Looking For Party – Give Me The Shiny!

Some crazy nonsense is going down on Eorzea right now, thanks to a rather disturbing floating monster called Atomos. He has been spotted attacking teleport crystals across the land and anyone who is in the vicinity can expect a hard fight on their hands.

Well I said ‘hard’, but thankfully there are usually something in the region of 30+ people in the same area, hunting this giant, gaping mouth thing.

Welcome to the latest event for players in the final weeks of the current patch of Final Fantasy XIV!

To begin with, the programmers may have slightly messed up – when you kill Atomos he drops a voidstone which you must examine as many times as possible to grab some loot, your reward for taking him down. You can either get a status effect – Quicken (to increase your speed) or Heavy (to slow you down) or you get over aspected crystals. In error, the game was allowing anyone who was present in the fight scene to obtain clusters of these crystals. It was later revealed that they meant to ONLY issue the clusters to whoever hits Atomos first, thus laying claim to the monster.

The reason they nerfed the clusters down to individual crystals was when the spawn timers are on cooldown (He only spawned from 18:00 to 02:00 in game time so about every half hour in real time) people would teleport back to the towns they have registered allegiance to and hand in these crystals for Grand Company Seals. These seals are vital in obtaining some rather lovely Level Cap gear, weapons and barding for their personal Chocobos. As soon as people got wise to this, they would spend days farming poor old Floaty McBigMouth and beat him senseless! I would love to say I feel sorry for him, but I am a terrible liar and I was one of those mentals, staying up until stupid o’clock to get me some of those sparkly gems. I really like shiny things.

Good old Square Enix caught on pretty quickly that whilst this was progress, it was all a bit too fast and easy. A few days later and some emergency maintenance, we all had the crystals milked down and had to work that little bit harder to reap the tasty rewards. People bitched, threw toys out the pram and complained. But noticing it was being ignored both in game and on the official forums, players promptly got back on with the mission and cut their losses.

He now only floats from camp to camp between 00:00 and 02:00 in game and since people got tore in fairly fast on patch release, the numbers attacking him at camp have fallen. But there are still enough bodies to go in and get a handful of crystals if you have nothing going on at that time. This has been one of the major downfalls of events in FFXIV – as soon as the general hype is over (usually after a few days as events don’t last long here) numbers fall and the event becomes almost impossible for players joining in late. Attendance numbers do not equal monster difficulty and this can be really off putting for newer players.

Sure enough, many players are all sporting the gear obtained with the GC seals; myself included:

In a strange way, its becoming less and less of a concern that the game in its current state is coming to an end in a matter of weeks. Come November 1^st, there will be no more FFXIV as we know it. The servers are coming offline, and whilst the game will still be playable, no save status between then and release of Realm Reborn will be saved. So ANY progress that anyone does will not be carried forward. I can’t deny, version 2.0 looks utterly breathtaking and I am really excited to see where they take the game from here. But my desire to work towards anything right now just isn’t present. I know that I am working to a time scale, and in the weeks leading to server closure I fully expect Eorzea to go totally bonkers as Dalamud draws ever closer.

This means I have to find other games to play (God forbid!) and if I am lucky, be selected to Alpha test the new game itself.

But for now I am going to plod on with my daily dose of crystal farming and levelling my Culinarian. I just don’t have the drive to work hard on anything else knowing that all too soon, little Paru Hachifusa is due a holiday. And I can safely say we are BOTH looking forward to it.