suspicious activity & a total scam

We weren't able to raid Eden's Verse for the past two weeks because Silver's FFXIV account got locked for "suspicious activity" and his queries to customer support went unanswered. What a cliffhanger after getting Iconoclasm to a 0.1% enrage.

On the plus side, Tiro agreed to sub for Silver last Sunday. Tiro! That guy! He exists! He's been in our free company for, I dunno, the past couple years, very quietly playing the game on his own. We weren't going to teach him an entire savage fight in the space of a day, so instead we did The Minstrel's Ballad: Thordan's Reign. Knights of the Round. Very chuu2. Tiro plays tank, so we did a bit of musical chairs: Dante switched to monk, and numbers switched to white mage. We made it to the start of phase 3, which was solid progress. The end of the add phase is utter chaos—meteors descending on the battlefield, aoes everywhere, all of us running around screaming—and I love it.

A few hours later, customer support finally replied to Silver, and he got his account back. Apparently the "suspicious activity" was him getting a new computer.

[6:41 PM] silver: you know if i were an elite INFLUENCER with one million subscribers this would have been solved on day one

[6:42 PM] silver: i also would have made at least 200 dollars from ad revenue on my latest video: SCANDAL?! SQUARE ENIX KEEPS ELITE RAIDER SILVERLINER LOCKED OUT OF RAIDING FOR 3 HOURS

===

So this weekend we're back to Eden's Verse. On raid day, a new crisis surfaced: HGR's headset had broken. Or I guess half-broken. It was literally semi-functional for combat. A portion of the plastic cord was broken, exposing the wires within, but if he held it in exactly the right position he could get it to work. He tried applying masking tape in roughly a dozen different configurations and finally got it stable enough to last through raid. He's currently lobbying newbie ("@simp") to buy him a new headset.

After a couple hours of attempts, we beat Iconoclasm! I'm kind of glad we didn't beat him last time because I didn't understand the whirlybird mechanic at all. Now I mostly have a handle on it, which is a lot more satisfying. (There's a whirling tornado in the center of the screen with exaflares rotating outward in a spiral pattern. Black and white orbs spawn at various places around the screen. You have to split into three teams based on color groups and grab the orbs in sequence before they detonate and kill everyone. I knew all that in theory at the end of our session three weeks ago, but I didn't get how it worked in practice; but now I do.)

I got a 9% parse, which makes me worried for the future. Iconoclasm is very forgiving in its dps requirement; Shiva is very not. In my defense, I died to raidwide damage after the first whirlybird, which was not my fault, and I died a second time to raidwides near the end of the fight because we had one healer down and the other understandably couldn't keep up with healing. On the other hand, xivanalysis says I had 75.8% uptime yikessss what a disaster. I blame whirlybird. Just because I did the mechanic correctly a couple times doesn't mean I'm competent enough to shoot at the same time lmaooo

Anyway, we're on to the Shiva fight! The capstone of the tier! Kan's been hyping it for months!

"THIS MECHANIC IS A SCAM," said Silver as he got tagged by Driving Frost.

"It is a total scam," said Kan, cackling in glee.

It's going to be a long adventure.