Guild Leadership Archives - Page 46 of 108

Bribing Good Behavior

October 30, 2014 by Belghast

Better Community

Yesterday I posted this picture and said that the person dancing with Sagacyte and I was a friend of his. Turns out that apparently this was not the case. The way she waved and immediately started dancing with us, made me think that she must have known him. So yeah… complete and total stranger came over and started interacting and now she is another person on my friends list. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked since this sort of thing happens all the time. There is a community spirit that infuses Final Fantasy XIV, and I am still not entirely used to just how prevalent it is. There are lots of quests that involve you walking into an area and a bunch of mobs spawn on top of you. The mobs that actually belong to you are marked but you can help out with any of them. It is a rare occasion that someone will move on after their mobs are dead and not help you kill yours. There was this one tank the other night that I swear “tanked” five sets of these mobs as new people walked into the spawning area.

This sort of thing is absolutely commonplace now, but the strange thing is… it wasn’t. What is strange about Final Fantasy XIV is that my friends and I played this game seriously at launch for roughly three months. Then we wandered off to do other things, and upon returning were shocked and amazed at how much the community had improved. At launch it felt like every other MMO, with folks doing the same kind of selfish actions that are so common place in other games. Running a random dungeon, likely meant that you would have one person complaining that you were pulling to slow, and another person complaining that the dps wasn’t somehow good enough… even though there are no meters for that. Basically the community had the same rampant asshatery that we’ve all experienced in “modern mmos”. Upon returning however we found that this negative element was almost completely gone. Sure you will encounter an abusive player every so often, but the community as a whole seems to have done a drastic turn around.

Bribing Good Behavior

One thing that we noticed quickly that had been added to the game since we last played was the player commendation system. What makes the system interesting is that at the end of every duty, each player gets a single commendation that they can award to another player from that group. Now normally when a game has a system like this, you can queue exclusively with guild members or friends and cheat the system. However in this case you cannot reward commendations to your guildies, but have to instead use it on a stranger. The other half of this equation is that you are rewarded both your giving commendations, and greatly rewarded for receiving them. Each week there is a challenge log entry for handing out commendations that gives the player a bit of experience and some gil. As far as the receiving side they have set up a system of increasing rewards for 10, 50, 100, 300 and 500 player commendations. The final reward is the golden colored Magitech armor that you see in the above screenshot… something that pretty much everyone I know universally wants.

What has happened as a result is that players are actively trying to win commendations while in dungeon runs. As a whole they are far easier to work with, and more willing to stop and explain mechanics if you simply speak up and let them know you are new to a fight. In fact I have seen entire raid groups come to a grinding halt just to explain the mechanics of a fight to a new player. Often times another player will mentor the newer player through what they actually need to pay attention to on a given fight. The only thing I have seen much frustration really is when a group wipes because a player didn’t understand the mechanics… and didn’t speak up about it at the beginning of the run. This leads players to be more willing to speak up about things that confuse them, or things they are having issues with… which then get solved as a group. Admittedly there is some content that is the equivalent of WoW’s LFR… but even then inside each individual team there is usually some camaraderie as the run goes on.

Rewarding Communication

I have long been one of those individuals who have stated that the addition of the dungeon finder to World of Warcraft made the game a significantly worse place. Sure it made getting groups easier, but it changed the way we ran dungeons permanently. The “push a button, get a group” nature of the tool had a ton of unforeseen consequences, the worst of which is it dehumanized your interaction with other players. Instead of people that you had to communicate with in order to get a group in the first place… they became roles that enabled you to get your loot Piñata at the end and nothing more. The first thing to go with the dungeon finder was discussion in dungeons other than screaming at other players for not living up to some set of standards. Folks stopped talking while running dungeons, and most players just kept their head down and tried to make it through the dungeon all the while trying not to be called in the carpet for being “bad”. It was during this era that I stopped running with strangers, because every time the experience was just so damned maddening.

With Final Fantasy, I restarted the game a few weeks ahead of the bulk of my friends… meaning my only option was to do random dungeons or either do no dungeons at all. The first thing I noticed when I set foot into a dungeon was that players greeted each other, and once that happened the communication started flowing again. Players seemed more willing to talk about what was going on with fights, what they needed help with… and even things completely unrelated to the current dungeon run. Granted all of this might be some elaborate act in an attempt to earn player commendations… and being the friendliest in the group usually earns you at least one… but whatever the cause it is a drastic improvement over the standard MMO environment. I think we have a case of “fake it until you make it” going on here, where players might start out faking a friendly attitude, but over time of doing this over and over… something changes inside you. I find myself not getting upset at the mistakes of other players, and not dwelling on what went wrong… but focusing more on what needs to happen for things to go right.

Positive Leadership

I am not sure if I can account all of the positive changes simply to the player commendation system. I feel like the more aggressive players that make up the early MMO rush have moved on from the game, leaving behind only players that are really dedicated to the Final Fantasy franchise for one reason or another. Additionally the way that the developers of this game interact with the fans is just completely different. I’ve talked about this before, especially in relation to the way the game developers at Blizzcon interact with their fans. It often times feels like they are living out some rockstar fantasy up on stage, and there is always a tinge of condescension when they answer fans. Watching Fan Festival on the other hand… was like watching one big fan talking to a bunch of other big fans. One of my friends commented that Yoshi-P seems to treat us more like investors in his vision, than customers. Another friend chimed in and said that it was almost like he was this super benevolent guild leader. In any case the difference in interaction shows, and trickles down to the player base as well.

So I think all of these little things add up to an atmosphere that rewards the player for being helpful and showing community spirit. So much in this game cannot be accomplished without other players, and the constant fiddling and tweaking with systems always seems to air on the side of supporting collaborative play rather than competition for resources. Granted Final Fantasy XI and XIV 1.0 had really interesting communities, and to some extent the XIV 2.0 and beyond community is standing on their shoulders. Even in the midst of all the rogue zergy nature going on with the release of a new class… players are still far more polite about everything than they were at launch. At this point I don’t care if they essentially have bribed us into being nice passive team players, the end result adds up to a very positive player experience. It had been a really long time since I had felt a sense of pride in a game community, and I am damned proud to be a Final Fantasy XIV player and even prouder to be a member of the ever amazing Cactuar server community. For years Azeroth was my home base as I wandered out to explore other games, but I think at this point that new title belongs to Eorzea. There is so much awesome stuff coming down the pipe, and I cannot wait to experience it all.

#FFXIV #FinalFantasy

Roguepocalypse

October 29, 2014 by Belghast

Awesome Overload

Yesterday was seriously one of the hardest days to get through I have experienced in a very long time. When I troddled off to work the Final Fantasy XIV servers were up and back from maintenance, and as I worked all day long I would see little tid bits of information here and there about just how great this patch ended up being. For the uninitiated yesterday was the release of Patch 2.4 “Dreams of Ice” which introduced a ton of new content, not the least of which is the Shiva primal encounter that the patch is named for. It is truly staggering to think about the amount of content that has been released for this game since launch. Roughly every quarter players get a major patch the size of 2.4, that generally introduces 1 to 2 new primal fights, 3 new hard mode dungeons, new main story quest chain, new Hildebrand story chain, new gear, new glamour bits, new hair styles and in this one they even introduced a brand new class and job combination in the Rogue and Ninja. On top of that we seem to see at least one minor content patch each month, the last one added personal housing so still no slouch content wise.

So when you contrast that with other games that can go six months to an year without any new content, it is phenomenal. This patch however is not with its controversies. Up until this point everything that has been available in game has either been earned doing in game things, or through subscription rewards. The game has some pretty insane subscription rewards that include tons of interesting mounts, pets and cosmetic items. This patch however introduced the cash shop, and they sprinkled a few really awesome items on it, not the least of which is the Slepnir mount you can see me on in the above picture. There is so much gnashing of teeth over the fact that this mount is $24, and the mini-pets on the store are $5 each. At this point however a cosmetic shop just seems like the status quo. One of the more interesting things they are doing with it is that each year there are unique rewards for completing holiday events. To allow players to get previous items they are putting the older items up on the cash shop for a minimal fee. Thankfully I have managed to pick up most of the holiday items I might want, but it is nice knowing that I could potentially get the items I missed during the Christmas events.

Focused Gameplay

Though out the day yesterday I thought about just what I would try and tackle that night when I got home. My focus was going to be on unlocking the three new hard mode dungeons so I could be ready to run them as the rest of my free company became available. I could always queue for the dungeon finder and take my chances with strangers, but I would really rather experience this content fresh with a guild group. There is something awesome about having to reason your way through the fights for the first time as a team, even if you fail to make the 90 minute timer. Even with my laser focus… there are certain things any proper Lalafell must do. While wandering around Uldah I bumped into Sagacyte Luxaloix and before I knew it we were dancing the manderville as is Lala tradition. Moments later we were joined by a friend of his Lirrianna Darkholme and there in the middle of the streets of Uldah we had an impromptu Lalafell dance party. We were all very busy, but traditions must be observed and social graces administered.

For those looking into unlocking the new content, there is an excellent blog post from a Lalafell blogger I just stumbled onto this morning talking about the start of each of the new content items. After we finished with our customary dance party, I went on about my business of unlocking the dungeons. Both Sastasha Hard and Sunken Temple of Qarn Hard were relatively simple to unlock, with fairly straight forward go and talk to this guy then go to the dungeon style quests that start in Mor Dhona. For Snowcloak however it is yet another quest tied deeply into the main storyline. So I set forth beginning that chain and two and a half hours I had reached a point where I was standing at the gates of the new Snowcloak dungeon. When they put in new story content… they put in a lot of story content. This however is what makes the game so damned phenominal, is that they keep moving the story forward and giving you a reason to care about the characters you meet. As a friend said last night, it is not so much that your character is the “big damned hero” but more that your character is the social glue that keeps all of the good guys working together. You are the one person they trust due to past interactions, and the lubricant to make things happen when something goes wrong.

Roguepocalpyse

I did not actually intend to start a rogue last night, but I ended up picking up a new quest in Limsa Lominsa near the Aetheryte crystal that just happened to lead me to the guild. I figured while I was there what was the harm of going ahead and unlocking the class. The server has quite literally gone insane for Rogues and Ninjas. The above photo is a scene from inside the Rogues guild in Limsa Lominsa, and there are even more folks milling around outside of the place. The Fisherman’s Guild port has never seen this much activity ever, and really the guild does a pretty piss poor job of disguising itself with all these people swarming around it. So while I picked up the Rogue I had no plans to level it until I got bored waiting around on a group to happen. Last night myself, Tam and Ash hatched a plan to make the guild some money that we could stockpile for our guild airship. Wanderers Palace is the bottleneck for the Relic weapon quest, in that you need a bloody weapon component to craft the precursor weapon for the entire quest chain. For most classes these are common enough that you can pick up a high quality version of the weapon for 20-30k gil and just be on your way.

This means that all of these newly minted rogues will need one eventually so that they can start down the Relic quest chain. As you can see there are only two currently available on the Cactuar market system and they are holding steadily at 300k gil each. The finished weapons are holding steadily at 500k gil a piece and both are in high demand. So we thought we could run Wanderers Palace a few times and if nothing else stockpile some blades for the guild, and at best pick up a bunch to sell on the market while the demand is high. We struggled to find a fourth, as there were a handful of folks available… but they all appeared to be either AFK or in a duty already. So while we waited around for something to happen… I decided to start working on the rogue. Overall the class is really damned fun to play, and in part it is the animations that make it so enjoyable. You feel like a whirlwind of death as pretty much every attack is some sort of a spin move. Additionally the way you hold your daggers… makes me actually kinda like wielding daggers. They feel brutal and swift, instead of awkward stabby weapons like daggers feel in so many games.

The only problem is that everyone is playing a rogue. This is what every fate looks like practically anywhere in the game right now. An army of rogues, their chocobos and a blinding flurry of circular slashes as far as the eye can see. As the second shot shows, some rogues have taken to putting Flash on their bar and run around gathering up all of the fate mobs while the rest of us hopelessly chase after them trying to do as much contribution as possible. I remember fates feeling like this at launch, and in reality it is like we have returned to that post launch period at least a bit. Additionally there are a ton of folks out there doing the fates as well trying to farm their Atma pieces, and it seems that the drop rates are in fact reasonable now. I’ve heard tales of folks completing a full set of atmas in a single evening, but I still feel you need to be lucky to make that happen. While I don’t so much care about my rogue, I plan on riding the FATE gravy train with my monk to see just how many levels I can squeeze out.

Broken Roulette

The influx of rogues has lead to some serious madness. I have not actually tried to queue as one, but I saw this tweeted awhile back with someone being stuck in the queue for over 120 minutes. DPS queues previously were 15 to 20 minutes on my server, and the low level roulette queues last night were reporting around an hour. Thankfully none of this madness has hit Syrcus Tower yet, as my dragoon queue there was still near instant last night. I feel like non-ninja dps will have a better shot at getting into dungeons, especially ranged dps since the game tries to match a ranged and a melee for each four man team. In any case if you have a tank or a healer that you plan on leveling, right now is the ideal time to do it. You will get instant queues and probably get the extreme gratitude of the ninjas inside the instance who have been waiting anxiously to do a dungeon. This reminds me of the way Ifrit and Titan were shortly after launch. My friend Tam used to queue doing “community service” as he called it. One time he ran into a poor black mage who had been sitting waiting on Ifrit for 3 1/2 hours. I am not sure if I will do it tonight, but I plan on working on my White Mage to help with the influx of folks queuing for things.

#FFXIV #Rogue #Ninja

New Kind of Creepy

October 27, 2014 by Belghast

Extra Life Hangover

Yesterday was a really strange day for me. In part I am simply not used to staying up as late as I ended up doing for my leg of the marathon. When it came time for me to get offline and got to sleep around 2:30 in the morning my time, I found that I couldn’t do it. I tossed and turned trying to calm back down enough to actually sleep. It might have been the monster I had about midnight, or it might have just been the adrenaline of having streamed, but in whatever case it took me until probably 3:30 to finally sleep. When I got back up around 9:30 that morning I was feeling groggy as hell, but also feeling like I should attempt to get up and around for the day. Everything about the day just felt “off”. By the time I got out of the house to get breakfast, they were out of sausage rolls.

I generally edit AggroChat Saturday night and upload it, so instead I had to do all of that yesterday morning. By the time I posted my blog post it was around 1:30 in the afternoon. I started laundry and attempted to chill out playing some Rift, but it seemed before I even turned around that it was time for Walking Dead, and ultimately bedtime. It felt like the day was going in fast forward, or I was stuck in slow motion one of the two. I cannot imagine how yesterday must have felt for the folks who actually did do the entire 25 hours themselves. I feel like I am extremely old at this point, because there was a time not too long ago that staying up til 3:30 in the morning would not have had this sort of massive negative effect. Hell there were many times while playing WoW that I did just this for one reason or another. All of this makes me all the more impressed for everyone who managed to complete the entire thing.

New Kind of Creepy

One of the things that Rift has excelled at over the years is introducing extremely creepy gameplay elements into the MMO genre. Sure Ct’hun was a giant eyeball with tentacles… but it never felt unsettling. So much of the things that you end up fighting against in Rift just feel wrong somehow. Storm Legion for example had all of these strange machinations that looked to be knitted out of mismatched piles of flesh. Even the agents of Crucia in their gleaming storm trooper armor… felt somehow unnatural. So when we move to the Nightmare Tide expansion you see this landscape that should be friendly. Full of pinks, blues and greens in all manner of pastel tones that should signal something relaxing… but trust me that just makes it all the more creepy. Especially as you hear these disembodied siren songs echo across the zone that remind you of the mermaids song from Harry Potter gone horribly wrong.

The storyline of this expansion once again involves multiple threats forcing their way into our world. One of the threats is familiar, the forces of Maelforge are draining the Plane of Water and invading it. As you wander around Goboro Reef you encounter their devastation as large sections of the realm are already dry, and you help the inhabitants deal with the consequences. This however is just the most obvious threat. There is an undercurrent of madness as well as you start to encounter the Akvan, nightmares taken shape and form. They follow the dark god Demogos who appears to be the embodiment of the nightmare. This expansion seems to be taking us past the bloodstorm and into something more sinister, making the players realize that the dragons were far from the worst threat we had to face.

Wandering with Style

The gameplay style seems to have improved greatly over Storm Legion. While they have still stayed far removed from the very quest hub based leveling of the first 50 levels, the replacement this time around feels far less grindy than it did in Storm Legion. All of the Carnage quests have been reduced in number it seems, so instead of having to kill 10 to 20 of a thing, we now only have to kill 4 to 8 to get completion. Right now my focus has not necessarily been on quest completion but on exploration. Goboro Reef is huge, and is full of little nooks and crannies where all sorts of interesting things are hidden. I went up into a fissure under water, that originally I thought might have just been a place where the terrain didn’t quite match. Instead I found that it was very much a purposeful gap, because at the end of it I found a treasure chest of sorts, in the form of a lost clutch.

I like that the zones allow me to wander about without feeling like I have to be focused on this thing or that thing. My focus right now is on getting as much Thalasite as I can, since I have so many tradeskills to level that all require large amounts of it. Thankfully it is fairly plentiful on the reef, but you often times have to leave the immediate clear path to find it. Often times you have to leave dry land and go swimming into the walls of water to snake your way up onto platforms where the ore sits. This is the process I am enjoying, the slower pace of discovery that makes this an enjoyable game to play while going through my most recent netflix binges. Yesterday I wandered around the zone while finishing up the second season of American Horror Story, and I found the whole experience enjoyable… both in the game and in the show.

Addicted to Minions

Part of what is making the piddling so damned enjoyable is the introduction of the Minions mini-game. In essence this works similar to Crew Missions in Star Trek or Crew Skills in Star Wars the Old Republic. You collect these cards, that represent creatures that you can then send out on missions. You start with a single mission slot available, but you can unlock additional slots through the spending of credits. As you can see here on the right hand side of the screen I currently have five minions going at the same time. Each mission takes a fixed amount of time, and costs a certain amount of stamina which is the number shown with the little lightning bolt like icon on the left side of the mission and minion cards. I am uncertain how fast stamina is recovered, but generally speaking I have been able to keep sending out minions while I play. When a mission is completed a little demon head icon appears in your notification pane, next to the time.

Right now I have encountered four basic kinds of missions. The first kind rewards some form of crafting material, and there are multiple flavors of these “Hunting” or “Harvesting” missions. Certain minions have icons on them relating to one of these skills, and if you match a minion with a mission card you have a better chance of success. Similarly there are Diplomacy missions that return items that give you notoriety with the various factions in the game. Some of the missions are searches for Artifacts, and I have had one of these reward as many as a dozen different artifacts from any manner of zones in the game. My personal favorite are the dimension missions, because they reward random dimension goodies, that can be anything from simple building blocks to actual dimension keys. There is another type that is called Assassination, but I have not actually encountered these, so not sure what exactly they reward.

So as I quest around and hunt for ore I keep sending my pack of critters out on missions, and every few minutes I get rewarded with all sorts of random goodies. One of the things about me is that I love RNG elements, especially ones that have a potentially awesome payout. I love sending out my retainers in FFXIV on ventures because of the random and interesting things they bring back. Minions are like this on steroids, because the payoff can be extreme. There are 1 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, 8 hour and 10 hour missions that I have encountered so far. The 10 hour missions require that you either spend adventurine or credits as well as the normal minion stamina cost. Right now I don’t have a clue how to get adventurine other than the small amount that I have gotten from purchasing the expansion, or buying a minion starter kit. In any case this definitely fuels my “Faff” and gives every little bit of aimless wandering more purpose, because I am letting my minions go find goodies for me. I really hope the minion game ends up getting added to the mobile application.

#Rift #ExtraLife

Bel Folks Stuff Debut

October 24, 2014 by Belghast

An Evening With Syl

A few weeks back I talked about a new kind of podcast I was planning on doing. Where I grab one of the very interesting members of our community and chat with them a bit. Somewhat of an informal interview podcast. Thankfully everyone I have talked to about this idea thought it was cool and has been willing to volunteer for the process. Since my friend @Gypsy_Syl and I have notoriously struggled to find time to actually hang out together on voice chat, I figured it would be awesome to start this entire process with her. Thankfully she graciously accepted and last Sunday at noon my time which was 7 pm her time… we sat down to record a show. I am really pleased with how it turned out, and while I still feel like I am absolutely “winging it” I can see how this is going to work with other “Folks” as well.

Right now the plan is to do this as a semi-monthly show, because quite honestly with daily blogging and weekly podcasting with AggroChat, I don’t feel like I can really add much more to my schedule. Naming a thing is always the hardest part, after some time I landed on more of a statement of what the show was… than an actual name. “Bel Talks To Interesting Folks About Really Important Stuff That They Enjoy Doing”. This however was way too long to be the title of anything… so I just shortened it to “Bel Folks Stuff”. It’s quirky I know, but I figure the folks that will be listening won’t care much about the title… but will instead be tuning in to listen to someone from our community talking about stuff that they enjoy. So please tune in and enjoy “An Evening With Syl” the very first episode.

Gobbie-Boom

Last night I spent most of the night working on my Monk, trying to push him ever higher in level. I was happy the other night to graduate from Totorak to Haukke Manor as it is a considerably more enjoyable dungeon. My friend Ashgar likes to refer to Totorak as “The Thousand Yawns of Total-Nap”. For me, I don’t mind the dungeon that bad but it does definitely seem to drag on, especially in that section where you keep having to bust poison balloons and move through the green sludge. Last night however I got to move into one of my favorite dungeons… Brayflox’s Longstop. The reason why I like Brayflox is simple… it has some really awesome sets that come out of it. While tanking the place I had managed to gather up a full set of Cavalry, and while healing I had managed to gather up most of a full set of Battle Mage. However every time I ran the place, either Infantry did not drop… or someone else was with me that wanted it far more.

As you can see from the above picture, last night I managed to get the Infantry Chest to drop. So far I only have legs, hat and chest… but I figure I will be running a lot more Brayflox. One of the things that I didn’t really cover in my guide is that every night I always do at least one completely random dungeon run. This is worth a massive amount of xp even if you end up getting one of the primals… that normally rewards next to no experience. After that I tend to just queue for whatever the highest level dungeon I can run happens to be… especially if I am playing DPS. Nothing sucks worse than wading through a thirty minute dps queue, only to end up getting Ifrit. So I expect over the next few days to queue up for Brayflox, and then run FATEs while waiting on the roulette to pop. The only thing I wish is that you could queue with your chocobo out, because this greatly lowers my survival in FATEs to have to run without him.

Using My Boost

This morning Faeblight appears to be down, so I can’t actually log into the game and take any proper screenshots. As a result you get a shot of my menagerie of characters. This is fitting because in reality I was going to talk to the boost to level 60. As you can see I have a whole slew of characters that I could have used this on. Mostly I struggled with a choice between boosting Belgrenth my Dwarven Mage, or Belgaroth my Bahmi Cleric. Belgrenth is still stuck down in his 20s, but overall I enjoy questing on him because the launch content feels better to play than the Storm Legion content. Belgaroth however I had just started the Storm Legion slog with, and felt like I was making no real progress. So did I go for maximum number of free levels… or did I go for helping me skip the content I wanted to skip on an otherwise really enjoyable character.

As I am sure you can tell from my lead up… I ended up using it on the cleric because skipping Storm Legion sounded like an awesome deal. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a good use for the free boost to 375 crafting, so I ended up spending it on survival… something that I struggled to level on my other characters. If I had been thinking really I would have used it on fishing… because as time goes that one seems to take significantly longer to level. The other big news from yesterday is that I think I figured out a pretty decent leveling build for Belghast. All of the warrior builds I was using when I last played have seemed to have gotten nerfed significantly. Once upon a time I could farm things with impunity and keep myself at nearly full health. Those days were long gone as upon starting the Nightmare Tide content it was a struggle just to stay alive.

I landed upon a thread on the official forums by a guy named Inny proposing his leveling spec for 3.0. You can check out the full magelo build here but essentially it is a 42 Warlord, 34 Champion, 0 Liberator build. So far it seems to be working pretty well, and the combination of a few minor heals and the combination of Weapon Defense and No Permission to Die allow me to stay alive in most situations. No Permission to Die need some really specific timing to make it work, as it heals you to 50% if you receive a killing blow in the time that the buff is up. The biggest boost to my survival was crafting a new set of weapons. Thankfully it was pretty easy to gather up the materials to do that, but unfortunately I have pretty much burnt through all of my available platinum on tradeskills. Hopefully that will start to regenerate as I quest, so I can do the same for Armorsmithing as I did for weaponsmithing. All in all the content is enjoyable, or at least significantly less grindy feeling than the Storm Legion content was.