The other half is killing people.

Hmm.... What to blog about?

I could write about recently taking two characters to 20, and how I did some PvP along the way. How I levelled my crafting professions, making negative money, yet coming out ahead. Somehow. How I've reconnected with some friends whom I haven't played with since around Burning Crusade's release, and how much fun I'm having just chilling out with them. Having my old main off-tank [if that makes sense] tank for me again is a joy that brings back old times. But all that happened in Rift, and I'm not quite ready for another "omg less than three rift" post.

I could write about levelling Leeloo. Or archaeology levelling in general. Or my massive obsession with solving every artifact ion my DK so that I can go back to Vashj'ir and Hyjal to experience the quests that I haven't touched since Cataclysm's release night. An obsession that has left me flying across the world [of Warcraft{!}] at level 85 and still mostly in my ICC10 gear [with a trinket upgrade, and a few sidegrades]. But I haven't even logged in in about a week.

I could write about writing. Blog writing specifically, and how it has changed - even in this short a time - the way I think about writing things down. How I pace some of writing so that it's regular, but not too regular, and how a 'schedule slip' such as this one - even though i don't have an actual schedule - gives me feelings of guilt. About the phrases that I use in writing repeatedly, that I never really noticed until I started doing this. About how many of my friends blog. But I've been poking away at that post for a couple weeks now and I've made very little headway on it.

I could write about how much I love the guild I'm in, and the friends within it that I made both prior to and after joining it. And how cool it was to actually meet some of my guildies. How they were such a wonderful breath of fresh air after leaving my old raiding guild, even when I'm at my most bitchy, people-hating-est. But I just did.

I could write about the circumstances that lead to me leaving my old raiding guild and how much of a blow to my fragile self-esteem that whole situation actually was. How, despite my current guild note reading, "Be gentle. He's fragile." bothering me to no end, how accurate ti actually is, thus me not causing [too much of] a fuss about it. But that's a can of worms I'm not comfortable opening up in such an ... open ... place as this. Nevermind the fact that some of the people from that old raiding guild happen to read this.

I could write about five paragraphs about what I'm not going to write about, when I already knew what I was going to write about before I pulled up the page to write this. Write, write, write. I've used the word too much, it's starting to look odd to me now. Nevertheless, I'm going to use the word again. I'm going to write about goblins. Specifically, my severe racism against them.

In the years that I've gamed, I've had a go at more than a few games in the MMO genre. I've played Everquest, WoW, EQ2 briefly, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, DC Universe Online, Star Trek Online, Champions wait for it Online, City of Heroes/Villains, Aion, DDO, Rift, WoW, even some of those free-to-play Chinese ones that were rubbish to play, but hey! they were free. But the very first MMO I played - excluding a 3 day trial of EQ that I loved, but couldn't upgrade to because that was a decade ago and I didn't even have one credit card, nevermind the multiple that I have now {as well as the associated debt} - was Final Fantasy XI. Anybody who's ever played that game can probably already see where this is going, but I'm going to meander and get sidetracked along the - ooh! shiny! - way.


I started playing that game for a multitude of reasons. I liked the franchise, for one. Final Fantasy was the 3rd game - excluding Mario 1 / Duck Hunt - I played on the NES [Mario 3 and Legend of Zelda were the other two] and I'd played every FF game since. I'd even played Vagrant Story. I've since missed some along the way - FF Tactics Advance 2, Dissida, Kingdom Hearts [Yes it counts. No, I still haven't played it. I've also never seen any of the Godfather movies. I probably never will either.] - but I've still played a decent chunk of the franchise. Haven't always finished them, but I don't finish a lot of games I play, for various reasons. Regardless, it was a Final Fantasy game. More importantly, it was a Final Fantasy MMO, and that brief trial of EverQuest was enough of a taste of MMOs that I was craving more. And most importantly of all, it was a Final Fantasy MMO that a friend of mine played. I could give him the money to pay for my subscription [it was a bit more complicated than that, but that was the gist of it]. And before I got my own account, he let me make a character to fool around with, to see if I liked it.

Looking back on the game now, it's a marvel at just how bad the game actually is.Terrible account management and downright obtuse billing. No real questing per se [there are quests and missions, but they didn't give you any xp, and rarely did you get a tangible reward, let alone a useful one]. A broken economy. There was a limit to how many auctions you could put up, and all bidding on auctions was done semi-blind. You could look at the price history of any item, and see that the average price was, say 500 gil, but you wouldn't know if the ones currently up were actually for sale at a 1 or a 10'000 gil price until you actually bid on them. Want to increase your carrying capacity from 50 slots to 55? Do a wallet-braking quest. 55 to 60 slots? Even more wallet-busting.

While there are some interesting things, like linkshells/pearls which allow to essentially be in multiple guilds at once - though only talk in one at any given point - and the job system, which effectively cures altitis, it's all implemented in the game in such a way that, after the fact [and during the fact for a lot of people], that makes you think Square-Enix actually hates their players. This is incredibly apparent when you get down to the crux of any MMO; levelling your character. Levelling 1-10 you do so, and while you'll die here and there, it's definitely doable. Levels 10-15 you can do solo, but it's safer to duo that level gap with a friend. It's not safe, you understand, just safer. Levels 15 all the way to the level caps [fianl cap at 75, but artificial caps at 50, and every five levels after] you'll be grouping.There's no way around this. If you want XP, you have to group. If you're lucky, you're levelling one of the core classes that every group needs, but that doesn't mean things will be easier. A lot of the time, logging on for the sole purpose of levelling, either entails a long string of bad groups, sitting on your ass in town trying to put together your group for an hour, or sitting on your ass in town all night waiting for a group that needs a whatever.

Once you're in a levelling group, things don't get any easier. While FFXI was hardly the first MMO to include an experience point debt - EQ did it for one, and then compounded it with making you run back to your corpse naked to get your gear back - it is the only MMO I've played where it's felt so much like a giant neon in the sky that reads, "FUCK YOU". You lose 10% of the experience needed for your next level if you die. Need 25'000 xp to reach level 17 and die? You've just lost 2'500 xp. And if you had only accrued  2'200 xp, you've just de-leveled. And unless you've managed to get a great group [assuming you've managed to get a group at all], some time during your levelling you will die. And don't think for a second that after you've levelled to 75 you've avoided the hateful grind that is 'true' levelling in this game, and just have to worry about keeping a de-level protection buffer up here and there. Thanks to the subjob system, you'll have to level at least one other job to 37, and depending on what that job is, probably another to 18..

Every monster in the game, just to remind you how Square-Enix feels about their player-base [I'm falsely attributing here, but it doesn't feel false], is a complete and utter bastard. There's a monster type called Rarabs. They're essentially Rottweiler-sized kangaroo rats. And they will kick your ass. At some point in the game you will get killed by essentially an oversized rabid bunny. No joke. Also no joke, one of the most personally gratifying things for me when I tried WoW while still playing FFXI was seeing a bunny in the game, and punching it in the face. I ran around the Valley of Trials for at least an hour just killing critters. Once you start levelling in groups though, you tend to stay away from fighting them unless you're at risk of losing your EXP Chain [you string together the killing of higher level mobs by killing them quickly enough and you start to get bonus experience; EXP Chains are at the core of every decent levelling group], because they're not worth the hassle. A group of heroic adventures avoid bunnies, because they're more work than they're worth.

Levels 15-20 are done in a zone called Valkurm Dunes. A lot of people call it Valkurm Hell. Or just Hell. It's a zone packed to the tits with groups, often competing with each other for pulls, often full of people who've just discovered the sign in the sky - the FUCK YOU sign - and are new to grouping, and always full of people 'training' mobs to the zone edges because they aggroed something either they or their group can't handle. Your levelling bread-and-butter in this zone are dragonflies, crabs, and goblins. Goblins in FFXI can be both a blessing and a curse for your levelling group. Goblins have two abilities that have a bearing on your group levelling situation. They probably have more, but these are the only two that matters. The first is a big ol' massive stab - I can't remember what it's called but it works out to pretty much being kicked in the groin with spiky boots, while being elbowed in the face. With spiky bits. If you're lucky, that hits your group's tank. If you're lucky, your tank survives it. If you're me, it hits you. And you die. And you delevel. The second is called Bomb Toss, and this is the one that can be a blessing. At any point in the fight, the gobbo might pull out a bomb and toss it [an ability called Bomb Toss involving tossing a bomb!? What is this madness] The toss can go one of two ways. The goblin can mess up his through and drop the bomb at his feet which will kill him. Or he'll throw it properly, and the bomb will do AoE damage - that usually kills somebody. Usually me.

Dying is a part of any MMO. You learn from your mistakes and move on, right? But no monster in any other game has killed me as much as the goblins in FFXI. Goblins my group were fighting killed me. Goblins somebody else's group were fighting killed me. Goblins chasing me across the zone killed me. Goblins chasing somebody else across the zone killed me. Goblins. Killed. Me. A. Lot. And every time I died - often with the joy of joys that is a de-level - was that much longer I had to be in zone that was overpopulated in both goblins and morons. In the entire time I played FFXI, I had one good group in Valkurm, and they were Japanese so that was frustrating from the language barrier standpoint [pro-tip SE, if you have to learn another language just to accomplish anything, you're doing it wrong. {and yes, I'm aware of the auto-translate tool's presence. You're aware that it was a flawed piece of shit, that often made working with the Japanese players harder, right?}] But you learn from your mistakes and move on, right?

So once I'd had a taste of what an MMO could be - and this was Vanilla WoW, so this wasn't even necessarily what an MMO should be, just what it could be - I left it behind like a Prom baby. And I realize that that is an incredibly tasteless simile, but it's the most apt one for how I felt about FFXI when I quit. I've been playing WoW off-and-on for six-ish years now. I've had my ups and downs with the game in that time, but generally I've enjoyed myself. But when I came, I - to put it mildly - didn't like goblins. I still don't like goblins, even though WoW's goblins are nothing like FFXI's goblins. FFXI ruined goblins for me forever. In every game ever.

So now you know. And knowing is half the battle.