Bannable Offenses

The Pandemonium Saga

I figured I would wait until after the whole issue was resolved before talking about this story.

When Pandemonium was introduced, he was designed as the new epic boss, the new truly awesome ass kicker.

This was the original intention behind Absolute Virtue, but we got kind of sick of telling people "the answer is in the video".

You've probably also heard about this guy in the news recently as a group of players tried to take him down and only managed to get their asses severely kicked.

Both in game and in real life.

Yeah. He's awesome.

But before we get to that part, we need to go all the way back to how the whole funny saga started.

See, in order to spawn Pandemonium Warden and actually get the chance to fight him, you have to obtain a Pandemonium Key and trade it to a ??? point.

The key is very hard to obtain and, when the Warden was first added, the key was seen as one of the rarest items in game.

Truly something incredibly valuable.

As you progressed through the quest and obtained your key, game dialogue explained where to take the key. It gave a vague description of where to find the ??? point.

You probably think that this seems all very straight forward.

We thought the same thing.

Shortly after the whole thing was introduced, an endgame linkshell managed to obtain their very own Pandemonium Key.

Very impressive.

Then they took that key and traded it to a ??? point.

Incredibly impressive.

Except they traded it to the wrong ??? point.

Less impressive.

Now, when you trade an item to an unrelated ??? point in FFXI, you immediately get your item back and the game usually gives you a message that amounts to "that's the wrong item, you retard."

That didn't happen.

Instead, a goblin named ATNM Test spawned.

The endgame linkshell, no doubt overcome with anticipation, pounced on this new epic NM with vision of victory and glory dancing before their eyes.

It was a long and arduous battle.

Three seconds.

Maybe four.

It seems that instead of the truly awesome endgame boss they had expected to battle, they were served a low level goblin.

Oh... And they lost their key.

They were not as happy as you might expect.

One might say they were even a little grumpy.

The death threats they started sending through GM calls speak for themselves.

Now, it's at this point that I'd like to point out that the description of where to trade the key didn't even remotely correspond with the ??? point they traded it to.

Not even close.

It would be like me telling you to meet me near Yankee stadium and you deciding I meant somewhere in Texas.

Sure, Texas is a great place. I understand things are quite large there.

But that's not where I told you.

Yes, yes. I know Texas is a place, too. I get that.

Not the place.

So, they traded an incredibly valuable item to the wrong ??? point. That was their mistake.

This is the point where I would probably feed them all to a certain purple dragon, but, uncharacteristically, I was actually kind of rooting for them.

They were the first guys to really get their shit together and get down to business on this. And they did it to improve themselves, not so they could flood forums with "OMGLOL 1ST NA EVAH" bullshit.

That's cool with me.

I thought they were really nice guys.

Well... Until the death threats.

They also said some very unkind things about my mother.

Not necessarily untrue, mind you, but unkind.

Still, how could we handle the situation?

TO BE CONTINUED...

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNNNN!

posted by Goblin Smithy @ 4:46 PM