without the use of 3rd party programs such as Windower or the application of what is called "reverse engineering"?

First off, I just wanted to be clear that I am not attempting to begin an argument about the ethics behind windower, botting, parsing, or any other third party program available for use when concerning FFXI. I would appreciate if this topic was discussed in it's appropriate threads, as there are already multiples of them on this forum.

But with recent discussion as it is, this topic came to mind and I wanted to see what other people thought about it.

I ask again: How much would we really know about the workings of FFXI without the development and applicable use of third party programs to reverse engineer?

I ask this because I realize that without these things, many of the in-game testing that has been done and more importantly, the information those tests have provided to the community, would not be available without the original practice of reverse engineering.

For those interested, Article 2, Section 4 of the FINAL FANTASY XI Software License Agreement specifically prohibits the practice of reverse engineering. See for yourself at http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/FINAL_FANTASY_XI_Software_License_Agreement

The reason this question interests me is because of how many players have benefited from these works. Windower plugins such as Distance and TParty taught the community a great deal when it came to Area of Effect, and (in the case of TParty) when certain mobs would ready specific abilities at direct HP percentages. This information directly lead to the formation of commonly accepted battle strategies. 3rd party parsing software was able to prove differences between equipment setups, showing what would be best for certain actions and situations. One of the games most famous reverse engineers was Kaeko's enmity testing, a project that taught players how the enmity system worked and could be used to create advantages during battle.

I am fully aware there are more examples than what I just listed above. I just wanted to be clear that works and testing such as those above have directly led to the quality of information found in widely used resources such as FFXIclopedia, something used even by players condemning 3rd party programs and ToS breaches.

The introduction of said information has undoubtedly made the general player community more knowledgeable overall, and thus created better players. Even those who do not directly benefit from the use of these programs have indirectly benefited from the information these programs and tests have given to the community. If these things had never become available or were never tested, how good do you think we'd really be at playing this game? I'm not saying it would be impossible to figure these things out on your own, but the amount of time and effort involved would have been drastically increased, stacked on top of incredible amounts of trial and error failures. That being said, I feel the information provided to the player community by the use of 3rd party tools and the application of reverse engineering has completely changed the way we play the game and allowed us as players to become more successful during events and battles.

Thoughts?

I just joined because I have a holiday breakfast dilemma. I'm planning on making an "oatmeal bar" for breakfast on Christmas, and by that I mean oatmeal with bowls of "fixin's" (dried fruit, brown sugar, nuts, butter, cream, etc, for everyone to do it up their own way).

I have been making batches of steel-cut oatmeal in my slow cooker for a few weeks now. I've been following Alton Brown's recipe for "over-night oatmeal" (it actually only take 4 hours in my slow cooker...), so I'm pretty comfortable with that recipe, but does anyone know the proportion of oatmeal to liquid if I don't want to add dried fruit to the pot while it's cooking? I'm assuming I would need less liquid because there is no fruit to be reconstituted... I just want oatmeal without bits in it.

(For reference, AB's recipe calls for 1 cup oatmeal, 2 cups of dried fruit, 4 cups of water, and 1/2 cup or half-and-half.)

You can get the Final Fantasy Online Ultimate collection on Steam (steampowered.com) for $11.

That's everything, including the three add-on scenarios (which by themselves are currently like $10 each iirc)

Also it's steam so that means no more having to track down your cd/dvd to install it. On the other hand, Final Fantasy is a BIG game (~10 GB) on windows, so installation could take a while depending on the connection speed you have. On the gripping hand, some people can't stand Steam, as it has some DRM and stuff, and relies on the Valve servers to enable your logins. (I know mmo games you can generally bypass steam once the game's installed, but not sure about FFXI).

I actually know about 4 ppl interested in joining me and my buddy Gel, but I'm on Odin, where none may trespass. (they burned out on Aion already. that took all of what, 2 months?)

I had a supremely yummy crock-pot beef roulade recipe last year and now I can't find it! I don't see it on here, but it could have come from anywhere. I remember the beef spread with mustard, onions, bacon and dill pickles, rolled up, dredged in flour, browned then put in the crock. Some kind of liquid was added, I'm sure. Then it cooked and at the end you got it out and added sour cream to the juice. Does that ring a bell for anybody? If so, please post the recipe with measurements and whatever I forgot. MANY thanks!

I haven't been playing much (read: more than one blm solo exp session per month) for the past year. Do people still level in camps past Yhoator Jungle anymore? Every invite I've had from levels 38-52 on my drg has been Qufim or the jungles except for one wonderful, glorious party on Colibri in ERon(S).

A lot has changed in the last year, apparently. Anyone remember skillchains? Skillup parties? People in Jeuno who aren't either bots or just passing through? Social linkshells? People doing nation missions? Promyvions? Being able to get anything done by /shout groups instead of linkshells? I miss these things.

Speaking of linkshells, both of mine disbanded while I was a non-player. I recall a time when having no shell would quite quickly get you invited to a social shell, but since those apparently don't exist anymore, people assume that lack of a shell means you've been kicked out of an endgame shell for a good reason and are therefore the antichrist.

What the hell has happened to the game I used to love?

Hello! Joined the community when it was on the front page and boy am I glad!

Here's my first official contribution:

Snowed-in-chicken (in honor of our lovely East Coast storm!)

Ingredients:

1 small to med sized chicken (without gizzard)
1/2 cup sweet vermouth
1 cup water
2 slices of thick-sliced bacon

spices:
generous amount of salt
sprinkles of: pepper, paprika, garlic, sage, coriander -- enough to dust the chicken in the pot.

To cook:
Loosen fascia (connective tissue!) under the skin of chicken breast, insert a slice of bacon over each breast under the skin. Wrap remaining end of bacon around each leg and tuck into cavity (looooong bacon!). Pour vermouth and water into crock pot, place chicken in crock, season with salt and spices. Set on high, done in 4 hours. Remove bacon, and serve.

Very tender, as usual with a crock, and mildly flavorful. Perfect for setting, forgetting, taking time to dig out the car, and having a hot bird ready for you when you get in! Plus the leftover liquid is perfect for chicken soup.

Ethereal Linkshell of Diabolos zergs in 45 seconds from pop to kill.

1 small prime roast beef
1 can of beer
1 decent sized piece piece of ginger, sliced
1 onion, cut into quarters
2 cloves of garlic
BBQ sauce
salt and pepper
5-6 small potatoes

1. Place onion on bottom of crock pot.
2. Place beef on onion. Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste.
3. Cover with beer and BBQ sauce.
4. Add ginger and garlic to beer/sauce mix.
5. Cook on low for 7-8 hours.
6. At the 6 hour mark, add the potatoes directly into the pot into the beer juices and cook til they are tender.

NOM!

Our holiday party plans fell through due to the snow, so we had to improvise dinner with little notice. We had boneless spare ribs in the fridge for tomorrow, so I threw them in the crock with a bottle of barbecue sauce, some garlic powder, cracked pepper and garlic sauce. Set it on high for 4 hours, turning the ribs over a couple of times to make sure they got coated all over (there were 5 of them in there). They came out perfect! The fat had all but cooked off, they were tender and delicious.

I had asked for some help on a recipe a while back (original entry here: http://community.livejournal.com/what_a_crock/734192.html) and said that I would let you know how it went... Then I went on vacation and forgot.

It came out awesome! Next time I'll add some shredded cheese or something as there was no cheese flavor at all. I ended up putting the soup and chicken into a pyrex dish and putting that in the crock to cook.

Here's a picture of how it turned out



That's my husband's plate as my piece of chicken fell apart and didn't look pretty on the plate. But it tasted really good!

I was tying up some loose ends on quests in The Eldieme Necropolis, when I decided I'd also use the Strange Apparatus there. So I go through all the legwork to drop down to Mark D on the map, which is apparently the only way to fall down into that specific area... and land into an area that, apparently, only leads way back to the very start! What gives? I'm really agitated about this; there's GOT to be something I'm missing here.

Also, for that scroll of Teleport-Mea quest "Acting in Good Faith" does anyone here know how often the question marks (???) move? Because I checked all four god-awful areas in what could only be described as an epic misadventure of incompetence and frustration, and... they weren't in any of the four areas they're supposed to be. Which means that it moved in the two hours it took me to explore them all. Now I know why I never finished this "easy" quest.

This is not precisely a slow-cooker recipe, but I think it could be easily adapted (and I'd love any advice from people who have experience cooking dried lentils in a crock). I'd intended to do it in the crock but ran out of time; the slow cooker recipe I glanced over recommended something like 2 cups of liquid for 1 1/4 cups of lentils but I ended up going with something closer to my mother's recipe for a similar stove top dish. I dimly remember her telling me four parts liquid to one parts lentils. So, this is what I made in my dutch oven; I imagine you'd want to reduce the liquid pretty substantially for a crock pot, but again, if anyone has a more confident proportion to use I'd love to hear it. I will DEFINITELY be making this again, it came out wonderfully.

1 1/3 C (I eyeballed the third a bit) dried red lentils
4 C chicken stock (accidentally low sodium - would probably also work great with veggie stock if you're feeling partial to a vegetarian dish)
1 60z can tomato paste
A healthy bit of curry powder; maybe about two tablespoons, maybe a little more.
Pinch cayenne pepper
Half a teaspoon or a little more ground ginger
1 yellow onion
Two tablespoons butter
Salt to taste (see note about the accidental low sodium stock; if you use regular you might not want it)

Chop the onion and slosh it around a bit in a skillet with the butter. Meanwhile, get the stock and the tomato paste together in your cooking vessel (crock, or dutch oven) with the heat on. After the onions start to brown, add the lentils to the skillet and slosh them around a bit, too. Add the onion and lentils to the stock and paste. Add your spices, and cook until the lentils are nice and soft and most of the liquid is absorbed.

Other slow cooker lentil recipes that I consulted recommended 2 to 2 1/2 hours on high, in a crock pot. This sat on my stove in my dutch oven on med-low/low heat (something safe enough that I could run with bare feet in my clogs out into the snow with my hair wet to watch a congregation of two hundred or so crows fill the sky above my neighborhood) for about an hour.

I served it with some saffron rice I made from a package (Mahatma brand! Mmm.) My friend and I ate pretty heartily, and I have 1-2 meals worth of leftovers (if I make more rice) in my fridge as a result. The slight sweetness of red lentils goes really nicely with the tomato, and it came out a really beautiful orange color - goes nicely with the hat I'm knitting for my cousin right now. :) (Does anyone else have trouble finding red lentils? Sometimes I can't, and it makes me very sad.)

I also want to note that, while I didn't price-check the pre-packaged curry powder in the spice aisle, I got a really healthy portion of organic curry from the bulk section of the grocery for less than two dollars, so keep an eye out!

So here's my story -
I forgot to take my chicken out of the freezer so I could roast it for Shabbos. I get home a little 1pm.  Shabbos comes in at 4:12pm.  That means I have to be DONE in the kitchen by then.  Stuff can keep cooking, I just can't cook it.  Make sense?  So there's no way for me to defrost, then roast the chicken, so it's going in the crock.  I know this works, it just yields a kind of tasteless chicken.  Any hints or recipes to keep some of the flavor?

Recently someone posted a dip recipe that used RoTel tomatoes. It was in the comments to someone else's post, it wasn't it's own post. It was slightly different than the standard Velveeta/Rotel combo. I'm thinking it had some kind of unusual sausage in it? Does this ring any bells? I can't find it now. Never wrote it down because I remember thinking "hmmm, that sounds so good I know I won't forget it!" So I guess I'm asking for people to post RoTel dip recipes...


EDIT TO ADD:
Yes! It was chorizo! Thank you so much. I don't know how I could have forgotten that b/c I LOOOOOOVE chorizo. Can't wait to try it.
I also remember seeing the cream cheese/breakfast sausage one too and thinking it sounded good. Will try that one some time too!

If you didn't know, I'm a member mod on the RPGamer board.

They've been doing a Year of Final Fantasy; they're sorta skipping FFXI, but. I've gotten permission to do something so we won't be ignored completely. Next month, they're doing FF10. Alongside that, I'm going to post a FF11 spoiler thread. I'll post it here when it's up...

I'm gonna be sticking to the windy storyline (summary only) but if anyone else would like to come help, please do. Only thing I ask; read the board rules and follow them, please!. I don't want to have to remove a bunch of too big sigs, for example. RPGamer runs a very tight ship, board wise; no trolls allowed, pretty strict sig pic limit, etc. I'd rather not have to hexa strike anyone from here. ^^ (The spoiler tag rule will be relaxed for that thread and only that thread since it will be clearly marked "SPOILER!" but other than that, I will enforce the rules.)

Keep your eyes peeled; I'll have it up in a couple weeks. ^^

[Edit] since the guy who commented said "we're not welcome"..Au contrare. The goal was to get though as many Final Fantasy games as possible before FF14 came out. FF11 got cut for time reasons, and possibly since it's a MMO. Also there's at least 5 RPGamer staffers (not counting this little member mod, who isn't a true staffer) INCLUDING the webmaster, Firemyst, who have played or do play FFXI. Not welcome my butt. ^^

I just got my FFXIV closed beta invitation in my email box. Ok, actually it's an invitation to apply for the beta. I figured, why not give it a shot. I'm not leaving FFXI until it's quite dead, but I'm a sucker for MMOs, really.


Anyone else get theirs? I'm hoping my husband gets one too, that way at least one of us might have a chance at getting it.

Chicken (I use three chicken breasts but you can use more)
2 cans chicken broth
4 cans cream of chicken soup
celery
carrots
red potatoes

Add:
chicken, broth, 2 cans of water, celery, carrots and potatoes to crock pot. Add some salt and pepper. Cook for 4-5 hours.

Add cream of chicken soup


30 minutes before eating add dumplings:

3 cups Bisquick
1 cup milk
Mix into dough. Roll into loose balls and drop into crock pot.

Serves about 4

I was going to make tater tot casserole in the oven, but I don't have a casserole dish.

Can I do it in my crock pot?

If so, I thought 4 hours would be enough, what do you think? I mean, there are only 3 ingredients. Tater tots, cream of mushroom soup, and cheese to go on top. All of which do not take that long to cook. I should probably put the cheese on last because I don't want it to burn.

Thanks