Big fat liar.

So, not only did I not have two posts on Monday, I didn't even have a post yesterday. LOL Ok, so going for two posts today. Monday and Tuesday were pretty normal actually, I have been doing a lot of farming, but with maintenance costs I am only gaining a little bit of ground, but it is nice to have over 100k on my person all the time instead of 5-10k. Lets see, Monday produced a good Zhayolm run, but no froggie drops and the boss didn't necessarily give us anything we needed. So no completed sets from that and Hiryo still needs to get his Usukane 25 head to complete his piece. Tuesday resulted in some good Sea farming and then another Zhayolm run with Rakuen with essentially the same results. Still loving Salvage. :)

Now, for some of the good news from today.

New Notorious Monsters (NMs) will be added to areas introduced in the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion pack in the forthcoming version update, with simplified access to their battlefields.

A Word from the Development Team

NM battles have been one of the most popular elements of FFXI since its launch. Nothing stirs the adventurer's soul quite the same way as cooperating with dependable comrades to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, with rare equipment drops being the very tasty icing on the cake.

Thus far, however, getting the chance to battle NMs has been almost as difficult a task as fighting the creatures themselves. One often needed a lot of time and plenty more luck to successfully arrange an encounter with the creatures. In light of the ever-increasing number of fan requests for more opportunities to do battle against powerful monsters and reap the rewards, the development team has decided to implement some changes to make the excitement of NMs—even those of the same caliber as particularly infamous varieties inhabiting Tu'Lia and Al'Taieu—more accessible to all.

Overview of the New System

Carrying out requests from a certain NPC will earn you points which, when accumulated, can be exchanged for NM trigger items. The cost of these triggers will fluctuate based on the corresponding NM's difficulty level and popularity among adventurers. A limit will also be imposed on the number of points that can be earned in one Vana'dielian day (one Earth hour). Even with the above conditions in place, obtaining triggers under this new system should be relatively pain-free, especially when compared to fulfilling the elaborate requirements of some existing NM battles.
*Please note that this point system is applicable only to select new NMs scheduled to appear from the June version update.

In order to maximize flexibility in participant numbers, in most cases the target to which you trade triggers in order to gain entry into battlefields will be located in field areas.

Rewards

Over fifty new types of equipment will be made available as exclusive drops for defeating these new NMs. Here are just a few samples to whet your ravenous adventurer's appetite:

This looks like something can at the same time be low-manned, done at players convenience and very little "staring at darters". Now, I am not necessarily for or against low-man events. I think that they can be good, but are more dependent on certain people showing up, and can easily get screwed up with differing levels of commitments of the players. The reason that I like them right now is because the Versus schedule is getting kind of crowded. Monday is Limbus, then Assaults, then usually Salvage, Tuesday is an event, Wednesday is an off day, Thursday is an event and then Limbus, and then sometimes Salvage, Friday is Salvage and Assaults, Saturday is Salvage, and Sunday is an event then Salvage. I need something that I can squeeze into the time remaining, not something that is going to take up another big block of time. This is especially true with the Einherjar update and that leading us back to try to fix it in the schedule. Heaven forbid they introduce a new end-game area/event that will have to fit into the rotation.

This leads me to new thinking on how we do events now. We used to have a strict rotation on the events we did, some days were Sea, some Sky, some pop NM's, etc, the problem was that the Sky events were not leading to anything new that people needed, and so we have become more flexible with the events that we schedule. For example, when we do Sky it is to get Despot first, then other NM's, because we need the most gear from Byakko, even over Kirin at this point. We have already become much more efficient, but we can still improve. :)

I am really looking forward to this update at this point. It is looking much better than at least the last several version updates. And it just keeps getting better.