Kongming posted:

I guess most people have at least heard of Absolute Virtue in FFXI but may not know all the details of why this boss was unkillable and the boneheaded way SE would handle it.

Absolute Virtue was the "ultimate" boss of the Chains of Promathia expansion pack, located in the endgame zone Al'Taieu which was commonly referred to as "sea" by the playerbase since it's supposed to be underwater in the in-game lore. In order to even fight it you had to defeat the seven jailers of virtue which all had quite ridiculous spawn requirements and culminated in the fight against "Jailer of Love". Upon defeating Jailer of Love, Absolute Virtue will spawn immediately where Jailer of Love died. As an aside, this was before comprehensive data-mining was a thing so no one actually knew Absolute Virtue would appear like this and Jailer of Love was undefeated for a long time so it came as a surprise when it appeared and murdered everyone.

In FFXI every job has access to a powerful special ability available from level 1 called a "2 hour" since they had a 2 hour long cooldown. Absolute Virtue was special because it had access to every 2 hour ability in the game and it could use them repeatedly. This included the White Mage 2 hour "Benediction" which instantly heals the user and its allies to full HP. Since Absolute Virtue could use this as many times as it wanted, it was the first real obstacle that made it "unkillable" since it could just restore all its HP randomly. This is on top of it having a 100 HP Regen that tics every 3 seconds, which is a lot of HP at the time to damage through. Eventually both of these problems were solved. The Regen could be removed by killing Jailer of Love's add spawns a certain number of times before killing it, and the rest of the Regen could be removed by casting elemental magic matching the current in-game day (the game has 8 day weeks each corresponding to one element) repeatedly. Furthermore, the 2 hour abilities could be "locked" by a player who is on Absolute Virtue's aggro list using the corresponding 2 hour in sync with Absolute Virtue (the window is so small that it's basically impossible to do this without third party tools that break the EULA). So regen and Benediction solved! It can be killed now right? WRONG

After a certain amount of HP is lost Absolute Virtue gains floating rings around its wrists and drastically increases its spellcasting time and power. This was called "bracelets mode" by the playerbase and since Absolute Virtue has access to Meteor, the strongest magic attack in the game, it became nigh impossible to survive the onslaught of near instant cast Meteors. Certain jobs like Paladin could tank through it, but the backline supports and damage dealers were all doomed to be wiped out. This is what truly made Absolute Virtue unkillable as, to my knowledge, no solution to mitigate bracelets Meteor was ever found.

Now that doesn't mean Absolute Virtue was never killed, because it was, but every time a strategy was found to kill it SE deemed it an exploit and patched it out. Some of these were genuine exploits, like breaking the bosses pathing so it can't move or act. Others were just clever use of game mechanics, like using a bunch of Dark Knights to zerg it down so fast it dies in 30 seconds. SE eventually released a joke of a video that they claimed was a strategy to defeat Absolute Virtue but it was a low quality mess that didn't answer any of the questions that players had, mostly just showing off the 2 hour locking mechanic that everyone had already figured out.

elf help book posted:

bracelets mode

Fungah! posted:

the only thing i knew about it other thn goonfleet stories from reading the forums for a billion years is the bank thing that cracked article talked about, some dude set up an entire banking system, ran it for a few years to sure people trusted it, then overnight cleaned out all the banks assets and sold everything for like 180,000 irl dollars

Wormskull posted:

Killing Lord British is loving epic.

Fortaleza posted:

Back about 10 years ago or so a Sim City game came out that was notorious for lots of bugs and being helmed by some goober with the name "ocean quigley". Someone found a way to have fun with the broken balancing by taking their city offline and removing all schools and businesses. Eventually the whole population becomes uneducated and jobless which in the game's logic turns them into criminals but with no businesses there's no crime to commit. So they'd get their city into this sort of equilibrium and then take it online with other players in every direction and there'd be immediate massive traffic jams as every citizen streams into other cities just to commit crimes then leave

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

tabula rasa was a failed MMO created by Richard Garriot himself which is only noteworthy because NCsoft forged a letter from Richard Garriot announcing the game was being shut down. Richard Garriot could not dispute this as he was in orbit around earth and did not find out until he returned from space lmao

Wormskull posted:

I traded someone a Topps Nidoqueen lmao for a bunch of real Pokémon cards and my mom found out and made me give the kid a fancy baseball card case that she wouldn’t even let me have. Then later when I was playing with that same kid I tackled him and it broke the case and my mom made me give him another one and some of my best cards.

goferchan posted:

Oh lol I found it

Sub-Actuality posted: