In other news.. Crafting kick almost done.

I’ve lost a lot of will to actually Play the game lately. I’m more keen in finding interesting bits of the game to do. I’d like to do Salvage, because the idea sounds awesome. Start in an overwhelmingly powerful area with severely limited skills, and fight your way out! Of course, I’d like some Morrigan too, but like I’ll ever get that. I’d like to get some Dynamis time in, but with my work schedule being slightly shifted due to new clients, I’ve missed and will miss quite a few runs.

So, for now, I craft. On my first character I had a fun crafting experience. I got Woodworking up to 88, and got my Apron, Gloves, and Desk, along with all the key items. I promptly Deleveled that, and got Goldsmithing up to 88, to do the same thing, Glasses, Apron, and Fool’s Gold. I deleveled that to go back to Smithing. I took that to 98 before I sold the character.

Why would I go through that? Oh, that was before the Ranger nerf. Hellfire +1s sold for 80-90M. It was, and I believe still is, the best gun in the game short of the Relic gun. I had the market cornered on those puppies.

Funny story: I started FFXI initially because of the crafting system.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love Final Fantasy games. The stories they weave are beautiful, and the environments are always astounding. There are other parts of the game I love. There is, to my knowlege, no other MMORPG out there which will allow you to play All Available Jobs on 1 character. And not only that, but combine 2 completely different jobs at any given time. Those things, along with so many other examples, are why I always call FFXI my home.

However, the crafting system is simply the best. Lets look at some other MMORPGs and their system.

Let’s look at the Elephant, WOW. Crafting is simple: Gather materials into Inventory, tell your “Recipe” maker to construct, oh, 200 copies, click “Create” and boom. Minutes later you have successfully crafted a crapload of stuff. No failures, no High Quality, skill means nothing but more recipes. Oh, you don’t even have to Remember recipes. They’re stored in your book. Granted, that is a feature I’d love, to instantly call up a recipe and not have to look to a website. However it’s not vital, and acts as a pseudo-barrier to making you think.

You get 2 “Professions” you can take to max. The other ones you can’t even dabble in. Subcrafts aren’t required, or even possible. Sometimes you need materials from other crafts, true. You can never make those materials for yourself most of the time, forcing you to use the Auction House. Of course, that may be a plus, but it’s definately a Minus for trying to maximize profit.

Most games use the same basic formula. You pick 1 craftskill, and you can’t dabble in the others. If you need Cloth, find a Clothcrafter and pay their price. End of story.

Now that this rant has gone on long enough, I’ll get to the meat. I spent the time in the past to get Smithing to 82.5. I capped out Woodworking. I got clothcraft to 53, where it will likely stay for a while, because I simply do not want to blow up silk cloth for 7 levels. Leathercraft is 49 right now, but within a day or so, I’ll get it to 60 and be done.

That will basically leave Goldsmithing, Bonecraft and Alchemy. Bonecraft I will probably dabble in as I go. It’s honestly not all that important to a Smithing main, but there are a few good profit recipes that use it. Goldsmithing is basically waiting for me to cap Alchemy. I plan to go the Bullet route, as pouring millions into a subcraft just does not sound fun. Alchemy, of course, is cheap. And it’s fairly easy to 60. However, it is time consuming. Quite frankly, I’m so burned out on the game I don’t think it’s worth doing right now. I’m not going to use the Gold sub anytime soon anyway, so it’s a wash.

So there we go. What next? I’m definately going to focus on the DKP for the 3 shells that have been begging me to get it worked on for them. I’m thinking about starting up a Low-man group to go do fun stuff. Mercenary type stuff like God kills, NMs, etc.

Oh… And I want to do a Summoner Burn from 13->75. Anyone on Hades interested? I plan to go to 75, and basically focusing on that for a few days, to a week. Whatever it takes.

Treasure Pools and Bazaars – A worthy DKP Addition?

Up until last week, I had never thought of this concept in endgame shells in regards to DKP. What concept? That of a shared treasure pool for certain drops.

For instance, lets look at a Dynamis shell. Generally, the Shell Leader, or Sponsor, buys the hourglass and takes all Byne/Wootz/etc from the pool, leaving the 1-5k drops and AF for the “cleaning crew”. How the loot get divided depends on who bought the glass.

In the case of the sponsor, haha suckers! (I kid!) The sponsor will take all currency, presumably toward a relic. (Honestly, i’ve never heard of a sponsor that wasn’t a Shell Leader that wasn’t working towards a relic. Then again, what do I know.)

In the case of the shell leader, there are generally 2 options. Option 1, the Shell Leader is just basically a Sponsor, and takes the currency for his/her relic. Option 2, the shell does Monthly/Quarterly/etc payouts, and at his/her discretion sells the loot to distribute payments. Of course, an alternate to that is when someone in the shell gets close to relics, the shell gives out the currency in bundles to help with the relic.

In the case of option 2, shouldn’t the DKP have a way to track what the pool currently is, and maybe the status of the pool? Enter the Treasure Pool. You’d need to be able to track what is in the pool, of course. Perhaps some kind of history about the pool, say “Sold 100 whiteshells at 13k each”, would also be necessary.

You could do some extra things with this. Maybe a Banking system, where the shell usually sells 80% of currency to pay members, but holds back 10% towards the next Hourglass, and 10% to help members fund relics. Loaning wouldn’t be entirely out of the question. You could also have a “Points for X” option, say in Limbus shells where you can exchange 25 points for 75 coins. I know several shells, and am in a shell, which offer a trade system for items.

Going along these lines, you could tie a Bazaar into the Pool/Bank system. Almost every endgame shell sells loot from Gods/Kings, for instance Black Belt items. You can list your bazaar, have histories, “referral bonuses” in Points, Cash, Items, whichever.

I feel like all of this would be an enormous help in running a shell off a pure DKP system, and actually I’m suprised that nobody mentioned me not talking about it. Thoughts?

Homam Hat! Also, DKP information

A few weeks ago, I joined a Limbus linkshell. I’ve known about this shell for a while, as many of my friends have been active in it, and have known how great the rules structure is. Up until a few weeks ago, I just didn’t want to join another shell. I got tired of politicing in endgame shells, and really, to be flat honest, there’s nothing I really want from 90% of the endgame content out there. Sure, Nashira would be nice to have. Is it a must? Not at all. Upgraded AF is kinda shiny, but not that big of a concern to me.

However, this shell, like many others I’m sure, allows you to trade your points for coins. In my book, this is an awesome thing. I have no jobs that can even wear Homam. I’m far enough behind on Nashira that really, unless the shell does Ultima runs every 3 weeks, and no Omega runs, I’ll probably never get it. So for the moment, I’m attending every run, and basically cashing out my points all the time.

To date, we’ve done 2 Omegas, 1 Ultima, and 1 “Zone Farming” run (Apparently they already had a Ton of chips saved up). I cashed out the points for 3 of the 4 runs (still an Omega run to cash out), and got a 15 coin bonus, on top of the 7 coins I got from the coin split. If I were to just sell the coins straight away, I have a cool 175k from 2 weeks of work. Sure, it’s not the best moneymaker out there, but really, think about the time required to get that. 60minutes for 1Omega+1Ultima, 1 hour for Zone farming. That’s a good 80k/hr rate. And if I want to get the Brutal for my warrior (because I already have Loq) I’m 33% already.

On the latest Omega, as we farmed, we actually got no Chip drops, but 2x AF+ drops, one of which was BLM, which I got. Yay! However, we also got an Adaman ore that autosorted to a friend (who gave it to me!) and a ton of coins, so the next farming run should be sweet. When Omega died, he dropped legs (which went to a friend again!) and Hat. Of course, nobody wants hat, so it went up to autosort. Apparently, while I was busy D2ing everyone, I forgot to pass. So I now have a shiny red hat that I might never wear. It sits right next to my Denali Bonnet, which shares the same fate.

DKP: The Quest

I’ve officially started writing code for the DKP. Nothing really usable yet, mostly relation code, the general queries I’ll want for the webpages. I’m using the runs from my old Limbus LS as a guide for data. Granted, there were not a lot of runs, so I might have to get some data from somewhere else as the project grows, but so far it’s a lot less complex than I had figured.

Organizationally, from a Member’s standpoint, you’ve got characters that you can be linked to (yes, more than 1), which are then linked to Endgame shells that use the DKP system. Each character has (currently) a Primary job, a Secondary job, and a listing of all jobs leveled for the shell.

From the Items Standpoint, you are able to add items Before or After they actually drop. I prefer to have all items available before they drop, but YMMV. You can also add Point Values for those items.

From an Events standpoint, there are Events Types (for instance a generic Apollyon NW run), Events (for instance, the June 03, 2009 Apollyon NW run), Attendance for each Event, jobs used on that event (if desired), drops from that event, and the Point value of the event.

History-wise, it will, of course, maintain the histories of each item, and its’ point cost at the time of dropping, who it dropped to, when it dropped, what Event it came from.

I know, a lot of it is basic DKP stuff. But it never hurts to write it out and see what people think. I’m open for comments, and would love some input. I’ve always been a staunch beliver in designing things fully before implementing them, as it’s always much harder to change your implementation based on minor details.

Crafting… and crafting… and Crafting.

In the last 2 weeks, the crafting bug has hit me hard. I’ve sold 90% of my HQ Black Mage gear, in an effort to push my crafting skills to awesomeness.

So far, it’s going pretty well. I’ve landed up at 79 Smithing, which is a good place to be. In the next day or two, i’ll have 60 Clothcraft to go with my 60 Woodworking. Bonecraft has been pushed up into the mid 20s, and Leathercraft up to 31.

90% of my Auction House history lately has been Desynthables. Antican Pauldrons, Troll Vambraces/Pauldrons, Quadav Backplates, etc. Every Darksteel and Troll Bronze that has dropped, I’ve saved. I know I’ll need roughly 90 Troll Bronze to get from 79 to 82, unless I use Darksteel to make Nodowas and take the gigantic hit.

In my effort to get up to 79, I made roughly 15 stacks of Karimata Arrowheads. Stacks of arrowheads sell on average 1 per day on my server. Note the “on average”. The reality is, it goes in spurts. Whenever someone is leveling Woodworking up through that zone, or someone wants to try to profit kill on Kaburas, 4-5 stacks go at a time. Then it takes a week or two to sell more.

1 day after I started making the arrowheads, my woodworking 100 friend went on vacation. Needless to say, I’ve got 15 inventory spaces clogged up with Karimata heads. The upside is, if we get those all into arrows, we’ve potentially got 7 million gil worth of arrows. It only cost me about 1.5mil to make all those heads, so even if I give him Half of that money, he’d have a nice chunk of change for the synths, and i’d make my money back, plus some extra.

Towards the end of this week, after I cap out Clothcraft, I’ll be going back to White Mage to finish it. I really want WHM at 75. I don’t personally like the job, but it’s handy in many situations.

Good luck everyone!

On Everything Recent

Well, when I got back from vacation, I realized I have no endgame shells left. So in the end, the only reason I have to write the DKP system I was planning on writing is this: The crazy amount of email I’ve received encouraging me. So all plans are still go.

I spent the last day crafting a little bit. I sold most of my WAR gear to finance a little leveling up session. I did the math and figured out that it would only cost a good 300-400k to jump me up another 15 levels in Smithing, so that’s been my goal. I’m in the middle of the session now, but i’m at Smithing 60, 6 levels away from being done with this stage.

Almost all of my friends have come back to the the game. Even R, the guy who sold his account, decided to completely restart from scratch. We’re only missing 1 of the old group now, and he can’t play because he’s overseas. I keep in contact with him on myspace, but he’ll be gone for at least another year.

Starting tomorrow I’ll be back towards meriting up the rest of BLM on puddings, and back into Limbus. Hopefully, our shell will be doing some ANNMs soon. Everyone seems to want to do them. Sounds like a lot of fun.

We’ll see what happens!

On DKP Systems

I mentioned in my post yesterday that I had basically taken over duties as “Points guy” in the Limbus shell. Let me tell you something. Doing points for a linkshell is Frustrating.

On top of the fact that you have to take perfect attendance, signed in triplicate by everyone attending, plus their friends, and that you still have to perform your duties for whatever event you’re doing, you have to record the exact information everyone wants, and record it perfectly.

It gets worse when you use a Point Tracking system that’s not easy to use. Cen uses excel spreadsheets and forums to keep track of points. That has to suck. I mean it’s nice and generic. If you ever pass control to someone, I’d wager that 90% of the computer users in the world have used Excel or some form of spreadsheet, so it’s easy to pass control. Our old leader setup a FreeDKP site. This is my biggest problem.

FreeDKP is a nice site. They let you set up (somewhat) free DKP systems for your guild/shell/whatever. With the exception of the Ridiculous advertising every 2 minutes, it’s fairly nice. I’d recommend it if you’re starting a Shell or guild, and need some basic points tracking. There are several things it lacks though.

On DKP Systems:

Did you know that the most popular DKP system, the one that’s used with WOW, is really just EQDKP modified to work with WOW classes and items? True story. It was designed for use with Everquest. But since that game has basically died out, people grabbed the DKP system and modified it for a game that is current.

Someone else out there has modified it to Half-heartedly accept FFXI, but there’s a few glitches in it. You can’t set more than 1 job, you can’t set which job people took to which event for statistical purposes. You still have to do things the crummy slow way.

You know what one of my biggest complaints is? You can’t add an Item into the system unless it has already dropped from a raid.

What’s a raid anyway? Well that’s EQ/WOW speak for a Monster kill or a function. What’s an Event? It’s a Type of Monster Kill or Function. Confusing? It was to me when I started.

Final Fantasy DKPS: Any Good Ones?

The only FFXI DKP I’ve seen that didn’t make me want to retch was the one that Excellence, a linkshell on Hades, uses. Stanislav, the guy who runs Excellence, actually custom made that. It’s a Java frontend using an off-the-shelf ORM to tie things together. It looks beautiful, and he’s done an awesome job with it.

So where do we go from here? The current solutions reek or are private, so we must build our own!

Begin the Custom DKP!

I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks before now. What would a DKP need to really be successful? Well, it would need to be fairly easy to use. It would need to be easy to install, and customize per user. It would need to have multiple easy ways to get data into and out of the system.

I decided I’m going to use Google App Engine to create a DKP system for Final Fantasy, the way I think it should be made. I’ve been asking around for people’s thoughts, and I will continue to do so. I’m going to start posting blog entries about what’s going on, and point to the example site I’ll be setting up.

Wish me luck!

The Next Generation

This last few weeks has been harsh on my time. My wife, children and I are setting up for a week long vacation. As a consequence, we’ve had to tighten our work hours for a while, and of course, that messes with every activity in the game. Since every shell sets themselves up for Eastern time, I already have a hard time making events for shells. (In case you didn’t know, I’m on Pacific time).

Limbus: The leader of our shell spontaneously decided he didn’t like Hades after all, and Server-jumped back to his original server. What did he tell the shell? “I’m taking a break for college.” What a jerk. So Cen, Raist, and Me took it upon ourselves to try to organize things better than the original leader did. I’m basically the points guy. I have our DKP set up for tracking, and it’s no problem. However, due to me not being able to play for the few hours our Limbus times start, I’ve missed the last 4 runs, and will miss the next 4. 

I’ve gone duo with some friends, to keep our coin counts up, and to keep in shape. It’s been great, we’ve gotten a few runs out of the way, and we feel like we could duo the world.

Dynamis: I recently got my Beaucedine Clear. The only clear I still need is Valkurm and I’ll be open for every zone. I’m also now involved with 2 shells. A good friend is in a shell full of Talented people that basically only run the zones with 20-25 at any given time, and the lists are short for all the gear I want. It sounds a LOT better than the bullcrap rules my current shell has, so I’m excited.

Sky: Well, Cen quit our sky shell after an idiotic BS episode from one of the other shell leaders on Thursday. Apparently the fallout is still happening, since as I type this blog post, 2 more have quit. I was already on my way out of the shell. The only piece I don’t have that I’d really like is Haidate. However, since the line is too long, and I just don’t do that much on warrior right now, i’m going to be cashing out my points in Gil drops on today’s gods, and getting gil from our bank. They’ve been a good LS, and I’m sure i’ll go back sometime. There’s just nothing I really need.

Other: My oldest, Best friend just sold his character. It was originally pretty heartbreaking to me, as he was one of the last 2 remaining. He swore he’d basically be quitting. He left for 2 days. Logged on one of our friends character’s, noticed that 3 of our old 6 man crew was online, and decided to play again… only now he doesn’t have his own character. It’s been interesting doing things with him. He at least seems to be having fun in the game again.

Hopefully, after vacation, I can get to do some of the things I’ve been wanting to do. I hear it’s possible to Duo and Trio some of the ZNMs, and it sounds like fun!

BCNM Drops, and how strange they are.

Lately I’ve been attempting to find ways to make money. I’ve taken my warrior out to Zi’tah and farmed Cuttings and Moss until my face turned blue. I took a friend to go farm Wyverns, which I haven’t done since my good BLM Bonecrafter friend quit.

Last week I learned about the Imperial Standing NM Puk that drops Khroma ore. Every time I see a shout, I feel compelled to join now. I mean it’s only 3k ISP. That’s maybe 2 hours of time in even the worst merit party i’ve joined, for a chance at 350k-ish. It’s like a money printing press. So far, i’m 3/8 on Khroma, which to be honest isn’t too bad.

Tonight, an LS mate put together an Under Observation run. Now I’ll admit, I think BCNMs are a joke really. The NMs are ridiculously easy, and to counter that, SE makes drop rates for anything that has any sort of value an abyssmal percentage of drop likelyhood.

Case in point: before tonight I had used 720 Beastman seals, and 120 Kindred Seals, and the biggest drop i’ve had was 200k (a Dragon heart in a KS30). I’ve never gotten a Ni, Kraken Club, anything that mattered.

So when I join these things it’s basically for the free gil you get on a win, and the 10-20k in random drops you get. 30k for 30 minutes of work isn’t bad, really. One less hour farming for your shihei costs.

So /random join member goes first. We wiped, of course, because I think it’s first orb bad luck.

Second orb is me. We go in, and just completely trash the eyes. None of us even were worried about dying, we just nuked the crap out of it.

I pop the chest, and wait. (There’s a good 1 minute lag between any BCNM chest I open before I see the drops). One guy says “Congrats!” one guy says “Jerk.” I’m thinking, Ok, I got Ni. That’s what my LSMate was going for, he needed Ni for one of his jobs.

We zone out, the pool shows up.. ZOMG I GOT THE CHARM!

We did the 3rd orb, and of course, the pool is utter junk. The best item was the Vile Elixer that sells for 20-30k.

Should I feel bad? I mean that’s kinda the risk you take when you do these things. I’ve seen countless people get awesome drops. I’ve had a guy in a Pooled Drop (where we were supposed to sell the drops and split the cash) take a Kraken club from someone elses orb, and hop servers. All I did was let it go. It makes no sense to dwell on it.

Ah well. Luck is strange. Gogo random percentage drops!

Limbus Soloing….. Failed.

This week I got rid of my Limbus linkshell. The leader was a nice guy, and lots of my friends are in the shell. However, real life forced my hand by changing my schedule to be horrible 1 of the 2 days the shell ran.

Since there was no purpose gaining Half as many points as everyone else, it was better to just cut from the shell.

And this left me at an odd point. Everyone I know who has Limbus access has a shell, because they want Nashira or Homam gear. I never particularly cared for either of them, I was more looking for a new circle of friends, and some of the AF+1, as well as coins.

Thus today I attempted my first Solo. I decided to try Temenos – East tower.

Starting out, everything was fine. I grabbed the first Fire Elemental, launched a nice 700 damage Thunder at him. Put him to sleep as he cast Flare. Grav, Bind, Aspir. Aero for a good 620.

Did I mention this thing has 8000 HP. Yeah. So even if All I hit it with were Max-damage Thunders, it would take me 12 nukes. Full MP,  I can support 6 Thunder 4s. Aspiring every round, and taking a quick knee, I was doing fine.

Then Sleep Resisted. Sleep 2 resisted. I died….. And I forgot to put up my Fresh, New “Limbus Only!” Reraise Hairpin. Oh, and the elemental was at 1% HP. Go team moron!

It was a good learning experience though. Half of the way through, I decided to try Water nukes, thinking maybe my damage was less because it wasn’t “elemental wheel” like. Boy was I wrong, Water4 was hitting for 450. That’s junk.

End result: In 3 days, I’ll try again, and this time I’ll only use Thunder 4.

Not really FFXI related.

It’s funny the little things you notice about yourself.

I notice that I enjoy to do things with friends. If someone asks me to do quests or kill NMs or just level with them, sure, I’ll do it. Because companionship is key.

I notice that I’m partially a masochist. I don’t like leveling jobs because I hate most idiots in the game. I prefer to look for Solo ways to do things. That’s the definition of masochism: preferring to do things the hard way. (Or at least it should be the definition!)

And lastly, I notice that I use the word “So” a lot to start off paragraphs in my blog.

I was reading over the blog to see what I’d written about so far, and maybe to mix up the style of it, and I noticed that at least half of the paragraphs start with “So”. Why is that? Is it similar to how people, when they’re speaking, use “like” and “stuff”?

To be honest, it’s quite fascinating to me. I’ve spent my lifetime studying languages and learning the intricacies of human behavior when it comes to communicating. There are many computer programs out there that I’ve written or co-written to analyze speech patterns and writing patterns.

And yet I start most paragraphs on this blog with “So”.

It’s irritating, to say the least.

As a result, I’m trying to be more liguistically aware of what I write here. It seems like it’s going to be a daunting task. I can’t really just start spewing out letters on the keyboard without thinking about it. I’m going to have to put some forethought into it.

Then again, maybe “So” isn’t that bad afterall.