Since last week, the high-end players of Final Fantasy XIV have been involved in a race. The best raid teams have been slamming their heads into the wall known as The Omega Protocol (Ultimate). After a stumble yesterday, it seems we finally have a winner for the World First clear.
Neverland, a team on the European server Chaos, announced that they’ve cleared the fight on Twitter. The clear came at 2:23am EST on February 1, 2023 (11:23pm PST on January 31, 2023). Congratulations to Neverland for the win, even if it looks like everyone died in the attempt! Right behind Neverland were Aether Group 3 for the North American server Aether.
Neverland Clear pic.twitter.com/ryl0ycf2Kt
— Zep (@ZeppeMonado) February 1, 2023
This means that the overall clear time for The Omega Protocol (Ultimate) was 7 days and 21 hours. That’s longer than the last three Ultimate encounters, The Weapon’s Refrain (Ultimate), The Epic of Alexander (Ultimate), and Dragonsong’s Reprise (Ultimate). According to the data at FFLogs.com, it took them 1,032 pulls to finish off the boss. Whew.
Technically, there was a clear prior to Neverland and Aether Group 3. Unnamed_ from the Japanese Gaia server cluster were the first raid team to clear the fight. Unfortunately, video evidence released after the fact showed that the team used third-party tools, which are generally prohibited at all times, but definitely prohibited during the World First race. As such, the team had their achievements stripped from them following some stern words from FFXIV creative producer Naoki Yoshida.
That casts a black mark upon this World First, in the same way there were issues with the previous race for Dragonsong Reprise (Ultimate). At the time, Neverland was the team that cleared that encounter first, but streams clearly showed the team using third-party tools to automate callouts during the fight. Yoshida congratulated the team, but stepped in with a strong statement about the use of third-party tools afterward.
Given that, some members of the community are waiting for a full video of the encounter before showering Neverland with their laurels. Overall, the sentiment is that the use of additional tools has soured the races altogether, since many now assume the best teams are using them all the time. Still, it’ll be some time before we have to revisit this discussion again; maybe by then the competing teams will have learned their lesson.
