Credit Roll and Trust System

I’ve been having this issue for the last several weeks where it would seem my internet connection would randomly drop. This has been very annoying while doing Shadowbringers content, because I would have to go through a whole song and dance of reconnecting… waiting for my character to log out… and then trying to resume whatever it was that I was doing. This is especially horrible when I am tanking a dungeon or something similar. The other night I managed to hold aggro until I disconnected fully… and then found out that the boss we were fighting was immune to provoke and Shiana had to die in order for me to get the encounter back under control.

I had gone through a flurry of activity surrounding this. I have network monitors running on my machine trying to determine when and how the drops were occurring. I had robust logging running on my router and emailing me the logs every so often so I could scour them with a confused look on my face trying to discern any sort of a pattern. One night it might be at 7pm and the next night it might be at 8pm… or I might have a large stretch with no disconnects. I have cycled the router and the modem many times in impotent frustration with lack of anything better to do to try and fix it.

Last night however I decided to trace the issue from the wall… and this is the point at which I feel like an idiot for not doing this earlier. In my office the main coax feed comes in from the attic and is floor level back behind my desk. That then feeds up to the cable modem and makes the magic happen. This line of coax was unscrewed completely from the wall and seemingly hanging by only the bit of copper wire sticking out of it. It was a sheer miracle that we maintained any semblance of a connection to the internet. I am guessing the cats did something silly like rubbed up against the thing sticking out of the wall… and over time that unscrewed it. I will have to watch this more closely from now on but it seems to have solved the random disconnecting behavior.

Last night I got the first credits roll for Shadowbringers, and I feel like I can say nothing about it save for showing off this image. Holy hell was this an amazing expansion, and it took so many twists and turns before eventually delivering us onto quite possibly the most epic feeling dungeon and trial I have experienced. I have no clue how I survived the trial but we managed to get in a two attempts, through no help of my own since I was constantly screwing up one of the mechanics causing me to take stacks of vulnerability. I am not looking forward to doing that on Extreme. At some point in the future I will talk about my feelings on the story itself, but right now much like a Star Wars or Avengers film… I want to give people enough time to catch up and experience it for themselves.

What I will talk about however is how great the Trust system is. Yes I did this wrong and waited until 80 to touch the new mechanic that is supposed to help you get through the main storyline solo if you so choose it. It is quite possibly the coolest thing that has been added to Final Fantasy XIV and makes the MMO feel so much like a console game. I am quite frankly shocked it works as well as it does, and it effectively allowed me to sit back… and run a very relaxed dungeon in about 30 minutes start to finish. It does take a little longer than the equivalent dungeon might with actual players… but this is a reasonable trade off and I figure as the NPCs level up… that time gap might decrease as well.

I was also shocked at how good of a way it is to acquire gear for your alts. While I only walked away with two pieces of gear that were relevant to my Samurai… I instead gathered up a bunch of gear that I will probably at some point use as I start out my various sundry other classes. I have a feeling that one of my central focuses soon will be getting classes to 71 so they can start using the trust system as well. The only down point is it requires way more runs of a dungeon to level your party than it will be to level you… so in theory I could see needing to stagger leveling your characters. The unfortunate side effect of that is it means you will run an awful lot of the same dungeon over and over. Regardless it is really freaking cool and might be my new favorite solo downtime activity next to my old favorite of hunt logs.