Grand Experiment Archives - Page 20 of 200

Obsession with a Skillet

May 25, 2015 by Belghast

To Achieve Self Sufficiency

There are a lot of reasons why people craft in online games. Some start down the path because there is an item that can be created that is better than something that they can get through other means. Others start down the path to earn money, or be able to play the market. For me I have always been the type that crafts so that I don’t have to rely on anyone else. I have the most awesome guild in the world, and in it are a group of individuals that would drop whatever they happened to be doing to craft me anything that I might happen to need. The problem being I hate asking people for things. I am the type of person who would give away anything to anyone that might need it, but when it comes to me asking for something… it goes against every bone in my body to impose on someone else.

As a result I tend to level crafting so that I can make my own gems, brew my own potions and enchant my own gear. In World of Warcraft for example I have one of every single craft at maximum or at least near maximum level. This has allowed me to basically take care of my own needs and it makes me pretty happy. In Rift I have the same thing, in fact I spent a large chunk of my bonus currency when they converted to free to play unlocking all of the trade skills available on my main character. So self sufficiency is an important mission to me, and it is a bit strange that until last week I had not actually touched the crafting system in Final Fantasy XIV. In part I had watched lots of my friends fall into the black hole that I am now in and wanted to avoid doing so until I had at least leveled one of every combat role I might need.

Obsession with a Skillet

Like I wrote yesterday I have now left the territory of being able to purchase goods from a vendor and craft those up in rapid succession. You can get to fifteen in a given crafting profession relatively easily. Sure it takes a lot of time and getting to fifteen in all professions took me roughly two weeks of piddling at leveling off and on to get there. Now however it seems like the challenge is not the leveling portion but the acquisition of items to use in crafting. While my friends seem to think I am insane in doing this my strategy falls along the lines of picking a single item and then farming up three for four stacks of materials and mindlessly crafting a given item until I ding. This worked extremely well for leatherworking in that I simply gathered up enough aldgoat skin and allumen to be able to craft up four stacks of aldgoat leather. Sure it was pure tedium to craft that many items in a row, but I did so while watching television so it ultimately was not that bad. The crafting system while more involved than just pressing a button and crafting an entire stack of items, is simple enough that you can pretty much do it through muscle memory.

Last night I spent crafting mortar by combining stacks of limestone and fine sand, both of which I mined up myself. This pushed me from 15 in Alchemist to 21 over the course of the evening, watching Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, Veep and Last Week Tonight for a reference in just how long it takes to push a profession. After that I started work on Culinarian by crafting a bunch of salted fish. I purchased three stacks of fish from the market place because it was relatively cheap, and the table salt I crafted by combining rock salt and distilled water. I managed to make it to 16 last night before heading to bed, and as soon as I finish writing this blog post I will begin the journey once again. Ultimately I decided to push Alchemist and Culinarian first because they are ultimately the professions I like the least. The strange thing is… that each step I make towards 50 makes me happy because I am that much closer to being self sufficient. While honestly I am not to the point of being able to make all that many useful things… I know eventually I will get there.

To Lost Causes

At this point I have 25 days to push eight professions from 15ish to 50, and I don’t feel like there is a way in hell for me to make that work. Even if I took that month off from work and did nothing but craft full time… I don’t think I would be able to make it. Even knowing this fact… I am still going to try. If I can at least get to 40 by the time Heavensward launches I will be happy enough. There are so many other competing things that I would like to accomplish but right now I am as my friend put it past the “event horizon” and the only way out is through. Crafting has dug its hooks into me and I am currently obsessed with getting caught up. I wish I had not waited so long to make the push, but in the grand scheme of things I tend to only feel the drive to do something… when pushed on from external forces. The impending launch of Heavensward is the catalyst that makes me want to do this, and for that I guess I am thankful.

Right now I am so thoroughly amped about the launch of this expansion, more so than I have been since potentially the launch of Shadows of Luclin in Everquest. That was really my “first” expansion launch, and I was so unbelievably excited about what it might hold for me. Everything I have seen about Heavensward is making me feel that excited about it all. I think this expansion is going to be just as game changing, because the new content feels so vast. The scale of everything seems to be amplified, and that makes me so happy. The world building of Everquest embraced the feeling of everything on a large scale, and my hope is now that the team has proven their mettle with a smaller experience that we will see them branching out and building worlds on a bigger scale. My hope is that with the introduction of flight that we will see less hard edges in the world. I admit I am leery about flight because in both World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 it changed the way I played the game potentially for the worse. In both cases I skipped content because I could simply fly over the top of it… and I am hoping that Square can approach flight from a slightly different direction.

The Madness Continues

May 24, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #58 – Eight Is Enough?

This week we explore the age old question of podcasting.. just how many hosts can you have before a show descends into madness? As the title suggests we ended up with eight hosts on this weeks AggroChat and I think for the most part we exited on the other side with our sanity still in place… or what little we actually had of it to start. This week Ashgar and Kodra are both travelling, and as such I made plans to cover for them if they were unable to make it for the show. However because they are the consumate professionals that they are… they figured out a way to podcast remotely. This left me with the choice of either backing out on the folks I had arranged or just push forward into madness. Like usual I chose the path of madness.

This week we have quite possibly our longest show to date as we aske the question if Eight is Enough? This week we talk about Kodra’s trip to Canada, and his descent into Pathfinder Online. This spurs a discussion about the recent crop of MMO nostalgia titles and how they all somehow miss the boat on what made those early MMOs so interesting. Since all of us literally are playing Final Fantasy XIV we spend a good deal talking about our two groups working on turn nine of the Second Coil of Bahamut, as well as contrasting WoW and Final Fantasy raiding experiences. Grace talks about her experience leveling a ninja and how this game causes us to play things we didn’t think we would ever like playing. I talk about my complete and total embrace of the black hole that is the crafting system and how I have managed to push all classes to fifteen this week.

On top of this we talk Sword Art Online in both the Anime and Game forms. We talk a bit about how each of us is trying to wrap up our time in Shadowrun in preparation for next weeks show. We talk Mad Max Fury Road and to a lesser extent Orphan Black. Ashgar talks about his continued experiences with Radiant Historia, and Thalen ventures into Broken Age. Dallian and I talk about our experiences this week playing Witcher 3, and how the Hearthstone mobile app doesn’t work nearly as well as we would have hoped it would. Finally we wrap things up with some discussion about Moonrise and the impending steam early access. It was without a doubt one of the biggest shows we have recorded but also extremely enjoyable to participate in. It seems we somehow were able to juggle eight people on a show without complete chaos.

The Madness Continues

The insanity that is the Final Fantasy XIV crafting system continues. It was a rainy day here in Oklahoma so I spent most of it curled up on the couch watching television and banging away slowly on crafting. As of yesterday evening I had managed to push every single crafting profession to fifteen, which essentially signals the end of “easy mode” crafting. During those first levels everything you need can be purchased off of a vendor and it is simply an act of brute forcing your way through the levels. Now I begin a trek through the dark territory that involves copious farming of materials. Last night while podcasting I farmed up three stacks of allumen and aldgoat skin for the purpose of leveling leatherworking. I was not sure just how much Aldgoat Leather I would ultimately need to get through to 30 but I suspected it would be quite a bit. Towards the end of the podcast and while editing I crafted up the entire stack of materials, making some 410 Aldgoat leather and it pushed me from level 15 to level 21.

In theory if I can just find something like this to farm at each step of the way I might make it through the 50 levels of crafting with ease. It seems that in leatherworking at least there is an item like that every 10 levels that can be mass farmed and crafted up. The ones that I worry the most about are Alchemist and Cullinarian because they seem to be the most fiddly of the professions. Right now I am farming up Limestone and Fine Sand to make a ton of Mortar because I actually need some to hand off to Cylladora to craft a Moogle themed wallpaper for me, for my personal room. Yesterday in the mix of things that I ran I helped some guildies get through Good King Moggle Mog and managed to get the rare crafting material to drop. Who doesn’t want Moogle themed wallpaper for their personal room? Anyways I am finding the whole crafitng thing oddly soothing but it has absolutely consumed every last moment of my play time. Now that I am having to farm up materials however I am at least venturing out in to the world some.

Poking My Head Out

Yesterday was quite literally the first day I have done something other than craft for the last two weeks. Maybe it isn’t quite that drastic, but the majority of my time in game has been working on some craft or another. Yesterday I ran Haukke Manor with some guildies and got to play my rogue. I have to say that class is just fun to play in that the animations are amazing. While it is only 28 right now I am thinking it might be the next class that I push to 50. A huge chunk of this desire admittedly is the fact that I have a pair of Moogle themed daggers waiting for maximum level. Mog weapons make everything more enjoyable, as I am using the mogfork on my dragoon and mogaxe on my warrior. Other than Haukke I ran an expert with Grace and Tam, and then later that night ran the Battle at Big Keep and The Chrysallis with guildies. It was good to actually stretch my warrior muscles a bit after all of the crafting. I feel like at this point I have more than I could ever actually accomplish still to do before the launch of Heavensward. There are only twenty six days until the Heavensward head start, and there is no way in hell I am going to finish a lot of my side projects before then.

Quite literally I feel like I could take a month off and focus on nothing but Final Fantasy XIV and still have things that are left unfinished before the expansion. Right now it seems I have opposite problems between Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft. In Warcraft there is nothing I really want to do, but in Final Fantasy I have what feels like dozens of competing desires. It is actually hard getting used to the notion that I will be going into this expansion with a lot of unfinished baggage, but I guess in the grand scheme of things that gives me reason to keep poking my head back in on the old world. The things that I absolutely want to finish before Heavensward is that I want to complete the Post Moogle storyline. I feel like I really just need a good afternoon to work through all of that content, so I am wondering if maybe that is going to be my mission on Monday. Put on Orphan Black on the television and quest my way through to one of the coolest hats in any game. Even writing this… I am realizing just how much content there is in this game yet to do.

Fear of the Unknown

May 23, 2015 by Belghast

MMO Nostalgia

One of the interesting subtexts this week that we will likely talk about on tonight’s AggroChat is Kodra and Pathfinder Online. He has begun the descent into this game and been trying to drum up a certain measure of interest from the rest of us to join him. The problem is that as I listen to him talk about the game I realize that I have already played this. In fact I gave three years of my life to Everquest, and everything about Pathfinder Online feels like a nostalgic throwback to that era. I am sure it is a perfectly awesome game, but while I miss the sense of community we had back then there are many things I don’t miss about it. This is all the more relevant since right now the Ragefire server is open in Everquest and folks are flocking there for their own hit from the nostalgia pipe.

The thing that I don’t miss about that era is the way I felt chained to the computer. Every time I set foot in the world I had a tangible fear of losing everything that I had worked so hard to attain to that point. There was always the fear that you might take a death in a place where you could not recover your body. Over time the items on your body started to decay and disappear, and eventually there was a point where things were simply no longer recoverable. The problem is when you took a death your entire mission in life became about getting that body back. I’ve known people that skipped major events in their life all because they were in the middle of trying to get back their virtual items. I’ve personally gotten calls on the middle of a Sunday afternoon begging me to go home and log in and go find them so that I could resurrect their body and give them back some of the lost experience.

Fear of the Unknown

So while I don’t miss any of that bullshit, I do the constant and tangible sense of fear. The problem being that the modern games seem to have missed the boat in what exactly caused this fear. Right now so many of these sandbox games take the cheap route and make every player afraid of every other player. The problem with this is that it is counter productive to building a community. You want your players to band together, rather than avoid each other like the plague. What caused the fear was that the world was this scary and unknown place. There were no in game maps, there were no mob statistics… and it was the lack of information that made the world frightening. We didn’t know what we didn’t know… and often times our imaginations invented a far scarier scenario than the game servers were possible of creating at the time. We imagined complex plans within plans… and that the server was quite literally out to get us.

There were situations like Kithicor Forest in Everquest, where during the day it was a friendly low level hunting zone, but at night all manner of maximum level undead spawned and started roaming. The truth of Kithicor is that there were far fewer undead spawning than we realized and that we were never in as much danger as we actually thought we were. In all the times I ran through the zone at night, I never once died to the undead… but I was constantly in fear of it. I “knew” death waited around every corner and because of it I tiptoed my way out into the world constantly aware of my surroundings and constantly afraid that at any moment the server would reach out and smite me for my impudence. The fact that it never actually happened, didn’t really matter… because I lacked the data mined information to tell me exactly what the spawn rates were and where the roaming paths were located at.

Players Together, Not Against

We are quite literally overloaded with information about the games we play. Knowing the amount of hit points a given mob has is just expected now, along with knowing every other intimate piece of information about the game. We know the attacks a creature is capable of making, and how exactly to counter them… before we even see said creature take a swing. Where this modern incarnation of Everquest nostalgia falls short is understanding that it was our lack of knowledge that made us afraid to venture into the world. It was not necessarily the harsh death penalties, and it most definitely was not that we were afraid of other players… it was that the world was cruel and unknown. The focus on PVP as a way of providing cheap content always seems to miss the point of why the original games worked. Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot worked more than anything because it caused players to be willing to look for help from anyone who would offer it.

When you expect the world to strike you down at any moment, you are willing to accept assistance from anyone willing to lend it. Especially in Everquest it felt like every player in the game was on the same team, that it was us versus the world. Sure there were territorial squabbles over spawn camps and the like, but more often than not each server had its own hard and fast rules for dealing with this sort of thing. We the players made order out of the chaos, and there was protection in numbers. There were many zones that you didn’t go to because you knew there were not likely to be other players to help you out if something went wrong. By the same token these untouched zones became the perfect place for a group of friends to go off exploring on their own. This is what we need in the current crop of nostalgic games, a sense of why exactly the first games worked and a certain measure of ignorance to make us all fear the darkness.

Don’t Believe Your Own Hype

May 22, 2015 by Belghast

Strange Dreams

Last night I failed miserably to attend the World of Warcraft raid. For whatever reason I have not slept amazingly well this week, so by the time I got home yesterday I found myself incapable of sitting up straight in my office chair. From there I attempted to game on the couch from my laptop, but before long was finding myself dozing off. So around the 7:30 start time of our World of Warcraft raid I was ultimately taking a nap. It looks like they put in ten solid tries on Blackhand without me, which is pretty awesome. Hopefully this coming week we can manage to down him and take his candy. I am not sure why I am apparently sleep deprived but after all the napping on the couch I still managed to sleep a fairly full nights sleep. Admittedly I woke up several times during the night, but each time I was able to get right back to sleep without much issue.

I did have a really strange dream during the course of all these wake ups. It was at some banquet for Blizzard Entertainment, and somehow had gotten chosen to say a few words. When it came to me and I introduced who I was and what blog and podcast I am from… there was a sheer look of horror from the stage. It was like this overwhelming wave of “What is he doing here?” sweeping over the fine folks from Blizzard. I proceeded to say a few words about my love of Blizzard and I am not really sure what happened next because I woke up. However I do remember having this general feeling that I did not belong there. The funny thing is… that in order for the dream to function I would have to be well known, and this is something that I am not willing to accept. I don’t think anyone at Blizzard has a clue who I am, let alone enough of a clue to be horrified that I would be speaking at their banquet. I am just a guy that does a thing, and not terribly important for doing it.

Don’t Believe Your Own Hype

One of the interesting things about being a blogger or a podcaster is that you are forced into the often uncomfortable role of self promotion. This aspect of blogging names my skin crawl because ultimately whether your like it or not, you are building a brand. The brand is made up of you, the image you project of yourself and the content you create. Most of us adopt a persona of sorts that we break out when it comes to interacting with the world and our readers. For some of us that persona is really damned close to the real thing. For me it is like a super hyped up and self confident version of myself, and the odd thing is that over time the REAL me has become more and more like the “Rockstar” me. For the most part this is harmless, because “super” me probably is far more enjoyable to be around than the sulky and moody “actual” me that exists sometimes. The problem is it is really damned easy to lose your sense of self on the internet.

In the decade or so I have been serious about socializing online, I have seen more than a few people lose themselves in their own hype. They start to believe that they are legitimately famous and as such somehow separated from the “common” folk because of it. If you ever find yourself with the strong desire to utter the phrase “Don’t you know who this is?” then chances are you have already gone off the deep end. As strange as it sounds this is a constant fear of mine, that I will end up becoming one of those empty self promoting husks. I spend most of my time trying to actively deny the fact that I have any sway over other human beings, and that I am ultimately just talking to myself. The reality is somewhere between because apparently as much as I try and deny it the whole #BelEffect thing that I am cursed with is apparently a legitimate thing.

Find A Grounding Force

The reality is that on a daily basis I have somewhere between 500 and 1000 readers of this blog when you combine direct hits and folks that read it through an RSS reader. I am by no means a large presence on the internet, but I do have a niche following. I do everything in my power to forget that I actually have readers, largely because I am scared to death of turning into one of the people that I have been frustrated with in the past. I just want to be me, doing the thing that I do… and sharing that thing with other people. Essentially what has worked thus far is to surround myself with people that are not buying into my own hype in the least. While my friends like to grief me with things like that hashtag or trying to claim I am some media personality… they are also the first people that would call me on my shit if I ever started to believe any of it. More than anything the biggest grounding force in my life is my wife, who is not part of the gaming universe at all.

I realize this is a strange post as far as Newbie Blogger Initiative tips goes, because if you are just starting out you are in that phase where you are struggling to gain the courage every single day to post anything at all. There comes a time however when those fears go away and you are able to interact freely. I’ve tried my best to stay grounded and humble as this blog has grown from something a couple dozen people followed to the readership it has today. The problem is that not everyone does, and I have watched this whole process go to folks heads. I am no one special, and thanks to the support of my wife and friends… it is my intent to keep it that way. Self promotion is a necessary evil, and the “rockstar” version of my personality will more than likely always need to be there as a coping mechanism for the stress of dealing with other human beings. It is my sincere hope that I can keep from falling into the trap of believing in my own hype. It is also my hope that as you go through your own rollercoaster of success with your own blogging endeavors that you too can keep from believing your own hype.