Race to the Bottom

Bel Folks Stuff #6 – A Good Friday with Liore

Listen to the Episode Here

I had these grand ideas about having two episodes during the month of March to make up for the fact that I missed a February episode.  That never quite worked out.  I had a handful of people that I had talked to but scheduling never quite worked out since I try really hard to squeeze these episodes in whenever my wife is otherwise busy.  With the weekly schedule of AggroChat and the various guest spots I end up getting called on to do, it means she is having to bend her time around me quite often, that I try my best not to make this podcast also do that.  As such I tend to schedule people on a whim, and I am super thankful that the amazing Liore was amicable about that sort of timing.  I literally talked to her Thursday to see if she was available, and we recorded on the afternoon of Good Friday since we were both off work.

Liore and I have known each other for what feels like forever.  She’s been in my guilds, I’ve been in her guilds… and for a period of time in Rift we raided together multiple times a week.  During all of this time we have forged an unconventional friendship.  It feels like we end up on opposite ends of so many discussions, but at the end of the day we do so with the greatest of respect for the other.  During this podcast we talk about all sorts of things, but one thing in particular we highlight because we found it extremely humorous.  Both of us have been getting commentary from the community about a supposedly rivalry between the two of us since we do similar columns now for gaming websites that are technically in competition with each other.  I had a blast spending the afternoon talking with Liore, and had I allowed myself to do so I could have easily spent another full hour chatting away.  I always love it when the conversation flows naturally.

Race to the Bottom

Yesterday we saw the release of the WoW Token out into the wild, and the demand for gold greatly outstripped the availability of people snatching up subscription time.  At the beginning however it was skewing the other direction.  The token started at a prematurely low 30,000g and I watched it yesterday raise up to 35,000g before taking a big dive into the territory that it is currently sitting.  Someone thought ahead and created an excellent stock market like tracking system on https://wowtoken.info/ and you can see the bottom starting to drop out.  Thing is…  most players already have an active subscription for the moment.  It was not until the end of the month when in other games with similar systems we started to see the demand finally climb again.  My advice, just like Wildstar is to snatch up these cheap tokens now because once the system matures a bit you will be paying significantly more per month of subscription.

The reason why I feel like this is the largest benefit of a system like this is it removes the temptation of players to turn to less than legitimate sources of currency.  When I wrote about this a month ago, my research at the time indicated that in the aftermarket this same $20 was buying players around 100,000 gold.  This means the legitimate route now costs you roughly five times as much as the illegal market, which is still going to be a huge draw for some players.  The WoW Token is a failure for Blizzard unless they can squash the third party gold sellers by starving them of their market.  Right now the token is new… and a lot of people are trying it out.  Given a month or two of sanity they will realize that it is greatly overpriced.  I guess for me, I won’t be doing this token unless I can buy a couple and get a big ticket item like an expedition yak, one of those things I have always wanted but was much too far out of my price range.  I have a feeling that this is going to be the case for your average customer.   If by the end of the month we do not see a massive spike in the price of a single token… then I will be extremely surprised.

End of an Expansion

Now for the hardest part of my morning… how exactly do I talk about the wrapping up of the storyline in Final Fantasy XIV 2.55 without giving any spoilers.  I chose a very careful screenshot out of the stack of them that I took because this one really doesn’t say much about what is going on.  In the most spoiler free fashion I can, I am going to talk about my impressions of the events.  I have to say Final Fantasy XIV knows how to end an expansion.  This is hands down the most satisfying and at the same time most anxious ending to an expansion I have ever experienced.  In games like World of Warcraft everything is generally resolved at the end, and all the loose bits tied up… because the intent is for that expansion to live on its own forever without actually continuing the storyline in the next expansion.  In Final Fantasy XIV…  every aspect of this closing means massive ramifications that will hopefully be resolved as we travel into Ishgard.  Instead of wrapping up the lose ends neatly… for each one that is concluded two more ends stand open waiting to be explored.

The awesome thing is… this game has proven that it WILL actually explore them.  How frustrating has it been in the past as games have hinted at things, that never saw fruition.  After all there are still I believe three portals under Wyrmrest temple that go nowhere, that will likely NEVER go anywhere because the narrative has moved on past the original plans.  I expect that each event that happens during the closing of “A Realm Reborn” is going to factor heavily into a future storyline chain.  It was a pretty shocking and brutal conclusion, but it makes me damned happy that I am playing this game.  I quite literally did not see this one coming, and I highly suggest you push hard so that you can see this content before the expansion.  I pushed through in part because my friend Ashgar said that the trailer that was releasing this Friday supposedly spoils some parts of this impact.  As the credits rolled they showed a number of scenes from the past block of content… and I have to say sometimes you lose sight on just how much we accomplished during “A Realm Reborn”.  I am extremely excited to see what happens as we turn our eyes “Heavensward”.