Good Morning Friends. I regret to inform you that there is no Mixtape Monday this week because I have not felt like fiddling with them over the weekend. I have two that are in progress but neither of them is really ready for primetime. I am playing the “is it allergies or is it covid” game right now as I had to attend high school graduation on Friday and just based on the statistics, more than one person in that crowd was a carrier. However, at the same time, the cottonwood is in full bloom which I am deathly allergic to, so more than likely… it is just allergies given a “general awful feeling” and “lethargy” are my only real symptoms so far. Aligning to my already strange mental state, I apparently booted up New World over the weekend and spent a little bit of time roaming around it.
My Character now apparently lives on Valhalla and I am not sure how many merges have taken place between our origins on Minda and the first merge with Frislandia. Whatever the case it appears that team purple is outgunned, though last night they did manage to take Everfall. In truth, a sequence of changes has more or less made it that I no longer give a shit about the faction balance. At some point the costs of teleports were reduced significantly, and also no longer take your inventory into account so if you are so inclined you can bop around the map at will. The other significant quality of life improvement that I noticed was the fact that there is now “peaceful regeneration” which turns on quick life recovery any time you are out of combat. I would say MOST of the food that I went through was trying to regenerate my health so I could get back into the action, and now there is just a buff that does that for me.
As far as combat in general, as heavy armor, sword, and shield tank… I feel much sturdier than I was previously. I need to do some more tests here but I spent a bit of time running around in Edengrove and fared far better than previously against everything there. I was also able to easily take single pull elites in Shattered Mountain and even managed a few two pulls. Like I said I need to get out into the world and try a few of my haunts that I was clearing regularly when the hatchet bug was in place, to determine just how viable open-world farming is again. If nothing else it was fun to do a good number of the lower level towers in Edengrove for materials.
I made a quick visit to Adjorjan and he still appears to be dropping decent stuff, though I am not sure what level of watermark he is capable of dropping. I only stuck around for a single kill but I got a purple bow around 550, but also did not get a watermark upgrade from him because there is now an animation that plays when that happens. As far as watermarking there seem to be a few reasonable ways to get daily progress namely in the way of bags that drop containing diamond gypsum. The other big change I noticed is that the bottom has fallen out in some of the rare materials. When I last played Void Ore which is a rare drop from Orichalcum, was selling in the neighborhood of 10k gold each. I just bought five of them on buy orders for 150 gold each. Unfortunately, I am nowhere near the skill level required to make a full set of Voidbent armor, but I had contemplated trying to convert my cash stockpiles into armoring levels.
The community seems to be hopping in spite of being MUCH smaller than it was and seemingly gone is the era of the “2k buy in” for a group. I am not entirely certain what quality of life changes lead to this but so far the game seems to be much more playable than it was when I last left. I doubt I will be spending a ton of time in the game, and the crafting system in its current state still feels awful… but maybe just maybe it has found its niche and can slowly start moving the needle in the positive direction. New World was a really fun game up until the point it abruptly stopped being fun, so a few tweaks here or there might be enough to save it. I will of course let you know if I continue to play from time to time and how that process is going.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Last week was mothers day and travel and such led to us not being able to record a show. As is often the case we ended up with a long list of topics and not enough time to address them all. First, we talk about the curious intersection of Pachinko and Roguelikes and more specifically Peglin and Roundgaurd… and its pinball-focused cousin Yoku’s Island Express. Thalen shares with us the joy of the Squirrelgirl Podcast. We talk a bit about the odd but obvious cross-over event between EVE Online and Microsoft Excel. We dive a bit into Guild Wars 2 and talk about how apparently Bel is actually doing PVP now, not just WvW. We also congratulate Kodra on getting his Skyscale mount and talk a bit about the long grinds. From there Thalen discusses the DIE Pen and Paper system. From there we talk a bit about the recent streamer bans for running addons and the whole debacle causing rifts in the community. Lastly, we talk a bit about bringing back the AggroChat Game of the Month… sorta… because we are going to all play Citizen Sleeper and then record a show about it.
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.
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.
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.
