MMORPG Pause Button

One of the challenges of being an adult and playing an MMORPG is that from time to time I have to step away from the screen, and because of the online nature there is no “pause” feature. I cannot count the number of times I have needed to step away to deal with some crisis, only to return dead and need to resurrect and find my way back to whatever it was that I was doing. “Hang on, I need to get to a save space” is probably something that my wife is exceptionally tired of hearing. Guild Wars 2 however has a feature that I wish EVERY MMORPG had, and that is a way to teleport quickly to someplace safe… and then return to exactly where you were in the normal game so you can return to whatever it was that you were doing.

The thing is… this isn’t just a paid feature available only from premium VIP passes, but something you can do with the base features easily. This morning I am going to talk a bit about each of the ways that you can teleport out of the action to hit a bank or vendor, and then rapidly teleport back to where you were in the world.

PVP Lobby – Heart of the Mists

Heart of the Mists is a zone that you can enter while waiting on a PVP Match to start, and also allows you access to your PVP-only gear profiles and build information. It can also be used as a rapid method of getting to a bank, vendor, trading post, or even getting a free teleport to Lion’s Arch. The coolest part about this is that I believe it is available at level one, and exiting this area through the PVP menu will teleport you right back to where you left the world so long as it is someplace still accessible. If you teleport while in the middle of a story instance, it will teleport you back to wherever you started that story instance.

WvW Lobby – Edge of the Mists

Calling Edge of the Mists this a lobby is a bit of a lie, but when you first teleport into it you are placed in a safe space where no players can harm you. This is nowhere near as feature-rich as Heart of the Mists as there is no bank access, but you can still teleport to Lion’s Arch and still have the functionality to return to the last location in Tyria.

Guild Hall – Location and Amenities Vary

There are currently four different guild halls that are available to players, with two located in Maguma, one in the Crystal Desert, and then one in Cantha. The Cantha guild hall called the Isle of Reflection is the one pictured above. They all function effectively the same and if you exit the guild hall via the guild interface, it will take you right back to where you were last located in Tyria. What you have access to in a given guild hall is wildly dependent upon how much of the restoration process your guild has completed. At the bare minimum however you should have access to vendors and can access your bank through the scribe station crafting machine. Using this as your fast escape to safety has the side benefit of maybe letting you bump into other members of your guild.

VIP Lounge Passes

There are a number of VIP lounge areas that are scattered around the world which require some sort of access pass in order to enter them. The passes come in two variants: a two-week pass and a permanent access pass. You can get some of the two-week passes by playing the game, but the permanent ones are generally only available on the Black Lion Store and cost 1000 gems each. While there are currently ten available in the game, there are only three that can function as a way to return to the spot you were last at in Tyria, and as such there are only three that really matter.

I personally spend most of my time in Mistlock Sanctuary which is pictured above, and generally speaking, is almost always full of players doing whatever business they need. Essentially it is a complete replacement for all of the amenities that you might need from Lion’s Arch. If I need to use the Mystic Forge or do some Crafting… I teleport to Mistlock and then can immediately return to whatever I was doing previously. Since so many people in our guild have Mistlock it also doubles as a sort of unofficial guild hall. I have this pass sitting in my shared account inventory which gives me easy access to it from any character.

If you do not have the gems to spend on a Mistlock pass, or it is currently not available on the market (which happens regularly as they rotate them out), then probably my favorite of the other options is the PVP lobby. Once you unlock the portals you can teleport quickly to the market area and do whatever business you might need to do before returning to the world. Sadly none of the free options have crafting machines, but it at least will give you a way to “pause” the game and go someplace safe whenever you need to unexpectedly afk. I wish EVERY game had something like this. Most games have the ability to teleport somehow, but it also means that when you come back to the screen… you will have to go through some level of nonsense to get back to where you were. This is quick and convenient and I love it so much.

Final Fantasy XIV Addon Debacle

Hey Friends. The last few days have been really weird for the Final Fantasy XIV community, and even though I am not actively playing that game… I still care about what goes down there. It isn’t like at some point I will not return to the fold like I always do. Essentially a sequence of events has started a ball rolling and it has gathered up enough momentum that I am not entirely certain where it will stop. There are a few factors in play, not the least of which is the supposed rampant cheating in the new PVP mode of the game, and reported wide use of third-party utilities during the race for Worlds First in the new Ultimate Raid. Something that should be very clear however is that Square Enix and more specifically Yoshi P and the team have been exceptionally clear over the years that Third Party Tools are strictly prohibited.

What has led to this most recent conflagration is the fact that on May 9th, SE reiterated its stance on banning third-party utilities from the game. This was then followed up by two very public bans of players a North American player (Bagel Goose) and a Japanese player (Hiroro). There is a discussion about this taking place as a result of brigading, however to me personally it sounds like a shot across the bow. The NA/EU communities and the Japanese language communities are pretty separated and if you wanted to get the message across that they mean it “for serious” this time, a banning in each would seem like a tactical play. Whatever the case this has caused the wildest spiral of the community falling in on itself that I have seen in a while. Essentially there are two camps, those who want unfettered access to addons and those who think everyone that publicly uses them should be banned.

I have to admit one of my favorite features of Final Fantasy XIV was its strict prohibition of addons and the fact that they would legitimately ban people from using them. I felt like this added to a more friendly dungeon environment since it took away the penis measuring that came with folks posting damage meters to public chat. It also stopped folks from giving “helpful advice” that they were not carrying their weight and should “git gud”, because those sorts of actions could end up landing you in the Mordion Gaol. It personally made me way more likely to be willing to random roulettes and felt like it was providing a much less toxic dungeon environment overall than those I had experienced in World of Warcraft.

The problem was that over the years that line got a little ragged as to what was allowed and what was prohibited. All of those great Instagram shots that you see from Final Fantasy players composing outrageous screenshots… are for the most part all using third-party addons and at a very minimum Reshade/GShade. The great bards that you hear every night in Limsa Lominsa… are pretty much all using an addon that allows them to feed a musical score and translate them to keypresses. If you don’t like the feel of the UI in Final Fantasy XIV and replace it with something more akin to ElvUI from World of Warcraft, then again that is a third-party addon. There are completely pure and good reasons to be running addons in Final Fantasy XIV, but there are also a number of more nefarious options like CactBot that can give the player DBM-style boss callouts. I am not sure what addon this is but I saw a video of something yesterday that was drawing out where attacks were going to go before the in-game visualization fired.

I think this has more recently reached a head with the influx of World of Warcraft players coming into the Final Fantasy XIV community. In World of Warcraft, I have not run a stock interface since 2005, and it is just accepted as part of playing that game that you are going to need to seek addons to improve its shortcomings. For example, I specifically ran an all-in-one addon replacement called BenikUI which was a fork of ElvUI… which in itself was a fork of TukUI. Addons are just the culture of that game and not running them puts you at a significant disadvantage. As more World of Warcraft players has transferred to Final Fantasy XIV, that mindset and culture have come with them. The problem here is that over the last few years mods have come from something that players did in secret and never talked about, to something being openly shown on streams now. The tentative truce between Square Enix enforcers and the players was broken… as folks started talking about fight club openly.

As Raiding in World of Warcraft has been turned into an E-Sport, the stakes of each new event have been increased as well. There has been an arms race in WoW Raiding and the armaments have been the addons that can give each team a slight advantage in specific encounters. This is so much the case that some of the large raid guilds have an LUA programmer on staff essentially to tweak and update raid call mods between attempts so that their team has an advantage. Blizzard has taken a very light touch over the years when it comes to banning mod behavior. I remember in Burning Crusade I had an addon that would allow me to bind a key so that it would automatically target whoever in the raid had the least health and cast Flash of Light. I used this to spam heal my way to being an effective Paladin raid healer, a class and role that I am very much not well equipped for. Sure, the ability to do this specific thing was removed from the API eventually, but the exceptionally clever addon developers found ways around it. Each time a function has been removed from the libraries, some clever user figures out a way to achieve the same results through a different method.

The casualty of this arms race is that World of Warcraft raid encounters shifted significantly to include more random elements that require the player to react to conditions and take the necessary action for that moment in time. Additionally, so much fire on the ground that you have to avoid to keep from dying a horrible death… I can still hear the awful klaxon of my GTFO addon. The randomness of each encounter made it so that the addons only really gave you so much information, and it required you to still execute based on the information you are getting. Running Deadly Boss Mods became a requirement, but the encounters were also designed in a way that took that assumption into account. If everyone is exploiting the mechanics of the fight, then no one is really gaining an unfair advantage.

The problem comes into play when you realize that Final Fantasy XIV encounters are not designed around the existence of addons. They are designed in a way to be equally competitive to both console players and those players on the PC, and the team has taken great care to ensure this. They also are just functionally different in the way that they play out, because if a World of Warcraft encounter is about controlling chaos… Final Fantasy XIV is about executing a dance routine with the highest possible accuracy. FFXIV bosses are tightly scripted encounters and often so much so that if you have a stopwatch running, the same abilities will be firing at the same moment in relation to some other event every single time. Succeeding in those fights is about memorizing the pattern and executing it flawlessly, and the degree of “wiggle room” decreases each time you step up in encounter difficulty. So that if you are doing Ultimates, the highest content in the game a single mistake by any one of the eight players doing the encounter can mean a wipe for the entire team.

In the escalating arms race of competitive raiding… in Final Fantasy XIV running an addon to give you exact call-outs and draw visualizations on screen is bringing a machine gun to a sword fight. The players not running addons are at a disadvantage so it starts to facilitate the need for EVERYONE to be running addons. Now we get to the situation we find ourselves in today. Square Enix and more specifically Yoshi P and crew do not want addons to be a requirement for playing the game. More importantly, they do not want an entire mode of gameplay, which are console games… to be invalidated for competitive content. I feel like they have allowed things to get into this state with their lax “just don’t talk about it” stance, and the end result is that they are going to start having to ban anyone using addons. The only way to right the ship at this point is to sweep the deck.

Folks are not reacting to this well… and shocking to no one Pyromancer who openly attacked his then World of Warcraft focused community… turns his anger on his now Final Fantasy XIV focused community. This is but one example of what is going on right now in all of the Final Fantasy XIV devoted platforms and admittedly is a more hyperbolic take… but still representative of the faction divide. My stance is the lack of addons is good for Final Fantasy XIV. We did not need them for completing Coil, and I believe the devs when they say that every single Ultimate is capable of being completed without addons as well. Final Fantasy XIV is honestly the first game of its like that I have played happily without addons, because it gave me enough control over my UI and inventory layout that I didn’t feel that I needed them.

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Essentially we are in this position where I feel that if players do not abandon these addons on their own, Square Enix will step in and solve the problem for us. As a publisher, they are already using Easy Anti Cheat for a number of games, which is absolutely capable of detecting that you are running an addon that is interfacing with the current window either by scanning memory for the executable or by looking for direct x hooks. This is the heavy-handed option, but it is an option that I feel we are on the cusp of having thrust upon us. Square will protect the validity of console gamers at all costs because they make up a huge chunk of the Final Fantasy XIV player base. If you do not want the next step in this evolution to be more DRM installed on top of your favorite game, maybe learn to live without your addons or at a minimum stop showing them on streams.

I think the only way to proceed fairly is that every streamer that can be shown to be using addons publicly, should receive a temporary ban. This is the only way that the point gets driven home. More so the official statement needs to be updated with a much clearer stance because I feel like the original point might be getting lost in translation and the obsessive politeness of this particular game team. World of Warcraft is a failed state, and there is no way back at this point to a time before the addon escalation. Final Fantasy XIV is not beyond saving, but that team is going to have to make some hard choices and take some equally stern actions. They have stated that they want every piece of content completed on all platforms and without addons, and they are going to have to back that intention up with action. I’m sorry Bards and Instagram Models… but yall are going to get damaged in the crossfire.

Game Tools Revisited

This is likely a post that very few people will care about, but I am making it nonetheless. Some years back I completely reworked the way my menu structure functioned, and among several tweaks was adding the “Game Tools” menu. Something you need to know about me is that I do not use bookmarks, and instead largely rely on the browser remembering sites I hit frequently when I start typing the name into the search bar. The end result is that I have near total recall while actively playing a game, but rapidly forget what sites I had been using when I go on one of my long breaks from a specific title. I wanted a way of keeping track of these resources that I regularly use while playing games that I often cycle back and forth between. The added benefit of the Game Tools menu is that it allowed me to easily share those same resources with anyone else interested in playing the game.

WordPress has this really neat functionality to nigh infinitely nest menus under one another, and I thought this to be a really cool way of creating a structure for links. The only problem here is that once a menu gets too large it becomes ridiculously cumbersome to manage. As a result any time I changed anything it would seemingly take a progressively longer amount of time to actually save the edit. I’ve even had the save fail completely and cause it to lose an entire submenu in the structure. This only served to cause me to not really want to touch the links at all and leave them more or less in an “as is” state. None of this made me happy, and like so many things in my life, I eventually reach a critical breaking point that brings me to action.

So instead of trying to come up with a clever way of handling this, I am legitimately rolling back to one of the earliest constructs of the internet… a static page. Right now I am in the process of converting all of the nested menu structures into a single landing page. This does a few things that are beneficial, namely, it reduces menu bloat but also serves to give me a place to make some commentary about each resource. At the time of writing this Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy V, New World, and Diablo 3 have been converted to this new structure. The rest will follow as I have time to take my contorted menu structure and rework it into something that makes sense in page form. I’m attempting group links a bit more than I have in the menu, but each game page is ending up a little bit different. I might roll some additional information on each page, like where you can actually find me in that game and maybe a link to that category of posts on the blog.

This is just one of several changes that have been a long time coming. Another thing that is really bothering me right now is the sidebar so I figure once I sort out my menus, that is probably going to be my next renovation. I’ve been consistently blogging on the same website for over thirteen years now, and I feel like I need to uproot a few things and move them around a bit. I still largely like the central column with sidebar format, because that is ultimately what feels the most blog-like for me personally. I’ve always felt like blogs are best experienced in the structural context of the chosen layout of the author, but I have to admit some of the more pictorial tumblr/instagram style formats drive me up a wall.

Again I am not sure anyone cares because I am not entirely certain anyone has actually used that “Game Tools” menu to access the resources contained within. However, I use it… and it will make things a little less fiddly to update.

Bel Goes Mad and Does PVP

Good Morning Friends! I’ve not put a ton of effort into it but as I get time I have been collecting cats for my home instance, and I noticed in Rata Sum one of them has started hanging out with this random Asura on the roof. I think this is pretty freaking cute and that you all needed this in your lives. There are times when I question who the hell I am anymore. Firstly for so many years I was diametrically opposed to Guild Wars 2, or at the very least I did not understand what people saw in the game. For even longer I have been one of the most anti-PVP people I know in my circle… and what am I doing now? I am dabbling in PVP in Guild Wars 2, and enjoying myself. I legitimately am wondering if I need to find an exorcist.

It all started simple enough with Thalen repeatedly making the comment that we need to find someone into PVP so we can get the reward potions for the guild hall upgrades. At that point, I had been enjoying World vs World in the game for a while, and it planted a thought in my brain. If I can enjoy this game mode where I spend most of my time dead and running back… maybe I can actually enjoy the structured PVP in Guild Wars 2. One of the things that I enjoyed about the siege combat of the battlegrounds is that there really is no negative to it. The deaths don’t incur a cost, and almost any amount of time spent there is rewarding so it is pretty much a win/win situation. Lately, I have been using the rewards tracks to farm up Mystic Clovers, and my extreme need for them also planted the idea of maybe doing the Drizzlewood track in PVP as well.

So for the last several days, I have been on this weird mission to farm as many PVP potions as I could. This has more or less meant doing three of the four PVP dailies each day, with the fourth being inaccessible because I have no interest in joining a tournament and waiting around for it to start. Through sheer happenstance, I have landed on my Ranger as my WvW character and my fledgling Engineer as my PVP character. So each day at reset I do Tequatl, then pop over to Belglory my Engineer and knock out my PVP dailies, then finally land on my Ranger for some WvW dailies. The end result is that on an average day I am knocking out all but two of my dailies in total. Depending on how fast I get through all of this I often end up working on leveling the Engineer that is now I believe 73.

So far in my travels, I have encountered two different modes of play for PVP, the first of which being Stronghold. As far as I can tell there is only one map here called Battle of Champion’s Dusk, with the layout shown above. This is essentially a highly condensed version of Summoner’s Rift from League of Legends, with your objective being to break into the enemy fort at the end of your lane and kill the “Lord”. This is done by summoning “creeps” to borrow the LoL parlance, which travel down the lane and bombs the fortified door. These are summoned through collecting supplies that spawn in the center of the map and are a contested resource. Additionally, there are trebuchets on both sides that are constantly attacking the door, and players can disable these to slow down the progress of the enemy team. It is a perfectly cromulent game mode, but it is far from my favorite.

The mode I would far rather play is Conquest, which is essentially this game’s version of capture the flag or as I am most used to it Control from Destiny 2. There are three objectives that can be held by moving your team members into the circle and waiting for it to capture. Each objective you hold contributes points to your score and the first team to 500 points wins. Each map in the rotation also has some sort of a secondary objective that might be taking down NPCs that spawn at regular intervals for bonus points, or pushing through to an objective and channeling an orb to capture it for your team. I am not sure what it is about this mode but it feels much more simple and as a result more enjoyable. It seems to be way more flexible for random players, whereas Stronghold feels like it needs a fixed strategy and core teamwork. I may also be biased because my dumb turrets build seems to work swimmingly in Conquest and mostly fails in Stronghold.

Friends… I still have no clue who the hell I am anymore. I am championing a game that I resigned from the alpha testing for because I thought it felt awful. Now I am playing a game mode that I have traditionally railed against for breeding toxic players. I mean sure I have run into a few knobs so far in PVP and WvW but for the most part, everyone has been damned chill. I am certain that the toxicity exists, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to just follow along and do some content. I did run into a commander the other night that was kicking anyone who would not join his Discord, so there was that. However, that has seemingly been the massive exception as opposed to being the norm. With my Necro, I mostly enjoyed taking camps, but with the Ranger, I find I am actually enjoying objective defense.

We need literally multiple hundred PVP potions for upgrades, so I am trying to ignore this and keep plugging away at it. We knocked out several of the other objectives in a similar faction by just contributing a little bit each day, so I figure slow and steady here will also win the race. I think more than anything that is the thing I am enjoying about Guild Wars 2. Progress is measured in weeks and months rather than days… which makes it feel not so crushing when you can’t do a certain thing on a specific day. All of the gearing objectives are working towards a long-tailed objective that isn’t also moving further away from me. Eventually, I will have Legendary items in the game, but I am also in no real rush to get there either, and not having them is not adversely impacting my enjoyment. So far at least it feels like pretty much everything is doable in a good set of starter exotics.