Amazing Neighbors

10 Years 10 Questions AggroChat Edition

Last night was another Saturday evening which means we recorded another episode of AggroChat. This week we were joined by Rae, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam who will hopefully be becoming a much more regular member of the cast. As per my post yesterday morning, my good friend Godmother is working on a thing for the 10th Anniversary of World of Warcraft. Last night we decided to skip our normal podcast and instead took up the Alternative Chat 10 Years 10 Questions survey. As a result we ran a bit longer than our normal cast, but since we will be without Kodra next week we wanted to push through all ten questions. I have to say I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and even though I know a lot of the information we talked about… I still found out a few interesting things in the process. I am hoping that we gave Godmother some usable content.

I am really happy she is doing this and I look forward to reading and listening to the end result.  I believe she has a master plan of doing a documentary podcast about all of this stuff and our responses.  While all of us are not really current WoW players, we all owe so much to the game including our friendships.  None of us would have known each other without this game and that is pretty crucial to all of us at this point.  As Kodra says during the cast, we have a lot of love for each other and it is entirely thanks to this game that we may or may not want to play anymore.  I figure that even among the former players we all have to give the game props for giving us so much in the process.

Amazing Neighbors

ffxiv 2014-08-09 17-32-46-316 I have to say that our trip through Final Fantasy XIV just keeps getting more charming.  In the 2.1 patch shortly after we quit they put in housing wards.  In these semi-instanced wards you have various plots of land that you can purchase for an exorbitant amount of money.  The interesting thing about this is that they become a sort of player made town as they have market boards, summoning bells and vendors on top of all of the player housing.  I wrote about this some time ago but we found an amazing plot of land in a very heavily built up ward in the Limsa Lominsa area called the Mists.  Just like we apparently lucked out on picking the right server we also apparently lucked out and picked one of the coolest wards.  Within moments of us plunking down our house we had neighbors welcoming us to the area.

Friday night however something even cooler happened.  It turns out that the other residents of the ward decided to create a neighborhood based linkshell.  Now we are constantly chatting and getting to know the other awesome members of our ward including the massive guild that lives up the hill from us.  It has been awesome to get to know everyone.  The above screenshot is me and a member of that guild randomly breaking out into the Manderville dance while standing around at the market board.  I took a bunch of screenshots because we were almost perfectly synchronized and it ended up pretty awesome to watch.  The little things like this in this game just make me so happy.

It is almost as though we stepped through a time machine and found the server community that assholes forgot.  Even as we have moved into harder content, the folks are still extremely chill and willing to work with the people who don’t know the fights.  The end result is that even when I have good reason to gripe at someone for failing miserably to do something… I find myself NOT saying anything, or instead being supportive because I just don’t want to do anything to damage this amazing environment.  The way people interact with each other reminds me of those early days of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot… when individual player reputations still mattered and everyone held other players up to higher standards.  I am so amazingly happy I decided to re-up Final Fantasy XIV.

Hard Modes with Friends

ffxiv 2014-08-09 23-58-19-757 Last night after the podcast we all decided to stick around and work on some hard modes.  I have to say we all kinda dreaded just how hard these might be, but in reality at the 55-60 overall gear score we were sitting out they were difficult but also very manageable.  I don’t want to get too much into the various strategies because one of the biggest joys for me is figuring these things out completely cold.  However I have to say I really enjoyed myself, and we managed to run Hard Mode Copperbell Mines and Hard Mode Brayfloxs Longstop.  In both cases the fights were challenging but after a bit of thinking on our feet we managed to push through and succeed.  I look forward to doing the other hardmodes because they were really rather awesome.

What makes them so cool is that unlike World of Warcraft heroics… these are entirely new dungeons.  When you step foot into Copperbell MInes for example, there are giant holes in the wall where the mobs from the first version popped out, as well as things like a broken elevator that are the results of your last trip there.  To make things even cooler the dungeon music has been changed slightly as well and is more akin to the heavy metal themes to the various primal fights.  The zone I absolutely cannot wait to do is Hard Mode Haukke Manor since the original version is this awesome Castlevania like romp through a Haunted Mansion.  The hard mode version absolutely has to be amazing, so maybe later this evening we can get that going.  For the time being I am absolutely eating up every moment of this game, and I still have a long list of things that I want to be doing.

#FFXIV #AggroChat #Blaugust

3 thoughts on “Amazing Neighbors”

Comments are closed.