A random collection of things from the interwebs. Interested in SW:TOR? I can give you a friend package! Go to http://www.swtor.com/r/8ZKM3R to claim it!
I run a gaming group online. It started out as just a Free Company and associated Linkpearl alliance group so people who were in other Free Companies could still RP with us in Final Fantasy XIV, but when I basically threw myself into it too deeply as the leader, to the point of excluding every other game I wanted to play, we opened it up to a general gaming group.
Our main focus is still Final Fantasy XIV, particularly now since there’s been an announcement of a new expansion. By and large, since we ejected a troublemaker back in January, we haven’t had much drama; around the end of April, beginning of May, we had to go into sort of a hiatus mode in XIV due to my medical conditions and John’s move in with mom and I, and some members moved from the FC on to a more active FC, but they remained in the Linkshell and the overall gaming group. Pretty low drama the whole time.
When John and I began working on coming out of hiatus - which was a long process due to a mega migraine flare that consumed June, and my shoulder dislocating in July - someone we had a wary friendship asked us to join in the story arc he was running for his own return to the game. He also asked to be allowed to rejoin our FC, or at the very least, the Linkshell alliance.
He was removed from the FC about two years ago or so due to an incident involving RMT - Real Money Trading. It was an economic problem created by Yantis and MySuperSales.com way back as EverQuest was beginning to hit its stride; essentially, people would “bot” the game, making as much currency as quickly as possible, then turn around and sell it to players for real life money.
The situation in question then was really sticky. The person was involved with a huge fallout with his old group of friends (which wasn’t initially clear at the time he was joining our Linkshell, then FC), so receiving information from them - even though we were friends with them as well and they were totally trustworthy prior to that point - was coloured by finding out about the massive fall out.
John and I had noticed that the person was buying a lot of the newest, very hard to make glamour items for people in the FC/Alliance. These items were very expensive on the market, and the person didn’t have the ability to craft them, nor to gather the materials when commissioning. So we started questioning around about the cash, getting a rather vague answer from the person, however his RP partner and his prior FC gave a very different answer.
Apparently, according to his former RP partner and prior FC-mates, he had purchased a few bundles of gil to get that FC their estate. At the time, it was very difficult to get housing, and it was very unclear just when they would release more player and FC housing; it was not uncommon for people to do crazy things to get gil for housing before a Ward release, or to pay crazy amounts for a plot that was being vacated, and the RMT market was going nuts with people purchasing gil to secure an estate. As I mentioned, these people were friends we’d played XIV with for some time, and even moonlighted in other games, and thus far, they’d never been anything but trustworthy - in other drama llama situations, they had documentation out the arse to prove shit happened, however it’s rather difficult to prove an RMT transaction when it’s not your account.
The friend we were wary of claimed that his friend worked at an RMT place, and had given him some gil to help him out with the situation, and that it had been more gil than what was needed to get the house. This rather much didn’t make any sense, as there’s really not a lot of US or EU based RMT companies, due to the laws in these places; the general rules that at least most early RMT places we were fighting when I worked at SOE would prevent someone who worked at an RMT company from just handing out free currency to anyone, unless it was the “extra” percentage in a purchased package.
However, with it being hailed as a “He said, She said” situation due to the other drama that was already going on, we ended up just very quietly having the so-called friend withdraw from the FC and Alliance, while John and I (and a couple of others) just withdrew from the overall drama entirely.
Unfortunately, the ‘friend’ didn’t really get that, and John had to write out a lengthy letter explaining how stress effects the health of someone with fibromyalgia, while I temporarily blocked the person until a bit after they acknowledged the letter John wrote; they had kept trying to talk to me about not only the removal from the group, but the other general drama - and it felt like I was having to pick a side, when I had no interest in such.
When Blade and Soul finally got rolling with strength, I ended up encountering them again. It seemed like things had largely calmed down, and that the person had learned from their mistakes. They were in what appeared to be an amazing guild for B&S (that was it’s own major clusterfuck that ran through B&S and into BDO, but that’s a tale for another time), which I joined, so I had quite a bit of time to get to know the person again, and it really seemed like they had learned something from that rash of drama.
Unfortunately, there were some communication problems between them and the guild leader, so they didn’t stay in the guild, and overall ended up not being as heavily involved in B&S as they were going to be. The whole RP scene largely collapsed about three or four months into the game anyway, as did the guild, so that wasn’t too bad of a thing, I guess.
I had been splitting my time between B&S and XIV at that point, but the persona hadn’t been - the drama had made them quit XIV for a while. It wasn’t till around the time of the hiatus that they tapped myself and John about joining them for their return story arc. They were also asking to be allowed to rejoin the gaming group, and the FC in particular; given that it seemed as though they had changed, I had a conversation with my then very small leadership council, and we decided that we would use their return plot arc as sort of a test pilot to see if it would work out. Not only had we had the RMT situation, but the person was kind of an aggressive RPer, and we did have some issues where such had caused problems during RP events.
His RP arc didn’t really end up panning out - we never ended up making the events due to scheduling conflicts and rescheduling conflicts. There were a lot of awkward conversations, and most of the time, he’d only speak to me and not John.
One such conversation a few weeks ago lead to the incident tonight. He said something about how he was making gil by selling the items from Square Enix’ online store, the Mog Station. There is a gifting system that allows you to send these items to someone else’s character or account, so he would basically arrange to get gil from someone, then use this gifting system to send them the item code.
When he told me about it, I felt like there was something wrong about this methodology of generating gil. Squeenix is pretty against artists selling their artwork for in-game currency, and files it under RMT activity, just like the purchase of in-game gil for USDs (or whatever your regional denomination is). So I began stalling out when he asked about rejoining the group, because something about this just didn’t sit right, and I felt like there was some sort of ToS violation happening, again.
Other things came up, naturally. Events had to be run, doctors appointments had to be taken care of, investigations of starting a Twitch show began, that lead to focusing on cleaning up the office room more, and of course, Fan Festival happened and dropped a tonne of information. As there wasn’t anything right directly in your face in the primary ToS, this was forgotten about.
Then last night, I happened to see the person’s character up close and personal in game, candidly, as they were running around Limsa Lominsa. I noticed that they were wearing a chestpiece that runs for almost 8 million gil, which is considerable amount. So I pulled up their profile on the Lodestone, which is a community site Squeenix runs for players; the profile section shows lots of stats about a character, including the last set of gear the person logged out in.
So the chestpiece was actually glamoured to be the Cashmere Poncho, the damn near 8m gil fashion whore glamour piece that literally has no stats and is just there to be pretty. However, it was glamoured onto the high quality iLevel 250 combat chestpiece for his character’s job...and he had the entire crafted high quality 250 combat set, including the weapon. One of my officers calculated it off the current market board prices, and it all - with glamours - was around 15m in items, just a bit above.
It really was all giving me a bad feeling. I brought up the fact that the person had revealed their method of buying Mog Stations items to sell for in-game cash, and the fact that it felt like RMT to me, even though i couldn’t find mention of it in the ToS. My two officers who are super active in XIV agreed, and eventually a third whose interest has been grabbed due to Stormblood got involved in the conversation, and seemed to be of the mind that if the group was against RMT, and we felt it was RMT, he should be gone, and if it was actually a ToS violation, he really should be gone - especially if he already knew the group’s feelings about it all.
One of the active XIV officers managed to find via Reddit that the Mog Station actually explicitly states (at least at this point) that trading the codes on the site for in-game currency or for real money is RMT activity, and a bannable offence. So, armed with that information, I attempted to casually find out about how this so-called friend got this incredibly expensive gear.
The explanation I received is that it wasn’t all HQ gear (even though I could see it was on the Lodestone), that some of it was made by people in a crafting FC that is lead by one of our good friends (and none of the names on the items match the names in the FC), and that many of the materials were acquired by doing maps and the Aquapolis associated with maps.
This all seemed viable. The person he claimed to be doing maps with is an omni-crafter and omni-gatherer, though given that, it was a bit odd that the person didn’t make the items he was wearing. However, aside from the fact he was lying about the item quality, the rest of the story seemed pretty viable.
But my officers still had a feeling it was bullshit, and were still heavily investigating, with one of the two XIV actives going into XIVdb’s tools that were once on XIVpads. Using the resources there, he discovered that this so-called friend had never done maps at all, none of the achievements in the Treasure Hunter category had been unlocked.
Even if he didn’t do the quest to unlock being able to read maps, if he just were along for the ride with his friend, he would still get achievements. For the first few weeks that the new maps with Aquapolis were out, I didn’t have the ability get and use maps, but I still was getting the achievements for doing them with friends.
It was all suddenly very fishy. The last time we dealt with this sort of bullshit, it ended rather unpleasantly, so I was rather panicked. It was pretty clear that I was being lied to, though the conversation had moved on from telling him about the fact I had checked was due to being concerned about his selling Mog Station items due to the fact it was RMT to the fact he was thinking of going into the house flipping business, and how that had been cited as a bannable offense the last time a Ward set went up, with a raid on house flippers and everything (which he was arguing over).
We ended up doing a write up, explaining what we found, how uncool it was to lie about things, and how the lying made it difficult not to question whether or not he was still participating in RMT in some form, due to his past actions. The write up also stated that we as a gaming group were ending our interaction with him, and asked that he not bother our members (as he did so last time, I wasn’t the only one, but he obliged when others told him to piss off).
At that point, I had to not only ban him with the gaming group’s stuff, but deal with quickly blocking him on my own communications channels - unfriending him on Discord (which blessedly makes it impossible for a person to message you), adding him to my blacklist in XIV, blocking him on Enjin (which is a rather half assed system), etc.
I’m hoping that the blocking keeps him from essentially stalking me this time. He lacks alts, so there’s no way he can send me tells, unless he manages to make one - our server is so full, the only way you can really get a character on it is to make one on another server and transfer it, or if you’re super lucky, make one right as the server goes down for maintenance.
This made our raiding an hour late tonight. We ended up only being able to do the first two rounds of Alexander (Creator), then due to two of our members having internet kerfluffs, we ended at 11 PM on the dot instead of going till 11:30 or so. After grabbing a few extra people from the FC/Alliance to get the clear of the second round, since it got messed up by the hiccups, I ended up going to bed due to the accompanying fibro flare; I woke up at 3 AM to deal with medications, and I haven’t been able to sleep since.
The sleep schedule mess up is a bad thing. I have an appointment at the Mazzoni Centre in Philadelphia tomorrow to discuss HRT that’s balanced for an androgyne finally. We have to leave at likely around 10:30 AM, which is early for me usually - I typically sleep from anywhere around 3 AMish when I take my medication till about 3 PM when I wake up to take my medication. Since I wake up roughly 16 times an hour, it’s hard to get a full 8 hours of sleep in just 8 hours.
Having anxiety get triggered, and having that trigger a fibro flare, and having that trigger insomnia was just not what I needed.
Extra Life is happening on the 5th of November! Yes, there will be plenty of Guy Fawkes jokes, a few masks popping up on my stream, and general shenanigans.
I will be streaming the whole time. I’ve learned a lot about OBS in the past week, just from talking to Merri about setting up for a new project on Twitch. I’m going to have a regular show that I want to do coming up soon, but I want to have everything done before launching - all the graphics for the Twitch page, all the graphics for event pop-ups, etc. I want to do it right, right from the start. But that’s taught me a lot about OBS, so even my Extra Life event will have some fun bits this year that it’s never had.
I know that right now there are a lot of things to donate to - Hurricane Matthew recovery, the many different Syrian humanitarian efforts, local homeless shelters and victims of domestic abuse foundations. However, if you can spare even just a couple of dollars to the Extra Life campaign, it would be fantastic.
My team donates to Johns Hopkins, a massive research hospital in Maryland here in the US. The research they work on is proliferated around not just the United States, but the world, so kids everywhere benefit from the work they do - it’s why we chose to donate to JHRC over any one local hospital each year. It lets the donations we gather to the maximum amount of good!
Please consider donating. I’ll also be reading of the first names of donors during the stream, because the awesome needs to be shared.
Been raining a lot again. A bunch last night, and now weather guessers say on and off for the rest of the week, then buckets on Saturday. (at The Pennsic War)
The swag bag from the Feel the Love contest that ran during RP Repository's birthday week arrived today. Finally got to retire the aging Rift mouse pad while the image was still decent and replace it with this awesome one!
The Republicans might get their chance at someone other than Trumpelstiltskin and if he really doesn't call it quits, Bernie could see more votes? I don't even know how legit this case is...but it could change everything - at least for...well, no, that is everything, because even if it is just not Trump, all changes.
Google's Pride for Everyone program will let you watch Pride parades anywhere in the world.
While this is for the VR platforms, it's a tremendous step for Pride and the LGBTQQI2SPAA movement around the world. The idea that any platform will be bringing this many Pride parades into households at all is fantastic, with backing from a huge company like Google. I hope to see other platforms aside from VR take this step, because why the hell not?
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