Grand Experiment Archives - Page 5 of 200

Twas Night Before Blaugust

July 31, 2015July 30, 2015 by Belghast

It’s Almost Time

I know I have said this many times… but I have to say it again. I am completely overwhelmed by the amount of support I have gotten for the path of madness known as Blaugust. As of this morning when I compiled the list I will be posting shortly… we had 47 people signed up on the Blaugust Nook. I absolutely suggest that you get out there and mingle with your fellow Blaugustians, because you are all embarking upon a mission together that will be challenging for many of you. There is a shared spirit of struggle that binds us all, in our mission of creating thirty one days of content. These events that we hold serve to galvanize our community, and create cohesion where it may or may not already exist. More than anything however… this event is about tricking each and every one of you into realizing that you can in fact write content on a schedule. Inspiration is a fickle muse… but I am here to tell you that you don’t need her anyways!

The Blaugustians

Without anymore rambling on my part… I introduce to you the challengers in the second running of the Blaugust games… may the content ever be in your favor.

This is a pretty damned impressive group of blogs if I do say so myself. During this years Blaugust I will be taking special note for the folks who also competed last year and will be coming up with some special recognition for repeat winners and survivors. Remember it is not too late to join in the madness, and you can sign up on the Blaugust Nook thread at any point during the month and play catch up. Lets make this the best Blaugust yet!

A First Prompt

What are you hoping to get out of Blaugust this year?

To make things a little easier on the Blaugustians I will be providing a writing prompt each day during the month of August in my morning posts. These are of course completely optional, but if you find yourself stuck you can go to the writing prompt thread and hopefully find some ideas. I highly suggest that we make the writing prompts a collaborative experience, and if you think of something good even if you are not going to use it yourself… post it to the thread to help your fellow challengers. I look forward to seeing all of the awesome stuff you fine folks create tomorrow. I mentioned this yesterday but I also plan on suggesting some games of the week, in case you are struggling to find purpose. Nothing creates content like your first time experiencing a new game, or even returning to a game you had forgotten about. That said I don’t really want to roll these out today, but will instead include them in tomorrows post.

Anook Community Award

July 29, 2015 by Belghast

Prepping for Blaugust

At this point we are getting super close to the launch of Blaugust, and the sign ups keep coming on the Nook. There is still time to sign up and be ready for the start of this exciting month. Also remember there is zero penalty this year for starting late and catching up. Last year my friend Tamrielo did something absolutely insane and wrote 31 really well formed posts in a 48 hour period. While I would never suggest anyone do something like that, it is absolutely possible to start a week late and make up the missed progress. Similarly I know folks will be attending Gamescom or Pax Prime during this month, so it is absolutely a good idea to stage the content ahead of time. For the WordPress users out there I highly suggest you check out their pretty excellent mobile app (iOS, Android) that gives you access to your blog on the go, and does a decent job of letting you compose a post on the go.

I tend to be a very pro WordPress person, but blogger is perfectly acceptible as well and while I have never used it there seems to be a mobile blogger client also (iOS, Android). The primary reason why I tend to suggest WordPress is just that there is a path between WordPress.com free hosted service, and moving to a WordPress.org installation on your own custom hosting. There are a number of guides out there to help this process along. What I like so much about this is the fact that it lets someone get their feet wet and decide if this blogging thing is for them… before plunking down the money it takes to rent space on a web host and purchase a domain. There are lots of people that never make the jump between COM to ORG, but it is nice that there is always that option if you want to do something with your blog that is not supported through the official channels. There are also guides for going from Blogger to WordPress, but they tend to be far less straight forward.

Anook Community Award

Last night something really cool happened, namely that Lonrem the tirelessly working community manager of Anook.com posted an excellent “best practices” document on the Blaugust Nook. If the document were not enough in helping people get the most out of their Anook experience… he also slipped a tidbit of information in down at the bottom. For a few weeks now we had been talking about Anook wanting to sponsor some sort of award. It was finally decided that the best way to have an Anook reward is to have the users of the website vote on their favorite posts. Here are the basics of this award posted straight from his document.

I’ll also announce here that Anook is going to support Blaugust with a special prize! I’m going to tally up the Hearts that each blog post gets for each blogger (Blaugger?) and award the top blog with a game code. I’m going to see if I can round up other prizes from some of our friends and partners as well, no promises there! This does give a bit of an incentive to post regularly, start on the first of August, but also to share the link to your blog on Anook! If you’ve got any questions, let me know!

This is really awesome to have our first “real” sponsor… because my pocket didn’t really count. Last year when I started this, I decided to host the challenge off of Anook because it is a network that I love. Lonrem singlehandedly won me over with his devotion, and the features basically keep me from ever having to build yet another custom SMF forum for anything. So I fly the Anook banner on my stream and mention it on every AggroChat just because I love the site. I am humbled that the site is returning some of that love and helping us get this challenge started in a bigger and better way this year. I’ve had an idea through this contest of creating a games of the week where I suggest a handful of free to play games that folks play, and then write about their experience to help get those creative juices flowing. While I might have been dreading the loss of my free time that Blaugust means… I am absolutely getting pumped about how much more “real” this whole thing feels for 2015.

Surprise Alex

It is not uncommon for me to log in to Final Fantasy XIV in the evening and hear the all too familiar chime of a group invite before the game has completely loaded. My guildies are used to ninjaing me into tanking all manner of things, and I assumed that it was yet another case of “daily expert”. So I accepted the invite without thinking much about it, and found myself shocked when I saw the Alexander loading screen. To make matters worse the ninja alex was turn 2, which is quite possibly the most frustrating thing for a tank to take on without having a second tank in there that they trust. The problem being that pugs like to stack all of the mobs together, which makes it impossible for the tanks to effectively hold aggro on them. What happens instead is that both tanks burn through all of their resources and the mobs spend the entire fight bouncing back and forth between them. This would be fine and good if it were safe for a single tank to take them on… problem being that in the later phases you have to try and carefully split the damage to even it out. All of the mobs on one tank is pretty much a certain wipe.

The positive of getting pulled into Alex like this however is that it took away my normal reluctance to such things, and as of last night I now have three of my four pieces of loot for the week. All that is left is Turn 1, and quite honestly it is the least stressful for me to pug. The tanks have clearly defined roles and for the most part they go fairly smoothly now that most people are pretty well geared. At this point for that final item I want either a chain which would instantly give me a belt, or a pedal… which would also instantly give me an item because I have a second one in my inventory. I have to say the way gearing works in Alex is a little maddening, but I feel that honestly it is their way of trying to delay people reaching level 190 geared. With Esoterics in place, I can’t really see going for say the Alexander chest piece since it takes getting a lucky roll four weeks in a row on Turn 4. My first Esoterics item of course will be the 200 weapon, because for a tank that is the single most useful upgrade. After that I will probably assess my weakest pieces and go after what I need the most… which is more than likely going to be my chest piece. Of course in the mean time Square could do what they seem to always do… and change up the game by taking away loot restrictions. That said I still think it is a little early in the patch for that to actually happen, and more than likely won’t be until 3.1.

Muscle Memory

July 28, 2015 by Belghast

Unexpected Happenings

There is a specific moment in my time playing Final Fantasy XIV where I realized that the Cactuar community was something special. It was the night that we purchased our Free Company house, and all of these neighbors showed up to welcome us to the neighborhood. Many of those folks welcoming us were from the Howling Moon free company, and over the months of playing I got used to seeing all of these people hanging out at the Marketboard right in front of our house. Among them the pair that I got closest with was Ayla and Joren Noye. There were many nights like this one where we did silly things to pass the time between queues. Then several months ago they disappeared, as did most of the people I had become close with from that Free Company. I asked around in the guild but no one seemed to know what happened. It is always hard when friends disappear that you are close with… but not yet close enough to exchange all of those personal details.

With Heavenward they were back as I had hoped, but started playing a little later than most. I guess over those months they had some personal stuff to deal with, but I was amped to have them back wandering around in our neighborhood. Since then at least once a night we exchanged random happy emotes and a flurry of /say conversation as we fiddled with our retainers. When I got the hint that maybe things were not as wonderful in their guild as they once were, I did the thing that I always do… offered them a home. I didn’t really expect them to take me up on the offer, but last night as I was starting my daily hunts… I got a tell out of the blue from Joren. He told me that things just weren’t the same, and if it was still okay he would like to take my offer. Needless to say I was absolutely thrilled and delayed a guild dungeon run until they were ready for the invites. I cannot put into words just how excited I am to have them on board, we may even have to reconvene the council of squishy hats to celebrate.

Muscle Memory

This morning I happened to randomly click through to a re-tweeted blog post from DragonChasers about SkyForge. On it was a comment from the blogger Jeromai that struck a bit of a chord with me, because I am absolutely the sort of person that would frustrate him.

You know what’s really frustrating to me? People who can do it (whatever it is), but cannot describe or break down or teach exactly -how- they are doing it, beyond “I dunno, I just do it” or “here, just watch a video of me doing it,” or worse, “lol, it wuz easy, I don’t know how come you can’t do it.”

To me, folks who really know what they’re doing can also break down and explain roughly what they’re doing or the tactics they’re using or what they’re keeping track of, even if execution by someone else requires a lot of personal practice.

Sometimes people say that they don’t really know how to explain it, because they don’t want to explain it. For me personally I quite literally cannot explain how I do half of the things I do. Essentially I try and commit as much of the things that I do to muscle memory as I can, so that I can do them… without thinking about them. So when I tank an instance… I do so many little things that I can’t really break apart the things that I am doing automatically… from the things that I am doing intentionally. I’ve always been a player that played mostly on instinct and reflex rather than mindful reflection on strategy. I think this all comes from why I play games. Ultimately they are a means of relaxation for me, and many times I find myself zoning out into the sublime motion of playing the game without really having to think about it. This has strengths and weaknesses, and the big problem that I run into particularly is when I have to unlearn my reflexes and replace them with something else.

For example on the Titan Extreme fight in Final Fantasy XIV there is a place where I absolutely have to ignore every instinct I have built up and stop myself from running back into the boss after an attack. I struggled with that for our first attempts, because I had to commit an exception to the rule to muscle memory knowing that there would be a follow up attack that would kill me if I ran right back in. The other big weakness is there are so many things that I do on a daily basis that I cannot tell you step by step what I am doing unless I happen to be sitting at the keyboard and doing them. At work I am awesome at fixing problems and troubleshooting things… but I am horrible at trying to walk someone else through the process of doing all of these things. The positive is… once something has been committed to reflex it stays with you forever. I fired up F-Zero the other day for likely the first time in two decades… and I still knew every corner and place to use my booster on the tracks and easily got first place. Same goes for an MMO, I can sit down in front of a game that I have not played in years… and if I set the hot bars up the same way as i had them before I can return to playing the game like no time has passed.

The Final Stretch

My big accomplishment for the night is finally pushing across the line and dinging 59. I was able to replace the lance that I absolutely hated with this pretty cool one from the Ancient Library dungeon. This is the point where I realize that I have apparently not run the library as much as I thought I had. When it came to the level 57 gear, I had most of a set… and apparently do for just about every possible class I would care to level. The 59 gear however from Library, I have only a small smattering of pieces and next to nothing when it came to lancer gear. Thankfully I had squirreled away a set of High Quality 58 gear from the quests… since at that point I technically had better gear on my Warrior from running dungeons. That should more than get me through to 60 before really needing anything else gear wise. When I hit 60 I have waiting on me a 180 weapon, and a bunch of 170 and 160 pieces that should make up pretty much a full set.

My hope is that I will be able to leap frog to 170 the Alexander requirement pretty quickly. The thing I need to sort out in the meantime is how to do a better job of maintaining the Blood of the Dragon buff. The problem that I keep running into is that I will get thrown into a situation where I cannot safely get back to the boss in time to hit either a Fang and Claw proc or Wheeling Thrust. So my buff drops… and I have to wait whatever is left of the minute long recast time to throw the buff up again. I assume that once I hit 60, if there is a situation where I know Blood of the Dragon is about to fall… this is when I mix in a Gierskogul to spend the buff on an attack rather than let it fade completely. Remember the whole muscle memory thing from above? I had a previous rotation committed to that swap space… and now have to revise it. Given some time at 60 I will relearn what I need to do, because honestly I am not looking for the insanity of the optimal dragoon rotation… but instead looking for something that is “passable”. I don’t care if I beat our top dps… but I just want to make sure I am not the bottom of the pack either. I feel like I just don’t have enough of a competitive nature to ever be a truly successful dps player.

Fifty Eight Singularity

July 27, 2015 by Belghast

Blaugust Update

Right now we are three days away from the beginning of Blaugust, and at this point I am happy with the pre-event response. If my count is correct, we have 35 different people signed up to do the challenge, and as I remember last year we managed to pick up a bunch of people after the start. This is a bit of a double edged sword for me at least, because while I am amped as hell to see all these fine folks participating… I am also realizing that in three days time my casual reading of the internet is over. I flip into stat keeper mode as I tabulate the posts that folks have made on which day to verify that at the end of the month they have in fact made their thirty one posts.

Blaugust is this strange dichotomy in that for most people it has nothing to do with the prizes that will be handed out at the end. However since I am offering them as an additional carrot… I feel like I have to perform my due diligence and keep track of everything. So as we near the start of this event I am a mixture of anticipation and dread. My hope is that everyone will include the day they are posting for in their post so that I can easily checkmark off a post on a given day. I struggled so much trying to reconcile timezones last year, and folks proclivity for posting after midnight but meaning it for the previous day. I remember Joseph Skyrim was amazingly awesome about always including what day he was posting for, which made the whole Australia thing so much easier. I think in the coming days I will go back through the list of people who did it last year and determine just how many are repeat participants. Just giving things a summary glance it certainly seems like there are many.

Finally Alex Four

I am just realizing that apparently yesterday… I did not actually have FRAPS running while playing Final Fantasy XIV. So that means all of the times I thought I was taking a screenshot, I apparently was not. As a result you are getting a screenshot from Turn 3 of Alexander instead of Turn 4 as I intended. For the last several weeks I had been hoping to run Alexander will a full guild group, however last Wednesday we struggled a bit on Turn 2 and only managed to get through Turn 3 before running out of time. Turn 4 is a huge deal, not necessarily because of the fight… but because the quest turn in at the end of it rewards a Gordian Bolt. For a little over a week now I have been staring at my 170 ring and grimacing because it was my one sub 180 that I still had. So the drive to get through Alexander Four was pretty strong for me, because it meant I would finally be able to replace that last ring with a shiny new 190 ring.

Yesterday afternoon I finally got the courage to pug it with zero guidance from the guild, and in truth it was not nearly as painful as I had expected. Firstly the fourth turn is a blast and is one of the few fights where I find the off tank role far more enjoyable than the main tank. There is a mechanic that works somewhat like C’Thun’s swallow mechanic from World of Warcraft, causing the off tank and another player to get sucked through a series of tubes into another room. There you have to burn down a “Doll” add within a certain timeframe before getting pulled back into the main room again. For me personally this meant rationing my cool downs so that I could survive, but also hoping and praying that I got a heal upon exiting… because you literally get sucked in back to back if the dps is going too slowly. There was a bard that each time I got paired with her, which is strange because you would think with all of the recent buffs that would have been a great choice to burn the add. Anyways… it took about four attempts but we managed to get it. I did both the main tank and off tank roles, but like I said I absolutely prefer to off tank it simply because seeing my tiny Lalafell self go flying through the air is hilarious.

Fifty Eight Singularity

Yesterday I had a decision to make, and I think I hinted at it in my blog post (truth is I rarely remember what I write from day to day). Essentially I could either grind out all of the esoterics I needed to cap, or instead I could work on my Dragoon. In truth I split it down the middle and pushed my Esoterics a little higher, before ultimately retiring for the evening to work on the Dragoon. I ran a course of three Vaults, and still am coming up short in experience to push across the finish line. As a result as I was starting to get more sluggish right before bed time, I decided to do my first Levequests of the expansion. One of the strange things about Heavensward is that all Levequests come from an NPC in Foundation just up the ramp from the Aetheryte crystal. This means that the game freaks out slightly when you attempt to accept the port after finishing one. In the Dravinian Hinterlands it kept dropping me off at the Bigwest Shortstop instead of actually porting me back to the foundation. This makes me think that the game initially intended there to be Levequest vendors in every zone, but ended up deciding that they wanted to try a centralized vendor in Foundation instead.

The problem being that Fifty Eight still seems like a hellaciously long level, even with the Armory Bonus firmly in place. I did a grand total of six level 58 levequests, and each one barely made the xp bar move. However I was able to whittle it down to just enough that I think by doing my hunts tonight I might actually be able to ding.` The reason why I want 59 so badly is somewhat stupid… mainly I am tired of the lance that I am using. I think it looks ugly as shit… but for the single level I am using it… I cannot bring myself to spend the money to glamour it to something more enjoyable. Especially when I know that I have a level 59 lance waiting on me. It is at the very least giving me that added push to get the hell out of this level on onwards to the final push for 60. I have also gotten a little sick of running the Vault. It was awesome the first dozen times I was in there, but now the music is grating on my nerves. I also simply think that the Library is a much more enjoyable dungeon, and does not have a death trap of a boss quite the same way as The Vault does. I still find that final encounter in Vault to be the hardest in the leveling dungeons, and I feel sorry when I see a healer struggling to keep up with the massive room wide damage. Hopefully tonight will see me dinging 59, and I can move on to more enjoyable pastures.