CoP Conundrums

One week ago, TrueRune took on the Snoll Tzar, and emerged victorious. With the Snoll Tzar's defeat, the stage was set for us to take on the Airship battle, arguably one of the hardest BCNM style fights in the game, and following that, one more BCNM fight before finally getting Al'Taieu access.

Unfortunately, defeating the Snoll Tzar would be the start of some new problems.

The TrueRune CoP group has changed a lot from when we first set foot in Promyvion, long, long ago. Because of the rather laid back nature at which we do things, in addition to our real life schedules, we progress through the CoP missions at a much slower rate compared to everybody else. That being said, only Akanea, Saoirse, Seraphpdh, and myself were with the group from the very beginning. We'd since picked up Chummy, who left his CoP static around the Three Paths in order to join us, and finally, picked up Tumble, whose own CoP static ditched him at the (you guessed it) Snoll Tzar battle, electing to pick another job that would "contribute better" to that particular fight.

When we picked up Tumble, he had already cleared all of the Three Paths except for the Snoll Tzar fight, and we figured that by grabbing him, we could finally have the entire CoP group be all-TrueRune, as opposed to "mostly-TrueRune-with-some-outsiders". We fought the Snoll Tzar four times before beating it in one of the most well-executed plans I've seen in a while, and we were raring to go onward with CoP.

Except that due to real life, Seraphpdh needed to take a break for this weekend, so we let that slide and figured we'd continue the next weekend.

Then, one or two days ago, Akanea sends me a /tell saying that Tumble was doing the airship battle without us. He, for obvious reasons, was not very happy with this, and was actually mad to the point where he almost kicked Tumble out of the LS right there and then. I wasn't all-too-happy myself, but I figured having someone go through the Airship battle to get a sense of what was going on, and what we should prepare for, would be a good thing. After all, as they say, knowledge is power.

Well, thirteen tries later, Tumble manages to clear the airship. I was happy for him, yet, rather unsettled at the recent turn of events, but decided to hold my tongue to see what would come next. Just to reiterate, all this was a few days ago.

Today, I logged in and said my helloes to the linkshell, when Tumble tells me that he beat Promathia last night, and is now getting the cutscenes to pick up his Tamas Ring. Thankfully, Akanea wasn't on the linkshell at the time, otherwise, goodness knows what would've happened, but suffice to say, I was not impressed.

While, yes, I suppose I should be happy for Tumble in that he has cleared CoP and gotten his Tamas Ring, I can't help but feel used, perhaps even exploited at the recent turn of events. When you, a White Mage, ditched by your CoP static at one of the hardest BCNM battles in the CoP storyline get picked up into our CoP group and through our combined efforts, clear said BCNM, your way of thanking us is with a "Hey guys, I beat Promathia last night?"

Of course, he says he will come back and help us, everybody does. In fact, we've had a number of offers from friends who have already and since cleared the CoP missions to come to our aid should we need it. But that isn't the point. For one, whatever happened to group unity, of sticking it out through to the end? That communal sense of wonder as the CoP storyline unfolds? We may not be the most optimal of jobs, and I could've circumvented all this by getting some of my other, high-level friends together and just powering through the CoP missions, but all for what? I wanted to complete CoP with this group of friends, and to that end, I expect everyone to stick together.

Admittedly, as I said, we aren't exactly blasting our way through the CoP missions, but if that wasn't your cup of tea, don't join us in the first place.

This creates a lot of dilemmas for us now. For one, because Tumble has now cleared CoP, CoP missions are no longer a priority. That is to say that if there is something else going on that concerns him, he will (understandably) want to go do that something else instead. Secondly, it is difficult to try and find someone else who has not only cleared the Snoll Tzar, but not the Airship, but is also willing to stick with us to the very end, to the end of CoP.

Of course, I could very well be mistaken about Tumble, and perhaps in the future, he really will come back and help us out through CoP. I am very dubious of this though, after all, how many missions do we want to do more than once? Especially the difficult, time consuming CoP missions?

I guess all that's left now is to see what happens.