Why so soon?

I find it interesting that SE already posted about the coming version update when it is over a month away. The optimistic part of me thinks that it could mean that the next version update is going to be huge so they need lots of time to give us information. The pessimistic part of me thinks its just so that they can cover their asses because the last update took so long and they didn't say anything about it for a long time. I am also a bit concerned that they said that this update will mostly be about the missions for Wings because even though it is definitely needed I prefer for the updates to be more balanced. They also might just be telling people that the update will focus on missions because there has been so little in that aspect up to this point. I mean of course the lottery and the new relics are a huge announcement but honestly they are actually a very small part of an update. The lottery is just get your 10 tickets, then forget about it for a couple of months. The new relics are the exact opposite, they in all likelihood take a long time to develop and won't be available immediately. So the content from the relics won't be having a major impact either.

I am really interested in the missions though, but I know people will complain that there is no "content" in this update and it makes me wonder what they mean by content. To me, content is the collective whole of things that are put into the game. In this case, even though the new expansion felt a little hollow at the start the shear amount of programming time and effort that went into creating Campaign had to be huge. But for some people, because there was no one piece of jaw dropping gear, there was no content. This is utterly ridiculous to me. I do agree that there was not a lot of gear made available in expansion, and that is something that SE should know by now that they need to include, but it does not mean they are not diligently working to make the game better. Campaign is unlike anything else in the game, and if you compare it to Beseiged in its complexity, design and quality, it is far superior. I love the fact that you can go and get a little XP or a lot and do it on your own time. Also, I look at the Campaign ranks in much the same way that I look at Assaults, people are not doing them now because they do not see the immediate rewards. That is retarded, because this time SE is starting by showing us some of the rewards already. The Iron Ram gear is amazingly good tanking gear indepedently, the other gear is also very good and strangely decent filler gear for leveling in the late 60's, early 70's. This gear is obviously tiered in a fashion that makes it accessible to those that at least keep up with Campaign ranks. I think we will again find people that will never get the highest gear because they refuse to do something that they should have done long ago but have now fallen far behind on. Well, they can keep paying the 200 ISP for Runic Portals too. LOL

Campaign is a ton of content, and my argument is that it was so much content that it explains why the rest of the expansion was relatively empty. Just the programming time that had to go into creating the Campaign battle because of the AI, the XP system and other factors is huge. This is all before they added Campaign Ops which vary widely but are hardly used, and further the other parts of Campaign that barely anyone uses like Recon, Headhunting, etc. The Campaign battles themselves are an amazing addition to the game creating a huge new ability to solo or do something while waiting for a party, but the other areas of Campaign have at the same time too much and too little explanation. There are NPC's that will rattle on endlessly about the status of the fort in North Gustaberg [S], but there isn't much help at all in figuring out what you have to do to complete Aegis Scream III. There is definitely a lack of balance in that respect.

I hardly ever mention anything about Windower, but I wanted to mention that the next version is coming out soon and people should grab it when it is released because it is a bug fix edition and with how good 3.3 is already, 3.4 should be even better. I very much am of the opinion that SE should official sanction the Windower people. They provide a great service to the community and since I would guess something like 80% of PC users already use it, and SE tacitly accepts the use of it for non-haxing purposes. The only reason in my mind for not doing so is that it is not available for PS2 and Xbox users, which is true but at this point is functioning as nothing more than an albatross for the PC users. I really hope that the next generation of Windower functionality will move beyond the base functions but included a more integrated look into the game. Currently, everything is basically just text on top of the game, but it would look much nicer of they actually created a nice UI that blended with the FFXI interface. I have seen some screenshots of people using so kind of Windower plug-in that looked very nice in that they were not just test but actually appeared window-like and were easy to read and understand quickly.

In actual game news, I got my BLM to level 30! I can not wait until this horrible job is finished but I am going to ride Bg's RDM till 37 if I can, and if I can't then so be it, but Bg and I are going to do RDM and BRD to 75 once he gets to 37 (or higher since I am going on vacation next week) and that should take about a week. LOL Probably more BLM leveling tonight after Salvage. I will keep you informed. :)