Last week I gave a rundown of the March update for Final Fantasy XI. Well, today the version update arrives — with a few new surprises. Here’s an overview of the new details from Square Enix. (A few details need to be tested. The maintenance isn’t over at the time of this writing.)

• I don’t think it was explicitly stated before, but there are new areas in the past world of Wings of the Goddess
• New spells have been added:
  • White Mages get the following new teleport spells, which send you to areas in the past: Recall-Junger, Recall-Pashh and Recall-Meriph. All three spells are level 53.
  • Black Mages get a new level 55 spell, Retrace. Retrace will apparently send you back to your home nation (or possibly a second home point) in the past.
  • Dark Knights get a new spell, Absorb-ACC at level 61.
  • A new Scholar spell, Klimaform, has been added at level 46.
  • Ninjas can now sneak at level 25 with Monomi: Ichi. The new ninja tool sanjaku-tenugui has been added for this spell.
• New job abilities have been added:
  • Warriors can now use Retaliation to add a counter-attack status, but it will reduce their movement speed
  • Thieves have a miniature version of Accomplice — Collaborator will take 25% of enemy hate and redirect it to the thief. Accomplice and Collaborator share a single recast timer.
  • Samurais get a new ability also — Sekkanoki will reduce the cost of the next weapon skill to 100%, allowing you to retain some TP. As a SAM75 myself, I’m happy to hear about this one!
  • Summoners can steal MP from their elemental spirits using Elemental Siphon.
• Dragoons are getting a change to their wyverns. Wyverns will now experience an increase in their attributes based on exp earned while they’re summoned. So once you summon your wyvern, it will get better the longer its out, until it dies or is dismissed. Presumably, it will return to the status quo each time you summon it, giving Dragoons incentive to keep their wyverns alive and healthy.
• New weapon skills are now available for Puppetmasters.
• The new Emperor Band replaces the Empress Band as the best exp ring. It’s been confirmed that you will need to drop your Empress Band to get it, as you can only have one ring of this type at a time. The EXP bonus is the same as with the Empress Band, but the maximum bonus is doubled — so using an Emperor Band is like using two Empress Band charges back-to-back.

The full details are available on PlayOnline.

There’s lots of talk floating around on Final Fantasy XI servers about the changes coming up in this month’s update to the game. Here’s a quick summary of what’s going to change:

The most interesting stuff:

• New missions will be (finally!) added to the Wings of the Goddess storyline.
• Artifact Armor quests for Scholar and Dancer. These jobs will also be able to “push their limits”, which could mean merit categories [Update: Nope, it means a limit break quest for Level 70 to 71... only needed for those leveling one of these as their first 75 job].
• New changes will be made to Campaign Battles. The technological level of whatever force is controlling an area will determine certain features that will be available, including the ability to call reinforcements from a Belfry or to restore your HP at a Mantelet. These new elements must be defended from Beastmen, or destroyed when the Beastmen control them. Beastmen will own their own strongholds which can be attacked when player forces become stronger in surrounding areas. Beastmen will also get siege turrets — devices that can spawn enemies and launch devastating ranged attacks — when their technological strength reaches a certain level.
• A new EXP ring is being added. The Emperor Band will be added to the Conquest Points purchase menu, as an upgrade from the Chariot Band and Empress Band. How much extra EXP is earned from this ring is unknown. It’s likely that you won’t be able to use your Empress Band anymore if you do switch to this new one, but this hasn’t been confirmed yet.
• Adventuring fellows (NPCs) will get new equipment, and will benefit from party spells like Protectra. They’ll also stop using area-of-effect weapon skills.
• Macros will be able to stored on PlayOnline’s servers, so you can use the same macro set on multiple platforms, anywhere you log into your account.
• New armor and weapons will be added.

Job-specific updates:

• White Mages are getting new teleport spells. Where the new teleport locations are remains a mystery, but they’re most likely in Wings of the Goddess areas.
• Black Mages are getting a new type of Warp spell. The most common speculation is that it’ll be a “Warpga” spell that would essentially cast “Warp II” on all party members simultaneously, as a time-savers for disbanding parties and completed linkshell events.
• Ninjas are getting a new ninjitsu spell that gives the Sneak effect. They’ve had Invisible for quite a while with Tonko, so this is only natural.
• Puppetmasters are getting new weapon skills for their automans.
• Summoners are getting an elemental spirit MP absorption ability… we’ll have to wait for clarity on that one.
• Scholars will get an upgrade in the number of stratagems charges they have available, as well as a reduction in charge time.
• Dancers will have their waltz recast time shortened to six seconds when Trance is active.

Other miscellaneous changes include:

• New icons for some status effects will be added.
• A new reddish-purple colour will be added to the colours for mob names. This will indicate a mob that is controlled by another party in your alliance, while the pink colour will continue to indicate a mob owned by another party outside of your alliance.
• Battle music will play for mages when they start casting magic on the mob or on party members in battle, even if they aren’t engaged to the mob.
• The ongoing problem of getting “stuck” when a cure spell is cast on you will be addressed — with the quasai-bind effect shortened, at least.
• Four new commands, /dance1 - /dance4, will be added. These will allow your character to dance, even when you’re not a dancer. Hopefully these will be a little different than just Dancer moves mapped to emotes, but don’t count on it.
• Two new hats are being added to the Adventurer Recruitment Program.

What I’m most looking forward to: New WotG missions and the new EXP ring. What about you?

Many Final Fantasy XI players are aware of a rash of account hackings that occurred over the past couple of months. A number of players saw their account passwords suddenly changed after their gaming computers were compromised. Square Enix has been unable to help most of these players, who saw hours of game-work disappear when their characters were stolen.

One 20-year-old has taken it upon himself to seek justice with his local police department, reports a Minnesota newspaper. Geoff Luurs reported the crime, in which 75 million Gil worth of virtual items and coin that belonged to his character were stolen. Although Square Enix prohibits players from participating in real-money trade (RMT) between game items and real currency, the gil is worth about $4,000 U.S. on the FFXI “black market”.

The police, however, refuse to investigate the event. According to them, virtual items have no monetary value whatsoever and no crime has taken place. The response angered law professor Joshua Fairfield of Washington and Lee University:

“What happened here is somebody stole almost USD 4000 and got away cold. This is just a matter of zeros. The first time IBM loses USD 10 million, we’re going to see some police action. The argument that a magic sword isn’t real, that doesn’t make sense to me. You can ask the question, why would somebody buy that? But you can’t say it’s not worth real money.”

Putting aside the fact that swords in Final Fantasy XI aren’t normally magic, Fairfield brings up a good point. Despite the fact that it’s against the rules, RMT is a common thing in FFXI as well as in most other MMO games, some of which allow and even participate in the trade of virtual items for real-world money.

Recent hackings involved exploits on some Final Fantasy XI information sites that were finding back-door entries into players’ computers, but in the case of this player, it’s also suspected that he gave out his information at some point. Luurs named another FFXI player as a former friend and current suspect, raising the question of whether or not he actually gave out his password in the past. This is a somewhat common practice, although it’s also forbidden by Square Enix due to security risks.

So what’s your take? Is this a case of the law being behind the times, or is this FFXI player crying over spilled milk? Having spent hours in Final Fantasy XI myself, I can certainly respect the amount of time and energy it takes to build up a character — there’s certainly a value to what was stolen, even if it’s hard to quantify.