Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Dopey Cunt]

Work on the crafter jobs first til you get the 150% research bonus.

Just failed the second fate in Maduin, we just don't have enough people. It'll pity auto complete it on the 3rd try but until then we won't get any red alert spawns in the interim which sucks and just further punishes us for being on a low pop server.
Also how does that work? Do I just craft and then the buff just activates or do I have to do something specific first?

 

[Well Intentioned]

Just failed the second fate in Maduin, we just don't have enough people. It'll pity auto complete it on the 3rd try but until then we won't get any red alert spawns in the interim which sucks and just further punishes us for being on a low pop server.
Also how does that work? Do I just craft and then the buff just activates or do I have to do something specific first?

Each relic you complete gives you an XP bonus to research. It's automatically activated and caps at 150%. The current bonus (if you have any) will pop up under the Loporrit text box in the Research window.

Crafters are easier because CP refills automatically each craft. It's still tedium, but it is less time consuming to get the research bonuses.

And dang, I looked at the progress for some of the other data centers. I'm surprised Japan is slacking, but looks like it is all Aether.

E: Also, might be worth doing Custom Deliveries and spending purple scrips on Hi-Cordials and saving them for Red Alerts. I forgot I have a cache of them and have been using them.

E: One other thing I forgot is that the differences between Gold & Silver isn't significant. I try to Gold at least once for achievement purposes but if something is too annoying/whatever I'm just gonna wait til I can out gear and brute force it.

Also,

 

[Xerxes IX]

Just failed the second fate in Maduin, we just don't have enough people. It'll pity auto complete it on the 3rd try but until then we won't get any red alert spawns in the interim which sucks and just further punishes us for being on a low pop server.
Also how does that work? Do I just craft and then the buff just activates or do I have to do something specific first?

Research bonus is tied to tool completion, so it's best to work on crafting jobs until you get the 150% bonus (since you can just pop in a macro and grind those out unlike the utter bullshit that is Gatherer leves) and finish gathering jobs' tools once you've got that.

 

[Dopey Cunt]

Oof so I need to start from scratch with a crafter job.
Okay. It is what it is.

 

[Well Intentioned]

Oof so I need to start from scratch with a crafter job.
Okay. It is what it is.
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If it makes you feel better, the first one I started on was MIN.

Don't be a WoW raid tranny and hyperfixate on min/maxing everything. Just appreciate it as figuring shit out.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Finally finished Stormblood, it only took a massive break from the game lmao

 

[Baguette Child]

Finally finished Stormblood, it only took a massive break from the game lmao

Stormblood was a slog at huge swaths of the expansion, for sure. I think part of why I struggled with making myself plow through it was that Heavensward had been a high point for my initial blind playthrough and I just wasn't prepared to go back to early-ARR levels of boredom.

I still think it had a few good moments though, which is more than I can say for Dawntrail.

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

WoW content creation only works because the things that happen surrounding WoW are often more interesting than the people talking about those things.

I think the main factor is PTR. WoW lets people download the beta version of the next patch or expansion and play around with it and then give feedback, which then results in some changes. Usually class or systems changes, rarely any changes to the story content. So a lot of these WoW youtuber videos are about the changes happening on the PTR to classes or systems or dungeon tuning, so they have stuff to talk about for a month before a patch's release. FF14 doesn't let the public do any beta testing so there is nothing to talk about except a live letter summary and a trailer analysis and then that's it until patch day.

As for lore, WoW has a lot of lore youtube videos still being produced. I think this has to do with how fractured WoW's storytelling is, where major plot events happen in books or short stories or in a prior RTS game most WoW players haven't played, and a lot of important details happened in tweets from the devs, etc. And ofcourse there were the retcons. So the youtubers were needed to stay on top of what was happening and what the current lore is supposed to be. FF14 in contrast spoonfeeds everything a player needs to know through the game. There are short stories on a website but nothing important happens in them. There are retcons but the retcon info is given to you in the game rather than you needing to go on twitter to find out what assumption the story is currently operating on.

Another contributing factor is that WoW gets the player invested into multiple different competing faction and class organizations, so people get fired up about their team winning or getting snubbed. "Death Knights raided our class order hall! Blizz needs to let us get revenge!". FF14 however only has everyone on the same one side, so there are no teams to get fired up over.

Dropping in from lurking again to ask what the fuck it is with this game that makes you either a homo or a tranny. Is there some shit in the water? Is it the sex tourism possessed, mandatory overly positive community, or a western social contagion?

I don’t touch MMOs at all, but I haven’t seen any game other than this or the fighting game “community” pump out imminent 41%s with this level of efficiency. It’s fucking sad.

It is a long visual novel with a tremendous time commitment. Unless you are unemployed then it could over a year to get through the story. Which means normal people get filtered out. People generally do not go online to talk about a game unless they have beaten it and are caught up, which further selects who you are seeing online.

I blame Square Enix's modjannies for enabling this globohomo-community.

I think that issue has more to do with how social media and most internet forums have been captured by insane people. Most youths grow up exposed to youtube or reddit, and then maybe join a FF14 fan discord. Infamously reddit and discord servers are captured by the greedy types who want to acquire internet fame and wield their faux authority as a bludgeon to enforce their beliefs. And that is where discussion of the game is.

Its weird to explain and I have trouble putting it into words, and this connection might not even be there, but it is what I always thought when I saw this ugly thing.

Fatherless men thrown to the wolves of society. They are not taught stoicism or how to be strong. Meanwhile, society tells them that it is okay to be emotional. People in Youtube videos and characters in movies on Netflix shouting at each other or doing inane juvenile antics.

I still think it had a few good moments though, which is more than I can say for Dawntrail.

SB is my favorite expansion. It is about people vs people from beginning to end and the plot does not get hijacked halfway through by cartoonish nonsense. HW and ShB are the fandom's darling but personally I disliked le evil Church and did not like how FF14 pivoted away from grounded geopolitical conflict into handwavey light vs darkness Kingdom Hearts schlock. I quite liked Gosetsu. People talk about Haucherfaunt but I didn't really care about him, but was saddened by Gosetsu getting crushed and drowning. I liked that you get to see two very different regions and it made sense to condense the two storylines into one expac rather than have four years of fighting in outer provinces that haven't been fully assimilated yet, though Gyr Abania's three maps could have been better differentiated rather than being three maps of dry beige desert. SB has far and away the best OST of any FF14 expac with 30 great songs, the highest amount of quantity and quality. And the pop song schlock hadn't become ubiquitous yet.

 

[Baguette Child]

I quite liked Gosetsu.

I'll agree with you on this part; I also enjoyed Gosetsu and his character arc. He was fun. Poor guy gets a lot of undue hate from the playerbase when he was one of the best parts of his expansion for me.

Also agreed about the soundtrack. Stormblood had some absolute bangers.

 

[Xerxes IX]

SB is my favorite expansion. It is about people vs people from beginning to end and the plot does not get hijacked halfway through by cartoonish nonsense.

I enjoyed the grounded conflict vs Garlemald and they chose to throw it all away for cartoon FATE OF THE UNIVERSE stuff. Dawntrail pretends to have people focused political stuff and then they don't, because everything needs to be hecking wholesome in the first half and goes back to retreading Shadowbringers and FATE OF THE UNIVERSE in the second half.

There's red Yok Huy who don't see themselves as under rule of the Dawnservant? Do we get to hear about them yelling AM I BEING DETAINED if they break the law of Tuliyollal? Doesn't matter because Team Wuk wins them over of course. Mamook has no teeth because it's resolved like a Steven Universe parody. They talk their feelings out as if the people there never expressed that the dead babies are making them sad. The Eugenics Lizards said they were really sorry and we gave them crops so it's completely resolved. There's comically little conflict between Tural and Alexandria after the day is saved, they are very quick to normalize relations with a country that invaded Tuliyollal, massacred civilians, and killed universally beloved Dear Leader Gulool Ja Ja. (And trapped Tural citizens in a dome that made them spend 30 years there, though that isn't completely under Alexandria's control) It goes the other way too, you and Wuk Lamat show up to Sphene's funeral and no one's outraged you're there even though you two killed their universally beloved Dear Leader, Sphene. You think there will be political conflict because the story's about leaders of nations? No, it is a poorly written afterthought because it's just set dressing for Wuk Lamat.

 

[RIPRhongoBongo]

SB has far and away the best OST of any FF14 expac with 30 great songs, the highest amount of quantity and quality.

The world can take Songs of Salt and Suffering from my cold, dead hands

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

Is it weird to say I kinda like "Footfalls" (Endwalker Main Menu theme) the best? Not saying that Stormblood's bad, far from it, just personal preference.

 

[Pigeon Enthusiast]

SB is my favorite expansion. It is about people vs people from beginning to end and the plot does not get hijacked halfway through by cartoonish nonsense. HW and ShB are the fandom's darling but personally I disliked le evil Church and did not like how FF14 pivoted away from grounded geopolitical conflict into handwavey light vs darkness Kingdom Hearts schlock. I quite liked Gosetsu. People talk about Haucherfaunt but I didn't really care about him, but was saddened by Gosetsu getting crushed and drowning. I liked that you get to see two very different regions and it made sense to condense the two storylines into one expac rather than have four years of fighting in outer provinces that haven't been fully assimilated yet, though Gyr Abania's three maps could have been better differentiated rather than being three maps of dry beige desert. SB has far and away the best OST of any FF14 expac with 30 great songs, the highest amount of quantity and quality. And the pop song schlock hadn't become ubiquitous yet.

I found it a bit of a slog at the time (I think the criticisms about pacing are a fairly justified complaint about SB's MSQ), but over time I've come to reevaluate SB and I think it's my favorite expansion now. It's just so much more grounded than what came after, in a way that IMO makes it feel much more relatable than the constantly escalating powerlevels and insane stakes that kicks off in ShB and has yet to stop.

I liked ShB at the time, but after Endwalker my opinion on it has changed for the worse, mostly because of how it opened the door to EW's fanfic AU bullshit with the Ancients. I still think it was, for all that it was less grounded than SB's geopolitical conflict, still a pretty decent story about people struggling to survive in a doomed world, though. It was about supernatural bullshit, but I liked the bits about how people cope with living in a world that's been teetering on the brink of fully ending for the past century.

Then Endwalker comes along and the stupidity just doesn't stop. "Oh, you fought the embodiment of Darkness to stop the end of the world? Too bad, here's his cousin Phil, who has gone entirely unmentioned before now but is totally twice as powerful and twice as evil, now go fight her next". Aforementioned fanfic AU bullshit with the Ancients. Unleashing the apocalypse then revealing that it only happened in like two places because uhhhh magic ozone layer n shiet, meaning they never have to acknowledge any of it happening anywhere else. Etc etc.

Then followed by Dawntrail, where the first half has absolutely no stakes or source of tension at all, because Fantasy South American Disneyland really is just a Hecking Wholesome place where everyone just wants to eat tacos and sing kumbaya, and every potential source of conflict or tension is either ignored or brushed under the rug in the span of one cutscene's worth of yapping (followed by three more where they reiterate repeatedly how shared love of ethnic foods is what makes Turali multiculti great and can solve all problems) . This is promptly followed by the back half raising the stakes to utterly meaningless universal annihilation yet again, culminating in what might as well be a step-by-step retread of the Endsinger fight except Wuk Lamat, as befits the expansion's true main character, pushes you aside to take center stage at the climax.

I'm sure we're gonna go to Meracydia and find yet another completely out of nowhere universe-ending threat to beat down in 8.0, too. It seems to be the only plot they care about writing these days.

 

[Brandy [◉'']]

SB was pretty poor for me because it painted the Garleans as hilariously incompetent on all levels, while trying so hard to be grimdark. The fact that they lost 2 major provinces in a span of less than a month is staggering. Also, big booty Zenons sucked back then and was only retroactively salvaged in EW.

 

[SuffahWhorse]

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(L)
Pint, known for making videos as a WoW female gnome then and a FFXIV female lalafell now plus becoming a vtuber, has come out as trans.

This is what he sounds like.

None of this is a surprise, he was actively and openly being groomed by the trannies of the FFXIV community when he came over. There were troons in his chat constantly talking about "egg-cracking", and I saw a lot of weird comments from trannies who would reply to him on Twitter. Most alarmingly was 2 years ago, when at a Twitchcon, Pint was hanging out with F1nn5ter. At that point I knew it was innevitable that he'd troon. Though it's extra funny considering he's in Mythic considering who owns it and who else is apart of it.

Also I see some people mentioning Cider Spider, well there are sadly some redflags from him too......

 

[SnowBall]

FF14 pivoted away from grounded geopolitical conflict into handwavey light vs darkness Kingdom Hearts schlock

Not going to lie I think it’s pretty disingenuous and unfair to reduce ShB to light vs. darkness KH slop as there’s much more to the plot than “light good darkness bad” or “darkness good light bad.” Also ShB actually turned the KH knockoff villains that were once shallow Saturday morning cartoon villains into fleshed out characters with actual backstories and motives.

As for SB I am one of the few that loved it when it first came out and defended it back in the day. I liked it before it became cool to do so. That said I kind of lost a bit of interest in it thanks to its fans and defenders getting progressively more insufferable over the years. At first I was happy seeing love for SB but people started getting extremely obnoxious over worshipping and defending it, bashing other expansions like HW and ShB to lift SB up, attacking others for disliking it with accusations of racism and sexism much like how fans defend Dawntrail now etc. Also personally encountered a few fart huffers unironically pull the “you need to have a high IQ to understand Rick and Morty” copy pasta who think people that dislike the political aspects of it are dumb with no attention span and just want anime fights. It was one of the first signs for me to stop interacting with the XIV community because fans were starting to ruin my enjoyment of the expansion. I’m glad I cut myself off from the fanbase. That said I still like SB a lot.

SB is a decent war story with a lot of great moments. I like it much better than HW (which I find extremely overrated and personally I find Maehiro’s writing for this game as a whole to be pretty bad. Also I will die on the hill that not only does HW have every single writing issue later expansions get ripped apart for just as badly but started all of them.) However there are some takes I see from many fans in the community I disagree with. For example I don’t think it deserves the praise of being a “grounded political conflict” that many fans give it. It flip flops way too much wanting to be a war story but also a shonen anime on both the Ala Mhigo and Doma sides equally. Unfortunately there are way too many ridiculous and over the top plot beats that make it hard to take seriously. Every time SB’s story gets grounded and serious something comes along to kneecap it and make it ridiculous. I have a lot of examples but it would be too exhausting to list them all.

For example the base msq fully jumps the shark with the whole artificial echo and human experimentation plot. I don’t know why but I never liked this part of SB. It felt tacked on and gimmicky. It really felt like the writers were running out of stuff to do with the echo and wanted to add new gimmicks. On another note for a war story there is quite a lack of a body count amongst the protagonists and we have fake out deaths.

And then there is everything involving Zenos. His every involvement in the plot and as the final boss of the base msq doubles down on the ridiculous stuff I mentioned earlier. While it was an epic and cool fight it felt like another shark jumping moment in SB’s base msq and really didn’t feel like it belonged in an expansion that was trying to be grounded. Another gripe with SB is the cast, it suffered from severe character bloat in that it throws so many characters at you but only a select few get a chance to shine. SB’s cast is extremely one dimensional even by this game’s standards, enjoyable but one dimensional.

To be fair I know this is an unpopular opinion in a lot of places but I personally find most of the grounded and political aspects of this game as a whole really below average, especially the stuff from ARR, HW and SB everyone praises. Every time it tries to be grounded and serious it always does something to shoot itself in the foot. It doesn’t matter who is writing it- Maehiro, Oda, Ishikawa, Matsuno, Hiroi- this is an across the board writing issue I have with this game. To me it’s just basic, generic jrpg shonen political fare. Yet again that’s just my feelings on it.

 

[Troon Whisperer]

SB was pretty poor for me because it painted the Garleans as hilariously incompetent on all levels, while trying so hard to be grimdark. The fact that they lost 2 major provinces in a span of less than a month is staggering. Also, big booty Zenons sucked back then and was only retroactively salvaged in EW.

I'm willing to give the Garleans a pass on this one, the incompetence was mostly Zenos's fault, as he gave zero fucks and delegated everything to subordinates who had their own agenda. Doma was lost because Yotsuyu mostly focused on torturing the populace and just being a petty bitch, meanwhile Ala Mhigo was Zenos not giving a fuck outside of fighting the WoL.

 

[King Of Braves]

I'm willing to give the Garleans a pass on this one, the incompetence was mostly Zenos's fault, as he gave zero fucks and delegated everything to subordinates who had their own agenda. Doma was lost because Yotsuyu mostly focused on torturing the populace and just being a petty bitch, meanwhile Ala Mhigo was Zenos not giving a fuck outside of fighting the WoL.

Yeah Zenos never had any illusions of being a leader, his usurping was just a means to an end. (The end being a test of your reflexes)

 

[Mr. Idiot]

Also I see some people mentioning Cider Spider, well there are sadly some redflags from him too......

...I regret my former statement. (I never even watched any of his streams so I've had no idea how he looked like)

Seriously though, why do these people who record video's whore themselves out on Twitch like that? Peak fucking degeneracy right there.

 

[Ravana]

The world can take Songs of Salt and Suffering from my cold, dead hands

I was thinking about that exact song when thinking about the Stormblood soundtrack. It's so good.

Is it weird to say I kinda like "Footfalls" (Endwalker Main Menu theme) the best? Not saying that Stormblood's bad, far from it, just personal preference.

The best main menu screen will always be Heavensward's.