SE Wants You To Bring Along "gimp" Players...

A third option would be to be continue to improve your character, but be satisfied with your progress and your activities (you know, have fun) regardless of your personal preferences when it comes to platform or windower or scripts or whatever.

Trying to level the playing field would be super boring (yay, everyone is the SAME!) It's also impossible: people will only come up with other reasons why they aren't "as good as X," and they'll always tell us about it on the forums. "Neckbeards play too much, I have a real life" kind of garbage.

In the meantime, this kind of whining doesn't actually do anything to change anyone's situation or the state of the game. So try to worry less about other people and more about yourself. Maybe apply this attitude to real life, if that helps you realize how pointless it is.

"The reason I didn't go to Dartmouth is because some *** with family connections got in instead of me."

"I didn't get the job because I was late for the interview - but that *** has a reliable car and got there on time."

"I could be that fit if I wasted half my life in the gym."

"I could carve a sculpture like that, but the tools are just too expensive."

But it isn't all gloomy. If you don't approve of someone, that's totally cool. "If the only way I could get rich was to sell drugs, I'd rather be poor." That's fine - but people usually don't walk up to drug dealers and tell them how much they disapprove of their lifestyle.

You can have as much "fun" as you want, but if u don't fit the mold that the neck beards feel is needed you won't be doing the fun stuff as this game takes more then just one person to get ***done.

Being good at a game makes you a neckbeard/basement dweller. Haven't heard that one before.

hate the players but good lord don't make yourself look foolish by massively stereotyping an entire group of people for no reason other than huttburt.

i constantly try to make my ls learn strategies, with constant failures, its hard to keep pushing on a server filled with lack of skill, this game is going to ***because the majority of old school well educated players quit, i dont think they need to dumb down content, i think the people jumping in game because abyssea made this game NOOB friendly drew too many lacking players to "try this game out"

having to explain strategies to certain people is like explaining to your kid you cannot afford to buy him/her new shiny ***, the player base is dying, and its bringing down most the knowledgeable players with them.

my job lately has been trying to teach the unteachable, i believe i reached my limit though -.-

I here Blumpkin might need a ls WHM POWER!

it is for people who dont listen/learn.

Well, sorry, but the theatrics are needed.

The thing is, there are two very separate and unequal playerbases, and each is disruptive to the other, by definition.

On the one hand you have "people who want to get things done" (and aren't afraid to go outside the rules to do it). These people have artificially and illegally inflated the skill level necessary to play the game that it basically has forced most of the North American PC playerbase to Windower. (Such is why the arguments are always made that killing Windower = killing XI.)

This is why I'm never surprised to see Square-Enix (Japan) prefer the JP playerbase and make no secret thereto, as the people trying to play legally are the other hand. The problem for the Windower crowd is that, to most knowledge, the VAST majority of the JP are still PS2. (Such is why they actually made, as the final JP PS2 game, the Adoulin expansion!)

The gulf is so wide (as evidenced with the Salvage dupes, NNI, PW, etc. and so on, and even to the Delve Mega-Boss wins so far) that only one fact is true: If Windower is legal, any player who can use it and chooses not to is disrupting the play of everyone they play with.


The problem is that that's no longer feasible, especially in an Adoulin-led FFXI.

The problem is that you would basically have to be satisfied with being a third-class citizen in a society that does not want you and believes you are holding it back. (Which see: PS2 players.)

Factually, a player who would be content like that never should've picked up SoA in the first place. They should still be in Abyssea and the occasional Voidwatch group which MIGHT take them.

At the end of the day, though, you will lose the ability to do any and all meaningful content -- either because the content has been phased forward beyond your perceived ability or the playerbase considers you abjectly irrelevant.

At that point, you would stand in effective violation of the Terms of Service through Game Disruption. Your $12.95/mo is no longer worth it to the playerbase, with you serving as an obstruction to the forward progress of FFXI.


That's one of the reasons the "Get a Life" statement before logging in is such an utter joke, but I digress.


The problem is that we live in an inter-connected world. As much as I'd like to tell Thornyy and his asshat bots to *** off once and for all, I can't do that. He and his ilk get to dictate terms as to how the game is played on a macro scale because the issues which they bring up are never addressed.

The fact is that these players have the ability to dictate who plays what, where, when, and how.


Which can happen, especially in the Ivy League. That is one great example of how the concept of "Laws for Thee, but not for Me" can have grave ramifications.


Mainly because people don't usually travel in those circles.

Some of us have.


Which is one of the grave problems with the Matsui gear-as-level paradigm: You COULD do much of the pre-Adoulin content alone if desired.

Now, you're basically forced to either group or fall so far behind that, in a few months, you aren't even really playing FFXI anymore.

hate the people that *** about my gear sometimes. If you're going to complain about it, buy me ***then.

You want people to stop using 3pp? Maybe SE should address their ***networking. If you've got 4 seconds to stun a TP move, and there's a relatively high probability your action won't process for 3 seconds due to their terrible networking and the high quantity of status update packets in delve.. you're not going to be able to stun that manually. It doesn't matter if you're paying attention, the reaction time will cost you stuns when the lag spikes happen. People using 3pp are less apt to have that happen.

If there weren't random periods where characters go unresponsive in delve, it would be EASY to clear megabosses without windower or any sort of 3pp. As is, it's still doable, you just risk getting screwed by a badly timed server spike. Many people who manually stunned legion have taken to using programs in delve because it's incredibly frustrating to lose due to something that was no fault of your own(pressing stun 3 seconds before the tp goes off and having it go off too late).

Lets be real here. The reason SE seem to "prefer" the JP playerbase is simply because they out number us and are the majority. As the majority it would naturally be most beneficial to not piss off said majority if you're SE cause it means potentially losing a lot of revenue. They are a business and as long as they are making revenue they dont give a **** about the players ethics unless it starts negatively impacting their revenue. The fact that they allow the rampant fish botting in beaucedine is proof enough that making money is their bottomline and they're naturally hesitant to part with the significant amount of revenue they would lose should they start mass banning them, let alone windower users (assuming they had a way to detect them anyway).

Not only are they the majority, but they're Japanese customers of a Japanese company.

If you think one second that Japanese players would be treated differently if they were the minority, you are badly mistaking.

Now, another big mistake would be to think that JP players are legit. There may be a majority of them on PS2, but Japanese players playing on PC are the same as any other player in the world. They'll be running their Windower, don't worry about that.

I personally don't see the issue with Windower and some of the plug ins. I find it sad that SE didn't come up with proper versions of their own, but oh well. The only thing I can say about Windower is that it gets ridiculous with some plug ins, that's about it.

The most "dangerous" plug ins aren't openly downloadable anyway, you have (had) to dig for them. So there is really nothing to cry about.

lol I start at the bottom and start to scroll up. See a wall of text with quotes and responses to them. Think to myself "hey that looks starcadeish" and am rewarded when I get to the posters name.

Don't know anything about Japanese culture but I find it hard to believe that SE would continue to be so accommodating to the JP player base if say their population numbers were swapped with that of the EU player base. Would they continue doing maintenance/updates during EU prime time if this were the case? Would they have still cut PS2 support for NA/EU for adoulin and yet kept it in Japan if they were the minority population? Seems illogical to me but I guess its possible their business practices are vastly different than over in NA due to their culture maybe?

Yes, you are following logic that is followed by typical western companies.

Japanese people think different. Their Japanese playerbase will always be worth more than any other. Why? First because their whole marketing strategy revolves around succeeding on their own soil above all other (they did make some huge efforts in America, but this is thanks to the fact that SE has a huge office in America that can hold its own sometimes, much like Capcom USA). Second because of their culture, but that's not typically Japanese, you can see Microsoft and the Xbox One doing the same thing (most of the functions are designed toward the average American and despite being available in EU and other countries, they won't be used the same way or as much, see Doritos and Mountain Dew partnership for even more examples).

Even if you traded the JP playerbase for the EU one (since they are respectively the highest and the lowest), they would still cater around their JP playerbase.
Because if everything fails, if FFXI and FFXIV are to disappear tomorrow, they will still have a very solid fanbase in Japan to buy their mobile and other high money making titles, the company will live on.

Meanwhile in EU and US, such markets aren't developed at all or not as much, making these 2 communities "optional".

The one and only place in the world that makes SE put even more efforts in their work and actually go all out is China. Other than China, there is not a single region that gives enough money to be considered relevant. They're merely full of pride and want to have moderate success everywhere, but they can live without.

So any xbox player who has a PC but doesn't do whatever linking system they need to to get Windower for the XBox is disrupting the game for everyone? and any PC player who would rather live without constant updates of files outdated every month and constant crashing is ruining the game?
From what i hear windower needs constant updating and any time a plugin faults it crashes.
I'd rather just play the game without windower.
That way you know that I skilled my jobs without afkmacros
I don't relay programs to tell me when my buffs are about to wear.
I can fairly judge a yalm distance without needing a counter to tell me how far i am from it.

Windower isn't required to play this game Therefore a player should not be forced to use it to progress through the game.

Bolded part: no.

Most plug ins used are useless anyway, people use them either because they don't take the time to think "oh ***, 25/26 of my plug ins are actually useless" or because they are hopeless idiots.
The ones that are good to use are usually reliable, I have never met any issues with them.
The underground ones are even more reliable.


As for the rest of your utopia, lol. If you don't use Windower, you are automatically inferior for many reasons that unfortunately cannot be discussed, such as "macro management" and overall switches.

Windower can be used as a game enhancer rather than a game changer like most people posting screenshot do. Try it and make up your own mind, don't be a sheep.

And it's going to get WORSE with this update.


So that gives you the right to create your own networks/bots for your 8-10 simultaneous accounts, Thornyy?

You seem to ignore several realities (what a shock!)...


You don't have the right to have that "not happen".

(Geez, I'd hate to think of what you think of Final Fantasy IX's combat system.)

And IX is basically the best example of it. They created the battle system at the speed they did for a reason -- you seem to deliberately ignore that XI is a tri-platform game (despite your personal best interests in destroying that).

But the fact is that you are not given the right to circumvent Square-Enix's networking, sir. As much as your utter delusions of grandeur (and *cough*illegal lucrative side job*cough*) would indicate otherwise, you are subject to the limitations which allow this game to be played on the other two platforms (which I would guess is probably a large portion of the reason you have unsatisfactory lag spikes).


And, guess what, YOU DON'T HAVE THE *** RIGHT TO CIRCUMVENT THAT!

That means your wins were illegal and your gear stolen property from Square-Enix.

Have you ever deigned to get that some of that might, in fact, be somewhat needed, if not outright balance-intentional?


Something the mega-boxers are trying to change.


But to the effective exclusion of the North American playerbase (sans a few cheating ***) as a relevant going concern?

Because that's what a lot of NA players feel like... (OK, maybe not the parenthetical, but still...)


Frankly, at that point, they should just allow RMT and disown any ownership over game materials, at that point.


(The key, of course, is to always remember that a pre-assumption to all this is you CAN use Windower. If you cannot because your only XI access is non-Windower platforms, most of them want rid of you a priori!)

In a Windower-legal scenario, yes. See Thornyy's *** above. The botting dipshit basically gave you an even better example than anything I could come up with.

Any realistic advancement of the game, in the eyes of the cheater-community, comes from THEM. The base assumption of the people who are of that ilk is that Square-Enix doesn't know it's *** from a donkey and has the illegal 3PP community to thank for FFXI's continued survival the last 11 years.

So the players have to do an entire UI rebuild for them (which Square's long-awaited UI overhaul will not come CLOSE to), not realizing that, since Square-Enix owns everything vis-a-vis XI (and I do mean everything -- they could force everybody to defend the Astral Candescence during a given Besieged as a condition of continued play if they really wanted to!), they don't the right to do so.


In a Windower-legal scenario and in the eyes of the predominant NA community, you are in the way of the advancement of the playerbase by deliberately gimping yourself in that situation. It's what I am trying to openly provoke the likes of Thornyy/Comeatmebot to do -- force Square-Enix to openly rebuke their own ownership of the game and Terms of Service.


You'd get a lot of disagreement.

On cue, here's some of it!!


And there's no point -- you're already effectively committing a criminal offense by using Windower in the first damn place, so what's a black-market underground plug-in among "friends".


Every last damn one of which YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO.

If Square-Enix wanted you to be able to change clothes at that speed, it'd have allowed it. They'd have given you the macro size to do so.

Gear swapping, beyond the speed and manner in which Square-Enix prescribes, is illegal.


But you don't have that right either, Senkyuutai. It's one of the reasons I can no longer agree with the "I have the right to play the game in the manner in which I choose." crowd.

If that manner, in any substantive way, is in violation of the agreements made to play the game, then the play is illegal.

"Criminal offense".

While it is against the ToS of FFXI, if you stop and think for a second, just using Windower to put FFXI in windowed mode was breaching the ToS, yet wasn't anything bad at all in term of action.

It did open to much more, but the very base, which was against the ToS in itself, wasn't anything bad or offensive.

You need to think and be able to split things in more than one category. Some plug ins are down right HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE (TParty, recast to give examples) and are abused by every single player because they are absolute ***to begin with (both can be bypassed using the normal game tools) and didn't think one second of bypassing them before they were even out. Other plug ins such as Distance are ok, they aren't toxic, they are helpful and rather harmless objectively speaking.

You need to learn to make this difference. The underground plug ins being only available to a select few means that the majority of players who are crying about unfair plug ins have a higher chance to have never seen/experienced them than the opposite. Doesn't make them ok to use, what I meant by this is that people crying truly have no idea of what the really, really toxic plug ins are, and can be.

About your second point, there is a very important thing you need to understand: you need to stop using the word illegal. It is "illegal" toward SE's ToS, but the most you can get out of it is a perma ban from their game(s). It is literally no big deal.
Use the word "violation" instead, it's more appropriate in this context.

The only "issue" with Windower is that it's widespread and some of the plug ins (or paths) that Windower brings/allows can be problematic when exploited by complete idiots (which are the majority of the community and therefore, Windower users).

But the bottom line and what you need to understand is that in reality, you have very little chance of facing real, uncounterable cheat. You also need to understand that the game is in such a state that your position and vision is literally 2006 old. It's not worth spending your time defending it, it is a long lost utopia.

Really, you're better off moving to a game that is made by another company (FFXIV is literally same ***, different smell) or to just move on and enjoy the game your own way. Don't stress about the rest.

C h i l l.

Jesus *** christ.

hi starcade

3 second response time is intentional in delve, can't have players able to control their characters or it'll be too easy

Unless your country law system is very different to my country (which is possible). Breaching a term in a contract (in this case, terms and conditions to the service (ffxi) that SE is providing) isn't a criminal offense. It is not under the criminal law.

Thus it isn't a criminal offense to breach a contract. The party of concern(i.e. SE in this case) can sue you for damage. But, as far as I know, the Crown Prosecutors (or whatever is relevant for your country) can't sue you for not abiding to an agreement, where your actions that breached the agreement is perfectly legal under criminal law.

saying it is illegal is already quite borderline, saying it's a criminal offense is definitely ... lol.

One of the most hilarious posts I've read in my years of lurking, thanks starcade.

*blink*

woah

Edit. Disregard. Quoted wrong person. Dumb phone.

Translation: I suck and can't keep up with others.

Did someone steal Starcade's Gukumatz?

lol, I think Starcade just trumped all the previous whiny *** I have seen on here. Bravo sir.

I'd say why not take lesser players but only lesser to a point. At least you should be able to get majority if not all of AF3+2 for your job. I consider myself weak unless I have that minimum, then delve/NNI etc come come next.

Sorry I never keep up with these forums.

I read that big long thing and I realized... has anyone mentioned to Starcade the whole "ffxiah acquires data in a non-SE sanctioned way to enhance people's experience" thing? I love that part.