October 2013 - Page 8 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Mayhem in Mathosia

October 3, 2013 by Belghast

Just a Gigolo

Last night I was feeling fairly antisocial. I logged into Rift for a little bit, but was feeling overall meh about the game, especially since I knew the bulk of the guild would be in FFXIV anyways. I still feel bad about the fact that almost all of the Rift guild moved rather abruptly to Final Fantasy… but that just kinda happens with recent games. Since I was not super amped about doing things with people… I decided to run around as a Bard and grind FATEs. I have been working up the class so I could have something dpsy to play when we had too many tanks and not enough other things. I had originally intended this to be my Dragoon that is sitting at 32…. but as I started to play the Bard it just leveled so much faster.

At level 45 in FFXIV you get a series of quests that give you four of the 5 pieces of your archetypal class look armor. This is commonly referred to as the Artifact gear and through the first series of quests you get every slot but your chest piece. This often leads to some bizarre looks, but honestly I am not sure the bard set COULD look goofier. I am somewhere between a rockstar, a gigolo and a movie style gypsy. In no case does this make me feel epic and awesome… and in the matter of a single quest I went from looking like the Dread Pirate Roberts to David Lee Roth.

Vanity Slots to the Rescue?

Supposedly there are vanity slots on the way… and they seriously cannot get here soon enough. I am mildly depressed to think I will have to wear a pair of pants that look like they were crafted from a circus tent until then. The above image is the set I loved to wear… Foestriker. This comes from the first three dungeons… and I have been slowly gathering the rest of the pieces of the outfit. Everything about the look seems epic to me… and I felt like the elite archer I was supposed to be. The bard outfit on the other hand looks like I am 5 years old and got to dress myself for the first time.

Apparently I am not alone in this assessment, as most of the major forums have at least one “wtf is wrong with the bard gear” thread. Overall most of the other class outfits I have seen have been amazing looking. Dragoon looks like everything you would expect it to be, as does Warrior, and Paladin looks very much like the defensive tank that they are supposed to be. Even Scholar with its quirky “I bought this jacket at an army surplus store” looks pretty cool. So right now the bard outfit seems to be the “Moon Moon” of the crowd. Which is kinda sad… considering just how amazing the bard class as a whole really is. If I knew just had bad I would end up looking… I might have focused on leveling up the dragoon instead.

Server Shuffling

Yesterday it was announced that Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn would soon open up server transfers. In an attempt to reunite friends and loved ones… the first five days of server transfers will be completely free. This is generally an extremely good thing… since there were a few Stalwarts who were not patient enough to play the “get on Cactuar” game that usually involves creating characters at odd hours. The only negative is that if you look at the list below… our realm is specifically flagged as one of the three US realms that are extremely highly congested.

As a result… the opening of server transfers may make our server queues even worse. Essentially every night there is a very small queue when we attempt to log into the server, the hope is that even if the queues increase we will never have to go back to using our login macros to get through the sea of 1017 errors. As a guild we would consider moving elsewhere, but it would mean starting over from scratch and moving separately. It feels like they planned this poorly in that they did not offer a guild move option. Currently we have essentially maxed out our guild, and all the frenetic questing of the first few weeks in part is what pushed our level up to where it is now. Without the assistance of the quests… it would likely be far harder to reach.

Additionally we have almost maxed out our faction with the Immortal Flames… which means we could consider switching factions and starting the process of leveling our reputation there. So the prospect of having to discard all this progress and start from scratch just does not seem like something we would want to do. We have very few people on other servers, so for the most part it is not a huge ordeal. I imagine that the folks transferring TO Cactuar however will have to do it during off peak hours, which could be a bit tricky since there is only a five day window to get that free transfer in. No word yet has been posted as to when the server transfers will begin.

Mayhem in Mathosia

I think this week why I have been so focused on trying to push up the Bard is that I know I will be spending most of my weekend playing Rift. Last week they announced a brand new server event called Mayhem in Mathosia. The goal of the event is in essence to get Rift back to its roots… massive large scale invasion events spanning multiple zones. During the event there will be unique planar drops that include new colors of Hellbug Mount, a unique Kirin, and some cosmetic gear. I want it all… I want it now.

The schedule looks a little something like this…

Phase 1: Friday, Oct. 4 – Saturday, Oct. 5 – Silverwood / Freemarch
Phase 2: Sunday, Oct. 6 – Monday, Oct. 7 – Gloamwood / Stonefield
Phase 3: Tuesday, Oct. 8 – Wednesday, Oct. 9 – Scarlet Gorge / Scarwood Reach
Phase 4: Thursday, Oct. 10 – Saturday, Oct. 12 – Moonshade Highlands / Droughtlands

RIFT_POSE_CinderHellbug_02

So I will likely be spending most of my time over in Rift this weekend and most of next week trying to gather up all the goodies. I will of course be popping back into FFXIV if someone needs a high level dungeon run, or to help out with instances as needed. We have been trying our best to be available anytime a guild member is on high center due to needing to do a specific dungeon run. I still would like to get my rogue to level 60… but the 50+ leveling just feels like a tedious process. Which is a bit disturbing considering I am right now playing a game where I am forced to level unaided by quests. By completing enough of the various invasions you can win the unique appearance Hellbug above, so that will be what I am working towards.

Sponsors Unite

October 2, 2013 by Belghast

Class of 2013

Yesterday the 2013 Newbie Blogger Initiative officially kicked off and the new blogs are starting to trickle into the forum. Yesterday I updated my blogroll to include the five blogs that had signed up to date, and over the night another two have joined the fray. Here is hoping that the effort will continue to grow throughout the month. Last time we ended up with I believe 110 new blogs starting the process, so we have a long ways to go before we see those numbers.

I will update my blogroll accordingly later today… but currently this years crop looks a little something like this…

Check them out and give them some link love.

Sponsors Unite

Similarly, yesterday kicked off quite a number of “advice” posts from the sponsors. Like always these varied in topic greatly covering general tips, where to find inspiration, and various technical tidbits. I am sure in the coming days we will be seeing a lot more of these posts but so far here is the run down of topics that were posted as of this morning.

I am sure as the month rolls on, we will see quite a few more sponsor posts as well. I think for the first day, the program was pretty well represented. My goal is to do a short daily synopsis of what all has been happening on the days I am not posting an advice article myself.

Heroic Characters

A few days ago I had posted about the fact that October 1st was the beginning of the ability to create a free Heroic Character in Everquest 2. Most of us initially thought this was for subscribers only… or in EQ2 nomenclature “Gold Members”. However yesterday Stargrace of MMO Quests pointed out that ANYONE can log in and create a free level 85 character during the October 1st – October 15th period. Additionally they have once again tightened the reins of the free to play restrictions. Previously it was extremely frustrating to play a free to play character, because you could not equip Legendary or higher items… which meant that essentially you could not equip anything that came from a dungeon or most world drops.

With the introduction of Heroic Characters, all of these item locks are gone… as are the various items that were sold on the store to unlock the ability to equip them. Additionally as of yesterdays patch… much like they did in the past with other expansions… Destiny of Velious is now included for free. This gives you access to content up to level 95, and covers all of the newer zones added into the game. They have also broken up the Age of Discovery features into bite sized chunks that allow you to gobble up only the pieces you want, for example you can buy access to mercenaries only, or just the beastlord class. Since they are removing some of the appeal for remaining a gold member, they have added in a permanent +15% coin loot bonus and +10% mount speed bonus to all existing gold members. They have also mentioned they will be adding more perks into the equation to keep maintaining gold level a valuable thing.

The Swash and Berserker

Wanting to take advantage of the free promotion, I logged in both of my accounts last night and created and or upsized characters on each. For some time I had been trying to level a dps character on my main account, and had created Belgrifter a Ratonga Swashbuckler. Namely the Swash is a very high survival dps, and I was having a decent time leveling him. Ultimately I ran into the same roadblock I ran into with all of my characters however. Once you have had flight in EQ2, you simply do not want to level a character without it. So essentially I was stuck with a decision… either grind up tradeskills or grind up levels. I managed to push him up to 55 before something shiny caught my eye and I abandoned the effort.

Since I could not really see myself returning to playing him until I had flight… I decided to go ahead and use that accounts token to super size my Ratonga. The gear that they give you is extremely nice… far nicer than the gear I have ever started velious content in before. I seriously doubt if I will replace any of it during the Othimir quests, it seems to be on par with that level of item. The weapon choices were a little wonky, giving me a sword and a mace… but I can live with that. The big problem is I have NEVER used a mace on my rat… but they auto leveled all of my weapon skills for me… so that really is not a problem.

If you look at the image from the above paragraph you will see Belglaive my new 85 Iksar Bezerker. On my second account I mostly had support classes, as I used to regularly dual box before the release of Mercenaries. As a result I really did not have anything “tanky” on that account. If I ever wanted to dual box again, I figure it would end up extremely handy to have access to a tank, and Bezerker is the one I have never really played to high levels. I have a very small dwarven one on my main account, but I think he is somewhere in the 30s. The best thing is… the changes give me full access again to my Dark Elf Warden, since I had stopped playing him due to the item restrictions and not wanting to maintain a second subscription.

Wrapping Up

The ability to create a free level 85 character is an extremely amazing offer. If you have ever considered playing EQ2, I highly suggest you make an account during the 1-15 period and create a level 85 even if you do not intend to play it right now. You can do a lot of cool stuff with an 85, and even use it to feed lower level characters items. I have always loved EQ2, and I will admit the prospect of fresh high level characters has gotten me pumped about playing it some again. Just not sure how often I will do so… given my current addiction to Final Fantasy XIV. If you do end up rolling characters, I highly suggest Antonia Bayle the Roleplaying server. It has probably the best community I have seen in any game… other than potentially Landroval in LOTRO.

NBI2–So You Want to Blog?

October 1, 2013October 1, 2013 by Belghast

October 2013 is Newbie Blogger Initiative month and you can be a part of the festivities! Sign up as a sponsor or mentor for new bloggers, or consider starting up a blog of your own and soak up the wisdom and support.

There has been a small matter of confusion about kicking the second Newbie Blogger Initiative off. The first few posts started trickling in yesterday, but to the best of my knowledge the official start is today October 1st, the beginning of a brand new month. I have always been a person that sought out a community, be it a game forum or a guild or other denizens of the twittersphere. As a result I have always tried to find connectivity to the various other bloggers operating in the same space as me. So when I heard about the first NBI, I was all about its goals and motives.

I feel as a community we can go a long ways to making new bloggers feel welcome. Much like last year however I am not sure how much sage advice I can really offer. I feel like I am just figuring things out myself, and not really a role model worth following. This month however I will make an effort to distill some of my experience being a blogger since 2009 into a few hopefully helpful posts. Right now I am setting a goal of at least one new NBI related post a week, but knowing me there will likely be more than that once they actually get rolling.

So You Want to Blog?

I don’t really think someone wakes up one morning and says to themselves that they want to be a blogger. I think for most of us it is something that happens over time, and we slowly transition into the role. I for example have always expressed myself in an entirely too verbose fashion. I was one of those guys who became a regular on whatever gaming forum I happened to be playing. I‘ve written so many long form walls of text on so many different gaming forums that I have lost track. It was a thing I was compelled to do, long before there really was a congealed gaming blogosphere.

It was late 2008 that I really became aware that there was such a thing as a WoW Blogosphere. I had been playing the game since late 2004 and the guild that I lead was a day one guild on Argent Dawn, the busiest of the Role Playing servers. So I felt like I had things to say about something I deeply cared about… but I likely never would have coalesced into writing a blog without a nudge forward by the existing community. I discovered Blog Azeroth and the wonderfully supportive people there, and finally gave me the courage to take a step out into this new world. My hope is that NBI can be a similar community to help support and encourage other new bloggers.

Finding Your Format

If you are going to be writing… you ultimately need a SOMETHING to be writing about. Generally it is this SOMETHING that attracts readers to your blog, gets them to care about what you are saying and keeps them coming back. For me… Tales of the Aggronaut started its life as a World of Warcraft blog… namely a Warrior Tanking and Guild Leadership blog. This was a nice clear niche that I could write about, and find enough topics to keep them coming on a regular basis. As a main raid tank, that happened to be a warrior, that happened to be a raid leader, that happened to be playing World of Warcraft… I had a naturally built demographic and hopefully audience.

Sure enough it worked… I posted and people came, because they cared about the things I also cared about. I feel like it takes awhile for people to actually care about what you as a person are saying, and it is far easier to make them care about the types of things you are saying. As a result I feel like the biggest piece of advice I can give someone is to find a “thing” that you care about, that other people also can care about. People like to be able to enter your blog in their RSS feed reader categorized as one specific thing.

The Escape Plan

The problem that I ran into with this notion… is that I ceased to care about the thing I started my blog about. Granted I am still a tank, and I will always likely be a tank… it is something so instinctual and rooted in me that I will likely never NOT be a tank. The big problem however is that I simply did not care about World of Warcraft any longer. So while as much as I loved the Blog Azeroth community, it simply was not enough to sustain me blogging about WoW when I moved on past that game. My new object of affection was Rift, so I briefly and somewhat successfully made a format change to being a blog about Rift. I even got sponsored by Trion as an “official” blog of Rift for awhile.

The problem is… once breaking the monogamy of only playing this one game… I was free to flit about madly. So while I started off happily playing Rift, I started playing other games as well. My format got confused, and I found myself not really sure what I wanted to write about on a regular basis. So many blogs die during this sort of existential crisis, because the original format of the blog ends up not being something the blogger wants to write about any longer. My next piece of advice is that when you pick a format… do so knowing that there will be a time that you no longer care about whatever that format is. Essentially have an escape route in mind… a direction you can grow your blog in to find new inspiration.

The Generalist

Earlier I said that you needed a SOMETHING that people cared about to write about… and this is true at least at the start. You have to build an audience that is willing to keep reading you. Granted many of us feel like we are writing into a vacuum, or at least I feel like I am talking to myself most mornings. However it is nice to be able to look at your statistics and see that yes… you do in fact have people reading the words you are saying. If you have engaged the community, be it through NBI itself, twitter, google plus, various game forums… you can reach a point where people actually care more about you than what you happen to be saying on a daily basis.

I don’t necessarily feel like I have actually accomplished this myself… I am a tiny minnow in a huge pond and I have managed to keep that perspective as I go forward. However I have managed to maintain enough of an audience through all my flights of fancy to feel like I am not entirely alone in this. After trying to switch gears from World of Warcraft, to Rift… I finally rebooted by blog to be game agnostic and simply talk about whatever the hell interested me at the time. Additionally I made a conscious effort to start trying to be more personal. So now I write about things that are happening to me… most of them game related… but sometimes not.

Finding the Time

So while there will be occasionally times that you have next to nothing to talk about… the biggest problem I always had was that I had to carve out a chunk of time to be able to sit down and write. Some bloggers can rattle off a paragraph or two, and make it seem like a full post. I envy those folks so much, because I don’t feel like I have written anything worth reading until I have filled up an entire page full of dross. As a result it takes a not insignificant amount of time for me to get through my writing process. When I was not stressed with a deadline and I could blog over lunch… the content was flowing freely. However when I was stressed out I tended to retreat from writing and absolutely clamp down on my content.

There were so many lapses in posting that occurred in Tales of the Aggronaut, before this recent blog every day experiment. The big thing that I had to solve was finding a time that I could commit to writing something each day. For me, I get up at 5:30 am in the morning, shower, make a cup of coffee… and then I piddle around for about an hour as I drink my coffee and try and wake up. While I am seemingly able to write, I am barely verbal before 9 am. Previously I would sit around upstairs and play whatever game I happened to be into for an hour before going into work. I decided I would sacrifice this fragmented game time and focus on trying to churn out a new blog post every morning.

Finding Your Routine

While this works for me, and I have been able to keep up with daily posting since April of this year… you have to find whatever routine works for you. One of the things that I have figured out… or at least think I have figured out… is that it is far more important that you are writing regularly than necessarily writing brilliantly. Of course… there are folks that write daily and do so brilliantly… and I am massively jealous of their prolific talent. However if you keep giving folks new content, they will likely be back or at least get in the habit of checking your site regularly for updates. It has gotten to the point where if one of my friends does not see a post from me in the morning, they are texting me to find out if I am still alive.

I am by no means suggesting that anyone else adopt this insane daily posting schedule… but in order to keep me honest I had to do something drastic. It is entirely too easy to say “I will just post something tomorrow” and then that tomorrow never really comes around. So my suggestion is to go into this with a posting schedule in mind. Start with maybe Tuesday/Thursday or if you are feeling your Wheaties… Monday/Wednesday/Friday. I suggest you stick to mostly work week days… because my readership always falls off a giant cliff into oblivion on the weekends. Keep it simple at the start, and keep it realistic. You can always ramp up the number of posts you make at a later date. The important thing here is that you keep the schedule and post regularly… when you do people will come out of the woodwork to read your work.

Learn from Others

The blogging community can be the greatest resource you have at your disposal. So many times, you will be reading a post that ends up spurring an idea in you for a completely different post. One of the things I have sought is to keep an updated Blog Roll, namely if it is a blog I am reading on a regular basis I want to let the world know. This tends to be how readers dip their toes into the blogosphere, by finding a blog they like and then cascading out into other blogs that are similar. So while you can learn so much from your fellow bloggers… also try make sure you are doing your part to help others in the blogosphere as well.

My ultimate goal with the Newbie Blogger Initiative is to create a better blogging ecosystem for all of us. Blog Azeroth was this amazingly supportive and nurturing cocoon for bloggers to get their start in. This is something we have been lacking in the greater gaming blogosphere for some time. There really is no central place that each of us are connected back to, where Blog Azeroth was like an amazing country… the rest of us are much like independent city states. I hope we can change that, and I hope I can be some small part of that change. One of the greatest things about being one of the generalists is that you have full autonomy on a daily basis about what you want to write about or what matters to you. However I often feel like I am lacking that shared sense of purpose that I once had as being part of a very specifically focused community.

Wrapping Up

Yes I realize the “wrap up” blog is a massive crutch of mine… but it works for me. I figure in writing your own blog you will find your own crutches that you can use to move the progression of the post along as well. In my case I am writing my posts in a very finite amount of time… time that is now running out, so “Wrapping Up” is my mental switch that allows me to turn off the spigot. As a result I am now trying to wind down my thoughts enough to write a halfway intelligible closing.

I feel like the first Newbie Blogger Initiative was a great success not necessarily because it had amazing consistency rates for the new bloggers posting… but more so that it caused many of us to start thinking of ourselves as being something larger than just our own blog. If we can nurture this community and create fertile ground for other bloggers to follow along behind us… I feel we will have succeeded in every conceivable way. The goal this year is to essentially figure out how to keep the bloggers blogging that start down the path during the event itself. I believe last year we had 110 new blogs started and roughly 30 were still active a year after the fact. Here is hoping we can improve on that figure with this new initiative.