Basically to give your alt money via the AH you have them put up a worthless item asking a high price, and then buy it on your main. A small cut is of course taken, but it means you don't have to bother your friends. Unlike in WoW, alts can buy each other's auctions.
Ooh, that's a good tip! Thanks! As an aside the 2 year anniversary event is really cute and clever. I just spent a while watching videos from 1.0 to get a sense of what it was like and what the plot was, so the timing was excellent as well.
I have to go & check that out. My housemate Paul bought 1.0 but stopped playing but never bought further game time, letting me get the recruit-a-friend bonus even though he had the game years before I started:)
I agree, I love the event. Just did it last night on both my main and alt. I don't think I'm likely to be running more than two characters at the same time; FF14 isn't really a game where there's pressure to have lots of alts like other MMOs, and it means that there's a lot to work through per character.
Honestly, I have my main and maybe 2 alts that I play somewhat consistency, and the other...like...4...are a once in a while thing. There really is SO much to do, and since you can do every class on one character...mostly I just really like playing with the character creator and running around as differently shaped people. Also coming up with backstories. If I've created a personality for a character it feels odd to play certain classes for them. Like Val has no aptitude for magic, but I wanted to get Raise and Protect, and playing him as conjurer was...weird. Its a silly immersion hangup I have, I guess. I also kind of barreled through a lot of the story the first time and so on my other characters I'm taking it easy and talking to all the NPCs to collect more lore knowledge. :3 Spoiler: some rambly thoughts about Thancred and also the worldbuilding; cw for discussion of rape/incest, spoilers thru 2.1 I have to stay, I started in Ul'dah initially. (gladiator) So, while I love all the Scions, Thancred kinda has a special place in my heart. But I hated him at first, lol. I thought he was incredibly annoying and rude, and it wasn't till around Ifrit that I started going hmm, maybe he's ok i guess? Then I switched the audio to Japanese from English on my alts, and he's really different in Japanese. Like he's still a flirt but he doesn't constantly do it, instead of calling Y'shtola lovely he just introduces her like a NORMAL PERSON and actually inquires after the PC's wellbeing when you first meet...whereas in English he says something flippant about you passing out. The contrast is sort of bizarre. It seems like the localization team really went for him fronting as this suave ladykiller a lot when he really just seems to do it when he wants information; otherwise he's very much a big brother type to the PC? It made me wonder what other stuff was changed during the non-voiced scenes. That said, I really appreciate that his story arc is one that's usually given to a woman. I realize this is a very strange thing to say, but. Trying too hard, depressed, gets POSSESSED by the big bad, and you have to rescue him. He's put in a very damsel in distress situation. AND to top it off, the rest of his friends really care for him and they blame THEMSELVES for not supporting him more instead of expecting him to just push through his illness, and they encourage him to rest and support his recovery. Like...ok, this is stupid I know, it's just a video game, but it really touched me after some of the shit I've been through with some of the people closest to me being really unsupportive about my mental health. SO YEAH. On the flip side, while I think a lot of the writing is excellent, I'm really sort of done with rape being used as a plot device. It just KEEPS. HAPPENING. ugh. I was definitely making faces about it the whole game (the arcanist quest line, holy shit) and I found the part with the Ala Mhigan girl extremely upsetting, especially because it came out of nowhere. And then Livia was kind of the last straw for me. Especially because the narrative is really...ambiguous about something that should be a big fucking red flag, maybe because she's a villain? But all her wiki pages talk about her being in love with Gaius as if it's her choice to be sleeping with him/she approached him, and about how LOL CRAZY YANDERE she is...Nevermind that if you do some digging you find out that he RAISED HER AND WAS HER ADOPTIVE FATHER which means there's some really horrific power imbalance going on there. Plus the scene where he tells her to sleep with him her response is...a tiny nod. It was definitely not enthusiastic. The whole thing skeeved me the fuck out. I don't think she should be forgiven for murdering a bunch of people but the nuance...it just wasn't there. Honestly i would have loved to see more of her and Rihtahtyn before you killed them off. Especially since his death seemed to set off her downward spiral, so I would have liked seeing them interact more...
Spoiler: Responses I agree with a lot of what you're saying about Thancred. I can't understand Japanese in either text or spoken, but even in the English version I very much got the impression that the "suave ladykiller" thing was an act, a front. From the beginning he comes across as a lot more emotionally vulnerable under the surface. And yes, that story arc is often a female one in Western storytelling. I haven't done the arcanist class yet, so I've not seen that part, but rape is definitely used. On the one hand, occupying armies really do do that in our nasty real world -- yes, even the "good guys" do it (plenty of material available about how US soldiers treated German civilians post WW2 surrender, for instance). On the other hand, is it necessary? But I also think that having it in backstory yet not calling it out as horrible, as in Livia's story, is worse. Instead we're just left to think she's no more than a truly horrible person who loves her villainous boss. There's also a shit-ton of male gaze stuff in the game; for instance, the cut-scene camera lingers on the women in a way it doesn't the men. And somehow we're always at Yda's crotch height examining the geometry of her micro shorts. And her outfit is SO fanservice-y. Why the hell would you wear heavy armored legs and tiny shorts, except to draw attention to what's between those legs? So blatant. (Also, an outfit not actually permitted to a player; pugilists don't get to wear plate like that).
Spoiler: response to responses Actually, Ydas sabotons are a holdover from 1.0 where gear wasn't restricted by class, or at least so I read? Papalymo wears the same type of armor as gauntlets despite being a caster. However, it doesn't excuse comboing that with hot pants. I think because the two of them are always together, whenever the camera's on him, we unfortunately are at Yda's crotch level, which would probably be less weird if she weren't wearing glorified underpants. that said the male gaze stuff just...blehh...it feels almost worse because there IS stuff the game gets right! Like Y'shtola's outfit is nice and practical, I love it. But the male pcs starter outfits are cool and most of the women get weird skimpy shit. And some pieces of gear randomly change into short shorts/skirt for a girl. But just some! It's strangely inconsistent. that and whenever there's an outfit that has the chest exposed on a guy, for the female version they literally just slap a bra on it and call it a day. It looks so weird. Couldn't they just bring up the neckline a little? Geez. Spoiler: putting the rape discussion under another cut bc it might be disturbing. Minor spoilers I've only gotten to lvl 15 on Arcanist because of this basically, but the lvl 15 quest has you running into your guild mate's rapist and then watching as she has a full-blown panic attack. Then the camera cuts to her perspective of him leering down at her. It was out of left field and really disturbing. I don't like to throw this word around but if I was really upset by it, no doubt it would be super triggering to actual survivors. It's not that I object to fiction tackling the tough stuff, and as you said with the occupying army stuff, it's a sad and grim reality. But it feels like the game treats it like a way to motivate the pc to beat people up rather than considering the actual feelings of the victims, if that makes any sense? And more often then not it's used to make you feel sorry for a guy close to the victim, and not the victim themselves i.e. Bertilana's assault making Wilfrid take action. Arenvald's mother kicking him out because he reminds her of his father, her rapist. The guy in Revenant's Toll (his name escapes me) who hates the Empire...because his mother and sister killed themselves rather than go back to being sex slaves for the soldiers. An NPC in Thanalan, who is a soldier, who begs the PC to fight some guys because she's afraid they'll rape her. The girl in the Shroud who gets a love letter and asks you to meet the guy in her place bc shes afraid he'll get violent when she turns him down. (A sadly realistic scenario.) The list seems to go on and it's...really depressing.
Spoiler: More discussion of rapey, abusey stuff I definitely get the feeling that much of the writing makes the assumption that player and character are stereotypical men/boys, and that really shows when rape and abuse show up. These are Opportunities To Be A Hero, generally through violence. Now, granted, this is partly the fault of the game format being centered on violence — you're a hammer, thus the world is nails. But even then, all too often the only thing considered is aggressive revenge. At least, I think, explore different solutions. Like if you're going to have rape, it shouldn't involve only helpless girls in need of a big, strong hero, and a perpetrator who's obviously evil. Maybe the rapist is unidentifiable. Or unfindable. Or unassailable. Or perhaps it's someone the victim doesn't want beat up or killed. Perhaps the victim needs to talk, to have a sympathetic ear. Perhaps he needs medical care. Perhaps she wants to leave town and needs an escort. Perhaps the best help you can give is to use your reputation to nudge local law enforcement into action. Or convince the rapist's family or employer to stop defending them or protecting them. Perhaps the victim wants to deliver the revenge herself, and needs the hero only to hold off henchmen, guards, or bystanders. And perhaps there's nothing useful to be done whatsoever. If you're going to include rape in a story, at least use it for more than an excuse for violence.
And yet, for all that, the leaders of all 3 city-states and the Scions are all women; and they are all different in personality, and seem not to be just fetish objects. There are lots of women doing the same jobs as men and often dressed almost the same. It's strange because there are such contrasts between different parts of this game.
Yes, this! We're presented with this world where people don't bat an eyelash at women fighting and leading, where the armies are 1/3-1/2 women, and yet this shit still happens. As much as I loved the 2nd anniversary event, there wasn't a single woman shown among all those developers...it's sad, really. I've played other games which maybe didn't have such reasonable armor choices, but the rape culture stuff was absent from the story. Hell...even in other FF games, I can't recall it being shoved in your face like this. (Also, nearly half of the summer event FATES involved protecting a woman from unwanted sexual attention. :/)
IN LESS DEPRESSING NEWS I figured out how to resize/rearrange my UI. I CAN ACTUALLY SEE THINGS NOW. (playing on a tiny laptop screen has been...difficult.) basically if you go to HUD layout, select the element you want to change, hold CTRL and then hit the "Home" key it cycles through a few different sizes. My quest list no longer takes up half the screen and my enemy list doesn't cover up my party list anymore! Spoiler: /joy.gif
I'm also curious as to whether the English localization is more rapey than the Japanese, or handles it worse or better? A lot (though not all) of the cases, it's only the words that make it rape-culture-y. It seems that it was decided to make FF14 more "adult" than other FF games. Unfortunately too often game devs interpret this to mean strippers, hookers and rape. Not completely, because there are parts of the game that hit adult territory through moral complexity etc. The other MMO I'm used to is World of Warcraft, which is more sexist in storyline (few major female leaders and rampant "chickification" of the ones there are) and clothing (they've improved from the early days where some outfits (Glorious Plate being perhaps the most notorious) were fully covering on men and metal thong panties and boob cups on women, but there's still a lot of bare midriffs and cleavage), but way less in the way of rape implications.
Also "no visible women on the dev team" seems to be pretty typical in Japan; the Japanese business world is even more sexist than the American. This might explain some of the contrasting things; the world they've created appears egalitarian in places it occurred to the men making it, but they had serious blind spots. I do like the fact it doesn't have too much gender imbalance in terms of who's allowed to look sexy, though; there's plenty of skimpy wear for men, and plenty of options for both genders. The initial outfits and the swimwear are pretty much the only gender-locked pieces and most outfits look reasonably similar on both men and women.
Considering the way I've already witnessed the localization team "embellishing" the dialogue (the weird old-fashioned speech everyone has is...really just within the normal range of casual speech in Japanese, generally? There are people with accents and dialects but it's nowhere near as exaggerated unless you look at the beastmen like the kobolds or sylphs) means I would guess that some of the rapey implications were not actually present in the original script. Yeah, I don't want to seem like I'm ragging on the game too hard, I really do enjoy it! And in some ways its a vast improvement from other games. there are just some things I wish were better...or more carefully conceived... (still sad that while woman can wear the Best Man Suit [yes!!], men can't wear the Bridesmaid's Dress 8( )
I love the game, but that makes me want it to be PERFECT but yeah, I'm in the same place. I don't bother criticizing things that are just stupid and worthless. I never noticed men can't wear the Bridesmaid's Dress! Probably because my characters are always women. It's sort of therapy for being trans and not transitioned in any way at all; I live what I would like to be in games, I guess? I've created male characters and they're cute as hell and I wish I could program them as NPCs, but I get such a sense of 'do not want' if I try and play as them that I just can't. But the Best Man Suit looks wonderful, especially on my Jame, who's skinny and flat-chested and looks practically born to wear a suit. The fictional character she's based on is always mistaken for a guy anyway. (I think honestly that's part of why I am so obsessed with that character; she's constantly misgendered and somewhat dysphoric about her body because of it, even though she's cis; cis people can get dysphoria too, when forced into a gender role that's not them).
Finally defeated Nidhogg so the main quest line can continue. Took about five parties over the last two weeks, but the group tonight did it in one go even though we only had bards for DPS. And now the storyline has me even more scared …
I missed this thread popping up because I've been.. semi away and busy I suppose. I actually took a brief week long or so break from FF14 because I.. wanted to replay an emulator of FF9, lol. I only have 1 character, a Hyur Highlander named Charlotte Wolfsong on the Balmung server. I'm considering server hopping though maybe... I'm in an FC I don't really care about and I don't really have any friends that I play with at all to keep me on the server anyway. So idk, I might be hopping elsewhere. I also might race change... I don't want to roll alts but then I want like 5 different characters because the character creation is so fun and I like pretty much all of the races. :/ I really wish alts were more practical and not so much of a time investment. Having to do the story line to get anywhere and do anything realllllyy keeps me from rolling anything else, when I can just skip the story and FATE grind whatever class I want to on my one character. The story can be really tedious at the points where it actually matters for leveling. I actually kind of sort of don't like the base game's story line up until like halfway through the level 50 quests. Heavensward has been doing a great job imo of being interesting though. I'm at about level 55. I unlocked The Aery last night and if I log on today I'll probably do it and be facing Nidhogg myself. Right now I've been leveling SMN/SCH but once I finish up The Aery I'll officially have flight unlocked in the Churning Mists.. which means I'll have a good and viable space to FATE grind unlocked. And I am probably going to go back and level up Archer to try BRD. SMN has been kind of eh to me and while I do like healing it's, idk, somewhat stressful. My main problem with this game is that I feel like I'm just kind of bad at it. I'm still trying to find a class that I feel like I can play comfortably and moderately well.
I just got through The Aery on Saturday, after beating my head against it for two weeks. There's a pretty nasty DPS check phase when Nidhogg leaves and sics some of his spawn on you; you have to take them down super fast so that Estinien can generate a protective shield before Nidhogg looses an insta-kill attack. During the rest of the fight, Nidhogg traps individual players and the others have to destroy the trap to free them, else they die. Ranged DPS players might not be noticed by others if they're out of their field of view, so make sure you call out in group chat. The problem I always run into in this game is that it's almost impossible to move fast enough for me to escape AOE damage. Even starting moving the instant I see it coming is frequently not enough, and I will visually appear to be well clear when the AOE triggers but I still get the damage. Is this a common thing, do you know? I'm wondering whether it's perhaps that I'm lagging a bit visually, but it seems that the decision of who gets damaged is done way before the visual effect. This game is hard at higher levels, so don't feel bad. It is significantly tougher than WoW in terms of standard-difficulty stuff, in my opinion.
@Morven, this is what happens to me on Japanese servers, it's lag. It doesn't happen on NA servers, where I am. You're supposed to have until the end of the enemy casting bar to get clear of the aoe. I thought I was shitty at it too, until I tried playing on a different server. If it's not caused by your server/data center, you could try cranking your graphics down? It could be all the battle effects going off. Did you have the same trouble at lower lvls?
