FFXIAH.com

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

Forum is back up and it’s new! It can be found at www.ffxiah.com/forum. It is home grown by ffxiah to include everything we need and excluding things we don’t. It’s still new and haven’t had much testing so please excuse any errors you may encounter.

One important feature to keep in mind is that only registered users with a verified character can post at this time. You may post as any of your verified chars.

The forum has 3 groups “FFXI”, “FFXIAH.com” and “Servers”. I may add or subtract as the forum evolves.

It has been reported on numerous websites that several character’s accounts have been compromised. The intruders will change the password and/or credit card information so that the actual owners cannot log in and make it difficult to get their password reset through SquareEnix’s tech support. I will try to deliver you facts that I know in this post. I have been given lots of information from visitors and team members of FFXIAH. Communities have been reporting this incident as early as Dec 4th. I can’t be sure of the exact date. How the attackers gained access isn’t clear either mainly due to vast speculation from self-proclaimed information security experts.

Somepage.com
It has been reported and confirmed that ‘somepage‘ HAD a hidden iframe on their front page. I don’t know how long it was there nor if it was the prime source of all incidents. If you aren’t familiar with an iframe, it can load an external page that can contain malicious code that is hard to detect. There was indeed what appeared to be harmful obfuscated Javascript code that was identified as a RealPlayer exploit. This may only have affected users with a combination of vulnerable versions of RealPlayer installed and Internet Explorer. The iframe has been removed from the front page but the webpage’s admin might need some time to make sure their site is fully secure.

FFXIAH Advertising
FFXIAH has recently become a member of a new ad network. The ads would contain non-RMT companies, as opposed to Google’s Adsense. Some users of our site experienced intrusive advertisements that aggressively attempted to get the user to install anti-spyware software. I could not recreate this behavior myself so I couldn’t tell what the original advertisement was. I need to know this so I can report it to the ad network. We theorize that one of the flash based advertisements in the rotation contained code to forward the page. We do not believe this has anything to do with the recent FFXI account hijackings, just a mere coincidence in timing. We have researched and found that this is a general problem facing advertisers, publishers, and ad networks. Either way, the possibility that these ads being exposed to our users is unacceptable to us and we have suspended the new advertisements at the time being. The incident is more of a blanket attack on publishers and advertisers and not necessarily targeting FFXI accounts specifically:

http://www.dynamoo.com/diary/malware-scan-newbieadguide-com-hijack.htm
http://forums.coldfront.net/coldfront/1762-invasive-banner-ad-kolwiki-redirects-fakes-error-message.html?highlight=avsystemcare
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-514848.html
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/11/doubleclick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lBUQqufZWc

ChineseRMT
Lately we experienced anonymously posted links on the blog and forum that were quickly removed. At first they just appeared to be spam but they linked to sites with hidden code. This pattern has been reported on other sites and Wikis within the JP community. The ChineseRMT are very resourceful and motivated to steal virtual goods without fear of consequence. It is a very unfortunate but we can only play defense. All Internet Explorer users, please use Firefox (getfirefox.com). It is the single most easiest thing to do to protect yourself. If you don’t have Anti-Virus, I can recommend AVG free edition (http://free.grisoft.com/).

Forum
You may have noticed we have taken down our forum. Our logs show evidence of IPs originating in China blatantly attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in PHPBBv3 and earlier versions. It has been taken down as a precaution and may be down for the rest of the month of December. Possible alternatives are being discussed, including possibly just a simple in-house model.

Let me know if anyone can supply me with additional information. I especially want to hear from people that had problems with advertisements on FFXIAH.com. Send me an email at ffxiah@gmail.com. Thanks in advance.

Few upgrades to the site, and some general news for our users:

• We’ve added a comprehensive Guild Pattern section to the site, which should prove useful for our crafting members. This is a first-pass implementation, so any input is still welcome over on our forum.
• New items from the WotG patch were added to the item tree and data collection. However, some of the synth recipes involving the new items have not yet been added. We’re working on it.
• The Shoutbox feature was removed from the Community section of the site until we can resolve some server load and security issues with it. It seemed fairly popular, so we hope to bring it back soon.
• We removed the process of linking your ffxiah.com account with your forum account. While this was originally intended as a convenience to our users, it ended up being simply confusing. Users now have to register forum accounts independent of their main site account.

We’ve also had a lot of questions about certain aspects of the site that we felt would be better answered via a FAQ in both languages. This should be ready to publish soon.

In the meantime however, some people have expressed interest in how ffxiah.com calculates its profit/loss numbers on synth recipes, so I thought I would take a moment to clear up any misconceptions.

All item prices are done using the median price for that item. Calculating median prices on-demand is a very intensive operation, so prices are computed by taking the median only once per real-life day. For items that are stackable, we either use the single item sale price or the price of a stack divided by 12, whichever is lowest. This is then multiplied by however many of those items are in the synth.

Because of this cached pricing system, clicking on a recipe can sometimes report numbers that are slightly off from those reported by directly looking up each individual item and doing the math yourself.

-Jaerik

FFXIAH.com adds a relic section for those that are curious or bored.

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

The data is collected from a number of places such as BlueGartrLS.com and ffxiclopedia.org. We also have people that contact us with info. So thanks to FFXIAH.com users and especially the communities at BlueGartr and FFXIclopedia.

The relic data includes the following:

Top Relics
This page shows how much of each relic item was made. The most popular with over 200 reported is the Aegis Shield which isn’t surprising. The Mandau dagger is the most common relic weapon.

Top Characters
Characters with the most relics. If you ever thought getting one relic would be impossible. Try getting 3. These 4 characters reportedly did: Ifrit.Ingram, Midgardsormr.Lei, Midgardsormr.Miyuu, and Gilgamesh.Ostrea.

Top Servers
Servers with the most relics.

Top Linkshells
Linkshells with the most relics. Big asterisk on this section. We don’t have an accurate database of what linkshells characters are in. Currently we only have user data entered, but it is still interesting to see what linkshells show up at the top of this list.

Relic Calculator
Use this to check how much Gil it would cost to get a particular relic if you were to buy the dynamis currency at a static price.