September 2013 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Dragoon Get!

September 6, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out in digital land. The last two days have been pretty horrible, at least in the way that I have felt. However at roughly 2:30 yesterday afternoon something “broke”, and I started feeling a bit better. I shifted from being shivering and piling on as many blankets as I could find with no real appetite.. to being hot and having a ravenous appetite. While my allergies are still going more or less haywire… I think whatever bug I had has moved on and I will be well on the mend. I am super thankful it is Friday however, as everything I seem to do just wears me out right now.

Dragoon Get!

After getting level 30 on my marauder and switching over to Warrior, I immediately set my sights on catching up my lancer. One of the key design flaws in this game appears to be a severe lack of quests. Essentially there are enough quests for you to level ONE class, but each additionally class you want to push up has to grind their way through the content. Every 5 levels you can get a class quest that will upgrade your weapon and armor, but essentially other than that you are on your own. There are of course leve quests but they are not really that good experience wise, and you are limited on the total number of those you can do a day. Right now the best and fastest way to level is to grind Fates.

Fates are essentially a cross between the events in Guild Wars 2 and the Rifts in Rift. They are random and sometimes player kicked off events that spawn in a zone. They have a time limit to complete the objective, and players are rewarded based on contribution. Unlike some games this one seems to be entirely based on the unmodified threat table. As a result healers and tanks seem to have an easier time getting “Gold” ranking than say a single target dps. There are certain zones that have become hubs of sort for Fate running, and roaming groups ping pong around the zones picking up credit.

Fate Grinding

This is essentially how I pushed from level 22 to 30 on my lancer, but running fate after fate. Sure it was super repetitive… but there are a few advantages. Firstly… Gil the currency is really hard to come by. It is only awarded by doing quests, leves and fates. There is no way to earn it from just killing random mobs. As a result Fates become one of your best repeatable sources of money. Additionally Fates reward grand company seals, which you can then use to upgrade your rank in your chosen grand company or buy some really nice gear upgrades.

After all my fate grinding I was able to bump my rank up several steps and buy a nice level 30 axe for my warrior and spear for my dragoon.. as well as a really amazing tanking hauberk that is pictured above. Additionally there are certain fates that reward various nifty things from getting maximum contribution. The fates are generally puns based on pop culture or songs… so the localization team had a lot of fun with them. In Costa Del Sol there is a fate called “It’s Not Lupus” where you fight a boss named “Cancer”… which is a House reference… and if you get maximum contribution it gives you a little crab pet to follow you around.

Gold Sinks

One of the things that really concerns me going forward with the long term health of the game is the huge number of gold sinks, and relative lack of ways to actually earn money. Always in the past my defacto answer for needing money was just to go farm mobs until I got the amount of cash that I needed. I have always loved mindless slaughter… however in FFXIV it has lost some of its luster since npcs out in the world NEVER drop loot. That is just not a thing this game does at all… essentially your only sources of loot are dungeon chests, leve chests, quests and occasionally fates. This leaves you with relatively few opportunities for money making.

Other than grinding fates over and over… the next best way for money seems to be running Guildleave quests. The oddity about these however is that you only earn 6 allowance a day. Now these allowances stack up until you have 99 of them, but if you are using them as a way to get money or to gain experience you can burn through them really quickly. While the game is amazingly fun, and I really love the freedom of the whole multiclass concept… I can see how very quickly we are going to enter a territory of currency micro management.

In theory I am guessing all of this is to make the crafting that much more valuable, and force players to create a market economy. That is all well and good but right now I would far rather dump my materials on our most seasoned veteran crafter to push him up in ability… than to try and sell items on the auction house to regain some of my lost gil. The market also is completely unreasonable at times. Gear seems to be dirt cheap overall, since you can gain it in multiple places… and there is really no functional difference between quested and crafted drops. However all the other things… are way out into the stratosphere as far as cost. Lord help you if you want black dye for example.

I am hearing of level 50 characters needing start alts just to run through the quests to steal money from them. That is going to be a sad activity if that ends up being the way MOST level 50s pay for their repair bills. Right now that seems to be one of the bigger money sinks. Everything has durability, and everything you do damages it somewhat. Ultimately this is going to be the thing that pushes me to level a crafter, so that I can end up repairing my own gear. There has been talk of adding in dailies and other ways to earn currency, but we will just have to see how heinous these end up being. If they are similar to the leve quests, which give me a random chance at really nice gear upgrades… then I might be completely fine with them.

Back On Track

Last night I finally got back to leveling my main class properly once more. After dinging 30, getting the Warrior job I took a bit of a break from the main storyline to level a bunch of other things. Right now I currently have 32 Warrior/Marauder, 30 Dragoon/Lancer, 22 Gladiator, 12 Pugilist, and 6 Thaumaturge. As I said the other day I ran up the 12 Pugilist because it has some of the most powerful cross class abilities… namely the amazing “Second Wind” which equates to a free potion when used. I seriously could not have passed the level 30 lancer quest if I did not have this ability… so far the toughest encounter I have faced in the game.

Leveling Lancer to 30 and picking up Dragoon was purely a “want to” not part of some broader scheme. I have always loved Dragoons in the Final Fantasy universe. There is just something about the jump command that mystifies me. The ironic thing is… I dinged 30, finished the Dragoon quest… but have yet to actually fight anything and USE the jump command. I immediately switched out my gear to my level 16 gladiator set and started leveling it. My goal there was to hit 22, so that I could get the cross class ability “Provoke” which is literally one of the only snap aggro abilities in the game. I figured this would greatly help me in the ultimate goal of my Warrior soul… tanking instances.

Essentially I am at a point where I have the low hanging fruit from both of the cross classes that feed into Warrior… namely Pugilist and Gladiator. So I feel as though I finally have a full range of abilities at my disposal for being the best possible Warrior tank I can be. Ultimately I will level my Gladiator at some point, because I would really like to have both a max level Warrior soul and a Paladin soul at my disposal. Each of the tank classes functions vastly different, and I am sure there will be cases where either one will be far superior. Normally I favor sword and board, but quite frankly… the weapons that gladiator gets look horrible for the most part… which is greatly destroying my enjoyment.

As of last night I am up to the next major dungeon in the storyline, Brayflox’s Longstop… so here is hoping we can get a group together tonight. Quite frankly myself and the other tank have been the bottleneck in the ability to run dungeons. The dps seem to always be far ahead of us in the quest line and they are waiting on us to catch up so we can tank the instances for them. The only problem is… in order to effectively tank you need all of the sub abilities that feed into your class. In both cases, myself and the other tank have been spending a lot of time picking up those sub class abilities. Now that I finally have my set, I should be fine with mostly focusing on the main storyline from this point on.

Wrapping Up

Well it is once again that time, and I need to wrap up this post and get on with my morning. I hope you all have a great weekend ahead of you. For me I am hoping that I finish mending from whatever crap I have gotten, and that the allergens in the air die down a bit so I can live normally. It is bad enough that my wife has even been bothered by her allergies… and she rarely if ever is. Is it too much to ask for a cold snap so that everything will die out?

Once upon a Cleric

September 5, 2013 by Belghast

Morning all you people out in internet land. For the second day in a row I feel absolutely miserable. I think overall it is just a massive overload of allergies, but it has managed to go and piss off my asthma. As a result I ended up at home about halfway through the day yesterday and have been juggling breathing treatments ever since. I have yet to decide if I am going to attempt going in today, but right now it doesn’t seem likely. I feel worse than I have felt in a long time.

Once upon a Cleric

Today’s post has been spurred on by a comment on twitter to yesterdays post. Essentially a friend of mine said that they would make a healer out of me yet. To which I replied… that few would believe but I actually started out my MMO gaming “career” as a healer. The friend of course could not believe that… so I figured today I would regale you all with the tale of how I ended up being so damned tank centric. We are going to have to step into the way back machine and go backwards through the years quite a bit to around 1982.

My mother was a high school teacher, and as a result I spent large amounts of time milling around the high school after hours as she finished up with her lessons. There was a traditional at the end of school each year… that essentially anything left in the lockers by the end of the day was thrown away. As a result the janitorial staff and by proxy us teacher kids got to rummage through whatever was left in the lockers. Stuffed in the bottom of the locker I found the thing that would begin my descent into madness… an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook.

From that point onwards I was obsessed with all things D&D and roleplaying, and I was especially hung up on the cleric class. I loved the concept of a battle priest, fighting undead and wielding both weapon and holy spells. This obsession was only further cemented when I read the novel “Pools of Radiance” and was introduced to the Tarl the Cleric of Tyr. I loved the fact that he was just as good with a weapon as it was with turning undead. I thought it was a cool concept and the idea was only furthered with the awesome images of battle priests in the Warhammer games.

Tiny Elvis

Scan forward a decade and in 2000 I got hooked on Everquest by a friend of mine. He introduced me to the whole mythos by having me play his second character on a Vox raid. Pretty much the most epic way possible to get introduced into MMOs. I pretty much went out the next day and picked up Everquest, the Kunark expansion and the newly released Scars of Velious. When it came time to choose a class, there really was no option but a Dwarven Cleric of Brell. I was completely enamored with the concept of battle priest fighting undead. That concept lasted pretty well into my late 30s… when I began to realize that my life as a cleric was that of a heal bot.

The end game reality for a cleric was the Complete Heal rotation. For those of you who are not familiar with this concept… essentially each cleric establishes an order and it is agreed upon before the fight. Each of us then set up a macro that shouted “Casting CH – Ready Cleric #X” whereas the X was replaced by the correct priest in sequence. When that cleric saw their number scroll by they were to count to 12 and then press their own macro. Then return to a watching for their number to scroll by state. The end result is that the tank received a complete heal every 3 seconds… instead of the normal 12 second cast time of the spell.

I have to say this made combat in the dungeons and raids and extremely boring and binary system. Watch chat for your number, cast your heal, return to not paying attention until your cool down was up. It was not until I dabbled with EQ1 a bit recently that I realized just how much downtime that game had. You were still chained to the screen of sorts, but I can remember healers knitting, reading books, all just waiting on their complete heal rotation. The thing that soured me on the experience however was not having any control over my own destiny. I essentially followed someone else into a dungeon and was there until they determined it time to leave. This experience has forever soured me towards healing in general.

The Celt

The game we played after we fell out of love with EQ and the hours spent standing around doing nothing… was Dark Age of Camelot. The above image is the very first incarnation of Belghast Sternblade. The Celt Champion was a really amazing class, in that it had ranged spells to pull with, loads of debuffs and was equally proficient in the tank, off-tank and dps roles depending upon how it was specced. Most of the time I tended to favor two handed weapons and served in a dps and offtank in a pinch role for the various excursions. My friend juggled the roles of both main tank and main healer by dual boxing a Dwarven Warrior and a Celt Bard together.

This is the point at which I should note that the bulk of my time playing DAoC was spent on Gaheris… the carebear server… largely because it gave us three whole realms worth of zones and dungeons to explore instead of the rather claustrophobic single realm setup. Adding to this trio we had a Lurikeen enchanter that served as our primary dps. It was amazing the amount of things we could pull off with the small group we had. There were many times I had to offtank a mob just to spread out the damage enough to get through the fights.

When I started doing Keep and Dragon raids… I got drafted into the full tank role a few times and really enjoyed it. This is essentially the game in which I got my first tastes of tanking. I liked the taste… and ultimately ended up doing quite a bit more with our alliance. As we moved on to other games I started favoring the hybrid/offtank role because it gave me soloing versatility and a key group dynamic that I could fill. When we played City of Heroes, I was a blades/regen scrapper which in many ways was one of the more tanky classes in the game. Once again a friend played the full bore earth tank, and I alternated between dps and off tanking as needed.

Bait and Switch

This is Exeter, a tankadin… and my intended main when World of Warcraft released. In beta the Paladin had been the ultimate synthesis of Battle Priest and Tank. I had so much fun running around with my friend who was playing a nuking priest at the time. My attacks would debuff the target against holy damage, and he would come in for the kill and demolish it. It was like the perfect symbiotic match… then Blizzard completely destroyed it at the 11th hour right before release by introducing the “Seal” system to replace the “Strike” system. Over night Paladin went from being the most amazing thing I had played so far… to feeling absolutely awful and confused.

With release… I stuck to my guns and tried to make a Paladin work… and so long as I had friends to level with I was doing awesome. Then tragedy struck… we had a death in the family, and I simply was not around for a few weeks. When I came back all of my friends had long since leveled past me, and I found trying to solo on the paladin a thoroughly frustrating mess. Since the one thing above all else Hunters were renown for was their soloing ability… I started playing Lodin. I was able to catch up to my friends with surprising speed and I played a hunter just effective enough to not be a horrible strain on my party.

Hunter Happened

I never really intended on playing Lodin as a main character… I just intended on using him as something to catch up to my friends… then later leveling Exeter on my own and returning to the intended role of Tankadin. However one thing lead to another… and a good friend of mine ended up starting a raid, that needed hunters… and before I really realized what I was committing to, I was a half GiantStalker decked out raiding hunter. The funniest and most ironic part is… that I ended up on the one class that had a cast rotation similar to the complete heal. Once we entered Molten Core I got indoctrinated into the Tranquilize rotation. Just like complete heal… hunters would set an order and we would then “tranq” the next enrage effect.

I had a lot of good times raiding with the Late Night Raiders, and I met a ton of people that have become permanent fixtures in my gaming life… but quite honestly I was never a good hunter. I could pass as one, and I could sit around 3rd in damage when compared to our other hunters if I really pushed it… but I just did not care about the class the same way the others did. My instinct was always to get up in the face of the mob and beat on it with something… and I hated pet management above all things. I managed to get Exeter to max level… but it ended up feeling just horrible. At that point Paladins tanked with Seal of Rage… which was a glorious mess that never really worked at all for holding aggro.

Priest Enabler

Around about this time a good friend of mine mentioned that she would like to level a healing priest, but didn’t really want to go through the grind that was leveling a healing priest. I had been kicking around the notion of leveling a tank, but again leveling as a tank was a painful experience. So as a result we decided to level my human warrior Belghast and her dwarven priest Finni together to make the process easier. This was probably a bad thing… because it was the first moment that I realized how amazing priests are. They enable me to make really bad decisions… like pulling ALL THE THINGS in an area and then living to tell the tale.

I loved this new play style of making everything hate me… then getting bailed out of my bad lifestyle choices by someone else. The two characters shot up extremely quickly, and before I knew it I was tanking the unofficial raid nights for Late Night Raiders. The problem is… the more I got into tanking… the more I hated playing Lodin. The only problem… Lodin was geared… and there was no way to get as geared as the LNR tanks. So I bided my time, continued getting tanking experience and “apprenticed” of sorts under the various really good warriors that we had in our raid.

One of the best things about an expansion… is it is a complete gear reset. As a result I used the Burning Crusade expansion to be my springboard to ditch the hunter and move forward as a “real” tank. From that point onwards I have essentially played nothing but tanks as main characters. Be it my Warrior in Rift, or my Marauder/Warrior in Final Fantasy… I always gravitate towards tanking. It took some time… but I finally found that one role that really suits me. Which I guess in a way is why I am so passionate about tanks being a thing going forward. It is a role I feel that I play fairly well.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it… the tale of how I went from being the most healery of healers to playing absolutely nothing but tanks. I figured it was a tale worth telling, especially since there are folks that still have trouble thinking of me as ever playing anything but a tank. The ironic thing is… there are a group of folks I raided with at the time that still think of me as Lodin the Hunter. I was a really horrible hunter. At this point… I am going to go crash on the sofa as I feel absolutely terrible. I sincerely hope you are having a much better day than mine.

Support Belghast

September 4, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning all you happy people in digital land. So far I am having another allergy ridden morning as I struggle to shake off my stupor. Right now I just want to go back to sleep, but I know that is really not within the realm of possibility. My lungs are pretty junked up this morning, so starting to wonder if I need to take a breathing treatment. Here is hoping that by the time I have finished writing this post that things will have cleared up and I am feeling much better. I kinda wish I had one of those cookies from the Matrix that makes everything feel “right as rain”.

Moment of Truth

FFXIV_ReviewOfHeadStart

This morning is in essence the moment of truth for Squeenix. Either players will be able to log in normally or at least within a few tries and get on with playing Final Fantasy XIV… or they will likely start to drop out of the game giving up. Today’s maintenance has been sold as the cure to the problem in many ways. If it ends up not being so… I am questioning just how much patience players will have. I know my guild is getting to the point where our patience is worn extremely thin at this point.

I originally thought the title of this subject was going to be “Epic Letdown”. Launching Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn was literally the first thing I did when I got upstairs. I was greeted with the familiar 1017 shuffle as pictured above. My immediate thoughts were “what the fuck”. This has been such an up and down rollercoaster. I feel like I have gone through the stages of grief with the outrage and the denial and finally I have arrived at the sad acceptance that they didn’t have a clue one what they were doing.

However I did a few quick searches and stumbled across this post. Essentially it said that they were going to throttle logins immediately after the servers came back up… and in theory they have just now come back up. Then over time this morning they will ratchet down the restrictions to make sure that the servers stay stable. In essence that makes sense I suppose. So shortly after this… I attempted to log in and got a 20 player queue and in within a few minutes. Right now things seem tentatively “better”. Time will tell as to whether or not the login lottery is gone… or if I am just seeing the effects of it being 6:30 in the morning.

I want so hard to believe that things are back to normal, or at least back to Beta 3 normal… because the recent norm has been pretty jacked up. We have several people in the guild who are unable to purchase the game and get onto Cactuar, so here is hoping that in the coming days they are able to do so. An encouraging sign was that apparently Squeenix gave Amazon the nod to go ahead and start offering digital sales and downloads yesterday afternoon. That was the point at which I started to get extremely hopeful… because to me that meant they really felt this was the solution. Here is hoping that it remains playable over the next few days as more players come online.

Support Belghast

Last night was a pretty momentous occasion for our little guild over in Rift. It was the first time since the founding a few months back that we had five level 60 players online at the same time… or quite honestly even in the guild period. Over the last few days Fynralyl and Psynister hit 60 on their main characters, and within the last week or so Sylladora did as well. They joined myself and Lukian who had been 60 for some time and simply been waiting for some more guildies to start up regular dungeon runs. The only problem with this… is we have a bit of a strange group composition.

The five of us add up to be 2 warriors, 2 mages and a cleric. Lukian had been working on a healing spec, so I knew we had that covered. Either Psynister or I could tank… so that should be good… but I thought Psyn pretty much ONLY had a tank spec, and since he needs tanky gear for elites I figured it was best to have him in that role. Fyn and Sylla would of course be dps… which left us missing one key role… Support. At the last minute I remembered that in Storm Legion, Beastmaster had turned into a support tree, so after a little bit of fiddling I reset one of my unused roles to be the default Trailblazer preset (Beastmaster/Tempest/Reaver) support build.

It took me a little bit to get a grasp on my hot bars and set up a few macros, but within 10 minutes we were ready to go with me queuing as a support role. It turns out that the Beastmaster is essentially a big walking buff bot. I bring with me 6 different group and raid buffs that do everything from increase our damage, to reduce our damage taken, to causing a small hot every time I do a finishing move. Essentially I am a lot like an Everquest bard… I make everyone in the party somehow better, but you don’t really notice it until you don’t have one.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at just how cool the re-skinned beastmaster cat pet looked. The previous version was this ugly emaciated blue thing, so apparently with storm legion there was a massive improvement in the models. I have to say playing it does not feel nearly as gratifying as playing a Bard… which was the only Rift support I have been used to. The effects of my work are far less tangible. I know that just me being in the party is reducing all damage taken by 5% and causing everyone to deal 5% more damage… but you really don’t show up on the meters either in the damage or healing you do.

I need to do more research into the support warrior roles, and come up with potentially a better spec. I went for this one namely because you could be semi effective at range with the addition of the tempest abilities. Also I feel as though I really did not have much time to soak in the abilities before trying to create some haphazard hot bars. It worked well enough however and we were able to get through the random normal 60 we queued for. Sadly only one piece of gear was usable… and even it was for the wrong spec. However hopefully over the coming weeks we will get some folks good gear.

Wrapping Up

Somewhat of a low news morning for me, but I did ramble on at length about two things so I figure this is a good place to cut it off. I need to finish getting ready and get on the road. I still feel like death warmed over, and my lungs still feel like crap. So much of me wants to just say fuck it and take a sick day… the only problem with that is I don’t really see any end to this until the weather gets colder. It is like all the allergies are hitting at the same time. Anyways.. hopefully all of you out in digital land are doing far better than I am… and that you are all having an amazing week. I am resigned to telling myself that we are at the halfway point to the weekend.

Pugilism

September 3, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land… I am somewhat awake and once again sitting at the keyboard in the morning. I know that over the holiday weekend I was a slacker and ended up logging late in the day for two days… but now it is time to return to reality and as such the morning posts begin once more. All in all it was a pretty good Labor Day weekend, we ran out and did quite a few things and I managed to get in a decent amount of playtime in on various games. I even managed to hit the suggested point in the NDA title, so I call the weekend as a whole a success.

Another Cool Find

Yesterday my wife went shopping with her mother and sister and I pretty much stuck around the house doing laundry, changing the ferret cage, and playing a lot of Final Fantasy. Right now there is a lot of closeout going on at the various Wal-mart locations around us, and she said she would check the ones in Joplin if they ended up there. I had honestly pretty much forgotten about it when I got a series of texts asking about various sets. I still think it is so damned cool that she is more than willing to feed my addiction to all things Lego.

At the first store there were many sets that I already had, and one that I had picked up at our store… but in amongst the various heavily marked down boxes was a gem. The Gungan Sub is a set I have thought was cool for some time, but it had an $80 pricetag that like all the bigger sets makes me not willing to pick them up. However yesterday she found it for only $40 so it was a definite buy especially considering this one is another out of print set from 2012.

This apparently is a re-release of a model by the same name that came out in 1999 for the release of the Phantom Menace. It looks like the model has been improved in every way, and in addition there is the first Queen Amidala minifig which is pretty sweet looking. Of course in the travels my wife found lots of stuff for herself, including a bunch of scarves that were on clearance and a few tops. It sounds like she had a good time hanging with her family, but I still think it is awesome that she thought to check the Legos and actually found some.

Pugilism

Now that I managed to get to 30 on my main class and pick up the Warrior job I have backed down a bit from pushing through the levels. One of the frustrations with specialization is that you can no longer access all of the cross class abilities. So by switching into Warrior I lost access to all the nifty toys I had from my Lancer sub class. As it stands currently, Warriors only have access to cross class abilities from the Gladiator and Pugilist classes. Since there are quite a few good low hanging fruit in the Pugilism tree, I decided to swap over and run up a few levels there.

I have to say I enjoy the way pugilist feels. In many ways it reminds me of the way the martial arts hero felt in City of Heroes. You have lots of awesome kicks and punches and a really interesting combo system. Basically how combos work in this game is that when you hit an ability, it will highlight the next ability in sequence… and if you press it you get some special added effect. The problem is if you miss the second attack, it is a lost opportunity.

With the Pugilist, each attack applies a short term buff to your character, and this buff is what controls the ability to proceed through to the next attack. This means even if you fail to hit the target with the second attack, there is always a chance to pull out a second attempt at the attack and proceed down the combo tree. Additionally they get a third step in their combo building process amazingly fast, within the first few levels. This makes the class design feel extremely responsive early on in the leveling process.

Right now my goal is to hit level 12, which will give me access to a few really nice cross class abilities. First we have Featherfoot, which increases evasion by 25% for 15 seconds. Next we have Second Wind, that is a variable heal that builds off attack power. Lastly we have Internal Release, which increases Critical Rate by 30% for 15 seconds. I have heard that the Marauder ability Berserk which increases attack power by 50%, will greatly buff Second Wind. While Berserk keeps you from using special attacks for 30 seconds after its duration… it could be a handy combo in a clutch situation where you are tanking and need a large heal NOW.

Primetime Patching

At the point of posting about the prime time patch, I had not really don’t the time conversion myself. Essentially the “Wednesday patch” is actually a Tuesday evening patch for the United States. I feel as though a million oceanic players are reveling in the frustration saying “see what it feels like”. The maintenance period is essentially 7 pm to 1 am central time, so pretty much encompasses the entire playable time period I would normally be in a game. All will be forgiven if this fixes the issues and we can finally stop the “1017 shuffle”.

I heard an interesting theory about what is happening to the servers and why they cannot support any more players. The theory states that it is not actually a problem with the individual shards themselves, but a problem with not having enough resources on the “instancing server”. The game makes constant use of throwing players into instanced scenes in the game as you complete some of the games more epic quest moments. This additionally is supposedly the same server that is used by every dungeon in the game. The majority of player disconnects involve going into or coming out of an instanced area.

The theory further poses that it is this instance infrastructure that was just too small to support the current deluge of players. This server was supposedly scaled for around 100,000 concurrent players, whereas we have well over that on a given basis. This is also why in the final beta test, before they imposed the caps… the main issue at hand was the complete and total failure of the instance system halting players from progressing in their quests. If this is in fact the case they may literally be able to throw servers at the problem…and after this maintenance all may be resolved. I really hope this ends up the case… because the game is far better than its shitty infrastructure shows.

Wrapping Up

Well it is time for me to take the trash out, feed the cats and get on the road. I hope you have a great short week ahead of you. My hope is that no real crisis arise and I can get some things knocked off my extremely long list. More than likely tonight I will be back in Rift, as I am sure the guild thinks I have fallen off the face of the earth. Looking forward to trying to get some more dungeons going this Wednesday for guild night. Crossing my fingers that the maintenance fixes everything, and I will be able to play FFXIV at will, and not feel like I need to play it whenever I can actually connect to the game servers.