FFXI Boss takes over 18 hours to kill! zomg

I had to blog about this. Call it cashing in on the media shitstorm.. but it was interesting to me at least..

Pandemonium Warden is a boss notorious monster introduced in the Zeni NM system for FFXI with the June version update (I did a short entry summarizing the NM system here)

As the highest tiered NM in the system, it was expected that the fight with Pandemonium Warden would be pretty challenging, although probably not on the impossible scale that Absolute Virtue was. On a expansion to expansion comparison between Chains of Promathia and Treasures of Aht Urhgan, however.. both AV and PW can be considered equivalents.

Anyway... about a week back, one of the strongest Linkshells (guild/clan/groups) across all servers 'Beyond the Limitation' decided to take on this bad boy and ended up withdrawing from the fight after a gruelling 18 hour struggle. Thats right. 18 hours. By that point that had reached the final form of PW, but were so exhausted (some apparently passed out and vomited after the whole thing) from the battle that they could not have pressed on any further to finish off the kill. I really take my hat off to them for that, because I can barely do 4 hours in a merit party without feeling fatigued. Its also quite a pity, because they really did put up a very strong fight... and the tale might have been a little more nice to tell with a happy ending.

But that really isn't the reason why I'm blogging about this. In light of what happened, members of the LS posted on BG forums (one of the main endgame forums for FFXI) about the fight, and from there, people forwarded a write-up about it to 1 gaming news agency. Somehow, this 1 became 2, and 2 became 4, became 10... basically sparking off a media blitz.

Its quite intriguing to see how far this has spread, and how distorted the facts have gotten when passing from 1 source to another. Its also actually the most media coverage FFXI has gotten since its release...

For me, what I'm really waiting for is a response from Square Enix about this entire fiasco... Perhaps getting the media attention is the only way to force SE's hand into fixing the extreme challenges that the playerbase has frequently complained about. Wait. wait. patiently. wait.

I still play this game, by the way...



Here are some links to the whole issue.

BG forum thread it originated from:
http://www.bluegartrls.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60265&page=19

Rukenshin's blog entry about it (hes probably the most outspoken member in that LS):
http://rukenshin.livejournal.com/17133.html

Other media links:

Destructoid
Kotaku
G4TV
Joystiq
Escapist
1-Up