So, the big day of the Final Fantasy XIV CE release is almost upon us, so I feel it's probably a good time to reiterate a bit of info to make sure it's on your mind when you're creating your characters on Wednesday!

First off, we're going to be sticking with the Palamecia server for release. NOT Figaro. Figaro is going to be overcrowded, and is going to have a much larger-than-normal Japanese population. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't speak Japanese, and neither do most of you. :P Plus, it was pretty good to us during Open Beta, so there's that.

Secondly... we're NOT going to be forming the Linkshell until after the Standard Edition release. This is to give everyone a fair shot at joining. (though we will be holding spots for those of you who joined the LS during Open Beta... for a time) That said, we'll probably wind up having an invite party, meeting up somewhere in the game world at a particular time, and getting everyone into the LS that wants to be. More info on this will be posted next week.

Last, all future info will be posted at the Linkshell's official forums, located at www.veravitae.com. Go ahead and sign up, (We ask that you use your character's full name if at all possible... and if you don't know it yet, don't worry - you can change it once you create it.) introduce yourself and let us get to know ya. Only reason that's necessary is because Square has set the LS maximum as 128 people. You can join multiple shells, of course, but there's still going to be some manner of separation after 128 people. I'm not happy about it, but hey - whatcha gonna do.

See you in Eorzea!

Update: Thanks to our forum's very own resident CSS guru, Baghead, the site now works on IE7 without issue. The real kick in the nuts? His fix took literally 20 seconds to implement:

"Try switching to absolute positioning for .comicback and then change top from -47px to about 107px."

Thanks for making me feel like a total douche, Baghead. THANKS. :)

(In my defense, I wrote the CSS for this over a year ago, and I'm much better with CSS layout now, but was too far along in the design process to want to stop and rewrite all the layout from scratch. It SHOULD happen, mind you... it just didn't. In any case, thanks Baggy.)

Hi Guys! Just thought I'd take a quick moment to throw up some screenshots of the more common website errors and explain the issues behind 'em, so you don't think you're crazy or anything. :)

This right here is gonna be your most common error. If you're seeing something like the image above, it could be a variety of things... but most of them boil down to "your browser is poop." For starters, that's how the page currently looks in IE7. Now, I know a lot of people don't really have the option of upgrading past IE7, like at their workplace where the IT department puts a stranglehold on new web browsers. It is because of you sad few that I WILL be trying to find the appropriate CSS hacks needed to position everything correctly... but as a rule, putting in CSS hacks just stinks. All those years ago when I made that whiny rant about how IE was killing the web... that's what I mean. They couldn't be bothered to adhere to web standards, and this kind of thing is the result. So, if you DO have the option of upgrading past IE7, I implore you to do so, even if I find all the needed hacks to make things work. We need to wipe that browser off the face of the planet. Even Microsoft has agreed that IE6 and IE7 are problematic. (And don't think I'm an MS hater - I love Windows 7, and IE8 is fine, while IE9 sounds extremely promising.

So, aside from IE7 users, a lot of IE8 users have been seeing the above image as well... this could be due to having the rendering engine kicked over to either IE7 mode, or to compatibility mode. Hit F12, and at the top of the window that pops up, you'll see where it says browser mode... set that to IE8 regular, and everything should render fine. So far, I haven't seen this error come from anything but these two user types, so I'm thinking it's confined to IE.

If you're still seeing this, even after I changed the name of the CSS file, it means you somehow still have the old CSS file cached. 9 times out of 10, a Shift-Refresh or a Shift-Control-Refresh will solve this error. If not, view source, click on the CSS link near the top of the page, and refresh THAT. Then go back to the page and hit refresh, and you should be right as rain.

I'll probably add to this as other errors come in, but those are the big ones right now. :)