Final Fantasy XI: Moblin Maze Mongers

Yesterday I went to visit the goblin who makes your bag bigger to see if I had enough rep to upgrade my bag size. (I don't, though my FFXIV authenticator worked so I have 30 more house slots.) I talked to the other NPCs in the room and one of them filled my inventory with junk dealing with Moblin Maze Mongers. Talk about counter-productive! I looked into what was going on a little more and it turned out I could use 3 of the 5 items he gave me as though they were spell scrolls to learn them forever. 1 of the 5 was a key item so it didn't take up any space anyway so I was left with just 1 item taking up space which isn't so bad. The question then remained: what are these things for?

It turns out with one of the expansions they added the ability for players to build their own random instances. You use the items given to you by this NPC to design the parameters for a dungeon and then you pay 100gil to have your party teleported to that dungeon. Beat the dungeon in a 30 minute time limit to get a reward.  Oddly enough the dungeons aren't limited to just beating up monsters, either. There's a fishing dungeon where your goal as a party is to gather more fish than a group of NPCs does. There's a crafting dungeon where your goal is to sneak around mining/logging/herbing stuff to craft stuff within the time limit. You can sneak around the monsters or you can beat them up since they drop crafting materials too. There's a twinky boss dungeon where you just fight a big bad. There's a stealthy dungeon where you get some disguises and have to loot treasure without getting obliterated by super powerful patrols. (Solid Snake Cardboard Box? Yes!) Perhaps most interesting is there's a dungeon where your goal is to twink out a level 1 NPC so that he can beat a pre-determined boss fight. You can't help him during the boss fight but you can spend most of the 30 minutes helping him do quests and kill monsters to obtain experience, loot, and possibly even change his class. And if you just want to beat up some dudes there are 3 different types of dude dungeons. A short one with two rooms of dudes. One where waves of dudes keep pouring into one room. And a huge one with multiple floors where you can abort between floors for a smaller reward if you're running out of time.

I want to give these things a try but unfortunately this is an MMO and therefore good things come in time-sunk packages. They started off by giving me the Maze Voucher for just the first type of maze (fight two rooms of level appropriate dudes). Winning that maze will give everyone in the party 8 'moblin marbles' among other rewards. For 100 marbles I can buy a voucher for one of the other types of mazes. I can only start one maze per earth day so if I was soloing this stuff it would be a couple weeks before I could try any other maze. Of course I probably can't solo it anyway, so that's probably moot. The main reward from the first maze is bonus experience. Each mob you kill is worth 50% experience when you kill them and 100% experience in a treasure chest should you kill all the mobs which sounds nice but I probably need close to a full group to win. (If I want the xp, anyway. I'm sure Tom and I can duo it since the mobs level is keyed off of the lowest level person in the party.)

But that's just to get new vouchers. You can customize each maze by adding in a bunch of tetris shaped pieces (called runes) with the voucher before you hand it in. Examples of such runes are Rune 005 "Lizard" which causes the monsters you fight in the maze to be lizards (good if you have a weapon strong against lizards I guess) or Rune 102 "Trial By Numbers" which makes everything harder by releasing more monsters or making the opposing fishers catch more fish. Runes that increase the difficulty of the maze would also increase the rewards given for winning. There looks to be 119 different runes which can be obtained either by buying them with marbles or in the chest you get when you beat a maze. I start with 2. Rune 106 "Guidance Contract" which appears to just give you hints as to what you need to accomplish in your maze and Rune 109 "Sustenance Contract" which spawns a vendor in the first room of your maze to sell you temporary items or let you change the music in your maze.

This looks like a fun way to spend 3 hours with a group of 6 people but since I haven't seen anyone ever advertising for MMM groups I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to run it fully.