Makes sense, surely. They aren't saying they're nerfing the boss here, just that they're imposing a time limit on how long you can fight one for. Obviously their is a method for correctly dispatching FFXI Gil the boss that the 18 hour marathon players never managed to discover.For the record, WoW has exactly the same system. If you don't get a boss down in time he will 'enrage,' making him faster and stronger.

Either you beat the boss bloody immediately, or he wipes your raid. FYI, WoW enrage timers are 15 minutes, go figure :P. @Kidblinks: Don't bother. Leveling up will be a pain as everyone has at least 4 level 75 capped jobs already. You basically cannot level efficiently without 6 people in a party and finding them is a big pain.

The game was totally fun 3-4 years ago. Now, unless you can spare 5+ hours a day, its not so much fun anymore. (I played this game for almost 4 and a half years.) Can't keep up with the time sink any longer because I didn't "forget my family, friends, and work."  One of his forms is in the picture in the article. You can see most of them in the LiveJournal of one of the BeyondTheLimitation members, [rukenshin.livejournal.com]

There you'll also find a pretty good summary of the fight, and why it can't be done any faster based on what we currently know.On the flipside of that coin, wouldn't you feel like shit if you gave up and knew you were 30 minutes away from beating one of the biggest bosses in the game? Everybody pushes harder to reach new achievements, that's not a new phenomenon.

What Ein is suggesting is that these people are dumb and just approached the mob with a neanderthal "HURR, I TANK YOU HEAL WE KILL K?" method, which if people would read the backstory on the matter they might realize wasn't the case; they (and others) already spent time on previous attempts trying to find things that might make an obvious difference in the flow of the fight, and came up empty-handed.

They even experimented a little in this fight as time allowed, but again were left with no results and simply trudged on. They were making steady progress, and actually got through more than 2/3 of the boss' "forms" in just a few hours; it was merely the last few forms that took so much more time thanks to the nature of the new attacks being dished out.

 Ah, my mistake, I figured you might come from a different MMO (WoW, namely) that gave you the initial impression you posted. But yes, they're the badasses on the block.In the next update, they're supposed to be adding a way to make it easier for lower level/number parties to get EXP. Already they've buffed the amount of EXP when in a party Qufim -> Yuhtunga -> Yhoator -> Garlaige -> etc) instead of experimenting with different camps.

18 hours is 18 hours. Yeah, I do the whole "Just a bit more.." "Just the next save point..." "5 more minutes.." deal with everything. And yes, I also do the "The family's gone, I have the house to myself and a girlfriend ready to come over at a moment's notice....buuuuut I really haven't played MGS in a few weeks FFXI Gil thing as well, so I can set aside a whole day for gaming. But when you do it to the point of physical illness, then that's YOUR (general you, not specific you) fault, not the game's.

They clearly needed to recoup. As you said, they got through the first few forms within hours. Great, so they've gotten that down pretty cold. It's getting to the 6 hour mark, Processors, Tempers, and Eyes are all getting pretty strained, it may be time to call it quits at 6 hours. But to go another half of an entire day?

Then there is the strategy standpoint. You say they did a lot of planning, a lot of other runs, a lot of experiments. What they failed to try, it seems to me, is shifts. Get a posting going on, take a week to get a massive group together spanning the globe, and have people com