Belghast

Good Morning Friends! A few weeks back I had this idea for a Friday mornings series where I talk about something that is special to me. In the first post in this series I talked about my bunny hat, and today I am talking about another item that has deep sentimental meaning to me. I don’t do one of these every week but I do plan on weaving them in from time to time.

Enbarr Whistle

The Enbarr Whistle is an item that drops from Whorleater Extreme, one of the original extreme primal fights introduced with the subsequent patches to A Realm Reborn. Most specifically this is the fight in which you tackle the extreme version of Leviathan, and was generally known to be fairly tricky given that it has a mechanic similar to Extreme Titan where players can be knocked out of the fighting arena and cannot be recovered by resurrection abilities. Essentially this means that all of the players have to execute on all of the mechanics in a timely fashion to keep from being knocked off of the barge that the fight takes place on.

Each Primal fight in the sequence had a rare chance of dropping a whistle to summon an elemental pony-themed after that specific encounter. Enbarr, for example, was themed after the color palette of Leviathan and as it runs you can see water splashing up at its feet. These were heavily sought after mounts not just because they look cool, but because while you are riding it the musical theme of the boss plays in the background. For anyone who has never experienced FFXIV boss music, this might not mean a lot… so I challenge you to listen to this banger of a track and not get excited. As you explore the world, this became your soundtrack and each pony allowed you to vary it up.

The Primal fights were just difficult enough to require attention to mechanics, but not so difficult as to feel tedious. Since each of them dropped a Whistle that summoned a different themed pony, we would occasionally do nights where we farmed a bunch of the fights in the hopes of getting drops. Enbarr specifically is special to me because it was the first of these whistles that I got. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have gotten it on 4/25/2015 and I wrote about it the next Monday in a post titled Splashy Pony. It is also extremely special to me because we farmed it with our original crew and while it was still an extremely challenging encounter. I dug up the above picture… and I believe it is from the same night I got my pony to drop. This is the beautiful thing about having my blog as a memory archive and lots of screenshots to go with it.

Among the Primal Ponies there is one that is significantly rarer than the others. Nightmare has a chance of dropping from any of the original A Realm Reborn Primals, but that drop chance is pretty low. We continued farming Ponies throughout other expansions, trying to complete sets for our members. On one of these Primal farm nights I managed to not only see this mount drop but win the roll. As a result I had it in the back of my head that I now needed to complete the entire set. Slowly over time I gained addition primal whistles. Xanthos from Garuda, Gullfaxi from Titan, Aithon from Ifrit, and Boreas from Shiva. I never had any luck with Markab from Ramuh, in part because that fight was never terribly fun to run and we just didn’t repeat it as often as the others.

Coming back recently I was told by my friends that I could probably easily farm Extreme Primal fights, specifically for the purpose of knocking out Wondrous Journey stamps. This leads me the other night to make an attempt at Ramuh Extreme and wouldn’t you know it… but on that very first kill I managed to get Markab the only pony missing from the set. One of the cool things about the primal pony set is that if you manage to collect them all, it triggers another quest that starts from the Wandering Minstrel in Mor Dhona. You assemble all of the Primal Ponies and it summons a new mount… Kirin. There is a neat cutscene from which the above screenshot is taken. The end result however is that you walk away with a brand new fairly rare steed.

Here is a picture of me riding Kirin, which has a really nice wing animation. The thing is though… Kirin isn’t the mount that is special to me. The one that I think about the most is good ole Enbarr because it sent me down this path and gave me a journey to follow. As gamers, we look for projects and missions in these MMORPGs because that is ultimately the driving force that keeps us engaged. For me, the Pony farm was an equip journey spread out over the course of several years. Now that I have completed it though… there are several more similar journies ahead of me. With each expansion they have introduced a new series of Primal mounts so I feel like I need to collect all of them. The next target is the “Lanner” collection from Heavensward which are a series of giant eagle like birds. So far I only have one of these but I am wanting to start farming the rest.

Side note if you want to join in this madness at some point hit me up. More than happy to help folks complete pony sets or come along as I start trying for the other mount series. The great irony here however is that I mostly just ride my Chocobo.

Good morning friends. I come to you with a heavy heart this morning because sometimes I get tired of seeing the same shit play out over and over. I wish I could just say it was a games industry thing, but it absolutely is not. If you have no idea what I am talking about then I suggest you check out this post from Bloomberg Law or even this summary over on WoWHead. Here is the important fact that needs to be taken away from this situation and everyone that has happened since the dawn of time. This kind of abuse continues to happen because somewhere along the chain of events there is a woman who was not believed. This person confided in someone and that confidence either kept their mouth shut, tried to diminish the impact of what happened, or just flat out did not believe them. Things cannot change until we accept that it is each of our responsibility to make sure the abused are safe from the abusers.

We need to be better. Our gaming communities need to be better. Our workplaces need to be better. It is around this time that someone generally brings out the “what if it was your wife or daughter” nonsense. It shouldn’t NEED to be that close to home for you to care about it. You should care because everyone deserves to be safe. The thing is, your wife and daughter already have their own history of stories to tell about events that have happened to them. This is happening every day and in almost every environment and needs to stop. I hate having to make public comments, but I also feel like if I don’t use whatever platform that I do have I am failing each and every person that is hurting. If I stay silent, the abusers assume I stand with them, and the abused continue to feel isolated because they question if I am going to hurt them.

So I spent my night alternating between doomscrolling and feeling horrible about the world on Twitter, and tabbing back into my Free Company and feeling good about my friends there. I am doing more with my FCmates and it is enjoyable. Last night Rae, Waffles, and I ended up running a bunch of roulettes together and it was super great. I have enjoyed my time running with random players, but I have to admit that I understand WHY I reached a point where I was mostly just wanting to run with at least a known healer. It felt so great to tank instances last night with a healer I wholeheartedly trusted to keep me alive. Previously I would end up hedging my bets and maybe using a few too many cooldowns just to make sure I survive a pull. With Rae at the helm, I was able to just be the tank I knew I could be.

There is also something special about the role of the tank when the ones you are with are your close friends. Like there is an instinct in me to be protective of my friends. Dungeons are so much more enjoyable when that protective instinct is rewarded in trying to get all of the hatred and protect my party when it is actually people that I care about on the line. That is really when I am most in my element when playing an MMORPG. I like being the tank and I am extremely happy that I have somehow managed to navigate the mental block that kept me from being able to enjoy that style of gameplay for a while. I’ve yet to get comfortable enough to start tanking Trials and Raids through the roulette, but I am sure at some point I will throw myself at those as well.

It is probably strange that I am starting this post the way that I did and then interspersing screenshots and comments about Final Fantasy XIV along with it. The thing is… for me video games are how I cope with the wrongs of the world. It is another world that I can sink into where the problems don’t seem quite so big anymore. I think this is the truth for a lot of people and I really feel for the folks who are reading this news and now feeling like they are cut off from this thing that they loved in World of Warcraft. I myself am struggling with the fact that this weekend starts a new Diablo season, and I am not sure if I feel right participating in it. The pain of that decision however are this is also the time that I and my friend Grace spend hanging out and catching up as we both focus on the same shared goal. It is something that I look forward to more than pretty much anything else on the calendar.

Right now however I just don’t feel right giving Diablo or Blizzard any oxygen right now. The reaction from the company in an official statement last night only made this situation direr for me on a personal level. I know the right thing to do is to say “fuck this” and stop participating in any Blizzard product, but also I know my actions don’t change anything and only serve to damage our “once every three months” binge of “diabbling”. I also deeply feel for my friends who work at Blizzard because the coming months are going to be awful to be there. When something like this happens everyone who was doing the right thing and acting properly is taken down with the individuals who caused the harm. That said it is almost impossible to be in one of these environments without knowing the lay of the land and understanding just who the abusers are.

There is one last piece of advice that I feel like I need to impart. When a situation like this occurs, I hear people talking about the failing of the Human Resources department. What you as an employee need to understand is that Human Resources is not there for your benefit. Sure they are assisting in your benefits or helping you with leave, but their core mission is not to be the advocate of the employees. The role of Human Resources is to make sure everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing, but not for the greater good. Ensuring that policy is followed takes place in order to limit the legal liability of a given company, which means when a bad situation happens they are always going to side with diminishing the impact of that event. Often times the only way change happens is when one of these stories makes the press, because it puts the company in a posture where they finally have to deal with it.

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was an exceptionally stressful day for me as it involved a family funeral where we are not entirely family. It was one of those situations where it was my wife’s Step-Uncle but also where she was not related by blood with anyone that was there. The end result sorta felt like trying to attend the family reunion of someone else’s family. An hour and a half there, two hours for the family dinner, two and a half hours for the service, and an hour and a half back… added up more or less to an entirely lost day. When we finally made it home it was evening and I attempted to rush through a bunch of things quickly to feel like I made some progress in Final Fantasy XIV. You can see my new glamour for my Red Mage that I have been leveling lately. I am thinking it is probably going to be the next thing I push to 80 given that it is already level 75.

In my travels since coming back to the game, I have been running quite a number of dungeons. Effectively at a minimum, I run the leveling, 50+ and level 80 roulettes each night tanking them on my Paladin. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is going through an excessive population boom as “WoW Refugees” show up on the shores of Eorzea looking for solace. I have to admit I have been somewhat worried that this massive influx of players from another community would change the feel of FFXIV, but so far it has not. World of Warcraft is an exceptionally toxic environment. You can’t be in the game for more than a few moments without experiencing some form of negative behavior from the player base. So with the influx of followers of he-who-must-not-be-named and similar World of Warcraft ilk… it was my fear that Final Fantasy XIV would become toxic as well.

The end result however has been nothing but joy. I’ve run into more than my fair share of players who admit to coming here from World of Warcraft, and I have done my best to welcome them with open arms. I’ve experienced some truly staggering acts of kindness as well such as the other night when running a dungeon and our non-English speaking healer disconnected. We all agreed to wait fifteen minutes for them before trying to fill the group, and even then when we had to kick them and replace them we all commented that we felt guilty in doing so. The other two players I was in there with were recent transplants from World of Warcraft. The end result is we just sat down in the instance and chatted as the time passed hoping that the healer would come back. The thing is it wasn’t because it is hard to get a healer, because as soon as we kicked the disconnected player we got a brand new healer almost instantly. Folks just didn’t want to make that healers night any worse, given that a disconnect is stressful enough.

So I am left with the question… were the players in World of Warcraft actually that toxic? Was it instead the sequence of events that a player goes through and the hyper-competitive environment that Warcraft creates that produces toxic behavior? Final Fantasy XIV from the top down is designed to be collaborative in nature and straight-up bribes players for positive behavior. Lower level dungeons need running, for example, so the game rewards players for queueing for leveling roulette and then heaps extra rewards on top of that if you have a player that is experiencing it for the first time. In addition to all of this structure, there is the subtle pressure that the commendation system creates, of wanting to perform well and be cheerful in the hopes of someone giving you a commendation at the end of the run. All of this structure stacks up to create an environment that is pushing players to be sociable and kind and to treat “sprouts” or new players with an extra dose of care given that with them comes bonus rewards.

I am absolutely certain there is going to be some toxicity that I come across in Final Fantasy XIV. However having been back for a few weeks now and throwing myself nightly into random dungeon runs, I can say that so far I have not encountered any. It doesn’t appear that the World of Warcraft Refugees are changing the game, but instead that the game is changing them and applying a certain measure of chill to their gameplay. There has been a lot said about the longer global cooldown system in FFXIV and how World of Warcraft feels more “immediate”. I think this slower pace however leads to combat in the game and all of the encounters as a result feeling more like a dance. It is more important to move with rhythm than to mash your finger against the button as hard as you can and as fast as you can in order to make the numbers go up. This pace though slows everything down… and I think there is just more time to stop and smell the roses along the way. For example I took a moment in a dungeon run in order to take this screenshot. No one yelled at me for taking that little moment.

I do want to close on a very specific note however. A lot of my posts lately have been contrasting the experience of playing Final Fantasy XIV to that of World of Warcraft Shadowlands. I feel it is extremely important to note and make sure that you readers know this, but if you are having a blast right now in World of Warcraft then I am happy for you. I intend no shade to be thrown on the player base of that game that is active and having fun, nor do I intend to try and create some hard press to recruit you away from something that you love. Instead I am sharing the things that I am loving about Final Fantasy XIV and using the only language that I know, a language forged over the course of over two decades of playing MMORPGs of all sorts. Anything I say about World of Warcraft also comes from a place of having loved it for so long, that maybe I care too much about it. If you are enjoying yourself though, keep enjoying yourself and I wish you all the happiness in the world.

Good Morning Friends! The weird thing about the whole Mixtape Monday thing is if I did have something I really wanted to talk about, the impact is somewhat blunted given that I can’t do so until Tuesday. Firstly as you are all aware I am back and playing an awful lot of Final Fantasy XIV. So much so that I am probably going to ignore most of the New World Closed Beta that I was looking forward to. Greysky Armada once again feels populated with lots of folks on any given night logging in and hanging out. Thalen, Rae, Waren, and I have been spending an awful lot of time online and with it has come more impromptu grouping opportunities. Something that has happened a few times recently is a treasure hunt map night, and we had a phenomenal time Sunday doing just this.

First off for the uninitiated, there is a thing collectively known as a treasure map in Final Fantasy XIV. For the most part, these come from gathering nodes and you can get one per day on a high-level Fisher, Miner, or Botanist. Additionally, there is a system called Wondrous Tails located in Idylshire, and for doing 9 events from the list of 16 possible events each week you get a guaranteed level 80 map designed for a full party aka 8 players. You “Decipher” the map which reveals the location in the world you need to head to. Once you feel like you have found the correct spot you execute another ability called Dig, which surveys the area looking for the chest. Upon opening it a series of encounters spawn and if you manage to defeat them all you get to open the treasure chest.

Starting in Heavensward there is a chance when you open the chest to instead spawn a portal to a special dungeon. Effectively you are guaranteed a single encounter, with a chance of additional encounters after the first one. These seem to come in two varieties, the roulette-style shown above and one where you are presented with actual doorways. In the doorway scenario, you are given your choice of two paths. If you choose correctly a new room opens up in front of you and you can proceed to the next encounter. In the roulette scenario, once the loot is dealt with an automated spin of the wheel takes place. Each symbol around the room represents a potential outcome. Essentially you are wanting to avoid landing on the purple portal with the monster face because that means a sweeper comes through and kicks your group out of the dungeon.

The fights themselves are sheer nonsense. We kept getting this one that was a giant mandragora that was honestly almost a minor raid boss in difficulty, and had a gimmick that the party had to deal with. Essentially there were two batches of tiny mandragora adds that spawned in. The first clump the tank aka me would take care of and hold with the boss. The others would run around the room and had no aggro table and each of them had a number over their head. The party had to kill these adds in numerical order in order to gain a bonus sack of loot before finally collapsing on the boss and normal adds to burn them all down. We went in with only one tank and one healer and for most of the night only six players but ultimately made it work.

The loot rewards are super varied and range from high-end crafting materials to things like housing items or minions. You also gain a shocking amount of gold in doing these maps along with a handful of the highest tier of tomestones, or as I will inadvertently call them “Bookrocks”. Right now the game plan is to start doing these every Sunday night and draw as much as we can from guild, friends, and the Super Dungeon Friends discord. The only challenge that got in our way there with one invite, is that the World Visit system was taking 3 hours or more to transfer players to Cactuar because he-who-must-not-be-named was streaming. I need to sure up a start time, but I am guessing sometime around 7 pm CDT/CST is going to be the start of festivities.

How fun these maps are and how shockingly lucrative they are for all players… is now leading me down a very specific rabbit hole. The most reliable way to get them is through gathering. You can harvest a map each day and then if you add that with the one you get from Khloe Aliapoh, that gives you a threshold of 8 that you can get in a single week’s time. There however is a challenge to how to store them, because you can only have one map in a bottle in your inventory and another map deciphered in your key items. That means you need to shuffle them to retainers and each of them can have a single one in their inventory, and an unlimited number posted on the Market Board… but also they sell quickly so you would, in theory, need to price outrageously to hold onto them. In order to feel like I am contributing to the mayhem… that means I REALLY need to get my disciples of the land up to 80. So I started doing some of that yesterday with Mining at 63, Botany at 62, and Fishing at 61.

There is definitely an “if you give a mouse a cookie” aspect to playing Final Fantasy XIV. The thing is though I am having a lot of fun and definitely feeling engaged. Between doing daily roulettes and beast tribe quests as well as trying to level more jobs and now falling into the gathering hole it seems like I will probably stay engaged for awhile. On top of everything thought there is just a feeling of the world being alive with so many new players coming and trying out the game. My city of choice is Limsa Lominsa and it is absolutely throbbing with new players, so many that often times moving causes a whole other set of players to load in. This game has a vitality that has been lacking from other MMORPGs I have played more recently and it reminds me of the way cities used to feel in Warcraft. The server downtime legitimately pained me that I could not be playing, and that hasn’t really been a feeling I have had for a game in a really long time.