Absolute Virtue feature on Massively.com

[Chupunpupun]

except that AV doesnt aggro, so yeah, no

cept AV aggros the person which had hate on JOL and AV have party/alliance aggro.

[S N K]

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.

I've seriously stopped caring about this mob. Until SE says what the hell we're supposed to do then there is no damn point.

[Melios]

If anything, it's the poster child for the most frustrating expansion in the game.

And yet, when they actually eliminated some of the most frustrating parts last year in June, people were throwing a total fit.

[Spekkio]

think about it this way. you have a maze made up of 500 chambers. you know that inside one of those chambers is a hidden door behind which is a vault containing treasure. one day, after beating Jailer of Love, the entrance to this maze appears and people dive right in with great excitement.

players combed for weeks to find the hidden door. no matter how much we searched though, the door could not be found. we all feel very strongly that if we could just find the vault, we could get inside and at the juicy toys it contains. we tried everything we could think of, from the obvious ideas of knocking on walls to find spots that sounded different to more wild ideas like singing Mary had a little lamb while flogging ourselves with soggy potatoes. nothing revealed the method to find and open the door.

at one point, somehow, while digging through the dungeon, we stumbled into a room and just found the door swinging open in the breeze. ecstatic, we think we're on to something, only to find it closed off the next time we return. this happens to us once more, and once more we find the door slammed in our face the next time we try it. never again did we find the door open.

eventually, and with great frustration, we all surrendered. we know it's in there somewhere, but after all this time with no progress, nobody's feeling motivated to continue, for very good reason. every week or so, some hotshot runs onto one forum or another and shouts that the secret is that the door is afraid of wooden weapons and you have to leave them all outside for the door to open, or suggesting something else we've already tried. arguments ensue, egos are hurt, and everyone becomes more bitter.

meanwhile, all our requests for help are met with "once you open the hidden door, to open the vault you must enter the combination. two numbers for it are X and Y." every time we get this answer we respond that we feel confident we could open the vault ourselves if we could just FIND the damn thing, and yet they continue to babble on about the combination. eventually, and very glibly, they release a video showing them taking a couple of left turns, a couple rights, etc. but with jumps between every turn. this tells us something about where the vault can't be, but not remotely enough to narrow the search sufficiently to find it. this further enrages the fanbase b/c we feel like we're just being toyed with at this point.

this is where we stand now. the hidden door (the way to control AV's "game over" 2 hr abilities) still remains unfound. once we find it, we're confident that we can brute force the combination to get in ourselves (as long as we keep chipping away at AV's health and can prevent him from recovering it, eventually we will win) but until we're given a more effective pointer to the hidden door, we're done looking. we don't care anymore. we're fresh out of ideas, and until we get a viable direction from SE on how to kill this, we're done trying.

it's 4:30 as i type this, so this may not make much sense, but this is the best i can do at generalizing the frustration we have into something that readers who don't know what benediction, meteor, 2 hours, etc. are.

[Apelila]

I can't really say anything that hasn't already been said better, but lets try.

First, you have to understand that when these items where 'released' there wasn't anything better. There still isn't! Like someone already said, the drops are nice but HQ of what most of the playerbase can already get. Back then, however there was no way to get a comparable "NQ" item without fighting RMT or getting really, really lucky. Many changes have been made, speed belts and such are no longer an everlasting source of /facepalm.

Second, we knew what the drops where almost a year before the NM was made available. This requires some guessing as to the correct dates, and I'll get to that in a moment. But it went almost a YEAR between when the playerbase was aware of the items to when someone got them. And then, that was a 'glitch' and was fixed.

The first time most of the items show up is after the 7/19/2005 update. This was the update which added the sea NM system. lolSash's page was created on the otherwiki on 7/22/2005, which likely means it was in the dat's for that update. That was a huuuuge update, and like many of the CoP updates it was during the 'year of massive lag' when updates took forever to accomplish. Like, worse than the current 4-5 hours we all bitch about now, I'm talking days.

I've also gotten off topic. So our intrepid dat miners had found the nice things. Going a little bit further, Jailer of love wasn't added to the wiki until until 1/6/06, and thats when AV was added as well. If you look at the Sash's update history, it took almost a year before a picture and confirmation that it dropped off AV on 6/29/06. However, it died once before that on Remora and dropped...NOTHING. See here:
http://www.shardofapathy.com/forums/...id=48&Itemid=1

This is also when the flood of batshit crazy, insane, and WRONG theories started popping up. If your wondering "Why the hell did it take 6+ months for anyone to confirm JoL's drops?" you've discovered half of the original enmity for AV's, and part of the on going pain in the ass.

Back in the day Jailer pops weren't 100% drop, meaning you could (and would!) be spending a long, long time getting the items to even try JoL. Add to that that AV isn't a 100% when it dies, and that JoL wasn't easily figured out and you have a monster no one killed for half a year. Followed by a monster no one's killed for 3 without it being a 'glitch'.

Ok, now that all those pesky facts are out of the way lets get to opinions. I've never fought any sea god, but I don't need to have tried to be able to tell that the video SE made was a useless, horrible slap in the face. All they've done is preach and preach about AV's regen everytime something comes up, and even when someone specifically told them that the regen was a non-issue, thats still all they focus on. I look forward to your article and hope that other journalists take notice, since SE has an anathema for listening to their playerbase on this issue.

[orson]

cept AV aggros the person which had hate on JOL and AV have party/alliance aggro.

AV is technically unclaimed when it pops, it'll aggro the alliance that killed AV and will kill the alliance if you leave it unclaimed. If one person claims it then gets killed it loses aggro to the whole group unless some one did something to generate hate (which is very common because of people healing and such as a spaz reaction.)

[Chupunpupun]

AV is technically unclaimed when it pops, it'll aggro the alliance that killed AV and will kill the alliance if you leave it unclaimed. If one person claims it then gets killed it loses aggro to the whole group unless some one did something to generate hate (which is very common because of people healing and such as a spaz reaction.)

Think you gonna have to reread and edit your post a bit. I'm not sure what you are trying to say but I've experience party aggro from AV when I was in an PT with a SAM who did a gekko to test his damage. After it chopped the SAM into pieces, it came after me even though I was miles away watching.

As far as I care, if AV pops, it's running to the hills time.

[Aymee]

...This doesn't have anything to do with the actual fighting, but there are a few humorous bits to AV.

For one, it's a DRG. And I mean lawlDRG, hm? At least, that was the prevailing logic at the time. If we actually thought the development team had a sense of humor, perhaps we could think this was a deliberate inside joke.

I know a lot of the other posts kind of sum up to this, but a partial aspect you might like to write up in a feature would be the epic contradiction SE works in regards to AV compared to the rest of the game. They say over and over and over they have to work on content for all players, or activities that more people can participate in, and that they're looking at the 'big picture'... yet they've put massive effort into keeping AV impossible. I highly doubt anyone else can think of any other instances where so much detail was placed on an endgame activity to tweak it in such a specific way. Actually, I don't think this amount of detail has gone into anything else in the game, period.

The fact that GMs were even conscious that they were to jail people who found a trick is massively strange, since our GMs are so collectively--well--how to put this... well, not entirely educated about how endgame activities work (that's as politely as I can put it).

...
I almost want to give SE credit for some of this, though. They made something so stupidly hard, knowing that no matter how hard it was some people would attempt to kill it. They also know it annoys the crap out of people when they can't kill something. It's not easy to scar a gamer with something like that.

In any case, they should be done being amused by now and just come clean on it so that all the people that have wasted epic time and exp doing mindnumbing Sea and god only knows how much JoL/AV shenanigans can go complete the journey and at least have a title and some screenshots

[Linktri]

I like the mystery vault analogy, but I think "The Money Pit" applies a little more accurately.

http://www.unmuseum.org/oakisl.htm

tl;dr:
1. Kids find hole and dig. Find weird shit. They think there is treasure buried here.
2. Kids come back as adults and dig. Find more weird shit.
3. Water floods the hole because it's booby trapped.
4. Find more weird shit.
5. Multi-millions of dollars are spent, retarded theories on the weird shit are advanced.
6. Some people die.
7. More weird shit is found.
8. No treasure is found in over a hundred years.

Lesson learned? Even if there is more than just weird shit in a hole, it's probably not worth the lives of people and more resources than the treasure could possibly be worth. If we as a people can put people into space, on the moon and send probes beyond the solar system but cannot dig a fucking hole in the ground, what's that teach us?

[Hanyoko]

The monster AV is the highest challenge of an expansion pack, since its release there has been two other expansion packs with its own content. The content from these newer expansion packs have provided players with realistic goals/timesinks. As such the playerbase often finds itself limited on what it can spend its time on. The time once spent on trying to figure out AV is being put forth on newer content that actually results in rewards for the time spent. The ROI on AV is so pathetically low its an embarasement to the expansion.

[ringthree]

defeatable by who?
The development team that has characters that can use their 2hr abilities over and over within a short amount of time, and lord knows what other differences their characters may have had from our own?

To say that it is defeatable in its current form is merely speculation.

The next line in my post was that we had no idea how to do it.

Unless you are one of those people that actually believe that SE has created this game specifically to torture it's players, then this is the only logical conclusion. By the way, the idea that there is no possible way to beat it under no circumstances is pure speculation also, but it is also illogical. Would you prefer if I said that without further information there is no way that the player base can defeat AV... oh wait... I did say that.

[ringthree]

No shit? That's some sage advice there. So, all we need to do is figure it out, huh?

If you can't defeat something because you don't know how, then it's undefeatable. If everyone on every server can't defeat it, it's fucking undefeatable. It's not whining, it's a logical statement.

Fuck it. You're clearly retarded. Forget you read this. Go play with something shiny.

/sigh. I wonder if some of you even have the capability to read. If you could actually go beyond the first line of my post, I actually clearly agreed with you. Thus the puzzle metaphor. There is so much teenage angst in this forum anymore...

[Drex]

The monster AV is the highest challenge of an expansion pack, since its release there has been two other expansion packs with its own content. The content from these newer expansion packs have provided players with realistic goals/timesinks. As such the playerbase often finds itself limited on what it can spend its time on. The time once spent on trying to figure out AV is being put forth on newer content that actually results in rewards for the time spent. The ROI on AV is so pathetically low its an embodiment of the expansion.

cop haet

[Sonomaa]

Ill go ahead and say it up front for your article
listen to kaeko

[fndragon]

I think the crux of the angst comes from the fact that there are no clues left for the playerbase to follow wrt Absolute Virtue. There's no assistance, no "flavor text" that suggests that perhaps the way to defeat Absolute Virtue is by giving him yummy cake or perhaps wearing yellow clothing would help. With certain NM's, especially the new Zeni Notorious Monsters that were released, it can be deduced rather easily how to defeat them. Certain monster behaviour can be easily spotted and countered, however with Absolute Virtue we're totally in the dark. The only help that we were given was directly from the development team, and they are very frugal when it comes to giving advice. Their advice was one of the only ways we would have deduced that killing the Jailor of Love's spawns reduce Absolute Virtue's regeneration rate (Since there is no other master/slave relationship like that in the game), and also to cast spells with the current day's element on Absolute Virtue to further reduce his regeneration rate (Also, unique to Absolute Virtue).

And the glorious irony of the situation is that the GM's and development team think that the situation is "finished", that the player base has been "pacified". GM's will often tell us to "Look to the FFXI Community websites for advice" however the information that we've been given has come straight from the FFXI Dev Team. And the last bit of information, the videos that were produced, are cryptic at best.

The FFXI developers are probably waiting for an "A-ha" moment when the correct strategy is found, and the FFXI community websites pat themselves on the back and praise the developers for making a difficult, yet beatable, monster, however the current situation is this:

1) AV cannot be fought without many hours of farming for pop items and killing Jailor of Love beforehand.
2) AV is not guaranteed to appear, thus eliminating any planned fighting/theory testing.
3) AV can and will destroy an alliance at will using Meteor, Comet, Aeroga IV, etc. Every death incurred is costly, requires a raise and five minutes to recover from, and demoralizes the group who popped him.
4) The development team is shown on video as using their Two-Hour Job Abilities more than once every two hours. This is generally seen as cheating, as we players can't replicate this behaviour.

That being said, most linkshells tend to ignore him if he pops due to the cost of attempting to kill him outweighing any benefits.

---

Also, the reason that the poster cannot simply "Use the 80 page forum post for the article" is that it hasn't been properly sourced. People posting in the other thread did not give their express right to the OP to use their material in another format, unlike this thread.

[arshesney]

You can overcome multiple Benedictions (hi PW).
You can survive the Aero spam (bar/aero build/spreading damage).
You can tank it even if he hits like a truck.
It's hard, really, really hard, but you can deal with most of his crap... However if (as the dev team stated) you're not meant to lock his 2hrs, he will always have the Reapfont trump card.
The wall blocking every "legit" attempt was blantantly overlooked (or "faded", or "director's cut") from the video.

Screw it, it's two expansions old content, fix the damn thing already or just say lulzyoucantwin, most people ain't bothering anymore

[shieldsofwindurst]

AV fun facts (i'll try not to repeat other people, but there's so much):
- As previously mentioned, AV was introduced several years ago. To this date, there has never been a legitimate (defined as "per the developer's intention") defeat of him.
- There was a significant amount of time, probably about a year, between AV's first pop and when progress was first made against him.
- The first LS to make significant progress was (I believe) LimitBreak on the Odin server, who held AV for approximately 30 hours. At about hour 26 they finally hit on the idea of standing on the other side of an uncrossable barrier and nuking him from max range, i.e. the "Wall of Justice," or WoJ.
- A number of other LSs then attempted the WoJ strategy with mixed success; AV would glitch and sort of move into the wall and wipe them, or would walk away for no reason. Also, some LSs attempting this strategy (for example, the EDI LS on the Garuda server) were contacted by GMs during the fight and warned against continuing, and ultimately jailed when they complained.
- Finally, the first kill was recorded using the WoJ strategy, which was done by (I believe) Apathy on the Remora server. In this case, there was a GM present, who was actively cheering them on (was recorded making /say comments in the screenshots). As previously mentioned, they got no drops.
-Of course, there was a great deal of angst in the FFXI community about using the WoJ to defeat AV; however, when you're fighting a mob which basically has the ability to wipe everyone at will and heal to full at will, when it actually popped, most people went with the path that didn't actually result in massive xp loss.

That's about everything I can think of that hasn't already been covered.

[Titanss]

Ill go ahead and say it up front for your article
listen to kaeko

read his LJ about AV too http://kanican.livejournal.com/15971.html thats a link right too the only theory that isn't on crack

[Gafgarionn]

To put this all into perspective, arguably the best AV drop, Ninurta's Sash, was just stolen from a player and sold to another for 200 million. I'm not too up to date on the price of Dynamis currency, but I'd estimate that you could probably finish a relic weapon and be well on your way to a second with that amount of money.

[Titanss]

actually I thought it was 100m ,gaiters, speed belt, and kc

edit: sonic belt