going the route of 'I look like Au'ra but am not Au'ra' is also possible. And granted how vastly different Au'ra can look between eachother (Due to skin color / horn / eye variations) It wouldn't be too strange for a creature to waltz around with features akin to your off the mill Au'Ra, but not quite just like it.

Then everything points that it was atleast consciously done, in the sense that they wanted to take that name from you, have it for themselves. So whether the motivation was to actually screw with you or simply because they want to emulate you is probably out in the open until you find out who it is, which might be unlikely. You'll be better off giving the name a light alteration or adding an unique type of letter to it (or a ') at the end. Chances that you'll get that specific name back are slim to none unless you contact FFXIV support directly, and even then you might not get it back.

What happened to your old nebula? Did you delete her? Did you rename your old Nebula into something new? Chances are that someone in your proximity / 'friend' group decided to screw with you and make a PC with that name the moment you dorpped the name. So unless 'Nebula Stardancer' is a canon name from some other show / material someone has done this consciously to nab that name and 'copy' you, so to speak.

..dang. Oh well. Just went by some of that evolutionary stuff I heard off, thought it'd apply in similar fashion

If there was a shared ancestor, another thing comes to mind that I find even more fascinating; Given the very specific ratial traits and how evolution works, it'd suggest that the ancestor race slept with something akin to giant-dogs to produce roegadyns, lions/tigers to produce Miqo'te and.. heck, I guess potatoes to create Lalafell. Or; The ancestor race combined ALL race traits (lol tailed hyurmiqolaladyn) And genetically each race kept dropping specific traits due to them becoming pointless in whatever life situation they existed in. AND; It also means you might have to hyurs breed and if there's a teeny bit of Miqo or roe in the family tree..well the offspring could be way bigger then supposed to and blue skinned. Each are hilarious options

Unless you do what Star Wars the Old Republic did and what I suspect FFXIV is doing with the Au Ra (that is reusing bodies and switching out heads) this is absolutely wrong, a race with 100% truly unique assets will be very demanding on working memory. But if you reuse assets from existing races (in this case the body) it won't be that much more demanding. You're not entirely off though, it's for both reasons; HDD space and memory, with the latter being a much larger factor. The PS3 has 256mb of memory for the GPU that's ridiculously low for modern architecture. It is the sole reason that racial customization choices are so limited to begin with. Although the Au Ra heads are unique I strongly suspect that the body pieces are just re-textured Elezen male and Miqo'te female models. However I do understand that this is just a theory and I might be wrong, we can't possibly know for sure until the data-mining settles things, but my idea about it being a technical consideration as well do in fact hold water and a few screenshots showing unique head models do not disprove it. What I don't see is how the inclusion of a new meshes for a race, (As in player models) raises the tax on memory in the fashion you mentioned. pretty much for the following reasons; A: Usually, player models are 'very' slim in size. as in, the 3d meshes. B: If adding new models would add such 'load' onto the memory, they would've technically hit said threshold a long time ago with the constant addition of new armors / weapons. A model is a model after all. Polygons and textures in play all over. C: I don't see how the load is bigger through an additional race with unique body mesh. Whether they add a new mesh or not, the amount of polygons/textures loaded remains roughly the same. The only difference is how these meshes/polygons/textures are alligned. Your memory will be simply drawing from different files for this then from your other files. View it this way; If player A is Roe, B is Hyur and C is Elezen, there's 3 different model/texture sets being loaded (Therein, same memory load) If player A is Roe, B is Hyur, and C is Au Ra, there's also just 3 different model/texture sets being loaded (Therein, same memory load). I'm not saying that a fourth unique mesh wouldn't add to the overall load, but i personall think (Looking at the screenshots, the way that they exactly differentiate from the Elezen etc) that they're actually unique enough to be called a new model/mesh of their own. Aso for that last point about Heavenswards area size and so on; I'm quite sure they will rather cut down drawing distance and such rather then risk FPS loss. A game that can't run at least 30 FPS more or less steady ( I'm gonna make an exception here for such scenarios as Odin etc), is more or less broken. Side note ; SWTOR's engine sucked incredibly, especially under load. Some truly well built machines 'still' struggle to run that game at a decent FPS number in a 16 man Ops

It seems so apparently, yeah. We'll have to wait for the full release, but I presume it's a racial thing.

New races shouldn't be very memory taxing. View it this way. your game limits the amount of visible models each given moment. a new race doesn't raise this number, nor does it weigh on the processing memory. Also, if the mesh of a model is modified / adjusted, it 'is' saved as a new file. Therein your 'memory efficiency' theory in regards to Au Ra' playermodels doesn't hold up because; LAST EDIT: there, fixed images The reason why we don't have 10-20 individual races isn't as much a memory efficiency issue as it is a HD space issue. Each new model would require armors to be refitted to said models / rigged accordingly, which is an individual process for every single piece of equipment out there. With each class introduced, this process has to be repeated. So a new player race probably raises the GB amount by 1-2 GB in itself If you click the image and zoom in you can clearly see that the face meshes, aswell body meshes are in no way the same as that of other races. Similar perhaps, but not same. therein they're new meshes as such. So the choice wasn't technical in regards to dimoprhism, it was an aesthetic/conscious design choice. Atleast going on what I know about 3d modeling and how games tend to work. Take it with a grain of salt, I is no professional. As for the PS3 version of heavensward. Technically there's no 'bigger' amount of memory processed simply because the expansion is present. Games have hard limits on the amount of what is rendered at a given time, and I suspect this number is kept lower on PS3 to accomodate with the consoles limitations.

While there's no metric to measure RP, there are certain key-points / rules in roleplay that some people follow religiously, and therein use as ways to claim 'Elitism' or denounce someone as 'Elitist'. Though I've seen it also abused actually. People who take any form of criticism as direct 'Elitism' because, no, you can't ride the last unicorn from middle-earth transposed into FFXIV, call it Pikachu and ram the all-spark into it's chest.

Going by that, In roleplay: Elitism in roleplay for me is when people more knowledgable on lore / that perceive themselves more knowledgeable actively try to enforce a certain standard of Roleplay Quality. Whether that is in adhering to lore, the quality of your posts, the quality of you portraying a character or how they rank/perceive your character. Elitism can take both good and bad shapes. There's nothing wrong with trying to keep a certain standard and helping others there (if they want said help). It's good if you truly just try to help people with constructive criticism / feedback and a helping attitude. It becomes obnoxious if you convey a degree of entitlement and superiority to the degree that you believe yourself to be of a higher standard if, infact, you're really not up to snuff yourself. (Especially if it's rooted in arrogance). In PVE In PVE I can 'somewhat' understand it, as it's performance based and everyone should have an interest in not 'hampering' their teammates / players. That being said, nobody fell from the sky as a perfect player or with a great understanding of the games mechanics, and the ironic thing about PVE elitism is that you end up discouraging people that would like to 'hang', or get to that level, all the while you probably get chewed out by the 'true' elite, the guys that manage to tackle endgame content in 1-2 days flat. In the end, both can be positive if they truly aim to up the ante on the whole playing field for everyone (given everyone wants to play at a higher 'field'), it becomes problematic if it's just another way of people taking out their aggression on others because 'Fuck off scrub you're wasting our time'.

this is not a debate, gaspard Very well, then you apparently wont waste your time as i'm not worth 'debating', but you'll waste it trying to argue with me over my posts. I can see how precious your time must be indeed. i dont want to waste time bloating your ego by treating you like the internet professor you wish you were. i would rather waste my time bickering over pointless shit. I concede. You're clearly the Authority on; How to waste your time No way I can compete with that in any way, shape or form. And I'll have you know I'm a certified Internet Professor, I studied at /4chan and 9gag.

this is not a debate, gaspard Very well, then you apparently wont waste your time as i'm not worth 'debating', but you'll waste it trying to argue with me over my posts. I can see how precious your time must be indeed.

Didn't you establish a moment ago that i'm not worth debating? Because it seems to me like you do want to debate 'something' at this point.

A word of advice on my behalf ; Stay away from capsing /sizing your points like a campaign add, It can insinuate that you try to bring more weight to your argument then the words alone can convey. yes. it is much more effective to compose an entire essay of words that are practically weightless. It's also incredibly easy to discredit something without providing sound argument as to 'why' it is weightless. you'll have to excuse me if I don't find the sense in your bizarre, MRA-esque, pseudointellectual ramblings im not going to waste my time trying to match up rebuttals to every little bit of nonsense you've convinced yourself is true and profound. you are, contrary to what you might think, not worth debating. before demanding rigor, demonstrate it yourself Understood, you've nothing constructive to add. Thank you for bowing out in time, then.

A word of advice on my behalf ; Stay away from capsing /sizing your points like a campaign add, It can insinuate that you try to bring more weight to your argument then the words alone can convey. yes. it is much more effective to compose an entire essay of words that are practically weightless. It's also incredibly easy to discredit something without providing sound argument as to 'why' it is weightless. Oh goodness, but this is a big deal. It deserves caps/sizing. To some of us, the risk of ruining our entire lives, putting children at risk and ending up in a prison is a very big deal that words apparently can't convey. It's hardly even an argument, actually. You can't argue with a judge when you are in court. You pray to god your lawyer is good at doing that for you. When something is against the law it is against the law. When people's real lives are at risk over a fantasy world of pretend, it's a big deal. I suppose I should have worded my post like this: I don't want anyone's tax dollars paying for your prison sentence! (◕ ◡ ◕) Please be careful online! (◕‿◕✿) Things online can get you in trouble IRL! (◡‿◡✿) Comparing things in real life such as alleged rape, to something as simple to avoid as erping with a minor? Why, that's like comparing getting a stab wound with getting a paper cut. My post wasn't a "YOU ARE ALL DISGUSTING AND I AM GOING TO ARGUE WITH YOU!" My post is literally, there is no grey ground on this when you get caught, watch yourselves. It's better to be safe than sorry. There is no 'oops I didn't know' once things like chat logs are presented in a court of law. An erp session or two with a minor? And how a lot of RPers get weird ooc when they have rp partners? It could easily be seen as grooming a child towards sexual things. And it's a life destroying thing that can be easily avoided. Why even bother comparing this to real life false rape charges? You are right, being careful in that notion is necessary if you don't want to be involved in legal drama over it, not mentioning the social repercussions. I compared the two on the notion that both touch the topic of sexuality and how law handles sexuality, and moreso how society responds to sexual Charges. Fact is ; Roleplaying with teenagers if you're an adult yourself is, through these laws, dangerous. So yes, if you want to be safe, you have to refuse to play with anyone who's not 18 or older, unless you make sure your roleplay (sexual or not) stays entirely PG-13

A word of advice on my behalf ; Stay away from capsing /sizing your points like a campaign add, It can insinuate that you try to bring more weight to your argument then the words alone can convey. That being said! The 'Law', as such, and all the accompanying legal actions in regards to sexuality and such especially in first world countries have created an atmosphere where you're running risk of being sued for simply having sex with someone, even if you're both consenting and legal. Your sexual partner can, if they're witty about it slam you with rape charges out of spite and make it stick rather easily. Infact, someone who isn't even involved with you can do so, All you need is to be in a disclosed location where there are no witness, 'scream HELP and RAPE' and then put on a good show for whoever approaches. Even if the charges wont stick, you will be ruined in a professional sense, and your employer, your co workers and pretty much anyone who will hear of it will probably view you with different eyes if not outright witch-hunt you to the ground. A similar example, though not in the same vein; A good friend of mine had his entire life fucked up that way by a seventeen year old gal who had a crush on him, who played him in that manner (Something she admitted eventually in the court hearing.) The damage was done however by that point. Nowadays, if you want to stride on the 'safe' side of things, you would have to outright refuse to play with minors in any capacity, as many - even nonsexual things can be described as corrupting in nature towards youth. Having your character consume Alcohol, smoke drugs and the likes could be already precedent enough for you to be charged with 'influencing minors' by that train of argumentation. (because the Law isn't infallible, and it certainly isn't just. It's a System in which the most rhetorically gifted can argue his way into things given he has some type of legal precedent, no matter if it truly applies on a moral basis to the situation.) Ofcourse, from a moral standpoint I do not endorse involving minors in any type of sexual activity with a legal 'adult', but I'd suggest we keep the law seperate from this topic, because According to Law I can get imprisoned on false charges and lose 20 years of my life based on that. The Law isn't a morally sound or sociologically applicable argument to this discussion. Also, to go a bit into detail in regards to your example about having kids and them Roleplaying/ERPing in a MMO setting; First off, it is your Job as a parent to monitor your Childrens behavior and what they are exposed to. If you fail in that, you fucked up. I find it laughable that in none of those cases the parents wheren't charged with negliegence, as they didn't monitor their Childrens online interactions. Roleplaying, no matter what, isn't Rape where an individual forces himself on another person and therein it's out of the hands of the adults to intervene. It's your goddamned job as a parent to know what your children do, who they do it with, how it may impact them, and if they're ready for it.

you need only read a good book or watch a good TV series with intelligent characters in it to see the divide between many of the intelligent characters found in fiction and the characters played by roleplayers that im criticizing. crime fiction, in particular british crime fiction (poirot, sherlock holmes, miss marple whatever), typically does a good job of presenting characters that are clever without resorting to them spouting meaningless technobabble or having their intellect shown by simply telling other characters "I AM VERY SMART". this, in a way, goes back to the show don't tell thing everyone learns (or should have learnt) in english class. i need more than "this character is very smart" for me to accept that they are, in fact, very smart. they should do something within the story that proves it. say something insightful, come up with a master plan, solve a complex puzzle, bring up their wide general knowledge (or specialist knowledge if they're an expert in a particular field) in a situation where that knowledge is relevant, helpful and solves a genuine problem. that is how i can truly tell if a character is intelligent or not. in cases where a player is really struggling with their character doing intelligent things, i would have to ask a few questions, chief among them: "is intelligence vital to the character's concept or story, or is it another embellishment intended to make them better in comparison to others?" if the player's motivation is to beat other characters or to live out their fantasies of being someone who isn't stupid, they'd probably just be better off not making intelligence one of their character's defining traits. if their character concept needs the character to be intelligent but the player just can't play that convincingly for whatever reason, it's up to the player to do some homework, or to negotiate with other players to set up situations where their character's intellect shines. if you can provide insight that could benefit that player's writing (maybe you know about the thing their character's meant to know about), you might be able to give that player some helpful hints. or you can just reprimand them. if a problem can be easily fixed, i see no good reason to accept that problem existing. 8-) I see. Well, I agree with this to a good part, 'however', when it comes to Intelligence, I find the term too subjective; What I mean is this; Intelligence comes in various shapes and sizes, such as Emotional intelligence, logic, abstract thought, communication, memory, problem solving etc. Intelligence in the end is an umbrella term describing a plethora of things, and therein creating or upholding a 'standard' isn't as clear-cut and easy as "show me, don't tell." They might already be displaying their particular degree of intelligence, you may just not see it because your personal/subjective interpretation of it doesn't corellate with theirs. To give an example ; you could have someone who seems like an overall ditz, knows more or less nothing of value in logical processes, someone who could by all means be described as an 'Idiot', and still have him be the perhaps most importantly intelligent figure in the group. What I'm reffering to is emotional intelligence. You can be dumb as bread in the educational sense, yet still exhibit the profound ability to recognize emotion, know how th cheer particular people up, or motivate them into action that someone you would call 'academically intelligent' would never be able to do. Which brings me to the following term ; "Fach-Idiot" which is german. It roughly translated into Professional/Categorical Idiot/Moron, and is an entirely negative word describing the phenomena where someone has been groomed/trained in a very specific are (Let's take accounting), and all of his theoretical number shifting and 'min/maxing' approach he's been taught and is now trying to bring to a company might be 'intelligent' in a math sense, but utterly moronic considering it will destroy your workers overall morale, create an atmosphere of fear for their jobs, and eventually cost the company more then it stands to gain from this min/max approach because the quality of production and efficiency will go down with the unhappiness of the employers, and therein the so calleds 'Fach-Idiots' intelligent approach to this is anything but as he's actually achieving the opposite to what he wanted to achieve. Another example of the so called fach-idiot would be someone highly knowledgable in one field, but a complete dunce when it comes to 'knowing life'. Such as interpersonal intelligence, societal intelligence and emotional intelligence. Someone who can code you the meanest programs or hack something in twenty seconds flat but can't participate in a social conversation without making it intrinsically awkward through his lack of experience alone. His intelligence is restricted to a specific field, outside of which he's a completel dunce otherwise. This is more or less my point to Illustrate that you cannot just 'show/define' intelligence in a way where you could simply look at something and call it intelligent. Intelligence is too illusive of a word to hold it to such a standard. And Intelligent doesn't equal successful / productive either. A construction worker who, beyond simple math, who can't really grasp 'writing' or language properly can still be more successful and productive then a highly intelligent person. He may contribute to the creation of several homes, houses and buildings, earn good money and so on wherein the Intelligent person who just graduated from law school might find himself, due to economical circumstances, have no job, or a rather poor paying lawyer gig. Now, who's smarter? the dumb construction worker that earns more, factually speaking contributes/creates more and is able to feed and nurture his entire family plus help a friend here and there, or the Lawyer who, with his vast intelligence doesn't amount to anything because the particular economic field has no 'use' for his brand of intelligence? Intelligence in my opinion is too illusive of a subject where 'show me, don't tell' doesn't apply. Often times, your character may not have a chance to exhibit / show his particular brand of intelligence, or expose it to the roleplay. Same goes for any other presumed trait to a character such as strength, cunning or street-smarts. If your characters narrative is restricted to social meetings in pubs or bars, you have no viable way of 'showing' your characters traits, and, infact, making it a habit to 'prove traits by showing' can actually be detrimental as you then propel your character into a bit of an attention seeker who is basically going 'Here! look how intelligent I am by stating this!, or doing that!'. Though I will admit that this argument here is pretty 'meta' in nature. I do agree that there's probably players out there that simply spout intelligence as just another notch in their belt, as another 'awesum trait' to make their characters feel special, and that that is what you've more or less have taken as an example to your point; However 'proving' or denouncing intelligence on a subjective interpretation of what the other person shows through their roleplay doesn't really work, unless they where as specific to say 'My character is a brilliant conversationalist' and then his way of talking / discussing topics is anything but. At most, you dispute/disregard very specific claims to intelligence like that, if what the player is doing stands in stark contrast what he claims their character to be. Otherwise, you can't hold people to a simple standard and go; "He's behaving like a moron in this example and/or i've only been exposed to his stupid tendencies, therefore the character is stupid and not intelligent."

not in the eyes of the law lmao The 'Law' is a joke in the majority of our world countries, including first world countries that pride themselves on being progressive and 'morally just'. I mean, people sue companies for millions because their coffee cup was too hot and didn't have a 'caution, hot liquid inside' label, and most punishments stand in absolutely no logical equation to eachother. Online piracy can ruin my life, push me eternally into debt and ensure that I will never amount to anything in life, even if I manage to avoid a Jail sentence. Killing another human being under the right circumstances will see me get a bit of therapy and a sentence that I will not even have to spend in jail.

Let's see.. Hannibal (Can't wait for season 3) Suits The Blacklist (James mfing Spader) Empire Arrow (Mostly because I root for the Bad Guys.) DBZ-A(All these squares make a circle) Hellsing-A(C-c-c-check your privilegue!) and ofcourse, House of Cards