Dear FFXI community.Follow

This is to include BlueGartr and FFXIAH as well, and pretty much any general community of any game for that matter.

I have a simple statement for you, please pay careful attention to it:



Nobody cares how "good" you are at this game if you act like a giant bag of dicks about it every waking moment.




Thank you.

Edited, Jun 11th 2012 2:14am by Raelix

I would simply say "Nobody cares how 'good' you are at this game." At all. Period. Seriously. No one cares. Not even a little. Your accomplishments, knowledge, experiences, gear, titles, crafts, gil, etc are all meaningless. Yours are and so are mine. No, I'm not being sarcastic.

Edited, Jun 11th 2012 6:55am by Camiie

[True Strike]

I support this message.

And I agree with your message as well Vlor. The use of the word "giant" was unneeded, out of line, entirely over the top and could have been omitted without a material change to the message at hand.

He's just speaking their language. I tend to do similar when dealing with trolls. :P


As another generalized rant, I'm growing weary of the mental conditioning rampant about MMO communities where voicing any kind of discontent on a subject is tantamount to whining, seeking entitlement, suck less, or opening the floodgates to insults from people who take offense to their gaming overlords making a mistake somewhere along the way. Telling people to just quit is another popular line, too.

Some of this actually ties into the point of OP, but I'm jabbing more at game developers that let it happen. The beauty of the MMO genre over their static console counterparts is that they can evolve. Without opinions and grievances being voiced, nothing will change for the better. You can't go all SE style and claim to value feedback, but up and shoot down or ignore it, either. This isn't to say every gripe ever made is valid (Like in FFXI terms, the curious group of people who want long spawn HNMs to return ultimately for prestige purposes), but when you get people talking about broken/useless abilities, a given job/class never being utilized, and so on... that means something. Devs aren't infallible and sometimes, contrary to cynical retailer opinion, the customer is right.

I think most of the people who care how good other people are actually only care about how good they, themselves, are.

They look for examples of 'bad' players so that they have someone to look down on, someone they can be better than.

Really, there is no 'good' in FFXI. The skill ceiling is quite low. If you're capable of basic things like swapping gear, using your WS at 100%, and using your spells/JA as appropriate... you're 'good' at FFXI.

That's 5% of the game. The other 95% is finding some other people to do things with. The difference between an 'elite' player and your average joe is less the shinyrare drops and 'skill', and more the fact that they have an alliance that understands basic teamwork backing them up... that and a couple bards and a corsair.

But, people like to compete and inflate their own egosi. That's why if you once farmed 120 coins in dynamis on your best day, you have to say you average 180 coins so that no one makes fun of you and gloats about how they average 200 coins without even using food. That's why every mob that can be beaten without literally breaking the game is "easy", even if people wiped fifty times before finally downing it.

It's why, if I wanted, I could make an alt account, pretend to be a newbie, and ask 'which job deals the most damage?'... and come back to a 15 page flame-war by tomorrow. (Admittedly, we'd probably be discussing RDM melee or the pros/cons of PUP by page three, but you get my drift.)

tl;dr: FFXI is a co-op game, but people still can't help trying to call themselves the best at it for some reason. The entire game is about socializing and who you know. Nothing else matters if you have a skill level at least on par with a typical farmville player.

I agree with you that no one should be a d-bag.

However, everything else you said is irrelevant to the OP.

I do and will continue to define others by their skill while I am playing this game because their skill and attitude are the only things that matter in the game. You bringing up the straw man of respect for a real person by the amount of in game skill/gear they have, has no relevance to any topic about FFXI. This is not what is being discussed. We are discussing attitudes vs. gear in the game. We are not discussing whether gear in game merits respect of a real person.

If their skill is lacking, I will not do events with them that matter to me. I will help them for charity reasons, and I do and will go out of my way to explain the mechanisms of the game to give them the proper tools to succeed on their own, but I will still think that they should have read forums and help guides and ask questions to others besides me, just like I did. And I will not invite them to events whose real life time depends on their skill and gear until they get that up to a minimally acceptable level in my opinion.

If their attitude sucks, I will not interact with them again. Period.

You see, I am the one who gets to define who I will group with. You are the one who gets to define who you group with.

My bar just happens to be slightly higher than yours.

I have met only a handful of people who were truly incompetant; their intelligence level or maturity level should have precluded them from playing any online game at all.

I have met, however, a great many mediocre players who were not capable of multi-tasking, yet insisted on letting outside distractions into their game experience.

Some people can have the TV going on in the background, or a second monitor, or spouse/kids/room mates distracting them and still manage to pay enough attention to the game to not let it affect their apparent skill level.

Most people who have those distractions cannot play without it affecting their performance in game.

Sad truth.

those people apparently "won" in FFXIV - since "summons" like Ifrit etc will be world spawn NMs ... and only summonable by the group to last defeat it...and won't respawn till people use it - so even worse in a lot of ways than old HNM, since whoever uses it will know exactly when they plan to use it and will have a leg up on monopolizing it.

Sort of an aside, but I think it is a hilariously bad design decision.

I think the underlying rule is anything that is exploitable in the game will be exploited. There are always doughs in the game, and they are more likely to take advantage of any exploits in the game; however, the people who take advantage of exploits are not always doughs. Anyway, that is why there always be rules (that are changeable) in the game. As in sports and many other form of gaming, people play exploits and holes in the rules to win. I think it really depends on what you want to get out from a MMO; in my opinion, I get my best MMO game play experience when playing cordially with other folks - and I am not sure being a dough will make that work. However, I will focus more in topping other players if I am playing Risk or Chess.

As for people getting distracted during play - sometimes it is for understandable reasons... I have seen Japanese player has to go AFK... well because his child po*ped in the pants (yuck, excuse my toilet humor). I do feel that gaming is fun only if you play the game with reasonable concentration - in the end, I think the best game play experience is only possible if you interact with the game.