Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Unless you are a Blu with Occultation.

Managed to beat Perfidien before the free preiod was over

Next campaign I'll work on the rest of the NMs. Probably.

Apoc is such a fun toy (thought mine was capped, didn't know there is an R15 stage lol. Perhaps next time)

Apparently 14 is losing a lot of subs, a woke expansion

Not really. I don't notice much of a difference. Steam charts back that up. Most MMOs struggle to keep more than 400k active players these days.

The only thing that stands out as "woke" is that one of the voice actors is transgender in the English version.

It's kind of sad that some of you FF11 fanboys just can't move on.

nothing to do with them dropping the ball when they first released it- nope nothing to do with that.


on a topic not related - my mom said trash defends trash.

It was gonna be rough no matter what after Endwalker. I didn't get that far so can't say personally, but finishing a major plotline across 5 expansions and starting a new one was bound to be unsatisfactory to some people.

They have only released endgame raids, there isn't much for the everyday casual to do. They need to come out with the relic grind or a deep dungeon. It's also January, when the American dollar goes into hibernation. I haven't seen any actual news other than the mobile announcement.

The current biggest complaints on the XIV boards now that the much ado about a trans VA has died down that I see are:

1, The patch cycle got extended so everything worth waiting for makes the wait longer.

2, Content drought. Especially mid core content.

Several posters have said this is a good stopping point and have left. For at least a while if not forever.

Final Fantasy 14 Is Reportedly Threatening To Drop Below 1 Million Active Players


OH NOES!!! A mere 1.03 M players. Whatever will squenix do?

probably cry their way to the bank, it is funny how people doom and gloom these things so quickly.

Remember this is a game where players created a brothel for simps and you can get banned for complaining about players who shouldn't be attempting content.

in FFXI I can be racist and mean at the same time.

Nick is the greatest racist slash mean FFXI player, and not the other way around.

cant be racist against JP

Tried - not worth the lower drop rate

It was a reference I was loosey goosey with, i thought the “not the other way around” would help sell it.

Endwalker was honestly garbage. It relied significantly on the hype train they started leading up to it, which worked because Shadowbringers was so good, narratively. (emphasis on narratively, job homogenization started in Stormblood but got REALLY samey in SHB).

Combine that with the huge amount of new players from the Blizzard WoW fiasco that lead to that massive exodus, and you get a recipe for a crap ton of people enjoying FFXIV, if for but the moment.

To SE's credit, they hyped EW up and struck while the iron was hot, but if you look at it with a critical eye, it's garbage.

They kill the Garlean Empire, the entire Garlean Empire, off screen with a hand wave. These were the pre-eminent bad guys until Shadowbringers. The literal massive army that was lead by the nose by The Ascians. The empire that was so large that Eorzea could barely struggle bus against 1 legion in one region at a time against them. But ah, ooh, Fandaniel/Zenos caused another Civil War and urgh argh, all the Garleans got tempered, killed, or driven underground. Or are busy off screen with their thumbs up their *** in other provinces we're not allowed to travel to in spite of being adventurers.

The Towers that came up in 5.5 all around the world in every zone that were being hyped up to be a nearly insurmountable, worldwide threat? Gone in one fell swoop after the level 83 dungeon. Dumb dumb, dumb dumb... DUMB DUMB, DUMB DUMB! (to the tune of Dr. Cox's wrong wrong, wrong wrong)

Two stealth segment solo instances within the same zone. One as Thancred, one as WoL's soul in a Garlean body (In From The Cold). Pretty cool. Complained about for months by crybabies in playerbase. Narratively nothing comes from it other than some mild disgust from players, as Zenos took over the WoL's body and proceeded to walk up to the Scions menacingly. MENACINGLY!

Fandaniel takes advantage of Zenos's fightersexual crush on the WoL to pilot Zodiark himself... So he could do a piss poor job at it and lose? But him losing was just a Palpatine maneuver, where he still wins if he loses because Zodiark was the only bulwark against The Final Days. So why did he need Zenos at all, again? *he didn't, the writers are inept or inert, take your pick*

Hummingways that insist on a new name bring the break neck pacing to a stand still with dopey, cutesy antics. With the pace killed at such a sudden stop, it never recovers. The writers didn't want it to recover. Expansion was supposed to center around dealing with despair, but they didn't want the audience to actually grapple with the issue, so they force in a lot of mandatory brevity which quickly turns from comic relief to comic drudgery.

Thavnair meets The Final Days. The literal best part of the expansion. The Final Days delivers here. You see all sorts of scenes where not everyone can get saved. Babar's Mom and brothers get turned into Blasphemies. The apparent Satrap gets eaten. A mother gets her neck wrung and her baby almost drowns (you save the baby). The whole expansion should have banked into this hard, but sadly, this would be the only populace truly visited by The Final Days in a way more meaningful than sudden strong problem monster causes about as much trouble as an A rank Hunt Mark sort of way.

Elpis... *head desk* You get fan service out the *** with Pre-Sundering Emet-selch and Hythlodaeus. Plus the introduction to Hydaelyn Venat. The fan service, of course, does nothing for you if you don't like those characters. I do, but the introduction to Pre-Sundering Fandaniel, Meteion, and Venat pretty much sours everything. Oh no, not immediately. Of course not immediately. This is our RUSHED(understatement) 2 levels to get to know major "protagonist" and antagonists of the expansion. To humanize them and learn their backstories. Of course, narratively, this was supposed to be WoL's time traveling gamble to learn what the actual root cause of The Final Days was, but in order for them to get that information from the Pre-Sundering Ascians, it means that the plot point that the Ascians didn't know the root cause would have to be written over. How'd they do that? Well, there's a memory wiping device that they keep mentioning after like 6 quests in Elpis.

So jee, I wonder what that means for the characters we've been introduced too? Well golly, it means that the lead researching wizard that's interesting in making blue chicken space lolicons is the architect of The Final Days, even if unwittingly. We sure as shoot know it's not gonna be Momma Hydaelyn. But then, if we're a time traveler and they figure that out simply by our presence and magical odor, what about The Sundering? You know, the civil war that came immediately after they'd solved The Final Days with Zodiark? The uhh, stolen god making ritual that lead to the splitting and death of every person and animal except 3? Well, there's no actual room for it in the plot of Endwalker, but by god, Yoshi-P is gonna give you Hydaelyn's side of being a false god that killed her people, and you're gonna drink the kool-aid! Or have it completely wreck your faith in the XIV dev team's ability to write. No literal portrayal of the event (we get a cheap metaphor with some demagoguery and the strawman Ascians). No apology for the event. Even the admission that she could, "See herself doing that." She was supposed to be the light and the goodness, but she was just a murderer who didn't actually believe in her own people. But it had to be done, "for the greater good." And it was just, "a tragic and hard decision born out of love!" Capital BULL Capital ***.

This doesn't even touch on the stupidity of the memory erasure device being able to be used on heads of government/the Ktsis facility being able to enervate heads of government but not the chief researcher who reports to them. Nor the stupidity of Emet and Hyth allowing their memories to be altered instead of summoning Emet's familiar and flying out like WoL and Venat, but I guess the plot has to happen right... @_@

So the WoL goes back to the future and gives out the info to the Scions after they save the Thavnairians from The Final Days AGAIN this time in Garlemald. They were on their way to the moon teleporter. After which we find out all about the Sharlayans working with Hydaelyn and being possessed of a spaceship they'd been designing for a couple hundred years. Also find out they have an elevator shaft that goes almost all the way to Hydaelyn in the Aetherial Sea, a place once thought to be intangible for physical beings. You go down there to have a chat about what exactly her plan is to stop the Blue Chicken Space Lolis, now Black Chicken Space Lolis. You fight your way through the souls of bad guys you killed in life. Yeah they didn't find peace after you beat them/killed them. They remained angry at you in death and now bar your path, because why introduce new bad guys when you can reuse old ones for memberberries to try and make it seem like this a 10 year story conclusion and not just the second half of Shadowbringers?

You get down to Hydaelyn and she tells you her planetary escape plan, which is nonsensical given Black Chicken Space Loli's ability to drown every planet in the known cosmos. She says you'll have to beat her to prove that you could stand a chance against Black Chicken Space Loli, also nonsensical, because she hasn't ever fought or even held off Black Chicken Space Loli's powers, in spite of planting a permanent tracking brand on her 12000 years ago. But as is usual for Hydaelyn, none of the good guys question her cryptic/nonsensical ***, and you fight and kill her. As she sits dying, she tells ya more *** and enchants the Azem stone that Emet-selch made with the ability to revive the dead. Yifftola confirms Hydaelyn's motive for The Sundering being to give mankind better ability to interact with Dynamis. Hydaelyn simply states there was no kindness or justice in the tragedy she wrought (in JP, "what's done is done"). After which, Yifftola posits in a talk to NPCs between CS dialogue that, "Maybe Hydaelyn's actions weren't amazeballs but WE can give them a nobler meaning." Yeah, no, genocide isn't just a hard sell. It's an impossible sell. Get *** XIV writing team. Go to Hell! Also the pacing in Labyrinthos leading up to this dungeon and moment was really slow and involved Hummingways again.

Then we get the whole call on the entire supporting cast of every prior expansion to deliver rocket fuel kumbaya moment. It's cool. I liked it. Why none of these characters could come along with us, since we don't know what exactly we're facing... Well we know it's because they only want to pay for so much voice acting, and also because as previously established, the writers for XIV are inept and unable to deal with cast size larger than 8~9 people.

We get out to Ultima Thule, the farthest reaches of the cosmos (in one direction, XIV dev team shows they don't understand 3 dimensional space...). One by one the Scions give up their lives to give us ground to walk on to reach Meteion's egg (of the perfect world, bay beeeeee). We reach just below ze egg and, of course, deploy the revival counter measure to... bring back Emet-selch and Hythlodaeus who make Elpis Flowers for Meteion which triggers her Blue Chicken memories causing her to lose hold on her own domain allowing us to bring the Scions back as Ultima Thule has now been bound to physical space. After which Emet says, "Nah fam I'd rather be dead." and undoes his own revival while expositing all the places we will be visiting in the future after EW.

So we go into Meteion's Egg and see 3 of the worlds that died after she visited them with babby's first existentialism. One of them is a very on the nose, "This is what woulda happened to the Ascians eventually, bay beeeee!" sorta place. Falls flat for several reasons, mainly because it's a straw colored area and a strawman of two fictional societies. Then we fight Meteion and the Scions are getting their *** beat so hard that the WoL presses the emergency teleporter button and sends them all back to the spaceship. Then Zenos breaks in as Shinryu because he was a lingering plot thread and we get to team up with FFXIV's Vegeta to stop Meteion, and we ride Zenos-Ryu and use him as the battle arena to beat her. We get a nice FFIV prayers moment in order to stop her ultimate attack a second time, and then finish her off as she flails around.

Then we fight Zenos one on one and nearly die in the doing. But now he's as dead as the writers want him to be, so they can finally stop trying to come up with something for him to do. Because none of the writers want too. Then the EW post game was FFIV references with NONE of the soul of FFIV. ***expansion. ***post expansion. Only did well because of hype and circumstance.

Yawnfail is just what Endwalker would have been perceived as without the hype (although a bit worse because it revolves around a blackhole sue).

TL;DR

Yes, Vyre has a meltie every time he thinks about Endwalker. Carry on with your day, you've got better things to think about and do.

WTF Vyre-kun!

Vyre dont *** play - he came with receipts

guy even screencapped his post to put it in the meme. A+ work.

I like the Vyre write-ups™. I enjoyed this one quite a bit.
The only downside is that you made me google "Yifftola"..

That whole memory wipe device was too convenient, way more than I'd give leeway for lol (and I'm quite forgiving towards FF writing in general)

IDK, I liked a lot of EW.

XIV is full of Final Fantasy fanservice. Throughout its run it has hearkend back to other Final Fantasies. For EW they got all self referential fanservicey and that's the part that got a bit sticky for my taste.

@Vyre

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/

Tonight we find out how much lube we are going to need to get a RTX 5090

Im expecting diddy tier

If youre upgrading from 4090 to 5090 you deserve to take it lubeless

2499 base model, believable rumors

Add a big beautiful $700 tariff on top, yummo

That Cliffs' Notes of Endwalker was epic my man Vyre, and I could not help but lol. Is why I never made it all the way through to to Dawntrail.

The best part of Yawnfail has been the FFXI 24 man. Voice acted Ark Angels is pretty great, even if most of them are limey brits. British Prishe feels weird, but then they also put her in that WTF outfit too and had her be a raid boss so...

To expand on DT's 24 person raids.

There will be three, IDK who will be bosses in the last two but they WILL be XI bosses.

Prishe looks WEIRD as a raid boss, but mostly she looks like XI's Prishe. She isn't XI's Prishe though.

And the nostalgic can hang around lower Jeuno AFK LFP....

I should run that raid again, I do want the AA armor.

That's why you play in Japanese. Prishe sounds so fun. And the AAs are on point imo. Shadow Lord too. You can feel his wrath.