Month: March 2018

Bunny Fail Tank Returns

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I’ve talked about this a bit in the past, but I have struggled with Final Fantasy XIV since finishing the Stormblood main story.  I am not exactly sure why, but after leveling my Warrior through the questing process…  and then grinding up a Samurai I bounced.  When I say I bounced… I bounced hard.  I just stopped logging in entirely and even didn’t care enough to log in for most of the major holiday events that have gone on.  At one point I made an attempt to get back into the game and pushed through the new MSQ content right up until I reached the Drowned City of Skalla.  I could not bring myself to tank that with a random group and I told myself… I would wait until I had friends around to run it with me.  That event never happened and I got distracted by a bunch of games in the meantime.

The problem with this is that it sort of set up an artificial barrier between me and the content.  It was as though I had some sort of a mental block preventing me at just throwing myself at content the way I used to be willing to.  I knew I needed something severe to get me off high center and back into caring about what was going on in Final Fantasy XIV.  There used to be a time when I willing to log in each night and run experts with completely random groups of players from the roulette system.  However I developed some sort of barrier against doing that… one that I think was slowly chipped away given how freely I am willing to do my “SOS Roulette” nonsense in Monster Hunter World.

Watch Sleep Deprived Bel tries to remember how to Fail Tank in FFXIV from Belghast on www.twitch.tv
As a result last night I used the presence of an audience as a bit of a kick in the butt to get me back into Final Fantasy XIV and doing dungeon content again.  I streamed for a little over two hours and in that time I believe I ran four dungeons and made some progress in the MSQ afterwards.  In truth were it not for the MSQ slowing the pace down significantly…  I might have streamed longer throwing myself at more dungeons for gear currency.  I managed to pick up a chestpiece with tokens and now feel like maybe I can do this thing and catch my gear levels up to something reasonable.  At the start of the night I was 313 item level and by the end I edged it up a bit to 315.  Skalla and the next set of patch dungeons all drop gear that is an incremental upgrade, as well as some tasty tasty currency.  Basically at this point I need to reach a state where I can start doing expert roulette again to play catch up.

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After taking a break from streaming and FFXIV I hopped over to Monster Hunter World for awhile and spent some time running nonsense with Grace.  I have been mostly running hammer when we are doing stuff, because it is a weapon that I like quite a bit… and one that I want to get better at using.  There are definitely times when I am fighting something that it feels like having something more than a longsword in my arsenal would help greatly.  We took down a Squirrel Blimp and I managed to unlock the third of my elder dragons while she ran around trying to find the Great Girros.  I was not in terribly long as I was already in a fairly sleep deprived state from the previous nights fragmented sleep schedule due to the launch.  All in all though it was a pretty great night and I want to thank everyone that stopped by to tune in and chat with me.  Also huge thanks to Solaria who actually joined my discord and hung out with me while I eased my way back into Final Fantasy XIV.  It’s fun lobbing comments at text messages scrolling across twitch chat, but it is even more fun when you have someone hanging out in chat to talk to over voice as well.

A Big Launch

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This morning I am feeling like the above screenshot.  I was using PSN the other night and this image came up…  which as a programmer tells me something went horribly wrong.  I am guessing these are the labels for each one of those messages and then the UI is supposed to replace that value with whatever happens to be your localization.  However the screen failed to render and presented me with this gem.  I am currently failing to render completely and glitching out while sitting here typing to you.

Last night was essentially the culmination of five months of madness, leading to the midnight launch of something we have all been working on.  I had this master plan for how I was going to handle needing to be up super late.  The goal was to come home… eat a big sleep inducing meal… and then go to sleep super early.  That super early however turned into about 7:30 after I spent some time in my office screwing around on the interwebs.  I did in fact get to sleep relatively early, and woke briefly as my wife got home from church and again when she went to bed. For the most part I got some reasonable sleep at least for what is essentially a nap.

I had set an alarm for 11:15 pm allowing me to get up and around and functional before the midnight go live…  however did not need it due to the phone call I received at 10:35.  Have you ever tried to be summoned forth from a glorious slumber… and then attempt to not only comprehend what someone is saying to you, but also supply the appropriate response?  It took a few times for the person to relate what was going on in a manner that my sleep addled brain understood.  From there it was off to the races as I needed to call in various folks that were actually responsible for doing the things that needed to be done in the project.

As is always the case with any go live… something is not working entirely as intended at the moment of the launch.  This is basically a rule and there will always be some amount of scrambling around last minute to fix whatever thing that is.  For most of this five month project I have largely acted as a conduit between my side of the house and the business side of the house.  The truth is the business doesn’t necessarily want you to do something… they just want you to handle it getting done.  As a result most of my time has been spent ferrying requests from one person to another person who can actually fulfill that request.

Last night was no difference and about 15 minutes from launch the issue that cropped up had been resolved and we were back to smoothly sailing towards go live.  The worst part about a launch is waiting for the first real data to start flowing through the system.  No amount of testing can ever simulate live input, even when you are yourself trying to follow the exacting procedures that the users will take.  Hell in this example we spent five weeks of two to three hour long hands on guided user acceptance tests… and  I still felt a certain amount of unease as we started seeing things roll in.

The truth is… things were working as we planned and by 1:30 in the morning I had decided it was probably safe to go to sleep.  I sent an email stating as much to the team and headed off to slumber.  There was of course a certain period of trying to get adjusted from firing on all cylinders to shutting down completely, but I fought through it and managed to fall into deep sleep again.  Unfortunately one team member did not see this however and called me about 3 am to tell me he too was leaving for the night.  So once again I had to force myself awake, but given the lower importance of the call I am not entirely certain I made it all the way there.

As a result this morning…  I have nothing much to talk about other than the experience of having one more big launch under my belt.  For those who have done this you will understand the roller coaster of nerves and anxiety that you go through as you start doing the software version of “did I lock the door?”.  In the end however things went mostly smoothly and I wound up getting way more sleep than I originally expected to.  That said it was a deeply fragmented sleep, and this morning I am still a bit glitchy as I sit down to post this.

Tonight however… I am planning on returning to the world of gaming and doing something interesting.  Right now the plan is to stream for a bit, but I have no clue at all what I am going to stream or when exactly I will get started.  Basically there are a few things on the table…

  • Defeat the Act 1 Boss in Dragon Quest Builders
  • SOS Roulette in Monster Hunter World
  • Re-learn how to tank doing Roulette in FFXIV

So in theory one of those things will happen tonight and during the day I will make some decision as to which.  If you’ve made it to the end of this post… I figure you are either a developer who has gone through this sequence many times over and continue reading out of a sense of camaraderie …  or you are super bored.  Regardless thanks for hanging out and reading my thought stream.