What Are You Doing Now In Game?

Trying to see how much Gil I can pump into duskorb stones for smn without getting anything over BP dmg +4. 50M and going strong!

My main character has been so overwhelmed with jobs and gear lately, that I've decided to level up my mules and get them combat ready, so they can share the load. The only downside is that my mules are severely lacking in missions, homepoints, waypoints, etc...

In any case, it gives me plenty to work on.

Damn that is some bad luck, i dont even want to say what my augs are ; ;

Idle around town all day everyday figuring out what i'm doing with my life :\

Need new server or somethin.
Asura kicks rocks.

I feel your pain. I just dropped 30M on Duskdim, Snowdim, and Leafdim, for my Helios MB set. And I still need to make a straight damage set as well, plus a few random pieces of augmented Telchine.

Watching more and more people get the ban hammer and now everyone is worried about it even more because of randomness of it and stuff said on forums from people, so they not even signing in until things calm down a little. :(

Who is getting banned now? I play with a small group of people and they've been untouched from this round of bans. (Then again I've been hypervigilant in warning my shell not to use mvt speed programs.)

Of course we all warning everyone else but that does not mean people listen, and do not mean they will admit to stop using it. Some people just like to push their luck I guess. I know of a small group (not mine) that has lost at least 2 people recently, and some of their players are not even signing on atm due to being worried about the random banning. I know of at least 2 people that also claim (I do not live at their houses or see their screens so who knows if they really being truthful) they stopped using that stuff, and been afk in town a great deal and still got perm like within the last month. Something is triggering the automatic bans to kick in, and from what some people are saying it might be buggy and kicking people from game for not doing anything really wrong besides being afk. Other FFXI forums have been actually discussing this possible issue a lot.

One of the people that recently got banned contacted SE to find out what was going on and the person at SE told him to contact a game GM on game about it...after he was perm banned. This is not the first time I have heard from someone that SE told them that.

Do not want to rule out the "perma ban while completely clean" possibility, which in the end is not that impossible, but at the same time I usually feel kinda skeptic when people claim that.

Same.

Someone on the BG thread said a GM told them they only look back 6 weeks. So whatever it is they got banned for it should have happened in the last two months.

I'm farming Boyahda Moss so I can get fame on a fresh character. That crap is 30k a stack on Asura.

A lot of people were speculating that it was from past things they had done, and it finally caught up with them. I too am skeptic Sechs because not many people are honest about using 3rd party tools. I really doubt the standing around afk is true because look at how many people do that while bazaaring. If they banned all those people the game would be empty. lol.

Just buy millicorn from a NPC and use that, takes more trades but its worth it.

Given how completely clueless they are, how very little official information they are told, how they in theory are not supposed to disclose information like that and how it's a different team of people (not GMs) who cares about banning and stuff, I'm very very very very likely to NOT BELIEVE whatever GMs say to people.

It's not a matter of them lying on purpose, it's a matter of them being not a reliable source of information, period.

About the specific information, it MIGHT be true, but just because "a GM said it" doesn't really mean it's true (more often than not, it's not)

Not to mention that GM's nowadays do not even know game mechanics. lol. Remember the ss Apollymi posted of the GM that did not even know Incursion levels went as high as they did (143), and Apollymi had to prove to the GM that they went that high lol. I think the post about it is somewhere on ffxi ah forums. I remember another incident too where another GM had no clue about something in game but do not remember specifics of that one.

I suppose GMs could be making stuff up but it seems more believable that they would know that kind of data (which directly relates to their job) whereas they might not know every game mechanic.

As far as incursion it seemed more like the devs didn't anticipate that anyone would take it that high than that the GMs were clueless about a game mechanic. Those 143 runs were pretty intense - 1 hours, multiple idrises, and they exited if the flanking NMs were the wrong job types. Even at 133 we didn't stick around if Gramk had a steadfast cause why bother making the fight last longer than necessary.

Crazy how you can level 99 a job in 2 hours now. Without dbl exp going on >.>

I do not expect the GM to know everything about game mechanics though they should know some stuff about the game. It just seems the GM they have nowadays are pretty clueless. Like I said above I know of other incidents where the GM did not know stuff that seemed pretty basic but idr the details of it. I am sure I could ask around to get refreshed on it. I am sure they did not anticipate anyone going that high in incursion. The reason why I mentioned this is cause the GM argued with Apollymi over it if I remember it right instead of just saying he did not know that.

I remember exiting with steadfast, etc, and yeah higher levels were very intense runs that required super good groups to pull off the wins.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/45202-Incursion-bug

The GM said he didn't know that incursion went over ilvl 140 and that nothing could be done. Both Wopa and the GM seemed moderately pleasant to one another.

Trying right now to decide whether I want to go for it and totally deck out one last job before the end of the game.

I'm just not sure.

I think I will though. I've grown a bit jaded with XI in the face of Escha but I've a few things I've always wanted to make that I haven't yet.

Cautiously holding out hope for August's version of Escha not being a total waste. I know it's likely to be, since they don't seem likely to change the structure of the event halfway through, but yeah.

I'd like to have a reason to find the time again.

GMs aren't required to play the game whether it's before or after they are hired. So most of them will bet on their other competences (because work as a GM has more to do with other tasks than policing/assisting in-game) and ace the interview regardless.

That being said, many, many times I've had players who reported issues, whether they were bugs or abuses, and they spent 5 whole minutes explaining how it worked so I would understand exactly the impact of the situation. It was so cute and it made me realize from the other side how people see GMs as clueless as ***.

Only advice I can give is, try to explain things to the GM giving details that can't be found on Wiki, BG Wiki, FFXIAH forums and BG forums. *hint hint*

Escha is like...they took all the aspects of Abyssea that weren't good or fun, and enhanced them.

You don't get the awesome OP feeling Abyssea gave you.

But you get the grindy repetition.

You don't get shiny new rewards, just sidegrades.

You don't get real good group content. Quite the inverse, you get BST being overpowered as hell (again) and ruining any reason to play in groups.

Whatever. I've got things to do so I'm trying not to be too big of a sourpuss. I just don't look forward to LS Escha nights.

I get this vibe from several of my ls members as well. As someone deciding what content we do the content available is really frustrating because there aren't a lot of alternatives for a group who has stayed active. Personally I'd love to go back and do incursion for the nostalgia but no one agrees with me on that and they're happy with their capes / capped on the gear. We could go grind more vagary but we already did that for 3 months (or was it 4). We can't really do the HTBF because we have more than 6 ppl but not enough to split into two groups. That leaves escha - a place where we're not capped on drops and wouldn't it be nice to see some of those rare bodies form the HELM NMs. I sympathize with people who are tired of escha but what else are we supposed to do endgame wise?

Well, to be fair you don't necessarily need exact multiples of 6. Say you had 10, could do something like two 5 player + 1 trust parties. Or if you're sitting at like 7-8 players just rotate and have people take turns sitting out a fight. Or do something like 6 people do the high tier fight and 3-4 people go kill some UNM, then switch up groups after a bit.