AV: Nobody Cares About Him Anymore...

[MisterBob]

only two earrings be the only thing worth a damn

Yeah screw Fortitude Torque, Merciful Cape, Altruistic Cape, Hope Torque, Justice Torque, Justice Sword, Temperance Axe, Love Torque, Prudence Torque, etc. They are ever so terrible!

[Luminaire]

For people saying sea is worth it because of new kinds of fights....uh....as many times as I've fought Fafhogg or their xcopy bigger brothers I still think wyrm fights are the most tactically interesting and fun fights in the game. Wyrms are interesting because they actually have reasonable stats and very little one-shot potential to individual player characters, yet they present the greatest threat to overall group stability, requiring the largest amount of coordination between all present. Let's have a look at how fun sea is:

Fortitude: hope you like BLMs and kiting. It's like 2004 Kirin Redux. Everyone runs around in circles aimlessly, Fortitude eventually dies.

Temperance: OK so finally they tailor a fight specifically towards melees and it spams annoying status effects and stones people. Great. If you want to make a FUN hnm that is tailored for melees, here is what I would do - make it like Boreal Hound, give it absolute shit defense, but 1,000,000 HP. Give it whatever crazy offense you want but DO NOT GIVE IT SUPERANNOYING STATUS EFFECT SPAM. You know, like every stupid mob in sea. God I LOVE me some AOE silence. I'm WAR main and have every appropriate type of weapon capped with the best possible weapon for each and I still hate this stupid fight. Everyone runs in circles aimlessly etc.

Justice - Bomb Queen. Wow new fight!

Prudence - 2x glitched Byakkos, very creative. What's more fun than Byakko? TWO OF HIM! :D

Hope - least tactical HNM in the entire game, just hit it. Easiest Jailer. It is less threatening or interesting than Gods. I would rather go fight Genbu for the fiftieth time. And I don't need to elaborate on the droprate. Everyone here in a strong LS can repeat the same horror stories I can about 8+ straight pops with nothing. W00t.

J.Lo - Normal mob on crack, awesome. I'm still waiting for the crab HNM, but bigger. At least that one will be funny.

AV - grats to everyone that lucked out and did not get jailed. New kinds of fights sure are fun.

For all that you get free PCCs that like Nny said and proved aren't as good as normal-ass PCCs that are equippable at less than half level if you gear a certain way, which wow, lots of uber people do. Also joke weapons and an HQ Moldavite Earring and Speedbelt +1. For all intents and purposes the stuff you can put in those slots already will produce the exact same result - just like how you can get an Adaberk, sell your Hauberk, and parse exactly the same. Think about something for a second. What if you replaced all the time spent in sea having wet dreams about Sash and moved that exact same about of people and man hours into dominating KA? Hrm.

Meanwhile Haidate is the best legpiece with guns blazing and no equivalents. This is what people mean when they point out sea drops are not worth the reward. For my money the only impact item is the +8 magic acc chakram. Too bad it's on AV and is therefore removed from discussion until AV is not BS. And with J.Lo long since nerfed and AV buffed, S-E does not seem to be erring towards actually fixing this ever. They certainly know by now - they've had enough GMs throw entire linkshells into prison and heard plenty of players' opinions.

Capes are awesome - droprate is not. Their droprate is the biggest joke in sea, moreso than virtues even.

Limbus - I agree with Xavier, I do not consider this part of sea really. I think it's clearly not from the same design team. One could probably check this somehow, but just like RoZ (good shit) and TAU (good shit so far, without a single upgrade patch yet) are from the primary dev team, I would bet so too was Limbus. And if we're lucky the Yakuza have thrown the COP dev team into the poured cement mix foundation of a newly approved Tokyo skyscraper. Yeah Limbus is a) fun and b) has attainable, inevitable, meaningful rewards. See how this sort of makes 'Limbus' and 'sea proper' two very distinct locations. One is a location that exists within the realm of reason and the other exists in a sort of gamer hell, near Daikatana, most movie-licensed games, and post-Core Combat PlanetSide.

All that said I still go farm sea with my LS because hey, it's there, why not. Something to do. No one really enjoys it, we do it anyway. It's there. I go for the fights even when I don't consider them fun - there's certainly no gear I care about. Yeah I have a Fortitude Torque for tanking/my swords but I'm not under some magical illusion that simply because the droprate in sea sucks that automatically makes it better than an easily BCable/AHable lv33 neckpiece (and Fortitude forces me towards Ridill/Joyeuse instead of Pcharm which is arguably better with Maneater/Ridill, hahaha). I wanted it because it's free, not because it's better. Maybe they'll fix AV eventually, who knows. And while I said I think wyrm fights are the most fun, sitting in Aery for no reason to not claim anything isn't really fun either. Now that I think about it, COP doesn't suck, FFXI sucks. I wonder if I can uninstall everything but Aht Urghan.

[Siatdiat]

How many people who dont care about Sea would suddenly go apeshit and work their ass off to get through missions if suddenly the higher tiers of jailers dropped gear comparable to koenig/adaman? Sadly, I think the dev team that made Sea designed it as is b/c they knew people would do it just b/c its there. As far as people saying rewards in ToAU are too easy,

1. No aspects of the new endgame have been added yet but I'm expecting to see something along the lines of Sky this time.

2. The expansion content so far is like a quick injection of crack to stop people from leaving this game. All business's, no matter what field, will always cater to the bitchy customers who threaten to leave, and let the faithful happy customer continue to be faithful and happy.

People are trying to directly compare different aspects of the game, and say which has the best rewards, well for the most part people will do anything generally fun wether the rewards are good or not. The only not really fun activity people will do is 3 kings, and even then its mainly b/c the gear is so good that its worth the annoyance. Ill say it again, when Sea has comparable rewards people will work to get access, so to everyone acting proud of your accomplishments there, continue patting yourself on the back b/c noone else is going to.

As you can tell from my sig I went and played WoW a bit, and I have to say to all the people saying that direct progression in an mmo is good, I dont agree. In WoW the whole game is one big straight line, and you either get into it, or you grind PVP. In FFXI the game is like a cone, people can go in any direction and many manage to cover the full spectrum, Its the freedom of movement that brought me back to this game, and will keep me here.

[Eternus]

Justice is different than Bomb Queen because it charms your tank lol. BQ doesn't do that shit. Prudence is like Byakko, but it goes untargettable and that isn't a glitch... it is 2x THF mobs... it is a /ja called hide (albeit Prudence has a fucked up godlike hide that doesn't wear when you hit it while hidden). Didn't mention Hope? Yeah its a nuking mob (shockspikes, thundaga IV, burst II spam)....JoL does boost and one shots you.. it isn't a regular UFO also has some fun other abilites that regular UFOs don't have (have yet to fight it tbh). Inside Jailers are crap.. and the Ix'aerns are nothing special but Aerns with job specific 2hrs. Well AV is just insanity though lol... Wyrms are all different kinda.. but still they are SMN zerged.. which makes them lame as fuck... seriously Ifrit has an all SMN LS.. 18 to 20 SMN raping Wyrms is not cool or strategic.

[Tom Chambers]

For all intents and purposes the stuff you can put in those slots already will produce the exact same result - just like how you can get an Adaberk, sell your Hauberk, and parse exactly the same.

I thought this was worth quoting because 2% more damage isn't gonna make or break your xp/hr, nor is it gonna get you over the top, finally allowing you to kill Nidhogg/JoL/Cerebus. All it's gonna do is, drumroll please, stroke your ego. Just as, for many people, having a Hope Torque that only 8 other people on their server has, strokes their ego.

When you're playing the game for ego (and don't lie, everyone is to some extent), don't be surprised if people love Sea almost because of it's low drop rates, because in their mind it weeds out the pussies. I'd bet a large amount of LimitBreak, Apathy, or SeaShell would read this thread and laugh in our faces.

Now someone is gonna rip on those guys (and probably me, I'm prepared to be called a douche by anime guy any second here), but you all jumped to defend the level-62-in-12-days guy for his time management, so keep some perspective.

[Septimus]

Fact is, if CoP was so great, why was it that one of the first LS's that got to sea, and reached JoL, now have a WoW forum under the FFXI forum, with other people following?

Bingo!

[Demetrios]

Fact is, if CoP was so great, why was it that one of the first LS's that got to sea, and reached JoL, now have a WoW forum under the FFXI forum, with other people following?

Bingo!

It couldn't have anything to do with Excalibur either or the JP botters could it? =P I'm sure Bert would have a different outlook on the game if he gave a relic horn it to your LS's equivalent of Xavier on BRD and had a stream of Ridills, Defending rings, E bodys, A bodys, and M bodys, to a point where the ground kings no longer seem the end all be all by the sheer quantity of them hanging around.

[Brennon]

For all intents and purposes the stuff you can put in those slots already will produce the exact same result - just like how you can get an Adaberk, sell your Hauberk, and parse exactly the same.

I thought this was worth quoting because 2% more damage isn't gonna make or break your xp/hr, nor is it gonna get you over the top, finally allowing you to kill Nidhogg/JoL/Cerebus. All it's gonna do is, drumroll please, stroke your ego. Just as, for many people, having a Hope Torque that only 8 other people on their server has, strokes their ego.

When you're playing the game for ego (and don't lie, everyone is to some extent), don't be surprised if people love Sea almost because of it's low drop rates, because in their mind it weeds out the pussies. I'd bet a large amount of LimitBreak, Apathy, or SeaShell would read this thread and laugh in our faces.

Now someone is gonna rip on those guys (and probably me, I'm prepared to be called a douche by anime guy any second here), but you all jumped to defend the level-62-in-12-days guy for his time management, so keep some perspective.

(Responding to the bolded part.)

Ok, so sea is like having a competition about who can punch themselves in the face the most times before passing out? If you win such a game, and feel proud about it... then... umm... congratulations?

[Tom Chambers]

No, more like an accomplishment few have the patience/perseverence to achieve. Ya know like...if we could all have the same talent for football, most people still wouldn't wanna practice in the hot for 5 hours a day over the summer, and probably say it's like 'punch[ing] themselves in the face the most times before passing out" (although in reality it's probably harder) but uhh...the players on the team would still have a a nice little glow about them because they did what was too hard for other people.

You get my point?

[Brennon]

No, more like an accomplishment few have the patience/perseverence to achieve. Ya know like...if we could all have the same talent for football, most people still wouldn't wanna practice in the hot for 5 hours a day over the summer, and probably say it's like 'punch[ing] themselves in the face the most times before passing out" (although in reality it's probably harder) but uhh...the players on the team would still have a a nice little glow about them because they did what was too hard for other people.

You get my point?

I'm not saying there is no possible appeal to that for anyone, anywhere.

Do you think that was the goal of the CoP dev team, to create such a system that only appeals to such a small minority of players, and turns everyone else off? I don't.

Hence, CoP fails.

[Raineer]

No, more like an accomplishment few have the patience/perseverence to achieve

The problem lies in getting 18+ people to follow you and agree to give up any and all enjoyment of the game just so you can say you were the "first" to do something.

You could also add "desire" to the end of "patience/perseverence", that would make it more correct. A word to the wise, no one cares about your epeen so I hope you get ALOT of enjoyment out of it, being the first to "perservere" and obtain a goal that is ridiculously not worth it is hardly an accomplishment at all.

[Siatdiat]

Its a pretty weak comparison, football players are in very good physical shape, and most people actually get a rush from the hard training. I run 3 miles in under 20 minutes, its not the best but its far better than the average human, it hurts sometimes to run but its a great feeling and it makes me feel better, more awake even. Punishing yourself with boredom and no reward in Sea doesnt compare at all sorry.

[Tom Chambers]

No, I don't either. Your 'hence' makes it seem like you're making a conclusion and ending the discussion but I wasn't arguing whether CoP fails or not. I really don't care if someone says it 'fails' anymore than I care if someone says it 'wins', it doesn't change what happens when I zone into Al'Taieu. The game still plays the same, ya know?

My point was that for reward vs. ratio Sea and Kings are almost identical, but you hear alot more bitching and moaning about Sea. But I think last night me and Wafik and Lockecole figured out it was just plain hypocrisy/laziness.

So uhh...guess I don't have much to add now. Just wanted to remind people that parsing 2% higher and having a super rare, marginally better piece of equipment basically does the same thing for your ego.

edit for raineer and siat: easy killers. We already established people get enjoyment out of achievements that few others get, now we're splitting hairs? Well this accomplishment I understand, but this one is stupid! Is that what we're doing now? And, raineer, you play MMORGs for ego (epeen, I guess the kids say), you do it too, so pot and kettle and all that.

[epigram]

I used to run a 15min 5k ; ; I haven't ran in years... I should get back to it, it's really fun :D

[Septimus]

Fact is, if CoP was so great, why was it that one of the first LS's that got to sea, and reached JoL, now have a WoW forum under the FFXI forum, with other people following?

Bingo!

It couldn't have anything to do with Excalibur either or the JP botters could it? =P I'm sure Bert would have a different outlook on the game if he gave a relic horn it to your LS's equivalent of Xavier on BRD and had a stream of Ridills, Defending rings, E bodys, A bodys, and M bodys, to a point where the ground kings no longer seem the end all be all by the sheer quantity of them hanging around.

As someone outside of BG you don't know what sea meant to the linkshell. From the start of CoP we were all about the missions, every update we would figure out what was new and work on getting everyone though it. When sea was released we were excited, even though there were no gods there we still had 85%-90% of the linkshell in sea before the next patch.

Then they added jailers. We farmed for hours, the drop rates sucked, but we kept with it. After weeks we finally had our pop set and not much else to show for or effort, we held on to them for a while, then we finally popped JLo. Although we didn't lose (we could have held it forever) we could not win the fight and had to concede.

It wasn't until the interview with Sage Sundi that it manifested. Square knew that people hated CoP and that sea was in bad shape, yet they did nothing. Botting and Excalibur did not help matters, but in the end it all stems from the fact that Sqaure refuses to fix things when they are broken or people despise them.

If sea had been Sky II the way we hoped it would be, I honestly think that 90% of the people who left for WoW would not have. But that would have required Square to listen to their customer base.

[Siatdiat]

I used to run a 15min 5k ; ; I haven't ran in years... I should get back to it, it's really fun :D

Word. I just got out of the Marines a year ago, and i didnt do shit at first.... Started getting fat from inactivity. Had to get out there and run, started back with a mile (lol) and worked back up to standard 3 mile run. The office I work in has a 5 and 10k run every summer, so im about to push up to 5 days a week running 3-6 miles a day. Going to put a dent in my play time but oh well, hopefuly this will get my 3 mile time under 18 minutes which is all I really want.

Sup non flame derail

[Septimus]

My point was that for reward vs. ratio Sea and Kings are almost identical, but you hear alot more bitching and moaning about Sea. But I think last night me and Wafik and Lockecole figured out it was just plain hypocrisy/laziness.

Stop comparing sea to kings- they are two very different activities. Compare sea to sky. Oh, but then you will have to concede that sea is a failure.

[Tom Chambers]

HELLO, THIS IS A CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE POST. IF YOU'D LIKE TO ENGAGE IN MEANINGFUL, ALBEIT AT THIS POINT CONDENSCENDING, DISCUSSION ABOUT THE SEA, SKY, KINGS COMPARISON, TURN TO PAGE 1. IF YOU'D LIKE TO HAVE YOUR OWN SHITTY ARGUING SKILLS THROWN BACK IN YOUR FACE TO EXHIBIT HOW IT PROVES NOTHING AND ISN'T WORTH A SHIT, TURN TO PAGE 2.

PAGE 1-

Am I cheerleader or something? Is this like a Lakers-Kings rivalry? I'd have to concede? Get your head out of your ass.

Sea is like Sky in that're zones unlocked by missions and they have popped NMs. That's it. That's where the comparison ends. I know, I know, there there, you really wanted the comparison to go on, but guess what- SE didn't. They heard people complaining about Kings and how they were botted, and they still thought the gear from them should be rare. So the next time they wanted to make rare gear, they decided to do through difficult missions and low drop rates. Viola! Now the gear is just as rare, but the players don't have botting JPs who hold Fafnir for 6 hours to get the window in Tokyo time to blame, they only have their lazy selves! What an ingenius solution!

But we have Septimus over here: No! I don't want the gear to be rare! I don't want it to be in Sea, I want Sea to be comparable to Sky, even though it's not!










PAGE 2-

Stop comparing sea to sky- they are two very different activities. Compare sea to kings. Oh, but then you will have to concede that kings is a failure.

[Lordwafik]

wow talk about thick.
we will NEVER compare kings and jailers side by side, because they have nothing to do with eachother.

We didnt go under missions to go to the area where the jailers are kept. Unlike Sky, where we did have to.

We dont pop kings, but we do pop jailers. Same way we pop sky gods.

From these two alone, should be more than enough reason to help you understand why we dont compare jailers to kings, but alas, no.

Here's another.

We dont kill kings, collecting items, in order to pop a gigantic king HNM, like we do with jailers, which *amazingly* is what we do with sky, you know, 4 seals to pop the big Kirin? Kinda like the 3 Virtues to pop Absolute Virtue.

Kings pop on a timed basis, 24h/1 week, CoP had it's wyrms, Zilart had it's Notorious Monsters.

[Demetrios]

If you say sea is a complete failure you have to include Limbus. Sea god armor comes from Limbus. Really, the content from Temenos and Apollyon is about how the same as farming the seals for Kirin and then killing him. Except it's divided into two cool fights and you get plenty of individual, worthwhile rewards on the way (sure we all trash the THF, DRG, BST that drops too much, but who's trashing NIN, BLM, RDM, WHM, SMN, and BRD AF+1 items already?.) Then in addition Limbus you have the Jailer system, which pops JoL who sits at about the same difficulty as Kirin, and then AV who we are still unable to kill legitamately. Sea has way more content and rewards than Sky. It rewards the jobs who didn't get much from Sky a hell of a lot more. Shinra armor sits at about the same situational/fulltime utlity as Homam/Nashira.

As for something comparable to AABCNM you have not one, but two GREAT rare ex rewards for everyone who bothered to complete the missions.