If you thought the rage over the Live Letter was bad, this invoked something worse.
Errors 3102/90000:
During the Open Beta (Phase 4!), a lot of the servers were undergoing a tremendous amount of traffic. I would like to think that SE was horribly underestimating the amount of people willing to give FFXIV another chance, especially those who had gone through the earlier beta phases. Also, the story of FFXIV itself is quite interesting, I mean let's be real here, they shut down the first iteration of this game. A live MMO was shut down and rebuilt from the ground up in order to surpass and exceed the abysmal quality of its previous existence. Who DOES that? Well, nobody did, until Square Enix went along and decided "Ya know what? We need to fix this."
The NA/EU servers were put through the wringer. I didn't manage to wake up in time to make my character thinking that I would have plenty of time later to do it, but I quickly learned that it was a mistake. Within minutes of my logging in, I was locked from creating a character on the server of my choice. I'm not gonna lie, I was quite pissed, since I had ended up being essentially locked out most of the day thereafter. I mucked around playing on another server until I would be notified via SE's twitter, but the thing about it was that it "shut off" in the evening and resumed in the morning. Meanwhile the player base is anxious for updates because suddenly Errors 3102 and 90000 happened. There was already frustrations running at an all-time high over being locked out of populated servers, and now this. I knew immediately what this would turn into:
People were disconnecting from the server, but not fully. The server still counted these disconnects as still being on the server so essentially once you were kicked out from one of these errors, one's avatar still was flagged as being online, stuck in limbo, and locked out from being able to be logged in again. People began to lose their collective shitballs, and well, the Train to Server-Wreck City began gaining steam as more and more people became affected by it.
Two distinct crowds once again made their appearance known.
"Why Won't SE RESPOND?!"/"Stop Being Such Entitled Crybabies, DIS IS BETA."
I completely get the reasonings behind why any of these crowds of collective opinions get their logic, but isn't anyone else besides me getting tired of running into this merry-go-round? Both camps have their points, but let's be real here. One side does tend to act a bit entitled at their worst, while on the other hand, the attitude on the worser side told the rest of us to suck it up, we're there to test the game and endure the bugs. I'm sure most of those latter responses were happily click clacking away in the game though, dodging the errors that kept affecting more and more people as the day progressed.
A thread on the beta forums had begun a while ago by the official staff, asking anyone who was affected by these errors to post their character and server name, and nothing else. This thread began to pile on and on as the day progressed, and eventually I knew that the servers would have to come down at some point.
Meanwhile back at Mystery Bug Camp 3k, the frustration at SE's lack of response grew and grew. And like I had pointed out on previous posts, the MMO audience of 2003 doesn't exist, as they kept making their frustration increasingly known on the beta forums. Most of the banter between these camps once again turned into another episode of FXIV Beta Forum Wars. This episode, Battle at Facepalm Valley indeed kept up to its location's namesake.
I can't defend the entitled worser aspects of the camp that demands satisfaction at every turn. It's sadlarious to see a chunk of the player base make themselves clearly known by how epically whiny they are, and how loud they tend to get on the forums. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that maybe it's the residual effects from such rampant behavior on other MMO's but most of these people were so predictable it was easy to tune them out from those who had valid posts and concerns. Despite those valid concerns and posts, most didn't get the attention they needed, as they were constantly de-railed by interludes back to the fray that was Facepalm Valley from either party.
Now on the other hand, I can't imagine those who never ventured outside of FFXI or FFXIV 1.0 to be not shocked at this kind of "savage" behavior. Then again I can't help but think that this is what most of this camp has been used to, being isolated from other toxic gaming communities. Suddenly the feeling of their game mixing with the "unwashed masses" begins to collectively form in their mind. And you know, I can't really hate on that because it happened to me too. Maybe in another game and in a different way, but I can understand that feeling akin to the idea of walking into your favorite restaurant and suddenly a flood of whiny brats stroll on in by themselves, complaining about everything, making mountains of molehills, exploding at the earliest inconvenience. And you can't do anything about it except keep sipping your coffee sitting across from your friend as you stare at each other, with the idea dawning on both your minds over the harsh reality that this is how it's going to be for a while. A long while. Some of these from this particular camp are very quick to defend the game and its rash decisions, but I like to think it's a direct result of being indoctrinated by the usual treatment from Square Enix's customer service. Or lack thereof, let's be honest here.
u tellem, blanche-dave!
Dang, Finally:
1AM came and the realm I wanted to roll on finally unlocked. I made Oriza and began my journey... FINALLY.
Was I pissed that I couldn't go on the server of my choice initially? Of course. But I did suck it up and waited. I knew I had lost a day of time, but so had a lot of other people. I just would have to make do with the time that I would get. I was happy though, to finally get started.
eeee so cute
Once again I was whipped up into the story fairly easily. I began in the city of Gridania, and unfortunately, it meant that my storyline cutscenes would be with these two chuckle-heads insead of the heart-throb Thancred:
princess cameltoe and dude with glasses.
yea those glasses are goofy, sorry 'bout it
But onward I went. I began Archer this time, because I had expressed earlier intentions of becoming a Bard later on down the road. I know that will change depending, but for now, I think it would do well for me to level something useful.
sparkly thangs!
ha!
rofl. yep. managed to get one snap before he got away.
some rando qtpai
Yeah evenually I did have to level Conjurer. Balls.
Starting Again:
Yeah, sure, Archer is easy DPS. As long as you can cycle your globals/buffs efficiently as well as keep the DoT up, you could do some real decent damage. Sometimes beneficial procs of certain self buffs would kick in at inconvenient times, right after spamming some other ability. But for the most part, as long as you had your cooldowns in check and timed them efficiently together, the damage could stack very quickly. I had to stop at 12 to level Conjurer. I figured I may as well. Blegh. I got CNJ til about 8 until I couldn't stay awake, and I knew that if I slept now the beta would be over before I woke up.
Oh well. Off to sleep I went anyway, grateful I made some progress.
Finally, I leave you with this:
he's too sexy for his er... hat?
