Why I Think My LS Is The Best!

This ls was made with a group of friends from rl who all lived in the same town and were pals in school. Since we all knew each other and got along in rl, it stood to reason that we'd get along fine in a ls with each other. As time went on, we gathered more people, most notably a girl joined that became a good friend of mine. We can call her Pink for this little story. After over a year of close friendship with Pink, another girl joined the ls. The other girl immediately started causing drama with Pink, calling her nasty names and being a jerk in general. Of course, I took Pink's side. As a sackholder, I also felt somewhat responsible for helping maintain peace on the ls, so I went to the shell holder (who happened to be a younger brother. Having a younger sibling believe he was 'in charge' of everyone was a mistake, looking back on it.) I told him that the new girl was causing trouble with Pink and that, seeing how upset Pink was, something needed to be done about it. I recommended asking the new girl to shape up or ship out. The shell holder told me, basically, that Pink was lying to get attention and that no disciplinary action was to be taken against the new girl. I could not understand his decision because for 1.) Pink had never been dishonest in the past and for 2.) I had seen the new girl bullying her with my own eyes.

I told the shell holder that if his decision was to allow the bullying, then Pink and I would find an alternative ls and every time the new girl started bullying, we'd go to the other ls. I'd check back occasionally to see if the new girl was still being a brat, and when she was no longer being a brat, Pink and I would come back to our home ls until the new girl started acting up again. The shell holder told me that if I found an alternative ls even for temporary use, he would remove me from his ls. From then on I really hated being on it, because it felt like I was forced to be there.

I think, looking back, things could easily have worked out differently if 1.) a child wasn't the ls leader (he was still a teen at the time), 2.) I hadn't made any suggestions to discipline the new girl but instead had just pointed it out to the shell holder every single time she started bullying until it annoyed the hell out of him, and 3.) if I had left when he started making me feel forced. Me staying gave him the power rush he wanted.

The whole thing made more sense when, several months after the ls had fallen apart and most of the people on it had quit, I found out that New Girl was actually a guy. I told the shell holder (he was living with my husband and I at the time) and he got very quiet and then stormed off to his room. Having a leader have a crush on any ls member is a sure recipe for disaster.

This was my first event ls. Being new the the ls scene, I really had no idea how it was supposed to work. The ls rules were simple-- points and tier system, and to hold a pearl you were required to do at least 1 event with the ls. The main strategy was if we had enough bodies to throw at it, no one had to actually be good at their job. The ls became very frustrating when leaders refused to do anything if we had less than the maximum number of people for that event. For example, we once waited in Hazalm for over an hour for 1 person to show up to einherjar, because we could just absolutely not do it without him. He was not a sack, leader, nothing of the sort.

Along with hugely crowded events, we also had people who could not listen to anything anyone said. Best example of this: For one einherjar boss we had a sackholder bellowing in caps lock for the entire duration of the fight (5+ minutes) for people to stop fighting behind the NM. We still had about half the DD's standing on the thing's arse and pummeling away at it. There was absolutely no paying attention to the people screaming and yelling to get OFF the NM's backside and fight from the front/sides. This type of non-listening (with no repercussions for the members who refused to listen) also got fairly irritating.

Along with simply horrible playing by a lot of the members, another issue was leaders trying to change rules to suit their needs. Best example: Getting ready for a different einherjar, we had a full event and were simply waiting for the lamp. The leader's girlfriend showed up, and even though 1.) we were full and 2.) the girl did not do events (a violation of a rule the leader later kicked someone else off over), The leader told some of the other members to /random and informed them that his girlfriend would take the place in the event of the one who random'd lowest. Not cool.

The last straw was when a friend of mine got booted publicly after being scolded harshly in /ls chat because he was not in dynamis during a run. The rules stated that each member had to participate in at least 1 event with the ls. His event was sky. He had a different ls for dyna. The shell holder yelled and bellowed at him for quite awhile, then broke his pearl. Several people cut in several times to say the member was following the rules, he'd done nothing wrong, etc etc. Leader paid no attention at all. His angry yells got so bad that I actually unequipped the ls during dynamis. Shortly after, my husband and I left the ls.

Although the two leaders were friends when they started the ls, they almost immediately (within a couple weeks of the ls's birth) began to fight. After a LOT of hideous drama between the two leaders (and one of the leads forcing the members to take sides), that ls broke. Shortest ls in history.

As you might guess, drama from LS3 didn't stop just because it had a new name and 1 less leader. After a couple melodramatic months, LS4's leader hopped servers. The events were well-done in this one, at least. Events were done more efficiently with 6 people than they had been in LS2 with 30 people. Second shortest ls in history.

Things started out great on LS5. The rules were similar to LS2's, but the people were simply better players. Instead of throwing numbers at things until they died, LS5 tended to throw skill at things until the died.

Things started to get shaky after my husband and I missed 1 einherjar run. Einherjar was at 7:30am our time on Saturdays, which was one of our only two days to sleep in. It was a sacrifice to make it there, but feeling an obligation to the ls, we did make it every single week. Except one. We accidentally overslept our alarm one time. Our points were promptly reduced by several runs' worth. When we were surprised at the large amount of points deducted, we were told those were the rules. We had gone over the rules very carefully before we joined because of our bad experiences with the other 4 ls's. We had not seen mass point reduction in the rules. Thinking perhaps we just missed it, we let it go. However, we did stop doing einherjar with them. Getting up at 7 was taking its toll and we simply needed more sleep.

The real trouble started with Abyssea. We never missed an abyssea run and showed every loyalty to LS5 for their abyssea events. There were several dozen people to get emp gear for on LS5 and the ls was having trouble accommodating them all because only 18 people were taken in per run. If you were late signing up, you missed your chance to get gear for several weeks because the ls moved around from zone to zone each run. Also, seals did not go to 1 person until they finished a piece of gear. For example, if 5 people wanted corsair seals, then instead of finishing one person's gear and then another's and another's, the seals from each run were divided evenly among the 5. Then, because of zone jumps, each of the 5 would carry two or three corsair seals around with them indefinitely until the ls got back to that zone. It was probably the fairest way to do seals for the ls as a whole, but it was dreadfully slow and destroyed inventory space on a personal scale.

Now, keep in mind, points were not spent for seals. They were based on a wishlist system. Also, the ls rules from the start had been that members could not do the same event with 2 different ls's for things they spent points for.

Since so many people on the ls were going without gear or with partial gear, if anyone had taken initiative to go get their own seals every single person going after the same piece of gear would benefit. Also, LS5 explicitly stated that it would not help members get emp weapons because it would not concentrate on zone bosses for weapon items.

For these reasons, my husband and I went with two of our other friends in a 4-man group to get the four of us seals and emps. It was not a ls, there were no points spent either in LS5 or the 4-man group for the items we were getting, and we did not hide our actions from the ls. We told them everything we were doing when they asked, and even helped them with certain NMs with strategies we had learned from the 4-man group. We also still went with LS5 to do abyssea to help out, even though we no longer needed gear from them.

LS5 was fine with this arrangement for a while. People were getting gear faster because my thf, blm, rng, and war were no longer in line for it, and my husband's nin, whm, rdm, and blm were no longer in line for it. However, when the 4-man group started obtaining +2 items, LS5 became angry. I'm not entirely sure why to this day. Perhaps since +1's were so easy they didn't care if we got them on our own, but they wanted us to need them for +2's? Not sure.

Anyways. When we started obtaining +2's, LS5 started accusing us of double-dipping, which by their rules was doing the same event with two ls's and saving/spending points in both ls's. We explained how that was wrong on many levels-- for one, we were not with another ls and for two we weren't spending points in either of them, not to mention that LS5 had been perfectly fine with this for weeks beforehand. So, since we proved to LS5 that we were not breaking a single rule, they changed the rule. Basically they told us that effective immediately, no one was allowed to lowman +2's or emp weapon items. That was awkward enough to begin with, but then they went one step too far and added that we could not hang out with our friends from the 4-man group. I was very angry that LS5 was not only changing rules to suit their purposes, but that they actually intended to tell us what to do with ourselves during non-event time. Forcing us to choose between LS5 and people we'd been friends with for over 2 years was a very bad mistake on LS5's part if they wished for us to stay. We dropped our pearls that very day. A day or two after we had already dropped our pearls, we were informed that we had been banned from LS5. I'm not sure what the ban accomplished since we were already gone, but it wasn't a huge concern at that point.

If they had come to us and said they were concerned with any ethical issues concerning us getting +2's, or if they had even just asked that we stop, we probably would have stopped. But accusing us of things that were not true and that they KNEW were not true, changing the rules simply to make our behavior against rules that had not previously been in place, and then forcing a choice between long-time friends and ls was too much. I could never stay with them. Then banning us after we were already gone served no purpose except to be childish.

I guess that's why for the past year we went to every single dynamis run scheduled, although I needed absolutely nothing from dynamis and only picked up things that no one else wanted, and my husband needed only rdm hat and a few pieces of ninja. We attended every single one, without fail, unless we could not go from things happening in real life (which happened maybe once or twice over about a year's length of time.) The majority of those runs had nothing that we specifically wanted. We went for fun and to help out.

I guess that's why we got up at 7:30 every single Saturday to attend their Einherjar runs. We missed one, ever, and it was from oversleeping our alarm (until we decided we could not maintain the Einherjar schedule and dropped the event altogether-- this happened very shortly before they canceled the event anyways.) Again, I needed nothing of value from Einherjar-- for me, only bluberk, and I didn't love my war enough to care that drastically about it (in fact, on over half of the Odin runs we attended, I forgot to make a bid for it on the website). For my husband, only the refresh body, which he also wasn't crazily ecstatic over. Did they think we gave up one of our only two days of sleeping in for kicks and giggles? No, although neither of us really cared about the gear, we got up and went to Einherjar to help out and because we felt a responsibility to do so.

I guess that's also why even though we were getting seals and gear on our own with a pair of pals in Abyssea and did not need the ls to get things, we still attended every single Abyssea run that we could. In fact, I don't think we ever missed an Abyssea run unless it filled before we signed up. And it was not because we needed the ls to get gear-- we got those on our own. I guess that's also why I didn't raise a fuss or even get angry at all when one of the sacks ninja-lotted some seals that were supposed to go to me during a run, and nothing was done about it. I didn't care-- I wasn't there for the gear.

For one, we took a lowman group from the ls to sea before Abyssea came out to farm UFO organs and it was terrible. There were four of us-- 3 blms and a rdm. My husband and I can duo UFOs, they are not difficult and there is no reason why we should have had any trouble at all. We had an agreement among the 4 that we'd get everyone who needed an organ one, then work on getting everyone another, so that everyone left with something. All four of us agreed to that before even heading up to sea. To kill, we'd nuke, sleep/bind, nuke, sleep/bind. One of the members decided that it would be fun to wait until two of the blms were resting mp and the rdm's sleep timers were down and then attempt to drain the 5% or so of hp that the UFO had left instead of dropping a gentle nuke on it. This wouldn't kill the UFO, but just wake it up. Had this happened once or twice, ok. But the blm did this, I kid you not, over 4 times even after being asked to stop draining, and eventually that blm's stupidity got the rdm and another of the blm's killed. Then to top it all off, after we got one person one organ and killed another UFO, that person ninja'd the stupid organ from the second one, disregarding the agreement we'd made at the start. This person was an upstanding member of the ls, a regular, one of the popular ones. The experience effectively killed any inclination we would have had to wish to lowman with people from within the ls.

For two, the only one person who was interested in making friends with us or trying to make us feel welcome on the ls was Souel, and he left the game a month or so after we joined. Not a single other person ever went out of their way to talk to us or include us in non-event things. So they want us to take a bunch of people we don't talk to much out when we lowman with our friends? Does that not defeat the purpose of lowmanning with friends? Maybe if we'd been on the ls a few more years and gotten to know people a LOT better and actually talk to some of them outside events, we'd have felt differently. But that ls felt very much like a job with co-workers, not a ls with friends, and that made this feel very much like being told we had to take our co-workers home from work with us.

For three, had these people ever tried to get folks to get going on something other than scheduled events? LOL yeah right. I have seen people beg and plead for help, but folks simply refuse to go unless the person asking help is in 'the clique.' Even if they, too, need something from it. And they know we don't need help, we'd only be asking in case they wanted to go, which would remove the guilt factor from it so of course people would say no. Or if they did say yes, they'd want to go on their timelines, when their TV show isn't on, when it is convenient for them. And that's perfectly understandable. But it also needs to be understood that we're not going to wait around forever for people to decide that they want to go now. A very big bonus to lowmanning for us is not having to depend on other people and their schedules.

For four, attempting to dictate who we may or may not spend our time with outside events is ridiculous. I am not a child, and the ls leader is not my father, and this attempted dictation oversteps the boundaries quite uncomfortably.