Be careful what you wish for... (FFXI)
Apr. 10th, 2004 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thistlechaserFor the past couple days I've been saying "I really should travel to new areas, see new things, find new things to fight...". Well, tonight I got that -- in spades!
But first, this morning: I'm at the point where I'm really supposed to be partying with people instead of going solo, so I put my 'seeking a party' flag up and waited. Soon someone sent me two messages in a row: "party" "party?" I always have to remind myself that typing does not count in this game, so I didn't judge this person by his. I asked who else was in it (red mage and thief), then I asked where they were going (the lack of a fighter-type troubled me, so I wanted to make sure they weren't going too far). They claimed not to be. So with one telling me "fallow me" and the other saying "com with us", I went along. Of course they headed right into the Orc Camp. One died as soon as we stepped in. (One of my friends saw us and warned us, but it didn't make a difference. I don't remember the timing of things, but these two were so green I'm surprised they didn't die by running into trees.) So the two of us ran back out to wait for the dead one to join us again, but I learn my lessons and left that party. Zero XP and zero money for the time invested (but at least I didn't die).
I spent the afternoon solo'ing and fishing. Raised my fishing rank to 2.5 (yay!), got about 600 XP for myself (not a lot, but not too bad). Then I decided to party again. The adventure was about to begin!
Right away someone paged me, inviting me to join an XP party. XP was exactly what I was looking for, so I asked her who else was in it (four others, three being fighting types). Everything sounded good (they claimed to be going only to the Plateau), so I agreed. We ran and ran and ran, picking up two more people on the way (and losing one to logging out). We ran... through the Plateau, through a tunnel, and into some sandy area with the sound of the ocean. EEP! Nervously I checked my map, and found that we were in the Dunes. I heard things about the Dunes, and none of them were good or low-level-friendly. We had a lot of people though (but only one white mage: me), and there's no way I would have found my way back, so I went along with them. They stopped at a spot where you can set your home to (home = place you return to when you die), and the party leader instructed everyone to reset their home there. Being the very untrusting person that I am, I did not. And in the end, that's what saved me.
We got attacked by something (Hill-something, looked like a lizard), and never before had I seen something that so well defined "cluster fuck". While one person pulled (drew the attacks to her), and I tried to keep up with healing her, the others wandered off and attacked other things. Soon the puller was dead, and the only thing the monster had left to focus its anger on was me. Eep! (I mean this literally: In the game, there's a setting called 'hate'. Depending on what you do, you gain hate. The monsters use this setting to decide who to attack. Healing people generates a lot of hate.) Luckily someone else came by and killed it before it could kill me.
We gathered together and healed, then went and attacked something else. This time most people attacked it at once, but still someone died. (I have only Cure, which heals about 20 HP. People were getting hit for ... well, lots more, and more often than I could heal.) After one more poor battle, people FINALLY got the friggin idea that maybe this area was too tough for us. (HELLO?) Bah. And in all this time (about an hour so far), I had earned under 100 XP. I could have made many times that solo'ing.
So we ran somewhere else (AWAY from the direction of home!) and battled again. Things were still too strong for us, and one person was tired, so the party decided to break up. There in the middle of no where. ?!?!?! Two people decided to go to a different city (not my home), and two decided to stay out and try to fight more. This left me in the middle of nowhere, with no way to get home! (This was way, way far away, and I had no maps for it.)
Luckily, since I had earned nearly no XP (around 100), I didn't level up. I could die and take the XP hit (10% of the amount you need to level up). "Amusingly", dying cost me 100 XP. So for all this time, trouble, and stress, I got nothing. (And seriously, it was stress. I was so tense my hands were shaking and I couldn't hardly type.)
Bah. I may solo for the rest of my time on the game! (Not totally serious there...)
Once the party disbanded, I decided to make the most of the situation and take lots of screenshots. It was sort of funny playing tourist, when I knew I could die at any second. (Since I didn't post on Friday night, I have some screenshots from then, too.)
Friday: Mostly hanging out and dealing with egg foo. Since the place was so crowded, I saw lots of interesting people.
An elf from San Francisco?
I love, love, love this weapon! I don't know what it is, other than orc-related (that's their flag/sign). Maybe it's the Orc Axe? Man, it looks so cool.
I love girls with flowers in their hair! A catgirl in white armor with a flower in her hair. She was so pretty! (Too bad the angle somehow made her look fat.)
Galka is a race you can play. They're also about the last race I'd pick. I'm human, and a small one. (You pick your race and then a hight for it.) I like playing people who are short! (Though not Taru Taru-short.)
In FFXI, you can make things from other things. It's a skill you have to learn, and it's way cool looking. (By the way, that's a Taru Taru next to him.)
Saturday: While the party tonight sucked, I sure did get great screenshots from the event!
Party running in line, fall trees, mountain, odd building. I have no idea what that building is, but it was strange as heck.
Death Lands... eh, the dunes. Pretty, pretty evening sky and lots of sand and trees.
Nearly night in the dunes. Boy, it was pretty. It was almost worth the trouble of the night.
Dunes, morning. (We weren't there all that long, but time runs about 25:1 in the game. 25 gamedays for 1 RL one.)
Party running in line. Windmills! Windmills! Too bad it was overcast, but still! Windmills! So cool! They really moved and all that!
More running, more windmills! Eee! My hands were shaking at this point, and it was hard to keep my finger on the button to run. (I couldn't use /follow, because we were avoiding monsters at this point.)
The BEST screenshot of the night! (It's a tad bigger than the others.) Flower petals on the hill in the foreground, mountains, overcast sky. I wish we could have stopped for a moment, but everyone just ran on...
Night falling, odd rock formations.
Second best screenshot, wonderful stuff! That odd building in the dusk. So cool!
This was on top of that odd building. I have no idea what it was... Maybe some safe place to heal? (Heh, maybe it was a teleport spot and I could have gotten home!)
My last sight before death... (very dark). Since I had no map, when I came to a mine I ran into it. (No, don't ask the logic of that.) Apparently undead like mines, because they chased me. Lots of them. When I came to a dead end, I came to a dead end.
(I hope that's enough screenshots to satisfy those of you who asked for them! I have about 60 more just from the last two days, but those were the best of them.)
Rereading this post, it sort of sounds like I had a bad day of gaming. It wasn't all bad. I enjoyed fishing a lot. (It was so peaceful! You could watch the stream's water flow by, fish meandering through it, nothing trying to kill you (except once).) I'll be happy (very happy) when this egg event is over. To sell anything, I need to be logged on. And to be logged on, I can't do anything else on my computer. :( I'm ODing on FFXI foo this weekend, which isn't good. If only you could do other things while being logged on!
Anyway, I'm still enjoying the game a lot. It's so so so real, it's just amazing! And while there are sucky people, there are some great ones, too. (After I killed a sheep, some low level fighter came up to me and said "WOW! You're SO strong for a mage!". It made me giggle out loud!) It's so great to be able to help people, too. Some new person wandered out too far, and he was getting his ass kicked by a hare (snicker). So I came close and kept healing and protecting him (which gained me hate) and soon the hare was attacking me instead... and doing 0 damage. Hee. So he hit it (and hit it and hit it and hit it) and eventually it died. I suggested he go back closer to the city. :)
But first, this morning: I'm at the point where I'm really supposed to be partying with people instead of going solo, so I put my 'seeking a party' flag up and waited. Soon someone sent me two messages in a row: "party" "party?" I always have to remind myself that typing does not count in this game, so I didn't judge this person by his. I asked who else was in it (red mage and thief), then I asked where they were going (the lack of a fighter-type troubled me, so I wanted to make sure they weren't going too far). They claimed not to be. So with one telling me "fallow me" and the other saying "com with us", I went along. Of course they headed right into the Orc Camp. One died as soon as we stepped in. (One of my friends saw us and warned us, but it didn't make a difference. I don't remember the timing of things, but these two were so green I'm surprised they didn't die by running into trees.) So the two of us ran back out to wait for the dead one to join us again, but I learn my lessons and left that party. Zero XP and zero money for the time invested (but at least I didn't die).
I spent the afternoon solo'ing and fishing. Raised my fishing rank to 2.5 (yay!), got about 600 XP for myself (not a lot, but not too bad). Then I decided to party again. The adventure was about to begin!
Right away someone paged me, inviting me to join an XP party. XP was exactly what I was looking for, so I asked her who else was in it (four others, three being fighting types). Everything sounded good (they claimed to be going only to the Plateau), so I agreed. We ran and ran and ran, picking up two more people on the way (and losing one to logging out). We ran... through the Plateau, through a tunnel, and into some sandy area with the sound of the ocean. EEP! Nervously I checked my map, and found that we were in the Dunes. I heard things about the Dunes, and none of them were good or low-level-friendly. We had a lot of people though (but only one white mage: me), and there's no way I would have found my way back, so I went along with them. They stopped at a spot where you can set your home to (home = place you return to when you die), and the party leader instructed everyone to reset their home there. Being the very untrusting person that I am, I did not. And in the end, that's what saved me.
We got attacked by something (Hill-something, looked like a lizard), and never before had I seen something that so well defined "cluster fuck". While one person pulled (drew the attacks to her), and I tried to keep up with healing her, the others wandered off and attacked other things. Soon the puller was dead, and the only thing the monster had left to focus its anger on was me. Eep! (I mean this literally: In the game, there's a setting called 'hate'. Depending on what you do, you gain hate. The monsters use this setting to decide who to attack. Healing people generates a lot of hate.) Luckily someone else came by and killed it before it could kill me.
We gathered together and healed, then went and attacked something else. This time most people attacked it at once, but still someone died. (I have only Cure, which heals about 20 HP. People were getting hit for ... well, lots more, and more often than I could heal.) After one more poor battle, people FINALLY got the friggin idea that maybe this area was too tough for us. (HELLO?) Bah. And in all this time (about an hour so far), I had earned under 100 XP. I could have made many times that solo'ing.
So we ran somewhere else (AWAY from the direction of home!) and battled again. Things were still too strong for us, and one person was tired, so the party decided to break up. There in the middle of no where. ?!?!?! Two people decided to go to a different city (not my home), and two decided to stay out and try to fight more. This left me in the middle of nowhere, with no way to get home! (This was way, way far away, and I had no maps for it.)
Luckily, since I had earned nearly no XP (around 100), I didn't level up. I could die and take the XP hit (10% of the amount you need to level up). "Amusingly", dying cost me 100 XP. So for all this time, trouble, and stress, I got nothing. (And seriously, it was stress. I was so tense my hands were shaking and I couldn't hardly type.)
Bah. I may solo for the rest of my time on the game! (Not totally serious there...)
Once the party disbanded, I decided to make the most of the situation and take lots of screenshots. It was sort of funny playing tourist, when I knew I could die at any second. (Since I didn't post on Friday night, I have some screenshots from then, too.)
Friday: Mostly hanging out and dealing with egg foo. Since the place was so crowded, I saw lots of interesting people.
An elf from San Francisco?
I love, love, love this weapon! I don't know what it is, other than orc-related (that's their flag/sign). Maybe it's the Orc Axe? Man, it looks so cool.
I love girls with flowers in their hair! A catgirl in white armor with a flower in her hair. She was so pretty! (Too bad the angle somehow made her look fat.)
Galka is a race you can play. They're also about the last race I'd pick. I'm human, and a small one. (You pick your race and then a hight for it.) I like playing people who are short! (Though not Taru Taru-short.)
In FFXI, you can make things from other things. It's a skill you have to learn, and it's way cool looking. (By the way, that's a Taru Taru next to him.)
Saturday: While the party tonight sucked, I sure did get great screenshots from the event!
Party running in line, fall trees, mountain, odd building. I have no idea what that building is, but it was strange as heck.
Death Lands... eh, the dunes. Pretty, pretty evening sky and lots of sand and trees.
Nearly night in the dunes. Boy, it was pretty. It was almost worth the trouble of the night.
Dunes, morning. (We weren't there all that long, but time runs about 25:1 in the game. 25 gamedays for 1 RL one.)
Party running in line. Windmills! Windmills! Too bad it was overcast, but still! Windmills! So cool! They really moved and all that!
More running, more windmills! Eee! My hands were shaking at this point, and it was hard to keep my finger on the button to run. (I couldn't use /follow, because we were avoiding monsters at this point.)
The BEST screenshot of the night! (It's a tad bigger than the others.) Flower petals on the hill in the foreground, mountains, overcast sky. I wish we could have stopped for a moment, but everyone just ran on...
Night falling, odd rock formations.
Second best screenshot, wonderful stuff! That odd building in the dusk. So cool!
This was on top of that odd building. I have no idea what it was... Maybe some safe place to heal? (Heh, maybe it was a teleport spot and I could have gotten home!)
My last sight before death... (very dark). Since I had no map, when I came to a mine I ran into it. (No, don't ask the logic of that.) Apparently undead like mines, because they chased me. Lots of them. When I came to a dead end, I came to a dead end.
(I hope that's enough screenshots to satisfy those of you who asked for them! I have about 60 more just from the last two days, but those were the best of them.)
Rereading this post, it sort of sounds like I had a bad day of gaming. It wasn't all bad. I enjoyed fishing a lot. (It was so peaceful! You could watch the stream's water flow by, fish meandering through it, nothing trying to kill you (except once).) I'll be happy (very happy) when this egg event is over. To sell anything, I need to be logged on. And to be logged on, I can't do anything else on my computer. :( I'm ODing on FFXI foo this weekend, which isn't good. If only you could do other things while being logged on!
Anyway, I'm still enjoying the game a lot. It's so so so real, it's just amazing! And while there are sucky people, there are some great ones, too. (After I killed a sheep, some low level fighter came up to me and said "WOW! You're SO strong for a mage!". It made me giggle out loud!) It's so great to be able to help people, too. Some new person wandered out too far, and he was getting his ass kicked by a hare (snicker). So I came close and kept healing and protecting him (which gained me hate) and soon the hare was attacking me instead... and doing 0 damage. Hee. So he hit it (and hit it and hit it and hit it) and eventually it died. I suggested he go back closer to the city. :)
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-11 04:19 am (UTC)I miss playing multi-player games. Other than the strategy games I've played, the last RPG/adventure type game I played in multi-player was Diablo (the first one). I do recall that I did a mad amount of leveling up on my own though before I even bothered to join a party. PKs were rampant then as well, so I had a fun time killing those who tried to kill me. >3
Healing normally gains you a fair amount of experience points, now I'm curious as to how the xp numbers tally in this game.
Ristoril in this shot (http://www.hot-hot-hot-catlove.com/ffxi/sightseeing2.jpg) interests me. Nice getup. Is he just an extraordinarily tall human or another race?
If I wasn't a gamer, I'd think being threatened by a hare to be ridiculously silly, but since I've seen odder things, I'm just horribly amused by it.
And something you said just made me realize you're playing this game on your PC. I thought you were playing it on the PS2. o.O Now I'm really tempted to get the game and play. How much does it cost per month?
no subject
Date: 2004-04-11 05:47 am (UTC)Ristoril is of the Elvaan race. Pretty much Elves, only they have a high STR instead of DEX/AGI like your typical elf. They're REALLY freaking tall and have kinna freakishly long limbs. ^^;;;
no subject
Date: 2004-04-11 05:50 am (UTC)... Also, you're gonna need a tank with better armor. That one elvaan dude is wearing like... level 7 stuff in a level 12 area. @_@
no subject
Date: 2004-04-11 08:36 am (UTC)... Also, you're gonna need a tank with better armor. That one elvaan dude is wearing like... level 7 stuff in a level 12 area. @_@
Heh, that was sort of the story of the night! One of them forgot to put his armor on before we set out! Can you imagine? Sheesh! :P
no subject
Date: 2004-04-11 08:42 am (UTC)Alas, healing gains you no XP at all! You can improve your skills in healing by using healing, but you get no XP for it! (Though if you're in a party and some other member else kills something, you do get part of that XP.)
And yep! The PC version came out way before the PS2 one. I play on my PC, and most good players that I know do the same.
C'mon, you know you want to play! ;) It's about $12 a month, and the first month is free. The game ran me about $50, I think? That may or may not have been including overnight shipping.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-11 10:49 am (UTC)I would have run away from that group as soon as I saw that.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-11 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-12 05:32 pm (UTC)If I hadn't been worried about how much time I have to play then I'd have bought the game and signed up in a heartbeat. It's just that I barely have time to play as it is, so $12 a month with a big possibility of me not playing much is a big waste to me. ;_;
no subject
Date: 2004-04-13 09:05 am (UTC)They're a good race for most everything, from magic to fighting. (I think they lean more towards fighting though, if I recall the FAQs correctly.)
no subject
Date: 2004-04-14 04:36 pm (UTC)