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

AggroChat Episode 28

Last night we once again rallied the troops and recorded another episode of AggroChat. This week Kodra was saddled with the dual burdens of illness and family… and as such could not attend. However we had Ashgar, Rae and Tam. The number one thing on all of our minds was experiencing the 2.4 patch content in Final Fantasy XIV which landed last Monday/Tuesday. During that time Tam has pushed up a rogue from level 1 to 50 and is now gearing it for raiding purposes. I have mostly spent my time running Syrcus Tower trying to get bits to gear out my warrior and dragoon. All of us have been slowly working our way through the brand new dungeon content. Yesterday shortly before the show Ash, Tam and myself finished the last of the three new hardmodes and I have to say I am really damned impressed.

Even more impressive is where the main storyline seems to be going. This is one of the aspects I find the coolest about FFXIV is that the story just keeps evolving and not in an artificial way. The problem with Star Wars the Old Republic is that when you reached 50… especially as a Jedi Knight or Jedi Counselor you had solved the galaxies greatest threat. There was nowhere to go but down from there. In FFXIV when you finish the main story, it is just the beginning and everything about the game tells you… you didn’t solve shit. You took out one pawn in a far greater game. So every three months or so when we get a major patch, I am always amped to see where exactly the story is going to go. Right now I am only a couple of hours into the new story content, and already they have thrown out some allusions to past Final Fantasy games that have me spooked as to where we might be going with this.

NaNoWriMo Supporter

At this point hopefully all of this years participants have at least broken ground on their new novel. Throughout the month of October I mulled around the notion of doing NaNoWriMo 2014, but in the end I have decided not to. Last year if you recall I essentially live blogged my novel and used each days writing as the next days posting on my blog. In the intervening year I have done absolutely nothing with it. I’ve not even cracked the original drive document to even begin editing it. This more than anything else tells me I am not quite ready to undergo the challenge again. Last year I won, and by winning I mean I actually finished my 50,000+ words by the end of the month. The problem is I have a chrysalis for a novel and not really something worth publishing. I need to put at least as much effort as I did writing it into editing it. At least once a week I think about digging into it and ripping things to shreds as I sort bits out that I slammed together in a rush. It just seems so damned daunting to unravel what I was only able to pull together through sheer will.

The other reason why I have decided to skip NaNoWriMo this year is that it took a hell of a lot out of me. My world for the month of November revolved around making sure I got my words done for the day. In the end nothing else mattered, and I pretty much abandoned everything else that I enjoyed. It was during the month of November that I faded away from FFXIV in the first place, because the game required too much effort from me to keep playing it while pouring out 1500 to 2000 words a day. Additionally my blog suffered because I could not keep up my daily blogging AND write that many words a day… was just not something I could juggle. This was the point that I got back into World of Warcraft, because WoW was a game I could play entirely on auto pilot. Nothing about the game made me think, and I could live in this blissful muscle memory zone where I got enjoyment without having to acknowledge the world going on around me. NaNoWriMo was all consuming, and while I think it is something that everyone should complete at least once… I have done that. I completed the competition last year, and wrote a novel… something that I can check off my bucket list. I don’t feel the need for a repeat performance… at least not quite yet.

What I plan on doing is being a cheerleader for the folks who ARE planning on doing the struggle this year. The folks that need inspiration or support as they struggle to keep up with the waterfall of words that NaNoWriMo is. Be it a word of encouragement or a swift kick in the ass when I see they haven’t done their words for the day… I will try and be there. So while I am not a participant I am very much a supporter of the process. Having actually gotten my novel finished on time last year I might even be able to provide a source of advice. I would never have finished last year were it not for the other people struggled through the process with me. They were a source of inspiration and I am hoping some of them will be taking up the challenge this year as well. It is an awesome thing, and hopefully I can play match maker between groups of friends entering the fray together.

I realize this is the second of November and not the first, but we are going to temporarily ignore that fact as I introduce a new thing that I am going to do all this month. In truth it was not until yesterdays post that I was made aware that this was a thing. My wife usually skims my posts each day to see if I have written anything about “us” in the blog, and after doing this yesterday she turned to me and said “you should have done a month of thankfulness post”. So yeah… I kind of wish I had thought about that before making my post yesterday. So this morning I pulled together a logo and am setting forth on this adventure. I’ve always liked Thanksgiving the best of all of the holidays because it isn’t about commercialization or how much you can spend to show your love… it is just about a simple thanks for the awesome things in your life. I am not going to make this out to be a big thing like Blaugust was, but I think it would be awesome if it spread a little bit around our community.

My Wife

I figured I would start off my series of posts with a post about my wife. Not only did she give me this idea but she is pretty much a constant source of support in my life. More important than that she keeps me grounded. I get absolutely engrossed in the things I am into, be it my blog, the podcast, streaming or whatever the latest video game I am obsessing over. She has a way of pulling me outside of all of this and focusing me on the real world outside of my computer and consoles. There are a lot of couples that game together, and I have always thought this would be a cool thing… but I also know it would never actually fly for me. If I had a gamer spouse the bills would never get paid, the chores would never get done… and I would ultimately end up losing my job. My wife helps me keep one foot firmly planted in reality, and keep from slipping down that slippery slope.

More than this we compliment each other nicely. She is all of the things I am not. She is a creature of logic and I am a creature of passion, and together we make this awesome pair. I can’t necessarily say that we are opposites, because we have just enough in common to make it work, but we definitely complement each other. The other strange thing is that we rarely actually fight. I mean we bicker back and forth, but there is rarely any spat that isn’t resolved by bed time. We are in fact an old married couple, and have been able to complete each others sentences for years. There are so many times we will just say a word or two before the other person agrees… because after almost two decades we know exactly what the other is thinking. Without having a place of love and stability, I wouldn’t have the courage each day to put myself out here in front of you all. For all of this and more I am very thankful for my wife.

…in a Fire

This morning I thought I would take a stab and talking about some of the constructs in online games specifically that need to just go away. Over the years I’ve noticed a bunch of things that really do not benefit players in games and only serve to divide them. This is going to likely be a more free form style post than my normal 3 blocks structure… but I am just going with that one.

1) Region Lockout

There are literally an unlimited potential visualizations of the internet, because so much depends upon the activity at the moment you observe it. The image to the left is someone’s vague attempt at “drawing” the internet. It looks like many things, but you know what it absolutely doesn’t look like? That’s right there is no way to somehow match that image up to a map of the countries of the world. The internet is this grand technology that has essentially abolished borders and turned them into meaningless distinctions. I have friends in England, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Ecuador, Brazil, and more than I can possibly count in our sibling to the North… Canada.

Ultimately I want to be able to play freely with all of them, and if it was not hard enough to try and juggle time zone conflicts… game companies seem to feel the need to throw up artificial boundaries to keep players from different regions in separate bundles. This needs to stop, and while server localization is a good thing… blocking players from freely mingling between the areas is a bad thing. Region based launches and region based exclusivity also need to “die in a fire”. We are living in a global community, and its about damned time we realize it.

2) Server Restrictions

Another massive frustration is that as gamers we are still somehow constrained to playing on servers. Don’t get me wrong… I love servers. Before it went to shit I loved Argent Dawn my role-playing server in World of Warcraft, and currently I am in love with Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV. I absolutely think having a small intimate group that you see every single day is a good thing. What I don’t think is a good thing is the hard boundaries. Just because I live in the Tulsa area in Oklahoma… doesn’t mean I can’t go visit someone living in the Dallas Texas area. Essentially this is how our games should work too. There are certain games that are already doing this and it is amazing. In Rift for example you can choose to move your character between servers at will once every week, but more important than that you can choose to transfer yourself temporarily to ANY server in your cluster and you are able to group across servers freely. The Secret World has the same sort of setup, and it allows you to join up with literally anyone else playing the game.

Both of these situations represent the ideal, that you still have a server structure that gives you familiarity with other players but at the same time the freedom to hang out with anyone else who happens to be playing the same game as you. Completely abolishing servers on the other hand isn’t as good of an idea. In The Elder Scrolls Online we free floated on the same server, but the fact that player names were hidden and that you were constantly being mixed with a different batch of players… kept you from developing ties. There are friends I have in FFXIV only because we saw each other doing the same things over and over and struck up a conversation while doing it. This is important, but it is also important to be able to hang out with that person you meet five months after you started playing… and find out they are playing in a completely different server community. Your character is just data, and it should be able to flow between servers… which are also just data.

3) Faction Walls

Another thing that I find super frustrating is when you meet someone that happens to be playing the same game as you… but then you find out that you are on opposite sides of some meaningless conflict in game and as such your characters are sworn enemies. Red versus Blue mentality needs to go away. It is a very dumb way of dealing with the concept of factions, because in the end it is the players that end up losing out. I’ve never felt faction pride in a video game, because these factions have nothing to do with me. I didn’t get to choose the way that the Horde was founded in Azeroth. I didn’t choose to align to the Orcs and the Tauren and Undead and god forbid the damned Blood Elves. I was brought into a situation where those were already connected for various also meaningless reasons. Nothing about that has anything to do with me and my motivations as a player.

What is more meaningful is that for players to start out in the world with certain baseline alignments determined by their race or their class… but have those be malleable. One of the things I loved about the original Everquest was that your faction choices were personal in nature. Paineel was a city of Evil Erudite Necromancers… but by choice I aligned my Wood Elf Ranger with the city through lots of personal work. Meaning that I could go there at any time I wanted and use the city like any other city. Similarly I knew players who factioned with the giants turning Kael Drakkel… an area that is normally a raid zone into a useable player city. These are interesting choices ones that take lots of effort, but ones that also bring the player deeper into your world as a result. Setting up artificial boundaries just for the propagation of shallow player versus player combat is a horrible idea and needs to go away. Let the players choose their allegiance, and let the players decide just what they are willing to fight for.

4) Weekly Lockouts

This one is a thing that is starting to change slowly, but where it still exists it needs to go away. What I mean by weekly lockouts is that once you run something like a raid you are locked out from participating for another week. This used to create this complicated process of making sure that you stayed unlocked from this or that content to make sure you were eligible to participate in it with your raid or your guild. As a raid leader it was always disappointing to get ready to go and find out that one of your key members had locked themselves out earlier in the week. Like I said this is starting to change slowly with the introduction of the “loot locking” construct, where you can participate as many times as you like but you can only receive loot once. Even this has many forms because the World of Warcraft version is a per boss loot lock, and the Final Fantasy XIV version is a single piece of loot period from the entire instance.

In both cases however it is significantly better than being locked completely and unable to help out your friends. If you notice that is a running theme in all of these things that need to go away. Basically there are a lot of MMO constructs that get in the way of you playing with your friends. For awhile now I have had this maxim of “anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is bad” and I still stand by it. What I would like to see is that there be some reward for the players “just helping out”. Sure they can’t win the actual loot off the boss, but maybe for participating they get a loot bag at the end of the run that can contain some interesting stuff. This sort of thing would give folks warm fuzzies for helping out their friends, but also not be rewarding enough for people to abuse it by grinding the raids over and over. In any case… these are four constructs that I feel that MMOs would be better off without.