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I'd shell out gil for a Large house for my Elezen nerd, and then super outfit the characters I want in them, in the Hannish shirt and Thavnairian dress, because hoo-boy are those expensive on Mateus. 25+ mil is way more than I want to spend on a glamour. And then I would buy the same for my friends, if they wanted it. Because sharing is caring when you have very deep pockets. ICly, Mea would probably turn around and fully fund rebuilding the damaged parts of Ishgard (so they can finally fix the damned Brume), and then the rest would go to the Ala Mhigan resistance and the Doman resistance. She already makes enough gil to live comfortably while taking care of her family, so anything else is just extra funds she could give away. My other characters kind of widely vary. Ursielle would fund a life of having fun. Brynrael wants to buy a fleet of ships. Khulan would use most of it to fund her traveling and education on different kinds of dances. Aelden doesn't care much about gil so he'd probably just spend it all on friends and showering them with luxuries. Finuala would use it to start a bar. Reimumu would fund an expedition into the Gubal Library to recover and reprint the entire repository of knowledge, also to buy a big fuckoff house because she could. Ran's a very simple girl of very simple means, so she'd probably just use it to make sure her family was taken care of for years.

I tend to be very flexible when it comes to my own gender. In-game, it's pretty much the same. I have male characters who are very much male, I have females who are very much female, and I have males who present feminine, and females who present more masculine. I tend to play based on the character and concept more than the gender. That said, I've had people convinced I was two different individuals, one of each gender, after RPing with one of my male characters, and one of my females. I literally had to log out of one and into the other to prove I wasn't two different people. I'm always of the opinion that people should RP whatever they want. If only because the gender of the player doesn't matter nearly as much as the gender of the character during IC interactions. Sadly, there are still some people out there who use RPing as a means of 'hooking up' IRL, and that leads to unfortunate and uncomfortably awkward situations. I sadly speak from personal experience.

Mar is one of the coolest dudes I've met on the RPC and is an amazing friend.

Given the current clusterfuck that is the latest RIFT Expansion, I'mma say that going F2Play hasn't really improved anything. I mean, they started out really, really well, but over time they have eroded more and more of the good things about their model. Currently, the game is more Pay to Win than Free to Play. Yeah, I've been out of RIFT for a while now. After the RP community on Faeblight went belly up from one-or-two people basically "taking over", and open world stuff was relegated to Argent Glade in Silverwood or... you know, I can't even remember where people congregated on Defiant Side, I basically left. But at the time, the model wasn't that bad. Initial shift from Pay to Play to Free to Play wasn't bad. It just got worse and worse over time. I've heard the same thing from some of my friends who still play the game. And yeah, Trion is pretty awful. It wasn't as bad a few years ago when I was running RIFT as my main game, but as I understand it, the company has shifted priorities, and, well, let's just say that I don't hear much 'positive' about them anymore.

A lot of 'good' games I've played have converted from the Pay to Play to the Free to Play model. Some good examples are RIFT, Lord of the Rings Online, etc. I've seen a number of games and have been in a number of games that have shifted subscription models and I think it's becoming less reflective of the MMO genre itself than it is differing priorities from the fanbase. There's nothing inherently wrong with the F2P model, and I've seen a few games I really enjoy that started out with that model and are still doing moderately well. And then we have some rotten 'Freemium' models, like TOR. That game feels like rubbish without a sub, or an awful large amount of money sunken into it. I do still play Star Wars The Old Republic, and even (though it wasn't listed in the first post), The Secret World. A lot of games are very 'niche' games which cater to and draw in from a small market. Star Wars fans are more likely to play TOR, and horror genre fans are more likely to play TSW. Tolkien fans will probably end up spending at least some time in LOTRO, and you have a large number of XIV players who were Final Fantasy fans before anything else. And there are only 'some' games that cater to a wide audience without attempting to hit a specific niche besides the broad genre that it belongs to (Rift and WoW being in the fantasy genre, for example). Players seem to think they want some great "next game", when primarily what seem to want is customization and the freedom to build and create in an almost sandboxy way, at least when it comes to features like housing. Devs seem to think that they want to release the next greatest game, when primarily what they seem to want is to release a game that is cutting edge and really draws in attention at the start, but they often end up falling flat after some initial patches and maybe the first expansion. What ends up happening is that you get several niche games that each fulfill one or two functions that players really want, but end up falling short on other ends. Or you get game devs that are very dedicated to trying to release good content, like the XIV devs, but who are struggling under corporate or system limitations (I'm looking at you, soon to be gone PS3 support). I don't think any one MMO will hit the right niche in the market, because you either end up catering to too much on one or another end of the spectrum, or the player base consumes all of the content quickly, then moves on. People also seem very reluctant to split their time consistently between games because they have greater obligations, and there's no real point to spending money on a game that you actually won't be able to dedicate time to playing, especially if that game, as all MMO's seem to, have some kind of scaling gear or progression grind. It's also very hard for any one game to 'take the market' when people are split by their interests. I have friends in TOR who would never play XIV because the genre doesn't interest them, and similarly, friends who would never touch TOR because they prefer fantasy over sci-fi, even though they like Star Wars itself. The MMO market is always going to have a largely divisive split in it, and that's part of the MMO market itself seeming to flounder. You have a continually expanding but ultimately limited cluster of people who have to choose the right game for them based on things like computer specifications, personal interest, friend group location, monetary spending and time budgeting. I feel like no one MMO, regardless of how 'good' it is, is ever going to be able to completely down any other game. And I can't comment on games that aren't the tradition RPG style MMO, because I haven't really played them, as they're not my preference.

I don't tend to treat fantasia as lore, because as stated above, it isn't actually seen in-lore in any major storyline and might not ever be. That said, I can understand why people might decide to just fantasia, and not change their name. Maybe they don't exclusively RP anymore. Maybe they want to keep their name so people can find them. Maybe they're changing the concept and simply dropping all previous RP history with that character because what they wanted to do with them didn't really pan out. Or it's entirely possible that they can afford a fantasia, but not a fantasia and a name change. I, personally, don't see a point in utilizing a fantasia for any of my characters, except in the case of minor tweaks and such, but even those don't really 'count', since none of them relate to the fantasia itself (character's getting a tan, eye color change via alchemical lenses or something similar, disguises, etc). That said, I'm not going to crucify someone for it. I might gloss over it in conversation, or have my character dismiss that part of the discussion as unimportant information. Personally, as far as fantasia itself goes, I find it much easier to pawn off sudden changes so far as race/height/body structure/build/gender as a type of glamour than to work a fantasia into the story. 'Glamour' also means that if I eventually get tired of the change, I can switch my character back, since it's known that glamours can be long lasting, but typically aren't permanent. I think part of the choice behind it is that people like to be stubborn about a character concept, or in the worst case scenario, they paint themselves into a corner with something. They make or utilize some type of change to their character, really want to change it back, and aren't sure where else to go with it except to spin it out as a 'this character needs to change, and so I'll fantasia them'. Some people might even choose fantasia not realizing that it isn't typically accepted as in-lore. It all depends on perspective and reasoning, I guess. People sometimes have weird reasons for doing things.

Another good system that they might consider implementing is separating Stabling and Housing, to allow for an instanced housing system. We've seen that gardens can be done in an interior setting, so it might be possible to tie the system together in another way (keeping in mind that I know nothing about the back-end side of the coding they have to do). Rift and EQ2 had instanced housing, and both generated wards as needed, and each 'housing' was considered separate. At the same time, you had a limit to the number of houses you could own without unlocking more (4 in Rift, and I don't recall the limit in EQ), both both allowed for a much more robust housing system. At the same time, in those systems you could literally build a house from scratch, so obviously they might not be able to apply things the way they have to in XIV. I'd love to see a more robust housing system in general, but I don't know of anyone who would be eager for them to pull resources away from other developments in order to work on a revamp. All they can do at this point I think is continue to work on the system they have and try to find a way to refine it to do what they want it to do.

My wikis are all pieced together from other peoples formatting, though I have done some things myself, some of them pulled from other formats, some pulled from formatting I've seen used off-wiki in other places. I love my wikis, but recently I started trimming them down drastically, after realizing I'd basically overloaded the information on there. That said, I mostly make Wikis because they're pretty, not for any other real reason. I do have a tumblr, but I'm lazy when it comes to tumblr coding (which is weird, I know), so that's a thing.

Those are actually really nice. As far as refs... My giraffe.

I want that shirt the Miqo'te is in.

I've heard good things about Covenant, but I've never had a way to play it, hence why I said not Covenant. When I said the remake, I meant Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth for PSP. They changed the music and.. just.. no. D:

So many great old games listed here, argh. I played a number of them, still have them somewhere, in fact. I miss Wild ARMS and other older games. I wanted more Arc the Lad, and more Legend of Dragoon (Which I still think of whenever anyone says Dragoon before I think of floor-tanks), and just in general, there are some great games that I would love to see ported over, even if not 'remade', because I worry how they might goof them. Another great series were the early Persona games (Revelations, Tsumi and Batsu), of which we didn't get Tsumi until much much later on, but eh, funny censorship things. I hate that some of the best games I loved have come over on portable hand-held systems. I'd love a remake of Valkyrie Profile (not Covenant of the Plume), but I worry that they'd somehow mess it up. I mean, I liked VP 2, but it just didn't have the same impact that Valkyrie Profile did. I worry whenever the gaming industry remakes anything old at this point. That said, I'd love new games for some of these series. Didn't Shadow Hearts have a second game? I know there was Koudelka, then Shadow Hearts, wasn't there a SH II?

Strictly 'as strong' as the Warrior of Light, then no, because it's obvious that the WoL has the specific blessing of Hydaelyn. That said, I definitely agree, none of this 'saving the WoL' or 'best friends' with him/her/them. I'm all for lore stretching, but that's more like lore snapping.

I'm just going to have to respectfully disagree with this. No characters should ever fight alongside/interact with the Warrior of Light, shoulder-to-shoulder or not. You could make a character that is powerful enough to stand toe to toe with a primal solo. But why would you? Not only does that not sound remotely entertaining, but it's kind of taking a crap on all the other RPers in the world around you. I feel like it's kind of a respect thing. It's also the same reason (primarily for me, at least) that I abhor seeing people RP NPC characters in the middle of the city. No one can, or should, be able to stop them because they're powerful PC-RPed NPCs. If people want to RP them, do so privately. It's disrespectful to take them publicly. I did specify that in scenarios like at Steps where there were more than just eight people fighting against the oncoming horde. Mercenary companies typically include people of all sorts of strength levels and capabilities.