synaesthetic

I thought all the Scions had the Echo, which is why they can actually fight primals--because they can't be tempered.

I always got the Mafia vibe from Ul'dah's "nobility."

If I had to guess as for a reason for the massive uptick in RP activity I would say: - Transfers have opened up, so RPers who rolled on other servers because Balmung was full can now transfer here. - RPers on Gilgamesh have gotten extremely tired of 4chan and reddit and have come here to escape the trollfest. - The sharded RP faction on Behemoth came back to Balmung. - Hardcore RPers have actually bothered to level a bit, so now they can travel more places instead of spending eight hours a day in the Limsa tavern.

THIS. God, I want that classic blue BLM AF variant so bad. BLM AF2 (Sorcerer's Attire, purchased with mythology tomes) is dark navy blue and has a matte texture rather than the shiny/leathery texture of AF1. It looks so much nicer.

NPCs already have palette-shifted versions of artifact armor, so I don't see an issue with allowing everything to be dyeable.

Not like dyes even have a purpose really since you can't dye endgame gear. *grumbles* I didn't have to grind FATEs on BLM to hit 50. Obviously I did on BRD and SCH, being on the same character instead of on alts.

Aeriyn would be interested in this. My chara, Aeriyn Ashley, is a black mage and a scholar of aetherial matters, one who studies magic in its myriad forms, but specifically focuses on the study and data-collection related to corrupted aether. It's for both personal and professional reasons, but she would fall all over herself to join a research expedition to Coerthas.

I don't roleplay combat unless the game engine allows me to actually attack the person. In games with a dueling option it makes things a lot more exciting than having an emote-fight. In games without a dueling option, like XIV, combat is handled through short fics and forum RP.

I am an alleged roleplayer, so take this as you will. My character, Aeriyn, is a black mage, but she's smart enough to know what she is isn't really well-thought-of (and sometimes feared for their power), so she just doesn't tell people she's a black mage. Most average folk wouldn't know the difference from Fire III and Flare, so she only has to hide her "forbidden black" techniques from learned individuals who would recognize the subtle differences between thaumaturgy and true black magic. Aeriyn's access to black magic came through an aetherial accident that happened during the Battle of Cartenau, a sort of Noodle Incident involving corrupted aether, a Dalamud fragment, an exploding Garlean magitek armor and the weird kitty herself. Before this incident that changed her physical appearance and wrecked her memory, altered her personality and left her... strange.

As a roleplayer "in theory," feel free to take this with a grain of salt (I've yet to actually RP since the game launched, having only done so during beta). My character, Aeriyn Ashley, is a "good" character. This is a bit of a departure for me since most of the previous characters I've played were morally ambiguous at best or downright bad people at worst. Aeri is a little strange, a little flighty and a little loopy in the head (as a result of corrupted aether exposure during the Calamity), but overall she is a good person. She is a self-described "independent contractor" (she does not like being called a mercenary) and refuses to take contracts that would cause her to perform evil actions. Aeri wouldn't accept a hit contract, for example, but she would accept a job to rout a group of bandits harassing a village. She wouldn't kill them unless necessary and would instead work to hand them over to the Wood Wailers/Brass Blades/Yellowjackets. She would go out of her way to help people in need, and she would wave off payment if it was offered (unless she was very broke at the time). Aeri has refused contracts on the basis that they would clash with her morals many times in the past, and this has led her to be placed in danger on several occasions. Due to her past, she is very strongly opposed to assisting or aiding the Garleans in any way, shape or form, and this is also where her greyness comes in. Past trauma means that even the sight of a Garlean military uniform will set her off, resulting in a complete emotional meltdown and/or apocalyptic, unstoppable rage. Aeri doesn't need a good reason to burn up a group of Imperial soldiers, and it's one of her major personal and moral dilemmas, because she knows that most (if not all) of the Garlean presence in Eorzea is composed of conscripts from Eorzea and Ala Mhigo rather than Imperial citizens proper.

Just keep the AF set for doing fates, farming, RP and such in a gear set, and Darklight in a separate set that you switch to for dungeons only. Then save up myth tomes for AF2, which is ilvl90, better than Darklight and looks just as good (if not better) than AF.

It depends largely on context--where you are, and who is around you. Unity is a "safe space," which means that members can expect a certain level of decorum being practiced in FC chat. This doesn't mean that people are required to sanitize their speech--there's no rules against dropping cluster F-bombs in FC chat (unless you start doing it so much it'd be considered spam). But the whole "That's Offensive" issue becomes a lot more of an issue when you have certain types of communities. When you have lots and lots of people who have traumatic histories and pasts and may easily be triggered by certain topics, you have to be a little more concerned about what "offensive" really means outside of someone turning their nose up at you. There's a whole world of difference between being mildly annoyed when someone cracks a sexual joke and being flung into a PTSD flashback and panic attack because someone made an extremely ill-advised rape joke. Yeah; I take this topic seriously.

The interesting bit here is it's almost always Sunseeker miqo who are portrayed as prostitutes and exotic dancers. The most Keeper miqo are portrayed in NPC form tend to be poachers... and enemies. I mean, it's a game made in Japan and it has a race of humanoids with cat-like features. What did you expect, fair feminist portrayals of female miqo'te? Not to mention our idea of feminism is a human idea, and miqo'te already have shown to have very un-human-like cultural traditions and beliefs. The concept of modesty seems to be really far down on their priority list.

I used my own birthdate for my main, and random ones for my alts. What I'd like to know is life expectancy for the races besides hyur.

For PvE purposes I intend to max Aeriyn out completely, but most of that stuff is extremely OOC. For RP purposes, she is a black mage with some minor knowledge of arcanima (and has the ability to summon carby), mostly picked up while working with the assessors of Mealvaan's Gate. Because being a black mage also requires some knowledge of archery (likely for the cross-discipline focus it would yield), Aeriyn's reasonably skilled with a shortbow (about as much as any average Keeper of the Moon huntress would be). So, while OOC Aeriyn would be 50 in everything, IC she's more like 60% black mage, 25% archer and 15% arcanist.

The Sue test was an amusing diversion. Aeriyn scored an 8 as a character. I suspect most of my characters would score low, since my characters generally tend to be fairly normal but skilled women who carry around big bags of issues. The best way I've discovered to avoid Sue-ness in a character is to write them interesting rather than special and write them as people rather than idealized paragons.

Remember, FFXIV is more Ivalice (mashed up with classic FF) than Vana'diel. If Dark Knight comes, it'll be the DPS/debuff job for Gladiator, likely with Thaumaturge as its off-class.

A dynamically-scaling population cap would solve the AFK problem. If a player is AFK for more than a certain amount of time, then the server should consider that player to be worth only 0.25 players. AFK players aren't using much in the way of server resources. They aren't clogging up the duty finder. They aren't opening leases on the instance servers. If they want to bring back player-run bazaars from 1.0, they're going to have no choice but to do this, because many people are going to stay logged in at all times.

Ya'll think this is bad? This is nothing compared to the WoW launch, where the servers went down for three days to fix a mail bug. The first four months of play were a nightmare of bugs, unexpected server downtime, heavy queues and the complete inability to either stay logged in or have a lag-free play experience. This? This is minor. This is barely even a blip in comparison. Granted, RIFT, TERA and several other games had relatively pain-free launches, but do you know why? Because they didn't have over a million players jamming up the servers on the first day. MMOs are one of the most incredibly complex and absurdly fragile conglomerations of IT infrastructure, so ya'll really should have expected this. Honestly, I expected much worse. In 2013, nobody releases software in a "complete" state anymore. They think just because we've all got high-speed internet connections that it's totally okay to release an Obvious Beta on release... then patch it later.

I don't hate the duty finder in the slightest--oftentimes I just want to run a dungeon to get a quest done and move on to something else, or maybe it's super-late at night and in the middle of Japanese primetime... Anyway, I like this idea even though I don't hate the duty finder. Count me in, at least, whenever I can actually log in... theoretically at launch (no early access for a non-Legacy-pricing 1.0 player) but you know how these things go... I'd love to run with folks from Balmung, especially since my Free Company, Unity, is going to be running a sort of community-outreach program where we ally with roleplaying FCs and help them organize and run PvE endgame content.

Probably whenever I feel like roleplaying... I suspect the first week or so is going to be pretty much leveling, leveling, more leveling and getting all the early/initial administrative tasks for my Free Company completed.

The leaders of the Grand Companies ordered the company forces and irregulars to retreat before the big boom. Only the Warriors of Light remained behind; all the others managed to get away. I'm sure some died from the debris, or from skirmishes with surviving Garlean soldiers, but most made it back alive. Three of my characters fought in the Battle of Cartenau; two irregulars and one soldier in the Immortal Flames. Only my main chara, Aeriyn, remained behind and ended up becoming a Warrior of Light. The other two retreated with the bulk of the army.

I fully intend to make Aeriyn a magitek vanguard minion and RP it as one of her magitek creations, being that she is ICly a magitek tinkerer.

I cook, my partner does the dishes. We are a good team like that.

Useful information, that. It gives me a better explanation for why my chara has a somewhat casual view of sexual partners for something other than "reasons." This should make it easier to set up the story between another of my characters.