Obsidian's Origin

Kaeko made this post on his Live Journal today and it got me into a bit of a nostalgic mood. After commenting on his post, I got to thinking more and instead of wall o' texting his blog post, I figured I would dump my thoughts out here.

Obsidian was indeed founded by Wijnand. In late 2004, the social shell that Wij, Gawayne, Lectrikelion, Suraph and myself led (Sirius) was seeing a rather large exodus of members to various end-game shells that were forming. Most of us didn't have any experience in the end-game arena. Come to think of it, most of us didn't actually have a level 75 job. Wijnand was pretty much anti-HNM and anti-elitism. When Kaeko says he half-jokingly referred to this mentality as "Anti-Elitism Elitism", that's pretty much what it was. Sirius was a very large social shell. It bore the typical social shell monikers of doing missions, af quests, level cap stuff (remember when you needed a party of 6 to take down Lichs?) and exping together.

Part of the exodus was due to Wijnand's refusal to subject members to what he considered the typical HNM mentality. So in an effort to curb losing members, Wijnand created Obsidian on the notion that all the HNM stuff is done with that pearl on and all the social stuff is kept in Sirius. Keep in mind, the term "HNM" wasn't really limited to what most would consider to be HNMs today. Serket, Roc, Simurgh, Bune, etc were all monsters that couldn't be taken down with anything less than 2-3 parties at the time.

The very first event that happened in Obsidian was something I wasn't there for. They had managed to claim and kill Bune and get the sword to drop. Back then, this sword was uber expensive and considered the epitome of RDM swords. This was also back when having a million gil meant you were essentially set in FFXI Life.

The question for Wij was, "What do I do with this sword?".

Do I give it to someone who can use it and make our group stronger? Do I sell it and split the money between the people who were there? If there's no one there who can use it, do I just hold onto it until someone can?

The answers to those became a rather harsh lesson in human nature and served as a perfect example for why Wijnand hated the HNM mentality so much. Wij proposed these questions on the forums we had at the time. Let's just say the response was pretty much an entry level novel into how greed can corrupt. What eventually happened to the sword I don't remember, but I do know this:

Wijnand had enough of his HNM Linkshell attempt after one event and a couple months later, Obsidian was turned into a dynamis shell.

At the time, Wijnand talked to a lot more people than I did. I preferred to stay within the confines of Sirius as far as who I would socialize with. Wijnand would talk to anyone and everyone. This worked to his advantage in a great way as he was able to talk to the various leaders of the big shells (LB, Unsent, BBQ) and generate a ton of interest in Dynamis. Most of these shells were probably large enough to handle dynamis on their own, but for whatever reason, they had either tried and didn't do it or they just hadn't tried.

Looking back on it, the sheer size we grew to within the first 3 or 4 months was probably more related to "right place, right time".

Wijnand had turned several of the Sirius sackholders into leaders for Obsidian despite the fact that not a damn one of us really had any end-game experience or a level 75 job. Some of the original sackholders in Sirius were Lectrikelion, Gawayne, Geddoe, Suraph, Catra, myself and a couple others who I wish I could remember, but can't...

You can look at the roster of the first crew we took in here(I wasn't there). It's actually kind of comical looking at that roster considering about 40 of those 63 people no longer play the game. But yeah, think about that for a second. The very first run Obsidian ever did had 63 people show up. That was a fairly consistent number the first couple years of our existence. So much so that we eventually started doing multiple runs on the same day by placing a pseudo-cap of 36 for cities.

Where do I come in? I started doing runs in Feb 2005. The primary reason for this is cause my DRG wasn't even level 65 and couldn't enter anyway. My very first run was Dynamis-San d'Oria where I picked up the relic lance that would ultimately become Gungnir, but that's a story for a different day.

Obsidian's philosophy was simple. We'd give you a shot as long as you leave your drama at the door. If you couldn't leave your drama at the door, then you'd be left at the door. This philosophy caused a huge swelling of the memberbase. As Kaeko states, at one point, we were dealing with 300+ active members. This huge memberbase ultimately led us to changing over our system from a free-lot-as-long-as-you-can-use-it system to the beginnings of our current bidding system. As you probably could expect, this didn't go over well with a lot of people, but this was something we knew was another example in human nature and elected to stay the course.

Why was this an example in human nature?

First you have to understand WHO plays an MMO. While this thought process doesn't apply to everyone, it does apply to most everyone. We knew your average MMO player could be categorized as something along the lines of a "lazy social miscreant". Any leadership group that caters to this mentality is setting itself up for failure (see shout groups...).

Secondly, because of that mentality, this means we knew there would be some who wanted to show up when they wanted (or more specifically, only to runs they stood to gain something from) and have the same chance as the guy who had been to every run. There's a fundamental unfairness about this. Obviously, we were not intending to prioritize the guy who showed up to everything every single time, but we're also not wanting people to basically pick their shots and fuck someone over that had put in 4-5x the amount of time. Naturally, the people who didn't want to show up all the time made a stink about the bidding system and some left the shell.

So now we have the memberbase and we have the beginnings of the organizational structure that's in place today. Now all that's left is for us to establish ourselves as serious players in the dynamis field and that meant taking down the DL.

As Kaeko points out, we weren't exactly the elite of the elite. Truthfully, we probably weren't even the elite of the common man/weekend warrior. Competition tends to bring out the best in people though. There were allegations of Obsidian members being stolen to Obsidian's rival group at the time (GatewayShuffle led by Lillath) and there was definitely a race to see which group could take down the DL first.

If you looked up and down the rosters at the time, GWS definitely had a huge advantage over us from a gear and alleged "skill" standpoint. I wouldn't say that we were consciously aware of being considered the "underdog", especially with as much verbal sparring that went on between Wijnand and Lillath, but the fact that these two linkshells were embroiled in this contest to kill the DL certainly added to the fun of doing dynamis.

Our first few DL attempts, we tried to pull the DL down to the ramp just past the SAM/RNG/DRG tower (right before you hit the northern lights). We never really made a significant dent in his HP. GWS on the other hand was consistently getting him down below 10% before they'd wipe. As Kaeko points out, he did a lot of research and came up with our ultimate strat.

Before I go further, I need to point out that at the time, killing the DL at all costs was the priority. This was back when eating an R1 meant you were losing something like 1.7k XP that would literally take you 30 minutes to get back in an XP party. Nowadays, we either kill him before CS Stun stops or we scrape ourselves up and go back to farming.

Kaeko's hard work preparing everyone for what we were about to do is something that should be credited to no end. However, you can't shortchange the people who actually sacrificed so much to make it happen. Yes, there were literally some people who went from 75 to 73 during that fight. I personally lost 17k XP on DRG...which was probably about as LOL as you could get at the time. Our linkshell probably lost a collective 650k+ XP during that fight.

Wrap your minds around that. We had 64 people and if they lost an average of 10k ea, we managed to lose 65 merits worth of XP in a 20 minute span of glory. The beautiful part is:

There wasn't a single damn person that cared that day. We won. The common man/weekend warrior shell took down something that hadn't been killed on our server by anyone other than maybe one JP shell. Obsidian was now considered legit.

Years later (today), I hadn't verbalized it yet, but Kaeko points out something that I had been thinking about for a while in relation to Obsidian and Odin.

Looking back at how things have played out on Odin Server in the last 5 years, I would even go so far as to say Obsidian is a major reason our server is so well known for team ups and mutual respect.

We had the leaders from most of the major linkshells there for that kill. They weren't LB, BBQ, Unsent or whatever members that day. They were Obsidian members. While we wouldn't have really known it then, I've always felt that if you get someone to shed their linkshell affiliation and just act human, you'd be surprised just how much more can be accomplished in this game. That's not to say linkshell affiliations aren't good, but it is to say that when something is more than a linkshell can handle (i.e. AV), most linkshells would opt not to do anything at all.

Because this actually happened twice a week for a couple of years at the very least thanks to Obsidian, I had always felt that this did indeed pave the way for a lot of the general cooperation among the major linkshells outside of dynamis. One day, I can publish a list of people who have come through Obsidian (or at least applied thinking about coming through) and most people on Odin would probably say..."Wow...that's rather impressive." You could effectively say that Obsidian was Awesomeland before Awesomeland had an AV to kill.

(Awesomeland being the cooperative combination of TK, LB and BBQ that took down AV god knows how many times before SE nerfed it.)

That's not to say we didn't have a ton of drama and growing pains to go through. We did and there are those that still hold some grudges against us for decisions made that didn't favor them. Grudges or no, there's no denying the impact Obsidian has had from an NA/EU socialization standpoint on Odin.

The only part of Kaeko's post that I take exception to is this though:

I am not, nor have never been a "Main" leader in Obsidian. I get that the perception exists I am because I mouth off a lot and have no qualms going toe to toe with anyone doing something stupid (which has earned me a spot on a lot of black lists). Geddoe, Gawayne and I are the "oldest" leaders in Obsidian now, but the leadership by committee that we had set up was designed for all the leaders to have equal say and power (evidenced by some leaders even arguing with each other in front of members). The original sackholders of Obsidian literally had a discussion about leadership perception and the fact that if membership perceives that there are only one or two main leaders, the second those "mains" aren't there, it becomes infinitely more difficult to provide direction. This is largely why I view our website as the "main" sackholder. Without this organizational tool that Suraph and Gawayne worked tirelessly on (Suraph in the beginning, Gawayne the past 3 or so years), Obsidian falls apart within a year and we're not having this discussion. Sackholders do have important roles, but generally anyone can be a sackholder in Obsidian as long as they're willing to do the grunt work with the website before and after a run.

Long post is long....