That's the killer about FFXI. It takes so much work to accomplish anything that it makes it almost impossible to walk away and abandon the immense amount of work you put into it. I also like the ability to walk away at a moment's notice. Even when running an instance if something comes up most players don't flip out when you say, "Hey I have to go." It's easy enough to replace someone or to 4 man the rest of the instance and instances don't take the immense amount of preparation that even a simple XP PT in FFXI takes.

My wife and I were discussing what affects the balance between the two games that allows so much more balance in WoW and not as much in FFXI. In WoW each job has multiple potential roles they can fill.

Druid can tank, DD, or main heal (really needs resto spec though)
Paladin can tank and main heal
Warrior can tank and DD
Shaman can tank, DD or main heal
Priest can DD or main heal

The list goes on. If you need a healer, half of the jobs in the game can do it (Priest, Druid, Shaman, Paladin). You need a tank, half the jobs in the game can do it (Druid, Paladin, Warrior and too a lesser degree Shaman and Hunter [with pet]). You need damage? Well pretty much everyone else can do damage and many of the already mentioned jobs can also fill that slot if not doing their other duties. Crowd control? Pretty much everyone has some form of it.

In FFXI. You want a tank... you have NIN or PLD. You want a healer... RDM, WHM, SMN maaaaybe BLM. You need crowd control... BRD, RDM, BLM. So now I've mentioned about 1/5th of the jobs. You want damage... everyone else as well as Ninja. You are a PLD and want to do two things? Too bad. You can tank. You can't effectively main heal or put out serious damage. This is the same case for most of the jobs. What you can do is ALL you can do and sadly for the vast majority of jobs that is do damage... there's only so much room for DDs in the world and when DDs are the majority you end up narrowing it down to which one is better (and there almost always a best). WAR, MNK, SAM depending on what you're doing.

The community grabs hold of these limitations and blackballs everyone who isn't the best of their category, which is sadly more than half of the jobs in the game to varying degrees.



So I have accomplishments. I blew up my video card. I dunno what happened but it made a loud pop and when I checked one of the capacitors blew off of the card. Dunno if it was overheating (not OC'd) or what. Gonna have to pick up a new vid card tomorrow.

I did manage to get my Druid to 36 and put on some pimp new gear (that I made nonetheless). Also did some battlegrounds and earned myself some boots. I never knew how fun PvP could be... crazy fun. I haven't been playing my alts too much. I've been really getting hardcore on the crafting with all of them and will likely start a new alt in the not-too-distant future to cover some other crafting needs of mine.