Bribing Good Behavior

Better Community

ffxiv 2014-10-28 20-17-28-489 Yesterday I posted this picture and said that the person dancing with Sagacyte and I was a friend of his.  Turns out that apparently this was not the case.  The way she waved and immediately started dancing with us, made me think that she must have known him.   So yeah… complete and total stranger came over and started interacting and now she is another person on my friends list.  I guess I shouldn’t be shocked since this sort of thing happens all the time.  There is a community spirit that infuses Final Fantasy XIV, and I am still not entirely used to just how prevalent it is.  There are lots of quests that involve you walking into an area and a bunch of mobs spawn on top of you.  The mobs that actually belong to you are marked but you can help out with any of them.  It is a rare occasion that someone will move on after their mobs are dead and not help you kill yours.  There was this one tank the other night that I swear “tanked” five sets of these mobs as new people walked into the spawning area.

ffxiv 2014-09-14 22-10-19-484 This sort of thing is absolutely commonplace now, but the strange thing is…  it wasn’t.  What is strange about Final Fantasy XIV is that my friends and I played this game seriously at launch for roughly three months.  Then we wandered off to do other things, and upon returning were shocked and amazed at how much the community had improved.  At launch it felt like every other MMO, with folks doing the same kind of selfish actions that are so common place in other games.  Running a random dungeon, likely meant that you would have one person complaining that you were pulling to slow, and another person complaining that the dps wasn’t somehow good enough…  even though there are no meters for that.  Basically the community had the same rampant asshatery that we’ve all experienced in “modern mmos”.  Upon returning however we found that this negative element was almost completely gone.  Sure you will encounter an abusive player every so often, but the community as a whole seems to have done a drastic turn around.

Bribing Good Behavior

GoldenMagitechArmor One thing that we noticed quickly that had been added to the game since we last played was the player commendation system.  What makes the system interesting is that at the end of every duty, each player gets a single commendation that they can award to another player from that group.  Now normally when a game has a system like this, you can queue exclusively with guild members or friends and cheat the system.  However in this case you cannot reward commendations to your guildies, but have to instead use it on a stranger.  The other half of this equation is that you are rewarded both your giving commendations, and greatly rewarded for receiving them.  Each week there is a challenge log entry for handing out commendations that gives the player a bit of experience and some gil.  As far as the receiving side they have set up a system of increasing rewards for 10, 50, 100, 300 and 500 player commendations.  The final reward is the golden colored Magitech armor that you see in the above screenshot… something that pretty much everyone I know universally wants.

What has happened as a result is that players are actively trying to win commendations while in dungeon runs.  As a whole they are far easier to work with, and more willing to stop and explain mechanics if you simply speak up and let them know you are new to a fight.  In fact I have seen entire raid groups come to a grinding halt just to explain the mechanics of a fight to a new player.  Often times another player will mentor the newer player through what they actually need to pay attention to on a given fight.  The only thing I have seen much frustration really is when a group wipes because a player didn’t understand the mechanics… and didn’t speak up about it at the beginning of the run.  This leads players to be more willing to speak up about things that confuse them, or things they are having issues with… which then get solved as a group.  Admittedly there is some content that is the equivalent of WoW’s LFR… but even then inside each individual team there is usually some camaraderie as the run goes on.

Rewarding Communication

ffxiv 2014-09-30 22-14-09-885 I have long been one of those individuals who have stated that the addition of the dungeon finder to World of Warcraft made the game a significantly worse place.  Sure it made getting groups easier, but it changed the way we ran dungeons permanently.  The “push a button, get a group” nature of the tool had a ton of unforeseen consequences, the worst of which is it dehumanized your interaction with other players.  Instead of people that you had to communicate with in order to get a group in the first place…  they became roles that enabled you to get your loot Piñata at the end and nothing more.  The first thing to go with the dungeon finder was discussion in dungeons other than screaming at other players for not living up to some set of standards.  Folks stopped talking while running dungeons, and most players just kept their head down and tried to make it through the dungeon all the while trying not to be called in the carpet for being “bad”.  It was during this era that I stopped running with strangers, because every time the experience was just so damned maddening.

ffxiv 2014-09-30 22-15-09-573 With Final Fantasy, I restarted the game a few weeks ahead of the bulk of my friends…  meaning my only option was to do random dungeons or either do no dungeons at all.  The first thing I noticed when I set foot into a dungeon was that players greeted each other, and once that happened the communication started flowing again.  Players seemed more willing to talk about what was going on with fights, what they needed help with… and even things completely unrelated to the current dungeon run.  Granted all of this might be some elaborate act in an attempt to earn player commendations…  and being the friendliest in the group usually earns you at least one…  but whatever the cause it is a drastic improvement over the standard MMO environment.  I think we have a case of “fake it until you make it” going on here, where players might start out faking a friendly attitude, but over time of doing this over and over… something changes inside you.  I find myself not getting upset at the mistakes of other players, and not dwelling on what went wrong… but focusing more on what needs to happen for things to go right.

Positive Leadership

I am not sure if I can account all of the positive changes simply to the player commendation system.  I feel like the more aggressive players that make up the early MMO rush have moved on from the  game, leaving behind only players that are really dedicated to the Final Fantasy franchise for one reason or another.  Additionally the way that the developers of this game interact with the fans is just completely different.  I’ve talked about this before, especially in relation to the way the game developers at Blizzcon interact with their fans.  It often times feels like they are living out some rockstar fantasy up on stage, and there is always a tinge of condescension when they answer fans.  Watching Fan Festival on the other hand… was like watching one big fan talking to a bunch of other big fans.  One of my friends commented that Yoshi-P seems to treat us more like investors in his vision, than customers.  Another friend chimed in and said that it was almost like he was this super benevolent guild leader.  In any case the difference in interaction shows, and trickles down to the player base as well.

So I think all of these little things add up to an atmosphere that rewards the player for being helpful and showing community spirit.  So much in this game cannot be accomplished without other players, and the constant fiddling and tweaking with systems always seems to air on the side of supporting collaborative play rather than competition for resources.  Granted Final Fantasy XI and XIV 1.0 had really interesting communities, and to some extent the XIV 2.0 and beyond community is standing on their shoulders.  Even in the midst of all the rogue zergy nature going on with the release of a new class…  players are still far more polite about everything than they were at launch.  At this point I don’t care if they essentially have bribed us into being nice passive team players, the end result adds up to a very positive player experience.  It had been a really long time since I had felt a sense of pride in a game community, and I am damned proud to be a Final Fantasy XIV player and even prouder to be a member of the ever amazing Cactuar server community.  For years Azeroth was my home base as I wandered out to explore other games, but I think at this point that new title belongs to Eorzea.  There is so much awesome stuff coming down the pipe, and I cannot wait to experience it all.

#FFXIV #FinalFantasy

We Survived Math Camp

British Vittles

britsnacks

I had said earlier in the week that the math conference I was working at not only represented teachers from almost every state, but also represented a handful of countries.  Among those were a couple of Brits, one of which decided to bring a bunch of items for us to try.  On the final day he set out a bunch of things that had not been consumed on a table for anyone to grab.  I nabbed a box of Jaffa Cakes initially, since I had heard about them from various people but never tried them.  This box represents the various things that were not taken, and since we were picking up the place to make it presentable they all came home with us.  I’ve had a Cadbury bar before, so I have not broken into it yet, but I have managed to try both “cakes” and “biscuits”.

I am not sure what I was expecting when it came to Jaffa Cakes, but the reality was absolutely nothing like I was expecting.  To put it into terms for the American palette when we think “sponge cake” we tend to think a Twinkie or one of the ubiquitous yellow cakes you buy to make strawberry shortcake.  This version of sponge cake tastes more like a stale vanilla wafer that has been sitting out on a table for a week and soaking up moisture.  The orange filling tasted a bit like a melted gummy bear, and the chocolate was more a kin to bakers chocolate.  The end result was not unpleasant but just not what I had been expecting.  I actually kinda like them, but I think that might be the fact that I am consuming something that I cannot otherwise get, so there is a bit of a forbidden fruit aspect to them.

On the other hand the Hobnobs or simply “biscuits” are rather good.  Like it doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to wonder why they are popular.  It is like a cross between an oatmeal cookie and a saltine cracker.  More so almost like really good granola made into a cookie form.  While I doubt I would go out of my way to eat a Jaffa Cake, I would totally be down with biscuits in the future.  All of this time I honestly thought that British biscuits were just American cookies, but nope it is a completely different animal.  We have things here called digestive biscuits, so I am honestly wondering if they are related to these kinds of biscuits.  Now the cool thing is that if I ever get a hankering for either of these items… there is a British foods import shop in town that stocks all sorts of stuff like this.  I likely would not have gone out of my way to try these things, but I am happy that I now know what they taste like.

We Survived Math Camp

I have to say it feels good to be able to say that we survived math camp.  I feel like we need a t-shirt or something to commemorate the event.  I honestly have a massive respect for the individuals who have hosted the event in the other locations, because the amount of prep work and little details that went into this undertaking was a bit staggering.  On top of that the fact that my wife and I lived in a sort of split household during the course of the events, meant that neither of us slept really well.  The first thing we did upon getting home yesterday was taking a nap.  I was surprised at just how many people had arranged for trips to the airport of their own volition rather than needing to run multiple car loads this time around.  I ran a single load on Saturday evening, and then another yesterday.  I have one more to take this morning, but for the most part there was not the mass number of loads that we had as folks arrived.

While I feel like I really had little to do with it, it feels nice to see people talking about how much they enjoyed their time in our city.  It is weird how after spending all this time prepping…  I take comments about the school system with personal pride.  I found myself using the royal we throughout the course of the week, like I was actually part of it or something.  Granted I have done a lot of work for the school system over the years as my wife needed this or that, but I never really felt connected to it other than “that’s the place my wife works”.  After essentially living for a week out of the building, and supporting those inhabiting it… I feel a deep connection to it all.

In other news… I tried Chicken and Waffles yet again… and yet again I don’t really see why the meal is heralded as so awesome.  After the conference split up about 11 am all of the folks what did not need to immediately rush to the airport went out to eat.  There I ordered chicken and waffles, since it was a place I had never eaten before.  I’ve tried it three or four times now… and every time it is a rather bland chicken breast or chicken strips over a nice big thick waffle… with all of it drenched in syrup.  It is charming but nothing earth shattering and overall I find the meal rather bland.  I just feel like I am somehow missing some cultural touchstone.  Like maybe I am supposed to be enthralled by the absurdity of putting chicken and waffles together.  But considering growing up I made grilled cheese sandwiches with waffles…  it doesn’t seem that odd to me.

Ding 40

ffxiv 2014-07-27 22-23-10-700 When we finally got settled in for the night, I popped back into Final Fantasy XIV to work on my dragoon some more.  Since the last time I played the game actively, it has made a number of really nice quality of life improvements.  Namely the addition of the Duty Roulette system that allows you to get assigned to a random dungeon out of a large stack of potentials.  The best part about this is that the experience gain inside the dungeon seems to scale to your level.  That means you could get assigned to a level 15 like Halatali and still get the same experience you would running a much higher level dungeon like Cutters Cry.  For the purpose of leveling this means you have extremely rapid queues, and while the gear that drops inside may not be usable, the experience gain stays consistent.

ffxiv 2014-07-27 21-18-19-766 Another nifty thing that I learned last night is that apparently while we were gone, they added in some perks for having an account authenticator.  In addition to having the three discounted teleport locations, you can now set a single free location if you have you account set up with the authenticator.  Since my grand company of choice is the Flames, that made it an absolute no brainer for me to use Uldah as my freebie. This now allows me to move Coerthas to one of the discounted locations, since I no longer need it for Uldah.  For better or worse Coerthas seems to be the best place for running FATEs, and I will likely be there until at least level 46 when Mor Dhona really starts in proper.  In any case alternating between Duty Roulette and FATEs seems to be a rather enjoyable way to level, and if I get much play time today I will probably be able to push through to 45.

We have a number of errands to run today, and another math camp person to run to the airport.  However once I get back from that my plan is to work on the level 40 Dragoon quest.  Since the 35 quest so simplistic, I am expecting this one to be a major undertaking.  The warrior quest chain had some definite gimme quests, but others that took all the skills I had learned to that point to be able to push through them.  The cool thing is that it seems like we are starting to get a bit more activity in the game.  A number of friends were talking about firing it back up last night, so it will be interesting to see how active it gets in the coming days.  Cactuar is still an extremely populated server, as all weekend long it was barred from new character creation.  However as of this morning it was open again.  Hopefully the couple of new people can get in and create a character today.

#FFXIV

Podcast that Wasn’t

The Final Day

I am up bright and early for a Sunday morning, because today is the final day of the Math conference.  On the arrival day I had to ferry trips back and forth between the airport, and today I am having to do the same thing.  The conference only actually runs for two hours, but I imagine the school itself will be open a bit longer as folks wait around for their rides.  My hope is that everyone checks out of the hotels before heading to the conference, so I don’t actually need to make any trips between those.  That was the piece that actually slowed things down the first time was dropping folks off at the two different hotels.

At this point I am ready for it to be over, so that our lives can return to normal.  I fully appreciate the gravity of what this event is for the folks who are attending it, but each night I have had to go home and sequester myself.  I am not good at dealing with an overabundance of human beings, especially not ones needing something from me.  There are a lot of things I feel bad about, but one of the big ones is that I spent most of the conference hiding out in my wife’s cube in the collaboration room.  I watched twitter, and came out of my hiding place whenever someone needed something.  However it served as a bit of a safe space where I didn’t have to try and make small talk or “act normal”.

Podcast that Wasn’t

Well it finally happened, a weekend when all of the members of AggroChat were busy at the same time.  Because it didn’t really feel right to not do anything… I recorded a quick blurb that I am calling Episode 15.314 in honor of the fact that my entire week has been consumed by playing a supporting role in the math conference.  This week I simply did not have the time to plan for a full replacement cast for the podcast.  I could have maybe pulled something together last minute, but I was honestly too drained to carry the cast forward.  At least we made it to fifteen episodes before needing a week off.  Next week hopefully we all will return to normal and be ready to be entertaining.

The funny thing is… the moment I recorded and posted this…  Kodra showed up.  So in theory we could have maybe limped along last night with Me, Kodra and Tam.  But I figured it was better just to take the week off if I thought I was not going to be my normal charming self.  Like I said above… I have had to do so much glad handing this week, that my social normality buffer is just gone.  I am not sure if I could carry on an intensely direct conversation with two other individuals… even if said individuals are really close and long term friends.  The blurb I recorded hopefully is charming enough, and talks a little bit about what we all have been doing.

Svara Still Awesome

ffxiv 2014-07-26 20-01-18-829 Coerthas is still an amazing place to run FATEs in, and I spent most of my evening running around out here hopping from event to event.  The king of all FATEs will always be Svara, which for the undoctrinated is a series of three connected FATEs that tell the story of the Isgardian fight against the giant dragon Svara.  First off it is completely epic to follow the path of this dragon and fend off the Isgardians from all of her children, then finally down the big beast at the end of the sequence.  It is also epic the amount of experience you get, considering if you hit gold participation in all three fates it is worth around 40,000 xp which is a really nice chunk all at once for about 15 minutes of work.  What makes Coerthas extremely awesome as a zone is that there are a bunch of this heavy xp fates and you can pretty much spend the entire night running between them all soaking up as much xp as you can.  I figure I will likely stay here until I hit 40 before moving on to someplace else.

ffxiv 2014-07-26 19-09-48-884 I am already enjoying playing the dragoon so much more than playing the bard.  Don’t get me wrong, the bard is enjoyable… but it is also the class that everyone seems to be playing.  Every time I solo queued for a duty roulette I would end up in a dungeon with a bard as the second dps.  Playing melee is just much more my style, and the Dragoon delivers some seriously potent direct damage.  Its weakness however has always been the fact that it has little to no area of effect damage.  In fact if I remember correctly it has a single attack, that I do not even have yet.  However they seem to have fixed some of the problems that existed in early release with FATE contribution.  Back then spamming any AOE was the key to getting high contribution.  However it seems like you can focus down a few spawns and still get the same scores that you would if you were just AOEing everything around you.  My goal today after all of the madness is over with shuttling people back to the airport is to do some more duty roulette.

#FFXIV #AggroChat

Wildstar Woes

Crack Dealer

So my reputation as a gaming crack dealer is intact, as I spent part of yesterday teaching another gamer to play Magic: The Gathering.  I guess it is fitting that we taught him at a Math Conference, considering it was invented by a mathematician.  In my defense this time, the attendee asked for someone to tutor him in the ways of planeswalking, and considering I was not actually attending sessions but instead just waiting around to be needed, I volunteered.  We met yesterday morning at 9:30 in the third floor commons area and I brought my patented “box o’ decks”.  @Jay2thaVee was a complete rookie to the concepts of magic and had not purchased any decks.  Thankfully I had left a few of the various $14 starters I have picked up in their original states, as those are pretty much the easiest way to learn.

Unfortunately I take “devotion to black” seriously, and every single deck in my box save for one had black somehow mixed into it.  He played a white/black nyx prebuilt, and I was playing a black/blue theros prebuilt.  Basically for the first game I played with my hand on the table, so he could see what exactly I was doing and when I was doing it.  Additionally every so often when he seemed to lack a play I would nudge him a little bit to explain how the cards in his hand might be useful.  By the time we got around to the second match he was up and running and ready to kick ass… and in fact he did just that.  The second match was excellent in that it showed just how quickly fate can change with the play of the right cards.  We both had cards in play that helped us soak back up some health in each upkeep so for a long time we were in a bit of a stalemate as I could only do as little more damage than he could heal up each round.

Thanks to an artifact that gave all of my creatures lifelink I was able to soak up quite a bit of health during this long drawn out stalemate.  At this point I was starting to get a creature advantage on him as well as a health advantage.  Then with a single play he rocked my world.  Granted I had to explain how good the card he held in his hand was, and why he should play it… but when he plunked down Banishing Light.  Now I must have been extremely tired or something, but I completely misread the card yesterday when we were playing.  It says banish “target” and for some reason I read that as “all” non-land permanents.  So I played it as though it was a complete board wipe, which made the game more interesting.  He began to make progress on chipping down my extremely high health pool which was like 32 or something similar at that point.

Then I get the big guns onto the board with my Abhorrent Overlord.  So I once again start whittling down his health at the same time as he chips away mine.  I do 6 health, he regens 2, and so on until we get to a point where he has 11 health and a serious creature advantage on me, and I have my single big guy as he eats everything else I can get on the board and 9 health.  He manages to do 10 damage to me in one turn and it is pretty much over.  However of all the ways to learn magic this is one of the better matches I have played.  It shows just how tentative a lead can be at any point in the game.  When we misplayed the banish card, it looked like the game was over… but had i not had several rounds of getting crap to play I could have maybe pushed back to get the victory.  In any case I think he is hooked and going to buy a couple of decks for he and his son to play together.  Sounds like awesome times.

Wildstar Woes

WildStar64 2014-07-26 08-21-14-508 Last night I got a rather frank question from a friend of mine regarding Wildstar.  Some time ago another friend had handed him one of the free trial codes that we got for preordering.  He just now got around to trying it a month and a half after launch.  While he enjoyed the game, it wasn’t like the most enjoyable thing he had ever played.  His question was how many of the Stalwart crew were still playing, and if he should pick it up.  He followed us into Elder Scrolls Online, and while he loves that game, he finds it extremely solemn to be playing by himself all the time.  The big thing is that he didn’t want to jump into Wildstar and it to be the same experience for him.  His question was, should he buy the game.  Now I could have put the hard sell on him and lead him down a path that would have ultimately lead to disappointment…  but I was honest with him.

For the most part in the circle of friends that he is part of… Wildstar has come and gone.  There are a few of us who log in periodically but this game had probably the briefest of “glory days” of any title we have played to date.  I only made it to 26 before slowing down and to the best of my knowledge none of us actually made it to the level cap.  I enjoyed aspects of the game, namely the dungeons…  but for whatever reason as much as I should love this game… the drive to play it was just missing.  I am still piddling around, this time on the Exiles side on Evindra but running into the same lack of drive to log in.  Everything about this game should be something that I really enjoy, and you could not ask for a better community team or company supporting it.  But when I ask myself what I want to play in a given night, this game never seems to come up on its own.  To be honest most of the time I was leveling my Chua Engineer it was the boom boxes that kept me logging in every night more than anything else.

So while I think there is a great game here, I had to be honest with him that he probably should give it a pass if he is only interested in playing with the Stalwart/Masks crew.  I think one of the things that really hurt this title was the fact that we simply rolled on the wrong faction for the wrong server.  Dominion side on Evindra is dead… like when I got to Whitevale I sat around for two hours waiting for someone else to wander by so I could take out one of the world mini-bosses and not so much as another adventurer came by at any point during that time.  To be truthful it feels like wandering around Illium you might see a dozen other players at any given point, whereas on the Exiles side you are constantly bumping into people.  The problem is with only 6 slots per server, it really negates the concept of playing both factions.  Within a few days all of the people who were primarily Exile, had deleted their Dominion alts to free up space for more Exiles.

So once again we are stuck at the problem of having all of my time devoted into what has essentially become a non-starter character.  So when confronted with the idea of re-rolling…  I just can’t be bothered to put much effort towards it.  Ultimately if my immediate circle of friends is not playing…  then what exactly am I rushing around to get leveled to be able to do?  I am sure I could roll with any number of the guilds on the exiles side, but I just am not sure if I have the social oomph left in me to start from scratch without being able to rely on the folks I hang out nightly with on voice chat.  I feel like Wildstar might have run its course through the internet as well.  I am seeing a lot of folks who claimed diehard loyalty to the game “taking a break”, which we all know is the beginning salvo in the “quitting the game” conversation.  I am not ready to cancel my subscription yet, but I am just struggling to find reason to log in.

Dragooning It Up

ffxiv 2014-07-26 08-06-32-335 Lately I have been back playing quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV.  I feel like I parted with that game on really good terms and it has always been extremely charming.  When not working on hunts I have been working on leveling the dragoon.  If we can convince a repeat of the other night to happen, when we all logged in to run a dungeon, that place me playing a DPS character.  Ashgar unfortunately only has two tanks to 50, and I have a Warrior and a Bard.  That said I have never really felt deeply connected with the bard.  It does amazing damage and is super useful, and mostly was easy to level through Fates.  The class I would far rather play dps wise is the Dragoon, so lately I have been taking advantage of the Duty Roulette option and running some random dungeons.  I have to say the groups I am getting randomly are actually extremely friendly and communicative.  I feel like maybe this game has crossed the threshold of shedding all of the folks who were caustic and toxic… and now really has devoted fans left.

I guess the real challenge will be what this game feels like trying to tank it with random groups.  At some point I will work up the nerve and tank a random as my Gladiator seeing as I would really love to get to Paladin conversion levels.  There is still a lot to like in this game, and it is the only Asian inspired title that has managed to create a male character I actually enjoy playing.  There are proper beards here, and you have options other than “pretty boy” as far as facial features go.  We will see how long it take for me to get this game out of my system this time, but so far I am really enjoying myself.  I feel like at some point I need to dig up a list of what all new content is available, as there have been three rather large patches since I last played the game regularly.  FFXIV is pretty horrible about advertising what is new from the game interface itself, so I think there are probably some other ways to level that I am just missing.

#MagicTheGathering #FFXIV #Wildstar