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 come on in teams. Team A, 4-6 PM, Team B, 6-8 PM. You've clearly found out that this is going to take an insane amount of time. Withdraw and plan for this contingency.
You speak as if you're a man that understands MMOs.

As such, I'll assume you know MMO players. Which means you KNOW they pushed themselves this far for the sake of being first. The stupid, idiotic internet idea of first. First post, first YouTube vid of Dragonforce, first person to kill this boss. This was, without a doubt, one of the dumbest things a crew of gamers have ever done. As such, people like myself and Ein don't give them much credit to "stratergize", because they already showed themselves to not be able to think about the big picture. They lost their strategy and their heads about 6 hours into this I'd bet, and were going on straight pride.

I never did HNM's in FFXI. Only got my white mage to 70 then unlocked Fenrir and started leveling my SMN. Then I quit the game when my MNK buddy did a server switch with his LS. So i didn't know HNMs had enrages. I hope they don't dumb the encoutner down too much though. I love how FFXI has "unbeatable" bosses.

I am of the opinion that no single event in a game should take more than the length of a movie. So in other words, keep your 3+ hours shit out of my games.I found the MGS4 intermissions to be the maaaaaximum I could take in one sitting and I cannot even begin to imagine having to fight some phoney interwebs monster for more than 3h in one sitting.

Oh i read how it went down. I've seen how it has different forms. Point being maybe they should have tried something different. i can think of a bunch of things to try different... Hmm lets see.The monster has 19 forms, 20 counting the final form. There are 20 jobs classes in FFXI. I played EQ for years, and in EQ there were a set of bosses that would ressurect themselves if the final blow wasnt dealt by a certain job.

It would call a quote right before it died, & was a ta certain percent of health, that would hint which job needed to deal the final blow. Maybe having atleast one person from each job present to FFXI Gil rotate in and out of the alliance to deal that blow or something. Maybe that job will do more dmg to it than normal people.Another guess, there are mobs in the game called Mammets that have the ability to change jobs.

 You can stop them form job changing by using a certain item on them which hinders them quite a bit. Maybe there is a item they are missing. Who knows.My point being, ZNM fights are not straight up fights. They are almost all a type of encounter at the higher tiers that require a special strategy. Having gotten that far they should have realized that and started thinking outside the box.

I swear they must teach the phrase "Do themselves a mischief" in whatever games journalism training camp that they all seemingly get sent to. It's everywhere in the British media and now it's here on Kotaku as well.But yeah, bosses change, gear improves. Hell, there's that fantastic video of a raid of mages circumventing the ridiculously extended Ragnaros boss fight in WoW by just hammering him to defeat in less than 60 seconds.

I imagine with the new level cap, Raggy can be brought down like any common mob and we'll get fantastic "Paladin Solo's Ragnaros" vids. I like the idea however of say allowing the lower end guildies to combat bosses around the world to weaken the big raider boss to the point of being defeatable. Sounds like a great way to involve the community without turning it into a Gates of An'Quiraj grind.

 seriously? takes the form of other known monsters - wow what a cop out! if i'm gonna square off with some boss monster for 18 motherf*cking hours at LEAST let it look cool and unique!  Well, you've seen the mass reaction to the mess; no boss should take 18 hours. Why plan for a contingency that shouldn't reasonably exist?

Not to mention the colossal nightmare that would be logistics if you tried to get that many people into shifts...not only because of the boss' threat table, but also from the standpoint of establishing who gets drops when it dies. What if the first shift is still asleep when shift 4 manages to kill it? Seems kind of lopsided, no?

maybe it's just me, but I'd find the logistics and planning of the fight FFXI Gil and the scheduling and the divvying up the goods to be much more entertaining than the fight itself. The knowledge that I orchestrated as large an undertaking as that would be quite the ego shot for me. But now we're just getting into personal tastes, completely off the issue.On a slightly related tangent, perhaps this boss is NOT MEANT to be beaten? QED- Chupon, FF6. You were not meant to beat Chupon, and were only able to if you got lucky with one of the one hit kills.