MMORPG

I am now officially in full swing of Nexus light farming and wound up spending my entire evening in Sastasha. In theory I could clear the entire place in roughly five minutes loaded in solo with undersized party. I had I had spent more of my time trying to optimize my route and my mob stacking… I could have potentially gotten it down to a bit lower. However for the uninitiated you might ask exactly why I spent two hours solid running the same dungeon over and over as many times as I possibly could squeeze into that two hour block.

Now some of this information comes from my friend Ashgar and other bits come from this Wiki page, but I am now in the step for the Nexus Zodiac weapon where I have to run a bunch of activities. Each activity produces a certain amount of light, and I have screenshot the table and placed it above. You effectively need to go from 0 to 2000 light to move past this step in the weapon grind, with different activities rewarding different amounts of light. So as you can see finding something that rewards Blinding Light for example is going to be way more effective than something giving you Feeble. Ash however suggested that generally speaking one of the early instances always rewards blinding light, and the trick is finding it.

The instances providing bonus light reset every two hours on the even hours… which doesn’t actually work for me when in truth they were on the odd numbered hours. So my bonus reset happened at 7 pm last night and I ground my little ass off until 9 pm getting in as many instances as possible with only a brief break to switch machines because I needed to call mom while grinding and wanted to move to where I could hook up a headset. I have no clue exactly how many runs I managed to get in but if you subtract about 15 minutes of the available time and bump my run time up to 6 minutes… you end up with me having run somewhere between seventeen and eighteen runs last night. In truth I think it was probably something in the neighborhood of fifteen to sixteen given where I wound up on the charts.

There is an in-game doodad that allows you to check how much light you have collected with a given weapon. Now I had run a couple of Frontlines that were both at Blinding Light, which is what leads me to believe that I was somewhere in the fifteenish range for runs completed. I started the night with the meter showing “No Activity” and finished the night with “Intense Aetheric Activity” as shown in the image above. In theory if I can happen upon another Blinding Light dungeon… in an absolute worst case scenario I am 5 runs away from completing. Alternately I could just run Sastasha 9 more times with no bonus and it would end up in the same result.

Whatever the case… I am apparently fully committed to this madness now and I have no clue what happens after I get the Nexus weapon. I have a feeling I will rapidly be entering a level of territory where it just isn’t worth it to keep pushing forward. Instead it is probably time to start another weapon if I so choose. Regardless this has done what it ultimately needed to do… give me a purpose for logging in every night and hanging out with the FFXIV crew prior to expansion launch next week.

I largely told myself that I would not do the thing I just did, in part because I thought it was nonsense. However if you have read this blog for long you know that I seem to be drawn to madness like a moth to a flame. I have done a bunch of really stupid things for very minimal amounts of enjoyment like creating accounts on Chinese Only MMOs. So the fact that I picked up where I left off in my Zodiac weapon quest really should not surprise anyone. The first step of course was to grind out a bunch of Alexandrite… for which thankfully I had a stockpile of Tomestones of Poetics to spend on treasure maps. Each map gives 5 Alexandrite… so 15 maps later I had the 75 needed to move to the next phase.

This is the step that largely held me in my tracks up until this point as it requires you to infuse 75 materia onto your weapon, starting with Rank 1 materia and shifting ranks roughly every 11 successful infuses. This is ultimately going to be a costly venture no matter how you go about it, but in my case I had been rat-holing Battledance and Savage Might materia for quite literally years, thinking eventually I would get around to doing this. I spent roughly 200,000 gil piecing together everything that I thought I might need. In many cases I had to buy way more than I wanted because only stacks were up on the board. I started liquidating everything I didn’t need in an attempt to recuperate a little bit of my woeful funding state and have gotten back 100k with several items still on the market. I was under 100k total gil for awhile… which didn’t feel super comfortable.

Another side effect of this entire process is I have officially done my first PVP in Final Fantasy XIV in the form of the daily frontline bonus. I’ve entered the Nexus step of the quest that requires me to do a bunch of stuff to gather 2000 points of light by doing “activities”. Most things seem to reward “feeble” light or 8 points at a time… but the daily Frontline queue rewards “blinding” or 96 points. I will of course make some more effort to do activities to farm light specifically, but for now I am casually queuing for frontlines every day. This also has the cool side effect of allowing me to start collecting some of the interesting PVP exclusive armor sets. Between the last two days I have already gathered up the full set of Bear themed armor that I had been eyeing for years.

So now we get to the title of this post, as I spent the majority of last night thrashing about with Amazon support staff. For the last few expansions Square Enix and Amazon have partnered to give some sort of an item leading into the expansion, this time around it is a Fat Black Chocobo mount. I figure that this is probably going to be something easy to do given that I already buy lots of stuff on Amazon. The problem is… this initiative is way more restrictive than any of the guidance would lead you to believe. If you go to the official Square Enix page you see the following wording.

Make a qualifying purchase of $19.99 or more on video games (excludes pre-orders) from the Amazon.com video games department to receive an item code redeemable on the Mog Station. Amazon will e-mail the Mog Station code directly to purchasers who qualify.

This offer only applies when purchasing qualifying items that are shipped and sold by Amazon.com.

If you go over to Amazon and manage to find one of the items that is specifically advertising the promotion you get a different but similar batch of text.

Black Fat Chocobo DLC.
Purchase any qualifying video game with a Purchase Price of $19.99 or above and receive the Black Fat Chocobo DLC. Must be shipped and sold by Amazon. Amazon will email your code within 2 days of the purchase date.Limit one per customer‘. Here’s how (restrictions apply)

When you click through to the “Here’s how (restrictions apply)” link you get a different wall of text that again says some pretty similar things and outlines exactly which items should apply for this promotion.

Promotion Details

Offer only applies to products and digital content sold by Amazon.com or Amazon Digital Services LLC (look for “sold by Amazon.com” or “sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC” on the product or content detail page).

Offer good while supplies last.

Digital content and services may only be available to customers located in the U.S. and are subject to the terms and conditions of Amazon Digital Services LLC.

Items must be purchased in a single order and shipped at the same speed to a single address.

Shipping charges may apply to discounted and free promotional items.

Amazon reserves the right to modify or cancel the offer at any time.

Offer is non-transferable and may not be resold.

Offer discount will be allocated proportionally among all promotional items in your order.

If any of the products or content related to this offer are returned, your refund will equal the amount you paid for the product or content, subject to applicable refund policies.

If you violate any of these terms, the offer will be invalid.

Unless an Amazon Gift Card is the stated benefit of the promotion, promotional codes (including those placed directly in accounts) may not be redeemed for Amazon Gift Cards.

So over the last few days I made a couple of purchases thinking I would be perfectly fine. The first of which was a digital game on the Switch being fulfilled by Amazon Digital Services. The second was a physical copy of Bloodstained Ritual of the Night for PS4 being fulfilled by Amazon.com. If you are following along those are the entities specifically called out in the promotion details paragraph above, however I never received a promotional code in either case. This prompted me to get on chat with Amazon support and jump through a sequence of hoops bouncing between platforms and ultimately ending up in the same result each and every time.

My purchases were not eligible for the promotion. No one has been able to tell me why purchases that fit the pattern of the promotional text above are somehow ineligible and no one has been able to transfer me to a department that can ultimately explain it either. There is a bit flipped in a database somewhere that dictates which items do and do not get the promotion and it does not appear to have any semblance of relation to what the text of the promotion states. So I largely post this as a warning. The only items eligible for this promotion are the ones specifically talking about the promotion on the product page.

The challenge there is that there are very few products that actually talk about the promotion. I spent some time between chat responses scouring the site looking for them and I believe I found three different products that had them listed, with no real rhyme or reason as to what does and does not given that everything I looked at was either being sold by Amazon Digital Services or Amazon.com as per the offer text above. The only item that I found that reliably has the promotion is the 60 day Final Fantasy XIV time card, which seems to be how most people are getting theirs. Unfortunately there is no real listing of products that have the promotion that I was able to find. Previously I was able to buy just about any damned thing on the site and have it count but for whatever reason Amazon fucked this one up.

Ultimately if you do not see the little “Black Fat Chocobo DLC” box below the price tag of the item you are looking at, then you are not going to get the mount code. The other place to look is under “Special offers and product promotions” which also should list something to the effect of an item being eligible for the mount. If you do not see either of these then you will simply run up against the brick wall that is Amazon support given that probably all they can see is that a bit in the database is or is not flipped to allow this promotion. What I find frustrating is how obtuse this promotion has been this time around. With Stormblood it was more along the lines of “purchase literally anything in video games section and get a code”. This time around there are weird stipulations that largely make it so you have to buy one single item to get the code.

Ultimately I would appreciate you spreading the word about this to warn other people from making a similar mistake.