It’s Not Over ‘Til the Cat Lady Sings.

As everyone is well aware in the FFXI community, things have been severely shaken up.

I won’t go into long rants about how important the endgame community is or anything, but it is important for it to be stated that endgame is mostly what I have continued to be involved in… when I actually have a computer and can play. Which… after having just gotten mine up and running, it died again, which is why there has been a lack of posts. There wasn’t anything to post. :P

I was called by one of the people I’d consider among my closest friends on Thursday when the bannings hit, and told to sit down. He explained what was going on, as not having any computer access and not really supposed to browse at work, I had absolutely no idea that anything had happened.

I remember laughing, kind of oddly, and honestly, it took me like, at least 5-10 minutes before I even got vaguely curious as to what happened to Ashira. I asked him to check for  me and found my account had been untouched. I am unsure if I received any sort of warning, however, since I can’t log into my mail at all, haven’t been able to for like, 2 yrs.

My group of friends that I did do things with, when I did do things, did find out about this exploit when we lost a member to another shell on another server. He got in touch with us to let us know. Kaeko is a type to be fascinated by that sort of thing, as I am sure everybody knows.

We did use this three or four times in Salvage over a period of three months. We just never ran with any regularity. I can’t even say what drops were gotten, if any. I know one time things were set up wrong, so drops were distributed normally. The last time we went, I was defaulted a pair of Freya Ledelsens for my up and coming COR… at first it was like “oh nifty” but within a week I was of the “good god i will never freakin’ upgrade these things, I still don’t even have any Morrigan what am I even thinking…. and goddammit INVENTORY SPACE” and tossed ‘em.

I don’t know that I had much of an opinion of the thing in general, it was a sort of “wtf” deal more than anything, like how the fuck did this work like this haha, and a sort of “neat” deal, but I didn’t really put that much thought into it. Honestly, the last few months I was sorta only half there for anything anyway. You know that mood, you want to do things but shoot down basically everything anytime anyone suggests something to do. I’d been really really frustrated of late in game, and Salvage was about the bottom of my list of things to do.

So as I said, my character was fine, and I’m now using a laptop and back in game and such, while finishing building my new and better computer (part by part.. sucks).

Then I heard that every single person I ran Salvage with those 3-4 times got hit in some way or another. Baffled.

So it’s been a tense 3 days.

I was told they used it in Nyzul once too, and honestly I can’t recall if I was on that run or not, but I -think- I was. Maybe? The only thing we got out of that was a WAR weapon. If it’s the run I think it was, I got two weapons myself, both legitimately distributed. I had just come back to game after a lengthy absence when my HDDs went nuts.

I think I got one of the drops in the run when things weren’t set up right and we just lotted out normally. And then, like I said, I tossed the Freya’s, though not with a good honest intention, just more of a ‘whatever’ moment.

It’s now been the three days, and two of my best friends in this game appear to have been hit with a permanent ban. Kaeko and Oreeooo, my two little Tarus, both great players, very smart, one very versatile and one just too intelligent for his own good… appear to have been permanently banned. And now I am just at a loss. I do not know what I am going to do. They were essentially the two I pretty much wanted to have online and around before I did anything. Oreo just basically kept me sane by agreeing with me about everything, haha, and Kaeko kept me sane by NOT agreeing with me about anything. :)

I suppose we can wait another week, see if they got a ten day or some such, but Kaeko already seems to have made his peace – you can see his blog at http://kanican.livejournal.com.

I know I need to wait it out a few days, especially since I’ve just now been able to get BACK in game myself, but I feel a little lost.

I’ve tried to rationalize and figure out why them, not me, why this, why that… one person who came with us only once got at least a temp also but got nothing from the runs. Kaeko collected Alexandrite in hopes for a Mythic, Oreo got a drop, but so did I even though I tossed it… I think the other only got the random weapon in Nyzul… it makes no sense, there’s no rhyme or reason here. I don’t mind the punishment, I understand it, but consistency would have been nice. As it is, I’m not sure what point there will be for me to stay.

Goodbye, my friends. <3