September 2014 - Page 4 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Outside Looking In

September 18, 2014 by Belghast

Game Launches

This is going to end up sounding like a strange topic for me to talk about, especially since I have raged at length on this blog before about bad game launches. However that said, it seems odd to be on the outside looking in at a game launch going horribly awry. For the first little bit I could fall back on the statement of “have these people never seen a game launch before?” but at some point we crossed the threshold into silly territory. There was a report on twitter that I read earlier about someone waiting in a 10 hour non-subscriber queue and waking up this morning to find they were still 115 in line. Then when the queue finally ticked down to 1 person remaining, they got disconnected. Similarly I have heard all sorts of nightmares about the amount of Patron time for a game showing at one moment that they have a full year of paid time, and then the next moment showing that they have 30-60 days.

Of course this is all anecdotal evidence since I am not playing the actual game. I feel like this launch however has a whole host of issues that may or may not be entirely Trion’s fault. The thing that folks need to keep in the back of their head is that ArcheAge is not their game. They might be promoting it, and bringing a localized version to America… but they didn’t build the game and there are lots of things that are quite simply out of their control. I feel like there is a bit of a massive cultural disconnect between Trion and XL Games that likely only exacerbates any issues that might be happening. Similarly there seems to be this new trend of Denial of Service attacks against companies servers when they launch a new game. It happened with Wildstar to some extent, and over the last few months has been happening regularly to various game providers. Reports have Trion fighting off a DDoS while trying to launch this new game… and quite frankly as someone who has experienced one of these… there is often times little that can be done other than hoping the perpetrator gets bored and moves on.

Outside Looking In

The strangest experience is watching this all unfold as a spectator. Generally speaking I am almost always on the front lines as a new game launches. I’ve got my limited edition collectors deluxe vip section seat ready to go and have already explored the world during the head start. So generally speaking I view these launches through the eyes of someone having to deal with the issues, and getting frustrated with the folks parroting “just play something else for a bit”. Now I feel like I am on the verge of being one of those folks to spread the same wisdom. After a weeks time, the servers will stabilize either through a obsessive interest or because Trion has added a good bit of resources. In either case life will return to a normal pattern in relatively short time.

As a gamer I would always fall back on the argument that a game company had “sold access” to the game, so they should know just how many people would be playing. That is like me saying that I know a Tornado is coming, so my house should be prepared to brace for impact when it actually hits. Game launches are this industry’s version of natural disasters. Players are this insane wave that comes crashing down on the servers hard and fast and with relentless and obsessive repetition. When Final Fantasy XIV launched we resorted to making hardware macros to try and log into the game, and as a programmer I KNEW that I was essentially adding to the weight of the problem by constantly spamming the servers… but as a gamer I didn’t give a shit, I just wanted to play my shiny new toy that I rightfully purchased.

Were I interested in ArcheAge I would likely be right there with all of you gnashing my teeth and rattling my sabers about the bullshit situation we were having to endure. As an outsider, the whole ballet feels very predictable. All of this said I am not trying to be apologetic for Trion, because at some point a company needs to learn from the mistakes of their peers. That said when a game launches blissfully smoothly like The Elder Scrolls Online, we tend to not even notice. We only seem to care when we are inconvenienced from playing the game. While a bad launch might signal doom for a game, if it goes beyond a certain threshold… a good launch doesn’t actually really predict long term success. As such it likely doesn’t really benefit a company to over prepare for a launch, when they can just ride out the first few days and the relatively short attention span of the internet zeitgeist will have forgotten about the rough spots.

Hoping for Better

I have lots of friends playing this game, as I always seem to have lots of friends playing every new game. For their sake I hope things improve by the weekend so that they can enjoy some relaxing game time. I played quite a bit of this game in Alpha and later Beta and it has so many interesting ideas. The problem for me more than anything else was the toxic community, and the griefer culture that seemed to evolve around various aspects of the game. Go afk in a relatively safe town, and when you walk back to the screen you might end up dead on the battlefield somewhere because a player thought it was funny to push you out of town with a tractor. That sort of game play is not compelling to me other than the fact that I find it interesting that someone, somewhere thought that was a good idea.

At my heart I am a Care Bear and at its heart ArcheAge is a serious open world player versus player game. So while it was interest to experience, just like with Eve Online… I don’t feel like this game was really designed for me. Had Trion created a Co-Operative server I would have been there with the rest of you on day one being frustrated by the events. However from my understanding it was XL Games that was completely against the concept of a non-pvp realm. The game has a lot to offer for those willing to put up with the other players, and put up with these issues at launch. It has one of the most interesting and detailed crafting systems I have experienced in any game. The biggest strike against the game for me personally however is its almost complete and total lack of proper beards. Thankfully I was able to get around this problem in Destiny by playing an awesome looking robot, ArcheAge sadly has no robots.

#ArcheAge

Minecraft and Microsoft

September 17, 2014 by Belghast

Of Minecraft and Microsoft

Monday the news broke that Microsoft would be buying Mojang, the company behind Minecraft for 2.5 billion dollars. Since then I’ve seen a lot of varied reactions on this, but I had not quite formulated my own thoughts yesterday morning so I didn’t mention it. I admit I am a bit scared for Minecraft as a game to be in the often ham fisted hands of Microsoft. The thing is this is my own personal biases showing through. While I make my living supporting Microsoft products, in truth I have not been a huge fan of the company since Bill Gates ejected himself from the picture. I’ve felt that they’ve made a significant number of missteps on a many fronts, more importantly to the topic of this conversation on the gaming front. In a way I feel like this makes Microsoft look like they are making a desperate grab at relevance by purchasing the juggernaut that “all the kids are playing”.

From the standpoint of Notch I completely understand why he did this, and I support his decision. Notch has always been one of those figures for which the spotlight has burned a little too much. He blew up his own blog Notch.net when he posted this statement, so it made its way over to Paste Bin. In the statement he explains how he feels like he had become this symbol, and not a person and for those of you who haven’t not watched the This is Phil Fish video Notch mentions you should really check it out. It talks about the weird relationship we have to developers, especially in the indie world. I honestly feel like Notch has always wanted to be this guy who worked on interesting projects, and just had the fortune or misfortune depending on your point of view of one of those projects going viral behind his wildest fevered imaginings.

So we have this odd marriage. Microsoft desperately needs to claw its way to relevance, and Notch needs a company with the infrastructure to support his creation. The Minecraft community can be extremely awesome, but they can also turn on a dime into an unruly mob as they did over supposed terms of service changes. I highly suggest you check out Notch’s “Literally Worse than EA” post to see the point at which I think he decided he was getting out. As an avid player of Minecraft since the early days of beta, my only hope in all of this is that Microsoft can keep from fucking it up. They have this golden opportunity to prove to the world that they are not these clumsy and confused overlords. Do right by this game and you might have just won yourself a lifetime of supporters. Do wrong by this game and you likely caused the next few generations to hate you. Ultimately this is not about me or my generation, but the children growing up with Minecraft as their generations Lego.

The Story Barrier

Last night we had the intention to go do the next few parts of the Coil of Bahamut raid. We did not however have the necessary well geared bodies to pull this off, so instead we opted to do the two instances that come at the end of the main story of the game. Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium are both 8 man dungeons that are extremely story and cut scene heavy. They often act as the bottle neck for players who have just finished leveling to 50, since so much of the end game content cannot be completed until you have finished this step in the main story quest. This is one of my biggest complaints about the flow of the game, is that you have this massive gulf to cross when you think you are nearing the end. You can of course queue for these two through the Duty system, but there is a significant problem with that.

Folks have figured out tricks to run these dungeons extremely quickly, and if you do so they are worth are lot of Tomestones of Mythology for limited work. As such folks tend to power pull these dungeons and anyone who stops to watch the story gets lost in the mix, often times missing entire boss fights because they are locked in a cut scene. This is extremely frustrating since so much of the final act of the story gets played out in these two dungeons. As such we try and wait until we have several 50s that need these before running them, since to run the two dungeons while watching waiting on cut scenes is around a two hour long Endeavour. Last night we had a block of time when we had a bunch of individuals online at the same time so we knocked them out for Thalen.

It had been a long while since I had watched all of the cut scenes and I have to say I am still impressed with the events at the end of this game. I don’t want to go into spoilers but the conclusion of the main story sequence is so satisfyingly “Final Fantasy”. It has all of the elements that make a game like this feel epic. Big boss fights, orchestral music with the requisite choral requirement, huge spell effects and large scale devastation. You cannot come out of The Praetorium without feeling like the big effing hero of the day. This is the way the ending of every video game should feel. The awesome thing here is that the story just keeps going, and in fact I feel like we are building to just as big and exciting of a conclusion somewhere down the line. I find myself actually waiting with baited breath on the next segment of the storyline coming with 2.4.

Recruitment and Games

I had a situation happen last night when two of my friends officially declared that Final Fantasy XIV was the worse. In truth I think they were referring to the hassle that is the Square Enix account management process, and in that I absolute agree with them. Square seriously needs to rethink the number of hoops you have to jump through to be able to play their game. Someone has to be pretty damned committed to giving them money to suffer through that bullshit. That said it did bring up a slightly different point, that I thought I would talk a bit this morning. I get super excited about video games, and in my enthusiasm I feel like I need to share that experience with others. As such through a series of posts on my blog I gush about various features of a game, and some of my friends have taken to calling me the “games pusher”. At its core, I want to share the enjoyment I am having with my friends… because I want them to feel awesome about things too.

The thing is this doesn’t always work, and that is completely okay if it doesn’t. People enjoy games differently, and as such the things that might be perfect for me are not going to be perfect for everyone. So if you see me gushing about a game, it does not mean that I expect you to like it just as much as I do. Hell I find it awesome that people have even tried to play whatever it is that I am playing. Of the folks who have taken the “FFXIV challenge”, a few of them have tried and decided they loved it. Still others have decided this game is not for them at all and walked away from it. I still love both camps equally, and for the folks who fought through the struggle that is account management to try it… I am especially appreciative that they push so much effort into it. Ultimately not every game has to be just right for everyone. We can play different games and still be awesome friends. That said I don’t think I will ever stop trying to get folks playing the game I am playing and on the same server I am playing. That is just too deeply ingrained in my nature.

#FFXIV #Minecraft

Hopelessness of Odin

September 16, 2014 by Belghast

Impending Patch

Last night was an odd evening for a handful of reasons. For starters when I first got home I attempted not to get into anything terribly involved. As such I did a random low level duty roulette and managed to get Haukke Manor. I think overall it went really smoothly, especially considering we had a brand new White Mage that had never healed it before. I attempted to explain all of the fights, and was shocked and amazed that my party requested a full clear instead of the normal abbreviated rush. Everything went pretty smoothly all things considered as I took the time to explain the final fight and what I was expecting from each of the party members. I’ve found that often times on fights with very specific mechanics, no one wants to admit to not knowing what to do. If I simply give an abbreviated explanation, overall it tends to go considerably smoother.

When my wife got home we walked to dinner and hung out for a bit. By this time I was absolutely starving, but to be fair she warned me exactly when she would be getting home. I should have eaten a snack when I first got home or something, because by the time we hit the Mexican restaurant I was absolutely famished. When we left the house it looked like it might open up on us, and originally we were headed to a BBQ place, but while walking it started sprinkling a little bit. Thankfully by the time we got out of the restaurant any signs of sprinkles had disappeared and we walked home on an extremely gorgeous evening. I love being within walking distance of several restaurants, because there is just something cool about being able to walk to dinner in an otherwise traditional car culture.

Hopelessness of Odin

With the patch downtime quickly approaching, but the time I got back from dinner I had roughly an hour and a half of play time left before the servers went down. I tanked another low level random, and then opted to start working on my Paladin Hunt log. For various reasons I have shifted my focus from working on my White Mage to pushing up the Paladin. As I said yesterday I went from 28 to 35 Sunday and managed to get 36 and almost 37 last night. I was essentially minding my business and porting from zone to zone cleaning up sections of my hunt log. When I zoned into South Shroud I thought the place looked really odd. One of the cool things about FFXIV is that you can check the current weather conditions by mousing over a little icon on the minimap. When I did that I started to get excited… the conditions were “Hopelessness” which is a unique weather condition when the Odin event has spawned. I shifted to my warrior job and shouted into zone “WAR LFG” and within seconds I got an invite.

It seems that Warriors are the kings of cheesing out FATE contribution, so they are apparently highly sought after for fights like Odin. It seemed like everyone was coalescing on Urth’s Gift, so I headed that way. I had never actually managed to catch Odin in progress before, and by the time I got there someone had just pulled him. I was not quite ready for the sight in front of me, which seemed to be roughly 200 players working away feverishly to get him down. The above shot is from the battle, and pretty much represents what the experience feels like. The entire area is a wash in spell effects, which makes his attacks extremely hard to see. During the battle he periodically casts these massive AOE fields that you realistically need to run out of. I avoided most of them, and with less than 3% of his bar left I finally ended up dying. I rode out the battle before releasing and managed to get gold contribution, which means I earned 5 Odin Mantles.

What is awesome about getting gold contribution is the fact that you actually get enough of the tokens to be able to purchase something right then. Both Odin and Behemoth have a number of really cool items you can pick up for mostly cosmetic purposes. You can get barding that makes your chocobo look like Odin’s mount, or you can get a helmet and chest graphic that makes your gear look just like his. The item however that I was interested is the one that any Final Fantasy fan will immediately recognize… Zantetsuken his insane sword. While the stats on the blade are no longer that great, thanks to the wonders of the glamour system I can make any blade look like this. My good friend Ashgar has had one for some time now, but I had to scrounge around this morning to find a picture of someone wielding it. As soon as I get my paladin up to 50 I too will be rocking the blade of Odin… which to be truthful is probably longer than my Lalafell is tall.

Winding Down

After the excitement of Odin I was wandering around, and popped over to Uldah to purchase more Ventures when I ran into the ever amazing Sagacyte Luxaloix. It is always awesome to bump into twitter folk while wandering about the server, and it seems like last night was a night for doing so. Earlier in the evening Sagacyte had bumped into the very amazing Spiral Sun and posted about it as well. Thankfully the meetings were commemorated in picture, so I could totally use them… as in my rush I absolutely forgot to take one. I love bumping into folks I know while wandering about the server. When doing Odin there were a bunch of folks from the Howling Moon free company in the thick of the battle as well. I was pumped to find out that Ayla Noye also managed to get gold contribution from the event, so we will all be rocking Odin goodies in the housing zone.

On top of all of this it appears that the 2.38 patch that went in this morning has a ton of quality of life modifications to existing systems. It seems they are focusing on making some tweaks to make 2.4 go more smoothly, including some visual changes to Limsa Lominsa… which makes me wonder if the new Thief and Ninja NPCs will be located in that city. The biggest news for me personally from the patch is the new command to copy an existing hotbar. One of the big frustrations is that when you switch jobs, most of your hotbars change with you. That means when you switch from Gladiator to Paladin for example you have to reconfigure your hotbar, as it defaults to giving you ones filled with the abilities in the order in which you received them. This command will let you copy one current hotbar to a new hotbar slot in a different profile.

Another big one for me which is kinda silly is I am pumped that they added a /hug emote. In every MMO this has kinda been my default interaction with a player that I happened to meet out in the world. Apparently the Japanese are not big huggers, because after a year of the game they still had yet to put that emote in. As a result my default had been /joy which is what happens to be pictured above. So I will be happy to be able to do drive by huggings in game soon. Another awesome change is the ability to scale back the spell effects. Maybe I would have actually been able to see what Odin looked like were this system in place last night. In any case, the patch looks to be a great one and I look forward to delving into all the things they added like Personal Player housing.

#FFXIV

Dance of my People

September 15, 2014 by Belghast

Enter the Jigglehats

Yesterday the Breaking Brick Mountains event started in FFXIV which is a repeat of an earlier event used to commemorate the launch of DragonQuest X. For those not terribly familiar with the Dragon Warrior/DragonQuest franchise, it has a rather distinctive art style. So seeing that art style appear in Final Fantasy XIV is extremely entertaining. The quests have this great Dragon Quest stylized “Quest Accepted” and FATE related text that just makes me happy to see in game. The quest itself is rather simple. You talk to Havak Alvak near the Central Thanalan gate in Uldah, which sends you to talk to the Beefy Businessman down by the Thaumaturge guild. From there you have to find a specific fate called “Brick by Brick”. This will lead into one of two other FATEs either called “Brick by Stone Brick” or “Brick by Gold Brick”, both granting you quest completion.

One of the things I love about Final Fantasy XIV seasonal and special events is that they are super easy to complete. I used to hate how frustratingly grindy other games events were, in that if you did not participate every single day of a holiday you could not get all the prizes. Even with the Lightning Returns event, and trying to collect all of the weapons… it essentially meant I had to farm 5 different FATEs and then was completely done. This event in total took maybe 30 minutes, and most of that was travel time. Completing the quest nets you a Thug’s Mug cosmetic helm and a Wind-up Brickman cosmetic pet. Next to the Beefy Businessman there is a Toughie Peddler NPC that sells the amazing “Jigglehat” or more properly known as the King Slime Crown.

It has become common place for our guild and the members of Howling Moon free company to mingle around while waiting on things to happen. The events of last night are pretty common, in that we each tend to hang around the market board just down from our house, which can be seen in the background of the above image. It all started when Joren Noye started up with this amazing outfit that he had built around his Jigglehat, that was mostly comprised of a dyed to match vanya robe. What happens when to amazing Lalafell meet? Well we dance of course, and within moments the ever adorable Jade Taiga showed up as well. Well it was not long before Ayla Noye joined in as well, and we had an impromptu jigglehat party. You have to love any game that supports this sort of random dancing in silly hats. My friend Tam is convinced that the entire point of this game is to collect ever more amazing hats.

Paladin Soul

I spent most of yesterday working away quietly on my Gladiator turned Paladin. I completed the final level 30 Gladiator quest, and went through the opening quest for becoming a Paladin. So far the 30 and 35 quests that I have completed are significantly easier than most of the job quests that I have done on other characters. I am guessing that at some point in the near future they will drop the floor out from under me with a quest that is significantly more difficult than the others. I personally thought the final level 30 Gladiator quest was rather challenging, in that I seemed to fail it the first time for no apparent reason. I was doing everything they had told me to do and then all of the sudden I got duty failed. Upon trying it again this morning I apparently did all of the things that I was supposed to and then some because I passed, but still have no idea what I did the first time versus what I did the second time.

I started the day at level 28 and finished the evening about halfway to 36. I have yet to really sit foot in a dungeon yet, and have been mostly doing the FATE grind. First in Costa Del Sol and now I am out in Coerthas. In part I guess I like FATE grinding because it is mindless and something I can do over and over. Additionally I have really become addicted to the whole Quick Ventures system, and I view FATEs as a way to feed Venture tokens to my Retainers. For those that are unaware you can buy 5 venture tokens for 1000 grand company seals at your grand company quartermaster. So far I am digging playing the Paladin again, but in truth I am mostly leveling this so that I once again have a good class for grinding FATEs to get Atma parts. I maybe made a mistake in going for the Atma weapon on my warrior first. That is pretty much the ideal fate grinding class, and in order for me to get another one up with that sort of survival… I am going to have to play my paladin.

Moonwalker

Other than playing quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV, I spent the bulk of the rest of my weekend playing some Destiny. At this point my Titan is level 10 and I am spending most of my time in the Moon Patrol zone. While I was waiting for FATEs on Saturday to spawn for my Animus book, I was hanging out on the PS4 wandering around either the Cosmodrome or Moon Patrol areas. This is pretty much the ideal play style for me. I like wandering about doing mini quests and killing lots of Fallen and Hive aliens. However if you listen to our podcast you can tell that several of our cast have a real issue with the fact that the game has very little tangible story. The story that does exist is questionably written and even more questionably acted. For me, it is enough story to keep me entertained, but we have already agreed that I need and more importantly want significantly less story than most folks. Wandering around and killing things is totally enough motivation to keep me enthralled, especially when the controls feel so damned good.

The weird thing for me is I tend to lose motivation to do the various missions whenever I actually unlock the patrol zone. It is as though the mission only serve as a vehicle to unlock patrol and once I have done that I have no real interest in progressing further. At some point soon however I should really finish clearing out the moon, but in the mean time I am wandering around the surface looking for interesting stuff. I love it when I find a chest or a new place that I had overlooked previously. I love exploring this game, but find it more than marginally frustrating when I encounter the “turn back now” wall around the outskirts of the areas. At least with the Cosmodrome you have understandable boundaries that limit you to just being on this one island. On the moon you can see forever, so it makes no sense why I cannot wander out in the open, as there are no logical obstructions. In any case, I am still really enjoying the game and look forward to playing more of it.

#FFXIV #Destiny