FFXIAH.com

I announced on our Forum that I made some additions to character profiles, crudely known as the “edit chars” page. Among one of those additions was the ability to give your general geographical location so that it can be mapped out. Keep in mind that participation is optional and the location can be as general as just your country. Although I would prefer you put the closest city name and applicable state/province and country. Postal codes will be translated to the city that it is in (if there is one).

URL: http://www.ffxiah.com/map/

For now, it is restricted to accounts with at least one verified character. It may run very slow when showing all servers at once. It’ still in testing, I am still learning the API and possible things that can be done, such as finding what characters are within a certain radius of another etc.

Keep checking back for further updates.

Sorry it’s been awhile since our last post.  We are still working on making the site a better experience for all.  Most of you probably noticed the new front page and have received mostly praise which is good.  I tried to keep all the old information and add some more.

Oh great, more POL news, I know.  Truth is, I found myself checking other sites for the latest POL news which I didn’t enjoy.  Also, sometimes POL will have an important message to FFXI players, I didn’t want FFXIAH.com visitors to be in the dark.  I just dedicated a little block for it and added a RSS feed.  I couldn’t find one on the official site, but if it exists let me know.  The news updates automatically when the official site updates… in theory.

Latest forum posts was added.  It really helped with bringing more activity to our unique forum.  Latest screenshots were added.  It gives our screenshots more exposure, keep them coming please.  You can post comments on item sets and screenshots now, so give it a try.

Other than that we have been working on stuff on the backend, fixing things and breaking them.  I can’t think of anything else right now, I will keep you posted.

We added some new things to the player page and made small changes to the layout.  Below is an itemized list of the changes.

• Character’s server name was moved in front of the character name.  This makes it very clear what server the character is on.
• City, Rank, and Title moved directly below the name, background color of this row is consistent with the affiliated city
• PM buttons now show online status.  It will be glowing green with a lightning bolt if the player is online.  An option will be added very shortly for stealth mode.

Tabs: These will be used to showcase additional info on a player.  Currently the categories are: Item Sets, Merits, Equip History.

1. Item Sets: We wanted to give users the ability to show their item sets on their player pages.  By default we associated all items sets to the “Main” character on the user account.  You will have the option to change the character associated with the item set.  The item set will need to be marked as public to appear on this list.  So.. Make them public if you want to share them.
2. Merits: This is still a new feature on the site so many may not even know about it.  You can configure your merit build for your characters.  Please notice that this is filled in by the user, we do not have a system to verify merits… yet!
3. Equip History: This one will probably get some hate mail.  We started retaining information found in player equipment boxes awhile back.  This section is simply the data we collected so far.  The date represents when we first saw the item on that character.  It will not record the same item twice so it’s more like “Date when item was first seen”.  I will give the user control whether they want this public or not.

Check out my player page:

http://www.ffxiah.com/player.php?id=1184651

The player search has been finally upgraded.  As our database of character information grows, so does the usefulness of the player search.  You can find characters that are on the same mission so that forming a party is easier.  You can also search job level ranges for experience parties. I also went ahead and categorized tanks,dps, and support.  Try it out so see what I mean.  If you are trying to do a flexible search, you may want to check “Match at least one” to get the results you expect.  This will apply to all the fields except “server” and “name” (they will always have to match).  If you need to find a crafter, this might help too.

Some things I want to do:  ability to show/hide any fields,  clean the URL up, and add the ability to search “active” players.  I would base this on how long it’s been since their last transaction.

I know many of you have spent a long time looking for a party to do a particular task.  Try this out if you aren’t having any luck in game.  Let me know if it helps.

I will upgrade the item search next.

To add tooltips like this to your site just add this script. It will automatically add a tool tip to all your links to ffxiah items. Here is the code:

<script src="http://www.ffxiah.com/js/ffxiahify.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

That’s it! You can put the code anywhere on your site but it would be best right before the ending body tag (</body>). Let me know if you have any problems or questions with the script. Also let me know if you use it and the URL.

Here are some examples:

Simple Text
Check it out!
<a href="http://www.ffxiah.com/item.php?id=12579">Check it out!</a>

Text with Server ID
This adds price/stock info.
<a href="http://www.ffxiah.com/item.php?id=12579&sid=1">This adds price/stock info.</a>

Image

<a href="http://www.ffxiah.com/item.php?id=12579&sid=1"><img src="http://www.kingbehemoth.com/icon/12579.png" /></a>

Square-Enix and Blizzard has urged their customers to update their Flash Player Versions. Download it here

This exploit is widespread and can potentially steal passwords from the infected host. Please make sure your friends and linkshell members do this. Below is a chart displaying the flash versions of FFXIAH.com visitors from yesterday (June 5th).

Here is your current Flash Version:
If you do not have 9.0 r124 or higher, you need to update!

Flash Version -> Visitors -> %

Anyone that is NOT in the green is vulnerable. In other words, 64% of our visitors still need to update their Flash Player. Download it here

Update: Currently we have been removed from the filter and hotmail users should be able to receive email, yay.

Our website got a new IP address when we upgraded our server and we started to have many email complaints about not receiving email from FFXIAH.com when trying to register and reset passwords. The problem is only occurring for users with the following email accounts: hotmail.com, live.com, and msn.com. We contacted Microsoft Support and we found out our new IP was on a blacklist of spammers called SmartScreen. Unfortunately they won’t just take us off the list, we have to do several things to ‘prove’ our server is a legitimate mail server. So basically here is the loop I am in:

1. Me: Hey, take me off SmartScreen
2. MS: OK you gotta do this
3. Me: Ok I did it
4. Repeat

Most of the time is waiting for Microsoft to reply. Right now this is my #1 priority and hopefully will be resolved soon! I know this has been very frustrating for many of you. This issue is affecting over 12,000+ registered users.

Corresponding Forum Post: http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/?topic_id=373

Some of you may have experienced erratic behavior from ffxiah.com in the past few days. We recently got new servers to replace the old ones. The logic behind our move was to make the website faster and for data redundancy. We ran into some unexpected problems during the move but most of the major issues have been resolved. I’d like to thank Cliff for spending several late night hours helping me with the transfer.

Website Bugs
Post any website bugs on our Forum. I know screenshot submission isn’t working right now. I’ve had some reports about not receiving emails when trying to register or reset passwords. I will try to get to these asap.

Tech Specs
If case you are one of those that are curious about the tech specs of the servers here they are. Both web server and database server have the same specs.

• Intel Xeon 3210 Quad Core Kentsfield Processor
• 2x 146GB, 10K RPM SCSI/SAS Hard Drive, RAID1
• 4096 MB RAM

Old server specs:

• Intel Xeon 3060 Dual Core Conroe Processor
• 1x 146GB, 10K RPM SCSI/SAS Hard Drive
• 2048 MB RAM

ThePlanet.com
Our hosting company was and still is ThePlanet.com. They have competitive prices and excellent customer service. They even upgraded our server configuration free due to technicalities with our initial specifications. Our old database server has an uptime of 455 days. That is about how long we had it on there.

This feature is obviously inspired by the xbox360 achievement points system. If you’ve seen FFXI’s breakdown of 1000 points you’d know how the achievements are ridiculously unrewarding. A relic weapon is equally rewarding as one 75 job and a 100 craft trumps all. You can read more about that here. We decided to come up with our own formula and award points to people that have made their SE LS Community Profiles public. This feature is still considered a “work in progress”. The exact formula will be posted in the future, but the basics aren’t hard to figure out.

Currently, Achievement Points are summed up from three areas. All 20 jobs, all crafts (including Fishing), and Relic Weapons(+Aegis+Gjallarhorn). Missions will probably be added in the future along with MAYBE some other items. I’d love to also do titles but it’s too difficult. Keep in mind any new achievements have to come from a source of verifiable data. The official Linkshell Community provides that.

The points are not updated in real-time, nor is your job/craft statistics. The ranking on the player pages are in this format: (27) (1). The first number is a rank across all servers based on achievement points. The number in parenthesis is your home server rank. If you’d like to see a listing of the Top 25 Overall or from a particular server you can do so here:

http://www.ffxiah.com/achievements.php

For now I’m happy with the current formula, you need to be proficient in all three areas to reach the top, so it is very difficult.

In other news I’ve expanded the Top Linkshells in the Relic section from 10 to 15. It started at 5 and moved up as more people opted in and participated. Also there are reportedly two more people to join the three relic club in the Top Characters listing.

By request there is now a Maat’s Cap list. It is not too unlike the Relic list, however, Maat’s Cap owners are collected in a few different ways. An FFXIAH user with verified character and a public LS Community profile can be added to the list automatically if they meet the requirements to have the Cap. If the cap is detected in the equipment box or the 15 Maat jobs are >= 66, then the character is added to the list. The last way to make it onto the list is by manual user submission. Any FFXIAH registered user with a verified character can add Maat’s Cap owners from their home server only. The Maat’s Cap list and submission form are located here:

http://www.ffxiah.com/item.php?id=15194

The Relic Calculator has been upgraded. It now has an option to exclude the last thirty ‘100′ pieces of currency from the final upgrade when doing the price calculation. Also, it has an option to only calculate for a single relic rather than all of them. It also gives you the price “in Fire Clusters” to upgrade each relic to satisfy your curiosity. =) A direct link to the Relic Calculator is here:

http://www.ffxiah.com/relic_calc.php