synaesthetic

Sturgeon's Law in practice.

I didn't even know the FC had a house until I checked the Teleport list yesterday *fails*. That's okay. I forgive you. But you should take a look; it's very tastefully decorated!

All creative works, but especially science fiction and fantasy, are really a commentary on the social, economic, political and cultural issues of the time in which they were created. Additionally, XIV is not a historical fiction title, so SE has absoluely no obligation to abide by reality by any stretch of the imagination. We're playing magic-slinging cat people and you're concerned that there isn't a large degree of "historically-accurate" sexism? Dafuq are you on about? And lastly, you sound awfully bitter that all the important NPCs aren't all male. Poor widdle baby! Is your pwecious mascuwinity damaged? Boo-fucking-hoo, cry me a goddamned river. "Respect" the lore if you want to or not (I usually facepalm about it because it's pretty C-list writing), but your reasoning strikes me as being really fucking pathetic and butthurt that your fantasy NPC leaders aren't rocking out with their cocks out. (Oh, and clearly you didn't play 1.0; Roes and Highlanders were the male-only races back then, and there was no male miqo'te option either. They added female options for both as well as the male option for both miqo'te subraces.)

dem blm buffs oh yeah. Wait, you've never seen our FC house yet?

An Update on Unity's Endgame Status - 6/12/2014 We've gone through some degree of upheval recently as Wildstar has just released and several of our members have moved to the new game, permanently leaving FFXIV behind. We wish them well and will miss them greatly. Currently Unity is only fielding one endgame group and its organization is somewhat in flux at the moment, though we could use a few players who play the following jobs as their main: Bard White Mage This group's times are currently Tuesday and Thursday from 5PM to 7PM Pacific, though these times are not set in stone and will change as we further discuss with the raid group. Additionally, on a more personal note, I have been forced to place my subscription on hold due to unexpected financial shortcomings. This means I won't be in-game for some unspecified amount of time--I'm not sure exactly how long since it's not really that much money, but it's a thing. I may be gone two weeks, I may be gone two months, I don't really know. In my absence Carli Skeggjold will be heading up the day-to-day operations of Unity in FFXIV. I will continue to handle our forum presence (except on the official forums due to being permabanned for no reason, thanks Square) and maintain the website as Unity shifts from being a pure FFXIV Free Company into a cross-title gaming community. Let's keep working to make Unity one of the best communities for LGBT gamers out there.

I've had the exact opposite experience, actually, though this may be because Unity is not a roleplaying FC but a PvE one. The drama my company has experienced has been minor, minimal in the extreme especially compared to the big egos and small minds I had to herd in WoW...

If you wanted to be non-magical, you could rationalize Flash as the use of a flashbang.

If it's un-instanced housing, I suspect the restrictions will only get tighter as more people buy property.

Meaningful solo and small-group content would be nice. Dealing with the fucking PF between raid nights is a serious fun killer.

The raise spells are just powerful healing spells that get you back up when you're in "critical" condition. Think like D&D rules where at 0HP you're unconscious, and at -10 HP you're dead for real and the various rules for actually raising the dead... high-level cleric of a god that isn't against your alignment, or a miracle or wish spell from a very high-level mage... and even when you do these things, the "raiser" ends up losing a lot (generally a good chunk of XP) and the "raisee" comes back with a permanent -1 CON penalty... XIV doesn't even have that much, so "Raise" and "Resurrection" aren't actually raising the dead but just stabilizing someone in very critical condition.

Well, to be honest I think that the whole idea of increasing your stats actually does nullify difficulty. It's why I think PvP in MMOs is completely stupid unless all stats are normalized. But you're taking my words a bit stronger than I intended. Key words here were "considerably easier." Twintania and Titan EX are good examples of where the mechanics can still kill you even if you massively overgear it. No matter how hard you overgear Titan, getting hit by Landslide will still knock you off the edge. Leviathan EX is an example of an encounter where overgearing it can actually make the fight harder (or even potentially unwinnable, if your DPS is so high that the converter doesn't have time to charge up). What I meant is if overgearing the encounter takes it from "difficult" to "faceroll," then the fight was never very difficult to begin with. Success was just unlikely. You just didn't have the gear to leave the realm of "statistically improbable." A good example of what I'm talking about is Patchwerk from Naxx40--it was a straight-up gear check. Just barely passing it required the best available gear at the time, but once you passed Patchy and got geared up from later parts of Naxx, he became very easy, because Patchy had almost no mechanics. It was just a DPS race. Pre-Rising/F2P Auricadis and Nightmare Auricadis from TERA are also good examples of this. The boss's mechanics are relatively easy to deal with. Almost everything he does is easy to avoid. The fight is very, very forgiving in every aspect until Phase 3, where you have just over two minutes to kill him before you unavoidably die. If you don't meet the gear check, it's impossible. If you just barely meet it, it's unlikely but doable. If you overgear it, it's laughable. When my sorc had maxed out weapons and armor two tiers higher, I and a few friends cleared the fight with 3 people instead of 5--I was the only damage-dealer, with one tank and one healer--and it was still easy. tl;dr: if the mechanics are not challenging, the fight is not challenging. Edit: Actually I think that on a player with Convalescence up it might be possible to eat a Landslide and not be knocked off if a scholar crits Adloquium for 2k-ish (which would give them a 4k shield). I know that Manawall prevents the knockback effect, but I'm not sure exactly how that works. I've never been hit by Landslide and taken 0 damage except under the effects of Manawall. Anyway, it's a corner case and not something that you can achieve on demand, so it doesn't really invalidate the argument.

We appear to be working off a different definition of "difficult." Ya'll seem to be defining "difficult" as "unlikely" or "statistically improbable rates of success." Let's talk about rolling dice. Is it "hard" to get ten sixes in a row? By your definition of hard = unlikely, then yes, it's hard to get ten sixes in a row. Does getting ten sixes in a row require learned skills that can be improved with practice and training? No. It's unlikely, but it's not challenging. Rolling dice is not difficult. Most raid bosses in vanilla WoW were not challenging. They were "difficult" because success was unlikely due to gear checks, poor itemization, poorly-designed logistical systems (forcing mages to spec Frost, Intellect not directly increasing spell damage). These were not things you could affect through practice and perseverance. They were things you could affect by grinding gear, using consumables and simply waiting for Blizzard to tune the fights downward. The same excuses were used to whiteknight TERA's multiple layers of RNG involved in endgame gearing. They weren't good excuses then, either. None of the fights in vanilla!MC were hard. They were statistically improbable, largely due to itemization issues. Once the itemization issues were solved (gear added later, from Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub, both Ahn'Qiraj dungeons), MC became faceroll. Vanilla WoW didn't actually get even slightly challenging until Blackwing Lair, and even there most of the "difficulty" was statistical improbability. Vael, the Guild Breaker, was about resist-gear grinding and luck. Again, we're defining "difficulty" as actual challenge. Something that tests your skills, not the gear you've ground out. Bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, a boss is not truly difficult and challenging if getting better gear makes it considerably easier.

I need to find my old List of Plot-Relevant Episodes which cuts Sailor Moon down from a 300-episode slog to something much more manageable at ~70 episodes.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty However, some games that should be relatively easy are actually quite hard. It could be due to shoddy programming, a Game-Breaking Bug, poor implementation of gameplay elements or time constraints, or the developers threw in something which makes the game harder, but which has nothing to do with the player's or AI's skills. This is fake difficulty. Emphasis mine. The "difficulty" that existed in early 2000s era MMOs was not challenging. It was not something you could get better at with practice. It was a logistical hurdle. That's not what I define as difficult. Beating a DPS check is no more "difficult" than getting +12 and masterwork and perfect stats on all your gear in TERA. Neither of these things require skill or practice, they simply require grinding. That's not true difficulty. True difficulty is going up against a chess master. Yes, you're going to get curbstomped and hard. But if you train, play and practice for years, you have the ability to actually get better than that chess master and beat her. Logistical problems don't get better unless they get solved. Practice doesn't fix it, and thus these things are not true difficulty. Having to maintain a roster of 40 raiders isn't hard, it's annoying. Having to grind for resist gear isn't hard, it's annoying. Having to spend weeks ignoring the fifth boss in a raid so you can gear up from the first four that you've got on farm and can kill with half your raid asleep isn't hard, it's fucking annoying. Annoying and hard are not synonymous!

People didn't pug vanilla raids because the gear requirement was too high. The barrier to entry was enormous. You had to be attuned, which was a time-consuming pain in the rear. You couldn't just pick up random people in blues to do MC. Itemization was terrible that early in the game and thus the DPS and healing checks were very, very tight. Without spending weeks farming the earlier bosses, you wouldn't have much chance against Rag. Additionally, you had to farm resist gear for several vanilla fights (further slowing things down) and many specs were just flat-out completely useless (fire mages, forcing mages to run frost, which just killed their DPS, and destro locks, though at the time destro couldn't touch SM/Ruin). This was before the days of easy respeccing and running dual specs. Flash forward to when BWL, ZG and the AQ raids added far better itemized gear, with gobs of spell damage and spell healing, attack power, MP5, etc. Guess what? MC became utter faceroll. My guild, when working on C'thun, would throw together a random cross-guild pug and go plow through MC without breaking a sweat to farm mats for peoples' silly legendaries. Vanilla raids were not mechanically more difficult. They were logistically more difficult. You needed more gear, more people, more consumables, more resistance bullshit. The mechanics themselves were vastly simpler. FFXI is a good example of this as well, actually an even better one. Most bosses in pre-Abyssea FFXI had no mechanics at all. They were simple tank-and-spank bosses, or groups of Elite Mooks. Even one of the absolute most difficult fights from the Zilart expansion, Ark Angels, was mechanicless. You just had five enemies with incredibly powerful abilities to manage. But you had no mechanics. They just had to be tanked and killed in the most expedient order. It was only "hard" because the gear requirements were enormous, far more than the average level-cap player could manage. When ToAU came out and PLDs could sub blue mage for Cocoon, Ark Angels' difficulty pretty much disappeared. The "difficulty" of the fight was a gear check--the tank damage was so absurdly high that the healers and damage-dealers had to have extremely high throughput to kill the enemies before the healers ran out of MP, whereupon the tank would die, then everyone else would die. A PLD/BLU using Cocoon could reduce the damage down so much that the fight became almost trivial in comparison, assuming your party was well-geared. Older MMOs are not mechanically more difficult. They're only logistically more difficult. More people, more gear, more time spent (many of XI's bosses took well over an hour of continuous combat to kill simply because they had hilariously bloated HP pools). This doesn't mean all new MMOs have insanely complex boss mechanics. FFXIV and TERA did not; both games rely on punishing "oneshot" mechanics that must be actively avoided by all players in order to clear the encounter. But to say that old MMOs are more challenging and skill-based than modern MMOs is disingenuous at best. They were harder, but that was Fake Difficulty. That was The Computer is a Cheating Bastard. It wasn't something you could overcome through practice; it was something you could only overcome through making your numbers higher... spending more time grinding.

Right. I never said fast-paced hack and slash third-person action titles were bad games. There's a bunch of them that I really enjoy--I absolutely LOVE the Ys series, and they can be challenging games in their own right. All I'm saying is that there's a big difference in actual learned/practiced skill requirements in order to advance between these titles. We can use shmups as an example, too--games like Gradius, R-Type and the like can be challenging, but they're not even remotely close to the difficulty of Touhou, Mushihimesama, Ikaruga and other bullet hell shooters. Bullet hell shmups are so incredibly unforgiving that you're not going to get anywhere at all without considerable practice. Even with infinite lives, you'd never make it past the first stage without either extensive danmaku experience to begin with or lots of practice with the game itself. Note they also tend to be far slower paced and place an emphasis on avoidance (and with the case of many Touhou titles, grazing enemy shots as a method of scoring) above racking up kills. This is similar to DS, Monster Hunter and the like. tbh, I find DS to be too unforgiving, just like I find most danmaku titles to be too unforgiving. I get stuck and get bored. That's why I loved TERA so damn much despite its pre-F2P issues--the game had that balance between the slaughterfest hack-and-slash of Ys, GoW, etc (especially in the open world and easier endgame content) paired with the emphasis on avoidance and dodging of DS and MH in the bleeding-edge endgame. It had the best of both worlds and I haven't found anything else that really comes close.

That's actually a really good analogy.

tbh I like the "plodding pace" of TERA, Monster Hunter and Dark Souls because it places a lot of emphasis on avoidance, observation and skillful tactics rather than quick combo mashing. Very fast paced hack-and-slash games like DMC don't have (and can't have) the same level of skill-based challenge that games like DS or MH, or even TERA to a degree. Humans just can't really react that quickly, so the avoidance mechanics are downplayed in favor of swarming the player with zillions of monsters to slaughter, but you aren't going to get oneshot by them. Games like DMC or MGR Revengeance have a lot more in common with tab-target, even though they "feel" faster and more dynamic, they really aren't. They're rife with lock-on, auto-aim-assist, juggle combos that the computer basically does for you, and it's not about dodging so much as it's about killing everything before it overwhelms you. They can still be fun, but I definitely prefer the deliberate avoidance-based games. Anyone remember Bushido Blade? That game was awesome. It felt incredibly slow compared to Street Fighter style tournament fighters, but it was much more skill and tactics based, when a single hit had a very high chance of killing you.

Most people can't afford more than one subscription, they bitch about it being $15 a month... ... and then they go blow $60+ per month in the F2P game cash shop on sexy outfits and power boosts. Sorry but I find the usual arguments against subscription games to ring quite hollow.

What I mean by "F2P dominance" isn't that they're making the most money or have the most customers, but that there are almost no options if you want to avoid F2P games. I like XIV okayish. It's not bad. It's fine. It's not terrible. I mostly play because of my FC; if it weren't for them I would have quit a while ago. I don't care for WoW because I don't like the player character options or the art style, and it has a cash shop now. I don't care for EVE because zzzzz. I don't care for FFXI because it's a trainwreck, having the worst parts of both EQ1 era games and modern MMOs. I don't care for ESO because roflroflroflroflroflWHAT. I don't care for Wildstar because I don't really care for the art style and the combat is just a slightly better version of GW2's without the circle strafing. So right now, I don't really like any of the P2P options. I don't have any other options. There just aren't any if I want to play something different, so I'm settling for XIV. I don't love it, but what are my other options? Games I dislike far more and games that are F2P. I don't like F2P games. The only one that I consider even halfway decent is RIFT, and I don't really like RIFT's art style and the combat system is just as dull as XIV's (though at least there's more stuff to do). I'd probably happily trade XIV for RIFT if my whole group followed me there, but other than that the main differentiating factor is that the people I like playing with are in XIV and my character is super cute, and I can't make a character in RIFT that really resonates with me (though my RIFT!Aeriyn does come close... ish). So what am I left with choice-wise? A massive mess of F2P games. I don't like F2P; I don't want a game nagging me to buy stuff. I want to pay for my use of the game resources and that's it. I don't want to see ads for "sales on bullshit in the cash shop" every time I log in. I don't want to see other players running around with shit I can't get unless I spend real-life money. I don't want to deal with the possibility that PvE endgame progression is solely dependent on how many times I swipe a credit card. I don't want to deal with trolls, botters, futa elins, hackers and griefers. P2P MMO communities are bad enough; F2P communities are typically a cesspit. So what are my options? Play a game I don't really like from the list of P2P Endangered Species, or don't play MMOs at all. If it weren't for the social aspect that I don't get in my actual life due to being poor, I'd probably choose the latter...

How many subscription games are left? WoW, FFXIV, FFXI and EVE. How many F2P games are there? THOUSANDS. How is that not "dominance?"

MMO "nomads" are the second single most significant reason why free-to-play/pay-to-win titles are completely dominating the market. If people stuck to one MMO for years like they used to, these wouldn't exist and subscription games would be a lot more common. (The other most significant reason why F2P is taking over is WoW, because most of the people who prefer subscription games are playing it, or playing XIV).

We'll be back dying on Titan again soon enough. Tuesday!

I don't like the use of established IPs because it diminishes the potential for innovation. It's "safe." It's "proven." When nearly every goddamned game you own has a number at the end, you know there's a problem. Now, I'm not saying that sequels are necessarily a bad thing, but when everything is a sequel/reboot/remake, you have some industry-wide creative bankruptcy going on. I would like to see more than the typical sword-and-sorcery MMO, sure, but before we can get to that point, we have to get away from constantly raising IPs from the dead. Right now, that's all the entertainment industry can do... make sequels and reboots and remakes. The older I get, the more I'm convinced indie game developers are the only source of actual creativity and outside-the-box thinking in the industry. I don't care if this makes me sound like a hipster; I don't play games for anyone else's benefit but my own. Wildstar has being an original IP going for it and that's fantastic. It's unfortunate that I don't really care for the art style and focus on humor.

Seconding Naunet's suggestion for more original MMOs. Cribbing from existing IPs is one of the "safe" tactics that limit the potential of the genre.