synaesthetic

Aeriyn would definitely be interested in accepting a temporary contract for the event and act as security.

The Legacy tattoo on your chara's back.

See, this would be awesome--if we got to actively cast the spells. Like, with gestures, touches or movement. If there was some skill aspect to it besides "gear up and mash your rotation over and over again." In TERA I loved the fact that I didn't have a standard rotation, that the spells I cast were strongly dependent on what the mob was doing, what the party was doing, where the mob was, where I was and what wasn't on cooldown at the time. For a game like ARR, the button-pressing just feels so insulated from the action, like I'm controlling a puppet with heavy gloves on. What would be awesome for games with passive combat? Anyone play Magicka? I wish THM played like that. Where you had just the elemental wheel in terms of spells... Fire, Blizzard, Water, Thunder, Aero. Then you cast those spells individually, and they'd do elemental damage to enemies, or charge yourself/your allies with a buff (Fire gives damage, Ice gives armor, Water heals them a bit, Thunder gives attack speed, Aero gives movement speed). But when used in conjunction with each other, then you could combine spell effects to create new spells on the fly. THAT would be damn awesome and I'd gladly give up the twitchy-dodgy nature of TERA-style active combat for a passive tab-target system. Wouldn't it be awesome to cast Aero on a spot, then cast Blizzard on the Aero effect and have it create a blizzard-like effect in that area that snares mobs who move inside it and does damage over time? Mostly my problem with passive target games is it's just not interactive enough for my tastes. It comes down to just learning your rotation and executing it without getting your fingers tangled up. With macros it becomes trivial (just like it did in RIFT for pyromancer). The 2.5s global cooldown is ridiculous because you don't NEED any time to make decisions, because you make them outside of combat when you figure out your rotation. In TERA, though, I had to decide what spell I wanted to use and if I picked the wrong one, it didn't just lower my DPS, but could easily get me killed.

We are completely opposed on this. I always play ranged in these games, usually some type of mage class, and I cannot, cannot, CANNOT STAND being forced to STAND STILL AND MASH BUTTONS. Seriously, I hate it. I hate it so much I almost didn't want to be a mage in ARR. I love, love, love being a sorcerer in TERA. It's so much fun. I love being able to kite so well, and dodge and leap back from attacks. Hell, even WoW and RIFT mages could blink; THM can only do it to a targeted friendly player. I'm going to deal with it, but I'm going to keep TERA installed just for that one thing, until they shut it down completely. Just so I can log in occasionally and play a mage that doesn't stand still and derp while giant monsters punch her.

Keeping. She's got more levels than a fresh chara, plus that snazzy Mark of the Twelve! Happy they're letting us do appearance changes in Phase 4.

Pretty much this. People have developed some sort of antipathy against active combat due to the horrible games it happens to be attached to. That doesn't mean the combat system itself is inherently bad--I mean, look at Dark Souls or Monster Hunter, which use active combat systems and are absolutely fantastic games. Western developers just seem to be unwilling to use active combat systems due to latency concerns (which can be expensive to address) and the general disinterest much of the MMO playerbase shows in anything that requires genuine skill training and practice over simply out-grinding/overgearing content. As an aside, I actually think Guild Wars 2 has rather fun combat. The problems with it, however, overshadow the fun. GW2 desperately needs the trinity to make it more fun in groups as opposed to mindless zergfests, and it absolutely needs more incentive to level your character. I've been playing GW2 on and off and my elementalist is still level 32 (or 33, something like that) but I don't have much incentive to play. There's little difference between elementalist at level 30 and elementalist at level 80. I don't feel that same "drive" to get to a higher level to use either a nice piece of new gear, or a kickass new skill that will really change up the way I play. It's all very sameish, and gearing/itemization is a very tedious, ho-hum browse-the-AH for stuff with higher numbers than my old stuff experience.

I'm going to operate on the assumption that Squeenix did not eat a bowl of brain cancer for breakfast this morning and that Piety is the prime attribute for arcanist (and by extension, scholar and summoner).

Sure, let's give the industry more excuses to play it safe and cheap. No. Just no. The reason that games like ARR continue to have boring, bland tab-target nonsense isn't due to anything special. It just comes down to money. Keeping your IT infrastructure up to snuff enough to support free-target action combat (aka "active combat") is much more expensive than passive "tab-target" combat. Active combat is much more latency-sensitive. Active combat requires far more thought and planning in encounter design to make sure raid bosses remain challenging without being a DPS-race copout. You see lots of KMMOs with active combat these days because South Korea's broadband infrastructure is vastly superior to America and Europe's. It's cheaper and easier for them to use active combat than it is for us, so you see it more over there. When those games get localized in NA and EU, we see lots of problems with latency, attacks not firing, blocks not activating when they should... It's not an issue of aging populations, a desire to remain true to the Final Fantasy spirit (if that were the case, why is the combat not straight up turn-based with the usual Attack Magic Special Item menu?) or anything interesting like that. Nope, it's money. Just money. People seem to have developed a hate-on for active combat due to the terrible shovelware Korean MMOs the system is associated with. Ya'll are throwing the baby out with the bathwater; if Squeenix had put a TERA-style active combat system in ARR, with their considerable resources and talent behind that system, it could have been incredible. Instead we get a fairly underwhelming experience that's less interesting (especially for healers) than the "king" of tab-target games, World of Warcraft.

Aeriyn smells of various flower petals, since she uses them as a sort of perfume to keep her own scent from becoming too obvious during her travels. If she has used magic recently, the sharp, acrid scent of ozone would cling to her.

I didn't either, actually, I keep thinking I'm the only one. Actually I might be the only MtF here, from the looks of it. <__< Nope. I am also! That's why I started Unity--because normal PvE endgame guilds filled with bigoted homophobic tryhards, and then a trans girl getting on vent? With the "wrong" voice for the perceived gender? That's not a pretty picture, let me tell you. I speak from experience. So yeah. The whole point of my FC is so that people can feel comfortable with who they are and still clear content, still make use of voice chat in progression raids where not having it would be a clear disadvantage. Members of Unity can feel comfortable knowing that if someone repeatedly uses the wrong pronouns with them (especially on purpose) then that person will be punished for their misbehavior.

Oh I know damn well why they chose to leave it out when the system launches. Because their analysts told them that they had a non-zero chance to lose money if they included it. I'm not an idiot, you know; I do know how business works, and the reason they plan to do this is entirely due to profit concerns. I just think it's bullshit. I just think that if they're that concerned about not damaging the delicate sensibilities of bigots, then they should pay the price for being douchebags, even if the source of their douchery is avarice rather than homophobia.

Yeah I doubt I'd be that lucky. For one, I'm nowhere near as attractive as she is, and if you think that didn't help her then I've got some oceanfront property on Mars to sell you at a reasonable price. Secondly, the number of friends I have can be counted on one hand. Not really much chance of that ever happening. I've pretty much just resigned myself to being stuck like this forever. When you're poor, you have no power, no agency, no control over your life.

I'm getting sick of telling people this, their intent doesn't matter at all. It doesn't matter if they refuse to implement gay marriage because they don't care about it, or because they actually hate gay people. The end result--gay couples being excluded from a part of the game simply because they are gay--is still discrimination. Their intent does not matter at all.

I didn't even know it was legal to use crowdfunding like this without a product or service to deliver. :dodgy: Now I feel like I should do something like this... because short of winning the lottery it's probably never going to happen and I'm just going to be miserable for my entire life. Doubtful even something like this will work, though. It's just so expensive... and trans people are terminally unemployable and totally fucked.

PM me if you want to contribute to the bilingual open letter to Squeenix!

You don't know much about corporations, do you? That response they gave us? That's Corporatese for "We don't give a flying fuck about your desires, because a) you are too small a minority to negatively impact our profits and b) most of you will buy our product anyway." Corporatese is always polite, even when it's describing to you exactly how they are going to take their six-foot-long engorged penis and shove it directly up your virgin asshole.

My fiancee just had the idea of getting me to write an open letter to Square-Enix on this topic that she will translate into Japanese. We will post this letter on the official FFXIV forums as well as sending it in e-mail form to Square-Enix.

I'd rather they take the hit and show they can be progressive, forward-thinking entities than perpetuating the cultural stagnation in Japan. I'm engaged to a Japanese woman. I'm sitting right next to her now, and she would tell you firsthand just how fucked-up her culture is, especially in regards to homosexuality. She is incredibly grateful that she lives in a country that doesn't all but hold her at gunpoint and force her into the heteronormative baby-making wife paradigm. Are you a weeaboo? Do you think Japan is the best planet in the universe? Do you wish you were Japanese or something? I've been to Japan. I'm engaged to a Japanese woman. I know that Japan is not any sort of utopia. It's got problems, major problems, and their view of homosexuality is seriously regressive and totally terrible. So no, I don't respect Japan's culture where it is used to oppress people. I am intolerant of intolerance, and if you aren't, I hope you're happy being oppressed, because that's all you're going to get if you just "deal with it."

You're being intentionally dense. You don't need intent to discriminate; you can discriminate without intent. As was already mentioned, it doesn't matter why you exclude black people from your whites-only cafe, you're still excluding and discriminating against people because their skin is a different color than you. By your logic, segregation is totally okay as long as it has a profit motive. "I'm not going to let black people shop here, because it might cause me to lose white customers" is exactly just as racist as saying "I'm not going to let black people shop here because I hate blacks." And the logic Squeenix is using? "We're not going to let gay couples get married because it might cause me to lose bigoted customers" is no less homophobic than saying "I'm not going to let gay couples get married in-game because I hate fags." They are exactly the same thing and you're blind and willfully ignorant if you cannot see this.

I don't know why they don't just make the wedding clothes available and let people RP their own weddings. It'd take the pretend controversy away and Squeenix would be left completely blameless; after all, you can't hold a company responsible for what its customers do. By actively choosing to accept only a heteronormative marriage paradigm but forbid anything outside that, they are absolutely discriminating against people and it is not cool. The easiest way out of this for Square would be to simply add no official marriage system and allow people to do whatever they wish with whomever they wish outside of the game mechanics entirely. I don't really get why they don't do this. I don't have a problem with other game developers who choose not to add marriage for whatever reason. If they don't want to deal with the flak they receive for "officially sanctioning" gay marriage, hey, that's fine, as long as everyone's on equal footing--both straight and gay couples have to RP their marriage themselves without the involvement of game mechanics. Choosing to allow only straight couples to marry through a game system and intentionally excluding gay couples is discrimination no matter what you say. I'm not going to "respect their culture" if their culture unfairly excludes me simply because I don't have any interest in cocks and balls.

Hey, hey, guys? This calmly sitting around and protesting in a meek tone while sipping tea? That shit doesn't work. It just doesn't. Remember when the XBOX One was announced with all those restrictions? No used games, always-on internet connection, all that stuff? Yeah. You know now the xbone doesn't have any of those restrictions anymore, right? You know how they got removed? Not by fucking being calm and polite!

just like whites-only lunch counters weren't really discrimination amirite

Why should we wait? So Squeenix can take my money and then, oh, later on, after they've already gotten six months of subscription fees out of me, then they'll drop heteronormative-limited marriage into the game. They should tell me now if they think I'm worthless so I can decide beforehand to take my money elsewhere. Square-Enix is a business. FFXIV is a product they are selling. We aren't happy-time friends here, this is a business transaction. If they fail to make their product worth my money then I'm going to take my money directly to their competitors.

What personal attacks? Slander? Where? I didn't slander anyone.

What is this I don't even I DON'T EVEN. Why the FUCK should I be accepting of someone else's irrational and unreasonable hatred? Why should I, a member of the oppressed population, be accepting of someone else's desire to oppress me? I don't know what the hell you're smoking but seriously, did you even read what you just wrote? Should I be tolerant of gay people being put to death in the Middle East because it's "their culture?" So now we're supposed to accept horrible bigotry and discrimination and evil acts simply because it's someone else's culture? No. HELL no. Seriously, pike off. By accepting their homophobia you're offering tacit approval of their homophobia.