thistlechaser | Apr. 19th, 2005

It's an odd thing. I sit at work and think of the endless stuff on FFXI that I can/should do... but once I get home I don't want to do any of them. Just yesterday I was looking at someone's screenshots, and I smiled to myself and wondered how anyone could ever be bored with the game, yet once I got home I was.

Since I couldn't do EN last night, I decided to kill two other birds with one stone: Go to Quicksand Caves and do the teleport quest, then use my key to open a coffer and get the map. (With XP from Escort, I hit WHM 38 last week. Luckily I had bought the scroll at that time, intending to later quest it and sell it back. That made life much, much easier.) I teleported to the desert, ran across it, entered QC, and ran through it to the "drop zone". I could drop in one direction and hit the area that has 4/5ths chance of being the right place, or I could go the other way to the area that had 1/5ths shot. Figuring everyone would hit the 4/5ths area and make the ??? stuck in the 1/5ths spot, I went there first. Of course it wasn't there. :P Plus it was a dead end. Warped out, teleported in, ran across the desert, ran through QC, went to the 4/5ths area. Found it in the third place I checked. Woo!

So lather, rinse, repeat: Warped out, teleported in, ran across the desert, ran through QC. Tried to find a coffer, but ended up in a dead end. Warped out... (lather, rinse, repeat).

I got tired of doing that, so decided to go to Rabao to finish the scroll quest before looking for the coffer more. I'd never gone there on my own, just followed others, so me with my lack of sense of direction was doomed. I headed for the wrong zoneline into the west desert, a goblin spotted me (since I only had sneak up), and in three hits I was dead. And deleveled. Luckily I had reraise up, so eventually I could raise (and got my level back, barely). Eventually got to the city and finished that leg of the quest. Hopped a chocobo, went back to QC, looked for a coffer, hit a dead end with no way out, warped out.

I really, really should have given up at this point, but I'm stupid. Things got bad here: Teleported in. Usually when you're on the telepoint, you have a moment to hit your sneak macro. As soon as I loaded, I hit my macro... but somehow an ant aggroed. (Thistle peers at ant as his Sneak is casting, "What's it casting sleep at? No one's here but me... maybe it's confus-Zzzzzzzz.") Even when I was asleep, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Then it cast poison on me and so I woke up... and ran. (I knew where I was going this time, and thought maybe I could outrun the spellcasting ant.)

That was a fine plan... till a worm popped and cast bind on me. Then from lord knows where another ant linked. Then another. And I died and I deleveled, this time for good.

So I gave up on the map and went to do some other stuff instead. Mostly failing crafting. (I swear to god, there is something wrong with the crafting system. There HAS to be. I failed four of five synths 60 levels below me (neutral day and moon). I failed more of Draque's arrowheads than I did ever before all together. There HAS to be something wrong with the system, I just can't have this much "bad luck"...)

So once more, since the game quite clearly intended to keep me bent over a desk, I logged off early and went to bed.

This morning the servers crashed. Again. And know what? I wasn't upset at all that I couldn't get on.