It’s that time of year and I am happy to announce that, for the third year running, we are going to be holding an FC raffle! This is free for all FC members who were with us at the start of 17th December and have been active within the last 30 days.
Previously we’ve had 5 days where the prize has been 1 million Gil (each day), but this year we are extending it to 7 days! As before all runner ups will get 100,000 Gil and anyone who didn’t win anything at all will still get a 50,000 Gil consolation prize at the end!
For more information, please see this years special page for the event!
Don’t miss out, enter without delay and pick your (hopefully) lucky number!
It’s been a few months since the FC house exterior was changed and with the start of the Moonfire Faire in-game event, now seemed like a good time to try out the “Florist’s Walls”!
It’s quite tall so unfortunately I can’t quite get it all in!
I’m sure you’ll agree it’s very different to the “Forge’s Wall” skin we were previously usin and it’s much more colourful! Here’s some other pictures from different angles:
Chocobo stable, fountain, flower stall (retainer inside it) and garden toolshed at the bottom leftAnother flower stall, one of our two striking dummies and the new pool areaGeneral overview of the gardenGarden plots are round the back out the way and also we have this… so we can get on the roof!“I can see London from here!” – Moby, SSX Tricky, 2001I’m so far up, everyone looks like ants!Chilling out in the new pool area at night
Finally, we rarely manage to actually get everyone in the same place at once and today, is no different, but here’s a picture of some FC members that I managed to rope into posing for a picture!
This week was quite a big deal for our Free Company as we turned four years old! Huzzah! So naturally we celebrated with some party games and some Gil prizes!
I made everyone taking part wear an “Altered Woolen Cowl” dyed in the colours of our FC and it caused quite a few comments from other players wondering what was going on!
We’re not a cult, honest!
So as in previous years we warmed up by climbing the small tower that’s in Shirogane (where our FC house is). A few of our members were familiar with this so it didn’t take them too long to get to the top and the first three people won prizes.
Jump!
After this we moved to Limsa Lominsa Upper Decks where I had 5 alt characters hidden. Everyone started off at the Aftcastle and then spread out to try and find the hidden characters. The first three people to find each character won a prize. This didn’t take too long, because it’s pretty hard to hide in the Upper Decks, but I think it still went well and everyone had fun!
“I bring this meeting to order…”
We even managed to get a quick group photo of most of the people playing, although sorry that it has gotten dark by this point:
Some of the Crystal Crusaders
After this we all moved to Horizon to play Lawn Darts. This involves having a waymark on the floor and everyone throwing themselves off a cliff, like a lemming, with the intention of trying to land as close to the waymark as possible. People had three tries each and scored 1 point for landing on the edge of the waymark and 2 points for dead centre. Scores were tallied at the end and highest scores won!
We had 21 people play this game and I was a little worried that it’d be chaos with everyone jumping at once, however, as requested everyone lined up and jumped in an orderly fashion and we got through the game without too many problems!
Is anyone else having flashbacks to “Raubahn Savage”?Geronimo!
After this we headed back to the FC house for a quiz. It was mostly about the FC itself and there were a few “go and count these objects” type games. These all had a prize for each correct answer. I always worry that it’s unfair to non-native English speakers as well as those who can’t type as fast, but everyone still seemed to have fun.
Inside the FC house
After the quiz we had a quick raffle for some bigger Gil prizes. To generate the raffle numbers we had everyone do a “/random” in chat and noted down their number. They had one chance to draw another /random and then the prizes were drawn (also using /random). The closest person to that number won.
One of our FC members, Blithesome Carl, is a talented artist and offered a raffle prize of a drawing of someones character as a raffle prize. L’ireiya Tia won this prize and I look forward to seeing the final drawing!
Oh and while we were getting the numbers… it involved more Raubahn Savage queuing:
We’re not all British, but we still like to queue!
After the raffle we moved to the PVP area and split up into groups for some PVP tournaments. We had one for melee DPS, tanks, ranged physical DPS, healers and magical DPS.
The DPS fights all went rather smoothly, but in the end we had to call a draw to the tank and healer fights. The tank fight was going on for about half an hour, long after we’d called it a draw. It was impressive to watch though!
It’s time to duel!
After that we called it a day and I went to tally up the prizes and send everyone what they had won!
Thank you all for coming, I hope that you had as much fun as I did and thanks for all being a part of such a great Free Company! Here’s to another amazing year! Here’s the list of prizes and who won how much!
Name
Gil won
Meow Chow
1,300,000
Nekomi Hounami
1,300,000
Ceyri Noca
1,200,000
Lex Miahto
800,000
Lyallon Estaqur
800,000
Rydia Nishiyama
550,000
Sylvia Flutterstar
550,000
Wom Blorm
550,000
Blithesome Carl
500,000
Terazoic Willowstar
500,000
Elydith Nelhah
350,000
Geralt R'ivia
350,000
Roy Yunomi
300,000
Driess Raronek
250,000
Kamisato Ayato
250,000
L'ireiya Tia
250,000
Erza Keso
100,000
Lucy Evercraft
100,000
Primatus Soprey
100,000
Sirradez Halvic
100,000
Dacent Valeroyaniox
50,000
Gianix Giari
50,000
And just to finish up here’s a random picture of us all mounting up in our “party outfits”!
We’ve had the “Shirogane Castle Walls” on our FC house since we bought the house back in 4.1, all the way back in October 2017 and it felt like time for a change. When 5.5 was released it added some new items, including the “Forge’s Walls” and now that’s what our house is using:
Looks great doesn’t it? It’s very different from the previous Shirogane Castle, but a change was definitely overdue.
The main reason we hadn’t changed the skin earlier was because we had a “Stump Elevator” setup which allowed us to get onto the roof of the house and also to glitch “inside” the house as well. The first time people saw that it always made them say “What the…” and that never got old!
Sadly, changing the skin around actually broke that and the stump which should have been on the ground, floated into the air, breaking the elevator as you can see in this picture below:
It took many hours of trying to get the elevator to work in the first place as it had to be pixel perfect, but I’m actually relieved it broke. It means that now we can change the house skin more frequently without having that stump elevator holding us back. It was great, but we had it for well over 3 years, we got our use out of it!
Wow has it really been a year since we updated this site? Ouch.
I’m glad to say that the Free Company is still up and running and we’re well over 3 years old now. Although the faces change from time to time, I’d like to think it’s still somewhere fun for everyone. Oh and yes, we still do treasure map runs every single Sunday!
So like last year, we will be doing another raffle for FC members and the total prize money will be at least 5 million Gil! The prize amount will vary depending on how many runner-ups there are, but last year the total prize money was just under 7.5 million!
For more information, please see this years special page for the event!
Don’t miss out, enter without delay and pick your (hopefully) lucky number!
Our raffle has now ended and the prizes have been handed out! We had 5 main winners who won 1 million Gil each, but also 13 runner-up prizes of 100,000 Gil each. Finally, the 23 people who didn’t win anything at all received 50,000 Gil each as a consolation prize. This brings the total prize money to 7,450,000 Gil.
I’m very proud to say that our Free Company is now two years old and to celebrate, we had a party with lots of games and prizes! We also officially launched this website!
Climbing the lighthouse in Shirogane
First we started with some jump challenges, specifically the lighthouse type building in Shirogane and then the Bokairo Inn in Kugane. We didn’t try the massive Shiokaze Hostelry because we didn’t have all day and there were other games to play!
Climbing the Bokairo Inn in Kugane
It didn’t take too long for 3 people to reach the top of each so after that moved onto “Hide and Seek”. I’d hidden 4 characters in an area (Limsa Lominsa Upper Decks in this case) and it was the first three people to find each who won a prize. Some were found quite quickly, others took a few more minutes.
About to start playing Hide and Seek
Then we played three games of what I’ve been calling “Lawn darts”. We climb a high structure, I place a marker on the ground and everyone has 3 attempts to try and land as close as possible to it, 2 points if they’re dead centre, 1 point if they’re in it at all. Highest score wins the round. Weplayed this at Amarissaix’s Spire (East Shroud), Witchdrop (Coerthas Central Highlands – this was the hardest one!) and The Descent (Middle La Noscea).
Next it was back to the FC house for a pop quiz (first to shout out the correct answer wins). Some questions outdoors, some indoors and I think it went pretty well!
Then we headed off to Wolves’ Den Pier for a mini PVP tournament. We had two separate tournaments, one for melee DPS and another for ranged/casters.
Setting up the mini PVP tournaments
Finally we headed back to the FC house for the raffle. While we were getting started at the beginning of event I had everyone generate a random number with /random and I started to use /random repeatedly. Whoever was closest got to pick a prize from our prize pool! The final few prizes were raffled off randomly to whoever had the closest to the prize pool.
Drawing the raffle and giving out prizes
Then the scores from all the events were tallied and the we had a grand prize which was won by Momo Blakes. This is a drawing of his character by our very talented Blithesome Carl so I look forward to seeing that at somepoint in the future!
Thank you to everyone who came today, I think it went really well and I hope you all had a fun time. Thanks for making the FC what it is and I look forward to another year of fun with you all!
