Absolute Virtue 9/16/08

[Tubbers]

If literally 1000's of people can't figure out the cryptic secret to AV after 3+ years of searching, the problem isn't with us, it's with them.

I'm beginning to think AV was never meant to be killed, and SE is just sitting there laughing their asses off showing us retarded videos while we waste our time and send them more money.

Edit: Had to laugh at the why so serious pic lol

[Guitarman]

smartest thing i've read thus far, and its not that they aren't trying to make him killable, in fact, they've obviously made adjustments to make it so. just go back to the drawing board. learn how to actually earn that gkt and sash, not just cry cause you can't slap it 600 times in 8 seconds anymore and get free stuff.

Trust me. None of my gear was fucking free. You make the mistaken assumption theres no planning in that type of zerg. 1 person screws up, its over. After 3 years we finally are able to kill it and SE goes "lol nope". We've been at the drawing board for over 3 friggen years. I'd say most of us that have been pouring over this mob for that long have "earned" the items.

[Colenzo]

Guys remember the date of the update, next year they will prolly un-nerf it again for a few days so we can get more stuff.

[Franzer]

Trust me. None of my gear was fucking free. You make the mistaken assumption theres no planning in that type of zerg. 1 person screws up, its over. After 3 years we finally are able to kill it and SE goes "lol nope". We've been at the drawing board for over 3 friggen years. I'd say most of us that have been pouring over this mob for that long have "earned" the items.

wow who you and everyone else? were you even around when the original av was killed? somehow i doubt it. i never said it didn't require planning, but zerging something to kill in 10 seconds isn't "earning" anything. you know what makes a fight fun? someone dies, and you have to find a way to recover. so the new way to kill av is gone, so what? i'm sick of this, "ITS BEEN 3 YEARS WE DESERVE IT LOL!" Obviously if SE wanted to tell you how to kill it, they would. This isn't how they want some of the best drops in the game to get into the economy, 14 drks slapping their penis on him.

[TB]

If literally 1000's of people can't figure out the cryptic secret to AV after 3+ years of searching, the problem isn't with us, it's with them.

That's exactly the point.

Creating a riddle for video game that players solve in no time without much thinking is bad game design.
Creating a riddle for video game that players need some time to figure out and which is somewhat challenging, is smart game design.
Creating a riddle for a video game that thousands of players fail to solve over the timespan of a few years is not game design, it's encryption science.

They need to realize that this is a video game. And video games should be enjoyable.

[LinktheDeme]

I have a strategy that requires 100 Ninjas to beat AV who's with me?

[Ramses]

Oddly, I am actually less sure how killable AV is then I was two weeks ago. Think about it, now it is confirmed that he goes into bracelet still at 59% and can back to back two hour. It would take a mammoth effort just to get to 59% and then he would get twice as hard. It also looks like the only thing player 2 hours do is increase time between AV 2 hours. That needs more testing, but unless the span can be increased significantly, I don't know how much help it is. I think we seriously need to spam SE's suggestion box, like get an organized effort going.

[Trolll]

Let me try to get this through your skull: Farming up that many zerg weapons takes time, money and a fuckton of effort.

What I have a problem with is when as many as 5 LS's are able to take AV down on a single server within 1 minute of engaging him less then a week after he has been nerfed (infact kclub zergs started the night he was nerfed didn't they?).

This may be difficult for some servers and I'm in no way flaming the people that did kill it, just that Square Enix should have given us a decent way of killing it instead of making people feel like they need to zerg it to win at all (since that's how most of you feel and admittedly with good reason).

I support that they nerfed the kclub zerg because some servers were having such an easy time with it (yes some LS's had to team up and yes there were some wipes, but that was just bad luck). What I don't support is that after taking our only method of killing it away (again) they didn't give us any advice on how to take it down in a way that pleases them. As that's what it's all about.

[Karbuncle]

I have a strategy that requires 100 Ninjas to beat AV who's with me?

put a 1 and two 0's on that and we have a deal. also toss in some Reacton Arms while were at it.

Well, I never got to know what its like to Kill AV, i hope eventually we find another way...

[LinktheDeme]

Everyone post an email complaint to SE through POL about this.

[donnie]

smartest thing i've read thus far, and its not that they aren't trying to make him killable, in fact, they've obviously made adjustments to make it so. just go back to the drawing board. learn how to actually earn that gkt and sash, not just cry cause you can't slap it 600 times in 8 seconds anymore and get free stuff.

Might as well "fix" DL , KV , BahV2 and Kirin. People shouldnt get the items withen 30sec span, its not fair .... we need a challenge so we feel like we earned the items!.

/sarcasim off

now to the facts:

1- TP burn does take time , communication and preparing so by it self takes time as well , for each JoL and AV it took an average of 1hr , so thats half the time that he was suppose to be killed. Now tell me that you always win your "challenges" within the max time limit.

2- TP burn would have been still more effective in terms of farming , I mean anything in game gets challenging and nice for the first few times , but as we know how FFXI works it will get tedious and too repetitive , so the thought of TP burns comes in mind and would let you progress more quickly. but thanks to you and your fellow whiners thats not going to happen now.

3- I dont know how you dont like this , I mean if you cant beat it now , i can garuntee you that you can beat it later , because everyone will work thier way for beating AV and you might not need that many KC DRKs anymore with strategies being tweaked , hell in those few last days , there were an alliance of MNK/DRKs added to the KCs and ridills. so by the end of few months everyone in a server will have those nice items which is a win-win situation .. to make it simple, if you didn't get your item now , it doesn't mean you wont get it later on , its just going to take more time for you then others.

4- TP burn doesn't neglect the actual strategy but rather enforce it , having more many AV spawns would lead to more observation to his behavior which ultimately leads to figuring him out faster.

[Praetorian]

Oddly, I am actually less sure how killable AV is then I was two weeks ago. Think about it, now it is confirmed that he goes into bracelet still at 59% and can back to back two hour. It would take a mammoth effort just to get to 59% and then he would get twice as hard. It also looks like the only thing player 2 hours do is increase time between AV 2 hours. That needs more testing, but unless the span can be increased significantly, I don't know how much help it is. I think we seriously need to spam SE's suggestion box, like get an organized effort going.

Judging by the video, when you fight AV correctly, he doesn't spam two hours and job abilities.

[barber2006]

Well, its certainly not the ideal fix but I know quite a few people with krakens that are at least relived it was a 'fix' to AV instead of a 'fix' to souleater or kraken club. I fully expected that SE, being who they are, would have just knocked drk zerging off the table completely. At least that didn't happen.


Having said that, I've yet to see one person tell SE what they think about AV with their wallet so I'll be the first. It's not an AV issue for me. It's a customer service issue. There is no other form of entertainment I've ever been involved with where the provider continually took a big dump on the chest of the customer like SE does. But because people like myself have invested RL hours (heck, at this point RL years) into the game they won't walk no matter how badly we are treated. Well, I was on the fence anyway and because of this I'll be spending my 27.95 elsewhere. Not that it matters, next year they will get 10000x that when people want to hit the mog bananza again, which is nothing more than a band-aid over the huge gaping puss ridden wound that reading two pages worth of threads on this board could tell you the bulk of players have been pissed about for 3-4 years.


I, and I bet I'm not alone, am just tired of SE 'fixing' every little imbalance and bit of ingenuity by cutting something off at the legs instead of incorporating a real solution.

-when I hit rng 75 they totally decimated the job and it didn't recover for years
-when I leveled blm they made it where a fully merited/geared blm would get smashed in damage by a new 75 if the newbie's spell landed first by one second.
-when I maxed digging they put the fatigue limit on because they can't stop bots
-when I maxed fishing they put in that idiotic fishing game and fatigue and there are STILL bots.
-when I leveled ninja they made it where a naked war with byakkos axe could clobber me.


and now they have swung the mighty bat of 'balance' once again. A few people got their krakens by luck. A few by RMT. But most I know got theirs by killing a billion spiders and selling the drops. And with one push of a button it could be turned into a thf knife 2.0. At least it was only made worthless on one mob, but still....this is crap when time consuming accomplishments are neutered just because there are now 10 sashes on all servers after 3 years....

I believe I'll be spending this months 28 bucks on a 12 pack of shiner bock beer and a 3 day rental of Conan the Barbarian. I'll be rooting for the players, if for no other reason than knowing that day will come again where you guys will sneak in the back door and kick SE square in the sack for a few days before they can call yet another maintenance to put the proletarians back 'in their place.'

[Corrderio]

Judging by the video, when you fight AV correctly, he doesn't spam two hours and job abilities.

True, however we don't know HOW to fight him correctly. People tried to mimic the videos but to no luck.

[*Shinzon*]

I don't know how else to say it, the video doesn't show anything, it never did.

[Tyche]

wow who you and everyone else? were you even around when the original av was killed? somehow i doubt it. i never said it didn't require planning, but zerging something to kill in 10 seconds isn't "earning" anything. you know what makes a fight fun? someone dies, and you have to find a way to recover. so the new way to kill av is gone, so what? i'm sick of this, "ITS BEEN 3 YEARS WE DESERVE IT LOL!" Obviously if SE wanted to tell you how to kill it, they would. This isn't how they want some of the best drops in the game to get into the economy, 14 drks slapping their penis on him.

I'm sorry for contributing to the derail, but this is absurdity at it's finest. Are you telling me that the playerbase isn't "earning" it after 3 years of trial and error, discovering 3 ways to kill it, only to have all 3 stripped away and passed off as a glitch? SE's stance regarding AV has been to frown upon creativity by passing off 3 different kinds of wins as "glitches". Yes, it's been 3 years, millions of dollars in lost revenue, the sanity of you consumers, and hours of server downtime to keep their baby unkillable. You asked "Do you know what makes a fight fun?" Do you know the answer to this question, because I don't think you do. What makes a fight fun is trial, error, and killing it the first 3 times. After that it's fucking redundant and you find the most efficient way to down it. Tiamat? Not fun, get 6 BLMs and burn the bitch to the ground in 20 minutes. Bahamut? Yeah, it was fun the first 4 times you did it with an army of BLMs, burning down all 4 wyrms on the way to a "legit" win. After trial and error and 4 redundant wins, it's time for efficiency. It's to the point where everyone shouldn't care less if he was killed by striking it with an onion dagger as long as you get your loot.

Also, I was curious then, and I'm curious now. When people started killing Vrtra via zerg, it wass thought that a ton of Krakens were needed. After enough playing and experience, people began using less and less until eventually a LS killed it without a single kraken. A sort of evolution for LSs. I wonder if AV could actually be downed with strong melees as opposed to simply playing it off. I seen the damage wasn't anything close to hot, but neither is melee damage on wyrms, but people have somehow managed.

[ronin sparthos]

Well, I will admit it is SE's game and they have the right to change him. However....

If SE wants us to kill AV the legit way.... give is some friggin hints. I don't care what they call that video. It hardly helped. How about giving us a reason on WHY the devs 2Hed.

Seriously.... why the f*ck does SE like to mess with our heads?

CAUSE ITS FUN, THE PLAYERS ENJOY AV!

If SE wanted to help the players along in attempting this monster, they have literally an endless amount of ways to get creative and inject a hint into the game for players to figure out. Fuck, make it a global event and have it culminate with SE representatives doing a LIVE fucking AV kill to have everyone and their mothers across server get to see streaming video of how to attempt him.

Hell, a fucking scavenger hunt would suffice where they demand items be turned into an npc over a period of time that culminates with a major hint on how to down this monster or at least breathe some FUN into defeating AV.

SE is obviously not concerned with fun because there are SO many ways to diffuse the stressful situation between the developers and the players who either dont give a fuck, are brainwashed into a mythic solution where the stars align or that AV is a crock of bullshit.

If SE announced a major event tomorrow promising live kills with SE representatives behind the wheel with their strategy being field tested - then im sure everyone would be praising SE as going above and beyond the call of duty to show visually what their strategy entails without actually spelling it out.

Until then, the video sucked, the 4+ ninja changes on this NM are getting old and AV will go back to not being cared for in a few weeks.

Pandemonium Warden... maybe he holds hope that SE did something besides change the rules again in their favor only.

[Lyramion]

Really dont know what the "trick" is to AV - it should be something mroe fun and simple. Like making a Skillchain with Chailerweapons and sealing away 2hrs with that or something.

[richardd]

I have a strategy that requires 100 Ninjas to beat AV who's with me?

my friend calls that the Taliban zerg.

im SURE if most of the player base is disappointed, than they'll end up giving it back to some extent. Do you remember the publicity they got from the 18h PW? It takes something like that to make them scratch their chins and say something along the lines of "well, if they haven't figured it out by now..... "

[Franzer]

whatever, plain and simple av zerg days are gone. next.