“Love is like a poisonous mushroom — you don’t know if it is the real thing until it is too late.”

–Bill Balance

Agaricus mushrooms were introduced in Final Fantasy XI’s Wings Of The Goddess update.  They are an unremarkable drop in and of theselves.  However, if you’re (A) a Paladin, that (B) knows a high level (94+) cook, and (C) can farm up the ingredients, you can get (E) Rabbit Pies.

I have A-C covered.  I just need to  (D) make the time time to farm.

What’s the big deal over Rabbit Pies?  Rabbit Pies are the best Paladin food — ever.  They raise Attack by 25%, Defense by 25%, plus give Strength and Vitality bonuses.  This food generates enmity through damage, and keeps it from ablating.

<rantmode: on>
Online sources says the Brasscaps in Grauberg have a 8.3% drop.  I think that’s a bit optimistic.

Last night, I marched into Grauberg as PLD/thf, and proceeded to off 52 Brasscaps — which should have given me 4-ish Agaricus.

I got exactly 4′ish less than that.

The night before I spent about the same amount of time doing the same thing, to get one.

So, hours and hours of mindless, soul destroying repetition to get one freeking mushroom.

I understand wanting to keep things rare’ish, but when an item is required in 4 recipes, and possibly needed to complete 2 quests — making it have a lower drop rate than the Bounding Boots off Leaping Lizzy is just f’ing retarded.

Clearly someone at SE likes to mess with players and probably thought this was amusing. I hope they develop a pair of kidney stones.

In the mean time I need to kick my own ass for falling for this trap.

</rantmode: off>

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.

I read this blog this morning, and one statement really stood out to me:

But back in the early days, we were given a set of tools as players and subscribers to craft our world.  If you think about that, it’s a very special thing to be able to do.  We were the ones, collectively, that were responsible for “making the game work.”

With my static having ended, I’m in a funk about Paladin — so I decided to level Dancer for awhile.

It’s not the job this post is about, but the party I was with from 20 to 23.  This party was so much like my static.  When this party ended I found myself both satisfied and wistful.

Satisfied because, this group played with the tools SE provided to make XP’ing interesting and engaging.

This group knew how to Skillchain and Magicburst, and used it to great effect.  When Fusion landed the Paladin and White Mage would Magicburst Banish, the BLM (yes, a Black Mage! In a party!) and Red mage would Magicburst Fire.  it was marvelous to see the monsters (Gigas) go from healthy to dead in just a couple seconds.

There was communication in the party to set up skill chains.  In the event something unexpected happened, we were all able to talk out what would happen.  And when things were running smoothly, we chatted each other up, bandied faux insults, and generally tried to be raucous.

Wistful because it reminded me static was wasn’t just good, it was great.

I dig this style of play, and my static did it well.  It bothers me when I see players trying to bring high level [TP Burn] mechanics down to lower levels [where it just doesn't work].  It removes a component of play that keeps the game engaging.  I also want to tell players that complaining about “part chat spam” when the party members are socialization to “go die in a fire.”  FFXI is a game you get to play with a few thousand other people — and you want quiet?

So the party last night was wonderful.   It’s encouraging to see players that played the game to be fun (all aspects of the game, including run-o’-the-mill xp’ing), instead of playing Final Fantasy XI like an Excel spreadsheet.

Playing FFXI is a nice way to decompress from my real life of looking at and fixing other people bad code, or creating some myself.

However, the day-to-day life of Suquamish can get a little hum-drum.  Offing Puks is great fun the first one hundred to one hundred-fifty times, but after that the excitement wears off a little.  Plus, there is only so much of time wasters one can take that supports life in Vana’diel.  Farming, Crafting, Harvesting, Fishing, Logging, Minning, Clamming, all get a bit grindish.

So a couple weeks ago I decided to book Brenner match.  The allure to Brenner was that it had no arbitrary limits set on it, no silly side quests to complete, thus allowing anyone in the LS to join [if they Chains of Promathia installed].  Most of us (including myself) had never done a PvP tourny inside FFXI.  Our collective knowledge about Brenner ended at knowing it as a complex version of capture the flag.

There are some nice nuances that PvP allows for.  For example, moving can cause your opponent to not be able to hit you, or not allow that Thief (or /thf) to be able to SA you.  Likewise, if your opponent moves, you can still strike him given he’s not to far away and there’s not any terrain blocking you.

Since it was PvP and we had a blast killing one another while figuring out the game. We had SO much fun, in fact, then and there we unanimously decided that it should be a regular fixture of the lolCats LS.

Last night was our second Brenner night.  A few new members came along, and were struggling to figure out the gist of the game, but with a core group the knew how to play and what to expect, Brenner took on a whole new level of excitement.  Not only was it a blast putting the smack-down on fellow lolCats, we had a few close games where the score was decided in the last several seconds.

Lessons learned:

• Damn those Paladins and their high DEF.. they’re impossible to kill quickly.   That is, unless..
• Samurai/thief with SA+WS can ruin any job in a terrifically short amount of time, unless…
• A level 75 Thief/ninja is just this side of impossible to hit.

I have to hand it to SE on this one.  Brenner is great fun. It both enforces the team-oriented spirit the game tries to foster, and allows for some seriously great head to head fun.  I’m already looking forward to our next Brenner event.

Now that my static has reached the point where we are starting to party in the likes of Wajaom Woodlands, Bhaflau Thickets, and Caedarva Mire — and our primary target is pink fluffy things, I am re-acquainted with some of the reasons why I dislike the Treasures of Aht Urghan expansion (ToAU).

While ToAU didn’t spawn the melee burn party, my premier bitch about ToAU is that it created an atmosphere where the primary style of party at the later levels is a melee burn.  I’m not a fan of any style of burn party (even when I was a dyed in the wool mage), but the current system bothers me in particular because it shuns most MP based jobs, and any down time is considered a sin.

My secondary beef with ToAU is that it’s removed camp diversity.  I’m in a static with 5 other players — yet we still must locate ourselves in a ToAU zone to attract the remaining player.  The mindset is that ToAU is an experience points express, and players are so attached to that notion that they’ll forego any XP gathered at a non-ToAU camp in hopes of getting a party at a ToAU camp.

It was nice to see a discussion crop up on a FFXI forum concerning this topic.

The discussion was centered around a suggestion of a game mechanic that “The Dark Ages of Camelot” used, where the zones received an XP modifier.  The base modifier is 1.000, and it is applied to the experienced earned per monster.  The more popular/crowded a zone is, the lower the XP modifier ( say a floor value of 0.750 ).   The less popular a camp, the higher the modifier ( say a ceiling value of 1.125 ).  My thinking on this is it seems a great way to even out XP earned by *burn camp sites and traditional-party camp sites as well as creating camp site diversity.  In fact I immediately entered a feature-request for this at the PlayOnline web site.

There were a few others that look at this simply as a nerf of the most efficient way to gather up experience.  For example this response:

…Non-meleeburn people are the ones who bitch and want nerf’s on ever damn thread. I have always said and stood behind play your way; it is not always going to be the most popular so you may have to work for it. Working for it is not bitching for a nerf and crying like emo kids.

I found a response to the anti-nerf crowd that really resonated with me:

Nerf is one way the system could be made fair, and the simplest. A system in which party styles are vastly imbalanced and in the dominant one THFs must struggle to use their JAs at all and can’t close skillchains, RDMs never get to enfeeble, WHMs are third choice for healing, BLMs can’t magic burst or even attempt to seek each other out lest they be invited to heal, PLDs can’t tank, BRDs can’t get a moment’s peace, SMNs can’t summon, BLUs can’t get parties at all, and sticking to a preference for wanting to do any of the above will get you no invites instead of an invite to a ghetto party isn’t what I’d call a fair system. I would be open to other ways to make the system fair — for instance, a parallel seek system so meleeburners don’t see non-meleeburn seekers and thus have no chance of assuming they’re doing them a favor by inviting them to a meleeburn.

As a Paladin, I now further myself by offing Toucan Sam’s wife.  Nerfing these zones by creating an XP bonus in less popular camps wouldn’t bother me in the least.