Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

Dopey Cunt said:
But you're telling me Alexandrians can't find a way to use it in more beneficial ways like creating dome shields for their settlements outside or using it for special suits for their hunters to protect them from stray lightning bolts or maybe even using it to combat the aforementioned lightning sickness? A civilization run by retards is doomed to fail.
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I'm not disagreeing with you that Alexandrians are largely coddled retards, but in their defence they basically did have solutions for most of those problems. The current settlements like the Outskirts apparently revived traditional farming practices out of a sense of tradition rather than necessity; the people in Solution Nine eat a completely synthetic diet and have advanced robotics, and appear to have existed just fine before absorbing Yyasulani for the generations it must've taken to build a city of that size. Why would they need lightning proof suits to go hunting if they don't eat real meat anyway? They can literally just get robots to do it.

Of course this leaves the question of why regulators are so important to the general public of Solution Nine anyway. My reading was that the average person genuinely is in almost no danger at any given time, and they just hold on to them to have a sense of safety, like maybe it's just cultural inertia from the days of the Storm Surge before Everkeep became the metropolis it is today.

Again it's a potentially interesting conflict; the people of Alexandria are completely fine with their robotic army and electrope to convert lightning into clean energy, but they've been so coddled by Sphene being a digital mommy for every single citizen that they've functionally turned into Eulmore 2.0, hence why a single retarded lizard could waltz in and conquer them without any resistance. I *think* this is more or less what the writers are going for; that the Alexandrians have been so sheltered by generations of Sphene's obsessive caretaking that the thought of life without their perfect princess waifu chatbot is making them suicidal; but it's so boring and poorly focused that it's hard to tell what angle they're going for.

edit: also, I will defend them on the whole soul supply issue: the Everkeep system and Sphene appear to run pretty much separately from the general public. The average citizen has little to no understanding of death and no knowledge of the previous generation, so do they even really know what Living Memory is outside of "people who grow old are sent to the cloud", let alone have any way of confronting the omnipresent algorithm that runs their society? The more I think on it, the more I think Sphene could've been a great villain if they had just emphasised the horror of what she'd already built, a Neverland of children who couldn't grow up, rather than "anime villain of the week with a paper-thin motivation to kill everyone but she's really sad so feel bad for her please!!"
 
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Sheep King said:
The current settlements like the Outskirts apparently revived traditional farming practices out of a sense of tradition rather than necessity
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This came about because Turali wanted to do this and pushed for it. Alexandrians didn't care for it or wouldn't have bothered leaving their safe spaces in everkeep for something they probably viewed was stupid and a waste of time and resources and a concept they felt was antiquated if they could just synthesize their own fake food. If anything, they only succeeded because they got Sphene's backing and she agreed largely because she wanted Turali to integrate into Alexandrian society despite a lot of them having misgivings about their soul system at first.

Sheep King said:
the people in Solution Nine eat a completely synthetic diet and have advanced robotics, and appear to have existed just fine before absorbing Yyasulani for the generations it must've taken to build a city of that size
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I can guarantee you that the everkeep system did most of the building for them meaning they didn't even have to bother lifting a finger. If Sphene can change the structure of the city on a whim, there's no reason to doubt that they could've created other programs capable of the same feat. Which begs the questions: if they already had solutions for a lot of their mundane problems, wouldn't that only exacerbate the issue of them being unable to stand on their own 2 feet without those conveniences? And if they were capable of such things, why would they put more reliance on a flawed system instead of creating something entirely new, self sustaining and easily managed? They are certainly capable of it. Yet they chose not to. This is their problem. Just because you give someone the tools they need to succeed, they can't succeed if they don't know how to utilize those tools to their full potential. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and he'll be fed the rest of his life.

Sheep King said:
Why would they need lightning proof suits to go hunting if they don't eat real meat anyway? They can literally just get robots to do it.
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The whole reason why hunters exist is because they can't have their robots go out and do it. The unstable lightning currents and the threat of lightning strikes messes with the robots too much and causes them to short circuit. That's why you see robot mobs outside because they've been short circuited by the environment.

Sheep King said:
Of course this leaves the question of why regulators are so important to the general public of Solution Nine anyway.
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They are important because the regulators are linked directly with the everkeep system and the system itself is responsible for erasing memories of the deceased, distributing souls and injecting both souls and memories into who's wearing them when they die. They also keep track of the people who die permanently either by natural causes like age or disease or from lack of spare souls. When they die, their regulator shuts down and it sends a signal to the system that the owner of the regulator has died. At that moment the system then catalogues the dead person's memories, stores them into the regulator and sends it to the meso terminal after the regulator itself is collected from their corpse while at the same time, sending another signal to all remaining active regulators to wipe the deceased person's memories from everyone. It's explained that the memories stored in the meso terminal is for the purpose of eventually reforming them in Living Memory and the erasure of memories from the living is to "spare them the pain of loss". That's why they can't handle nor know how to grieve. Because they never had to for so long. It's a reality check they aren't capable of dealing with. The only way they can retain memories of someone who's died is if the dead person has their regulator removed before they died or if someone who knew them removes their own regulator before the death. With their link to the everkeep system cut off, there's no way for the system to go through the process of recording the memories and erasing them. Think of it like people being connected to a hive mind.

Sheep King said:
hence why a single retarded lizard could waltz in and conquer them without any resistance
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Zoraal Ja didn't conquer them. Sphene basically handed him Alexandria and unrestricted access to do whatever he wanted in exchange for agreeing to become her little pet genocider. She wanted to use him to harvest more souls. The problem is that she didn't realize how unstable he actually was and didn't even think of the possibility that he would turn on her and Alexandria. Which in of itself is stupid because if you have someone jumping at the chance to murder innocent life, then they are obviously not someone that can be trusted with literally anything. Her shock at his betrayal was ludicrously retarded given all that context and during that scene I found myself rubbing my temple with enough force to peel my skin back and expose the frontal lobe of my skull.
 
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RIPRhongoBongo said:
How is it that a bunch of Kiwis can sit around and do a better job of retard-proofing a video game plot than the "paid professionals" that worked on said plot?
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Alexandria's flaws are made even more apparent after the latest patch. They so scared of death that it renders them incapable of doing anything. They are so scared they are willing to do literally anything to avoid it. So when not Sphene suddenly appears out of no where and basically tells them "hey, let's just kill all of you and turn you into endless so you never have to fear death again", they practically jump at the opportunity. Then she tells them "well we only have enough power to turn like 3 thousand of you into endless. Rest of you are fucked" they break out into another panic, especially when they realize they don't have 100% chance of being chosen to become an endless. Because what she's basically pitching is to kill every citizen of Alexandria, turn 3 thousand of their total population into endless and then convert the remainder into soul power to fuel those endless. The core issue still remains and doesn't change though, eventually that surplus of soul power will run out and they'll be right back where they started. No, even worse off than before. With no living people to sustain their society, it will literally collapse once their souls run out and the system and all endless just vanish into the aether because there's nothing left to power them. It's just delaying the inevitable and they can't keep delaying and delaying forever. Nevermind that they are seemingly okay with a localized genocide against their own population so long as it serves their own personal needs. Not a single one of them raises any doubt about this. What of their children? Are they okay with their children being slaughtered to save only a tiny fraction of their population? A tiny fraction that will end up just fading away over time anyway? It's things like this that cause me to shake my head in utter disbelief that anyone on the dev team thought to let this drivel pass quality check. If I were in that room with them I would ask them if they are reading the same thing I am, because what I'm reading a load of dogshit and that a 13 year old fanfic writer could write something better than this.
They don't care about any of the possible drawbacks or what could happen to their society if they all just suddenly abandoned it to become endless or what it could mean for all the people left behind. They are so desperate to break outta the wheel and escape their fear of death that they retardedly agree to doing something so absolutely absurd.
 
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Dopey Cunt said:
Alexandria's flaws are made even more apparent after the latest patch. They so scared of death that it renders them incapable of doing anything. They are so scared they are willing to do literally anything to avoid it. So when not Sphene suddenly appears out of no where and basically tells them "hey, let's just kill all of you and turn you into endless so you never have to fear death again", they practically jump at the opportunity. Then she tells them "well we only have enough power to turn like 3 thousand of you into endless. Rest of you are fucked" they break out into another panic, especially when they realize they don't have 100% chance of being chosen to become an endless. Because what she's basically pitching is to kill every citizen of Alexandria, turn 3 thousand of their total population into endless and then convert the remainder into soul power to fuel those endless. The core issue still remains and doesn't change though, eventually that surplus of soul power will run out and they'll be right back where they started. No, even worse off than before. With no living people to sustain their society, it will literally collapse once their souls run out and the system and all endless just vanish into the aether because there's nothing left to power them. It's just delaying the inevitable and they can't keep delaying and delaying forever.
They don't care about any of the possible drawbacks or what could happen to their society if they all just suddenly abandoned it to become endless or what it could mean for all the people left behind. They are so desperate to break outta the wheel and escape their fear of death that they retardedly agree to doing something so absolutely absurd.
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That's pretty much what the moral takeaway of this subplot seems to be, though? That fulfilling all of a person's needs, inoculating them from learning experiences like grief, makes them lazy and complacent? I guess I'm just confused why you'd hate the depiction of the Alexandrians when they act exactly like you'd expect for a people in a society with no material needs.

The whole "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" thing doesn't really work here. It applies to Eulmorans who were wilfully ignorant of the death and suffering that was happening right outside their walls. But Alexandrians grow up in what appears on the surface to be a perfectly functioning society. The soul supply question is largely out of their control and doesn't affect the rest of their needs; electrope and everything else functions fine with no soul storing. How do you convince these people who have genuinely never known hardship, who are all on a first-name basis with the immortal, omnipresent computer that has guided their civilization since before they were born that actually they shouldn't rely on the perfectly functioning machine?
It is a genuinely interesting question and the big problem with the subplot imo is that it isn't focused on more.

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime, engulf the world in apocalyptic lightning as a result of immortal fuckery causing countless wars from the man's neighbours over fish supplies and he'll build a perfect fish-generating AI machine that ensures his future children will never want for fish again before the AI which was trained off a dutiful leader decides to personally protect every single person from any discomfort and those people become nigger cattle.
 
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Tari said:
the same reason why modders can fix bugs in a week that it takes years for actual game devs to

we actually give a shit about what we're consooming
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And also we don't care about what other players think, don't have corporates yelling in our ears on how much diversity we have to cram into the story, and so many more things that kill the creative process instead of enhancing it.

We just shoot the shit and autistically brainstorm to create a better story.
 
Honestly they should get someone else to write the story of ff14. The time of yoshipee has passed, he should have retired at the end of endwalker and pass the torch.
 
Sheep King said:
That's pretty much what the moral takeaway of this subplot seems to be, though? That fulfilling all of a person's needs, inoculating them from learning experiences like grief, makes them lazy and complacent? I guess I'm just confused why you'd hate the depiction of the Alexandrians when they act exactly like you'd expect for a people in a society with no material needs.
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I hate it because it's a road we've already walked down and have already established that it's possible to go on without them being so scared. There's a reason why they specifically make the juxtaposition between what the Yok Huy believe and the Alexandrians' complete rejection of that. The entirety of the second half of the last expansion was dedicated combating despair and helplessness. Nothing is more annoying than watching some cunt constantly whine about his lot in life and make no efforts to change anything even when presented with endless opportunities and resources to make something of themselves. Instead you watch them continue to fall back on old habits knowing full well that it won't end well for them yet choosing this path of self destruction.

I don't care about a society of people who never want to put in effort to do anything besides run away from their problems the moment things start to break down a little. Expecting them to behave a certain way doesn't take away that they can do better and have the tools to do better but the plot demands that they all be lobotomized because the writers can't stop writing themselves into a corner every other paragraph. I don't want to waste time helping people that don't want the help. That's why I say if they want to erase themselves from reality with their dumb fucking ideas, let them. I can't be ass'd to care about people who don't even care about their own society. If they wanna doom themselves to extinction, fine by me. So long as they don't drag everyone outside of their stupid bubble down with them.

That's why it ticks me off and that's why I hate them. I find them insufferable and whiny and always complaining about the circumstances they put themselves in while laboring to put more effort into destroying themselves than using their vast knowledge and technology to improve their civilization so that they don't have to rely on such a flawed system that's doomed to fail. I find their behavior utterly illogical, even if I understand why that's the case.

I want to root for the people who strive against adversity. The determined few who are capable of seeing a better way and wanting to reach something better. Those who are able to see the flaws in their design and improve. Endwalker spent so much time instilling those values in us and yet we have to watch Alexandria kick and sob like helpless little babies at the first sign of trouble. Cliche I know, but those kind of stories are what I want. I want to be inspired. I want to always believe things will be okay in the end. I like a feel good story of people pulling themselves up from the brink and making a better tomorrow for everyone.

Maybe it'll change later down the road and my opinions of Alexandria will change as we're drip fed more story. But as of right now, I want nothing more than for Alexandria and all it's citizens to be deleted from the game.

Sorry if it comes off a little ranty, but I hope you can glean why I dislike them so much.
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Dopey Cunt said:
That's why it ticks me off and that's why I hate them. I find them insufferable and whiny and always complaining about the circumstances they put themselves in while laboring to put more effort into destroying themselves than using their vast knowledge and technology to improve their civilization so that they don't have to rely on such a flawed system that's doomed to fail. I find their behavior utterly illogical, even if I understand why that's the case.
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This reads like an allegory to the Jews.
 
Dopey Cunt said:
Maybe it'll change later down the road and my opinions of Alexandria will change as we're drip fed more story. But as of right now, I want nothing more than for Alexandria and all it's citizens to be deleted from the game.

Sorry if it comes off a little ranty, but I hope you can glean why I dislike them so much.
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Fair enough. I could keep sperging but if you just dislike the story that's the end of it. I can understand hating Alexandria if only because the story spends so much time trying to get you to feel bad for Sphene and "muh people" that I started resenting them just out of spite.

Either way I'll still take this over 10 hours hanging out in wholesome multicultural Tuliyolal where the only interesting question is "how many tacos can Wuk Lamat fit in her mouth before she chokes?"
 
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Sheep King said:
Fair enough. I could keep sperging but if you just dislike the story that's the end of it. I can understand hating Alexandria if only because the story spends so much time trying to get you to feel bad for Sphene and "muh people" that I started resenting them just out of spite.

Either way I'll still take this over 10 hours hanging out in wholesome multicultural Tuliyolal where the only interesting question is "how many tacos can Wuk Lamat fit in her mouth before she chokes?"
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Speaking of multicult wholesome Tuliyolal, is the city really involved in absolutely no shady shit or conflict whatsoever?
 
Kane Lives said:
Speaking of multicult wholesome Tuliyolal, is the city really involved in absolutely no shady shit or conflict whatsoever?
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Biggest thing I can think of is there's some shitty people out in Yaasolani. I assume they came from Tuli since I have no idea where else they'd be coming from.
 
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