Absolute Virtue feature on Massively.com

[kayn]

The fact of the matter revolving around AV is that the playerbase is tired. Tired of SE's (as someone else stated) lack of interest in listening to the playerbase. If I worked hard to develop a project such as the CoP expansion and the playerbase as a whole rejected it for years I'd be quite upset and feel that my work was a failure. SE doesn't seem to think this way.
Yes the drops are (were) good but the mob is now so old that comparable equipment is available from much easier methods. Just like the Reviler's Helm from Vrtra. The mob was too hard at the time and the drops became out dated by the time people could kill the mob.
AVs case isn't as severe as Vrtra's because the gear is still "the best" but rings w/ acc/atk and r.acc/r.atk are now available elsewhere and AV's drops are now just +1s of those. I personally don't know of any linkshells that would bother to make an attempt when he pops. I know our LS has done 4 JoLs and my previous LS had probably done 30 JoLs and we never did and probably never will we attempt AV unless something seriously changes.
AV like the Jailors and Sea in general was made for the most dedecated players it seems with a high degree of difficulty and minimal rewards. (This does not include Limbus.)
All the sea torques are now just chiv chains +1. Our novias are all free lot. The only reason we do sea at all is for Novios otherwise we'd probably be in sky.

[Khrno]

The only reason we do sea at all is for Novios otherwise we'd probably be in sky.

Doing Kirins for wlegs and having none drop in like the last 18 in 3 months orz

[Gwynplaine]

They (SE) had mentioned in an interview once they were considering releasing an item to "enfeeble" AV (whatever that means) but no word ever since.

Source:http://blogs.gamersinfo.net/index.ph...1/16/ff07_1311

[Not Kuno]

AV is a slap in the face from SE to the playerbase. There probably is a way to kill it, but it's just so gimmicky nobody is going to figure it out until SE flat out says how to kill it.

[Lordwafik]

But, as a journalist, I can't just go back to old threads and pull up what someone said and then quote it. I technically don't have the right. When you guys post to me here, and say these things to me, then you understand that I'm going to quote you and what you say may be reprinted.

Ok I'll bite.

But, I'm coming to you guys on work business sadly, and not old memory business. I'm doing a feature article on Absolute Virtue for Massively.com, and I'm looking to talk to some people about the monster, fights with it, and how close people have gotten to legitimately defeating it. (Not wall glitching it or other stuff like that.) I'm still too low to see it personally, so I need to talk to some people who have killed off Jailer of Love and have been beaten to death by AV.

I'm interested in your comments on the AV fight, any findings you guys may have found with AV, and a general opinion of the battle overall. If you guys have any screenshots of it, I'd love them too to use in the article, with your permission of course.

AV is a mob that excited gamers all over when they learnt of it, because finally we have a monster that we can fight that's mimicked in the same way as the sky system (fight lesser NMs > use their drops to pop bigger NMs > use their drop to pop the big boss).

The frustration began out of a few facts
- AV doesn't have his own ??? to pop from, he shares one off Jailer of Love. SE has been asked why this is so, they replied that they wanted it to be an epic fight when he pops and many players team up to fight him.
This is a problem, as SE don't understand that the playerbase in endgame XI aren't friendly to each other as a whole, and would rather see eachother wipe to monsters so they can steal them, than team up. So then you have an LS holding AV there, wasting time since he's unkillable, while another LS is gathered and waiting because they wanted to fight Jailer of Love, however, they cannot pop Jailer of Love, because the ??? only appears when AV is gone.

- AV is not 100% ! This is a problem because people want.. wanted, to try things to it, but it sucked when they'd pop 4 Jailer of Loves in a row, and didn't get AV from any of them.

- AV is too hard. No this is not a whine, he is legitimately too hard. When my LS fought him, we lasted a whole 1min40 seconds using the "hints" from the square enix video. All 18 of us died right there, due to him using Aeroga4 and meteor, doing more damage than we have HP. As of now he's impossible to kill with our current knowledge , if square enix showed us a legitimate example of the fight, as in they go to a server and kill without any Dev team exploits, rather than killing it on their test server - then we'd have more of a clue.

Another example of SE withholding information and us never finding out the information due to impractibility : In salvage, there is a Poroggo Madame on every floor except the boss floor. 1 was never found, due to the way the zone is set up. To pop #1, you have to use no cells and clear the whole wing, which is something that would never occur to anyone's thoughts, because not using any cells slows you down excessively and makes people useless. (this has been exploited now, but not the point). So long as SE doesn't give us exact details of the very vague AV fight, he will never become killable.

We want to kill AV, Square Enix doesn't want us to kill it, it has been proven by the amount of times they've changed AV each time the playerbase has found a way of killing it, and also proven by their video teasing us by showing us nothing useful at all. People have mimicked the video and have not seen anything come out of it aside from negative exp.

[Cream Soda]

AV has a large penis and doesn't afraid of anything.

[Lexa]

AV is the perfect example of an extremely poorly executed joke. SE introduced this mob that nobody can beat, and in the cases people did manage to beat them, they "fixed it" so that it once again became unbeatable. All the while, they're laughing at us, telling us cryptic hints with a twinkle in their eyes, and completely fail to realize that the fun has gone out of this mob eons ago. We're not looking for "helpful" hints anymore, we're looking for an actual solution.

[Meat]

AV has a large penis and doesn't afraid of anything.

av can ride his bike with no handlebars

[Hashmalum]

Sadly this seems to be a recurring theme with the SE dev team. Remember the Strange Apparatuses? When they were added there were absolutely no hints of any kind on how they were supposed to work; apparently the playerbase was just supposed to blow chips that cost 21k each, plus Infinity Cores, to try an eight-digit password on the one in one hundred million chance that they might get a working password, and then they could try figuring out how the system works from there. How stupid is that? Even if someone completely randomly got a working password they'd most likely keep it to themselves and use it to make money, rather than giving the info to the community. Years later, SE finally caved and gave the info to some Japanese game magazine. Likewise, we know that the choice of which job's relic armors will drop in Dynamis is non-random, but we've never figured it out and never gotten a hint. (My pet theory is that it has to do with the Marble Bridge's "special days".)

[Surealistic]

goblin wolfman wut?

[Tythera]

I doubt you can use them as they were of the old modified user interface, but I included a couple shots of the wall they spoke of. Also put some of the jailing aftermath, was during the time period where some LS got praised for killing it with the wall, others got jailed. Just seemed like it depended on the GM and if someone shit in their coffee or not.

Edit: pictures got shrunk some, oh well I guess.

[LinktheDeme]

They (SE) had mentioned in an interview once they were considering releasing an item to "enfeeble" AV (whatever that means) but no word ever since.

Source:http://blogs.gamersinfo.net/index.ph...1/16/ff07_1311

it's possible they could have been refering to the video

[BarthelloSylph]

The main problem, and I do mean the main problem, with AV isn't that he's super powerful, or that there's some strange gimmick that we might not guess in a hundred years...

...it's that he's not a 100% pop. Nothing in sea is 100%.

You can work hard straight for a week, gather 2-3 pop sets for JOL, and never see AV.

That means less opportunities to test it. And when he does pop, you might not be ready to test a theory - you may just be ready to kill JOL.

That means, a sea focused LS may get 1 good opportunity at AV a month. And when they get it, its massacre.

So, if they solved THAT problem, my guess is that AV would go down within a month or two.

PS. Dynamis drops are non random???

[Hashmalum]

PS. Dynamis drops are non random???

I'm pretty sure it was confirmed in an interview. But the drops are so notoriously streaky, with particular pieces routinely being no-shows for months and then several in a run, that something more than mere statistical clustering seems to be at work. Of course if anyone does figure it out they have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to share it--scheduling conflicts are bad enough as it is without everyone trying to grab the time slots where pieces that people actually want will drop instead of everybody's zillionth freelotted BST crap or whatever. So in a way it's a good thing if no one ever figures it out, unless SE pulls their head out of their ass and instances Dynamis.

[LinktheDeme]

I'm pretty sure it was confirmed in an interview. But the drops are so notoriously streaky, with particular pieces routinely being no-shows for months and then several in a run, that something more than mere statistical clustering seems to be at work. Of course if anyone does figure it out they have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to share it--scheduling conflicts are bad enough as it is without everyone trying to grab the time slots where pieces that people actually want will drop instead of everybody's zillionth freelotted BST crap or whatever. So in a way it's a good thing if no one ever figures it out, unless SE pulls their head out of their ass and instances Dynamis.

Defending Ring is like that too. When I used to camp kings we wouldnt see a drop all year then 2 KBs in a row it dropped.

edit: Also wtf are you talking about Dynamis are instanced

[Tythera]

I'm guessing he means instanced in that you can actually run multiple instances at once, so there's no gay scheduling or people jacking zones from each other.

[Amok]

I think it's worth mentioning in your article that many players have come to truly believe that SE is "out to get them" and that it's all a big joke or some kind of conspiracy. I honestly was very excited when the video came out even though I don't belong to an endgame LS. It's something epic that added a whole lot of mystery and caused a lot of people to invest countless hours into figuring out AV. Even though I can't believe that SE is actually laughing at our frustrations, I do believe they're making a mistake by leaving it the way it is. Like others have said, FFXI contains many instances where key information was discovered by players without any reasonable hint in the game. They're only increasing frustration and decreasing the playerbase's confidence and trust in SE's capabilities as a whole. If SE board of directors knew the kind of damage this is doing to their reputation I'm sure it would be a different story. At least, I think so. Maybe it's something to do with Japanese culture.

[Judai]

Oh, thanks for the infoz guys. But what's your opinions of the mob? Do they need to lower it? (Obvious answer is yes) What have been your experiences with it?

I want the player angle, not just something that a thread can tell me. :D And ranting about how SE blows is fine, I'll try to edit ya. :D

Sarcasm is great... I think my entire opening is sarcastic so far. :D

Player Base opinion; SE needs to stop beating around the bush and either tell us their massive sercret to beating it for fix the monster. It is pretty much unkillable at this time. Nobody has been able to figure out the "trick" to beating him and SE's one attempt to "give us a hint" was a copout. Their video whoed us pretty much nothing and I'm not sure they even have a clue how to beat their own monster.

They keep telling us about his regen but his regen is not a problem, it's his constant barrage of 2HRs and Aergoa3/Tornado2/Meteor spam that destroys allys of players.

They don't need to lower him, they just need to tell us this inane trick to beating it that they have been side stepping since it was created. A Majority of players don't even bother fighting him anymore due to the fact that it is near impossible to do much to him. We are no closer to figuring AV out then we were when he was released. Most LSes just let him depop now and don't bother, or they toss around some Exp for 30m-1hr fooling around with him and then give up.

[Octavious]

Absolute Virtue is unique because (as has been mentioned) it's as if they honestly do not want anyone to beat it. A prime example as Wafik explained is his entire linkshell, most if not all of which are skilled players (I’m assuming because Wafik's awesome sauce so his LS will inherently be awesome), wiped in a matter of minutes.

Also, it should be noted it isn't for a lack of trying by the player base. There has been a ridiculous amount of Absolute Virtue attempts in the past few years after the last wall fix and nothing has been discovered. If a look can be taken at say, Ixion. That Notorious Monster was out for all of 30hrs before it was figured out by a group from their collaboration online with others on different servers (see: Ixion Discussion Thread). If there is a way to defeat a Notorious Monster, the chance is the player base is intelligent enough to more/less debug the many theories and find at least 1 way to kill it.

Part of me wonders if the players have just given up on Absolute Virtue because of the difficulty or because it is a shining example of SE not giving much help at all for 2 years. It's kind of sad since the 'Secret to AV' video was released and received with a high amount of anticipation only to find out that it was a confusing, non-sensible, worthless video.

[Aksannyi]

The video was so disappointing, it truly was. It was like the biggest slap in the face. AV has now become my LS's "challenge," if you will. Some of our members will go head to head with him to see just how long they'll last, and then we laugh at them on vent when it's less than 45 seconds. But I think a small part of us is also crying.

I've not attempted it. We have a damn good linkshell that has very little trouble taking down JoL, but if AV pops we just leave him alone. It's not worth it. The only thing we get out of it is xp loss and frustration, and honestly, who needs it? I know a guy on my server who is dedicated to figuring out AV's existence, but he's really made no ground so far, after numerous attempts. It's the most frustrating thing SE has put in this game, and people are getting tired of trying. SE wants to cry about us not playing certain aspects of the game (look how Pankration was revived so people could farm Zeni, for example) but yet, they won't adjust this mob even in the slightest even though we've almost given up as a whole.

It really sucks. I don't really want any of his drops. I'm certainly not even hoping I'll ever get one. I just want us, the playerbase as a whole throughout the world, to figure this enigma out. I think a lot of people agree with me. It's been long enough, SE. What, three - four years now? It's time.