November 2014 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Littlest Odin

November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 by Belghast

Flirting with Viral

Last night when I got home I had a message waiting on me, wanting to know if I had talked to a certain blogger. At which point I gave my perspective, that I thought they were trying to keep a fairly low profile lately. This started the gears in my head working, thinking about the fine line each of us walks each day when we post. I admit that I live in a small amount of fear of one of my posts ending up going viral for some reason. I mean ultimately as a blogger you want readers, but there is a limit to that. Right now I have a dedicated group of a couple hundred regular readers and this feels comfortable. It feels like I group I could reasonably have a conversation with, and remember the names and faces of each of them. I write some fairly personal posts, and this feels like a small enough community to share that sort of intimate details with.

The problem is there have been a few of my posts that have for one reason or another gotten picked up in a much larger sphere of influence. When this happens I find the whole experience stressful. While it is cool to suddenly see your readership spike, at the same time personally I feel almost invaded. Like this group of people that are not “my” people are trampling my lawn and ruining the flower beds. The group of readers that I have now feels organic, and they have one by one found my blog for their own personal reasons. Having a huge influx of people brings with it wholly different ideas of what community means, and what proper interaction between a blogger and reader is. There were a few posts of mine that got picked up by WoW Insider back when this was for the most part a WoW blog… and it was as though the Mongol Horde was knocking on my front door step.

It is awesome to feel like your blog is a popular thing… but at the same time I think most of us live in fear of our side project getting too big. That someday something will happen to cause it to grow out of control and develop a life of its own, rather than this thing that we have fought hard to develop in just a certain way. With the recent strife in the gaming community, I admit I have been more afraid of my blog suddenly being found by the “unwashed masses”. I am still uncertain if I was the target of a DDoS a few weeks back, because it seemed like only my sites on the provider were actually effected. We live in this climate where having a differing opinion to that of the riot mob has serious consequences, and that doesn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies. Still however i put myself out here every morning, hoping that the right people will see this… and the wrong people will get bored before finishing the first paragraph of one of my posts.

Littlest Odin

A few nights ago I happened to be paying attention to chat at exactly the right moment, when through one of my many social Linkshells I saw a call that Odin had spawned in South Shroud. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Odin is one of the coolest primal forces to have existed in the Final Fantasy universe. In each incarnation there is generally the mechanic that if you take too long in attempting to defeat him he will cast Zantetsuken and destroy the entire party in a single attack. Zantetsuken of course is the name of his sword which apparently roughly translates to “Sword of Vengence”. The Final Fantasy XIV incarnation is just as painful, and involves him casting massive area of effect abilities that are extremely hard to get out of, and in some cases can in fact one-shot the player. When Odin spawns it is as part of a fate, and players fight desperately in this chaotic mess to generate enough threat to qualify for Gold level participation.

If you participate at all in the fight you get an item called Odin’s Mantle, and if you manage to get gold you end up getting five of them at once. Once you have collected five, either through getting Gold once or something else multiple times you can take them to Revenants Toll in Mor Dhona and trade them for some interesting stuff. The king prize at least as far as I am concerned is Zantetsuken itself, which while no longer that good of a weapon is still an amazing item for the purpose of glamouring onto other items. Another really popular item is Slepnir’s barding, that makes your Chocobo look like Odin’s mount Slepnir. However since I actually picked up Slepnir itself from the cash shop, that was no longer a big deal to me. So this time around I picked up Hjalmr aka Odin’s trademark helm. In honor of the new look I dyed my Soldiery chest black to blend things together a bit better.

When the Dark Knight becomes a reality, I am really hoping that they release a two handed version of Zantetsuken that I can then glamour onto my weapon. Even though I am wielding an axe, I still think I make a pretty badass tiny Odin. The funny thing a bout this is that Odin actually spawns as the race of the person that landed the last killing blow. So when I fought him the other night in South Shroud, he had actually spawned in Lalafell form. Nothing says awesome like a tiny bundle of death oneshotting players left and right. Both Odin and Behemoth are really cool experiences, and while I hate that I am constantly missing them… there is something about the extremely slow respawn timers that gives them a sense of mystique. I am not sure what the actual timer is, but at least as a player it seems to be several days. In any case it is the sort of thing that I drop whatever I am doing to join in the fun… or will at least until I have gotten all of the shiny baubles that are available to win.

Dungeons with Friends

I have always liked to tank for my friends, but for whatever reason in Final Fantasy XIV I have always found the experience to be a bit stressful. I am not sure if it was just lack of confidence in my abilities, or still getting used to the subtle differences of the way tanking works in this game… but for whatever reason I have tended to prefer dpsing in dungeons and letting my friend Ash take the tanking lead. However over the course of the last few months I have been “feeling my wheaties” and with the release of brand new content I find myself actually preferring to tank. I guess this is a good thing since Ash right now is in the middle of a move and will be without internet for an undetermined amount of time. Additionally for the longest time I DPS’d in part because he had no “non-tank” jobs to play, and since I had multiple dps we could pick and choose whatever we needed the most. That however has changed as he now has a monk available, and it is allowing me to climb back into the tanking seat.

As such I have spent a lot of time lately tanking the new expert dungeons of Snowcloak, Sastasha Hard, and Qarn Hard. In fact I am starting to get requests from outside of the guild to tank for people. Last night I finally accepted one of these after turning them down for various completely legitimate reasons. I felt horrible for having to keep declining because I was generally either already spoken for by the guild, or in the process of trying to wind down enough to log out for the night. I have to say I had a blast tanking for folks that I am less familiar with, and maybe just maybe I will gather up the courage to start tanking for complete strangers as well. I am not sure what has changed but upon getting my 110 weapon threat generation seems to no longer be an issue. The encounters just stay glued to me, which allows me to have more freedom and less watching of “bejeweled” making sure someone doesn’t get eaten by a stray mob. In any case that sense of unease I had while tanking seems to be dissipating and I am enjoying myself more each time we run something.

My Readers

I would like to think that even if I had no readers at all that I would keep doing what I am doing on a daily basis. Most of the time I write my posts like I am talking to myself, but in truth it is really helpful to know that I have people listening on the other end of the line. I have always been impressed with my readers, at how thoughtful and kind they are. The moment I first knew I had a dedicated audience, was shortly after I had started my blogging each day thing. For whatever reason I did not get a chance to write my post that morning like usual, and I had intended to write it over lunch. That morning I was deluged with folks asking me if I was okay, and making sure everything was alright. They were concerned when they did not see a post waiting there for them when they did their normal crawl of blogs. I’ve always tried to respect my audience and keep my blog a mostly positive influence in their lives. Here is hoping that I can continue to do this, but please know how much it means to me that you all are dedicated to taking this journey with me.

MOBA Crash

November 5, 2014 by Belghast

Falling Down

Yesterday we had an interesting bit of news released as the first big MOBA, or multiplayer online battle arena if you are not familiar with the term, announced that they would be closing their doors. Dawngate was the product offering by Electronic Arts and entered closed testing in May 2013 but quickly fell from the buzz cycle. Quite honestly when I saw this announcement I had quite literally forgotten there was a game called Dawngate. Some of the complaints about the game was that it felt like a rather lifeless clone of League of Legends. Many of the Champions or “Shapers” as they called them seemed to have one to one relationships to league of legends champions. However the game did try to fix some of the things that were broken with the existing Summoner’s Rift map type, adding in more interesting gameplay elements.

The problem is that no one that I knew was actually playing it. There were a handful of people who got into the beta process last June and then I never heard anything again about the game. For whatever reason they lost at producing enough forward hype for their game to drown out the other MOBAs or at least fight for a place at the table. The game looked very pretty, but I just don’t think they did enough to excite players. My only hope is that Riot will take some of the ideas that Dawngate had and try and incorporate some game modes that are similar to that into League of Legends. I am not the biggest fan of MOBAs in general, but I have played enough of them to know some good ideas when I see them. The fact that Dawngate had this mechanic where taking down each tower was essentially the equivalent to like 1/3rd of an inhibitor seemed like a cool idea. Instead in League you reach a point where taking down additional towers is a waste of time… and I don’t think you would ever reach that point in Dawngate.

MOBA Crash

One of the interesting things about the games industry is how much it repeats itself. When someone has a successful idea, it seems that the “investors” all get involved to dog pile on that genre and try and crack out as many look alike games as they can. That is not to say that each of the new games does not have merit, nor is it to say that they are not good games. The problem is there is a certain point at which the market has reached saturation and can support no new offshoots. Unfortunately I think we have reached that point already with the MOBA genre. Dawngate was really the first major game in the genre to call it quits, and Turbine the developer of Infinite Crisis does not look terribly strong right now after a round of layoffs in October. I feel like we are just about to enter the same area we have been with MMOs for some time now… where there is no “easy money” left in the market.

Right now you have the juggernauts of League of Legends and DOTA2. To a lesser extent Heroes of Newerth still has a bit of a following, but their latest product offering of Strife seems to be struggling to gain traction. Smite on the other hand… seems to have found a niche in the fact that it is a WASD controlled MOBA and for folks like me that hate click to move… it offers a new way to play this game genre. Heroes of the Storm on the other hand has done what Blizzard does best… polish a game to a mirror shine and lower the barrier of entry. As such HoTS is a much easier entry point into the MOBA genre for non-MOBA players. Personally of all of the titles it is my favorite in part because it leverages characters that I already know and love and just extends that nostalgia into another genre. Apart from these few games though I think pretty much every other MOBA is suspect, fragile and vulnerable to be the next announced cancellation.

The Cycle Repeats

I think my first experience with this cycle of trying to cash in on the next hotness was the massive amount of vaguely playable games that came out after the release of Doom during the early 90s. For every Dark Forces there were a few Depth Dwellers or Nerves of Steel that were barely playable. Then Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans came on the scene… which itself borrowed heavily from the mechanics of Dune 2. But immediately following was an equally confusing cavalcade of RTS genre games finally ending up with only a handful of series surviving. We are seeing this same thing playing out currently with the string of “Minecraft clones” fighting for your dollar. Essentially if a game comes out that is popular enough you can bet that somewhere in a back office someone is willing to pour money into something vaguely similar in an attempt to rush their version of the trend to market. Eventually someone comes along with a box full of straight pins and the bubble popping begins.

The thing is that I don’t really even think this is a bad thing, other than for the folks who get caught up in the round of layoffs that almost always follows. It is possible for a game to move the genre forward even if it doesn’t end up a success itself. Warhammer Online for example had quite possibly the best quest objective visualization system I had played with, and many other games came through after its launch and offered a similar system for their own product. The next release of World of Warcraft offered a version of quest visualization that looked almost exactly like this one. So even though Warhammer Online turned out to be a failure, it imparted on the genre a few features that have stuck around. As such I feel like if we are starting to head towards a MOBA crash, the ones that failed to find a niche will still have an impact on the games that ultimate end up dominating the market. There will always be a market for MOBAs, just like there was always a market for Adventure games, FPS, RTS, Survival Horror, MMO, Sandbox Building or whatever the next big fad becomes in gaming.

Fuzzy Blankets

This month I am talking about something each morning that I am thankful for. This morning as I am wrapped tightly in a fleece blanket while typing this… I am reminded just how thankful I am for our array of very warm and very fuzzy blankets. Oklahoma is an interesting place, in part because we go through this seesaw act with our weather towards the end of Fall. Until a week ago it was pretty reliably 70*-80* days and I was mostly wearing shorts on the weekend. Then a cold snap hit is and it has gotten down to the 30s. The problem is I fully expect that we will be back in the 70s within a weeks time. During this back and forth I am always reluctant to turn on my heating, just because I know it isn’t “really” winter yet. As such we spend a month bundled up in blankets and honestly due to the weight loss I find myself more cold natured than I used to be. So this year like so many years I am thankful that fuzzy blankets exist to keep us warm, when our weather is still deeply confused.

A New Lance

November 4, 2014 by Belghast

Curiosity Abated

I ended up getting into a conversation yesterday based on my post regarding the longevity I have played Final Fantasy XIV. Like I said yesterday I have been back in Eorzea since July so this will be going on four months… which for me in my recent MMO history is a really long time to be playing any one thing. I have officially played Final Fantasy XIV longer in this one stretch than I did both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar combined if you just count time spent playing the production clients. This got me thinking and my friend as well… what my longest played games might be. So this morning I turned to Raptr, which I have always just left running in the background quietly logging time spent in whatever game I happened to be playing. When you do this you end up with some unexpected results.

For the purpose of this chart I ignored anything with less than 100 hours played, which it turns out is a surprising number of MMOs including Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2 and a few others. The fact that almost 40% of my time spent playing MMOs has been in World of Warcraft was not a huge shocker, considering I played that game for roughly 7 years without taking much of a pause. The fact that Rift weighs in at number two is also not a huge shock, considering I have played it off and on since release. What did surprise me is that I fully expected Everquest 2 to be in third place, as it is one of those titles I keep cycling back to periodically. I guess the thing is that I don’t end up playing it for terribly long before the combat system ends up frustrating me and I move in. In the year it has been out Final Fantasy XIV has shot to the number three spot in total time spent in an MMO with 536 hours. If nothing else I feel like that is pretty telling of just how much I am enjoying this game.

The last revelation is that I found it interesting that I spent roughly the same amount of time in Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars the Old Republic and Wildstar. Wildstar was the lowest of the 100 hour plus club weighing in at only 122 hours. Elder Scrolls Online was the highest with 163 hours, but were we able to include the year I spent testing that game I would have probably overtaken Everquest 2 at least. With Star Wars the Old Republic I could have sworn I spent more than 127 hours playing the game, so it really makes Wildstar and SWTOR almost exactly the same… which is strange considering that I never got a character to maximum level in Wildstar, but managed to level three in SWTOR. I guess the content grind really was that much faster in SWTOR than I realized. In any case it is interesting to look at the data and see where your time has been spent. Raptr by no means is an exact science, but I have it running on both my desktop and my laptop so in theory the data should be relatively complete.

A New Lance

For some time now I have focused on my Warrior job in Final Fantasy XIV as my main. I figured it was the one that I needed to be geared the most since I was going to end up tanking for my free company when we raided. However since launch I have also really liked playing a Dragoon, and for the purpose of Duty Roulette I almost always queue as DPS. Ages ago I got all of my jobs that I have at 50 to ilevel 90 so that they would be viable doing pretty much anything I cared to dip my toe into. However before we started contemplating raiding, I picked up a handful of pieces out of Syrcus Tower on my Dragoon placing him slightly ahead of the pack. Since the unlocking of loot in Syrcus I have been spending most of my time there trying to get him gear. Right now I still figure that most of my soldiery needs to go to finishing getting the warrior to ilevel 110 or better, however at 108 I am still leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of my guildies.

Factoring that in I figured I could splurge a little on my own wants for awhile. When playing any class my focus has generally been on getting a new weapon. It always feels like the most significant improvement, because it is that object that is most visually noticeable when you swap out a single slot. As a result it has annoyed me for some time that I still had my Gae Bolg Zenith weapon on my Dragoon. I could after all start the Atma grind, and the Animus book grind… but really in the grand scheme of things I do not have the money to get through the Novus step… so while I want to finish these for the sake of finishing them, it is not exactly a pathway to a better weapon for me. With the uncapping of Syrcus Tower it means that we have ready access to Unidentified Allagan Tomestones, the precursor step for getting the Weathered(100) and eventually Unweathered(110) weapons. So while I started out running ST over the last few days to pick up level 100 gear for my Dragoon I have ended up essentially grinding out one of the weapons.

ffxiv 2014-11-03 22-25-12-711 Last night I finished my grind to 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery and as you can see in the above screenshot I am the proud wielder of a shiny new Liberator lance. Unfortunately this happened like moments before bedtime for me, and I never really got to try it out. So tonight my plan is to run a quick Syrcus or Labyrinth to see how good it feels to have bumped up 20 levels in weapon ilevel. When I got my 110 axe on my Warrior, it was a massive and immediately noticeable difference, and I am hoping it will feel the same on my Dragoon. After dumping this 1300 “bookrocks” on a weapon, I will now return to gathering them up for the purpose of finishing out my set of Soldiery gear. That means I will need a ton of Sands of Time however to get those pieces up to 110 ilevel, which means I will still be running a truly silly amount of Syrcus Tower. In the grand scheme of things though I enjoy running it. I never see it as a grind, because it still feels very epic to me. I feel about ST the way I feel about various WoW raids that I used to solo for fun. It feels like I am doing something epic and important, even though it is content that is very much “on farm”.

This morning I am going to get by with just a two section blog post. Each of those sections took awhile to write so I figure it all shakes out in the end. This morning for my Month of Thankfulness post I figured I would talk about something fairly unlikely. Yesterday at work I had my annual performance review, and even though I am in many ways the pocket expert on so many systems we have… it is still a process that I find stressful. I think most sane and rational people have these moments where they feel like they are a giant fraud, and these seem to hit me just before I go into my yearly performance review. Yesterday was the same as every year, lots of anxiety for no reason. Once again I had a fairly glowing review, but I am kinda just beating around the bush here.

What I am thankful for is my boss. When I started out in my current position my little sub group got passed around like a hot potato. At one point I had been under six different managers, four directors and three CIOs… and had only been with the company for two years. Then my current boss took the position. I have to say when he took over I was suspicious, because I had never seen him in a managerial light, however he has done an amazing job. I really respect the focus he has placed on making our environment not only productive, but a very fun place to be. Each of us has our own “kitch” and for the most part he supports it all. It is the first time since my very first job… that I felt like I had a work family. This is also the first group I have ever willfully attended the Christmas Party for… and we do all sorts of outside activities like most recently going to the RiffTrax showings. So this today I am thankful for the effect he has had on improving how I think about my job, and the fact that for the most part I look forward to going into work each day and seeing my team mates. Sure each of the members of our team is a self starter, but it is his focus on morale that has made the entire thing work.

Slow and Steady

November 3, 2014 by Belghast

Longevity

There was a point yesterday when I realized something that somewhat shocked me. I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV for longer than the combined time my guild was active in both The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. There has been a trend over the last few years where when we move into something new we last around two months and then move on again. Elder Scrolls lasted roughly two months, and Wildstar in truth less than a month before folks petered out. For Final Fantasy XIV I have been going strong since July so this will be going on four months. In truth this is the longest I have played any game in awhile without pause. I am not sure if Rift counts since I tend to always be playing that game off and on, and the period of large amounts of activity last year only lasted a few months at most before it was back to me and a skeletal crew logging in periodically. Another thing I have noticed is that I tend to turn the lights off when I finally go, meaning that I am one of the last people to leave.

In Elder Scrolls Online this was maybe a bit different, since Sig and PK were both active considerably longer after I stopped logging in on a regular basis. I however only recently actually went through the process of cancelling my account there. Wildstar on the other hand I was all too willing to cancel my account, but sadly by the time I did the entire guild was completely toast. I guess I wonder what has made us grazers of MMOs rather than large scale consumers. For awhile I thought it was just the ramifications of coming from a multi-year game like World of Warcraft, and being unfettered and experiencing some kind of options overload. I still feel like there are so many good games out that to be played, and just not enough time to really experience them. I wish I could realistically play FFXIV, Rift, EQ2, LoTRO, TSW and Landmark all at the same time. The problem is when I rampantly multigame like that I get absolutely nothing accomplished in any of them.

Slow and Steady

Right now I am enjoying making slow and steady progress in all of my endeavors in Final Fantasy XIV. Last night I managed to hit 108 ilevel on my main job which is the warrior, and in part that is because of the 2.4 patch. There is a big of a paradox going on after the Dreams of Ice patch. Unlocking the loot in Syrcus Tower means that it has gotten significantly easier to farm the ilvl 100 gear drops and the Sands and Oils of Time needed to upgrade level 100 soldiery gear to level 110. The problem is that it feels like it is significantly slower to grind out Tomestones of Soldiery than it was to get Tomestones of Mythology. So as a result I am sitting on several unused Sands of Time and a couple of unused Unitentified Allagan Tomestones because I lack the Soldiery “bookrocks” to purchase either a weapon or another slot of gear to use the sands on. At this point I am closing in on the 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery needed to purchase a level 100 weapon, which I will then turn into a 110 weapon with one of the sands, finally giving my Dragoon something decent to poke things with. Before this patch I never would have spent soldiery on an alternate job, so it makes me happy to finally start progressing my Dragoon again.

The other side effect of the patch is that it seems to have become significantly harder to gear your very first character. Previously you could hop on the “hunt train” and farm up enough Allied Seals to purchase a full set of ilevel 90 gear within a few hours. For 270 Allied seals you could purchase an entire set of gear for a new job, which in the grand scheme of things even if you didn’t do the insane hunt process was only about a week of doing the daily hunt quests. This was a huge benefit to getting new players into the game quickly. This has slowed down considerably because all of the level 90 gear is gone from the hunt vendor and replaced with the level 100 Soldiery equivalents. Unfortunately this also means that the items themselves have gone up massively in price. The pieces can be purchased for 660, 400, and 300 for the various slots adding up to a grand total of 4020 allied seals for an entire set of gear. Right now this just seems absolutely insane to me. I feel like a later patch is probably going to reduce this price but that for the time being they are trying to make it easier to get soldiery gear… but not so easy that we can cap out over night and run out of things to progress.

Active Free Company

Another awesome thing about the 2.4 patch is that it has seemed to revitalize our server as a whole. Cactuar has sprung to life as so many players I think had taken breaks before the launch of this latest patch and all of its goodness. Granted a flurry of the activity has been leveling rogues, but that seems to be slowly tapering off. Similarly there has been a resurgence of activity in our guild as folks have joined up to start working on characters on our server, or returned from their own pre-patch absences. At several points yesterday we had around a dozen players online, and that still is not including some of our more active members that were curiously missing from the fray this weekend. I know Rae was off doing work related stuff, and Kodra was sick most of the weekend… and Ashgar busy packing for his move. With all of those things factored in it seems even more impressive that we were able to field the numbers that we did. I ran several of the new dungeons with groups of friends, and have yet to actually make my way into the expert duty roulette without a premade group.

Granted I am fully expecting that the upcoming launch of Warlords of Draenor will pull a few players away here and there, but I think the majority of our group is well insulated against the effects of WoW at this point. I am generally the one who returns, and right now as it stands I have no plans of playing at launch. In fact were it not for the level 90 boost that we got from preordering so far ahead of time… I doubt I would have even purchased the expansion this time around. I kinda wish I could claw back that purchase to be honest, but I guess that is the problem with preordering going roughly a year before the release date. That seems so long ago at this point, especially considering the short periods of waiting for new content I am getting used to in Final Fantasy XIV. This game is rolling out a new major patch each quarter, and a minor content patch on a semi-monthly schedule and I hate to say it… but you get spoiled. I don’t think I could return to a game with a year between content patches again after this.

Fuzzy Children

As I said yesterday this month I am trying to come up with something each morning that I am thankful for, turning it entire an entire month of “Thanksgiving”. This morning I am thankful for my “Fuzzy Children”, aka my pets. My wife and I have no intent of ever having human children, so our babies are as close as we will get to having kids. Presently we have three cats, one kitten, and two ferrets and they are all awesome. Each of them have their own personalities, and each of them their own routines that I would not change even if I could. Animals have a way of enriching your life for just existing, and while I might complain about this or that I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I wouldn’t know what to do without one animal at my feet and another on my lap… and another wandering around my office knocking stuff over. I am thankful for my fuzzy warm bundles of happy, and the joy they bring.