…and the bartender says “What is this, a joke?”

Last night started off as a bad joke.  I put together a Valkurm Dunes party with some of my Paradigm linkshell mates, so my buddy Xai could get some levels on his Thief.  See my previous rant about Valkurm Dunes.

The party consisted of MNK/war (me), THF/sam (Xai), NIN/war, DNC/mnk, WHM/blm, and fellow LS mate Rukkia coming as BLM (no subjob).  No power leveler.

We were a little light on damage dealing, and I was the co-tank with our Tarutaru NIN/war, so our WHM had their work cut out.   The party started off with three near complete wipes.

The first one was a complete accident.

The second one was the leaders fault; the bone head was filling the role of “veteran player that forgot how low level parties work,” and tried overhunting.

The third one was some combination of n00bery, overhunting — though we had moved to lower level prey, and plain bad luck (the crab used it’s version of Stoneskin EVERY time),

Experience for those the first hour was slow if it wasn’t negative.  The poor performance of our party was compounded by mistakes and people AFK’ing.  I swear that Valkurm Dunes drains experience from the minds of players. Xai, whose pulling expertise I’ve witnessed first-hand ran into links (which left me agog) - though he handled them with aplomb, they still slowed things down.  Our rank 10 WHM wouldn’t rest during battle.  Besides continuously overhunting, I contributed most significantly by not using Provoke fast enough allowing our Tarutaru Ninja to take too much damage (which caused more MP issues).

The beginning was so rough, and dis-satisfaction with our party was so high,  I could taste failure in the air.  With dissention was setting in via /tells, and I had pretty well resigned myself to the party falling apart.

Miraculously everyone was stuck it out long enough for us to move all the way back to the lowest area in Valkurm Dunes and we went after tier one Goblins. This was the one solid thing I did as party leader, and I managed to pull this move off because of my Linkshell mates (I’ll discuss that later).

From here we started making chains.  Once this happened, we settled in a bit of a groove, and you could feel the regret of being in “one of those d00nz parties” lift and get replaced by confidence.

Once all the frontline jobs had managed to get to level 14, we starting to opperate like a team, and we moved back to crabs.

With just a little dose of confidence and a dallop of experience, this too went smoother — which only increased our confidence as a unit.  Soon we were able to take on fights at the very edge of our abilites.  Once party chat went from uncomfortable silence to joking and bravado I knew we had fully turned the corner.

When the party finally ended, the result was everyone making at least 2 levels — if not three.  Not stellar, but not craptastic.

The coolest part, however, was being with Linkshell mates.  Had it not been for them this party would surely have fallen apart, but Rukkia and Xai hung with me.  As a result, I found my footing as the party leader.  Likewise, their staying put enough peer pressure on the other three players to stick with the party.  As a result we managed to make progress not by quitting and finding a better group, but by forging ourself into a better group out of determination.

You are standing in an open field West of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

I read this article over at Pet Food Alpha.

Quick summary is this.  There is an impossibly hard monster to beat in Final Fantasy XI.  A linkshell finally made it to the point of starting the fight with this monster, and after 18 hours, found it impossible to beat.  People got sick because they spent so much time trying to beat it.

This has created a row in the FFXI endgame community.  Basically they’re calling bullshit on SE’s method of making super-hard bosses an endurance challenge (versus a skill challenge).

I’m not sure I agree… The again, I can’t disagree either.

On one hand, I think SE’s method of making fights endurance challenges is a display of poor design and programming.  It’s also disingenuous to have a sign in screen that says “we have no desire to see your real life suffer as a consequence [of playing the game],” then go design a boss fight that the devs estimate is at least an 18 hour fight.

On the other hand, if you, as a player, know that a fight might wander into the territory where it’s going to get unhealthy for you to participate (say, past 4 hours), then you’ve got little reason to complain. You’ve made the choice to do something that most reasonable people will look at you cock-eyed for doing.