Addison

My use of the term "special snowflake" was in no way derogatory nor was it elitist. But that's your opinion, and I'll respect it, the way I've always respected peoples' views on this topic. I could spend all day arguing debating this topic, but I'll leave the thread with this quote: "When everyone is super, then no one is."

Points bolded are what I'm addressing: 1) To put it plainly, because 'weak' characters aren't special snowflakes. They are average. They're the everyday people we should be associating with, but aren't, because everyone wants to play the special snowflake. If you want to play the special snowflake, great! But what makes you special? What sets your character apart from the hundreds of other roleplayers playing special snowflakes? When has anyone asked a 'weak' person to back up their claims that they're a bad mage? Or an inexperienced swordsman? Or a terrible cook? We're not called upon to prove a negative. 2) Even though this was addressed to Kellach: To me, that sounds a lot like metagaming.

Maybe for you, but for me they certainly overlap in some regards, especially since the arena in question is that of a video game. Not your dining room table during your private D&D campaign where you are the end-all solution to what the rules are. We're just going to have to agree to disagree. And I'd appreciate in the future if you didn't address such posts with such a sarcastic undertone. Just because we differ in opinion doesn't mean you have to talk down to me. Thank you.

People discredit legitimate effort put into PvE and PvP all the time. Look at this very poll. As of writing this, 57% of respondents say it isn't important at all, despite this being an MMORPG where PvE and PvP are the focus. I'm not saying one is less equal to the other. I'm saying there needs to be a balance (contrary to what the majority of roleplayers think), and if someone wants to take the title of King Badass, they need to prove it both creatively and within the mechanics of the game. Otherwise, you're just blowing smoke up peoples' asses.

I feel that if you're going to portray your character as the 'best' of something, you should at least put the effort into unlocking all their skills. This is still, first and foremost, an MMORPG. I can't take the guy who spent all his life training to be an elite -whatever- seriously when he doesn't even have the class unlocked. I'm sorry. We expect it for crafters, don't we? Why isn't the same rules applied to adventuring? It is of my opinion that when you spend a large majority of your roleplay trying to convince everyone how much of a bad ass you are, you need to actually go out there and prove that you're a bad ass once in a while.

Unless it is specifically requested in their search comments, I have to respectfully disagree with sending a PM to someone before engaging in open-world RP (within reason, of course). The whole idea of open-world RP is that it is spontaneous; anything could happen. If someone is to put themselves in a hotspot like Ul'dah to seek out walk-up RP, I would be shocked if they honestly expected every encounter to be a good one. If someone does not want their RP session to have random characters join in, it would make sense to avoid a melting pot for exactly that. I roleplay a character who is naturally confrontational. He is no stranger to punches in the face for acting like an ass. He's a big goof, really, and makes a daily habit of embarrassing himself by acting like an ass. He thinks of himself as the guy who says what everyone else is thinking, although he's rarely correct. It adds a fun dynamic to RP, but it inevitably causes hurt feelings. While he isn't 'evil' or 'villainous' by any stretch of the imagination, people aren't expected to like Allister at all. What troubles me is how people's dislike of the character consistently bleeds into an OOC dislike of me as a person. I'm troubled because, for so many people, the line between IC and OOC is nearly indistinguishable. I have to agree with this. It's not exactly 'open world RP' if you're filtering every interaction you OOCly dislike. Sometimes I feel as if people aren't as open to 'open world RP' as they like to proclaim. Instead, it seems like there's a large group of roleplayers* that view open world RP as 'open world RP but only if you read the fine print of this contract stating all rules and regulations for interaction with my character then sign with your blood.' *Just noting I'm not pointing out anyone here specifically, but the whole PC 'ask my permission before you breathe anywhere near my character' is a plague rampant in the EQ2 community, and a large part of the reason RP is so stifled there.

While I'm happy for the overall ruling, the fact that it won by such a narrow margin just proves we will have a long way to go. And I can't imagine what kind of crap the people against this ruling are going to pull, especially those in power in Congress.

The whole "I'm going to post my drama all over tumblr" sounds so foreign and quite frankly stupid and asinine to me.

These are absolutely gorgeous.

After being in queue for half an hour, it kicked me out. "Unable to connect to data center." I've been trying off and on to get online for about 6 hours now. I've pretty much given up trying to get into the game this weekend. It's not worth the aggravation, so you all have fun. Maybe I'll have a chance on Wednesday morning when the initial hype dies down and people are at work. But for now, I'll just have to deal with falling further behind. /shrugs

I learned with the launch of 1.0 that one should never take off during any launch. Every FFXI and EQ2 expansion taught me that too. While I can't play HW yet, I already bought it so I can access the second I catch up. But you all have fun

With the servers being down and the odd Thursday off for me, it's all about FFXI nostalgia

Somewhat unrelated, but this post made me think of it... My RP experiences here have been limited, but something that always boggled my mind about other RP communities I've been a part of is that some PCs do nothing but sit around and drink at the local tavern. They drink, they go home, they sleep it off, they come back the next night. But they still look like Photoshopped super models. Seriously, how do you drink all those excess calories and still have a 6 pack? Or bulging arms? Or a waist so tiny that makes Barbie jealous?

Addy? You know that one weird kid in high school that was always nice to everyone? The one who could barely know someone but would offer to hand deliver the day's assignments because they were out sick with the flu? Or the one that would give her lunch away to the kid who hasn't hit his growth spurt yet and got beat up and his lunch taken by the football team? Or the one who would offer to tutor said jerk jock in chemistry because he was failing and the school was riding his ass to pull his grades up? Or the one that found the weird goth girl crying in the bathroom because she got laughed out of class and would offer her a shoulder to cry on, even if it meant detention for a week for cutting her next class? That would be her.

You know, I've seen this stated in the forums here a few times while looking around and I'm a little confused about it. Is there anything in-game that supports the idea of a large number of illiterate people? Because... so far... all I've seen are examples of people being pretty literate in general. Books, logs, journals, letters, etc... all being passed around in quests.... Signs and posters on the walls... Wearable "reading glasses".... Books decorating buildings... etc... There's also a statement in the Hyur character creation about how Midlanders are taught to read very young or "trained in letters from infancy" if you will. The only thing I've seen to support illiteracy in game was a one-off statement from a game dev without much elaboration (or racial/regional/cultural specifics). Curious if anyone here could point to more examples from in-game text/lore to support this at all? I'd LOVE to know though, because I'm thinking of having my character be pretty literate... or perhaps a "book nerd" if you will. It would be nice to know how odd/rare that kind of thing actually is amongst people (or Lalafell specifically) so I can RP appropriately. This is something I don't get, either. We have that statement from the Dev saying that literacy is rare... yet we have so many quests where we're passing notes around for people. Or putting up notices/posters. And then there's the actual Moogle Delivery Quests. And the 'newspaper' NPC's that pop up for some events. There's only one NPC (quest out in the Gold Bazaar) that I've ever encountered that, when trying to give them a flyer for work, actually said "I can't read". Everyone else, you give them a piece of paper and they read it. On the topic of literacy... For me, personally, MMO spaces are by-and-large a small taste of what's actually going on. What we see on our screens is but a small example of what the world might actually be if it were going to transfer into reality. A city-state like Ul'Dah might only have a couple hundred of NPCs we as PCs can interact with when we load up FFXIV, but I'm willing to bet if Ul'Dah translated into the real world, it could hold several thousand people that we will never see in game. To fully populate a game to make it feel like a real place (yay immersion!), it would require a lot of resources both from the development team and on our hardware. SE has done a pretty good job with populating areas with NPCs, whether they serve a mechanical function for our PvE experience or not, so that areas don't look so empty. Remember, there's a ton of doors that we can't open. There's places we physically can't put our characters. There's mountains we can't climb and oceans we can't swim in. So just because the NPCs we primarily interact with are literate doesn't mean the whole population, or even the implied population we don't see, is wholly literate. Or even the majority literate. Educated and literate people are easier to write into a story because the creators making those characters are educated and literate. Besides, would you really trust a guy who tells you the fate of the world rests in your hands and you have to slay the primal -whoever- for -whatever reason- when the guy couldn't be bothered to learn how to write his own name? I certainly wouldn't.

I'm a veterinary technician. I draw blood and urine samples. I run various labs. I look at poop and urine under a microscope. I restrain mean pets from biting or scratching people. I take X-rays. I do some grooming. I educate owners on proper pet care ("No, cheesesteaks and milk is not nutritious for your cat, sir"). And about a thousand other things.

You're not the only one! As for me, I'll be getting my whm up to snuff, and that includes leveling ARC more and unlocking THM. Oh and rp of course.

Two people can witness or participate in the exact same roleplay and walk away with very opposite opinions on it. That's both the beauty and the curse of roleplay. Enforcing 'etiquette?' Other than the big "Dont's" of roleplay and "Be excellent to one another," I fail to see a reasoning for more etiquette than that. I've witnessed groups of people attempt to do that, and it's backfired each and every time. The RP community in EQ2 is dwindling to only a few dozen people now because people attempted to impose ridiculous guidelines and label them as "etiquette" that roleplay there has become a chore.

Did they not say they were streamlining the process by upping the EXP rewards for the MSQ? Why not? Everyone else did it. Why should new players like me get a free ride? You know the biggest complaint I hear from veterans in other games? "This guy joined the game 2 weeks ago, has a max level character, and doesn't know jack shit about the mechanics." Where are all these new players complaining about this? I haven't seen them. Perhaps you can point them out to me, because all I keep seeing in this thread is veteran players speaking for new players, as if they understand what it's like rolling a new character with minimal knowledge of the game. And they simply don't. You're talking from your experiences as someone who's been there/done that. You don't want to do the MSQ because you've done it. You've seen it. You know what happens. That's fine. But new players haven't done the MSQ. That's why they're called new players. Who is it really harming that new players need to do the MSQ to access later content? Certainly not you. So what's the issue here? Sell what concept? That there's an entire world to explore that's still relevant for new players? That new players don't have to feel rushed towards expansion content because SE made the decision to keep the core game relevant for anyone who happened to say "Ya know, I'm gonna give FFXIV a go." Yea...that's utterly dreadful. How dare they?

ESO, in general, is a passable MMO. As a TES game, however, it sorely misses the mark. And that's my biggest disappointment. That and the PvP, which was hyped to be 'revolutionary.'

Is this you? Because if so, I fail to see what you're complaining about. You're 50. Twice over. I'm going to assume that during your time as a WHM and ARC, you did the MSQ. And if that's the case, you've already met the requirements to unlock the new classes. Congratulations. What exactly is your problem with a requirement you've already met? It sounds like you're complaining for the sake of complaining. I'm curious as to what MMOs you've played then, because no MMO starts you at the 'end' the second a new expansion is dropped. There is a certain amount of "ready time" one has to accomplish before making it to that point in nearly every MMO out there. Whether it's currency farming, rep/faction grinding, or just grinding the same 4 dungeons over and over to get yourself gear ready for the expansion, everything requires some amount of effort and time. Perhaps I'm not seeing the difference between the MSQ in this game, which actually rewards you along the way, and say....the CoP missions in FFXI, which doesn't give you jack shit in terms of quest EXP (nothing in FFXI gave quest EXP. Ever.) and you hardly got any tangible reward until the very, bitter end.

A lot of the design choices people are saying are bad are pretty standard in both eastern and western MMOs. And it's not going to change so long as games that follow that formula turn a profit. John Smedley (president of DBG, formerly SoE) might like to think that the current MMO formula is dead, but that's only because the games his company produces are either failures at launch, or on life support and haven't made money in years.

I might be a healer, and therefore kinda sorta responsible for you. But I can't physically pick up the DPS and move them out of the AEs. I can't hold hate for the tank. I can't be expected to keep you alive if you can't even have the patience to let me properly buff the group before you try to prove how much of a badass you are by pulling without Protect or Stoneskin. I realize the cool thing to do is pick on the healer when people die. I realize picking on the new kid on the block makes you some kind of hipster and that's my "rite of passage" or whatever. But I can't do my job if you're not doing yours. And no, asking "Addison r u even healing bro" is not ok. Nor is it funny. So just stop.

It sounds as if magic users really got the shaft lore wise. Would a conjurer with a greater affinity towards healing magic rather than destructive be a viable option to play? WHM was my favorite class in XI, and I like the mechanics thus far in this game, but I am sorely disappointed that my character ICly would be viewed as nuts or people would refuse to RP with me because she's a WHM. I guess the major question is can a player roleplay a healer at all without a lot of IC grief?

I just joined tumblr. Here's the URL: http://addisonstone-ffxiv.tumblr.com It's OOC for now.