Sounded Like a Good Idea at the Time?
Consider this the official “why I took down the For Glory CoP Guide Site” EreBlog entry thingie.
First off, yeah, I took it down. Yeah, me, Erecia, the site’s creator. It wasn’t hacked or something. It wasn’t an issue of money or webspace hosting. It was me making a conscious decision to fire up the FTP client and remove everything on the site and replace it with the stylish “Yeah, it’s gone” index lovingly made in Netscape Composer.
Why? A couple of reasons.
First, it was badly dated. Badly. I tried for a while to keep it pseudo-current, but it just wasn’t going to happen. Between the playerbase having so much more general common knowledge about the missions and the repeated SE’s mucking with most of the BCNMs, I began to lose scope of what sort of information should be on there. Almost all of my fight strategies, firmly solid in the days when the guide was young, reek nowadays of paranoia and overreactivity. I mean, sure, airship’s still hard, but most of the other BCNMs don’t require much plan now other than “let’s go in there and murder it lol.” I know this because I’ve seen it work. I guess that’s what SE wants for the CoP missions these days.
Second, because of the wiki. I’m not blaming the wiki for putting me out of business or anything. I suppose the wiki was the next logical step in FFXI player information - a site where anyone can contribute information without having to email a webhost like me and hope I put their suggestions up. Early on, the wiki stole my guide blatantly and cut out all the half-jokes, which made it suck pretty hardcore. But after a while people began to contribute to the mission pages far more than I could hope to through sheer volume of experience. I had a large number of people email me with contributions and corrections as well, but it became a huge matter of scale - the wiki’s information was many times better than my own. Eventually it got to the point where, in order to stay competitive, I’d have to either a) steal information from the wiki for my own use or b) go firsthand on all the missions and research it myself, only to come to basically the same conclusions as the wiki and waste huge amounts of personal time, exp, and gil. I chose neither a nor b, and it meant the guide never really advanced.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s too vain to say I agree with the people that said For Glory was the best CoP guide when it came out. Was. About two years ago. I put a lot of time and research into it, but heck, I basically just made up anything I didn’t know on the spot to fill in the gaps. The first three chapters of the guide was little more than a long-running rant. A lot of that got corrected later, some did not. I guess a certain group of people actually enjoy my irrelevant rambling, but I always thought it was sort of distracting away from the actual meat of completing the missions.
Thirdly, the attempt at a ToAU guide taught me that trying to make anything new for the site was an exercise in futility. I’m pretty sure no more than a handful of people ever used my ToAU mission and assault guides, partially because they were very late to be finished and partially because the wiki was so much more established by the time ToAU came around and, once again, the wiki included far more than I could hope to find out on my own. It would be the same with anything I tried to create now - a limbus guide, a salvage guide, a WotG guide. All of them have been done already by people that have put more time into researching things than I could hope to do. The wiki has made guide making trendy, something that was not true when I started all this. I can’t complete with the sum total of the playerbase and I refuse to spend my time trying since I know it will get me little more than heartbreak.
And finally, because the bloody guide haunts me. I swear, I can’t get into a heated debate without someone saying “Wow, I used to respect you because of the guide, but now I can’t because…” or “Well, yeah, of course you’d say something like that, you’re the one who loves CoP” or “Typical Erecia, always having to toot her (grr…) own horn, since everything has to be about you.” I mean, seriously. Amazingly, despite numerous threats to quit and several times actually doing so for many months, I still play this FFXI game. I’m poor and nobody likes my fun jobs for merits and I have a whole slew of normal-person problems, and the last thing I need is someone trying to pretend they know all about me because of something I wrote on a sugar high like three years ago. I’m glad you found it useful, I truly am, but I wouldn’t mind talking about something else for once.
So yeah, those are my reasons. You can hate me if you want and unbookmark my blog because I’m no longer “cool” for taking the guides down and do whatever else you gotta do. To the people that were still doing CoP and looking at my guide, I’m sorry, but I’m sure you can find the information you need (and more) elsewhere.
I guess I’ll put this here since I don’t think it’s up anywhere else on the internet anymore. Goodnight, Soldiers of Glory.