So Where Do I Begin?

I promised a detailed intro post, so time to deliver.

First off, we'll start with where my name came from. I'm sure some of you are wondering, "How in the hell did he come up with Stiker?" And if you aren't...well skip this part. I love my name, mostly because it reminds me of being a total n00b. Seriously, just by looking at my name can bring me down to earth as someone that can always, and very easily screw up.

I bought FFXI when it was released for PS2. I also had no USB keyboard for my PS2 at the time. I had heard it wasn't required, so being a college student, I decided to save money and not buy the keyboard.

Mistake #1...

So then I started the registration process. And I immediately regretted not having a keyboard. I seriously got so frustrated filling out all that damn info with the PS2 "soft" keyboard. So I kept pounding through all the crap SE felt that they needed to know about me, and finally got to character creation. I set up my little Elvaan dude, and I had decided on the character name "Striker" being a big fan of FFVI (for those that don't know Striker was the name of one of the best weapons for Shadow), and since I also had used it in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.

"But wait!" You may say. "You're name is S-T-I-K-E-R right?"

Yes...my name is a damned mistype...

The best part was, I didn't even friggin' notice that I had screwed up so badly. Not until I had a friend come by my room watching me play and pointing it out did I even realize it. I was just so glad to be done with all the registration crap, I completely didn't check my spelling/typing. So I made my first n00bish mistake before I ever set my virtual Elvaan ass in the game.

Either way though, the name has stuck with me, and I like it now a lot. And like I said, I can always remember my first mistake by just looking at my name and give myself a chuckle.

My mistyping rear ended up on Valefor thanks to a world pass from a RL friend, and I also set my home nation to Bastok because my RL friend was there as well, plus I was interested in possibly taking up Smithing at the time. I started grinding my way through the levels, and set of on my quest to become a Paladin. I ended up picking this job because I loved Cecil in FFIV and the concept of tanking sounded like a lot of fun. Thankfully, I have absolutely loved the job and am very thankful I do not need to be switching my main job anytime in the near future.

I am currently a member of the CrimsonToothBrush (CTB) linkshell. I've been in there for about half a year or so and it is my second shell. My first one, the TruthSeekers merged with them about half a year ago. So I've been very lucky to be playing with some good people for pretty much my entire FFXI career. CTB is an endgame shell. Right now, we mostly do a lot of sky, sea, and limbus. We are trying to look at the HNM scene, but are being quite cautious about it, due mostly to all the drama that goes into it. We really like to take a laid back approach to things, and are definitely trying to do all that we can to keep it that way as much as possible.

As far as missions go, I have completed all of the Zilart and Promathia missions (save for the Apocalypse Nigh quests). I am also rank 10 in Bastok, but have recently switched to Sandy since I'm now in a static with some LSmates to get rank 10 in all nations (and it's going quite well as I've reached rank 8 in Sandy in under a week). I am also nearing the end of the Aht Urghan missions and am currently on ToA 35 right now.

In crafting, I am a 89 cook (+1 with a chef hat) and am also a level 42 fisherman. I also am a 41 smithy, but I haven't touched the craft in forever. I figured that my main expenses are food (you die enough, and you tend to burn through the damn stuff fast) so I have stuck with cooking to lower my food expenses and make some modest profit. My big project right now though is fishing and getting my Lu Shang's fishing rod and currently have just over 4k moat carps out of the 10k needed. My hope is to have my fishing complement my cooking to increase profits since fish can be quite expensive ingredients in many of the dishes I use as well as some of the more popular dishes in the game.

And that pretty much wraps it up for who I am in this game. The only other thing of note would be my user page on the new BG Wiki which has some of the equipment and mission goals that I am currently after.

Thanks for reading the wall-o-text,

--Stiker

New Home, Same Blog

Well I have decided to move my FFXI blog from a certain Wiki that had a lot of drama. I'm not going to talk about it at all, but if I'm starting up my blog elsewhere, I'm sure you can figure out where I stand on the issue in general.

Anyways, this seems like a much better interface overall anyways (being able to archive and publish from Google = win). So at least it would appear I am moving to greener pastures.

I'm probably not going to do a copypasta job from my old blog. Basically, I think I'm just going to start the whole thing over again and start from scratch. So expect to see a fairly more detailed intro post in the near future and I'll get this ball rolling again.

--Stiker