Top Ten - #4: If you think I'm not aware...

Let's get one thing straight right now.

I'm somewhat proud of having one of the most read blogs on Vana'diel.

I don't need to be told that I am considered Vana'diel's biggest running joke. I really don't. I'm fully aware of that fact.

I'm fully aware that most people consider me a joke, for any number of various and sundry reasons.

1) As I was talking to several people in the social linkshell I'm in, this game is all about the e-peen. It's all about not only getting the gear, and cheating your ass off in the process, but then telling everyone about it so that either they have to accept that they are inferior, or flee the game because there's no use playing it in a world we should be honored to be in and in the presence of these elite players.

As I will make no secret over the next four days: The next elite player that I see who isn't cheating will be the FIRST elite player I see who isn't cheating. There is great debate (which I will chime in more than a bit on over the course of the next four days here on the blog) as to what the Salvage bans (that, and player attitudes about cheating, will be #1, as I believe they will not only impact what is left of Vana'diel, but XIV as well) did to FFXI.

I think it's clear when you see attitudes like this gem from Yabby on BG:

"Man i don't know what your talking about. If you don't post on BG and all endgame shells know your name, you are a no body, You suck at the game, and when the important great players of the game get banned you sir will quit because you have nothing to live up to."

Or this one from Nynja:

"Enjoy your 1500$ ps2? Because thats all your PC is if you play without windower."

To whom I specifically say to fuck off and suck my dick.

Or this one from Silenka:

"tl;dr people who call windower an evil 3rd party program are either jealous because they're not on pc, or confused about exactly what windower plugins do. They also make me extremely cranky. All I can deduce is that they ENJOY playing in an inferior way like the guy above me. Work smarter, not harder. >.>"

(To wit I say that if I had that attitude, the only question would be whether I'd DDoS people like this or come to their house with a baseball bat and take out their computers entirely.)

Or the bitch on my server (forget if Leviathan or Siren) who insisted that the player didn't play with Windower, but the game was no fun without it...

The point is that these attitudes go all over the FFXI Net. This game, to them, is all about them, and they would much rather I not be here. I reiterate again:

The only reason I continue to play FFXI is because I know these shitheads want me gone.

That's it. That's all. And that leads me to the second point:

2) I am in full understanding that, as a social interaction game, FFXI has a lot of public pressure for the player-base to look the other way (and for Square-Enix to do the same (whoops, that's tomorrow's rant!!)) and not only allow cheating, but encourage it and require it.

I don't play this game for social interaction, though I will do it, but only when necessary to do so.

I specifically remember one player blasting me with words to the effect of: "Enjoy killing a lot of stuff alone..."

To which I could only reply: "WHAT DO YOU THINK I DO NOW, IDIOT??"

But, to my point: Because of the abject need to be "leet", the players basically demand the use of these illegal mechanisms to actually play the game. When I ask if these fuckers could kill a bee in Gustaberg without cheating, I am deathly serious...

Start reading these blogs. Listen to the podcasts. At least with a nudge and a wink (and, often, with far more than that), illegal tactics are the only way to play -- and, when someone speaks out about them, they're on a high horse.

I was wondering how I got that nosebleed. If it's on a high horse to demand you fuckers quit cheating, I am and proud of it, bitch.

But the thing is that I fully understand that, to be able to play this game at a level most players will accept, you must cheat -- and that's what angers me. I don't respect you, and if there were any real system of enforcement in this game, every elite North American linkshell in this game would be banned. Every last one of them -- because of what is required to be elite.

The public pressure to cheat demands it. You use Windower, you cheat. You use a bot, you cheat. That simple. And you need to be off the game and polluting some other game into a piece of shit, not dissimilar to what you've turned FFXI in to.

But I get that public pressure forces people to basically turn their backs on fair play.

3) I'm about the only person to speak as loud and long on this subject, so shaming me into silence (if not out of FFXI-existence completely) is a goal of these cunts.

It's basically Japanese-in-reverse, and, as I said during my Flamage series after the Salvage Bans, I really think it's because Americans enjoy being heel. They get off on being bad.

Bret Hart was right when he turned heel during the last year and a half of his (first) WWE run.

People enjoy not only stepping on people, but grinding their spiked heel into their head to finish them off and run them off.

Look, assholes, they've run me off of entire towns for being too dangerous to allow to live there. I've had more police investigations on me than the rest of you put together. I dare not go where you go, or I get on the Evening News -- again!

(And if you think that's e-thugging, you have no fucking clue who you are dealing with.)

But public shame is something I'm well familiar with and accept that. I did in high school when I publicized a significant set of suspensions on the basketball team (I was the person who called in the scores to the media and slipped that one in on the drunks and druggies who were turning my small-town Wisconsin high school into a shitfest...), and they called me into the principal's office for it. They asked if I did, and I told them I did, and the matter was ended.

I have no shame in exposing things for fraud, and trying to get them stopped.

And that basically gets to the take-home point for today:

Yes, I know that most of the people who read this blog see me as a fucking joke, but I say to consider the source -- a player-base whom, especially in America, has lost all right to feasibly play this game. So STFU, HAND, FOAD, and get off "my game".

Tomorrow: And Square-Enix shoulders much blame for this fraud too...