Very unbecoming of me, Mojojoe? Son, you ain't seen nothing yet!

After yet another round of "I want my skill-ups, so fuck the Astral Candesence!!":

Had a little discussion this afternoon with a person who either recognized my blog or recognized me as formerly of Leviathan.

Within five minutes, he told me to go back to the hole where I came from and I had blacklisted his ass.

Why?

I decided to tell him exactly what I thought of American gamers and American gaming.

They suck, and are detrimental to the gaming environment.

(Yeah, we're back to basically the post I made the evening of the Salvage bans, before I found out about them and all Hell literally broke loose across Vana'diel.)

And I don't think I need to go into intense detail as to my distaste for them, and my experiences why. I'll just cover a few with one sentence (or so) each and move forward...

-- I've witnessed gamer gang acts of violence among American gamers.

-- I know of tactics, like naming shame, that other gaming cultures use to keep the players in line. Yes, there are Japanese cheaters, who are then SHAMED... And I think one of the differences between our culture and theirs is that shame actually means something. I'd literally be dead in a Japanese family culture.

-- I've seen television programs where American gamers, in major-money tournaments, damn near start rumbles by getting in each others' faces and screaming about "pwnage" and about how big their dicks are with respect to their opponents' because they just scored on Madden.

-- The Salvage bans, and the notoriety of many of the players so banned.

If I had this type of an attitude, I'd commit DDoS attacks against other gamers to prevent their progress in the game. I know there are places I best not go, and the American attitude of gaming (cheating, "pwnage", and what not) is one of them.

Do I think myself superior? Remember, I don't consider you having an achievement of any sort if you cheat. This is what troubles me about Square-Enix' "We must maintain our cash flow for XIV, even if the player base is cheating their fucking asses off!" stand.

I do not play this (nor any other) game to make friends.

Again, for emphasis:

I do not play this (nor any other) game to make friends.

XI, now, is a backdrop to everything else I do online. It's "something to do" to keep me from doing things I know people would regret.

I see that the online beta applications for XIV are up. I give it basically about a month into the release before the game is sufficiently reverse-engineered that playing the game fairly will put you at such a disadvantage that the money is being wasted in continuing.

That's where we have been with XI for a long, long time. And the only reason I continue playing it is to spite the fucking cheaters who have taken it over.

XIV, because of the influence of American gaming, is an abject non-starter I am not interested in taking part in. Third-party software and bots will be forced on the community within 30 days of the release of the game.

I will be doing another Top Ten this year, and I already know the #1: The Salvage Bans and the Resultant Death of FFXI.

Could there be something positive in those Union chests?

Was there a Ninja update at some point?

I got back into doing Campaign earlier this week and I noticed that, more often than it used to, you could actually get some decent stuff in a solo or low-man Union chest, when it didn't used to be that way.

Now, yes, there is the occasional non-chest or Silk Thread/Silver Ore/Slug Eye chest. But it does seem that, with enough points, you can get some decent stuff, more likely than it used to be...

Hint, Special Task Force: R M T i,s dog (dog=not) t|h|a|t sTUpid

I apologize in advance for the people who cannot read that title, but I do that to make a point.

Yesterday was my first good 7-hour FF11 session in quite some time. And it is clear that, using many of the methods I illustrate above, that the filters against RMT spam worked for about one month, but no longer.

I literally made about a GM call an hour for that entire run, and only one of those seven calls was not RMT/filter-evasion material.

These people are not stupid, Square-Enix -- they've figured out how to get one step ahead of your system.

1) Substitution strings: We know that many of the site names are in the filter, as is the word "bonus", which is often used in an RMT advertisement. So, often what they will do is what I did in the title above with the word "dog", except they will not use it for an entire word (because that word is in the filter), but for a portion of the word or the website name.

Another way I see this going down is something like this:

"Blog by Sierra Tango Alfa Romeo Charlie Alfa Delta Echo"

What did I just do? I spelled "STARCADE" in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet)

Anyway, what would stop RMT from doing the same thing?

2) Punctuation insertions. Like the word "is" (i,s) and "that" (t|h|a|t). I've seen this on repeated occasions. It's not unlike many sites I go to, where obscene and unpleasant words are automatically censored, even if those words are part of other words ("grape", for example, for the latter case).

So they get around censoring website names by adding punctuation...

3) Spacing.

... and spacing. I saw an actual .cn Chinese RMT website get through the filters with both spacing and punctuation.

So why do I post this?

Here's a hint: YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT RMT WITHOUT SICCING LEGAL ON THEM AND SHUTTING THEM DOWN.

Your filters effectively worked for about a month, Square-Enix!

But they work no longer, for you think that the RMT (especially the organized Chinese RMT rings) are as stupid as you think most of us are.

So, I reiterate: Get Legal to shut down these websites for the theft and sale of Square-Enix proprietary property (as much as you would with a website doing the same with PHYSICAL S-E proprietary property (which see the lawsuits you won against some of the vendors from a few months ago.

Else, you will once again lose to RMT.

Edit: This post has been sent to the Special Task Force through the relevant Square-Enix website.

Haven't done a full update in a while...

Not much to update either:

RDM 66, SMN 31

Several more successful Nyzul 20 runs, but, out of all the times I've done 20, I've seen 2 drops and 1 we couldn't get due to time.

Biggest thing this week has been crafting, since they decided to basically force it on us with this Synergy stuff.

Started by getting Cooking from 0 to 30, or close.

Going to do Alchemy to 32 or 33, for Fewell production.

And Fishing is at 2 or 3 as well.

Oh yeah, fuck me for not cheating my ass off, isn't that right, Square-Enix with your Nyzul bullshit!!!!

Oh, I'm pissed again.

Square-Enix is apparently deciding that they don't want any more people getting to floor 100.

Sounds like they don't want us getting to floor 26 either!!

Just tried to do two Nyzul runs 21-25, and here's the fun part:

First run:

21: All-Dahak
22: Leader-Shielded Chariot (which wiped another attempt with a different group I was on last night)
23: All-Dahak
24: Family-Flayers - Time out

Second run:

21: All
22: Lamps-same time
23: Family-Flayers
24: All with an NM Wyvern thrown in for fun
25: Leader, but true-sight imps in the zone and we timeout before we kill it

WHAT IS THIS FUCKING SHIT, SQUARE-ENIX?

You want me to dupe and cheat and RMT and all that shit just to be able to advance in this fucking Nyzul bullshit???

I fucking appreciate wasting my time with players you believe to be substandard -- that is, people without relics and mythics and all that shit.

I fucking appreciate seeing the same goddamned attitude in some of your playtesting and R&D that I see in the BluGartr children.

I fucking appreciate seeing real effort in this game come to NOTHING.

WHY DOESN'T SQUARE-ENIX JUST BAN MY MOTHERFUCKING GODDAMNED ASS AND GET IT OVER WITH????

Synergy update today...

Haven't gotten a chance to play much at all in the last 7-10 days. (A couple Nyzul 20 runs on Wed., and that's about it, with the Net being real stupid -- sounds like it was a short and some corrosion (with a little splice-point thrown in)).

Sounds like today is the Synergy update. Interesting to see how it eventually goes, but I have to get this thing loaded first and hope everything holds up on my end.

We'll see on that. My friend is finally back to work tonight. :)

This week has sucked rocks

Not only the busted window, but:

-- Now 0/4 on the Mithra Fight in Kupo d'Etat. Got it down to 1%, but the bitch Clamped me before I could Icarus Wing and kill it for our party.

-- And now our Internet is semi-borked, keeping my roommate from working on her projects until Associated Tyranny and Terrible-ness feels like coming out here to fix a shorted-out phone line (when it rains (about twice a year) out here, there's a chance water gets into the phone lines... Now our DSL and phone lines are bleeding together, with predictable results!). My roommate has had these before, and it took her 20 minutes to convince the dorks at "Customer Service" (probably more people in India) what was going on...

-- Went to pick up some groceries for the roommate today. Bus was 20 minutes late, most of the pasta boxes were broken, got 2/3 of the pasta sauce wrong (another run tomorrow), bus home was disrupted by a guy who pushed his way through me off the bus (as I was carrying all my roommate's groceries), got a 10-pence piece instead of a quarter...

-- And this Christmas music is going off like a hypnotic mantra -- "MUST... BUY... EVERYTHING..." Look, I love a great gift just like the next guy, but we've gone far too far on this Christmas-as-shopping crap.

BAH HUMBUG!!!