Unrest in the Garden of Square Enix

New article up; this one's talking about the recent FFXI bans that basically gobbled up a portion of the hardcore endgame FFXI community. Before y'all go and say anything stupid, like "they still play FFXI?" realize that you're stupid and that's that. The point I was trying to make was that SE is clearly out of touch with their endgame playerbase if an exploit this ridiculous could have been utilized for at least a year and a half. If SE did not know about this exploit, then that says volumes about their inability to maintain a close eye on their most ambitious players. Say what you will about business models, but the fact is, these are the guys that explore all the new content. In this regard, while paying attention to your endgame playerbase is less beneficial monetary wise, in terms of creating a video game, they certainly contribute extensively to the creation of what constitutes an MMO.

Forgive the lolcats, as they are misleading. I did not mean to say that SE absolutely did know about it.

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Read the full article at http://allakhazam.com/story.html?story=16761

It is remarkably difficult to open a discussion about the very subjective subject (heh) that is cheating and exploiting, so I decided that I would utilize the greatest essay introduction ever. If you are enrolled in university at the moment and you ever write an essay, I’d suggest you take the following thesis, change the words to fit your needs, and thusly reap the rewards of creating pure, undistilled academia. No need to thank me. Donations, however...

Ahem. To continue:

For millions (maybe billions) of years, man has pondered the meaning of cheating. But what is cheating? Webster’s dictionary defines cheating as “to practice fraud or trickery” and “to violate rules dishonestly”. An online dictionary further defines cheating as “an annual European species of brome grass widely naturalized in temperate regions”. Taking the above definitions, therefore, we may define cheating as a method of dishonestly violating rules to practice fraud or trickery involving a European species of grass.

Awesome.

European grass aside, this article was written mostly out of wedlock; born from the marriage of Square Enix’s recent bannings and my awkward desire to be ‘hip’ and ‘with it’ in my writing. For those who don’t know, on January 22nd, 2009, SE finally decided to bring divine punishment down upon hundreds of FFXI players who had exploited an in-game glitch to get 3x the loot in specific zones. While this wouldn’t have been so bad if all of the items in question were RA/EX (bind on pickup), a number of the dupable items could be sold (and were) for extravagant amounts of gil, mostly due to their rarity. Thus, not only did this duping trick allow players to get excessive amounts of RA/EX gear quicker than SE intended, but they profited an incredible amount in the process.........

THE REST OF THE ARTICLE CAN BE READ AT http://allakhazam.com/story.html?story=16761