CoP > NAFollow

This post will put my Karma to the test, but it has to be made. Some people need a kick in the ***...a very hard one.

Why am I bringing the "NA" aspect into this? Because the overwhelming majority of people I play with are NA. Nothing more, nothing less. If I partied with JP or EU players, I'd include them in this, but I don't, so I'm not mentioning them...got it?

Many NA have had some resounding success with CoP areas (Promyvions, Aqueducts, Riverne, etc), while many (dare I say most?) still flounder with them, unable to accomplish much of anything and then turning it into an excuse to knock SE for releasing a waste of an expansion.

I'm here to tell you that's not the case. The fact of the matter is, NA players as a whole tend to be limited in their skills. There is more to FFXI than Skillchains and Magic Bursts. The strategy is what enthrals me. It's something I understand, it's something that I very much enjoy developing and implementing, and I see tremendous results when I do that.

My experiences with other players, however, show that for the most part, there is a tremendous lack of understanding about strategies, and an ignorance about pretty much everything related to the game. How long has CoP been out now that I can STILL take full groups to Promyvion areas and they don't have a clue what they are for? You bought the expansion...you paid for it...why? So you could leave it sitting on your computer for 3 months, installed but totally unused?

More to the point, and more specific, I'd like to offer a list of things that NA need to get a firm, solid, unwavering grasp on before things like CoP missions become fun challenges instead of dreary, frustration filled crawls through dangerous areas.

1) Follow the Leader. Do what the leader says. If the leader screws up and everyone fails, you only have one person to look to. If the leader says one thing, and everyone does another, you and up with chaos that almost always results in failure. ONE person should be appointed to make decisions. Who that is is up to you. Generally speaking, it should be someone who knows what they are doing. In the absence of someone who knows what they are doing (it happens a lot), you still have to pick one person who will make the final decisions in order to keep the party unified. Having 4-6 people all thinking that the final decision lies with them is a tremendous way to ensure frustration and wasted time, nothing more. It could be something so simple as the leader identifying that someone in the party knows more than they do about where they are going, and says to the rest of the group, "OK, everyone follow <person> and do what they say." If you want to run around and explore regardless of what the leader/guide says, do it on your own time. If I'm the party leader, and I give people instructions that they don't follow, it just reflects poorly on them. If they don't follow my instructions and they put the rest of the party in a dangerous situation, they are booted. I will not tolerate one person ruining the experience for five others because "I'm not the boss of them".

2) Aggro Management. Beyond level 30, anyone should be able to move through a hostile zone without getting aggro. This is made possible through preparedness by carrying silent oil/prism powder/shinobi tabi at all times, and just using some common sense when you are moving around aggro mobs. That beautiful red message that shows up saying sneak is about to wear off does NOT mean run head-long into the largest group of monsters you can find and stand there panicking. It means get your dense *** to somewhere safe (backtrack if you have to) and re-apply stealth before you continue.

Beyond that, what do you do if you see an angry mob staring at you, but just out of aggro range? If you're like most NA, you will stand there and wait until the mob aggroes. NO! RUN AWAY! If there is nothing behind you, GET OUT OF AGGRO RANGE. There's no reason to be a "dear caught in the headlights". Get your act together and get things done properly.

3) Communication. Communication is more than hitting your TP report macro (even though far too many people don't even do that). Communication involves ALL things, from watching your log for information, watching your party HP bar (whether you are a healer or not), to answering questions that are put to the party. Here's a great example...something I'm sure you've all seen before:

Puller >> Is everyone ready?
~~~~~~silence~~~~~~~
~~~~~~silence~~~~~~~
~~~~~~silence~~~~~~~
~~~~~~silence~~~~~~~
Puller >> <call> Is everyone ready?
PT1>> Ready
PT2>> ya...sorry
PT3>> pull
PT4>> (|Ready!|)
~~~~~~silence~~~~~~~
~~~~~~silence~~~~~~~
~~~~~~silence~~~~~~~
Puller >> <call> PT5? Are you ready?
~~~~~~silence~~~~~~~
PT5>> pull something

The above example is all too common. ALL too common. And it's BS. What the hell are people doing that they arrive in camp, make no mention of being AFK, yet when the puller checks to see if everyone is ready, they don't respond? Is that FUN for some people? To put LS chat over party chat and ignore what your party members are asking/saying to you? Do some people think that somehow "no response" translates to "yes" so there's no point in replying?

Or how's this...party leader asks everyone in Jeuno to make sure they brought silent oil. They mention it 2, maybe 3 times. Everyone heads out to the point where they need the oil, and one or two asshats invariably say they don't have any. Perfectly fine in a group of lvl 20 people, but 60+? Go play something else if you can't handle basic communication.

Even something as simple as deciding where to go for EXP. I KNOW PlayerX is at the keyboard...I see them moving around, and it's OBVIOUSLY not their cat hitting the keyboard while they are AFK. The party decides where they are going for EXP. They decide how they are going to get there. They start forming up for tele/chocobos and one genius invariably asks "where are we going?" NONSENSE. Watch your damn logs for new information. The scenery is pretty, but that's no excuse to be a dunce.

Let's get down to roll specifics, shall we?

Tanks: Holding hate is a very important aspect of your job, but it's not the ONLY aspect of it. The person with the hate is responsible for the positioning of the mob relative to other mobs and the rest of your party. If you are lazy and force the party to fight in cramped, confined quarters because you never consider where the mob is relative to everyone else, you are putting your distanced attackers at risk. BLM, WHM, RNG, SMN, etc have the fantastic ability to stand out of most mob AOE range and still do their job quite well. When the tank decides that the mob should stand wherever it stops after the first provoke, it usually leads to needless damage to other party members, causing more MP to be spent.

Ranged Attackers: If the mob you are fighting has a particularly nasty AOE, STAY AWAY FROM IT. Fighting Fomors in the Aqueducts last night (stupid idea) everyone was told about the AOE drown the Fomors use (-10 HP/second), yet getting the RNG to stand at max bow range so they wouldn't get hit by it was like pulling teeth. You have a ranged attack, use it. In the case of Drown, not knowing your max bow range (or refusing to use it) resulted in our WHM having to waste MP on extra Erase casting for everyone affected by the drown, not to mention more MP for cures healing damaged people who wouldn't need healing at all if they knew their roles.

Mages: If you are having connection issues, you need to let your party know. It's not good enough for the WHM to wait until they DC after an hour or so of a weak connection to let your party know you are having problems. If your connection is giving you massive lag spikes, you HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING.

For any job that is capable of casting Cure magic...USE IT. I don't give a rat's *** if you "didn't join to be backup healer". If you're there for exp, you will do whatever is in your power to keep that exp flowing, PERIOD. I was in an Exp party recently where the WHM DCd and the RDM just kept throwing out nukes while the tank got bludgeoned from full HP to death. Just because your "primary" function in the party isn't main healing doesn't mean that you aren't responsible when party members die, especially when you had the ability at your disposal to prevent it. If your goal in the party is to get exp and you decide to nuke/debuff/pick your *** instead of healing someone when the "main" healer is obviously overwhelmed, how are you benefiting? Is it worth causing downtime (which affects you as much as anyone else) to prove some childish point that you didn't join the party to heal?

The reason why people fail in droves trying to finish Promyvions is because they don't understand these basic principles. For the innocently ignorant, I'll have enormous patience. I will explain as well as I possibly can what we are doing and why. But for those complete and total blights on the gaming community who are clueless but insist on acting like god's gift to their role? You aren't going to be able to exercise your godly talents after you've been booted from my party.

Only too true... Me being the puller 80% of the time, it's sad when I have to spam a <call> 3 or 4 times to make sure everyone is ready, only to find out that 1 or 2 people are AFK without giving a notice... then they wanna be mad at me cuz I "Didn't give a warning" -_-'

(Props and Rate Up for a good post/rant ^^b)

Edited, Sun Feb 6 17:28:37 2005 by ShokotanKnight

Hehe...a fair question, and a good one. It's a rant with a point. It doesn't seem to matter how hard I try, the majority of the parties I join rate on the scale from OK -> Awful. It takes more than 2-3 good players to make for a good party. One terrible player can make an otherwise good party a nightmare. But it's rarely just one terrible player these days. It's a MINIMUM of 1 for every 6 people (that usually means 2-3 in an alliance), couple with 1 or 2 mediocre players, a good player, etc. More than half the time when I was leveling in Onzozo, it took forever to get to camp because people would get killed on the way.

Leading parties through Promyvion areas is a real headache. I started an LS specifically to do CoP missions and had a good response to it, but I just had to take a break from it for a while. Everything from having to try and convince people the importance of being prepared (instead of just charging off to almost certain defeat) to getting everyone in the group to act unified and together while moving from the entrance to the Spire became such a tremendous frustration for me that I put the Linkshell in storage and haven't even looked at it for a couple of weeks. I failed my first few attempts at Promyvions because I was doing what everyone else told me to do, regardless of how it made less and less sense to me every time I did it. Since I started doing it my way, I'm 2/2 in Dem, 1/1 in Mea, and 2/2 in Holla. And we're not talking about hard-fought victories. We're talking about resounding successes that leave no doubt in anyone's mind that the time put into preparing themselves for the mission was well worth it.

I understand that the biggest challenge associated with this game has nothing to do with the mobs you fight, it has to do with coordinating a group of other players to achieve the best results. When those players don't even understand fundamental aspects about how to play the game, it makes things needlessly difficult.

Fantastic post, can't believe that it was warranted, but yeah, pretty much all of that occurs constantly. Too bad the people who need to read it likely won't.

This is the reason I have given up on pick-up promyvions. I tried forming my own twice, and later joined a few other runs. The closest I ever got to success was the first run I led. We got to the spire, but the group had not wanted to spend the time farming any animas, and we lost with the boss almost dead.

The second time, I was resting for mp and the group engaged the MR despite being told to wait. Before I could get up and move to a safe position, the MR used empty seed and knocked me back into a nasty bunch of mobs, thus ending the run.

The third time I went, I just joined an alliance. I was simply tired of spending 5+ hours putting together an party, only to be met with failure due to other's incompetence or impatience. I have a life outside of this game, so I just can't devote that sort of time to this (I'm a bst, afterall). Anyways, this run was a disaster, we ended up dying when the group aggro'd 5 VT-IT mobs at once. I was killed while trying to cast escape. It's just as well, I have a feeling I would have been met with "Omg eldred u noob, we could have won!"... *sigh*

Usually, the majority of people are at least competent, but what dooms promy runs (almost invariably) is a few idiots who simply do not listen. These are the people who take off in front of everyone else, and when they aggro a mob they run around linking as many as possible. They take unneccesary risks, like running dangerously close to a group of mobs on the third floor. I don't get why people have to push their luck so much after spending a ton of time getting that far. It's not needed; you can just wait for them to move and NOT jeopardize all of your work. If they don't move you just kill them one at a time untill the path is safe to cross. Omg, so simple.

*sigh* I guess I was never meant to have a gaudy harness...

This has got to be one of the first times I laughed my **** off at a "rant". It's all too true, although I'm hesitant to say it's a NA only issue...

As far as the promyvions go, they are laughably easy now compaired to when I ran through them before the nerfs to the zones. You can easily get a single "gimped" PT through to the end and win as long as you have a couplke anima. There is absolutly no excuse to say these are too hard now.

The Aquaducts likewise pose no threat as long as everyone knows to sneak passed the oils and run passed the taurus when their not looking at you. If you do have to fight a Taurus or in the Minotaur fight you don't even need holy water, if your tanking it, just turn your back when it uses it's doom attack. If you get aggro from fomors and it's something your PT or alliance can't handle have the decency to run off somewhere safe to raise before you die. They don't track the rest of your PT as long as they don't do something to get aggro.

For Rivern Site A, it's simple to get to the top, just avoid drawing aggro. For the monsters you need to fight to get passed the unstable displacements, just find a safe camp and pull them like xp mobs.

I'm on chapter four now and the only real challenges have been the 2-5 fight and Diablos.

For 2-5 it's important to have yellow liquids to help prevent Transmogrification. If they use that ability one person should be on lookout to do a call and have everyone stop attacking the mammet. Wait alittle bit then start killing it again. Nothing sucks worse than having a ranger EES the mammet during Transmogrification and seeing the mammet going from 1/5 hp to full hp.

Diablos is a pain... Healing management and propper PT placement are really the key elements.

The one thing that I really think can be the difference between success and failure is how much you really want to win... I mean this gilwise. My average expenditure on food and meds for these has been between 15-40k per BCNM fight. If you are not willing to spend the gil on the propper supplies for these, then do everyone else a favor and stay home.

Personally I wish more people would do these missions, I can't even begin to express how much my skill in BCNM type situations has increased from doing these, not to mention how easy many PT situations becomes after you get more of a feel for what you are really capable of.

/agree

Doing a Promyvion-Holla yesterday with a 6-man group, no alliance, we had one genius in it who liked to run around and ahead of the party when we were resting after a Memory Receptacle fight or finally moving along. One rest point he was running around as usual and aggroed a monster, while the Black Mage and I (the White Mage) were still resting our mana. This of course lengthened our stay, as we had to waste our mana healing this guy and nuking the monster, when we could have finished resting and been halfway through the floor by the time we finally were able to move.

I told him to stick with the party so we could stay safer.

Later on, we get to a place on the third floor where a thin 'bridge' was between us and the Memory Receptacle we wanted to fight. Being only a 6-man party, we decided we'd wait for the monsters to wander to one side so we could slip across without drawing their attention.

Our friend the genius decided he'd test the waters before it was safe, and ran ahead across the bridge, drawing aggro and, of course, dying.

I then proceeded to tell him that that was why we moved as a group, to which he replied 'I know what I'm doing!'

Yes, you know what you're doing, and you died for it. Next time STICK TOGETHER.

But, he says, he only leveled this job for promyvions. He doesn't care if he dies. Now this I have a problem with.

I don't care if you just leveled that particular job for Promyvion missions. I don't care if you don't mind dying. I do care if you don't mind dying so much that you take such stupid chances that slow down the rest of the group. I'm not going to bring up time limitations, but I am going to bring up the fact that I don't think anyone wants to spend four-plus hours doing a Promyvion run when it shouldn't take four-plus hours, simply because someone who doesn't care if they die takes dumb chances which result in more time wasted for the rest of the party.

I would be more active... but I'm out of cash now and can't afford CoP (seriously, I don't have 25 bucks to spare). I'm a high school student who works at an ice cream shop. But, in a month when we open back up I'm grabbing CoP and trying to progress with the story.

I disagree that this is an NA problem. I think that is a little too degrading towards us, and the game has been out long enough that we should really no longer be differentiated between JP players.

What I DO notice, however, and that is VERY consistent with every statment that you make, is that those who have jobs 70+ seem to be the most prominent in members who have completed the basic missions. Maybe this is because of our antipation towards sky2, but I belive its more because many of us have learned that sometimes we have to look at the greater picture than just do what our job specifies.

We not only have more experience with fighting HNMs, Zilart Missions, Dynamis, etc., but we often have more than one viable job, the money to pay for the disposables to succeed in a mission, and a real goal at the end of this.

The reason I say a lot of this, is becuase you don't see too many JP's who are in Tavnazian Safehold who are level 45 max. They are also in the high 70's in one or multiple jobs. Sure, that's to be expected with most of them having had the game for much more time than us.

Sorry - by the time you reach level 65 or higher probably, NA or JP doesn't really matter. If you do any of the things as you stated, even as an NA player, you will have found yourself with an awful reputation amongst your peers, and you wouldn't be in those missions.

As much as people felt that the level capped missions were to accept more and more people into these missions, so you could feasibly do them at any level, I disagree. The amount of prep-work and challenge behind these missions is extensive. I feel that the REAL purpose of these missions was to throw everyone for a challenge. You couldn't easily burn through with 5 level 75's and 1 level 50. You have to have a balanced, prepared, and sometimes, lucky group in order to beat some of these things.

my experience with CoP mission (nothing outside of these).

when i did with japanses. the leader will explain startgies, all members will share the concern of what they will face and what their job is. we will discuss what everyone need to do down to the single detailed. everyone shows that they have read the startgy on internet and everyone have some basic idea what to do.

when japanese shout mission in jueno, we can accomplished the mission in 3 hrs at most. everyone has all the food, medicine and items well prepared. everyone knows what to bring and have the cut scene done.

when i try helping NA within LS. they will take hours and hours to say, what cut scene i need to get rdy? who should i talk to? what items and medicine i need to bring. that wasted 2 hours. when ppl finished cut secen, no body listen the startgy. no one knows what they are facing in BC.

that's the problem of NA doing missions. i did all CoP missions with jp who are totally strangers. all 6 ppl didn't know each other and we managed to win every mission. we know what to face, everyday beforei went to bed, i search the website and understand basic tactic. i bought all my medicine and finish all the cut sence before i join mission. everyone does the same. after forming all PT, leader goes through tactic, and last order for medcines just in case someone miss any. we can start mission within 30min of forming pt. and we can finish it in 2 to 3hrs.

you all have to understand the basic tactic, and prepare well before joining mission. that will save everyone's time. that's the crucial thing that why japanese can finish CoP within 1 month of released. (well i finish within 1 week)

yes, i helped them. i even spend countless hours to guide them through chapter 1 to 3, i am having a group at chpater 4.

i learnt my leasson and i will only select those who understand my tactic and my advice. my group now know what to do and finish all the prepration before we start. everyone knows a bit of what they are doing.

this is important. even if you advanture in real life, don't you read maps, understand what kind of insect there would be, what kind of tropical illness if there is any. what kind of common medicine you need to bring? the best advanturers need to prepare all of these, you need to know where to go, what to do , take a risk assessment. if you go to africa , which group will survive? those with knowlege of tropical things and research, or those who doesn't do anything and say advanture means you don't prepare?


you learn things through advanture, but if you go to tropical areas, you probably near dead it you didn't prepare and read all about insects and illness and take medicne from you doctor beforehand. is dead the less you want?

game is the same. having basic idea of tactic won't ruin it. remeber, all tactic need to be polished in order to work. i give you tactic and it won't mean you will win 100%. i expect my group will die 1 or 2 times to polish tactic.

How about like you first said... your LS'ers asked you for advice.

Again, I see _any_ strategy guide (even the ones on Alla) as a "crutch" for people who don't want to learn to play the game.

Otherwise, depend on people who have done it on the game, during the game, for the information. Isn't that the idea of a community.

Now I could understand if these people have either already done it, and want to see if they could better it, or if they're trying to learn what they did wrong after a failure, or if they are COMPLETELY and utterly stuck at a certain point.

But for the people just beginning out, they're going to ask for help, and if you're willing to offer it to them, don't criticize them for taking 2 hours to learn it. (IMO).

Now if you're critiquiing them for not taking your advice during the game, that's a completely different issue, and one I could agree with you on.

Most NA players seem to be casual gamers, and it would appear that is not ok! You must be hardcore or you are nothing. *rolls eyes*