First post. No pictures, just thoughts.

So I find myself blogging for the first time in my life. I've made a habit of following a few blogs and thought I should create one since I'm generally one opinionated individual, but never really found the time or the energy to do it.

Anyway, here I am.

I'll start off with my opinions on the latest SE mini-expansion.

A Crystalline Prophecy: Ode to Life Bestowing (Spoilers follow).

A few months ago, SE broke the news that instead of a full-on expansion release in retail stores, they would be trying to come into the digital age by releasing new content in smaller mini-expansions. They detailed three of these expansions to be released over the course of 2009. The first of these three was released April 8th, which I promptly bought like any other expansion hoping that if we're getting 1/3 of a previous expansion, then it'd be worth it.

Boy was I wrong.

Not only can you finish this expansion in a very short period of time, the storyline isn't the least bit interesting, the quests are annoying as can be and the fights aren't really all that challenging. The introductory cutscene offers a little promise, but then the annoyances begin. Keep in mind, I'm writing this completely aware the competition for quest items from new content just adds to the annoyance factor, but even if I were out there by myself (as I was for a couple hours in Batallia Downs), it was still annoying.

So to start us off, SE decides that it's fun to send us out to Jugner Forest, Meriphataud Mountains, and Pashow Marshlands to kill their respective beastmen for Seed items. Pashow was my first destination and I went 1/1 on kills. Was that just sheer luck or was that how SE intended it? Next stop was Jugner where I discovered the answer to the previous question was, in fact, "sheer luck". I didn't get my second item the first night of the expansion. The next day after work, I catch Jugner in a bit of a lull (especially after the obligatory 2 hour emergency maint. after an update) and proceed to spent the next hour mauling any orc in sight before the 2nd seed dropped. Fortunately, I had help from Celestria's TH to speed this process up...but it STILL took us an hour of constant killing. Now that I'm irritated...off to Meriphataud Mountains where the optimist in me figured my time spent there would be in between what I spent in Pashow and Jugner. About 10 kills in, I finally have all 3 of my seeds, so off to trade them to the ???, right?

Yeah, no.

SE removed it from the game temporarily.

Inventory -3 and I had to wait until the next day until they fixed their game.

Next day rolls around (Good Friday...please live up to your name). Still broken, emergency maint. between Noon and 2:00. Servers actually came up a bit early, and I ran out to trade my seeds to the ???. AWESOME! INVENTORY+3!

Wait...now I have to go out to Batallia Downs, Rolanberry Fields, and Sauro-whatever and kill goblins for key items?

Then I have to run through Crawler's Nest, Beaucedine Glacier and Garlaige Citadel (WotG shortcut ftw...FU banishing gates) to get to the ???s that spawn NMs with the key items Young Aldo actually wants.

Let's just say I didn't get around to trading these items to the ??? until later that night. By the time I get to the point of running to the ???s to spawn the goblins that die in one hit for key items, I'm thoroughly annoyed. Finally, Kaylea and I make our way out to the ??? in Qufim yet again after literally HOURS of goblin killing.

New content competition made for a huge clusterfuck of people standing around this ??? trying to spawn the mandragoras for this fight, but it was already late and I didn't have the patience to stand around and wait. At least SE realized this ahead of time and made it so that the fight would respawn about a minute or so after the last one ended. This fight would be the only humorous event throughout my adventures in this expansion.

The fight itself is against waves and waves of Seed Mandragoras. Five at a time in all their squeaky glory. They didn't hit hard, but I didn't expect a TP move of theirs at all. I showed up as DRG/BLM fully intending to just Jump and one-shot my way through all of them, but then they decided to start using moves called "Demonic Flower". This move sacrifices most of their own HP into damage dealt to the target. Three of them used it at once and all of a sudden, I'm at half HP with a subjob I don't normally use and no macros to boot. On top of that, I'm mostly out of MP to -ga them with (humorous moment being a DRG/BLM using Thundaga on mandragoras that did 550+ damage each time...).

Not wanting to die in front of a crowd of people, I quickly changed my Poisona macro to Poison and managed to get healing breath off with about 100 HP left, then proceeded to finish the fight. Felt like a bit of an ass soloing it for that long (took me nearly 15 minutes...), but yeah I grossly underestimated their abilities and almost paid for it.

With that fight over, we moved on to Fei'Yin where apparently SE thought the timer used in the race up to the Cradle of Rebirth was a feature that wasn't used enough. Now we get to race through Fei'yin to find 9 Seed Afterglows before our tri-force-esque hand-embedded seed fades to non-existence.

It's a good thing nothing aggros me down there or I probably would still be running around that damn place looking for those afterglows.

After finding all 9 of these things, I figured Akimarie ("Cuban" from here on out) and I would take a shot at the BC. Mainly cause I was pissed off at the annoying quests SE was having us do. We lost in dramatic fashion.

i.e. We didn't even kill one Seed Beastman.

...and we had to crawl back through Fei'Yin to recharge our tri-force. (GOOD GOING SE! NOTHING LIKE REPEATING QUESTS SUCH AS THESE TO MAKE THE EXPANSION SEEM A LOT BIGGER!!~)

A couple hours later after an old-man nap was interrupted by Kay calling me saying the Cuban had formed a party, I cleared the BC with ease. Izman, Invy, Highlife, Kay, Cuban and myself.

And now with that part done...time for some more CSs (a decent one in Hall of the Gods) and onto perhaps the most annoying facet of this expansion.

Level capped crawl up Delkfutt's tower to find yet MORE seed afterglows. Seriously, if anyone at SE happens to read this blog at any point in the future, let me make one thing absolutely clear:

LEVEL CAPPED CRAWLS ARE NOT FUN. >.<,,!,,

Have to find 12 of the buggers now. Fortunately, they don't move around like they did in Fei'Yin nor do you have a time limit, but they are parked right in the middle of where goblins, gigas or bats hang out. The easy way around this is to just have someone stay uncapped and maul everything in your path, but then that means you're doing the same for them when it's their turn to get their key items. The kicker to this is, even if that uncapped person is in your party, they can't cast anything on you while you're under the level cap effect. The crawl was time consuming, but it got done. Kay, Cuban and I are now ready for the final fight.

Which we didn't do yet.

Mainly cause all three of us think this expansion sucks.

More to follow when we're not collectively annoyed to the point of wanting nothing to do with this expansion.

I will say that the future mini-expansions will not be purchased by me immediately. I will give it a few days to see if it's worth bothering with. It's not that $10 is hard to come by. It's just the only way to get SE's attention. If they see a drop in mini-expansion sales, they'll likely realize something was wrong and start researching what was going on. One $10 fee isn't going to make a bit of difference to them, but I get the feeling I'm not the only one that will take this approach to the 2nd of the 3 mini-expansions due out this year. A $1,000,000 hit in initial sales revenues would definitely get their attention.

And to paraphrase Ringthree's thoughtful analysis of SE's recent trend of selling gear and features (i.e. Augmented body pieces for completing ACP and Mog Satchels) to it's playerbase...it's not a slippery slope...yet.

Let's see what they tag onto the next two mini-expansions. :)