One of the plights of the FAQ writer is the reader
email. In reading other FAQs, especially those by top-tier FAQ writers, I
was hearing about how these authors were receiving literally tens of thousands
of emails about their FAQs - sometimes for a single game. A disturbingly
high percentage of these messages lament problems already resolved within the
FAQ or cause some other emotion of annoyance and/or concern for mankind's
general mental prowess. They then state they simply did not have the time to
answer every question (although they somehow have time to write a FAQ for every
other big game within two weeks after its release, a practice which has kept
them on Gamefaqs' board of elite FAQ writers for the past four years even as the
standards for placing there have tightened).
Well, the number of emails I've received on the
topic of Final Fantasy III total roughly 500 as I type this. Even during
the guide's most popular times, when it was likely the most clicked on FAQ on
Gamefaqs (nearly 15,000 hits per day), during the mid-November gaming orgy when
FFIII was rubbing elbows with FFXII, Gears of War and Twilight Princess on the
Top Games list there, I got an average of five emails per day. These days,
the hit totals and emails have been cut by about 80% from that time. My
average time spent dealing with an email is roughly one minute (not counting
this feature).
So either my guide is simply more in-depth,
exhaustive and all-in-all question-answerier (i.e. better) than their guides or
they're full of shit. I'm willing to bet both are correct.
But that whole "A disturbingly high percentage ...
concern for mankind's general mental prowess" shit - that's no joke. The
bulk of the mail I've so far received for FFIII falls decidedly within this
classification. Granted, there are some legitimately intelligent moments
within these attempts to contact me, but not enough to renew any great faith in
humanity.
The emails are in white text with blue
backgrounds, my comments are not. They appear exactly how they've been
sent to me with a few insignificant alternations (removed the To field from the
header since they're all to my email address, removed columns awkward columns
and rows present by default by this mail provider, added a horizontal line for
increased legibility, changed background color to blue and text to white), but
the main course, the text, remains the same, completely unaltered.