Hell Levels

Playing with Forge

Last night I spent a good chunk of time playing with Forge.gg and in doing so I forgot the problem from before… that it ultimately broadcast all of the audio from teamspeak.  However I did manage to pull a few nifty clips from one of the dungeon runs.  The problem being I have no clue how exactly to embed them in a site.  There are a bunch of features that I would love to see added to forge, namely the ability to easily get an embeddable snippet.  Similarly I would love to see a feature like Twitch and Hitbox have to export the video to youtube.  The big take away from last night is that I need to sort out how to extract teamspeak audio from my stream.  This has been on my ToDo list for some time but I have yet to actually sit down and do anything about it.  Which is somewhat unfortunate since I have several different tools installed right now that can essentially do the same thing.  I started working through a tutorial for something called Breakaway Audio this morning, but have been running into issues…  namely Teamspeak doesn’t seem to recognize the channel I set up for it.

Ultimately it would be awesome to solve this issue because I think I would end up streaming quite a bit more.  The big thing for me is that I have to choose between being sociable with my friends on teamspeak…  or streaming what I am doing.  However if I solve this issue… in truth I am probably not going to mess with Forge that much, and simply just use Twitch.  The always on functionality is cool…  but I have to disable FRAPs to make it work which takes away my primary means for collecting screenshots from games.  Generally speaking I disable whatever screenshot functionality exists in a game, and then use FRAPs to collect the screenshots in a generic “gameshots” folks, giving me a quick place to look for something I want each morning when I work on my blog post.  To get Forge to work however I have to completely exit out of this software and it did not seem to work with DxTory either which has always been my fallback general screenshoting software.  I still feel like maybe Forge isn’t a great fit for me, but I see a lot of people using it and enjoying it.

Hell Levels

ffxiv_06302015_202922 Once upon a time in Everquest there was the concept of a “Hell Level” meaning that there were certain levels that were far more difficult to get than others.  While back then these were literal mathematical break points where the experience needed was greater than the previous levels or the levels after.  However this term has continued on into MMORPGs as a frustrating patch in the leveling curve.  Right now it feels like 58 is a Hell Level because I very quickly hit another level wall, and really did not have much in the way of experience between it and the last one.  So I am currently running around in the Dravianian Hinterlands doing quests, in an attempt to make up the difference.  The problem being at this point I have yet to even reach the halfway point through level 58.  I am pretty sure that the folks that are sixty in the guild have simply chain run dungeons.

I could do that, but in truth I would rather just wait until people in the guild actually need runs.  Like last night I helped a guildie through The Vault, which is where all the forge.gg clips came from.  There is just something more satisfying for me to be tanking for friends.  I ultimately have this protective nature when it comes to my friends and family, and this makes tanking feel more “real” I guess for lack of a better word.  The community in Final Fantasy XIV is awesome, and I have seen nothing bad to speak of with the influx of people for Heavensward.  I absolutely could queue for dungeons and be just fine, because at this point I know the fights well enough to be able to explain them to anyone.  The problem being when I am tanking for strangers,  I feel like I have to put on the mask of “super tank” and be bigger and better in everything I do.  I feel like I am on stage in a way, but with my friends I can just chill and I don’t stress quite so much when aggro twitches or I am slow to turn the mobs.  I know no matter what I do in the dungeon they are still going to love me when the dungeon is finished.

Viva La Fake Friday

Today is my “Friday” for this week!  This is because here in the United States most of us are getting off Friday for the Independence Day holiday.  I opted to also take Thursday because we have things we are going to be doing over the break.  For whatever reason my family growing up always did some project over the fourth, and recently I started talking about wanting to rearrange my office to be a better set up for gaming and streaming.  My wife jumped on this and said we could do a lot of the little things we had been wanting to do over the extended break.  This escalated quickly and now we are having a small dumpster delivered in our front yard on Friday.  As a result I am going to be flipping a lot of my posting, meaning I will be writing posts each night and working on stuff around the house during the days.  The first of these is likely to begin tonight, but to you the reader… it will appear just like any morning post.

I always feel the need to be honest with my readers about my schedule, because I guess to me staging content ahead of time…  feels like it breaks the nature of my whole experiment.  The original idea was that I would post something every morning without fail, and for the most part I have done this.  Just sometimes the writing actually occurs the night before.  I hope I survive the next few days because the whirlwind of change is about to suck me in.  My hope is that when I exit on the other side I will have a much better space to do my PC gaming in, and if I can also sort out my audio issues…  my hope is to also begin streaming a hell of a lot more.  The next few days however might be a lot less talk of gaming… and a lot more talk of my failings at doing home improvement stuff.

10 thoughts on “Hell Levels”

  1. Email the devs about it! They’re really good about figuring out new things for the site and adding things. You just need to ask haha. Like I was trying to figure out a way to find clips based on certain games instead of just discover and until they can figure out something else they added in hashtags and it literally got added the next day. team@forge.gg It is still in beta and we’re there to help them make the site better but we have to speak up in order for that to happen. 😉

    But Forge isn’t for everyone which is totally understandable as well lol.

    As for me getting to 60 from 58? Yeah that definitely sucked and 58-59 was worse than 59-60 imo. Although I didn’t just chain run dungeons. I went back and did a lot of sidequests in different zones that I unlocked through Ishgard. I also did my hunt bills and did daily roulettes and challenge logs. 59-60 will be the same though sorry to say. And it’s worse the 2nd time around to 60, my MCH is sitting at halfway through 59 and yeah it’s frustrating haha. But getting flying in the last zone is a lot faster than the others so that probably had a lot to do with it as well lol.

  2. Yeah, my experience cleaves closely with pkudude99. I didn’t really run dungeons more than once barring a couple extra Ravanna runs. I did every single quest I could find, daily hunts, and the occasional FATE, and 58, 59 it generally dumped me within 5% of the next level.

    There aren’t enough quests that you can ignore any if you want to level through questing primarily.

  3. As I was leveling up, I didn’t leave any quests on the table — I did them all. I also did the daily hunts, and if I saw a FATE i’d do it as I was running by, though I quickly learned which ones only gave 8K xp for a win and learned to avoid them like the plague. I did the leveling dungeons as I came to them, but didn’t repeat them either.

    When I finally ran out of quests and the MSQ wanted me to be 58, I was within 90K xp of it, so I ran to Foundation and grabbed 3 leve quests, ran them, and they popped me over.

    Continuing in the same vein as before, I didn’t run out of quests again until the MSQ said “you need to be 60” and I was at 3,808,000 xp out of 3,888,000 xp needed. 2 levequests later I was 60. Yay!

    That said, going from 58 to 59 did feel like it took longer, even though it really was the same 6-ish hours as any other level. I started playing at 7 am on Saturday, had some distractions and whatnot, ate breakfast, etc, but hit 50 at 2:15 pm, so full time that I wasn’t playing was 7 hours, so subtracting distractions… 6-ish, just like any other, but evne so… it felt longer. Probably some perception issue, becuz 59-60 felt like it flew by, and it was also that same 6-ish hours.

    https://nomadicgamer.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/ffxiv-ding-60/

  4. I know that feeling. My favorite moments are when I am the tank or healer and I have a friend playing whichever I am not. I like the freedom to be a little looser and not feel forced ‘to perform’ (to use your analogy).

    I also like doing stupid stuff like aggro or pulling or just going a little wild. I wouldn’t force that behavior on anyone who may interpret it wrong, but on friends? I know I can get away with some lalafoolery.

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