Absolute Virtue 9/16/08

[Lonewind]

I do not understand SE's sadistic methods that is called Absolute Virtue. It is pretty blatantly obvious that the player base, however many of us out there, have attempted every "reasonable" methods provided with the minimal, if any is even useful, or decipherable, cryptic hints from SE; losing tens of thousands of experience points on this three year old NM. As soon as someone has found a "unintended" method of defeating it, the Dev team goes and shuts us out. Stop trying to hold on to this impossible, and I repeat IMPOSSIBLE to solve puzzle you called AV, do some customer service, we don't want you to give the solution to us blatantly, but at least some credible hints, and yes the AV video fails at giving hints, and move on. Players found a way to defeat it, good for them. Don't act like a 3 year old child and deny the players of their victories.

If you truly feel that AV should not be defeated, move the loot pool elsewhere (yes you designed a game that the equipments are generally the main goal of most players); to other challenges that is actually logical with comparable, but possible, difficulties, and delete AV from this game, it's obviously you don't want to give a challenge/reward system to the players but leaving us with only frustration.



on a side note, can someone volunteer to develop a seizure or stroke, or some sort of hospitalization from the frustration of this update so we can get some media attention? Seems that's the only way SE will listen.

[HadesChubbs]

It would not take anything long for wars to do one pre 300 tpd ws, Wing WS again, meditate and try to hit it twice to ws again. Should take about 20 seconds to do that. The only time period is the transitional phase between the first allys wipe and the second ally of the same party finishing off AV.

edit: Wow I made a boo boo ;o

With that lag i dare you to do all that under 45s

[LinktheDeme]

With that lag i dare you to do all that under 45s

The lag factor from the previous AVs was the fact that everyone had the drain animation going i'm pretty sure. On the lowest resolution settings and everything the only thing that'd be lagging you is the people around you not the immense amount of lag we'd get on the previous avs because 15 drks had drain animations going for 6 hits in an attack phase.

edit: Hell it'd be like killing something in dragons aery minus about half the people

[Arthars]

on a side note, can someone volunteer to develop a seizure or stroke, or some sort of hospitalization from the frustration of this update so we can get some media attention? Seems that's the only way SE will listen.

anxiety causes seizure sometimes and maybe thats why AV was buffed(someone out there too excited when seeing entire LS swing their k clubs)

SE did the right thing to make it "normal" but i do agree with you that hints they gave are AS

ABSOLUTE SHIT

[Silenka]

Wasn't AV originally created to be a basically undefeatable mob though? And if anyone found a way to do it, they nerfed the strategy/bug as quickly as they could, right? I'm not sure why anyone expected that to change, and even so, obviously zerg isn't the right answer if they nerf the new zerg strategy right away, so I'm really not sure why people are still pushing the zerg idea.

However that's been said before by a lot of people, so my big question is "Isn't it supposed to be an undefeatable mob anyway?"

[Arthars]

im starting to think that its just a mob to test our limits and find out what we can do which is "game breaking" or "bugged" to them so they can fix and add in more NMs like this in the future to piss us off so server can shut down.

if anyone managed to beat it, SE sees it as "thank you for finding bug/unbalance to the game, you can have this sash/gkt. we'll fix that, so please do try more often."

[liami]

You do realise AV WILL go on farm status again when it's gimmick or another strategy is revealed, as long as the gimmick isn't something retarded...
It doesn't matter that you think that it's the pinnacle of FFXI, it will be farmed the fuck out of, just like it has been these last few days. And the more it gets farmed, the more efficient strategies will come and it'll be down to a 30 minute fight on a ??? pop.
And what's more is AV isn't as much of a tight fisted wanker like the other jailers, NM's etc and actually puts out when you kill it, which makes it 100x more attractive than anything else.

[Septimus]

Ok first "people who call for nerfs of any job should dig themselves a grave and crawl into it"...because SE is infallible amirite? Why of course you're entitled to do 11k-16k damage in 30 seconds on any mob if you've spent forever getting uber gear.

It's not so much "waah waah my ls can't kill AV I'm jealous of your krakensss" as it is who has the most kraken clubs shouldn't be the determinant of who can kill what's supposed to be the hardest mob in the game. I think most everyone wants AV to be something epic, even those who were able to zerg AV post-update, not an anti-climactic 30 second splooge.

In my ideal, AV should be something requiring massive amounts of skill as opposed to massive amounts of gil. Maybe the difficulty should be steep enough that you'd have to be very well-equipped to pull it off. But what interests me more is a fight requiring intense focus, skill, strategy and cooperation to succeed at, and that's very unforgiving if those break. At least that's what my "ideal" ultimate boss would be. Sure, zerg requires some of the above...only it's for a freaking minute and not slipping in a minute is much easier than being on your A+ game for say half an hour. Of course I was happy AV was killed without outright exploits, I was just disappointed that it cheapened what AV symbolizes for me.

inb4 gb2Alla but sure, I'll say it, I'm not very HNM, I just look for what challenges I can outside the life-devouring routines HNM seems to require and I'm taking my sweet time, so I'm sure I don't "understand" when I say that I could care less that AV can't be overwhelmingly zerged like almost every other mob in the game. Because as someone admittedly on the outside I value the myth of AV more than the ability for it to be killed / farmed for drops every 2 hrs. In my mind (and the minds of many) AV has stood for the pinnacle of FFXI, and me and many others imagine a day when we can take part in beating AV, and that beating will epitomize reaching the top of FFXI.

I know AV traumatized people in their childhoods etc., and its very existence taunts you like Moby Dick, and yeah it's a bit shoddy design that the gimmick has been so impossible to figure out...but I hope all this shit just heightens the "eureka" moment that figuring out a "real" strategy to beat AV will be.

And also, I know that if the only thing keeping me playing FFXI is the idea of having a velocious belt +1 or a divisor ring +1 or whatever, or being able to beat 1 monster at all costs, I know it'll be time for me to quit. the. fucking. game.

No, seriously, go back to Zam.

I am very sick of people who come to this forum with their "I'm don't do HNMs but..." mentality of what they think endgame should be. If you don't do HNMs, shut up about your magical thoughts of what it should be like. It is great that you "value the myth" of AV. Some of us have been fighting the myth of AV and we are pretty tired of it. "Wah wah, it's not fair that people are using x method to kill some mob that I have never touched, wah wah." Yeah, that "eureka" moment is going to be fantastic, except for all of the people who have thus far wasted their time and XP trying to find it. But, I know, you don't care about those elitists as long as your precious myth about AV stays sacred.

It's great for you that look for "challenges", but as long as you aren't one of the people involved in wasting your time and XP in solving it, your opinion holds as much value as Tom Cruise at a "Not a member of a crazy religion" convention. Maybe you would understand why people are so pissed off if you spent countless hours to gather up some JoP pop-sets, get skunked on torques most of the way, then get some sodomy surprise from AV whilst trying out all of the fun little conjectures that people who have never fought him will imagine; then repeat that a few dozen times. AV only stands as "the pinnacle of FFXI" for people who have never fought it. For the rest of us it is a constant reminder of how the Dev team has mocked and disrespected us for over three years now. You can go on imagining that you will find the way to beat AV, because chances are that is the only place where AV is going to be defeated unless they nerf it severly or finally give us a real clue of the method of defeating it.

So I guess my point is this: "Shut up about content in which you do not participate." And also: "Go back to Zam."

[Khelek]

We just need the press to write an article on how terrible it is of SE to take away the only known way to beat AV, right after giving it to us, without having given any sort of hints on how to fight it, except for a video that made no sense whatsoever, unless the trick to beating him is zooming in on the chat log, in which case, we'd need to fraps the fight, then go back in time and apply it to the fight after editing it. Maybe then we'll get some real hints.

[Hashmalum]

For example, the Animated Weapons in Dynamis-Xarcabard will respond to you saying they are interested, and will fight longer, or they will say they are getting bored and then start to leave.

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but we never did figure out how those work. Don't people just deal with their Warp by stunning it with weapon skills, rather than trying to go through whatever hoops the designers had in mind to keep it from happening to start with? It's quite possible that the dev team doesn't know this, and used a similar mechanism for AV, and is now sitting there thinking "it's like the animated weapons, and they figured out those, why can't they figure out AV?" never realizing that we dealt with the weapons by a means they didn't expect. Maybe next chance to ask questions to the dev team, someone should ask them "What makes the animated weapons decide to warp? We always just stunned them to stop it from casting." Failing that, maybe there is a resemblance to some other mob mechanism we never figured out but simply bypassed instead.

[Varrin]

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but we never did figure out how those work. Don't people just deal with their Warp by stunning it with weapon skills, rather than trying to go through whatever hoops the designers had in mind to keep it from happening to start with? It's quite possible that the dev team doesn't know this, and used a similar mechanism for AV, and is now sitting there thinking "it's like the animated weapons, and they figured out those, why can't they figure out AV?" never realizing that we dealt with the weapons by a means they didn't expect. Maybe next chance to ask questions to the dev team, someone should ask them "What makes the animated weapons decide to warp? We always just stunned them to stop it from casting." Failing that, maybe there is a resemblance to some other mob mechanism we never figured out but simply bypassed instead.

Slight derail, I know...

The weapons say something for each level of "interest" as it changes. Using the relic WS of the weapon (ie. have your Stage 4 weapon) resets the interest level by something like 3 levels, it's pretty easy to observe (unlike AV!). I used Geirskogul on the Animated Spear 3 times over the course of the fight (100% TP, Icarus Wing, Meditate + Shikikoyo) to keep it from warping away.

[TB]

I hope everyone of you who is bitching against SE in this thread is also sending in the exact same thing to the suggestion box in POL.

[Norellicus]

Sorry to be such a nitpicker here...

Posting screenshots of logs during an AV fight is not really data... It's just a fairly accurate account of their fight - observational. Data implies you controlled some type of variable etc. and specifically eliminated or supported some theory. This in generally in hard as fuck to do on AV because it's hard to control it period. This is not to say that doing this doesn't help, it's just not as valuable as it would seem because you can't conclusively tell action X led to reaction Y.

Problem with logs is it doesn't give time order of events accurately, especially when we're talking about doing something moments after AV does something. You really have to be there yourself or get it on recording to get any sort of accurate time response.

Er...posting screenshots of logs is data, it's just not useful in its raw form. Data is just numbers, it implies nothing as far as reliability or proof of concept - but you take the data gathered, apply control conditions, and form a hypothesis thereto. Execute your hypothesis, if it holds consistent based on the data you previously gathered, then you likely have a winning formula.

[Ohaigaiz]

I don't think there is a method at this moment. I think after 3 years of people trying to discover the 'secret' to defeating AV and coming up short, it's nonexistent. Really, how difficult can it be? This isn't fucking neurology, it's an MMO, and I'm 99% positive even if this was neurology this would've been figured out by now. SE's constant quirks show me that they won't change as an MMO team, and they should commit suicide. The fact that they won't release the secret behind AV hints to me there is no secret. They want you to believe there is so you will keep on throwing them money. If such a secret is ever released, honestly, what could it be that hasn't been done already?

[Demonic]

actually there was a DRK ^-^

[Chen]

So the pessimist/realist side of me was correct. I tried holding out for hope that SE wouldn't validate that they're still employed with fucking idiots, and lower its damage resistance so ALL linkshells would have a shot at killing it. Silly me. Well, now that they've confirmed that SE hasn't changed with their moronic approach to managing this game, I'm fucking out of here in a week if they don't start releasing hints, ala Goblin Drink, on how to kill this fucking mob.

This is the straw that's going to break the camel's back for me. I've sat here over the years and watched as SE has done everything from being completely passive while RMT looted & pillaged the game to the point where SE's hand was forced to do something (meanwhile hiding behind such laughable bullshit replies such as "they're just people who have more time to play than you"), to blaming players for their own accounts getting hacked (which has a modicum of truth, but it wasn't for the reason SE thought, aka giving out account info), and hundreds of other little things. Inconsistent GM decisions, ridiculous waiting periods/artificial time sinks, horrible requirements for completing certain quests (hi2u alexandrites)... the list goes on and on. Each item in the list pushed me closer to quitting, and now that we'd finally gotten AV back into killable status, SE fucks us over again... for the THIRD time. Welp, as the saying goes: 3rd time's a charm.

One week to start handing out info/changing its mechanics to give us a clue ala lord waffle's suggestion, or my subscription = canceled. SE you can go fuck yourselves with your cryptic bullshit. I'll be sending a message similar to this via PlayOnline suggestions & feedback.

it's just one mob, ignore it and the bleeding will go away

sure it sucks that we can't beat the mob, but there is more to the game than AV, i think someone said it before, if the only reason you play ffxi is to beat AV, you should probably just quit

[Croaker]

They should have just left it killable, but given items very low droprates like everything else in the game.

What really sucks about this is that the people who were killing it were not using any kind of cheat, hack, exploit, or glitch. SE is just upset that people found a way to kill AV without solving their riddle.

[Khalil]

Basicly what you're saying is AV drops give you strength to get up every morning to eat piss cereals mailed to you by SE for 15$ every month, and you're still eating?

I wouldn't say the equivalent of giving your strenght in the morning, lol. What Therin and others are trying to say is that for the last 3 years that this mob has been in the game, no one has beaten him the "correct way" or a way in which SE is satisfied with. Every way a LS has tried, it was due to a glitch or an exploit, that was quickly patched. So, I don't think we've seen a legit way until they nerfed it and we zerged it down.

Honestly, to all the fuckers who think that zerging isn't a "legit" way to kill are retarded. Just like there's lots of methods of doing things to acquire gil and whatnot, there are other ways of killing shit. Slow and steady or pure pwnage in a min. A kill is a kill, regardless if you're wiping on the way or everyone hasn't lost a single hit point. One person on these forums said it best "All that matters is the kill".

[Turbotwo]

From AV, to HNM, to proper usage of dates. De-rail much?

[Gunitsoldier]

From AV, to HNM, to proper usage of dates. De-rail much?

Datetalk was 4 posts and ended 3 posts ago, way to fail at trying to stirr shit up.