Lazy Sunday Night, or MMORPG Denouement
Mar. 20th, 2005 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caraigWay back in December when my computer got so fragged I had to reinstall Windows, I was going to cancel my FFXI account before the end of the month. Then I reinstalled, and discovered that FFXI had apparently mated with the Windows Registry in such a way that it failed to recognize to makeover I'd given the computer and refused to come out and play. Which meant I would need to reinstall FFXI to cancel the account. No problem, I figured I'd get to it eventually. Then, well, everything happened. And I didn't get 'round to it until today.
Before I meander all maudlin-like let me get one thing straight: FFXI defines the term 'grind,' and that was what made me leave it. Everything was a timesink: leveling, crafting, exploring, questing... everything was purposely made hard, hard, and a bit more harder just to be certain. To be sure, the meager accomplishments I had in that game were ... pretty meager, for the amount of time and energy I put into it (which admitedly wasn't nearly as much as what some people put into that game.) It may have made you reasonably proud of those accomplishments but it also made you look up the great big slope of reaching 'more interesting things' that it became horridly daunting.
There were a few things I enjoyed about it. The scenery was gorgeous. The game-world was very beautiful and a lot of the scenery was simply breathtaking. A lot of care was lavished on the game-world. The Zilart ruins were gorgeous, looking at once old and also inexplicably high-tech. The player races were a little hokey -- basically, humans, elves, magical chipmunks, orc-like bricks, and catgirls -- but still visually very well-done. And the backstory? Fairly simple at first blush but the two expansion packs expanded on that story considerably. There was a wealth of mythology/history that was packed in the game. I could have been quite, quite happy to just toodle around the game world and be a sort of archaeologist, go through the quests and learn the backstory and explore.
Alas... even that had to be worked for to an insane degree. With the second expansion you had to fight through three incredibly difficult battles to get to about 50% of the expansion's content. I don't care what anyone says; the Promyvion battles were HARD. And not only hard as in 'difficult,' but 'hard' as in 'trying to find anyone who wants to do them.' After a certain point, people just did not want to go through the bother of even trying. Even without the expansions, with such a broad and expansive game-world, one would think that there would be plenty of things to quest through without going through that rigamarole. Ah, but there you would be wrong, because the national missions also required not only insane amounts of time but also large numbers of people to complete, sometimes as many as 18. This isn't even counting Dynamis, which involved raids of 64 people if you were lucky to get invited to one.
This brings up the other major problem with FFXI. Elitism and Cliquishness. The game was centered on party play. You really couldn't do anything -- except maybe fish and craft -- without a party. And while pickup parties were common, at the higher end of things opeople would only work with people the knew and who were in their linkshell/guild. People got reaaaaaly scary-level cliquish. The Drama(tm) ran high, sometimes. Because the game did not have any player-versus-player components (except for Conflict, which came much later) it was entirely player-versus-environment, which... actually made things get ugly, at times. It was like, for want of any PvP the players MADE for themselves a PvP situation. Reputations made or broke a person and those reputations were surprisingly fragile. There were arguments as to the hunting and claiming of notorious monsters, who was a member of what linkshell, people leaving linkshells, people throwing hissy fits... the list goes on. And if you wanted in on those parts of the game that involved high-end content -- i.e. the 'fun places' -- you had to have the right connections and know the right people. Want to hunt HNMs? do a Dynamis raid? Who Do You Know?
I had a whole lot more to say on the subject of elitism but I'll just summarize: if you didn't have the best gear -- some of which could go for a million-plus gil, and gil was notoriously hard to come by -- and didn't know the right people and didn't have the exact 'customization' (subjob, equipment, etc.) to your character, you were considered sub-par. You were pariah, you were gimped, you were found wanting and needing. You were not of the Body, Landru. Made for a bit of a bad state of mind, I imagine. Interesting parallels can be made in how a community can inflict that mode of thinking on it's members, between FFXI and the portrayal of men and women in modern entertainment media.
The grind ground on. It ground me up and I walked away. Not without some regrets, mind you. I would have been QUITE happy to just take my red mage and explore. Go hither and yon, quest and learn more about the backstory and history of the game-world, interact with NPCs, and just do stuff, do fun stuff. But ultimately to do most of the fun stuff, you had to be a pretty damn high level, you had to have all the gear that level and job 'required,' you had to have the right subjob, and most importantly you had to know the right people. Oh... and you had to put in the time to grind to the point that you could do all that. Not me. I passed.
A lot of the people I met there were good people, and unfortunately when I stopped playing I lost contact with most of them. I like to think I learned a lot from playing FFXI, in particular what I like and don't like about games. I miss the gorgeous and rich game-world. I miss the very nice graphics. And I miss the people. Everything else... well, not too much longer from now I'm going to have a lot of empty space on my hard drive.
Anyway! Enough maudlin meandering. Here's a joke that I fell over laughing when I first heard it. It's a bit obscure, but short:
"These two guys are standing around when Baba Yaga's bar walks into them...."
^.^ Hey,I laughed at it. Pax!
Before I meander all maudlin-like let me get one thing straight: FFXI defines the term 'grind,' and that was what made me leave it. Everything was a timesink: leveling, crafting, exploring, questing... everything was purposely made hard, hard, and a bit more harder just to be certain. To be sure, the meager accomplishments I had in that game were ... pretty meager, for the amount of time and energy I put into it (which admitedly wasn't nearly as much as what some people put into that game.) It may have made you reasonably proud of those accomplishments but it also made you look up the great big slope of reaching 'more interesting things' that it became horridly daunting.
There were a few things I enjoyed about it. The scenery was gorgeous. The game-world was very beautiful and a lot of the scenery was simply breathtaking. A lot of care was lavished on the game-world. The Zilart ruins were gorgeous, looking at once old and also inexplicably high-tech. The player races were a little hokey -- basically, humans, elves, magical chipmunks, orc-like bricks, and catgirls -- but still visually very well-done. And the backstory? Fairly simple at first blush but the two expansion packs expanded on that story considerably. There was a wealth of mythology/history that was packed in the game. I could have been quite, quite happy to just toodle around the game world and be a sort of archaeologist, go through the quests and learn the backstory and explore.
Alas... even that had to be worked for to an insane degree. With the second expansion you had to fight through three incredibly difficult battles to get to about 50% of the expansion's content. I don't care what anyone says; the Promyvion battles were HARD. And not only hard as in 'difficult,' but 'hard' as in 'trying to find anyone who wants to do them.' After a certain point, people just did not want to go through the bother of even trying. Even without the expansions, with such a broad and expansive game-world, one would think that there would be plenty of things to quest through without going through that rigamarole. Ah, but there you would be wrong, because the national missions also required not only insane amounts of time but also large numbers of people to complete, sometimes as many as 18. This isn't even counting Dynamis, which involved raids of 64 people if you were lucky to get invited to one.
This brings up the other major problem with FFXI. Elitism and Cliquishness. The game was centered on party play. You really couldn't do anything -- except maybe fish and craft -- without a party. And while pickup parties were common, at the higher end of things opeople would only work with people the knew and who were in their linkshell/guild. People got reaaaaaly scary-level cliquish. The Drama(tm) ran high, sometimes. Because the game did not have any player-versus-player components (except for Conflict, which came much later) it was entirely player-versus-environment, which... actually made things get ugly, at times. It was like, for want of any PvP the players MADE for themselves a PvP situation. Reputations made or broke a person and those reputations were surprisingly fragile. There were arguments as to the hunting and claiming of notorious monsters, who was a member of what linkshell, people leaving linkshells, people throwing hissy fits... the list goes on. And if you wanted in on those parts of the game that involved high-end content -- i.e. the 'fun places' -- you had to have the right connections and know the right people. Want to hunt HNMs? do a Dynamis raid? Who Do You Know?
I had a whole lot more to say on the subject of elitism but I'll just summarize: if you didn't have the best gear -- some of which could go for a million-plus gil, and gil was notoriously hard to come by -- and didn't know the right people and didn't have the exact 'customization' (subjob, equipment, etc.) to your character, you were considered sub-par. You were pariah, you were gimped, you were found wanting and needing. You were not of the Body, Landru. Made for a bit of a bad state of mind, I imagine. Interesting parallels can be made in how a community can inflict that mode of thinking on it's members, between FFXI and the portrayal of men and women in modern entertainment media.
The grind ground on. It ground me up and I walked away. Not without some regrets, mind you. I would have been QUITE happy to just take my red mage and explore. Go hither and yon, quest and learn more about the backstory and history of the game-world, interact with NPCs, and just do stuff, do fun stuff. But ultimately to do most of the fun stuff, you had to be a pretty damn high level, you had to have all the gear that level and job 'required,' you had to have the right subjob, and most importantly you had to know the right people. Oh... and you had to put in the time to grind to the point that you could do all that. Not me. I passed.
A lot of the people I met there were good people, and unfortunately when I stopped playing I lost contact with most of them. I like to think I learned a lot from playing FFXI, in particular what I like and don't like about games. I miss the gorgeous and rich game-world. I miss the very nice graphics. And I miss the people. Everything else... well, not too much longer from now I'm going to have a lot of empty space on my hard drive.
Anyway! Enough maudlin meandering. Here's a joke that I fell over laughing when I first heard it. It's a bit obscure, but short:
"These two guys are standing around when Baba Yaga's bar walks into them...."
^.^ Hey,I laughed at it. Pax!
