thebeauregardbros

[thebeauregardbros]

🙏⛅ my very sunny friends ☀️💪

[thebeauregardbros]

gulool ja isnt an ipad baby he's a fucking linux toddler he was handed a broken ipad and a soldering iron at the age of Two and figured it out from there. actually fuck linux he's clobbering sol9's firewalls from dos

[thebeauregardbros]

i will always be more on the side of "this has some problems, but i like it!" over "doesn't matter if you like it, it has problems". the world is negative enough. things do not need to be black and white

[thebeauregardbros]

The Rising (Previously Foundation Day) Artwork (2011 - 2025)

[thebeauregardbros]

8/26/25

what helps your wol(oc) fall asleep?

[thebeauregardbros]

real sadists understand that you can torture The Character simply by forcing them to live with themself

[thebeauregardbros]

Thoughts on Language

It is interesting to me, either on social media or streaming or YouTube, to see people say "The XIV community is..." because even doing Coffee & Carbuncles I've often said on the podcast that I feel as though I'm standing in the shallows of a much larger ocean. That comes even after 11 years of playing and 4 years of interviewing various groups within the player base. I find myself saying "The RP community is" on the podcast fairly often but every day I'm still discovering new RPers, new venues, new ways people are roleplaying. Ultimately this is to say that while I feel as though it is linguistically convenient to say "the community is.." I've never felt as though it is accurate to try and sum up 300,000+ players with one or two sentences and I believe it is something we should be careful about.

[thebeauregardbros]

[thebeauregardbros]

If you deal with any haters hit em with the ol' jaz hands People were still having fun with how shitty the game used to be and people will still have fun with it with "whatever x complaint is now" Don't let haters and troll dictate what you find fun.

[thebeauregardbros]

It's REALLY FUCKING BAD

When the head Mare Dev tells ffxiv players to go touch grass.

[thebeauregardbros]

I finally kicked my ass into redoing her ref sheet…My sheila…

[thebeauregardbros]

I feel like I made a cute dancer outfit

Also a Astro outfit

[thebeauregardbros]

Omg!!!,,

[thebeauregardbros]

[thebeauregardbros]

[thebeauregardbros]

in general I think I have a weak spot for sunk cost fallacy characters. no point in trying to change because there's no going back! can't stop now because the possibility of being wrong is too unbearable to face head on and would destroy me if I tried!

[thebeauregardbros]

As I am an FFXIV RP blog, I suppose I may as well share my thoughts about Mare going down. This is going to get pretty long, because I'm honestly kind of conflicted in how I'm feeling, but I'm going to try and lay out both the bad and the good.

For background, I've been playing for just about 6 years now, started early 5.2, and as soon as I cleared MSQ I started looking for the RP scene. There were modders then, mostly sharing screenshots of whatever custom sculpts and glams they used on Twitter or Discord, and as a console (hence, vanilla) player there were times I really felt left out. I got told in my own goddamn FC that I helped found that my gposes were lazy because I didn't use any posing tools, and I had ppl say they wanted to RP with me only to change their minds when I wanted them to just describe their characters instead of letting them send me their mod pack. But there were a lot more people who wrote for the love of the art form - who enjoyed telling stories and playing dolls with other people, and a lot of them I still consider friends.

Then Mare happened. And over about the first six or eight months, I noticed a change in how RP happened. Instead of walking up, checking the search comment in a character's bio, and saying hello if they looked interesting, it became "do you use Mare?" Or later, just "mare?" like that's a complete greeting/question/conversation. Groups started not merely offering but REQUIRING members to join their syncshells- and leaving console players like myself to rot. I still had my own groups, but even most of them would ask me from time to time when I was going to get a decent PC and join the modding game. Like playing vanilla somehow made me less of an RPer than the ones that use mods. And that stings. But I'm still here, because I enjoy the world and I like playing dolls with other people - even if they talk without thinking sometimes.

All that background matters, because for as fucking EXASPERATED as I've been with a lot of the Mare players (with good reason imo), I never hated it. It was a tool, not the cause, and I don't blame a computer program for how its users treat other human beings - that's dumb, and I know it. So please don't take this as some kind of anti-modding rant. The way I see it, there was a confluence of facts that all came together at once, and while I feel for the people who will miss their moon magic, I'm mostly surprised that THEY'RE surprised about it finally going away. Here's why, in no particular order:

Japanese law (which Square-Enix, as a Japanese company, has to follow) prohibits third-party modifications to licensed software.

The Terms of Service to FFXIV that we all agree to in order to make our SE accounts likewise prohibit third-party modifications and add-ons.

Mare saves your data to its own server. Know what else did that- Playerscope. AKA the stalker mod that got SE in so much fucking trouble just a couple months ago.

The page to install Mare had the dev's Ko-fi and Patreon right there on the cover. Money was being made, and as everyone who's ever been on AO3 knows that's one thing a copyright holder can't allow.

The Live Letters have had people asking about third party add-ons at least twice since I've been playing, and both times Yoshi-P basically said "we can't see what you do on your own computer but we ask you please don't use mods." AKA DON'T BRING IT TO OUR ATTENTION. (this point is relevant to the next couple facts)

Party Finder venues have been increasingly advertising "we have wifi" or "ask for syncshell" in their in game description. Not keeping it on a carrd where you at least have the plausible deniability of getting the info from an outside website, but right where everyone and their sister can see it.

Players with some kind of reference to "moon magic" in their character search comment have come to outnumber ones without anything of the sort three or four to one. Or more, depending on where and when you look.

People in Ul'Dah and Limsa have at times just shouted asking for Mare codes.

Those last three were probably the nails in the coffin. Lots of modders charge for things, and Dalamud, Glamourer, or even the content tools that got the world first teams banned aren't being touched. It's only Mare. Because people couldn't remember the first and second rules of fight club.

You don't talk about it

Now, I can't tell you what to do. If you want to go on Steam or the forums and review-bomb the game, I'm not your mom, I'm not here to tell you not to be an asshole. I know a lot of venues are shutting down, and I think that's really sad that they don't trust themselves and their guests to be good enough writers to play dolls when they all have to use the same, out of the box dollies as everybody else instead of their home made custom ones, but each venue knows its own circle best. But I'm going to be here, playing with my doll, inviting the rest of you to bring your dolls and come tell stories with me.