synaesthetic

When it comes to acceptance of homosexuality, I don't trust any game developer at all, not even Bioware after they let themselves get pushed around by LucasArts. I like a lot of what Yoshida advocates, but sometimes I think the entire ARR dev team is so incredibly over-cautious that they're going to end up selling themselves short in a big way. Yes, I get it--1.0 was a failure of colossal proportions. I know that well, since I am a 1.0 player. But I seriously think they're worrying themselves into near-paralysis, which isn't going to help them recover from that fiasco. They're going to have to be bold, to be brave, to go out on a limb and really bust their asses to make ARR successful. Unfortunately they aren't doing that; they're playing it absurdly, ridiculously safe and that will end up not being very safe for them.

Easy solution is easy in two steps: 1) Add wedding outfits as crafting recipes. 2) Let people RP their weddings however they wish. It's all-inclusive, cheaper than implementing game mechanics and since it's completely under the control of the players, nobody can accuse Squeenix of supporting those filthy homos.

So easy to whiteknight for this when it doesn't affect you and won't ever affect you. Try being gay sometime and being consistently marginalized and ignored by the entire gaming industry and all developers not called Bioware.

I'm considering not restarting over this and just giving up on MMOs entirely as a completely fucked genre. This nonsense, combined with the incredibly short Phase 4 beta (how are we supposed to properly test arcanist in three days?!) and the insulting denial of early access from 1.0 players... Squeenix, ya'll aren't really inspiring confidence in this lesbian gamer. This game had me so goddamned excited, a subscription-only game without a cash shop, but I swear to gods, sometimes I think the dev team ate a giant bowl of brain cancer for breakfast.

Oh, fucking wonderful. Three days? What the hell, Squeenix? What the fuck can we test in three days? The preorder people whined, didn't they? They complained that Phase 4 made early access worthless. Seriously, this puts enough of a bad taste in my mouth I'm almost, almost tempted to not pay for your game again, Squeenix. Look, I bought your game when it was a terrible, buggy, unplayable mess and you can't even give me early access? Seriously, screw you. Yeah. Not too happy right now, especially with the level cap so low. I can't even start my Free Company during Phase 4, so by the time launch hits, the name will probably already be taken by someone else during early access.

I'm assuming since Squeenix normalized the equipment rewards from all three Grand Companies in ARR that there will be nothing more than a cosmetic difference between Free Company affiliations... and my FC isn't an RP Free Company... eh, I'll probably just put a poll on the forums before launch.

The fact that gladiators use daggers at all is inane. I felt like a moron tanking with a letter opener in Phase 3.

Whips... no. Just... no.

Not really. If you notice, conjurer and thaumaturge two-handed weapons aren't really different functionally. They just look different visually. Just make sure that the Nomad's Arm is clearly visually distinct from the Gladiator's Arm, which isn't that hard.

I'm hoping for XI-style blue mage class with lots and lots of Ul'dah flavor. Make them a DoM class, wearing light cloth armor and their weapon should be the scimitar, with dual wielding as a passive trait picked up somewhere in the 20s. Nomad > Blue Mage Nomad being pretty much physical DPS with skills learned from monsters, though I'd handle this through quests rather than grinding. BLU as the job adds on some iconic and well-known blue magic spells. Of course, we should get red mage, too... I'd like to see RDM done in ARR as a magic/enhancement tank, with fencer as its base DoW class. The weapon? Rapier, of course. Fencer > Red Mage

I'm going to side with Eva and see that mundane medicine and magical healing are two different sides of the same healing coin. Magitek medical devices might bridge the gap a little, but when it comes to healing magic, this is how I see it: On the battlefield, you're taking mostly superficial damage. When you're dropped to low HP, you aren't losing any speed, agility or strength, so you really aren't that hurt yet. Being reduced to 0 HP means you are now seriously hurt, and you need some major intervention to repair yourself. It's a way of handwaving the Critical Existence Failure aspect of RPG game mechanics. So the fast, rapid-fire healing that conjurers and white mages perform in combat is basically combat medicine--quick, dirty, stop the bleeding and throw 'em back into the fray. It's not going to cure things like decapitations, limb amputation and the like. When it comes to serious injuries, I'm not of the mind that magic is impotent, but that the effort required is significant. Raising the dead takes a truly powerful healer who must sacrifice a great deal of their own energy, perhaps even permanently, to re-anchor the lost soul to this reality. Amputations, serious wounds, horrible diseases? All of these should be able to be cured via magic, but at the cost of significant investment of power and resources, with multiple extremely-powerful healers working together. Mundane and magical medicine aren't a linear sliding scale with magical healing the superficial and mundane handling the grievous, but they're actually different methodologies, different routes to the same destination. Serious life-threatening wounds shouldn't be "easy" for even the most powerful of conjurers to heal. For example, in most D&D rule sets, raising a PC from the dead requires a significant investment of energy, resources and materials. The character being raised from the dead loses a full level of experience, a point of Constitution (that they can NEVER get back unless they use a wish or miracle spell) and the priest who does the casting has to expend a chunk of their own experience points as well as material components that are extremely high in value. On top of all of this, the spell itself takes a long time to cast, and the body has to be in good condition--if it's gibbed or disintegrated or melted into goo, the raise dead spell will fail to work, and a much more powerful version (true resurrection, or a wish or miracle spell) must be cast. I'm not really seeing how this is "easy" just because it's magic and not mundane.

Hitler Youth-style indoctrination, pretty much. Garlemald is a pretty transparent stand-in for Those Wacky Nazis.

I, for one, welcome our new magitek overlords. Because it'll provide lots of chances to see my chara go berserk and burn people to ashes.

Aeriyn Ashley lives... wherever she happens to be. If she's in Ul'dah, she gets a room from the Quicksand, or she stays at the Ashley family manor, depending on if her adopted sister was involved or not. If she's in/near Gridania and/or the Black Shroud... probably a tree branch. If she goes to Limsa Lominsa, she can often be found sleeping on shipping crates in the docks. For some strange reason, none of the thugs or criminals ever seem to bother her. Ariene Ashley lives in the Ashley family manor in Ul'dah, but she often sleeps and eats at the Immortal Flames barracks and mess hall. Being a rather conscientious Flame Captain, she likes to stay close to her people. K'airi Thalen currently lives in Gridania, using the Adventurer's Guild as a base of operations for the time being. She doesn't actually have a true home any longer since she abandoned the Hipparion tribe due to the disappearance of her mother and a clash between her own ideals and those of the tribe's traditionalists. Linala Lin lives in Limsa Lominsa, near the Arcanist's Guild, of which she is a member. Her apartment is small and sparsely decorated, but comfortable and warm as would fit a Plainsfolk lalafell woman.

The reason the lore feels like it's full of holes is because Squeenix doesn't post lore on their website like Blizzard does. It's super annoying and I really wish they wouldn't play their cards so close to the chest. Wait until launch, when people have started going through quests, missions and all the flavor text attached to all the items in the game and then we'll start seeing those holes close up.

It's not really a surprise as to why the miqo'te NPCs don't really exhibit the lore surrounding the miqo'te. Can you imagine the sort of media frenzy ARR would create in America if there were plots and in-game dialogue concerning miqo'te tribes and harem breeding? Shit, look at the insanity that Mass Effect spawned because they showed a split second of Liara's sideboob.

The thaumaturge class quests state that individuals have "aetheric capacity" that enables them to utilize thaumaturgy. In fact, that's one of the plot points of the questline--the lala brother who became an alchemist and ends up doing A Terrible Thing in order to gain higher capacity. This particular lala's capacity was so low he couldn't cast even the simplest of spells (i.e. even spells with very low MP cost), even if he could learn the method, he wouldn't have the aetheric energy to fuel them. This suggests that aetheric energy is the Eorzean analogue to "mana" in other fantasy settings.

In WoW, your character will use the "talk" animation whenever you speak in /say. They even have different animations depending on if you end your sentence with a question mark or a bang. I wonder if ARR will have different animations for ending your sentence in か or よ?

Indeed. The mad scientist argon cyborg and the cheerfully sociopathic artificial being who enjoyed playtime with knives.

You might know Aeriyn Ashley from: - Constantly being yelled at and/or threatened by the Brass Blades - Walking around Ul'dah with no pants on because her pants had a hole in them and are at the Weaver's Guild for mending - Climbing on all manner of things, usually with the intention of sleeping there - Sleeping in trees when she visits the Black Shroud - Bathing in public fountains, ponds and other water features (especially in Ul'dah) - Avoiding the Ossuary as much as possible, while still trying to seek their knowledge of thaumaturgy - Wandering around Thanalan, La Noscea and the Black Shroud for various reasons ranging from measuring aetheric corruption to finding a long-lost ancestral heirloom - Talking with a red-haired Midlander woman outside the Immortal Flames offices

Aeriyn being a thaumaturge is in-character; when she can become a black mage, that will also be reflected in-character. This doesn't change the fact that I will probably be tanking more than DPSing inside instances and raids.

As the person behind one of K'piru/Antimony's children (K'airi) I'm sure there could be a considerable amount of good RP if the tribe itself assigned you (or anyone else interested) to try and track down the wayward daughters and the missing mother. It could be a really good way to help Airi find her mom, since she knows there's a possibility her family is still alive--after all, she never saw them die directly since she was called to fight alongside the Immortal Flames against the Empire.

I didn't think about the FC housing, that's a good point and probably explains why some RPers who have contacted me are still on the fence about joining Unity. Regardless, I'm still going forward with Unity because I believe it fills a much-needed niche, and because I personally am 30% RP and 70% PvE, and it's been a long, long while (FFXI in 2007-2008 was the last time, really) where I was really able to get into the meat of a game's endgame content.

Thing is, Free Companies have infrastructure built in that's useful for endgame guilds (shared bank, perks, etc) that aren't especially useful for roleplaying. It's clear that Squeenix wanted to update their "guild" infrastructure to match the more modern MMOs' examples, but they left Linkshells alone simply as sort of permanent private chat channels.

Hello. My name is Corinn. I play MMOs. My first one was FFXI, as I imagine most of the people here can probably say the same. I've played lots of other MMOs, from World of Warcraft to The Old Republic to TERA Online, as well as XIV 1.0, and now I'm back for ARR! Most of my MMO life was spent playing strictly PvE (except for a short stint in Guild Wars where I really got into Mesmer PvP), but more recently (starting with TERA and SWTOR) I started roleplaying and was totally hooked. I'm still a primarily PvE type--I love endgame raiding and hardmodes, can't get enough of 'em--but now I spend a good bit of time RPing as well. Even when I played XI (which had about as much of an RP community as Pong does) I would always write bios for my chara and occasionally fan-fiction, have people draw pictures of my cute little Hume blue mage and such. Nowadays I'd say I'm 70/30 PvE-to-RP ratio, but I love the RP that I do. My ARR character is Aeriyn Ashley, a Keeper of the Moon miqo'te female who lost her memories during the Calamity and awoke in Central Thanalan during a terrible monsoon. She stumbled upon an Immortal Flames patrol beset by an Amalj'aa warband and saved the life of a Midlander woman, Ariene Ashley, who gave her the name "Aeriyn" and later ended up becoming her adopted sister. Aeri's past is quite mysterious--even to her--and she knows only very little. She has reason to believe that she was born in Ala Mhigo and that her memory loss and other physical and magical oddities are the fault of the Garlean Empire. Aeri spends her time doing odd jobs for whomever will pay: from sweeping out a dusty tavern to fending off a beastman attack on a village, she doesn't mind either way. And yeah that's pretty much it. More than that will be discovered through more RP! My other characters: Ariene Ashley (Midlander female) K'airi Thalen (Seeker of the Sun female) Linala Lin (Plainsfolk female) I also run a PvE Free Company called Unity in A Realm Reborn (or just Unity), an LGBT-safespace FC where raiders and RPers alike can join forces together in order to clear content while respecting the RP needs of its members. Check it out!