The Hardest Boss In Video Games History

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Жыл бұрын

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Not all video game bosses are made equal and the Final Fantasy franchise has had its fair share of devilish foes. But one of them stands above all the others, Absolute Virtue.
Introduced as part of Final Fantasy XI: Chains of Promathia, Absolute Virtue was undefeatable unless exploits were used to ensure victory and it wouldn't be until around six years after its inclusion that players would be able to defeat this superboss with a bit more comfort.
Credit to TimberAngry for the "Wall of Justice" footage: • Final Fantasy XI - Abs...
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@m-acyr651 Жыл бұрын

imagine making this very nearly unbeatable, completly unfair boss, and deciding to : make a very low drop rate, buff it multiple time, nerf tactics used against it and threaten to BAN people who find ways to cheese it. Wow

@johnhanzelyjr Жыл бұрын

They wanted an unbeatable boss.....enough said.

@AzureKyle Жыл бұрын

@@johnhanzelyjr And then taunt players that it was, in fact, beatable, but with their PROPER method.

@RaxiazRedux Жыл бұрын

@@AzureKyle That's what pisses me off more! You know, Square Enix used to be one of my favorite game devs, but over the years they're just relegated to "meh" territory for me and I find that I liked Square Soft a bit more than SE. Now I'm all about FromSoftware's games...

@m-acyr651 Жыл бұрын

@@AzureKyle A "proper" method that is basically impossible in reality because of server lag might I had

@johnhanzelyjr Жыл бұрын

@@m-acyr651 .....and threaten to ban people if they beat their "beatable" boss in any other meathod than the method they wanted players to use. Let's not forget, that after they showed players "how to beat" it...they patched that strategy out, as well......unless that was a different Ultra-omega-Impossible-to-beat-unless-you-use-THEIR-method-super-boss that happened to.

@Xenodyne Жыл бұрын

The mental image of a bunch of Dark Knights ganging up with clubs to beat the absolute shit out of Absolute Virtue gave me a chuckle.

@Marqrk Жыл бұрын

The idea of the devs getting absolutely assblasted about it makes it even funnier “Noooo you can’t just find a novel way to beat this boss you have to do it my way! I’m gonna nerf your entire job as punishment!”

@justinh7560 Жыл бұрын

I was a Dark Knight and was lended a Kraken Club from my linkshell for Jailer of Love. I swear I did 30% of its health alone. Massive damage when you do soul eater and blood weapon. With enough Dark Knights, I bet that was a sight to behold for Absolute Virtue

@h2ojr1 Жыл бұрын

RIP Dark Knight your clubbing was too epic

@echelonchi Жыл бұрын

@@justinh7560 As a WHM, I can assure you you did way more than 30% of its health. Now stop moving out of my range so I can Haste you!

@TheMontablac Жыл бұрын

its better than that, each dark night had two clubs, and each club would swing 2-8 times thats 4-16 attacks per normal attack cycle add in blood weapon saping your HP and adding the amount taken into your attack, and drain restoring your HP on hit, and wellll..... you can see how bonkers it is

@jst5280 Жыл бұрын

This is like the MMO equivalent of a DM getting mad and godmodding

@the_exegete Жыл бұрын

Comets fall, everyone dies.

@Matthew-Fair Жыл бұрын

"The boss regains all health and I'm changing his stats on the fly. Go f--k yourselves" -Square DM, 2005

@aegisScale Жыл бұрын

@@the_exegete Square really rolled a buncha dice, sighed and said "the strategy fails."

@irogt Ай бұрын

I just saw the video and I was thinking the same exact thing. The devs were unnecessarily salty.

@Puffytosser Жыл бұрын

lol this is like a DM throwing a fit and punishing players for coming up with a better idea, even though they never said you couldn’t do it that way before.

@Zenoxio Жыл бұрын

For clarity, DMs never create nor design enemies. DMs are operational staff only to enforce MMO rules and similar, not to create/design the game.

@jackson4w Жыл бұрын

@Ty I think that was a D&D reference, talking about the Dungeon Master, the person who runs a given game in D&D.

@Blackwind_Legacy Жыл бұрын

@@Zenoxio by DM, he means dungeon master, not a game master you dealt with in an MMO.

@erickfw197 Жыл бұрын

@@Zenoxio I think that you're talking about GMs, DM means dungeon master, from tabletop games and such

@FollowMe4REP Жыл бұрын

In other words, a DM realizing they’re too lame to be a DM, and instead of bowing out gracefully, taking their ineptitude out on the people unfortunate enough to trust their free time to a bad DM.

@sunstonespice Жыл бұрын

The sheer malice behind this thing’s design will never not leave me speechless.

@Darth_Bateman Жыл бұрын

I know….isn’t it beautiful?

@Adaephonable Жыл бұрын

Never not leave you speechless? If that is the way you speak, being speechless is probably better.

@Darth_Bateman Жыл бұрын

@@Adaephonable it’s a double nega- …. Go back to school.

@Adaephonable Жыл бұрын

@@Darth_Bateman The 2 people that should go back to school are: The original commenter for using a double negative. and... You, for not knowing what an ellipsis is. I will give you a hint: ".." - wrong "..." - Correct "...." - The one you used... very wrong.

@Darth_Bateman Жыл бұрын

@@Adaephonable ……

@BHFFS Жыл бұрын

FFXI message when you logged on: Please don't destroy your life by playing our game too much. Also FFXI: Absolute Virtue

@IaconDawnshire Жыл бұрын

Don't forget Pandaemonium Warden

@SatonakaCP4 Жыл бұрын

@@IaconDawnshire heard stories about that foo. never fought him, but an "18 hour fight" hoo boy. Wish I took part back in the day, sadly those "sweet times" are long gone XD

@forevergogo Жыл бұрын

Are you kidding? Just to get a group together to go get an exp party took 1-2 hours of Looking, then Traveling (safely) to a 'spot' and then Hopefully everyone could stick around for 3-4 hours to grind a couple levels together.

@Darth_Bateman Жыл бұрын

This game was designed to be a time sink. Do you understand how long it took to level back in the day…..? Imagine a day of playing league…. That would not be enough to go from 70-71

@jailerofjustice Жыл бұрын

@@Darth_Bateman you had no friends that’s why. FFXI is strictly meant to be played by friends, and other people. They took that idea from Japanese high schoolers and found they form many cliques. FFXI revolves around that concept.

@jvstice56 Жыл бұрын

Absolute Virtue is a prime example of open hostility towards the player base. Every time it was nearly beaten with a proven strategy, Square got pissy and nerfed that strategy. Rinse repeat until the power creep from players made it go from superboss to easy fight. Something like this is used as a cautionary tale for game devs: if you're going to make a very difficult fight that takes hours of a player's life to defeat, make sure it's well balanced. It's a safe assumption that AV wasn't properly balanced, given they nerfed everything *_but_* the boss itself.

@zachhawn8720 Жыл бұрын

Angy DM syndrome is the worst crutch for devs who don't even like their products

@jvstice56 Жыл бұрын

@@zachhawn8720 100% Correct. Even WoW has better DMs/GMs, and they had some very notorious events happen in their game.

@HoloTWWOriginal Жыл бұрын

So the devs wanting players to beat something a certain way is bad?

@AzureRoxe Жыл бұрын

@@HoloTWWOriginal Yes since at no point did the devs minded when they did a lot of these strategies, they only minded HERE because they wanted AV to remain unbeatable. Don't forget that the strategy SHOWN BY THE DEVS THEMSELVES was also nerfed when the players began trying it.

@HoloTWWOriginal Жыл бұрын

@@AzureRoxe how is reducing the fight time limit a nerf? At no point did it ever say that it was impossible to defeat the boss in the time limit

@RTDelete Жыл бұрын

It's like beating a child at a game: 'Uh, no that didn't count'

@superbaas8822 Жыл бұрын

Lets be real, Square just wanted a "Gacha" boss, dangling the idea that it was "beatable", and they got genuinely pissed when people did it and threw a fit every time they had to work to make it harder.

@AzureRoxe Жыл бұрын

Pretty much. They wanted their own Kerafyrm, a big unbeatable boss, but then they realized people were smart enough to use specific comps to cheese or get around certain mechanics and they couldn't handle it.

@alchemicalvapour8950 Жыл бұрын

sounds like an aggressively railroady GM

@Aichi1138 Жыл бұрын

@@AzureRoxe you can tell these dev's never once played DnD if you put a stat block on it, players *WILL* find a way to kill it

@FourCogs Жыл бұрын

Gotcha would be the correct word to use there. Gacha refers to gachapon (a type of toy capsule dispensing machine) and gacha games.

@Arlacent Жыл бұрын

The people who first "did it" exploited the fact that the boss doesn't despawn right away and brought him to an area where they were protected by in game terrain which at the time was a ban-able cheese for a few bosses.

@LunarWingCloud Жыл бұрын

Absolute Virtue will definitely go down as one of the most infamous bosses in the history of games, and moreso, will go down as one of the most infamous instances of game developers openly hostile towards their player base for not playing the way they wanted them to

@h2ojr1 Жыл бұрын

The weirdest part is that the game devs offered no ingame conveyance towards what do even do. As it turned out to win you look at your CALENDAR??? and use that ELEMENT???

@ultimateloser3411 Жыл бұрын

Even the devs aren't sure of themselvea what to make of the boss lmao

@aegisScale Жыл бұрын

@@h2ojr1 "It's possible guys, you just have to cast this specific spell on this specific day at this specific time after entering these three exact chat phrases within 30 seconds of the casting!" No wonder the devs took over 12 hours to beat this thing for a demonstration💀

@mwbwyatt 9 ай бұрын

@@h2ojr1and even with THIS method, which they deemed the correct way...the nerfed the strategy after people managed to defeat AV with it. XD

@DrKepperGaming Жыл бұрын

To answer the question at the end, I beat absolute virtue during the kraken club strategy in the few days before SE patched it. My linkshell was the first group (of Americans at least) to defeat Jailer of Love on our server. However, there are some things the video didn't quite get right. 1. AV did not have a very low spawn rate; it was pretty close to 1/2. Al'tieu took months worth of quests to gain access to and once you got there it took a very long time to farm the spawn items for JoL. So it was rarely seen. 2. AV did not have low drop rates...in fact it always dropped some items; the first 2 groups to kill it using the wall of justice strategy actually did not get any loot because it died 'unclaimed'. When a monster cannot reach a player on it's aggro table, which was happening literally constantly due to the wall of justice strat, it deaggros and goes unclaimed. If it dies in an unclaimed state, no group gets the loot. 3. AV did not have bad loot...far from it. It dropped the best waist in the game for any melee class (except mnk) during tp building, best haste belt for tanks which was used for most spells, and best haste belt for mages which wasn't as important but had it's uses. It dropped the best ranged item for mages casting offensive spells. It dropped the best ring for all melee users during tp phase. It dropped the best ring for ranged attack. It dropped a very good great katana, second only to the relic which required years of grinding and/or hundreds of millions of gil.Only 2 items weren't sought after; a rod that let you come back to life and a tank ring that increased physical damage but reduced magic damage. There were still fights or parts of fights (like Jailer of Love ironically) that the tank would take almost exclusively magic damage and it was the 3rd best ring to use behind Dynamis Lord's Ring (25% drop rate off the final boss of dynamis. Took 36-64 people and typically only fought once every 3 weeks due to dynamis time constraints) and Defending Ring (

@Ieatbabywhales 7 ай бұрын

Thx this was the type of insight I was originally looking from the video. Too bad they didn't really get into the mechanics of the now defunct strats to beat the boss.

@jamin12342 6 ай бұрын

thanks for this informative post

@lukes9192 5 ай бұрын

@@jamin12342people in the comments are so mad that they made a boss that was hard and patched out cheap wins for "no reason" on the premise that the boss had no value other than being a challenge based on what's said in this video You explaining the drops should change a lot of tunes lol. Was it too hard? Yeah, sure sounds like it. Does that mean it'd be a good thing for people to be able to cheese items comparable to ones that took months of grinding and luck? Probably not

@treesuschrist1782 Жыл бұрын

I feel like absolute virtue is a really cool idea on paper, but was implemented in just the WORST ways. A zone wide superboss that needed you to kill a number of other high powered monsters just to unlock it, taking powers from each slain monster and using them. Super cool. Making that same boss unkillable without a 2 day playtime and a super hidden exact way of doing it, while also punishing everyone who finds ways around said way of doing it? Bad. Theres gotta be a balance in all fights. This one took that balance and threw it to the moon. AV and pandemonium warden are the best examples of why there needs to be reigns put on combat designers sometimes.

@equilibrium1950 Жыл бұрын

I was part of a LS that struggled with PW and AV for months. We even pulled together some of the most OP players and LS for help and it felt impossible. Some people quit because of it. Those were the days. Now, you can SOLO PW with RDM and AV with a couple of players and Trust

@josephvalenzuela311 Жыл бұрын

@@equilibrium1950 Well said. Facts. So were the days. LOL.

@callmeshaggy5166 Жыл бұрын

Players should be rewarded for exploring different battle tactics, like finding a well-hidden weakness. It should not be the only way forward.

@cosseybomb Жыл бұрын

Not everything needs to be balanced.. when games are made using a formula that's when things get boring

@k4yser Жыл бұрын

Hidden mechanics were deeply entwined in ff11. It wasnt anything unique to the boss, it was part of the general gameplay. MMOs back then were less formulaic and every mmo did things differently. So was FF 11. I really like the idea of an almost impossible to beat boss, which gives a reality check to player power. This keeps the world dangerous, which was a huge part of ff11 design philosophy. And having players quit over this nm sounds weird, because it implies there was nothing else to do, even though there was and still is an insane amount of content

@IntegrityGames Жыл бұрын

"You can beat the boss, you just have to play the game exactly how we want you to play the game, and not improvise at all." -The Devs, probably.

@bighamgrizles Жыл бұрын

naw u have to be really clever to beat it any other way and once you have it evolves it’s a never ending battle

@shirrenthewanderer414 6 ай бұрын

A lot of players act like this for making parties, "you must play these jobs in this specific way or you are a LEECH".

@ngultrum1 3 ай бұрын

What's even funnier is, their "legit" way was impossible for anyone who wasn't a dev due to latency, cause the devs are barely 3ft away from the servers. What's even more funnier is, they nerfed their own "legit" way of playstyle cause others started doing it.

@DarkFrozenDepths Жыл бұрын

The whole story of Absolute Virtue honestly sounds like that one person that's just never satisfied with what you do, so they keep changing things up. Oh, you did this fight this way? Now do it again but harder.

@granmastersword Жыл бұрын

it was more like: "bullshit, that's not how you are supposed to beat it! THIS is how you are supposed to beat it!"

@kiriuxeosa8716 Жыл бұрын

@@granmastersword except they never tell you how you're supposed to beat it they just modded themselves a win recorded it and showed it to us

@Arkholt2 Жыл бұрын

Hearing about how the devs removed the ability to use exploits and whatever means they deemed inappropriate to defeat the boss reminds me of an abusive parent telling you to do something and every time you do it they yell "NOT GOOD ENOUGH!" Sounds crazy. Imagine the hardest part of a boss not being fighting the boss itself but fighting the people who made it.

@AzureKyle Жыл бұрын

IIRC, even the 'proper method' they showed players got patched out shortly afterwards. Like, imagine getting so pissy players found exploits to defeat your boss, so you patch the game, and even entire classes, probably ruining a bunch of other stuff in the process (like Nerfing the entire Dark Knight class) just for this one boss.

@AzureRoxe Жыл бұрын

@@AzureKyle Not just that, but the "proper method" showed in the video was very suspicious and many players theorized that they realized the boss WAS unbeatable normally and used GM commands to kill it.

@DumbestDumbFool Жыл бұрын

this shouldn't be held as the hardest boss but the pettiest boss. If I were one of the people who found about the exploit and was deemed as the wrong way to defeat some boss, after hours of using the exploit to kill it, I'll drop them. I can't imagine feeling happier than stop playing the game or rather play other part of the game an not touching this part of the game ever again.

@AzureKyle Жыл бұрын

@@DumbestDumbFool Have you ever heard of the Sunk Cost Fallacy?

@bobjones4469 Жыл бұрын

Nope, those nerfs were needed, Dark Knights and Scholars were way too OP. They were able to just brute force an otherwise impossible to beat boss, that's how OP they were. This game was never a balanced game but this was ridiculous. Using one BS to beat another BS doesn't make either right.

@darkaero Жыл бұрын

For anyone wondering the "correct strategy" that wasn't found out until later involved a player to use one of their 2 hours that was the same job as the 2 hour the boss used, which locked the boss out of using it, essentially.

@purrpocalypse Жыл бұрын

Honestly people knew of this strategy even before SE released the video, and then the video confirmed it.... But even after that it still didn't work because of latency, so it seemed like a broken strategy. SE back in the day really didn't understand how bad the latency was connecting from the US to Japan. Or they didn't care. But it really seemed like they were baffled by it, and even more baffled by our poor infrastructure.

@darkaero Жыл бұрын

@@purrpocalypse People had figured out that using the same 2hr as AV within the 3 second window locked out that 2hr from being used again but hadn't quite figured out that there were patterns to his 2hr usage. And that by locking a few specific 2hrs you could skip locking the others in that chain. Also, because AVs fighting style changed depending which 2hr was active at the time, leaving 2hrs such as Mighty Strikes (Warrior 2hr) and Hundred Fists (Monk 2hr) unlocked would make the right much easier since both gave you 45 seconds where AV wouldn't cast spells or use TP abilities every time he used them, giving your group a break from the deadliest moves he had. The Auto Regen mechanic also gave people problems after the 2 hour time limit was patched in, since it could take up to 30 minutes in order to kill enough of Jailer of Love's adds to fully eliminate one part of AVs Auto-regen, with the other part being eliminated by casting spells that corresponded to the in-game day of the week enough times (fire spells for firesday, ice spells for iceday etc.. essentially). Latency was an issue but it wasn't the biggest factor that kept it from being killed using the proper strategy as it could be compensated for by using your 2hr when you saw AV use the 2hr animation instead of waiting for it to show up in the battle log which one he used. You'd have large link shells bringing in people on wthe jobs they needed the 2hrs for to lock the abilities even if they were level 1 since they could still lock the boss as Y6 as long as you had enough people to execute the strategy, and most kills didn't happen until a new strategy that relied on a new Avatar for Summoner was developed that replaced the Zerg strat they nerfed. And once the level cap was raised it wasn't exactly an accomplishment anymore so there just wasn't a lot of linkshells that had the amount of knowledge, skill, gear, and members necessary to kill AV using the intended strategy before the fight became trivial/irrelevant from the level cap increase. The introduction of Pandemonium Warden as the new hardest boss also took a lot of focus off of Absolute Virtue in the endgame community at that point, besides a minority that would post their findings from their attempts on forums. By then most endgame linkshells had either already killed AV using the wall or Zerg method before the nerf anyway and didn't consider the time or rewards worth the effort. This over-explaination of the history behind the strategy of a old obscure boss is brought to you by a former FFXI addict with too much free time....

@blackkkabllakkcaa Жыл бұрын

@@darkaero 👍

@andrewmartin2953 Жыл бұрын

@@purrpocalypse this is the answer everyone was looking for. Look no further, up vote this one.

@aegisScale 10 ай бұрын

@@darkaero I must thank you not only for the explanation of the boss's history, but also the in-game particulars of why it was so impossible. It was really difficult to conceptualize _why_ a boss could cause a group of people to need hours to defeat . . . And why its defeat method was so weird.

@julinho218 Жыл бұрын

this boss was an example of incompetence of the developers, whose demeanor was like whining little boys that were the owners of the ball and take it home because the game wasn't going the way they wanted.

@Tooamazin Жыл бұрын

It's not, it only looks that way because of how this guy described everything in this video. Another reason you shouldn't just blindly listen to social media/news as they can bend any story to fit any narrative. Every "strategy" he talked about was an exploit, ESPECIALLY the DK one with kraken clubs. You could slaughter literally every boss in the game using that exploit in seconds to minutes, where they would normally take 20 minutes to hours. There is a reason the DK's ability was nerfed after this was discovered, as with that gear setup and skill combo was well over 20x what any classes DPS could reach (Which is how they killed it in 30 seconds)

@HitoSarg Жыл бұрын

@@Tooamazin That user is 100% correct. I say this as someone who played XI since 2001. The kraken club was not an exploit: it was literally how the DRK JA souleater and their 2 hour, blood weapon, interacted. They didn't nerf souleater/bloodweapon UNTIL it was used to defeat AV. Before that, people had used it for years on Kirin and other bosses. They literally got mad that their prized boss was defeated in such a way and nerfed an entire job as a result. Defending Tanaka's horrendous decisions in XI is not a good look.

@Tooamazin Жыл бұрын

@@HitoSarg Yes, it was used before on older bosses that weren't relevant/current and hard to beat. The combo was absolutely broken (I played also) and needed to be nerfed, once the GM's saw just how insanely broken the combo actually was, since they were watching every kill of that boss it was then nerfed. Just like any current MMO, if you find some exploit of weapon/ability combo that does INSANE damage compared to anything else and use it to fight old bosses it's pretty hard for them to notice it and the only way it will be noticed is if you get reported. If you use it on any current raid tier bosses and get a crazy fast kill, it will be noticed and looked it, then you will be banned and it will be fixed.

@HitoSarg Жыл бұрын

@@Tooamazin "Old bosses" wasn't a thing in XI till Abyssea. People were still killing land kings/Kirin/Dynamis Lord for w. legs, d ring, ridill, etc up until (and even after) the level cap was raised in Abyssea. And they were doing it with TP burn alliances: SEBW+KC DRKs included Let's not try to rewrite history. Tanaka got upset his ultimate boss was beaten with a raid composition that had been widely used up until that point so he nerfed it. Just like a child taking his ball and going home. Tanaka's animosity towards the playerbase, especially NA and EU players, was not just limited to this incident which is why he was canned after making a disaster of FF14 1.0.

@randomman057 11 ай бұрын

@@HitoSarg Bloodweapon wasn't nerfed in the entire game. Absolute Virtue was given a resistance to it that built up over time, so even AV itself didn't fully resist a Bloodweapon Souleater DRK right away. AV was changed to prevent that strategy from working on him, and subsequent bosses implemented later on in the game had similar resistances given to them. However, it was only AV that was changed after the fact.

@rufrox9947 Жыл бұрын

Square acted like a childish DM angry that his players figured out ways to beat their souped up boss monster easily.

@wildcardalbedo Жыл бұрын

The big thing to keep in mind with Absolute Virtue is that you had to spawn and fight SEVEN OTHER NMs as preparation for the encounter. So players who did all that prerequisite work for Absolute Virtue's spawn were worn down already before the 18+ hour encounter even really began. So that even added to the difficulty further. A long, grueling fight that required a HUGE amount of prep, constantly moving the goalposts when strategies came out that were deemed "non-viable", it's no wonder AV is such a legend among FF bosses.

@AzureRoxe Жыл бұрын

Another big thing is the Jailer of Love, which was another infamously powerful NM.

@Malacite Жыл бұрын

Only to die horribly once it either summoned THREE giant wyverns or activated Chainspell & Manafont simultaneously and went into Meteor spam.

@gregorysmillie2008 Жыл бұрын

Didn't keep my crappy LS from taking part in a kill. Only took us like 10 DRK's and 2 and half hours.

@MajinBadat Жыл бұрын

@@Malacite Or just crush your hopes when you get him to 10% and he uses Benediction.

@Malacite Жыл бұрын

@@MajinBadat That was kind of the point. Surprised it wasn't mentioned in the video, but Tanaka was asked about AV and basically said the whole reason they did it was to give the playerbase a seemingly impossible challenge.

@hemanthemighty6523 Жыл бұрын

I was one of the team members that won the Ballista Royale in Seraph, with all of the horror stories of absolute virtue I never even tried going anywhere near him in my entire 7 years of playing lol.

@LilT2o00 Жыл бұрын

They stopped doing ballista royale by the time I got into ballista :( one of the guys I'd always play with though was in it. Was a Galka Monk named Lysol from Fairy/Sylph

@cocodojo Жыл бұрын

I miss Seraph! It was sad the day the server shut down, I went back to San D'oria around the AH for when the timer ticked down.

@Vailsiren Жыл бұрын

this is confusing me, cause Seraph didn't win the Ballista Royale, Siren server did, on both the JP and NA side. and Siren faced Pheonix server for the NA finals do you mean you just represented the Seraph server for the tournament?

@hemanthemighty6523 Жыл бұрын

@@Vailsiren they've since took the interview stuff down but I promise I have no reason to lie xD I played for 7 ish years and even had my Stars cap that you win for besting all the teams in your own world

@opo3628 Жыл бұрын

@@Vailsiren - Yes. He meant that his team won the right to represent Seraph in the server vs. server phase of the tournament..

@chuganoga1908 Жыл бұрын

Imagine finally coming up with a strategy on how to take this dude out and then being punished for doing so and having your job nerfed in effect.

@Tooamazin Жыл бұрын

All of the strategies that worked were basically exploits, the DK one was an oversight with a specific club that multi-hit 2-8 times and one of the DK's newer abilities was that their next swings would drain life and deal extra damage per hit. So it would proc 4-16 times (dual wielding) adding tons of damage but also leaching tons of HP from them and was meant to be used for just a few swings then turned off. This exploit gave them INSANE damage and broke every single fight in the game and any boss could be slaughtered using this, which is why DK's got nerfed and this strategy was removed.

@OtakuWrath Жыл бұрын

@@Tooamazin Well yes using a club that had a 0.03 drop rate off a monster you had to pay untradeable, tedious to farm currency just to fight in a level synced fight that limited you to 3 players that needed to be specific jobs to make it easy enough to beat and there was no real way to control loot so any one of the 3 players could ninja loot the club and it was worth so much that it was extremely common to see it get stolen or you could pay 40+ billion gil for it. Multiple years of farming gil legitimately to afford or you could win it in a yearly raffle that only had 1 winner and that winner could choose any of the rarest most insane items in the game. This club wasn't something everyone had access to and 100% the players that used it against absolute virtue got it by buying gil with real money or HEAVY botting continuously for months to achieve it. Any job that could use the Kraken Club was instantly boosted in power multiple times over. I would argue that just seeing that many Kraken Clubs in one place at the same time was rarer than seeing Absolute Virtue get defeated.

@Tooamazin Жыл бұрын

@@OtakuWrath Right, it was just so rare and so few people had the club that once enough people in the same group were able to all use them and show off that dual wielding those basically gave you 10x your normal DPS. That was when Square realized that DK's drain ability was busted with multi-hit weapons and nerfed that ability (to only proc once per swing I think? Can't remember) so they could still make weapons like that later and not have the same problem.

@chuganoga1908 Ай бұрын

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@@TooamazinI wouldn’t say it was an exploit just an oversight on an already insanely rare weapon. If you could get enough people there with kraken clubs you deserve to win

@gorimbaud Жыл бұрын

Everything I've heard about Absolute Virtue just sounds like a poorly designed fight. Having only one specific valid strategy is very dumb, and patching and threatening players who find a different viable strategy is awful. It makes its reputation as the hardest boss in history feel artificial and undeserved.

@TheEpicNewman Жыл бұрын

People cheated and used an exploit to beat it, and FFXI was a no handholding game so expected to have potentially one way to beat a fight

@gorimbaud Жыл бұрын

@@TheEpicNewman Except in this case "cheating and using an exploit" means that through trial and error of slamming their head against this absolute brick wall of a boss, they found a way to beat it. It was only called "cheating and exploiting" because it wasn't a specific intended way. "Cheating and exploiting" against Absolute Virtue means just playing the game you have in front of you according to the rules and skills available, and being punished because you did it in a way they didn't intend you to. Moreover, _having_ one single intended way to beat the fight is what I'm calling bad game design to begin with. Especially something as obtuse as the method revealed here, with no hints or signposting whatsoever (meaning the only way to discover anything is the trial and error that lead to "cheating and exploiting"), and very limited party comps that leave any player who didn't play one of those classes out in the cold. That's not the hardest boss of all time, that's just someone doing a bad job of making a puzzle. All you're really saying is that Absolute Virtue was bad design by design, and if the bad design is what they meant to do, it's still bad design, and a terrible way to treat your playerbase.

@Matthew-Fair Жыл бұрын

@@gorimbaud This: Exactly this. Also, people also just found different ways of beating it and the legit way to do it used to be mugging it with DRK and a club. Which is hilarious that THAT was actually just a cheesey way to do it and they got mad and nerfed the entire job because they were mad about it being used in one fight a specific way If that doesn't scream that something is wrong with the design and direction of your game and how it's supposed to work, I don't know what else would convice you otherwise (This bit in response to the other reply)

@bruhbruh4329 Жыл бұрын

@@TheEpicNewman it's not cheating if there is no legitimate way to beat it

@Zraknul Жыл бұрын

Used in game items and class abilities isn't cheating or exploiting, it's literally using the tools provided. They did lots of handholding, including posting a kill video. The devs just threw a tantrum repeatedly that players knew their game better than they did.

@thalandor46 Жыл бұрын

I think one of the most important contexts to remember here is that it was 2004, in a time before the rise of KZbin and proper infrastructure for video based internet. This meant that most of the data we had about these fights was shared in through text based forum posts, with supplemental screenshots at best. Videos existed, but the ability to record, host, and share them was a rare luxury. So a lot of speculation ended up going back and forth, based entirely on someone's memory of such a chaotic fight. Something else to remember is that Chains of Promathia was probably when the game was the most difficult across the board. Leveling a job in FFXI was not a trivial task at the time, mostly achieved by grinding open world mobs in a party of 6. So you needed to find a decent party setup with 5 other similarly leveled people, and hope that one of the few open world spots for grinding reasonably killable mobs wasn't occupied by another party. CoP did basically nothing to alleviate this like other expansions and content packs did. Level Sync was reserved for specific instanced fights, while Equipment Sync was not in the game at all. And the story campaign itself was brutal in this regard, which was REQUIRED to even reach Lumoria in the first place. The 8 chapters of the story had various level caps throughout it, which meant you typically needed 6 properly geared players at each specific level to progress. If you entered a level 30 fight with level 35 gear, the gear would unequip, full stop, unlike the stat scaling that most modern MMOs see today. All that is to say, the privilege to even have access to Absolute Virtue in 2004 was reserved for the games most hardcore players. In many ways, you couldn't just throw more players at the fight to try and figure it out. Compare that to the Ultimate raids that XIV sees today, where it might take a reddit thread a week to hammer out the details and see a first win, and you'll understand how different the MMO world was back then.

@BotmanR Жыл бұрын

Yep. I switched from FFXI to WoW around the time Burning Crusade came out once I heard that you could make it to max level completely solo if you wanted to, without having to wait or worry about finding XP parties, level cap quests, or AF gear that everyone said was mandatory.

@atari460 Жыл бұрын

Best comment I've seen in a long time. People don't understand that information was much harder to get back then. You couldn't just google "how to beat xyz" or watch guides on youtube. Nor could you just keep trying the same fight over and over until you figured it out like you can in FFXIV. Every attempt for any difficult fight required items that were difficult and time consuming to get that would be consumed upon your single attempt, which slowed the learning process substantially. FFXI itself was an already very hard game at the time. Anyone who actually managed to even get to level 75 was already an incredibly good player possessing a huge amount of skill and knowledge around their chosen job.

@tek512 Жыл бұрын

I actually fought this thing when it was current content. It taught me that SE, or at least FFXI's particular devs, truly despise humanity.

@KenjiShiratsuki Жыл бұрын

Something I'd like to point out, that the video did not, is that one of the ways to stop Absolute Virtue from using job 2hr (now 1hr) abilities was to pop the same one yourself, which locked him out of ever using it again on that spawn as far as I know. This was the latency mentioned, doing it too late would be ineffective. This meant for every one you wanted to lock out, you had to bring that same exact job in your composition. This would be completely unheard of in modern MMORPGs, especially XI's cousin, XIV. It's the main reason that I'm hesitant to go back to XI, even though I loved it, because XIV is built on the idea that ANY job can do ANY content, it's entirely reliant on the player's skill with that job. to put it a different way, your proficiency with your toolset determines your success. That's how superbosses should be designed in MMORPGs.

@yuffington Жыл бұрын

It basically wasn't possible to lock unless you were in Japan near the data centres.

@KenjiShiratsuki Жыл бұрын

@@yuffington what they should have done is provided challenges that required specific 2hrs to overcome. For example, it uses Mighty Strikes, Hundred Fists, and Blood Weapon. You have your tank use Invincible to counter. It can't deal damage, so it doesn't heal. All those effects wear off at the same time Invincible does. They could even do something with benediction where they warn the players he's "about to heal, but a strong series of blows could break its concentration!" Indicating they need to perform a LV3 skillchain and Magic Burst, to test how coordinated they are, or just have the SAM do a solo skillchain. It could cast Chainspell but become vulnerable to stun, thus allowing a Chainspell stun RDM to lock it down until it falls off.

@helpfulDeathgod Жыл бұрын

I mean, less unheard of for XIV. Every job has its niche, but if the point was to lock it out from doing specific jobs, then the idea would be to bring people who like the "off-meta" jobs and are good at it. Dancer does some of the worst damage, but if they dance partner the right jobs in time for their burst, they're invaluable. Edit: Because some "I Have to be Right, All the Time" weirdo brought it up, I will clarify. DNC does not do enough DPS to solo anything. Their DPS is effectively based solely on who their Dance Partner is, meaning they always have the opportunity to do high damage if they're paying attention. Likewise, parsing is a terrible model to use as your "who is good at DPS right now" scale because, as from top parse being achieved by getting boosted by the entire party giving their buffs to that one person, ALL PARSES ARE CLEARS. Meaning even low parse is usually HIGH ENOUGH for the content! Unfortunately, Parse is a scourge that cannot so easily be removed. I'm muting this because of some "Simon Cowell" wannabe who refuses to accept that they don't understand what I was saying. Which was, "You can play as whatever class you want in 14, as long as know what you're doing, even as the lowest DPS. Just make sure you do your job _right."_

@simoncoweII Жыл бұрын

@@helpfulDeathgod Good evening. DNC is actually doing the best ranged rDPS right now in P8S. MCH, the most selfish of the three, is the weakest (perhaps in the game) in relevant/current content. A grey parsing MNK can out-DPS a 100% perfect MCH parse. While I can understand someone wanting to be part of a conversation regardless of expertise, the fact remains that you unfortunately do not know what you’re talking about and are spreading misinformation.

@helpfulDeathgod Жыл бұрын

@@simoncoweII because me being... wrong about DNC specifically is... going to what exactly? Make someone upset? Like you? People play the jobs they want in 14, regardless of DPS. At the time, my statement was true, and today it isn't. Congrats. You corrected someone in a random Comment Chain. The one who sounds like they "want to be part of the conversation" is you.

@SeiferA2001 Жыл бұрын

Absolute Virtue always sounded like a monster of legend to me, similar to the The One Sin in .hack. But now after watching this video and seeing the comments, it’s clear this boss was more of a shiny toy that Square wanted players to dream about beating and not actually defeat. Kinda sad to see that was the actual reality but I guess I should be happy I never dedicated myself to this game that hard to get this far

@Thejeretic Жыл бұрын

I heard so many stories about AV while I was really into FFXI. They were all horror stories.

@agentnorth2758 Жыл бұрын

I was there for the first fights... im still scarred

@paradigmnine Жыл бұрын

@@agentnorth2758 same here lol. Even to this day, ffxi memories run strong

@donnyyasu2764 Жыл бұрын

I remember tanking Jailer Of Love for the first time as a PLD/RDM in the 75 cap, and once we won, AV spawned. Everyone left after JoL died lol. I engaged AV solo just to say I fought AV. Died in moments.

@cocodojo Жыл бұрын

@@donnyyasu2764 You're a braver player than most!

@LuckyPunkProd Жыл бұрын

I think I also heard that some people who tackled Absolute Virtue (or Pandaemonium Warden) for such a long period of time actually became ill to the point of vomiting due to dehydration, which also led to SE making changes to the boss.

@AzureRoxe Жыл бұрын

Yeah, one of the battles against him lasted almost 24 straight hours and they only realistically failed because some were getting sick.

@wildcardalbedo Жыл бұрын

I think the boss where that happened was Pandaemonium Warden, but Absolute Virtue absolutely could have, and probably did, have that happen to a few groups as well. Either way, the fact that a boss of AV's level of difficulty existed at all, nevermind existed twice, is insane to me.

@thalandor46 Жыл бұрын

Almost! I believe that news actually revolved around Pandemonium Warden, and entirely different but similarly absurd super boss from the 3rd expansion, Treasures of Aht Urhgan. It was briefly mentioned in the video, but it was the uproar over the length of the PW fight that ended up nerfing BOTH Pandemonium Warden and Absolute Virtue to the 2 hour time limit.

@turokken Жыл бұрын

Well, the fight with PW was the one that got all the headlines. I'm sure there were people feeling negative effects of sitting on a screen for 20+ hours with no breaks

@LuckyPunkProd Жыл бұрын

@@thalandor46 Well, in either case, despite being an MMO, no boss (or superboss) should be that impossibly difficult or time-consuming, even with a whole squad of players. I'm pretty sure a lot of people got their patience tested to their limit and then some from that. Mind you, this is coming from someone who hasn't played XI (I play XIV, though).

@SorasShadow1 Жыл бұрын

I'd heard that the relationship between 11 players and the devs is a bit....fraught, especially in comparison to the relationship between 14 and the devs (ie; 11's director calling the players "customers" instead of "players" like 14 tends to, much more....impersonal, businesslike) and I've never heard the specifics of the devs responses to people actively trying to fix/have fun within what they were given so I feel like it really encapsulates a lot of the differences between the 2 mmos. Seems like the people in charge of this thing had active contempt for the player base at the time, honestly.

@foomp Жыл бұрын

Contempt isn't the right word most XI players would use, as that implies the devs are actively trying to do things to create bad experiences for players as "payback" for whatever reasons. To most XI players, saying the XI devs had contempt is like saying FromSoftware has contempt for their players in the Souls series. The early years of XI is a relic of the past in terms of development direction. Things were intentionally made to be difficult and they actually weren't as power tripped as people in the comments suggest. Players played Ninja as tanks, which was completely different from their original intent. Zerg strats were a thing in other endgame content without being nerfed. AV and PW were literally intended to be the hardest content to ever exist in the game, so there's going to reasonably be some bias on the matter from the devs. It is without a doubt pretty bad about the DK and Kraken club nerfs on AV, but things like with exploits and bans related isn't exactly unreasonable. Most MMORPGs do that today if people cheat lol. It was a very different mentality back then from what it is today. Mistakes were definitely made, but that's why people learned from them. That said, some things that people consider "mistakes" of games like XI are part of the reason why people complain about the games today. Struggle and some degree of unfairness or imbalance actually make games more memorable and enjoyable (to some degree). Frustrations are absolutely part of the journey. Ask any FromSoft fan or other difficult games of the past (e.g. Super Meat Boy).

@Infindox Жыл бұрын

This and a few other instances in XI, and how XIV was for 1.0, is how you can tell the difference in caring for the player base between then and now with Yoshi-P and his team on XIV.

@granmastersword Жыл бұрын

Indeed. Heck, I remember how Tanaka, the former game director, claimed the reason 1.0 bombed hard was because us western players were super crappy at the game and didn't know to play it well and correctly like the Japanese players, painting it like the failure was due to whining rather than...well, bad design and development fueled by hubris

@crowdemon_archives Жыл бұрын

@@granmastersword difference between trying to be "Nintendo hard" and "actually respecting the players" lol

@holographicfrog1503 Жыл бұрын

I'm thrilled they are making FF16. That was literally the only way I was going to buy that game after 15.

@apexreactions4231 Жыл бұрын

@@holographicfrog1503 15 would have been one of the best games of all time if they followed through with the modding tool and I will die on this hill

@holographicfrog1503 Жыл бұрын

@@apexreactions4231 It really wasn't good though. The only decent part of the whole game was the fraternity of the brotherhood and that's it. Unless you view it as a Skyrim type of thing. Then I can see your argument. I don't think the modding scene would've been big though.

@GrandStyles Жыл бұрын

The level of trolling SE performed with this boss is unparalleled

@horaciohernandez2850 Жыл бұрын

A video on Pandemonium Warden and the controversy surrounding it would be neat.

@timmer6287 Жыл бұрын

I remember watching BTL fight him. They did that shit for like 30 hours.

@glenmcl Жыл бұрын

@@timmer6287 poor strategy. At least they won though.

@donnyyasu2764 Жыл бұрын

Rukenshin's (BTL officer) Live journal entry addressing the controversy and spawn by spawn updates are still up. Sadly the images are down due to PhotobucketLol. It's still a pretty in depth two part read though

@purrpocalypse Жыл бұрын

Honestly they shouldn't have lied and said people were fainting/throwing up to make the fight seem more hardcore. At the time the community thought that would make the game look better since we were so accustomed to harder=better. Surely a fight that hard would help the game make a comeback after WoW's launch, right? Of course it backfired and they had to nerf and ultimately ruin the game.

@stferguson88 Жыл бұрын

I loved the mythos surrounding this guy within the playerbase. One of the most enjoyable elements of the NM system in XI (in my opinion, at least) was the way it promoted discourse, and caused their legend to spread throughout the community. This said, I never managed to topple this chap, but he remains one of my favourite bosses of the franchise to this day. Shout out to the Titan server that was!

@Diego-Designs Жыл бұрын

I miss FFXI. My main was RDM and I miss especially the music and just lounging around in the fields relaxing. Shout-out to Carbuncle server!

@TenchiHawkwing Жыл бұрын

I loved that AV brought the community together like no other. Everyone wanted to be the guy who figured out "the way" to beat it and even people who never even stepped foot into Lumoria were getting in on the brainstorming. It was incredible.

@andrewz4425 Жыл бұрын

Shout out for titan from Zaros!

@the_exegete Жыл бұрын

@@TenchiHawkwing Would have been better is AV actually was beatable rather than being a cruel prank played against the player by the devs.

@THEGRUMPTRUCK Жыл бұрын

Shoutout from a Carbuncle who moved to Asura!

@thriftingtonpost Жыл бұрын

For any curious, the loot for the first kill of Absolute Virtue ever was only a Light Crystal. A garbage item. While it wasn't uncommon for extremely hard bosses to drop literally nothing, this still made people wonder if it even had its speculated loot table enabled - things like Mars's Ring or Ninerta's Sash were assumed to be on it but not known for certain yet. It possibly having no loot table only furthered speculation that it wasn't supposed to be defeated yet.

@michaelfisher737 Жыл бұрын

Wow, lots of memories from playing endgame during this time in FFXI - I've been apart of a few attempts to take AV down in my time - of course, only bringing it to 79% before we were Manafont/Chainspell meteor spammed. I remember standing in Upper Jeuno watching the chat spam too fast to read, players completely hyped about AV being taken down on an entirely different server. It was like reading a ticker flying out of the machine, with people reporting moment by moment what was going on. This was during the era of wall of justice kills. One thing I don't think I noticed was mentioned in the video was how hard and how much effort and time was required to bring AV from the Jailer of Love spawn to the Jailer of Justice spawn to set up a wall of justice kill - there were aggressive monsters from below the floor and in the skybox, there were also a large number of curious, fish-like monsters that would follow you, if your party used AoE spells you could suddenly have a horde of angry fish following you so you needed to be 110% aware the entire journey to the other side of the map, all while AV is casting horrible, party-wiping spells constantly. It was like moving a full raid of 36 people across the map together, in formation. Everyone had to be on top of their jobs of supporting the tank party with debuffs and add killing, all while the tanks juggle staying alive and maintaining enmity on AV, otherwise it would deaggro and very quickly begin walking back to its spawn, erasing a large portion of progress. This explanation doesn't even put in to context the extremely long casting times, the pure lack of natural mp5 (you relied on other mages), and punishing distance requirements to cast spells - this required tight, constant, and informative communication between all players, with a shot-caller who has a keen sense of foresight. To play well in endgame, you had to be pre-emptive, not reactive. To say just moving AV in to position is difficult would be an understatement. I also believe the first AV kill reported in this video using the wall of justice was actually the second, though I could be entirely wrong because it has been 10+ years, was actually achieved by linkshell of japanese players. The strategy was translated to our english players through forums - I remember delving deep into bluegartr and killingifrit forum threads during this time looking for strategies to lead my own linkshell to victory, as the way to beat AV was pure mystery at this point. If anyone was running high level HNM endgame during 2006 and can correct me if I'm wrong, please feel free to! But I distinctly remember the discussions surrounding the translated texts and screenshots of the JoJ wall trick with japanese text on the screen. (For context for non-FFXI players, there was a strong divide between JP and EN players, we all shared the same servers, but our information and knowledge of the game did not get shared very often. We had a mutual respect for each other but japanese players and western players played the game very differently!) Thanks for the fantastic video on one of the most legendary creations I've ever seen in a video game! This really brings back a lot of good memories running my linkshell through all of the 75 cap endgame experiences - Jailer of Love was a fantastic fight I always loved participating in. To have the mysterious and terrifying absolute virtue spawn immediately after JoL dies and start romping on your alliance of players, running in fear of their lost experience points as they try to escape the wrath of the raging celestial Aern - it was really the time to be playing FFXI. Here's to hoping we see classic servers one day, I'd love to take another walk through the land of Vana'diel as I knew it.

@90piterr Жыл бұрын

Do u play XIV? c:

@HybridAssassins Жыл бұрын

Reading your response is like I'm back there again. 14 years ago.

@OJtheLIONKing Жыл бұрын

Fascinating to watch and also it's reminding me what a love hate relationship I had with ffxi and the dev team's frothing hatred of players. Looking back on all of the years I sank into it, I realize I only really enjoyed the friendships I made and almost nothing about the actual gameplay. I'm so grateful that FFXIV was saved from this by Yoshi P.

@the_exegete Жыл бұрын

FFXI has been saved from it as well. Thank you Matsui!

@cocodojo Жыл бұрын

FFXI for the longest time was a constant HATE relationship from the Devs side towards its own player base. Find an activity that's enjoyable? Nerfed it! You like fishing? We broke it (in the excuse of making it harder on RMT fishbots) except now you've got a stupid mini game and the fishbots actually fished out all the good stuff you wanted, so fishing's no longer a relaxing side hobby for the downtime. You like crafting? Nerfed it! Oh you need money? Well, we've removed practically all viable ways to make money so now you're stuck with the AH (and basically creating a stronger market for RMT). Oh, you like gear drops? Nerfed that too! Any little bit of enjoyment you have, we'll nerf it and make it no longer enjoyable, just to spite you and make it take longer do get anything done. Yeah... FFXI became more like a 2nd job for a long while. the ever diminishing return of time spent to fun gained was always widening.

@duhotatoday3277 Жыл бұрын

@@cocodojo gotta make sure the players keep renewing that subscription, heh. It's like pay2win but pay2sinktime2paymore

@MeifromLevi Жыл бұрын

Despite Square throwing a hissy fit every time AV was defeated, FFXI still holds a special place in my heart and one of my favorite games of all time. It’s one of those “you should have been there to understand” type games.

@cocodojo Жыл бұрын

FFXI's one of those games where the term "The struggle was REAL" was not just empty words for those who've experienced it for a good amount of time. Still its always funny seeing someone die, de-level and suddenly become naked because they no longer meet the level requirement for their equipped gear and is now dead on the ground in pretty much VERY hostile territory even for well equipped players is always an amusing sight. Also, its always been weird when you check a mob and it says "Even Match" yet when you try to fight it, its more on the level of "I'm gonna wipe the floor with your sorry butt" if you try to take one of them on solo at most points in the game back in the days. That level check system lies, you'd be lucky to survive an "easy prey" fight most times!

@ChaseFace Жыл бұрын

Just a reminder that FFXI has a classic fan server Horizon opening on December 17th 2022, which is basically going to relive FFXI from it's 2004 launch up until current content with a permanent level 75 cap, meaning the game-ruining 99 level cap set after Abyssea will be regeared to function entirely with level 75 gear, so all of your gear will be relevant forever. It's gonna be massive, I highly encourage anyone who missed the original FF11 boat give it a shot! And it's free! And Square Enix isn't interested in pursuing a classic server (since it would cost too much and be too much work and FF14 already makes infinite money from casuals), so you don't have to worry about losing anything in a cease & desist order. And the folks working on it are very talented programmers who have been doing this for years on other private servers.

@ZealPath Жыл бұрын

After hearing about the "Dark Knight Kraken Club Zerg while buffed to the teeth with Bards and Corsairs" strategy my linkshell allied with one of our competing linkshells (who we already had a mostly-friendly relationship with from a previous Dynamis alliance) to utilize this strategy to defeat AV. Much like the video shows, it wasn't terribly exciting and was clearly a "cheese strat," but it was still cool to get the win and the "Virtuous Saint" title for my character. I was even lucky enough to be the recipient of the "Bellona's Ring," which, while totally underwhelming stat wise for the effort (it was basically a Sniper's Ring +2), was a pretty cool trophy item.

@crowdemon_archives Жыл бұрын

Lmfao

@BAKAGAlJIN Жыл бұрын

The first change with the wall of Justice was definitely needed. It basically glitched Absolute Virtue into not being able to move or attack the players.

@PinkyZKey Жыл бұрын

I believe Pandemonium Warden was close to impossible at first, too. Back when I was playing this game, I read the article about the first LS to down him. It took somewhere around 48 or 72 hours of straight combat. Something like that. They had to force a nerf, because some of the LS were hospitalized. Some of them got really sick and were puking in the middle of the fight. I believe this is also when they rolled out the warning on the loading screen about taking breaks, drinking fluids, and sleeping lol.

@bigheadkittygaming 10 күн бұрын

Link shell was Beyond the Limitation. I played with some of them outside of my own LS time when I was on Seraph. Those guys were awesome. Many quit the game after that fight.

@MatthewSwaine Жыл бұрын

I remember tackling this boss so many times, and it took us several years till we figured out how to beat it. We managed to best it before the level cap increase after finding out you could lock him from using his 2hours multiple times, although it was very unforgiving as AV still had to use each of his 2hours at least once to lock them. If Absolute Virtue uses invincible for example, if a player on the hate list used invincible within a couple of seconds, it would prevent AV from using invincible again. This still meant that he would be able to use Chainspell, Benediction, Manafont & hundred fists for example all at least once in the fight, all of which were almost guaranteed to wipe parties. Our strategy had us bring along more than the full alliance of players, and we had one specific party that would pop the him, and all attack him just once to make sure they were on the hate list, before letting the 2nd PT in the alliance engage (the main tank PT) and then the original spawning PT would drop the alliance. The spawning party would consist of 6 jobs of who's 2hours were the main focus to be locked, BLM RDM MNK WHM PLD SMN, and since these 6 players were on the hate list, even though they were no longer in the main alliance, if they used their 2hrs after AV it would lock his 2hrs.

@SpoonySamurai Жыл бұрын

I remember absolutely virtue and when they first introduced it. I played on carbuncle and i knew the first American player on my server to get an amanomurakumo. I actually introduced him to the game, aladwar was his name. I had a theory early on how to beat absolute virtue...I suggested using 2 hour abilities in some way. I didnt have a way to communicate the idea to larger shells because I was stubborn and I didn't have much clout other than training some of the best on my server. I come to find out years later I was 100% and years ahead of people.

@uxtalzon Жыл бұрын

I remember that gold dragon from DnD. It's attack was "WOW" or something. Devs were like "yeah it's beatable, watch this video", but it took them 18 hours and zero lag. This is exactly like New World devs who overtuned bosses for such a long time that players wanted them to prove it's doable. They tuned the content down BEFORE making their video. Dishonest fucks.

@joeykornegay4587 Жыл бұрын

The fact that square enix made a boss that was so hard it literally broke the news is just as crazy as it is also hilarious and awesome. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to dying every five minutes in Strangers of Paradise on lvl 300 missions on Bahamut difficulty.

@pestopartyy Жыл бұрын

Given how they handled this whole situation I'm not surprised that XIV 1.0 turned out the way it did

@purrpocalypse Жыл бұрын

They were definitely full of hubris, and they were overly focused on the Japanese market with 1.0. They ignored WoW completely and just went with the "Well we have the best game in Japan, and Japan is the best, so we don't need to try hard."

@alterrondo4179 Жыл бұрын

game is still bad to this day. Square devs are some of the worst lmfao

@hakageryu-hz7jz Жыл бұрын

@@alterrondo4179 Bad? Laughable. For every way its well designed, its also terribly designed in 2 others (Not including all the garbage left over from 1.0)? Absolutely.

@doomguy676 Жыл бұрын

Square was so pissy about people who beat ot. It's like a child on the playground whinging that their character is sooooo much better than yours.

@amorphant Жыл бұрын

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Kerafyrm. Sony did a similar thing with a one-time spawn unkillable boss in Everquest. One PvP server's top guilds agreed that any guild who triggered the spawn would be destroyed from then on by the others. Kerafyrm stayed unspawned on that one server for a couple years, till expansions made players powerful enough that they could use a legit method to defeat it: a couple hundred players, with a mass of clerics spamming their free rez and pet classes having a swarm of pets zerg rush the boss in melee. After a couple hours, when the boss was almost dead, Sony despawned it... The fight was legendary, with people from all servers paying attention because it was finally being spawned on that last server. There was an uproar, Sony apologized, reset the event, and gave the server another go the next day. They downed Kerafyrm, and the loot table was empty, since Sony never thought it would be killed. EDIT: The old model still looks great too, the awakened crystal form with the colored head. Imagine that thing rampaging across the realm, screaming that it was going to kill everyone and everything while doing so.

@criminalsen2441 Жыл бұрын

Some dev teams actually applaud players for finding innovative shortcuts and hacks - taking the time to find these exploits shows high investment in the game, after all - so it's kinda crappy that these guys did the opposite. Like, no argument that it was a hard boss.. but sounds like it was hard in a bad way if you know what I mean:/

@jonbourgoin182 Жыл бұрын

This makes me feel like defeating Ruby and Emerald in FFVII wasn't such a big deal. And I guess it wasn't overall. But to me it was..

@David-nd4to Жыл бұрын

They were as a 10 year old lol

@LemonSandwich Жыл бұрын

@@David-nd4to Amen 🙏

@madalice5134 Жыл бұрын

FF7 was my first rpg, so beating Ruby and Emerald was a huge deal to me. I stumbled around for so long trying to figure out what to do, so when I finally cracked it, my 10 year old mind was blown.

@mrdude88 Жыл бұрын

Got wiped from Ruby Weapon on the first time I saw the tiny red worm, then got wiped again after preparing myself, then kicked his ass the 3rd time around after forgetting about him and grinding for level and master materias. Emerald in the other hand was pretty easy for a super boss.

@David-nd4to Жыл бұрын

@@mrdude88 emerald is the easiest of the bunch

@OddlyIncredible 5 ай бұрын

It's worth noting that the FFXI dev team were actively and overtly hostile to the playerbase, and AV is a great example of how that hostility was manifest in the game design. The disdain they had for the players was obvious in their dev videos, and they deliberately refused to make badly needed QoL improvements until years after someone did it first, such as adding a minimap and support for windowed mode _only after_ a patcher (Windower) was created by players to add those features. Player suggestions were pretty much ignored, and any time a player figured out how to cheese some system the dev team focused its energy and effort into defeating that approach rather than investigating whether and why it was required in the first place. It was almost like FFXI was a personal pet project for a handful of people and they resented the millions of interlopers that dared intrude upon it. The same team worked on FFXIV 1.0, and the tremendous number of technical issues aside, it was an unmitigated disaster that dealt a lot of damage to Square Enix as a company, and was only undone when a new team was assembled that actually cared about both the game and the players of that game, and FFXIV: A Realm Reborn (version 2.0) and the soon-to-be-five major expansions that followed were the result of their efforts.

@Magicalpow1 Жыл бұрын

I appreciate the background you gave before you got to the boss itself as even though I've played games with such bosses I literally never noticed things like optional bosses, among other things, until you pointed them out; a proper context for someone who games but hardly knows what they're doing. Awesome video.

@ReaverPrime Жыл бұрын

I played FFXI for 12 years from NA release. I was a 4 song Gjallarhorn Bard with all my RME weapons (left before Aeonic was a thing). I'd been a part of all the high end content up to that point. Feeding Kirin with Hymnus after a bad wipe. LS Dynamis runs on Fridays. The disaster that was Jormungand's release. Pandemonium Warden... Nyzul Isle... The super diesel crystal dragon... Etc, etc. Of all the nonsense we endured over the years, Square's utter refusal to allow AV to be beaten was downright disgusting. I was in a linkshell called HiddenPower at the time and part of our crew was hit by that swing of the hammer for the wall. In my opinion, AV and PW were blatant and gross displays of ego. The PW scenario ended horribly though and created nasty PR that forced them to change the way they went about encounter design from then on.

@AzureKyle Жыл бұрын

And that's why, even now in FF14, they have time limits for every grouped piece of content. Whether it be dungeons, trials, Bozja/Eureka, raids, etc.

@RaxiazRedux Жыл бұрын

@@AzureKyle i feel like time limits are a natural development of the medium but I agree that having an encounter take 18+ hours to beat is nonsense, no matter what MMO you're playing that's just ridiculous

@shukuffxi Жыл бұрын

I remember your LS name from back then :)

@myhr2320 Жыл бұрын

@@AzureKyle Interesting, I always wondered why you would have time limits in FF14's dungeons. The more you know!

@AzureKyle Жыл бұрын

@@myhr2320 Yup, so you don't end up spending too much time in it. Though, you don't usually come anywhere near that. The only times I've ever timed out were from Savage raids, Extreme trials, and Bozja. Though I did get close while doing Puppet Bunker raid blind on patch day.

@BlaiseArath Жыл бұрын

The Randomly-spawning Notorious Monsters in FFXI are literally something I wish more games had. I >love< the idea. From the unique drops, to the naming schemes, to just giving fun to exploring and danger to certain areas. Like, its probably the one single thing that kept me playing XI for as long as I did, because a lot of my free time was spent camping all the different and unique NMs in this game, no matter how good or bad the drop was lol. It was such a fun experience. But yah, fudge me, Absolute Virtue and the sheer amount of hate the Devs expressed at the playerbase when they found a strategy to beat him that didn't involve their convoluted 18 hour long 2-hr locking RNG fest of a fight was something I got to experience firsthand. Absolute Virtue should be a required case study for game devs on how not to design a super-boss, and how not to treat your playerbase when they defeat him. Then they should look at Pandemonium Warden too. Anyway, I solo'd Absolute Virtue the other week when they introduced the Sea campaign for the cosmetic weapons and boy did it feel good to kick his butt, but never came close in the 75 era.

@attaug Жыл бұрын

I miss NMs/Rare Monsters in MMOs that have random spawns/specific conditions. The problem with them existing in modern MMOs though is the fact that in the olden days of rare spanws/NMs a server would usually have a few hundred to a few thousand players total on it at most and usually a few hundred playing at the same time (barring special events and the weekend). This meant that stuff like NMs or world chests or open world dungeons that had timed spawns/loot would likely be open for a random group of players or a few friends trying to get something. The content was also designed to be grindy and hard to get through causing less competition on top of the already small player-base. In the more popular modern successful MMOs you tend to see thousands of players online at once and everything is tracked with some kind of third party tool or website. Randomly stumbling upon something or needing to keep a personal calendar for something you were looking to get/kill is a hard sell these days. Especially given the demand everything has on everyone's time. Even high schoolers have less "free time" or patience now than they did 20 years ago, everything is instant gratification or "if it takes more than a couple hours it's too much time," which to a degree is fair.

@boota2798 Жыл бұрын

FFXI is one of the most hardcore MMO's still operating with dev support. You literally (once) needed a solid party of 5 to lvl in the open world after roughly level 12. This boss was hell, I didn't even fight it, I was just a member of a support linkshell. But I heard of the horror.

@ChaseFace Жыл бұрын

@Phoenixryu Жыл бұрын

I was on the Pandemonium server and used Blue Grtrs strats a lot. I never fought AV but I definitely heard the nightmare stories about him. I retired from the game with AV being one of the few HNM I never challenged but at least it sounds more doable now.

@RaxiazRedux Жыл бұрын

you can solo AV now with i119 gear (using trusts but I bet a RDM could solo). He's a joke now. Warder of Courage, the i119 version, though... Not too bad actually; if you can manage to zerg it!

@Phoenixryu Жыл бұрын

@@RaxiazRedux I retired from the game officially shortly after the last expansion so I'm not sure what i119 gear means exactly. I have no plans to return but I'm glad the game is still running and older content can be experienced still.

@purin6792 Жыл бұрын

I was going to say “No, Galdera the Fallen from Octopath Traveler is the hardest JRPG boss” but no, Final Fantasy XI bosses makes hard bosses from single player JRPGs look pathetic, especially Absolute Virtue.

@miarose5156 Жыл бұрын

This doesn’t surprise me but it’s so interesting hearing the development history of this boss!!!

@apdj94 Жыл бұрын

It's funny to me that they wanted to reduce the amount of time spent fighting bosses for the sake of player health, but Yiazmat in the very next installment would take up to 4 hours to defeat. At least with the gambit system in FFXII you could set up gambits and walk away, letting the game play itself.

@TheBlueLink3 Жыл бұрын

To be fair, 4 hours is very different from 18 hours. Plus, you can pause the game.

@HappleProductions Жыл бұрын

Besides the gambit system allowing you to walk away, Yiazmat specifically had mechanics to allow you to walk away in-game, as well, keeping his health total after you leave. Even if it's taking you ridiculously long to kill Yiazmat, it isn't like you have to do that time consecutively.

@fattucus1361 Жыл бұрын

it should be noted that both Yiazmat and Absolute Virtue came out in the same year. Not the 2h version, the 20 hour version.

@shirrenthewanderer414 6 ай бұрын

Yizmat health didn't regenerate when you stopped the fight, so you can do it in sessions, and it was a single player game.

@DanielRenardAnimation Жыл бұрын

*Squeenix:* _"Haha, we made a boss that is EXTREMELY difficult to beat!_ 🙂 _Can you do it, we wonder~"_ *Players:* _"Okay, we found a way to beat it."_ *Squeenix:* _"N- No! You can't do that!!_ 👿 _BAN, PATCH'N NERF!!!1"_

@masterseal0418 Жыл бұрын

Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden are easily the most difficult bosses that video games never mimicked the same way as these two. Glad to see that Absolute Virtue didn't cause insomnia and/or hospitalization compared to the Pandemonium variant.

@wildcardalbedo Жыл бұрын

Actually, it did. Pandaemonium Warden had a group of players that ended up in the hospital due to fatigue and dehydration after a FAILED 18-hour encounter with the boss. Bear in mind, Pandaemonium Warden was introduced AFTER Absolute Virtue and everything that came with AV, so SE KNEW what might happen with long, drawn out encounters like that. It was the bad press from PW that ended up leading to AV and PW being heavily nerfed and made "beatable" in the realistic sense.

@Johnnyballgameus Жыл бұрын

My LS had a much easier time with PW than with AV, although we did get both when the level cap was raised to 80.

@TenchiHawkwing Жыл бұрын

It was PW, and not AV where that happened.

@masterseal0418 Жыл бұрын

@@TenchiHawkwing My bad.

@AlexanderMartinez-kd7cz Жыл бұрын

IDK about PW but AV really isn't that hard a boss. It was only that hard because no one knew what the mechanics were.

@Tekkaras Жыл бұрын

Can't imagine the devs have much goodwill left among the gaming community after making an invincible boss, lying and saying it was possible, and then *banning* people who actually beat it.

@TheEpicNewman Жыл бұрын

They did have goodwill, the game was hard, people knew it and the bans happened to people who openly cheated to beat AV

@purrpocalypse Жыл бұрын

At the time we loved it, the game, and the devs. We weren't angry about these things, we just kept going. No one was upset at all. Gaming has changed a lot since then, but at the time? We signed up for this game because of how excruciating it was. That was the selling point, you know? The big disappointment now is that gamers would just cry about QoL instead of embracing it.

@TheEpicNewman Жыл бұрын

@@purrpocalypse The sense you achieved things was amazing, you earned everything.

@RemnantSoul Жыл бұрын

I remember the bullshit around this boss. It was essentially "The Sleeper Dragon" all over again. Devs didn't think of "everything" so when the boss did get destroyed, they had tantrums and fits with some GMs healing the boss, buffing it, and even debuffing the players or teleporting them. With one GMs despawning the boss when near death. I digress... Absolute Virtue and Pademonium Warden were...impo proof that FF11's dev team held nothing but contempt for the players and had no idea how MMOs truly worked. It was bad enough that FF11 was an unofficial survival-horror MMO (everything was devastatingly deadly, and players were frighteningly weak. You prayed nothing saw, heard, or smelled you during every trek in the game. You prayed a super boss wouldn't spawn on your boat. Literally an MMOs where 98% of the time, players were sneaking around, avoiding enemies.) but the devs making enemies and then patching them to ensure they defeated the players were beyond egregious. I've never forgiven the FF11 team for that. My LS used to joke that Absolute Virtue's true ultimate ability was to patch the game and buff itself.

@Player-dw3pe Жыл бұрын

Skill issue.

@CreepyHandedMan Жыл бұрын

@@Player-dw3pe Yes, clearly these devs lacked essential encounter design skills.

@bluenova123 8 ай бұрын

So let me get this straight. The intended method of winning basically involved having a group of people all having TAS levels of timing and RNG in an environment with variable command input lag. The odds that everything would line up that way in such an environment, and even with everyone playing perfectly, you are more likely to win the jackpot on a lottery. Yes it is technically beatable, but the odds are almost non existent of being beaten in such a way. I am halfway convinced that they created this knowing people would find work arounds and cheese. In other words that they basically used it for bug testing, and that is probably why the first method was allowed at first, so that they can collect data to patch an unintended game mechanic.

@lenk1432 Жыл бұрын

its kind of lame how game devs kept moving the goal post when people found a way to beat him legitimately

@thalandor46 Жыл бұрын

5:14 Small correction, there were in fact 7 Jailers (Faith, Prudence, Temperance, Hope, Fortitude, Justice, and Love), which would then lead into Absolute Virtue, making AV 1 of 8 NMs in Lumoria, not 1 of 7 🙂

@ianh1504 Жыл бұрын

Theres gotta be some people out there who raised up a dark knight to the highest possible level to slay absolute virtue and finally did so, only to get nerfed. I'd probably quit.

@caffienatedtactician Жыл бұрын

This was a fantastic and wonderfully informative video! I'd love to know more about other superbosses.

@perezkoala Жыл бұрын

I was in an elite group (HNMLS) and there was a point in which the FFXI community gave up for years, after glitches were nerfed. Not only popping the monster was incredibly time consuming, but just making 1% damage and surviving took a lot of effort and concentration from everyone. Add a strong regen on the monster and the fact that it could randomly use abilities that either wipe most of the party or cures ALL of this enemy's hp. This was a MMORPG and people were willing to fight strong enemies or scenarios for hours without a rest, but this shit, no one was crazy enough. It wasn't until they made some updates to reduce its HP and new gear came out that people started exploiting the Kraken Club (one of the rarest items in the game) + Souleater. Sadly, the dev team nerfed that and they became infamous for pushing the gamers to kill that monster in an specific way.

@Seidragon Жыл бұрын

Besides stating that people gave up, you literally just said everything that was already in the video lol.

@Alen725 Жыл бұрын

You literally mentioned everything already described in video but with less details. You werent in elite group, you were in pathetic group of no lifers spending time in garbage game.

@ChaseFace Жыл бұрын

@1nvaderz Жыл бұрын

I remember the 30 hour fight. The killingifrit forums were going crazy. This is some incredible nostalgia, thanks for making this.

@joshua2752 Жыл бұрын

Any of the link shells I was in before the level cap was raised to 99 didn’t attempt Absolute Virtue. After the cap was raised some people fought it, but I wasn’t there. I did however take part in a fight with Pandamonium Warden which we did defeat it.

@Buildermon16 Жыл бұрын

I feel like the lessons learned from this boss/development tantrum went into creating the Ultimate fights in FFXIV. Insane encounters that are level-locked so they're always hard as balls, combined with an onslaught of rapid-fire mechanics in a 17 minute gauntlet that require hundreds of hours of prog/hundreds of pages to explain. Since they're level-locked and item-level-locked, power creep doesn't effect them as much, though player skill does still make them 'easier' for veterans. Also, in spite of being insanely tough, Ultimate fights are more or less communicated as such, so players know what they're getting into.

@crowdemon_archives Жыл бұрын

And also way fairer.

@NickMC512 8 ай бұрын

Calling this boss “the most difficult boss battle of all time” is like calling a live porcupine “the spiciest and most difficult-to-eat cupcake of all time”.

@Dullsonic3 Жыл бұрын

Ah yes, a boss so long and hard that you would have to sacrifice yourself in real life to defeat him. Even for the dreaded Mayumushi avoidance from one of those "I wanna be the Guy" fangames, at least it's almost 4 minutes in length and you can take breaks if you die.

@turokken Жыл бұрын

Wait, wasn't there also a mechanic that players found (or did SE tell us?) that you could cancel out AV's 2-Hour moves by having a party member using it before him? I thought that was how you were supposed to prevent the Benediction bomb(s)

@Lorkanthal Жыл бұрын

believe that was what was shown in the dev. video but the strict timing made it very hard to pull off with latency players would have.

@the_exegete Жыл бұрын

You had to have someone use their SP move within a couple seconds of AV using the same SP move. It was basically impossible to do it fast enough without being right next to the servers for 0 latency.

@JoshuaJacobs83 Жыл бұрын

This boss is so legendary that even non players like me know the name of him and heard stories

@WaterDrinker666 27 күн бұрын

I remember meeting a Blue Garter member in XIV with several ARR world’s firsts about a year ago. Didn’t believe him at first, but his Lodestone checked out. Like meeting a living legend tbh

@emperorzz Жыл бұрын

Malenia thinking she's the hardest boss with at least a million people defeating her solo within a few months. Meanwhile... There is Absolute Virute who took years to defeat with a full party attacking

@unstoppableforcevsimmovabl1701 Жыл бұрын

AV is on another level

@Hip-Gnosis1134 Жыл бұрын

Yozora in KH3 remind is a pretty impressive “super boss” too.

@LeviathanTamer31 Жыл бұрын

The difference being, one is made for Solo Play and was designed to be difficult to defeat by any build while still providing sufficient gaps in her defense to allow skill to shine through no matter the build. And the other was designed to be deliberately nigh-impossible unless you had the exact right team with the exact right commands at the exact right time and if you beat it without doing that the game devs patched your strategy out. That's not Super Boss territory, that's bullshit. To get the same level of bullshit, we'd need to make Malenia absorb all Sorceries and Incantations, her attacks aren't parryable, she immediately shatters all guards, her health regen is constantly on, she has 99.997% Damage Reduction against Piercing and Striking, is immune to all status ailments, and god help you if your Summon brought anything more than a Katana to the fight. And then they patch out the Summons too. Now does that sound like a well designed Super Boss meant to test your abilities and tenacity in this game to the limit? Or does that sound like shoehorned in bullshit?

@purrpocalypse Жыл бұрын

@@LeviathanTamer31 It sounds like a memorable experience that would make the game better, honestly.

@LeviathanTamer31 Жыл бұрын

@@purrpocalypse Not really, A big draw behind a lot of Fromsoftware's games is that you can really play the way you want to. Make things as challenging or as easy as you are able. And in the few games where that's not the case like Sekiro, they instead give everyone the same toolset but craft the entire experience around being able to use that toolset from its basics to its more advanced tools. This concept for a Malenia fight is pretty well the antithesis to all of that. A fight built around only allowing a single build in a game to work, in a game where the individual tools are not that far developed because they built for Quantity. People already complain about the Elden Beast absorbing Holy Damage effectively removing one broad type of build rather than letting any build challenge the boss. This version of Malenia would go down in history as the worst Fromsoftware boss. Without a single doubt in my mind.

@ryanmcdaniel468 Жыл бұрын

i remember getting my asskicked by virtuefor years. miss the good ol days of FFXI.

@dust_to_dust Жыл бұрын

That was very interesting. Thanks for the thorough debrief, man. A learning experience.

@maxdecphoenix Жыл бұрын

The really insane thing about AV isn't necessarily AV itself being stupid OP, it was that the ENTIRE Chains of Promathia expansion in which AV even existed was, at that time, only reached by such an insignificantly small portion of the playerbase that most people that even played FFXI hadn't even acquired access to the region, much less fought its big baddie. The Chains of Promathia expansion was released Sept. 21, 2004. The Game's next major expansion, Treasures of Aht Urghan was released Apr. 18, 2006. Then another expansion, Wings of The Goddess was released in November 2007. And in June of 2010 the first of 3 'Add on' packs was released Vision of Abyssea. That's alot of years right? 2004 to 2010. Well by 2010 less than 1/5th of the player base had actually completed CoP and even had access to the region AV occupies owing to the punishing environmental and tactical difficulty of the initial missions in that expansion. I recall some fanfest notes in which a dev mentioned that something like half the player base hadn't even made it past what was essentially the 'first mission' in the expansion. and this is in like 2009/2010. It was that difficult. You had to have the exact specific jobs, those people had to all be on at the same time and willing to dedicate 2-3hours of prep work just to get to the arena for the first boss. In a level capped area. With no recovery point. Meaning you could spend 2 hours getting to the boss floor only to have a stupid-OP monster 12 levels above you dispel your White Mage's reraise effect, kill them, and render the whole run a wash. Or your Tank d/c. any of 1000 things could go wrong. Oh, and you had to do that 3 times. And that was just 'Chapter one'. Lumoria wasn't even accessible until 'Chapter 8'. So few people had actually progressed in CoP content, that SE would reflexivly use it as an excuse for not producing more content in the expansions people actually liked (RoZ, ToAU, WoTG). A dev literally justified a lack of content creation by stating that so few players had completed CoP that there was 'plenty of content' for those players and they should do that. Basically if you missed out on the initial hype of CoP, finishing it was a grueling task of spending HOURS trying to build a group with very skilled players, with particular jobs, for very specific functioning strategies. HOURS trying to fight through the artificially over powered areas owing to the level caps, to then try your hand at the boss of that chapter. Many failed so many times and wasted so much time on CoP missions that they'd simply given up on completing it in favor of less artificially tedious content in ToAU/WoTG. And the people who had managed to hack through it had zero intention of going back and helping others. Took weeks of dedication. So in June of 2010, coinciding with the Visions of Abyssea 'addon on' which put the level cap at 80, almost 6 FULL years after initially released and two full expansions later (some would argue 3), Square Enix did a radical patch of the Chain's of Promathia content which removed the level cap from all areas associated with the expansion. And there was a mad dash for folks that had given up on CoP to finally complete it. And even with that, the mission fights themselves were still no picnic. The fights were the same toughness, it was just 'getting to the fight' was made way easier. That's how bad CoP was. 6 years after its release it had to be radically altered top to bottom so that more than the try-hard, no-lifers could actually experience the content they'd paid for 6/10ths of a decade earlier.

@eW91dHViZSBpcyBjZW5zb3JzaGlw 11 ай бұрын

thats horrendous. thanks for the essay!

@AbombOO7 Жыл бұрын

I get Square Enix being upset with the first time people beat it because of the exploit, but them nerfing the dark knights strat is such BS.

@Player-dw3pe Жыл бұрын

Skill issue.

@johnermactavish1162 Жыл бұрын

To be fair that isn’t even remotely a legitimate way. Kraken club was one of the rarest weapons in the game. Like thousands of real life dollars to buy one. Having one made you a legend. To see one in action was a tale you told your LS. Having a gang of DRK’s curb stomping AV was hilarious but never once considered when designing it. It is like making a hard boss for 6 people and they cheese it into 30.

@frobeusns6404 Жыл бұрын

I was in a LS on Migard called PlusOne and we were part of the joint effort to take him down using the wall. Virtuous Saint title will never be topped for me in gaming bragging rights

@BlackKoiRecords Жыл бұрын

I think its dumb when they force you to play their way only.

@KyokujiFGC Жыл бұрын

Imagine the devs being petty enough to nerf an entire class because you found a way to cheese their "unbeatable" boss.

@BeauxPhades Жыл бұрын

I actually beat AV last month with 2 friends. The tank was the party leader so when he got charmed he killed me while our third ran away cause the charm dispelled the trusts. Once the charm wore off we got the kill

@flipskaterdave Жыл бұрын

i'm still playing this, just got home from work logging into FFXI and then seeing this one youtube. I remember the days of attempting Absolute Virtue back in the 75 cap era. basically impossible.

@ChaseFace Жыл бұрын

@flipskaterdave Жыл бұрын

@@ChaseFace I’d rather keep retail alive for as long as possible

@baxterbruce9827 7 ай бұрын

"Oh yeah, just kill this other boss's minions really quickly and then use magic based on the day of the week, how did you NOT figure that out this trick to make it easier?" This feels overly convoluted at best and purposely ridiculous to find to figure out, then they basically revealed they didn't want the boss beaten with basically... everything around it gettin nerfed?

@ChaseFace Жыл бұрын

@OGBuddah Жыл бұрын

I have been playing FFXI on the Bismarck server since nearly the start. I recall the trials we endured to kill that monster. It would be awesome to have a more in depth first hand account of the planning that went into that fight. I am going to see what I can dig up.

@imperialzink1365 Жыл бұрын

Great video though I would love more info about Pandemonium Warden. Maybe another video? Do you have any sources as well-- not that I don't trust you or the video, it's just I found it ridiculously hard to research AV.

@apthehagg2241 Жыл бұрын

I’ll be honest, I don’t even care what ya’ll upload. Your content, voice, and editing is just so pristine that I can put ya’ll on a playlist and relax, even if I’m at work. Keep up the amazing work. I legit live for your videos.

@mitchhamilton9513 Жыл бұрын

Insane that this fight kept getting so many edits.. love the video though, would love more short-form deepdives like this!

@ajaverill08 Жыл бұрын

Reminds me of a few bosses from the early days of everquest. One had am item called something like ring of the cheater as the only loot drop because the devs thought the boss was unkillable. And another boss, a dragon called the sleeper was only fightable once per server and a pvp server still hadn't woken theirs long after most servers did. So all the big guilds got together to wake and kill it but GMs shut the server down right before they did

@CosmicChris Жыл бұрын

I can't seem to find info on that Ring. Are you absolutely sure that is the name? Because that sounds amusing lol.

@chaocobojun2098 Жыл бұрын

I remember reading about that once per server dragon. It seemed absolutely amazing and I would love to see the concept in an MMO again. Nit just because it’s one per server, but because, what I read about it years ago, is that once you wake it up, if you fail that one encounter, it goes on a heckin rampage through the entire world. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the concept actually filled me with dread for some reason. Like a primal fear. I wish I could’ve been there, but I feel it would have been too terrifying to experience.

@ajaverill08 Жыл бұрын

@@chaocobojun2098 yeah you were supposed to fail killing it. Then it would rampage through the server killing all the other dragons because they imprisoned it.

@kevinchappell7966 Жыл бұрын

@@CosmicChris Correct names were; Boots of Sad Exploitation, Cuirass of Sad Exploitation, and Earring of Sad Exploitation. These dropped off Lord Inquisitor Seru before he was able to be reached legitimately and guilds were gravity fluxing into his area to kill him. The loot was changed after the Arx key was introduced and the exploit was fixed.

@CosmicChris Жыл бұрын

@@kevinchappell7966 I am just laughing because I'm reading the stats. " -99" On EVERYTHING. That's hilarious.

@MrZerosins Жыл бұрын

Solid video, was pretty neat hearing the different methods people used to beat this boss, plus the back and forth between the devs/players. That's being said I think there could have been a bit more of a deeper dive on what the boss actually did that made him so difficult; I felt like I didn't have enough context to really grasp what made this fight so difficult, outside of it taking actual years for players to kill the thing.. You mention how the devs would patch the boss because they weren't happy with how the players were clearing the fight, but never really mention what the "intended way" of clearing the fight actually was. Outside of the brief mention of how the method demonstrated in the dev's demo video wouldn't be possible in real servers, there isn't very much details on what they were doing, or why that was the case.

@ElZamo92 7 ай бұрын

This boss wasn't the hardest boss, it was just physically impossible for anyone who didn't have a data centre next door to where their entire group was playing... and when people found a way around SE's BS they got banned, and the cheese strategy was patched out... Really, can't figure out what SE would be without Yoshida and his team...

@Firestar1992 5 ай бұрын

The most frustrating part is the developer response. As long as the strats are within the parameters in the game's code, it should not be considered cheating, and should instead be praised as players learning the game well enough to discover how to defeat it in their own way. I can understand banning and other such punishments due to mods that cheat, such as the TOP debacle in 14, but if it's within the limits of the game as the devs designed it, then they should accept the solution the players discovered rather than throw a fit that they're not beating it "the right way."

@WaifuVideoGamer Жыл бұрын

Square Enix Developers

@ericdavey5452 Жыл бұрын

You could also mention the Modus Veritas debacle, in which many linkshells were actively prepping and leveling the Scholar job in order to abuse the ability to one shot AV and other bosses which Square caught and nerfed before it could ever see the light of day. At 12:29 you the linkshell you mentioned was called Excellence, interestingly enough was lead by Stanislav Vishnevskiy who is the current CTO and co-founder of Discord.

@jackhorkheimer 9 ай бұрын

Never knew that about Stanislav, that's really funny and interesting, I remember him/Excellence from Hades