Yes, I am officially necroing the blog because of all the Endwalker whining... GET OVER IT!

(Posted on my sports-conspiracy blog, but I thought it might be good to put it here too!)

I could probably go into any number of sports-related rants regarding the entitlement of fans and the like -- up to and including my increasing anger at the idiots who do not understand a sports fan has no right to a legal, lawful, nor fair contest.

Really, they don't.  Mayer!

But what I have seen the last almost-five days now in video-gaming has to take the cake.

I know I probably said here (and I know I said elsewhere) I was never going to play Final Fantasy XIV again.

The coronavirus and the need to kill copious amounts of time while staying the fuck at home (thank you, Samuel L. Jackson!!!!) changed all that.

Today is the official release date of the final expansion of the first story arc, Endwalker.

I do not know when I will complete it, or whether I will be able to.  More on that in a second.

I have been considering doing another video-game post on the death of Activision-Blizzard, and the DESERVED death of the company, as a going concern.

I may, well, soon.

But this is one factor in what is going on here.  Because a lot of people, disgusted with the sexual-harassment/assault culture at Blizzard (as well as increasing microtransactions, including pay-for-gold (which the company which owns the game DOES have the right to do -- unlike Real Money Trading outfits!)) have left World of Warcraft in monstrous numbers, leaving WoW with a player-base, by some estimates, of less than 2 million subscribed accounts.

By comparison, Square-Enix and FFXIV, this weekend for the "Early Access" of Endwalker, have reported, and by quite a distance (some metrics say the record could be by a multiplicative factor of at least two, if not more!!), the highest server load in the history of the game.

Which has created massive problems.

One of which, which will probably take a back seat, is a very real issue with certain processors (like mine, AMD models appear to be reported as having problems) with the game, at best, dropping or stuttering sound.  At worst, like mine, the computer will randomly freeze and force a complete reset of the system!

But that's nothing compared to their more glaring problem:  Full worlds and massive server queues.

And everyone says "This is normal for a launch!!", etc.  And they are right -- TO AN EXTENT...

The problem is, the mass exodus out of Blizzard and into Square-Enix was never foreseen.

The second problem is that the development team knew they couldn't do anything about it.

Some blame COVID, I blame Bitcoin.  There's also a definite scalper motif into this, which has bled into the high-end gaming consoles as well.  It's one of the reasons I may have to quit for a while:  Upgrading systems has become impossible because of the semiconductor shortage which has gone on the better part of 12-18 months now.

I have friends of mine who would like to update their video cards.  Here's your problem, as evidenced last June at a store in Dallas.  I want you to take special note of a gentleman in the mob just in front of the cammer before it attempts to stampede the store, upon notification that, between all the Bitcoiners and scalpers, there's no prayer there's enough video cards to get everybody one:

(Look at about 1-2 seconds into the video.  Look closely at his hand, you won't see it for long...)

There's at least one person in the damn line who has BRASS KNUCKLES!!!

That's how bad that is.

But the reason I made this post is another kind of entitled jackass...

"I WANNA PLAY WIGHT NOWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!  WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!"

Just a short list of what has been going on on the Official Forums of the game (and thank God I'm banned from those several times and characters over, because somebody would get threatened with a punch to the mouth):

• "I want to thank you for making bethesda and fallout 76 look good. I was going to type a lot more, but why bother. you and the company decided that you would loose more money from player leaving then from getting more servers."
  
• Another thread:  "I don't accept your apology"
• Calls for lawsuits...
• "Shame on you Square"
• I know there was at least one all-caps profane rant on the question -- which was probably allowed to remain far longer than it should've...
• "Get over it?  No, I don't think I will."
• And on
• AND ON
• AND FUCKING ON!!!!!

The only way Square-Enix was going to get this right was not to release Endwalker for AT LEAST ANOTHER YEAR.

That's how bad the gaming console/semiconductor/video card/chip market has been FUCKED, between the scalpers and the Bitcoin geeks, with a small nod to COVID, in the last two years.

If you don't think they would've done something if they could've, you're even more arrogant than I thought.

FUCK OFF.

 

My Reputation Finally Following Me To XIV?

I think I've seen two people in Duty Finder parties now who recognize me from my rants on here and on XI.

First one was harmless:  Drew Ultros on my Trials Roulette and the guy asked, recognized me, told me to keep it civil, we did.

The second guy was an asshole.

Couple of nights ago, drew Amdapor Keep (Hard) for my Expert/Alexandrite run.  My friend Arg came with me to farm tomes.

Basically, the main mental midget was the healer. I'm certain the guy knows me from BG...

Why??

• We're on Anchag.  The third time around, I get the draw for the lightning, and do not make it back to the statue in time.  So, Douchenozzle Healer decides to /pray, /pray, /pray some more, and eat about 2/3 of his life when he gets AoE'd because he's too interested trying to figure out whether he wants to dismember my corpse or have sex with it.  The Swiftcast Raise FINALLY comes, but basically too late.
• Boogyman, second boss.  Nothing much a problem here, except the dickhead decides, out of very much nowhere, to /slap me.  Mental note made, I also make the note in my FC chat, which Arg is in as well.
• Final boss, and I'm getting heat for sucking.  Yep, full-scale Bluegartr reject, whether he's actually BG or not.  I get heat for using the limit break to finish off the DPS check before we die to it (mainly because healer and tank cannot be arsed to break everybody out of their pudding).  I tell him to shove it, he lets me die when the Cankerous Goblet decides to hold me in place.
• By this point, I know the jackass ain't gonna raise me, so it's on from here.  Arg finally has to break it up (after he, as the only DPS the tank and healer ever gave a damn about, much less two), and the healer says Arg was the only one doing anything, with far lesser gear than mine.

You know, if I wanted that, I'd post on Bluegartr.

Really.

Do me a favor -- you think I suck shit that badly, you and your buddy kick me.

But you'll lose the person single-handedly responsible for bringing me on XIV once he takes the 30-minute penalty too.

PS:  He suggested that, next time, I report you for harassment. Well...

Wow... That was... underwhelming.

Took me longer to download the updates than to complete Rhapsodies I.

I have two songs to describe Rhapsodies I:

"This song...  is pretty damn short."

and

"This is your birthday song...
 It isn't very long..."

I think it's clear that when XI becomes an MMMRPG, the whole thing is basically going mobile.

The new area and battle system is _OK_, but there just isn't enough meat and potatoes to it.

As for the storyline, interesting but not nearly up to even Adoulin standards, much less 2.55.

Be interesting to see if I even THINK of resubbing, barring circumstances.

Big Story from Azeroth: Blizzard needs to shut down WoW PvP...

Only being put here because it's so similar to a lot of my Final Fantasy XI rants (and what's with the damn download times on the update, even BEFORE the free login period begins, SE???)...

Big news in the gaming community this week that Blizzard banned a number of users for using bots in World of Warcraft PvP competition.

... because that number is SIX FIGURES of six-month suspensions.

Various reports put the number at somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 banned characters (or is it accounts?).

That's 1-2% of the 10 million subscribers WoW has, and, PvP being the sole raison d'etre for a lot of these immature shitheads to play WoW, I would have to think we can add at least that number to the two million or so subscriptions which have fled WoW in the last few months.

Basically, it appears as if the entire PvP metagame (and if it's not all of it, it's a large, large fraction!!!) was based around the bot HonorBuddy, which allows players to farm honor in PvP play without actually committing to PvP.  No engagement is necessary.

They're still looking, but it now appears that this is a problem even an order of magnitude or two above the Salvage bans of 2009, which basically exposed FFXI for what it really was, and set the table for the company to transition to FFXIV.

There's really only two solutions:  Reset ALL PvP in World of Warcraft, or shut it ALL down until gameplay can be rebalanced.

This isn't 1 or 100 accounts.  This is the classic case of "If you owe the bank $100, it's your problem.  Owe the bank $1,000,000, and it's the bank's."

It is now clear that no meaningful PvP play is going on whatsoever on World of Warcraft, so it either needs to be reset or shut down.

This, on the heels of Blizzard actually doing something SE may have tried to do ONCE:  Blizzard won $7,000,000 from a WoW bot maker in court.

I always knew most WoW players were immature little pieces of shit, so none of this surprises me.

Take Your RMT and Pay To Win Shit and GET OFF MY GAME!!!

That took about 30 posts on the XIV Official Forums.

This one might well be a temp unless they realize it's the same guy from the XI forums, at which point I'm probably done there.

We have an RMT apologist on the XIV Official Forums, name Tocsin, I think from the Jenova server.

Goddamn bitch decides he wants to be against RMT, by allowing Square-Enix to sell the gil, making the game Pay to Win!

I'm gonna tell you right now.  I don't think SE has the manpower to start and RMT/P2W operation -- the credits to 2.55 seem to indicate they have no manpower to stop it.

What I hope isn't happening (and what I fear happened in XI) is that SE got a cut of some of the profits to leave them alone.

And it sounds like this piece of shit on the Official Forums would rather see this game decline to Pay To Win status.

Take that shit to MMMRPG XI, shithead!!  We don't need you here!

We've got enough of a problem when communication between players becomes damn near impossible/unfeasible because of talk and shout RMT spam.  We don't need RMT/Pay To Win encouragement here.

Otherwise, this game becomes XI, and it's fucked.  Period.

Oh my dear God, they didn't...

Well, the good news is you don't get an immediate shutdown.

The bad news is that you might get it WORSE.

With about 48 hours notice, Square-Enix Japan announced a press conference for "The Future of Final Fantasy XI".

What we got was not what we expected. Some people are probably happy that the game is not shutting down.

The first major announcement was the final scenarios to the game. 

Rhapsodies of Vana'diel will be the final set of scenarios added to the game, the first of which to be added in the May version update.

From the digest, it's going to tie in fourteen years of FFXI.  The other two parts are in August and November.

One major prediction came true and then some:  PS2 support is ending in one year's time.  So is XBox's.

And the major event coming forward is apparently "The Goddess' Gala", incorporating both in-game campaigns and other campaigns.

The second of three major announcements was the announcement of a new Vana'dielian mobile game for Japan only -- Final Fantasy Grandmasters.  This took up the bulk of the 45-minute presentation.

But then the third one came, and, when it did...

They are planning to partner to get a mobile interface for actual FFXI play -- with one of the worst and most corrupt such companies around, Nexon.

OH...  SHIT!!

So you're not only possibly creating "All The Bravest II", but you're doubling down with the people from Maple Story and all the hacking and shit and cash-shops and the like from that???

Are we going to have a Final Fantasy XIV left when you guys are done???

Oh, and Draylo can still shut up...

Got some interesting news from the "agents in the field" just before I got XIV.

Draylo finally got banned for RMT??

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

(if true)