Before You Start Selling Vagary Carries

Poor choice of words for me. Never meant to stomp on anyone's parade.

So you essentially agree with me. If these people would do those other things there would be no one selling wins. *LIGHTBULB*

I'm not sure it's everyone. But there are some who ruin it for everyone.
The OP brought up a good argument. Please don't sell clears. Either help people get them, or let people earn them. If you help people get them, then those people will be happy because of the spirit of camaraderie. If you let people earn them, then those people will be happy with their sense of accomplishment. They will also become more skilled.
This idea was posted on a forum and now we had a chance to discuss it. The pros and the cons.
But before we even reached page 2, it had already devolved into an argument over who has an RL and who's stupid. Good going.
So if the crazies have left the room, maybe we can get back to the original discussion. I would actually like that.

The only reason to sell this content is because people do not want to shout to put together a party to do it. Those are the people I complain about the most. I am all for helping people and I have a pretty solid track record of doing it, but to think that people are not going to sell wins is crazy. They will and others will line up with fist fulls of Gil to pay them. Whether they are lazy or not I guess is subjective but still people will pay.

Of course if there is no reason to need the victory then maybe we will just see items being sold from it instead. If it is gated like Delve then you will see people buying the wins.

I'm essentially agreeing with the business aspect of it, as well as the independent side of it.

This same business practice applies to people in the real world who would rather pay someone to do something they could do themselves. There is a reason why Pep Boys, Jiffy Lube, H&R Block, etc exist.... They have no problem charging you for a service you could very easily do yourself- it would only cost you time and significantly less money. To some people, spending 30 bucks on an oil change beats spending an hour (and 7 bucks) in the elements doing what any quick google search or youtube video could teach them. Or possibly end up doing it wrong, and messing up big time. Or wasting time. To many, time = money. They'd rather pay someone else than waste their time doing it themselves. Doesn't make that person lazy at all, otherwise, you'd have to fault every consumer who decided to pay for a service instead of "learning to do it themselves".

This is precisely how business works.

You cannot fault the people who pay for a convenience and not fault the business who uses that customer's unwillingness to learn & perform in the same manner. That's illogical.

Well you're right I'm stereotyping the FFXI player base as lazy terrible players. I wonder where I could have possibly gotten that idea from....

Glad to see there are still elitist pieces of ***in this game.

Don't worry OP, while people like him might excel in game due to the hours they put in or pure luck, they fail horribly at RL. If you think their in game attitude is unique to the game you'd most likely be mistaken. And it is at that point you can feel sorry for them.

Also, you can do whatever you want. You don't have to listen to the negative nancy who only cares about himself.

I guess it'd blow your mind to discover that many of those you call nolifers actually have jobs and family and still manage to be good at the game and have the best gear.

:D (that is all)

So how much is it going to cost me to reforge and +1 all my Empy THF gear now?

The "no life" insult is sort of a truthful, yet backhanded compliment. While there are some who may live, sleep, and die ffxi and have no social existence whatsoever out of the game, its not the norm. While you are kind of complimenting the player on being the "best" (elitist, etc), you are trying to smear that compliment by suggesting that the only way they could ever be so damn good is by forfeiting their life outside of the game. I know it makes you feel better to think this, but more often than not, its just not true. Sometimes players just work harder than you, or are better.

Not sure the most important question would be... Are you buying the wins?

To be honest, I'm glad there is content that my friends and I can Merc now. That is by far the easiest and quickest way to make money for us CASUAL people.

I have a mythic, but I would consider myself Casual at this point. Non-casuals are the ones you see in game making money ALL DAY LONG.

I have no crafts
Very little jobs 99
I rarely log in, even when I had events every day. I would log in for those events and then move on with my life.

Definition of "Casual", but I can still log in and clear any bit of content in this game with my friends.

Mercing benefits us casual players a lot more than any other gil-farming method. I can log in for a few hours on the weekend and make a ton of gil.

Insulting people, saying they have no life because they won't drag you along for a free run or sit down and teach you how to play this game is stupid. Casual and Elite players are only differentiated by one thing, play-time.

the people bitching about everyone mercing or not letting them on their runs are not "Casual", they are lazy and bad at this game, period, END OF STORY.

If you are good at something and can profit doing it, why would you EVER do it for free?

In real life I don't even get out of bed if I can't make more than $500 USD that day.

This thread is casual !

I have no idea what's needed yet for them. I just remember having to farm a lot of gil for relic+1's.

Do these reforges solely rely on obtaining wins? Or are they items that you can trade/sell?

Let's put it another way, Leviathan's population is very very very low. So I have to take into consideration that I might have to buy something rather than shout or wait for a shout endlessly.

full *** potato lol sorry that you lead a miserable life in game and out

Not to mention aren't the 100% guaranteed asshats everyone likes to pretend they are.

Despite being part of a group that merc'd and ran 2-4 hours 5 days a week(though my attendance was spotty at best), I've always responded to forum messages or in-game tells(at least as long as they were still in my log when I got back from AFK) asking advice ranging from general game mechanics, job specific questions, or Windower related issues.

As far as helping strangers with actual tasks; if I was burning my mule in Abyssea I'd probably let someone who randomly showed up sit there and AFK as long as they aren't directly making my job more difficult. If they needed help on something short (~5-10min) that I happened to be nearby(I don't know, let's say they were struggling with one of the GEO/RUN AF NMs) I'd probably do that too assuming I was free. These are events that are pretty achievable by one or two people, but maybe they just needed a little extra help.

Things I merc? Well if you're wearing sparks gear and have relatively low understanding of the game, that content isn't for you. You should not be doing it because you are not ready for it. Its not something you need "some help with", its something you are outclassed by and want simplified and handed to you. I'd go as far as freely clearing for friends of friends that are strangers to me, but no more division than that.

What about mid-level players who could clear it but can't quite put the pieces together yet? The information you need is all over the place. I'd say ask someone you may know with a decent reputation of being friendly instead of posting an entirely new topic on a forum. Or at least try to piggy-back off of something already started, but frankly, you should be able to get the jist of everything from reading what is already available, and posts should only be for clarification, not spark notes. Just because everyone else has already cleared something doesn't mean it should take away from your satisfaction of learning to beat it with your own group.

Oh the salty-Ness, with a side of chip on your shoulder

That doesn't happen. Most people get mad when you tell them to Google the info instead of regurgitating it down their throats.

You can blame the elitist scum who sell wins all you want but getting newer players to step up and want to do this content is challenging. As an example our linkshell has been recruiting for a while now. We can clear content as we are, we have a lot of dual and tri boxes, but we would rather bring more people in to the shell to have fun with. No one is taking us up on this even though we are guaranteed to clear the content. It seems to me some people would rather buy the wins than do the work.

The only important question you should be asking is, how much for a win? :p

For you? 5 mil!

It's almost impressive that out of a few dozen responses only like two actually responded to the inherent argument in my post. The debate about casual versus elitist is pointless. It's been done a thousand times on these forums alone - there is no point to this line of argumentation. Consider, however, the community as a whole not in terms of who can clear right now and who can not, but in terms of longevity and sustainability.

Imagine if no one was selling clears, and everyone was forced to clear the content on their own merits, or GTFO. I really feel that in response most players would wise up and actually start looking at info online or starting conversations about strategy in game, simply because there is no available alternative. You might very well see a rise in people wanting to clear earlier content in order to gear themselves properly and understand the game better; the shouts for Vagary would be far more frequent, since far more people would be trying to best them based on their own means, rather than having it handed to them.

I get it that everyone has a right to do whatever they want, my $12.95 and so on. But consider where the game is now. Are you doing it any favors by exploiting the players below you on the totem pole, or might you be doing the game a favor by inspiring them? Maybe I'm far too altruistic for this game at this point. Like it was said earlier, the community that might sustain this kind of behavior seems long dead.

Mwhahahaha! You summoned me *evil laughter.

*Glances over to a can of gasoline & matches. 'w')

I think you're missing the biggest thing. People LIKE mercs. They WANT mercs. Generally it's not because they can't get a group or because PuG's generally suck, it's because they wanna be lazy about something, or they don't want the commitment of a LS to be guaranteed loot, or they don't want to be looting against a potential 6+ people for a piece. A good majority of our customers are fairly well geared people that just want 1 or 2 pieces or a clear they can't get for whatever reason. There's a reason that mercs are so popular, and it's because there's a pretty huge demand for them because they're convenient.

Heck there's been things in the past that have been annoying for me to get for one reason or another (like certain bc drops that I went 0/30+ on) that I would've gladly shelled out 15+ mil for just to not have to deal with the hassle. Because we merc delve, we'd had a lot of tells asking to buy other random stuff from all over the game as well.

Never underestimate the money you can make off human laziness. Pretty much everything in our stores and society banks off human laziness and making things more convenient. Think of it like a loaf of bread, or a pizza. You could spend hours making one yourself, or just go to the store and buy/order one.

TLDR; mercs aren't popular because people can't do stuff, it's because people don't want to do stuff.

This has nothing to do with lazyness, but still work well with your point.

I agree with the general concept of mercing. Thats how I got a few of the Sky drops I still needed back in like 2008. It serves a legitimate purpose to the game, no doubt. After Seekers and Delve, though, mercing took on a very different role in this game, and became not something that one obscure shell does from time to time (as was my experience on Fairy/Sylph way back when), but became a far more invasive part of the game. It reached the point where it wasn't to get that one drop that you couldn't get despite running with the same LS for a year, but it was to clear the damn content in the first place, and that's where the difference is. I think high tier battlefield mercing is a much better example of the old style of mercing that was prevalent in FFXI, and has a positive force on the game. I do however think that mercing gated content that a vast majority of the players will want to do is very different in concept if not in execution, and hurts the game far more than it helps.

even if everyone who reads this post vows never to merc again, there'll be people willing to do it whenever there are people willing to throw gil at it

you'd have better luck stopping the tide