March 2015 - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Night Means Business

March 23, 2015 by Belghast

Weekly Caps

Another weekend down, and I have somehow managed to cap poetics at the 11th hour. I did not get near as much playtime as I would have liked over the weekend, and I was pretty horrible about managing to do an expert roulette every single day. That said I still managed to cap without a whole lot of issue yesterday evening while watching television. This meant that I also managed to get a second item this week in the form of the ironworks neckpiece. Right now this only leaves me with the ring that is sub 120, as far as the full set of poetics gear I still need a chest and a belt. One of those will take multiple weeks to get, so at this point I am trying to decide whether or not to go after the expensive piece, or to go for another 375 item and upgrade my final 110 item to 120. I really wish that World of Darkness had a shot at dropping jewelry, or at the very least rings since that seems to be the problem item for all of my classes.

The problem with rings in Final Fantasy XIV is that they are unique equipped. Now there is a slight trick to this, that the unimproved and improved version of the same ring count as two separate items. This means I could buy a second ironworks ring now that I have an augmented one and get rid of that last 110 slot that way. This always feels wasteful since you are essentially never going to use that non-augmented ring for anything other than a bridge to slightly higher stats. This is one of those things that I hope they work around in the expansion, making more ways to fill that second ring slot without resorting to wasteful spending of tokens. Another thing I would love to see is for max level players to get a few tokens for running free company mates through low level content. I was honestly concerned that I might not make the cap this week because I spent most of my weekend tanking lower stuff for friends. I wouldn’t change a thing, but it would have been nice to know I am slowly inching towards the cap when we were running Dzemael Darkhold or Aurum Vale.

Lower Content

Other than the stress about hitting the 450 poetics weekly cap, I had a blast this weekend running free company mates through lower level content. Over the course of the weekend I tanked a few primal fights, a couple of trips into Stone Vigil, a couple of trips into Dzemael Darkhold, and if I am remembering correctly at least one trip into Haukke Manor. Essentially anytime a guildie needed something run, I stepped up and offered… sometimes with some caveats attached like that I was already in a run. What makes me even more happy is it seems like most of the guild is doing the exact same thing. Our folks really genuinely seem to enjoy helping, and this makes me extremely happy to see it in action. I find it interesting that even though we are spending a lot of time running content below our actual gear levels, that they still feel fresh and challenging each time we sit foot in them. That is a real testament to just how good their dungeon content is, that after running Haukke for what has to be close to the 100th time, it still feels just as enjoyable.

The awesome thing is that thanks to all of this dungeon running we have a whole new flock of players getting close to hitting the level cap on their first classes. I believe Syl hit 47 on her Black Mage, and I know Grace is somewhere in the 46ish range after our various runs throughout the weekend. What is so awesome about this is that doing 8 player content is going to be all that much easier as we keep adding new folks to the mix. The awesome thing is, there is a possibility that at some point we can actually be running two full parties at the same time. This is going to be great for offering lots of different content options to the group as a whole. It is a super exciting time to be playing Final Fantasy XIV in the Greysky Armada, and all of it just has me pumped to log in each night. I am thoroughly enjoying the game and really looking forward to June and the Heavensward expansion. That said also really looking forward to the 2.55 patch coming March 31st.

Night Means Business

I spent some time yesterday afternoon playing the Final Fantasy XV demo, otherwise known as “Episode Duscae”. The demo starts our cast of road trippers a bit into the content from the sounds of it. Their vehicle has broken down and they are having to make some cash to pay for repairs. This serves as a way to teach the player about combat. The other thing that it should have taught me better was that the day/night cycle means serious business. I did what I always do in games, and went wandering off the path looking for combat wherever I could find it. I took on packs of Saberwolves, and foolhardily a giant pack of what I think were called “Gerdua”. They were these huge lumbering tusked calf things, and somehow I managed to aggro around a dozen of them. I got a lot of practice using the parry options to take them down. As night fell the game reminded me that I really should camp for the night. The problem is it did not really message well where i should camp or even how I should go about doing this. On my map was a house icon, and an exclamation point there saying something about making camp.

So I wandered off in that direction in the middle of the night, and from out of the sky came a horribly bright light signaling an enemy drop ship was just about to flood me with baddies. After dispatching the first party of four heavily armored troopers, I started getting attacked by Goblins. The goblins were no big deal because they had minimal hit points, in fact after some time I started really enjoying wrecking them. That was until a second and third drop ship showed up… so I started trying to juggle eight heavily armored troopers and a half dozen goblins running in to fight me. I was actually holding my own for a bit, until the Saberwolves started showing up… and at that point I was pretty much done for. I thought to myself “That Escalated Quickly” and it really did… one minute I am doing just fine and feeling like I have a chance and the next moment the entire world seems to be attacking me. So when this game tells you to camp… I suggest you camp.

FFXIV for PS3 Closeout

March 22, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #49 – Road Trip Fantasies Type-0

During this show we are joined by our normal cast of Belghast, Rae, Tam, Kodra and Ashgar as we devote the majority of the show to lots of different things Final Fantasy. We talk the release of the Final Fantasy XV Demo and how this has sent Tam back into the 90s. We talk Final Fantasy Type-0 and how we are enjoying this very different Final Fantasy Offering. We also talk about how the Final Fantasy franchise going to more “on rails” games turned several of us off the franchise for awhile. Ashgar beats Ori and the Blind Forest and talks a bit about his feelings regarding the ending. Tam talks about his enjoyment of Dreamfall Chapters and how it isn’t really required that one has played the previous games. Rae talks about her new Noms website, where they plan on making a recipe a week and reflecting on what the various authors think of it.

I talk about my current funk with my World of Warcraft raid and how the frustrations there are harshing my enjoyment. We also delve into a deep session once again where we talk about the differences bertween WoW and FFXIV raiding. We also have a session of “Tam Told us So” now that the news about crafting specialization has taken some of the focus away from us all becoming Omni Crafters. I talk about my return lately to Elder Scrolls Online and the conversion to a Buy To Play system. I talk about a game I did not expect to like but find myself begrudgingly enjoying, and that is ZMR: Zombies Monsters Robots. Finally we close out the show with some discussion about the League Championship Series and the introduction of the new roaming support champion… Bard.

FFXIV For PS3 Closeout

Yesterday we spent the day mostly roaming around, in an effort to get out of the house more than anything. Tis the season for post Christmas clearance in all the various stores as they start closing out one seasons stuff in preparation for summer. This is generally an awesome time to pick up all sorts of random bits, but more often than not I am hunting for Legos. I’ve already found several sets deeply discounted and I have reached the point where I really don’t pounce on something until it is at least half off or more from the original price. In my journeys yesterday I noticed that it seems like all of the Target stores are closing out their PS3 copies of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn. This creates a unique opportunity for players who have been on the fence about playing the Game. Throughout my journeys yesterday I found it between $6 and $10 for a boxed copy of FFXIV PS3. Now if you act very quickly you can turn this PS3 copy into a PS4 copy with several caveats.

Firstly this offer goes away on March 31st, so you will have a limited amount to time to actually do it. Secondly you have to have a PS3 or access to a PS3 to make this work. You have to log your PSN account into a PS3 and bind that PS3 to your account. Then you have to boot up FFXIV and log into the game, thereby registering your PSN account to your Square Enix account. Finally you have to go into the Mogstation and you can click the link that should now appear at the bottom of your account screen. This should give you a code that you can then enter through the Sony Playstation store on your PS4 to get a copy of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn of PS4. This is a ton of hoops to jump through but it should allow you to get a copy of FFXIV ARR for really cheap. There are some caveats here… firstly when you claim your PS4 copy, it nullifies your PS3 copy. Secondly this does not give your account a PC License, which would be a separate purchase. I did this some time ago myself but I had forgotten all of this bullshit that you have to do until yesterday when a friend was trying to make this work. I normally play on my PC but I like having the option to play on PS4 especially since you can remote play through a Vita or PSTV. Granted the controls are kinda wonky, but it would be well worth figuring it out for leveling and crafting as such.

City Building

Another game that I have been playing around with lately is the confusingly named Cities: Skylines. It seems like I was suffering the same confusion that so many other gamers seem to be… that Skylines was somehow connected to the Cities XL and Cities XXL franchise. That colon apparently is there to somehow differentiate the games, because they are in fact from two different companies. I had played XL in the past and was not terribly impressed, so when I say the buzz about Skylines I for the most part ignored it. That was until I actually watched some game play footage and saw that the game was essentially everything I wanted the last couple of Simcity titles to be. Overall the game feels very much like a logical successor to Simcity 2000, which was really the last big city building game that I enjoyed playing. If you take the concepts from that game, and bring them up to modern standards you have the Skylines interface. The game strikes this balance between trying to have mind bending graphics and being pleasant to look at and play with.

I took this screenshot because I am pretty damned proud of getting my first upgrade. Apparently in the years since I have played Simcity 2000, I have gotten pretty horrible at city building. The biggest problem I am having with skylines is that it seems difficult to figure out how best to build the roads and utilities to conserve space for zoning. The above city is actually my second attempt at creating something viable, and so far it is working okay. My first city was a complete mess because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I have a feeling that this second city will also be a learning experience as I try and figure out how best to optimize putting in an electrical grid and such. All I do know for certain is that skylines is definitely a way to lose an hour without realizing it. I started playing this as my wife was getting ready to leave yesterday morning, and next thing I know she was ready. I feel like I need to watch some people playing it to figure out how best to do things again. The standard grid that I used to build in doesn’t appear to really work here. If nothing else this feels like the true “next best city building game.

The Guide Program

March 21, 2015 by Belghast

There are many stories that at the time were frustrating but become more humorous through the lens of nostalgia. I think we as gamers all have thousands of such tales in us, and with this new feature my goal is to try and devote some time to committing these to paper. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but one that is fun to wallow in every now and then.

Exeteroth Iceforge

I’ve been sitting here for a bit staring at a blank screen, not quite sure what to write for my Storytime Saturday post. Which lead m to start thinking about the things I miss in games. One of the casualties of the whole Daybreak Games debacle was the majority of the in game GM department. From what I have heard they currently have only a single GM per game, which makes me wonder why there is not talk about bringing back the Guide program. For those who are not familiar with the concept, the Guide program was a series of player volunteers that gave up some of their in game time to serve as junior GMs on a server other than their own. These guides took care of a lot of the day to day requests like players stuck in geometry, and minor behavior infractions. The guide system always felt really cool because you knew more than likely you were getting another seasoned player helping you out, and in part you felt more connected to them because of it.

This freed up the GM staff to do some interesting things like live events. It was always extremely awesome when something was going on, and it was amazing how fast word trickled through the community. Players would drop what they were doing to flock to whatever zone something cool was happening in. The unfortunately thing is it has been literally years since I last participated in something like that. Modern games seem to have a GM staff that simply does not come out to play anymore. There was a time when on Xegony in Everquest we knew all of the GMs and guides assigned to our server. There were so many times they would be hanging out in zone with us as we took down a raid boss, cheering us on. The problem is there were tales of GMs doing questionable things to help out some of the top tier guilds. I really hope they were just rumors, because while we might have had GMs in zone with us they never did anything to assist us other than to lend moral support.

Spawn Rights

One of the rights of passage in Everquest was the obtaining of the epic weapon. This was an extremely long process that involved the camping of many rare spawns. I’ve talked in the past about playing a cleric which was actually one of the less annoying epic weapons to obtain. The worst ones relied upon steps in raid instances that were extremely rare spawns. I remember getting home from work, logging in and seeing messages in guild chat that “Pasta” was up, and everyone immediately knew that it meant we were going to the Plane of Hate that night. Magi P’Tasa was a super rare spawn on what I vaguely remember being a two week long spawn cycle buried deep within the Plane of Hate. When it was up… it became a race among all the various raid guilds on the server to see who could field a raid first and clear to it and defeat it. So many times there was a fever pitch battle to try and log people in fast enough, and get us all into Hate in order to grab the spawn rights first.

That was one of the awesome things about Xegony is that for the most part the raid guilds respected each others “spawn rights”. Meaning that if someone was in a zone, it was more or less off limits to any other guild trying to come up and muscle them out of it. So whoever gained a foothold in Hate for example, owned Hate until they were doing farming it. These farm sessions could last days at times, especially on the weekends. This however was not the case on every server. Originally I started on Veeshan, the home of the fabled Fires of Heaven raid guild. They respected no ones “spawn rights” in any form, and there were constantly tales of them steamrolling their way through a zone that someone else was currently farming to muscle through to the spawn they needed. Often times training mobs on the rival guild to keep them busy while they got what they were after. I feel like in part the reason why we have instanced dungeons in World of Warcraft, is in part because of these sort of shenanigans.

Murky Depths

The cool thing is that while all of this was going on, it was not unusual for guides and GMs to be hanging out watching the race for the spawn. I have to say the coolest instance of GM intervention I ever experienced was while I was working on my own epic weapon quest. At the bottom of Lake Rathetear was a particularly annoying step that involved farming a set of Aqua Goblins until a rare named goblin called Lord Bergurgle spawned. Like so many of the spawns in Everquest this on was based on a random chance anytime you killed the placeholder. This often meant spending hour after hour on the bottom of Lake Rathetear which was a slog of a camp because the bottom of the lake was pitch black…. with nothing other than some crumbling ruins to stare at. During one of my sessions down on the bottom of the lake a random GM popped by and spend several hours just keeping me company as we waited on the spawn. It was awesome that she was more than happy to chat away keeping a lonely cleric company while waiting on an annoying spawn.

Basically I miss this sort of interaction between the customer support staff and the player base. During these early days there was so much more cooperation between players and customer service, because it felt like we were in this together. That we were working together to make this game we both loved all the more awesome. I am not saying that CS is not doing an amazing job currently, but I miss this era of manual and personal intervention with the players. The GMs and Guides were physically in the game with you, not connected into it through a chat server in a call center somewhere. In part it was also cool that “guide robes” were something that was instantly recognizable as a person of authority. It was like a uniform that every player immediately recognized and respected. They were the in game security guards and forces of right and good. I keep hoping now that we have these smaller niche games that they will bring back something like the guide program. I think it is good for the community as a whole to have representatives in direct contact with the player base on a regular basis. If nothing else it is fun to fondly remember this era in MMOs, even if I doubt it will ever fully return. I feel like this is probably something that gets harder to support the larger the game gets.

Pope Belghast

March 20, 2015 by Belghast

On Spoilers

This week has been an absolutely insane one, and I have had this feeling of constantly being behind the curve. So it is no surprise that yesterday I was just not getting around to listening to the relaunch of the Contains Moderate Peril podcast, now with the addition Jaedia and Jasyla joining the cast of permanent hosts. One of the topics that landed on was a discussion about spoilers. I have this mixed feeling about the concept of information being spoiled, and it largely centers around the fact that I don’t generally mind them. If nothing else knowing there is a plot twist coming up, only serves to enhance my interest in the product. I can only think of one instance where a spoiler actually stopped me from watching the show… and that primarily was because the single character I cared about was killed, and I didn’t feel like going through the motions of watching it happen.

All of this said I am super sensitive about potentially spoiling someone else’s experience. For example on AggroChat when we are about to discuss major plot points, even if it is a game well past the statute of limitations on such things… we still tend to preface it with “spoiler alert”. All of this discussion however has made me realize how generally awesome my twitter feed actually is. I can count on one hand the number of times that I have seen information in it that was actually a spoiler to anyone. Similarly the group of people that I hang around with and game with seem to be equally sensitive to such information. I just find it interesting that we don’t consider reading the book before going to see the movie spoilers, but when we read a plot synopsis it is somehow different. I will say that knowing the “Red Wedding” was coming, only served to enhance my enjoyment of that season of Game of Thrones, because I knew at some point this event would happen. That said… I would have been pissed as hell had someone spoiled any moment of the Harry Potter books for me, so I guess it goes both ways.

Back to Blackrock

Since my world was insane Monday and Tuesday… I ended up missing my World of Warcraft raid group night. As a result last night was my first time back this week, and it felt a little odd to be back in the game. It seems on Tuesday they managed to down everything we currently have on farm but the Operator Thogar encounter… which is fine by me because so far that is hands down my favorite fight this expansion. It took a few tries but I think on attempt three we managed to down Thogar again. I was absolutely shocked when I saw loot pop up on the corpse, since we generally run on personal loot. Our raid leader said that we had very few upgrades that could be gotten so that personal loot was no longer the big draw it once was. Unfortunately I have to disagree with him as I have not had a single upgrade in going on seven raids. I’ve gotten nothing but gold, and in many cases double gold since I am spending tokens left and right. I kept expecting that one of the weeks the slot machine of a loot system would pay out… but I am guessing that is no longer the case.

I was really hoping this week would be my week to pick up shoulders, since I have been sitting on the chest piece for a few weeks now. Neither piece is an upgrade unless I am also getting the two piece set bonus for wearing them. I am annoyed that I still have four slots that are sub 670 gear, but given time I will hopefully find some upgrades. One of the things I was not expecting is that they bumped Blackrock Foundry gear up by 5 ilevels, which actually makes LFR worthwhile for a couple of slots like my 640 legs. As far as progression content we worked on the Heart of the Mountain encounter for a bit before popping out of the instance, flipping it to heroic and working on Hans and Franz. On our best attempt we managed to get them down to 8% but we had various issues. Largely we were flying without a safety net last night as both our Deathknight and our Healing Druid were not in attendance… meaning we had no battle rezzes at all. I am getting frustrated that we are struggling with this attendance hump, not quite being able to get all the right classes we need to succeed on at the right time.

Pope Belghast

Before and after the raid I spent time in what has become my more comfortable gaming home… Final Fantasy XIV. For a period of time I was splitting myself fairly equally between World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV, but honestly at this point I am only actually logging in twice a week because I feel a sense of commitment to the raid. The thing that has always been missing in every game we have played is a huge thriving community. Right now we have that in Final Fantasy in spades, and in fact I would say our average player base is easily twice the number of people who are actually online regularly in House Stalwart. I want to say Ashgar said that over the last few days we had 55 unique players online, and we often top 20 on a nightly basis. For awhile I was actively recruiting players, but folks seem to keep recruiting themselves once they hear about the Free Company. All of this makes me a very happy Belghast.

After yesterdays post about being a reluctant healer, Ashgar took it upon himself to convince me to heal expert roulette last night. I told them this was a horrible idea, but they didn’t really listen and I endangered the lives of not only Ash but also Thalen and Solaria. It turns out that I honestly didn’t do too horribly. We ended up getting Keeper of the Lake which is a frustrating instance at the best of times. We died to the very first boss, but I believe that was the only time we wiped, and I only managed to lose a player once… and that was on the final boss encounter where I swiftcasted a battle rez. Yesterday after the WoW raid I spend most of the time milling around in the housing district, when we had a brilliant idea. I have been sitting on the player commendation pope hat for awhile, and with my soldiery healer gear… it just worked too perfectly not to use it. I even have a proper miter in my hands. I introduce to you Pope Belghast, the reluctant healer.