September 2013 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Trade Cartels

September 14, 2013 by Belghast

Forgive me father for I have sinned… it is roughly 8 pm before I am sitting down to write today’s blog post. In my defense I have been out running around all day. Firstly to my hometown to go see my grandmother, and then later gallivanting all around the countryside in search of cheap Legos. But that is a tale for another day… namely tomorrow. Today I have a topic I have been wanting to write about since yesterday afternoon. I just have failed miserably at being near a computer today to be able to do so.

Trade Cartels

Yesterday a number of us got into a rather length discussion over twitter relating to my loot commentary, or on the lack thereof in Final Fantasy XIV. Shortly into the back and forth I got this comment from @DesslynStorm. Essentially to paragraph, they believe that all loot should come from crafters. I guess in an idyllic situation this would probably be an alright thing. The problem is that I have seen far too many games where a specific branch of crafters got a monopoly on a specific item and abused the hell out of it.

I love crafting systems and by extension generally love crafters, but in every game I have played where specific items were ONLY obtained through crafters, the Trade Cartel has reared its ugly head. Essentially this is when a group of crafters collude to price fix a specific item so that everyone can turn a specific profit on it. Without a doubt the most heinous of these has generally been the bag makers in each game I have played.

The Threats

On Argent Dawn in World of Warcraft, my warrior was a bit of an oddball. He was an enchanter and tailor, namely so that I could have someone to make bags. Bag space is one of those things that I put a premium on in whatever game I happen to be playing, and will generally go to whatever lengths it takes to make sure my characters have a decent amount of them. I occasionally made a bag and threw it up on the auction house undercutting the competition by a large margin. It was at this point I was approached by my first trade cartel.

A seemingly reasonable mage mentioned that I really should price my bags higher. I told him that I was making a profit and I wanted them to move quickly, so I was fine with where they were priced. This is the point at which the threats started pouring in… another crafter joined sending me tells. Going so far as claiming that they would ruin me on the server. Something that I laughed off because at this point I had been the leader of one of the largest guilds on the server for roughly three years. I was in a pretty active raid and knew the guild leaders of most of the other larger guilds personally.

The Retaliation

But the I am pretty sure that had it been real life, the next step would have been them trying to send someone over to my house to break my knee caps. They proceeded to start buying the bags and relisting them whenever i posted a new one. So at this point I made it my life’s work for the next few days to flood the market with cheap bags. If I was online I was farming humanoids for cloth and turning around and dumping them on the market at cost. No one puts babby in a corner! For awhile they were ravenously snapping them up, but at some point they lost their fervor and simply waited for me to get bored.

I imagine that I had run them out of their current gold, and probably made a handful of enemies for life. But I have encountered to a lesser extent these price fixing schemes in several other MMOs. Each time my instinct is to break the regime because I have seen what it is like when someone has fixed the market. Early on in the life of Argent Dawn, there was a single player that had almost all of the rare enchants. He was part of a big raid guild on my server, and as a result he had a few of the raid drop only patterns that no one else seemed to have. Additionally he could do crusader in a time when it was not commonly known where that dropped.

Since he had 100% of the market on these enchants, he charged truly ridiculous prices. When I finally figured out where Crusader dropped… I decided to break up his monopoly, but standing in Ironforge (the only auction zone at the time) and offering free crusader enchants so long as mats were provided. Again came the threats, because I was cutting into his profit margins. I am sure I had nothing to do with it, but as more people started offering free enchants with mats, he ultimately quit the server and went elsewhere. Functionally I just really dislike when someone tries to profit unfairly on others.

Exclusivity is Bad

If you had a game where the only source of gear were through the crafters, the average player would end up having to pay far more than they do currently to outfit themselves. I realize that Desslyn’s experience comes mostly from Star Wars Galaxies… and I feel that game is vastly different from the modern MMO in innumerable ways. Additionally I feel like the average player within that community had a level of altruism that we will likely never see again. So I feel like what worked in SWG will never likely work again in another game.

An example in Everquest 2, crafters can create what is arguably the best available gear in many occasions, the Master-crafted sets that occur every 10 levels. These require some rare materials, but not so rare that they are unattainable. Since only crafters are the source of them, they have total control over the market for them. On the brokerage system, almost all gear is extremely reasonably priced, however a level 10 set of Mastercrafted gear will go for several hundred times the amount of gold a level 10 character would ever have to spend without buying currency. Crafters have priced the privilege of having a good matched set of gear out of the hands of most players.

Multiple Paths

My personal stance is that all games should have multiple paths to acquire your gear. I feel like different kinds of players want to play the game in fundamentally different ways. Players who deeply care about crafting for the sake of crafting…. will always do it regardless if they can profiteer from it. I feel like there should be viable options for end game gear through Crafting, Quests, Exploration, PVP, Dungeons and Raiding. Any given player may like a mix of those things, and giving multiple options to achieve their goals in a game, allows each person to tailor their journey to suit their own tastes.

I have always thought it would be great, if you could really gain the best possible gear… by doing a series of extremely long and arduous epic quests. By the same token I think it would be cool if crafters could complete a series of trials to synthesize rare materials and with that craft top end gear as well. I see it as a risk vs time type equation. Dungeon and Raid loot might be instance, but it requires a large group and repeated running to get everything you want. Whereas with quests and crafting, it is more a cast of slow and steady wins the race… the end goal is achievable but likely takes a considerably longer amount of time.

Fallacy of Profit

I feel like the hidden root of the whole concept that all good gear should come from crafters, is that crafters by default should be able to make large amounts of profit from their trade. This is just a foreign concept to me. I am one of those people that crafts because I enjoy the relaxation sometimes of crafting. I am not a rabid crafter, but when I do craft I tend to do it because I like outfitting my friends in gear. In Rift I regularly farm up cloth to set new players and new characters up with a full set of 24 slot bags to begin their journey. I enjoy making things for people, and making them happy in the process.

So to view crafting from the point of a cold profit based calculus just makes no sense to me. Sure I feel like crafters should be able to get their money out of the items they make and maybe make a meager profit… but I feel if you go into a trade skill with the purpose of making money you are likely crafting for the wrong reasons. Crafting and the self reliance that it gives you should ultimately be its own reward without any need to tie it to monetary gain. So I guess I question the notion that a certain class of crafter has that they should automatically be able to get rich quick through their crafting endeavors.

Wrapping Up

I feel as though I rattled on more than enough. Additionally I am tired and sore from the days excursion. Right now I want to relax on the sofa and boot up Final Fantasy. One of my good friends managed to get onto Cactuar so I want to get him invited to the guild. Tomorrow hopefully will be a much more relaxing day. I hope all of you had a great day and that the weekend has turned out to be awesome.

I Love Loot

September 13, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy denizens of the interwebs. Getting a slightly slow start this morning, as I was trying to find my old pair of 10 eyelet Doc Martens. Not sure why, but lately I have been wanting to wear them. Positive is I found a pair of Docs, but negative is I did not in fact find the ones I was looking for. I guess that is what happens when you don’t wear them for a decade. Today is going to be oddly busy, with coffee in the morning with some local web developers… and a dinner at night for a friend of hours. Hopefully all the points in-between are relatively uneventful.

Web Games

This week a few significant web based games have been in the social discussion mill, namely folks remembering Glitch fondly and talking about the official launch of Card Hunter. Both of them are extremely fun little games… but I think in both cases they miss the boat a bit by being web based games in the first place. By day I am a web developer, and I maintain a large infrastructure of websites… so I am deeply committed to the “web” as a technology, but I simply do not feel like it is a great platform for the delivery of games, or at least it is not for me. I guess I should explain my position a bit more than that.

Essentially the only time I can play a web based game, is when I am sitting at one of my computers at home. I have web access almost 24/7, but I sadly do not have one of those jobs where I can fuck off all day long playing web games. So this pretty much leaves my time to play these games when I am sitting at home… and if I am at home I have access to hardware that will run “real” games. So in that case, there is almost never a time where I would prefer to play a browser based title than something more engaging and visceral.

Glitch was a really awesome game, and I actually logged a couple dozen hours playing it. I was one of the beta testers and forced myself to sit down at least once a week and spend a few hours engaged with it. The great tragedy of that game for me… is that it was not mobile based. If I had that game on my phone, I would still be playing it… and likely it would have had none of the funding issues that eventually lead it to close. Mobile is totally the ideal platform for this type of game, because I can access it in a way when I am in the break room, or standing around waiting for my wife to finish shopping… essentially I can play it when I am NOT near a real computer.

Card Hunter I fear will be a similar tragedy. It also is a really fun game, but when I have to choose between playing it and playing a “real” game, it is going to lose out every time because quite frankly the experience is not good enough to compete with FFXIV, Rift, Borderlands 2, Diablo 3 or whatever happens to be my current game of heavy rotation. It is a super cool concept, and I love the D&D red box era artwork and nifty feel of it all. However the fact that it is a completely flash based game, means it will always be relegated to the land of novelty, and not something folks will seriously latch onto… since for the most part just like Glitch it will be unplayable on mobile devices.

For the longest time I thought I was maybe the only one that felt this way, but the other night talking about Card Hunter among my friends… we all expressed a similar feeling of “rather play a real game” if we had access to our home computer. The niche for these games seems to be for people who can play them at their workplace to be honest. Since that is often considered bad behavior and is punished in most workplaces… I feel like that is maybe a bad niche to latch yourselves onto. The problem with anything web based is generally that as a society we see web content as “free”, so I feel like trying to extract a viable payment model from anything web based is going to be a long term challenge as well.

Quite honestly I wish Card Hunter the best of luck. I think it is a really compelling game, I just wish I had it on my phone or tablet rather than having to play it on a computer. I would love to be able to say that I will likely play it…but I know based on past track records it is the type of game I would play one night on a whim and then never play again. If I could boot this up while out in the world and waiting on someone… then hell yes I would likely be playing it. I just think this is going to be the long term issue with web based games that cannot easily be played on a mobile client. I hate to say it, but I think Flash is just dead as far as a viable game development technology, unless they can get broader mobile device support.

Shiny Seeker

Today is ending up as a day to talk about all the things I have wanted to talk about… but just have not quite made it to doing so. These all seem like partial themes left on the cutting room floor. Lately I have been blogging a lot about FFXIV, and how much I have been enjoying it. This is still very much the case and last night I had fun running Sunken Temple of Qarn as my Warrior and then later on switched to my Dragoon to dps Brayflox’s Longstop. The simple fact that is something I can do without switching characters… is pretty awesome by its own light. Today however I am not going to gush on the game… but instead talk about one of the problems I have with it.

One of the things that hooked me on Everquest and MMOs in the first place was unpredictable loot. As much as I might complain about random number generators… I have always loved that rare chance of getting something truly amazing from killing a monster. All thought my life, I have had a fascination with randomized systems. When I worked in a card and comic shop, I used to have an uncanny knack for being able to pull that rare foil card from a pack, or getting whatever happened to be the high priced rookie card. Randomized loot in MMOs is this same thing multiplied over and over, and I love it dearly.

The problem with Final Fantasy A Realm Reborn… is there really is no loot to speak of from killing monsters. Sure you can get crafting material drops, and these end up cluttering your bags… but you will never get a piece of useable gear, a rare pattern or an adorable pet from killing monsters. In fact the number of opportunities for you to get items from your adventures is extremely limited at all. Essentially you can get them as quest rewards, or from chests that spawn while doing leves and dungeons. The chests give me a little shot of randomized loot goodness… but it almost feels too few and far between.

I Love Loot

While I truly do love this game already, and I can see myself playing it for a long time. It will never fully replace games like Rift for me. Even now I am more than happy to log into rift and roam around killing random things… because with each mob I kill I have a chance of getting truly phenomenal. I have talked at length about my bloodlust when it comes to games… the desire to see what the next mob might drop feeds into this immensely. While I am still likely to kill random mobs, I find it to be happening far less frequently in Eorzea since I am neither sufficiently rewarded by experience or by loot for doing so. So it turns out that my bloodlust is a fairly complicated formula that does in fact take reward into account.

Honestly all they would really need to do to make me completely happy, is make it so that there is a random chance of one of the chests spawning after killing a mob. Even a 1 in 100 chance would be more than enough to make me happily roam the countryside slaughtering families of goblins and kobolds. Randomized loot is the thing that keeps me going out into the world and killing things for the off chance of getting something really cool that I can use on an alternate spec. So my ultimate fear is that there will be a time where the novelty of this loot-less system wears off and I simply don’t want to play any longer.

Confused Economy

Another huge concern of mine is the economy in general. The only way to get Gil, is from doing quests. Killing random mobs out in the world never rewards you any money. The best source of cash are Guildleaves. These are short quests that involve you going out into the world and completing some objective. These often reward random gear as well, but primarily they are a good source of money and an okay but somewhat lackluster source of experience. The problem is… you are limited to doing 6 of these per day. These allowances stack up until you hit 99, so if you are not playing for a few days you can still do them.

The challenge is these leve allowances are used by tradecraft, battlecraft and the guildhest system. After a certain point, these are essentially the only “quests” that you can do in the game after you have completed all of the normal quests. The only other repeatable source of money is from grinding FATEs, which are Rift like random events that occur in zones. The result of this is that the economy is extremely front loaded, in that you can gain lots of money from doing the initial quests… then after completing those… your prospects for gaining money tend to dry up significantly.

As a result, many players are finding themselves grinding up multiple characters only to view them as disposable vessels only for the purpose of taking money from them. I myself have contemplated this if I run into dire straights. Essentially every quest you do has a “cash” option, that allows you to take essentially trade coins that can be sold on the vendors. Since all of the quested gear is exactly the same as the crafted options… and you seem to be able to buy crafted items far cheaper than the money reward from a given quest… I find myself always driven to take the money payout option from each quest. Right now I am leveling faster than our crafters can keep up… but soon there will be the option of just having one of the guild crafters make my gear.

Essentially I am concerned with how the players will keep up with the expense of playing the game. This last patch they greatly reduced the repair costs… but there will be a certain amount of upkeep that is just required as a player. Last nights Sunken Temple of Qarn run I considered extremely successful… but I still took 5 deaths thanks to some rather bullshit mechanics… namely an ability that seems to have no cast timer and will one shot a player if not stunned constantly. Essentially I just feel that this loot less and cash less combat system… is inventive but deeply naïve… and so much of me hopes they will patch the game and make it work like every other MMO on the planet.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap up because I have a coffee date with a group of community web developers. I am not really looking forward to it, nor am I looking forward to the evening dinner date with friends. All I really want to do is go home and hang out on the couch, and maybe order a salad from Rib Crib. We have eaten fairly poorly all week, so this weekend it is going to be our attempt to do better. I am still down roughly 60 lbs since my start so I am doing okay… but we have to be constantly vigilant. I hope all of you have a great weekend ahead of you.

One Room Dungeon

September 12, 2013September 12, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people of the digital domain. Last night at least in one way did not go at all like I had expected. My wife and I originally planned on travelling to my hometown last night to go visit my Grandmother on her birthday. However my wife got held up at work, and didn’t end up making it home until six thirty or so. I called my mother at some point to find out “how late is too late”, only to find that she simply was not feeling well today and had been sleeping a lot. Tuesday she had oral surgery so I think she was simply recovering from that. As a result I made a long call to her, that way she could continue resting rather than entertain guests. I figure we will make a trip up to see her over the weekend.

The Event

September 11th has a weird significance to me. Sure I remember watching as the World Trade Center events unfolded, but I am not talking about that at all. Nor am I necessarily talking about my Grandmothers Birthday… which unfortunately the World Trade Center bombings have made the easiest date for me to remember ever. For me… 9/11/2012 was the single worst day I have ever had to experience in my career. I found out yesterday that a coworker never really understood why we called it our “9/11 event”… we were not being metaphorical… that is simply the literal date it happened.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the day that we completely burned down our web infrastructure, and had to begin rebuilding it all from scratch. Essentially one of our security personnel mistook a routine network intrusion scan, from a company that we pay to do exactly that… as an actual breech of our network. 9/11/2012 is the day the decision was made, by forces other than our department to shut everything down… take all the sites offline… and ship the machines off for federal investigative forensics. It was the single worst overreaction I have seen in my history as an IT professional.

The result of all of this meant the beginning of a very dark period of that involved lots of 60-70 hour weeks trying to rebuild our infrastructure from the ground up. Additionally it was the beginning of one of the biggest lapses in content my blog has experienced. Much like the real 9/11 has completely changed the culture of the United States… this event completely changed the culture of our company. From that point on… even though we realized within a few days that we essentially cried wolf and that nothing at all had happened that was not included in a network intrusion service that we pay for… all things going forward carried an undertone of extreme security.

We have survived and I feel like the department as a whole is better off, but it was an extremely bad period to be me. It did allow us to “reboot” several things in the way our processes work, and shed old code that had been sitting around since the early 90s. The irony is… that a year after the fact we are still not completely done rebuilding everything we demolished that day. We have rebuilt all of the important infrastructure, and added numerous new things to the mix… but there are still a handful of minor legacy systems that we have not addressed. You can only do so much with a staff of three people to completely rebuild two decades worth of infrastructure.

One Room Dungeon

Last night was another guild night Wednesday over in Rift. Originally I thought I was going to be considerably late due to the whole visiting my grandmother thing. Instead I got home at a decent hour after taking my wife out for dinner and running a few errands. When I logged in, we had a large assemblage of players available so I started asking for volunteers for a little mission. Archive of Flesh is a level 57-60 dungeon, that supposedly has a chance to drop a doodad that is required to upgrade the depleted chest piece to its third state, and level 57 spec specific chest piece. What I gathered up for volunteers was Caithris 57 Tactician support, Delariond 60 Mage dps, myself playing a 57 rogue, Lukian a 60 cleric tank, and Psynister a 56 cleric healer.

What we experienced with that group composition was almost raid like difficulty. However over the course of multiple wipes… we managed to struggle through, learn the encounters and completed the dungeon. The odd thing about Archive of flesh is that in essence it is a one room dungeon. Everything of any significance occurs in the room pictured above… or the upper pathways over the room. The room changes slightly over the course of the encounters as new bosses are revealed, each one slightly changing the rooms dynamic. But I just found it interesting that you could make a completely compelling dungeon.. without involving any crawling at all.

To some extent the Trial of the Crusader raid in WoW did exactly this. However that really never felt like a compelling experience. It felt more like a slipshod raid that allowed the designers to roll something out quickly, rather than spending much time on creating a new zone. This on the other hand felt like a completely story driven experience so that you almost forget that you have not left the entrance to the dungeon. Weird thing is… Golem Foundry… that we ran directly after this dungeon… had almost the same kind of thing going on. Single room with various shafts and hatches that reveal new encounters. Both of them felt really good, and I really enjoyed the essentially “trash less” dungeon experience, without making it feel overly cheap like the Crusader encounters.

It was a fairly good run, as most of us walked away with extremely significant upgrades. Unfortunately the upgrade doodad did not drop, so none of us were walking away with a really nice upgraded chest piece out of the ordeal. Rae (Caithris) and I both walked away with half a levels experience towards 58. I hope I can catch my rogue up and push it to 60 within the coming weeks. This is largely selfish I realize, but since my warrior is already raid ready… I would really like to start running my rogue that actually needs some loving with the various guild dungeon runs. Additionally I really like playing rogue for support than I did playing Warrior. Bard and Tactician just feel better overall than the somewhat confused Beastmaster role.

Overall though it was a really great night. We got in… ran a couple of dungeons and had a blast doing it. I hope we can continue to do this as a regular thing. The only frustration is we had a large number of folks that showed up after we had already pulled together a group. As a result we were two short of making a second group. So here is hoping that we can get a few more higher level folks up there and start running two groups on Wednesday nights. I know we have the folks in our numbers, it is just a matter of getting people online during the time period. In hindsight we should have broken apart our group between the two dungeons and tried to get some of the folks waiting in the wings in the process. But quite honestly at the time none of us really thought about that.

Wrapping Up

This feels like a really odd post… breaking a lot of the normal formatting that I do with my blog. Hopefully it is still overall readable. I figure tonight will be a return to FFXIV after the server maintenance. I am really hoping that Cactuar will be unlocked and some of the folks who have been waiting to roll there can start their characters. My goal for tonight is to run Cutter’s Cry and maybe another Sunken Temple of Qarn. I really want to see what is in the “treasure room” that we completely missed. I hope you all have a great Thursday and that it serves as the gateway to a really awesome weekend.

Four Oh

September 11, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people of the digital verse, I am slowly waking up this morning. Normally I have this open and writing well before six, and at this point well past. I had a good nights sleep but I also feel like I could have likely slept forever this morning. It took me a few minutes to realize that the alarm was going off, and that it was a thing I should care about. Hopefully the coffee beside me will cure this present stupor.

Unintended Night

Last night I had every intention of coming home and playing some Rift to try and push my rogue up to 60 for dungeon running. However that is not at all what happened. I logged into mumble, where everyone was currently in FFXIV so I ended up joining them as well. Not that it takes much coaxing to get me into the game mind you… it was just counter to my original plans. Tentatively I agreed to run Brayflox’s Longstop to help the people still needing gear from it. However this ended up taking quite a bit of time to pull together. So as I munched on the super tasty Chicken Tiki Masala takeout… I continued on with my questing.

Currently I am out questing in the Coerthis Highlands region that is essentially the “snowy zone” for the game. Not sure what it is about snowy climates but they usually end up being some of my favorite ones in any given game. I was a huge fan of Winterspring in the original WoW, and Icecrown seemed to be the zone I always defaulted to going to when I wanted to kill something… since Ice + Undead is a pure winning combination. Coerthis is no let down as you wander around a truly inhospitable climate ringed with extremely fierce and isolationist royal houses. I won’t go into details about the main story arc for the zone… but suffice as to say it is hard to win friends.

One of the best things about Coerthis is the Svaras fates, or at least off the top of my head I think that is the name of them. Essentially there is a really awesome series of fates that begins by following a soldier northwards from Camp Dragonhead. You battle numerous drake attacks along the way, until you reach a ruins to the north. When that fate ends another begins immediately to hold of against a dragon onslaught. Finally when this second fate ends, a third one begins to destroy the mother dragon Svaras herself. They go pretty quickly, but the first fate rewards around 5000 xp, the second around 10,000 xp and the final dragon fate roughly 20,000 xp. So if you can hop on and ride the entire thing out, you mob up over 35,000 xp and a large number of grand company seals.

Add to this big main fate a number of smaller fates that spawn in the central corridor of Coerthis, and it becomes a fairly solid fate zone. The only danger is that the entire zone spans from 30 at the lowest points to 50 at the highest points. So there is a high chance of roaming into areas that are just too high for you currently. On other cool notes however… in my wandering around last night I located the plateau that Behemoth spawns on. This is a big end game primal fight, that my server has taken down at least once. Not sure how difficult it is, but from what I have seen it looks absolutely amazing. I am sure there is the chance as some spiffy gear from it as well.

Brayflox Conquered

Brayflox’s Longstop is a level 32 dungeon that appears as part of the main storyline. Essentially everyone is forced to run it in order to progress their quest chain forward. As a result I ran it quite some time ago for the first time, and did not like the dungeon at all. Essentially it was the first dungeon that I learned how unreliable overpower becomes after your transition to warrior. It is decent for initial aggro, but you simply cannot hold multiple targets for long with it. Essentially Overpower was a crutch that I needed to discard, and this involved developing some new tactics. Brayflox was the run that I ended up going through most of these growing pains… so I remembered it in a less than fond way.

Ironically… this is the dungeon that everyone in my guild seems to want to run. Admittedly it has some of the coolest “unique” gear sets in the game to date. As a side effect our players have been wanting to run the place til their eyes bleed trying to collect the last set pieces. The big bottleneck we have is that there are essentially two tanks right now. Myself and Ashgar are our only dedicated tanks at the high end of the level range. We have one additional dedicated tank in the mid 20s, and a bunch of alternate tanks that are hovering in the 15s. So since all of us prefer greatly to run dungeons as a guild, everyone ends waiting on myself or ash to be able to run the instance.

Ash was not available last night, the 1.5 HD remix of Kingdom Hearts was released… and he had given us warning he would be spending time playing that. So as a result I offered to tank Brayflox in his place. The funny thing is… after having conquered the Sunken Temple of Qarn… this dungeon felt like a cakewalk. The primary difference is that I have developed strategies for multi-target tanking that did NOT rely on Overpower since then. As a result the dungeon no longer felt like the chaotic mess that it did the first few times I ran it. The good thing about the dungeon is that it is really pretty good experience, and with roughly ten chances at bonus chests… you end up with a good amount of loot, some of it was actually an upgrade to my current gear.

It was thanks to the two dungeon runs in Brayflox that I was able to ding 39 and equip the Flames grand company axe that was sitting waiting in my bag. The grand company seal gear is really amazing, and I have found that it lasts normally twice as long as the average item for a given level range. Last night Ash finally made it on, and the group that had not gone to Qarn ended up running it. During the run he ended up getting a unique named axe, but after rattling off the stats… the grand company seal axe was still slightly better. So it is equivalent or better to a dungeon drop for the level.

Four Oh

After the Brayflox runs wound down, I decided to continue on with the main story quests out in Coerthis. Over the course of the next few hours I managed to whittle down the gap to four to something extremely manageable. After a good Svaras fate, I was within a stones throw of dinging… so I ended up picking up one of the more “killy” leve quests I had available to me. After a few minutes of collecting pages, and summoning a big baddie… I dinged 40. This opened up a bunch of gear to me… allowing me access to the majority of the Mithril set and a the new line of parry jewelry. I feel as though the majority of the crafters on our server much be stalled out in this range, because all of the gear for the level could be purchased around 1000 gil… which I considered a steal.

After equipping all my new shiny baubles… it took my unbuffed, non-defiance hitpoints to 2230, which is a sizeable increase over where I was previously. Right now I kinda look like a mishmash of gear sets, but I can live with that. Nothing I am wearing looks too terribly heinous, even though it is technically from about four different “appearances”. Now I really want to run the next optional dungeon, Cutter’s Cry… as a number of my Flames hunt log mobs come from there. Additionally I would like to continue to push dragoon up. I got him to 32 so I would have the option of dpsing Brayflox… but considering the relative guild tank shortage I doubt that will ever really be an option.

Cactuar Locked

Right now my biggest point of frustration is the fact that while everything appears to be working great server wise… and I can log in at almost any moment without a queue… we still have a completely locked server. As of right now I know of at least four people waiting to make characters on Cactuar the server we are on that cannot because it is seemingly perma-locked. There is a list on the FFXIV ARR website that updates five times a day… and while other servers are coming off the lockdown… Cactuar appears to be permanently stuck in that state. It is my hope that with today’s lengthy maintenance period… that we will finally get some additional resources and the folks who have been waiting in limbo can roll on the server.

Additionally if they offered us a way to transfer the entire guild to another server… we would likely jump at the chance. Personally I would love to have us move to Gilgamesh, since that seems to be where the majority of folks I know that are NOT in my guild are located. The problem is… right now our guild is level capped… and we have a massive stockpile of the guild currency to spend on the day long buffs. I would not want to readily give that up, so in order to make a jump feasible we would need to transfer as a total unit… rather than a bunch of piecemeal server transfers. I don’t necessarily relish the thought of moving, because after the initial launch the server community here has ended up being not too shabby. At the very least, the public channels are not quite the painful experience that they are for me in most games.

Wrapping Up

Tonight is going to be an odd night. We need to run up to my hometown after work to wish my Grandmother a happy birthday. After we get back from that, whenever that is.. I will be over in Rift alternatively working on my Rogue and trying to get some dungeon runs started. I am kinda hoping that folks won’t mind running the normals that a 57 rogue can attend, as I really prefer playing support as a rogue than I did on my warrior the other night. The problem is I really have no clue when exactly I will be getting on, since getting away from my hometown is generally painful. I hope you all have a great day ahead of you, and I hope mine is productive and that I can get online tonight at a decent hour.