Real Life: A Need to Vent

Even before I started playing FFXI over 2 years ago, Allakhazam was a site I read regularly to learn more about the game I was eagerly anticipating. Within 5 weeks of starting the game, because I found the site so useful, I paid for a premium membership. This meant I didn't have to suffer with ads, had my own journal space, could use an avatar, and had the ability to use the search function. Plus I was supporting the site. There are really a lot of questionable posts in the forums there, but there is also a great deal of useful information, and a lot of helpful, informative people, and my husband and I try to be part of the latter group. I really like the character pages, where you can "dress" your character with its gear, both as a guide to others, and to ask questions like "is my gear ok?". And it's useful for figuring out what to wear for level capped events. I also find the threads for quests and missions very helpful while trying to come up with strategies.

I feel that Somepage is superior for their item database and crafting recipes, as well as their monster database, but they just don't have the same sort of walkthrough information, nor is their forum system terribly useful. I also love their Food page, and refer to it quite frequently. I do get annoyed by their ads at times though.

There are a few other forums out there, but I never really found a general FFXI forum that held my interest. Some of them seemed to be filled with juvenile insults rather than helpful information. The FFXIcyclopedia recently added forums, and while I use the site extensively, the forums haven't seemed to get off the ground yet.

Yesterday, my happy little FFXI internet resource world came tumbling down. The owner of Allakhazam announced that they had been bought by another company (see this thread). At first, this news was cause for excitement: it would mean new hardware, more staff, and more features for the "community". Then, as he revealed more details, a sense of betrayal set in. The new owner of Allakhazam is apparently a holding company, which also owns one of the most notorious gil-selling sites, whose name starts with an I, followed by a G, and ended with an E. Some posters are claiming that the holding company was set up by the gil selling company just so it could gobble up all sorts of game-related internet companies, while the people running the companies being bought could rationalize the sale to themselves and pretend that they weren't in any way benefitting the evil gil sellers.

I really hate the business of selling game money and items for real life money. Anyone who buys gil is nothing more than a cheater. If they can't earn their own way in the game, they have no place in the game. Many argue that their time is worth too much to "waste" game time generating game money to support their character, but THAT'S PART OF THE GAME! If they don't like it, FIND ANOTHER GAME! There's plenty of time: there's no deadline, you don't have to be 75 within three months, it's not a race. The gil selling companies prey upon these people, and make a fortune in real life by supplying virtual items/money for the cheaters. Since there's so much money to be made, we end up having people playing the game simply to generate as much in-game income as they possibly can, then sell it to the impatient cheaters. They're not playing the game for fun, they're not playing the game for entertainment, they're not playing the game for the sense of accomplishment you can derive from it, they are playing it to make as much real life money as possible, and will go to extremes to interfere with the real players. If people would just stop cheating, and not resort to Real Money Trading, we wouldn't have this problem.

Given these circumstances, I simply cannot promote Allakhazam any longer, and must cease to contribute to it as well. I simply cannot be part of anything that helps the gil-selling company, holding company parent or not. It's unfortunate that my premium account auto-renewed for another year just this past Saturday. I originally started chronicling Kiki's adventures in my journal at Allakhazam, but will now work on moving it over to here, back-dating the posts to their original post-date. I always intended to do that some day, but this news makes it more important for me to do now.

I would like to encourage people to turn to the FFXIclopedia Forums, and help contribute to its success. I will be doing that myself.