Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 105 of 129

Of Game Servers

September 20, 2014 by Belghast

The Server Dilemma

This week there has been a bit of a war waging in the ArcheAge community between two factions. The first faction wants them to open new servers so that they can play the game and not have to wait in 10+ hour long queues. The second faction doesn’t want new servers to be opened at any cost, because it serves to dilute the community, and in a game where land ownership is a crucial part of the experience there is no real way to merge the servers. I feel like this is one of those arguments when both sides have equal merit. Generally speaking when a company spins up new servers to help cover the launch weekend users, they also end up having a bunch of completely dead servers months later that have to be merged.

The ultimate problem with new servers, is that we want to play with our friends. By nature an MMO is a social experience, and at this point most of us bring with us a large group of friends and acquaintances that we want to be in close proximity to. As such lots of players will roll on another server only to get the feeling of actually playing the game they crave, but ultimately later on re-roll once the opening weekend crush is over to be in the same place as their friend. So I feel like new servers by nature are a damned solution to the opening weekend problem. Any servers that spin up are by nature less valuable to established players than the original servers. They will have less of an economy, and less resources to run any group content. Having done this multiple times, there is a certain pride in playing on a “day one” server.

Abolishing the Server

For a long time I thought the solution to this problem was to simply do away with the server infrastructure entirely. Elder Scrolls Online launched with a Mega Server infrastructure, where instead of pool resources into smaller named and classified clusters of servers… they just dumped all of them together in one of two larger data centers US and EU. This allowed them to simply add more nodes to the cluster to gently smooth out the server load without actually interrupting the users experience. I have to say after the what has to be hundreds of game launches I have experienced… this concept made for one of the absolute smoothest I have seen. We were able to get in and play without needing to fuss about what server our guild was going to be on. It solved so many issues and let us get in and play with our pool of players.

The problem there however is that as the population dwindled and our regularly nomadic guild did what they were good at… and moved on to the next big thing, we were left without much of a community. The only intimacy we had in that game was that which we brought with us. Coming back to Final Fantasy XIV it has refreshed my understanding of just how important that server community is to the overall feel of a game. The night we bought player housing, we had various folks from different guilds popping by our house and welcoming us to the neighborhood. Our housing district has not one but two dedicated linkshells for communicating with “neighbors” and after months of doing hunts and fates we’ve joined other really social linkshells that flesh out the rich community feel that I had been craving. So while the Mega Server answers one question, I feel like it comes up lacking in the social aspect greatly.

A Transitional Population

The Rift launch looked like pretty much every other game launch in memory. I compared a game launch to a natural disaster the other day, because really it is very similar. There is this crashing wave of users that hit the servers, and that which they don’t break they flood to the point of bursting. After the storm clouds cleared they were left with the same problem as always. Some servers had massive queue times, whereas the others where relatively dead. World of Warcraft tried to solve this problem by allowing players free character moves between overpopulated servers to very specific under populated ones… and as a result a bunch of thriving communities were born out of the leftovers of higher populated ones. We would not have the Scryers or Wyrmrest Accord servers were it not for this process, so it feels like it mostly worked well.

Rift however went a step beyond this in allowing any character to transfer to another server for free. There were some restrictions initially about transferring from PVE to PVP, but over time these went away as they patched in the “Faction as Fiction” concept. This allowed players to self sort, and overall it seems to have worked. I’ve moved around quite a bit during the time since this went live in that I started on Shadefallen a server that was whisked away in a great depopulation of servers. From there I moved to Faeblight, and then to Deepwood to hang out with Liore and the Machiavelli’s Cats… and then back to Faeblight again because I missed being on a Role-Playing server.

This solved the problem of being fettered to a server and having your friends disappear on you. You could freely transfer elsewhere to play with a different pool of players. One of the big problems I have with World of Warcraft right now is that my friends are so splintered across so many different servers. While you can do cross server grouping to an extent, it just isn’t quite the same as being on the same server and in the same guild. At $25 a pop it would simply be cost prohibitive to move my army around to another location, even though Argent Dawn where we are currently has seen it’s better days. With the Rift situation it becomes relatively easy to move your guild to a new location and set up shop again on more favorable shores. The big thing that Rift is missing however is an equivalent to the BattleTag system that gives you a simply way to connect all of your friends with one single ID.

The Hybrid Approach

I feel like maybe there is a hybrid to these options out there that we just haven’t seen yet. I really like the concept of the mega server in that it removes the work of even having to discuss what server everyone will be located on. It also opens things up.. so if you meet someone that plays the same game as you… there is never that moments later heartbreak when you realize you are on different factions or different servers. What I think we are missing is the concept that Elder Scrolls Online talked about when they were launching, that never quite panned out. Originally the idea was that while everyone would be on a mega server, we would be able to self sort into pools of players with like interests. This would apply an almost dating website series of questions to identify what types of goals you are focused on when you play an MMO. Then through these questions you would be sorted into the cohesive community that best represents your interests.

So when you are wandering around the Capital city, you are seeing the players that represent your tastes in MMOs. If you like being around role-players and crafters, you would end up being shuffled into a very collaborative environment. If you like competing with other players and doing battle to determine who has the most skills… then you would be shuffled into a very competitive focused environment. I feel like a scenario like this would give me some of the permanence from the community that I found I craved when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV. I like being involved with the community just outside of my guild. Guild is a comfortable home for me, but it isn’t the end of my universe, and I crave interaction of new ideas and new players. I feel like this self sorting mechanic would allow for both seamlessly. You could have different types of players in the same guild, but self sorting into their own little “perfect community”.

The Solution

Essentially I have seen a lot of solutions for the same problem, and each of them has fallen short. That doesn’t mean that we should just declare that there is no right answer to the problem and fall back to the old tried and true server structure. I feel like traditional servers are going to be a thing of the past, but we need to find ways of carrying the best aspects of that intimate server community forward with us. I am interested in seeing how people solve the problem moving forward. Games like Landmark and eventually Everquest Next will be tasked to solve it, and with Landmark they are already moving in what feels like the right direction. The ability to move between servers freely gives you the ability to play with anyone also playing the game. The permanence of an individual island however gives you a localized community feel. Do I think it is perfect? No, but I think it is a step in the right direction, and I hope more games try doing something new instead of falling back on the pitfalls of the server.

Booking Dungeons

September 19, 2014 by Belghast

Final Fantasy Roadtrip

This week the Tokyo Game show is happening and we are starting to get a trickle of goodies out like the long awaited updated Final Fantasy XV trailer. After watching it, I have to say this looks like it might be a Final Fantasy quite unlike the others. My friend Kodra mentioned how unusual it was to see an automobile in the Final Fantasy setting, and I had not really thought about it until then but he is right. It has almost been as though they have denied the existence of Automobiles in pretty much every setting other than Final Fantasy VII. Even in the super futuristic VIII they had the requisite flying airships in the form of giant aircraft… but they still lacked anything even resembling an automobile. Let alone a crazy sedan with suicide doors like they are touring the countryside in for this game.

From the video this seems like the game is going to be more like Final Fantasy XII was in the form of a more “Action Combat” approach to the JRPG. This has its fans and its critics, but I have to say one of my favorite Final Fantasy “cousins” was Vagrant Story that featured a very action combat game play style. I even liked Final Fantasy XII for what I played of it, at some point I want to go back and finish the game. What intrigues me the most about the game is the way it feels like the monsters are almost part disaster movie, like they are taking a road trip to survey the countryside like some sort of awkward rubberneckers. I just hope I can control which ever character I choose, because man I am all about the big dude with the beard and the knock-off buster sword.

Castlevania Dark Souls Edition

Another game I have been looking forward to on the PS4 since this years E3 is the game Bloodborne. At TGS they released a new trailer with some more tasty bits about the gameplay featuring what looks to be multiple classes for the player to choose from. I’ve somehow almost entirely missed the Dark Souls madness, but I am looking forward to this game as it feels more firmly in my wheelhouse. I love Castlevania, and I love the dire battle against the things that go bump in the night feeling that this game has. I just hope that the gameplay is every bit as fun as it looks like in the trailer. For a game like this to work for me, the moment to moment gameplay has to feel amazing… and from what I have played of Dark Souls my problem tends too be the wonky feeling control scheme.

This is probably going to to be a title that I end up trying before actually picking it up. I am sure this is blasphemy here but I actually thought Dragon’s Dogma felt much better than Dark Souls as far as moment to moment gameplay. As such I am really hoping that the control scheme is more similar to Dogma. In any case it is a grim dark game about slaughtering the undead and such, and that along makes me a happy camper. We need more games where we roam the country side slaughtering baddies for fun and profit. The only negative that I can see from the trailer is that like Order 1886 it looks a little bit “on rails” for my tastes. In any case I am watching both of those titles closely.

Booking Dungeons

Wednesday night we had tried to run Pharo Sirius for my friend Waren to complete this first Animus book and wound up failing miserably. In my infinite wisdom I attempted to bring along two of our lowest geared players, one of which was the healer… and quite simply he didn’t have the mana to heal the place at just barely ilevel 48 the bare minimum. Last night however we changed up the mix and brought in a very seasoned healer and cleared the dungeon with minimal effort. That really became the theme of the night, cleaning up dungeons both myself and Warenwolf needed for our Animus books. So in total we ran Pharo Sirius, Lost City of Amdapor, Tam-Tara Deepcroft and Stone Vigil. For the last of these we managed to grab one of our up and coming healers that still needed experience and got her roughly a level in doing the place.

Essentially what we learned through the failure that was Wednesday, and the success that was Thursday is that pretty much you can only afford to have a single player in the mix that is significantly undergeared for the content. There were other issues Wednesday night, like the fact that the player had not completed the level 50 quest and was missing both the piece of armor from it and more importantly the critical ability you get that for white mages is your full heal. I cannot impress upon new players enough that the moment you ding 50… go complete your last Job quest. It always gives your class something that you will desperately need from that point onwards. The game assumes you have these abilities, and will throw things at you that often times require them.

As far as leveling goes I managed to get my Paladin to 39, which let me equip a sweet new Grand Company weapon. Since I got Zantetsuken waiting on me in the bank, I thought I would take this opportunity to glamour my weapon to look like the Blazefire Saber. This might literally be the only time I get to use my spiffy gunblade from the Lightning Returns event… since seriously there is no weapon in the game nearly as cool as Zantetsuken. Additionally I have been banking the Hunt Seals needed to buy my Paladin a full set of gear the moment I ding 50. I am not sure what exactly happened, but at this point I have definitely changed focus from leveling the White Mage to pushing up the Paladin. I think more than anything it was my realization that I lacked a class to easily grind additional Atma bits on, now that I screwed up and got my Warrior Atma weapon first. Atma grinding does two useful things for me… firstly I get the chance at atma bits, but more importantly the steady flow of company seals keeps my ventures running. Hopefully at some point this weekend I will have a brand new paladin ready to go.

#FFXIV #FFXV #Bloodborne

Minecraft and Microsoft

September 17, 2014 by Belghast

Of Minecraft and Microsoft

Monday the news broke that Microsoft would be buying Mojang, the company behind Minecraft for 2.5 billion dollars. Since then I’ve seen a lot of varied reactions on this, but I had not quite formulated my own thoughts yesterday morning so I didn’t mention it. I admit I am a bit scared for Minecraft as a game to be in the often ham fisted hands of Microsoft. The thing is this is my own personal biases showing through. While I make my living supporting Microsoft products, in truth I have not been a huge fan of the company since Bill Gates ejected himself from the picture. I’ve felt that they’ve made a significant number of missteps on a many fronts, more importantly to the topic of this conversation on the gaming front. In a way I feel like this makes Microsoft look like they are making a desperate grab at relevance by purchasing the juggernaut that “all the kids are playing”.

From the standpoint of Notch I completely understand why he did this, and I support his decision. Notch has always been one of those figures for which the spotlight has burned a little too much. He blew up his own blog Notch.net when he posted this statement, so it made its way over to Paste Bin. In the statement he explains how he feels like he had become this symbol, and not a person and for those of you who haven’t not watched the This is Phil Fish video Notch mentions you should really check it out. It talks about the weird relationship we have to developers, especially in the indie world. I honestly feel like Notch has always wanted to be this guy who worked on interesting projects, and just had the fortune or misfortune depending on your point of view of one of those projects going viral behind his wildest fevered imaginings.

So we have this odd marriage. Microsoft desperately needs to claw its way to relevance, and Notch needs a company with the infrastructure to support his creation. The Minecraft community can be extremely awesome, but they can also turn on a dime into an unruly mob as they did over supposed terms of service changes. I highly suggest you check out Notch’s “Literally Worse than EA” post to see the point at which I think he decided he was getting out. As an avid player of Minecraft since the early days of beta, my only hope in all of this is that Microsoft can keep from fucking it up. They have this golden opportunity to prove to the world that they are not these clumsy and confused overlords. Do right by this game and you might have just won yourself a lifetime of supporters. Do wrong by this game and you likely caused the next few generations to hate you. Ultimately this is not about me or my generation, but the children growing up with Minecraft as their generations Lego.

The Story Barrier

Last night we had the intention to go do the next few parts of the Coil of Bahamut raid. We did not however have the necessary well geared bodies to pull this off, so instead we opted to do the two instances that come at the end of the main story of the game. Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium are both 8 man dungeons that are extremely story and cut scene heavy. They often act as the bottle neck for players who have just finished leveling to 50, since so much of the end game content cannot be completed until you have finished this step in the main story quest. This is one of my biggest complaints about the flow of the game, is that you have this massive gulf to cross when you think you are nearing the end. You can of course queue for these two through the Duty system, but there is a significant problem with that.

Folks have figured out tricks to run these dungeons extremely quickly, and if you do so they are worth are lot of Tomestones of Mythology for limited work. As such folks tend to power pull these dungeons and anyone who stops to watch the story gets lost in the mix, often times missing entire boss fights because they are locked in a cut scene. This is extremely frustrating since so much of the final act of the story gets played out in these two dungeons. As such we try and wait until we have several 50s that need these before running them, since to run the two dungeons while watching waiting on cut scenes is around a two hour long Endeavour. Last night we had a block of time when we had a bunch of individuals online at the same time so we knocked them out for Thalen.

It had been a long while since I had watched all of the cut scenes and I have to say I am still impressed with the events at the end of this game. I don’t want to go into spoilers but the conclusion of the main story sequence is so satisfyingly “Final Fantasy”. It has all of the elements that make a game like this feel epic. Big boss fights, orchestral music with the requisite choral requirement, huge spell effects and large scale devastation. You cannot come out of The Praetorium without feeling like the big effing hero of the day. This is the way the ending of every video game should feel. The awesome thing here is that the story just keeps going, and in fact I feel like we are building to just as big and exciting of a conclusion somewhere down the line. I find myself actually waiting with baited breath on the next segment of the storyline coming with 2.4.

Recruitment and Games

I had a situation happen last night when two of my friends officially declared that Final Fantasy XIV was the worse. In truth I think they were referring to the hassle that is the Square Enix account management process, and in that I absolute agree with them. Square seriously needs to rethink the number of hoops you have to jump through to be able to play their game. Someone has to be pretty damned committed to giving them money to suffer through that bullshit. That said it did bring up a slightly different point, that I thought I would talk a bit this morning. I get super excited about video games, and in my enthusiasm I feel like I need to share that experience with others. As such through a series of posts on my blog I gush about various features of a game, and some of my friends have taken to calling me the “games pusher”. At its core, I want to share the enjoyment I am having with my friends… because I want them to feel awesome about things too.

The thing is this doesn’t always work, and that is completely okay if it doesn’t. People enjoy games differently, and as such the things that might be perfect for me are not going to be perfect for everyone. So if you see me gushing about a game, it does not mean that I expect you to like it just as much as I do. Hell I find it awesome that people have even tried to play whatever it is that I am playing. Of the folks who have taken the “FFXIV challenge”, a few of them have tried and decided they loved it. Still others have decided this game is not for them at all and walked away from it. I still love both camps equally, and for the folks who fought through the struggle that is account management to try it… I am especially appreciative that they push so much effort into it. Ultimately not every game has to be just right for everyone. We can play different games and still be awesome friends. That said I don’t think I will ever stop trying to get folks playing the game I am playing and on the same server I am playing. That is just too deeply ingrained in my nature.

#FFXIV #Minecraft

Hopelessness of Odin

September 16, 2014 by Belghast

Impending Patch

Last night was an odd evening for a handful of reasons. For starters when I first got home I attempted not to get into anything terribly involved. As such I did a random low level duty roulette and managed to get Haukke Manor. I think overall it went really smoothly, especially considering we had a brand new White Mage that had never healed it before. I attempted to explain all of the fights, and was shocked and amazed that my party requested a full clear instead of the normal abbreviated rush. Everything went pretty smoothly all things considered as I took the time to explain the final fight and what I was expecting from each of the party members. I’ve found that often times on fights with very specific mechanics, no one wants to admit to not knowing what to do. If I simply give an abbreviated explanation, overall it tends to go considerably smoother.

When my wife got home we walked to dinner and hung out for a bit. By this time I was absolutely starving, but to be fair she warned me exactly when she would be getting home. I should have eaten a snack when I first got home or something, because by the time we hit the Mexican restaurant I was absolutely famished. When we left the house it looked like it might open up on us, and originally we were headed to a BBQ place, but while walking it started sprinkling a little bit. Thankfully by the time we got out of the restaurant any signs of sprinkles had disappeared and we walked home on an extremely gorgeous evening. I love being within walking distance of several restaurants, because there is just something cool about being able to walk to dinner in an otherwise traditional car culture.

Hopelessness of Odin

With the patch downtime quickly approaching, but the time I got back from dinner I had roughly an hour and a half of play time left before the servers went down. I tanked another low level random, and then opted to start working on my Paladin Hunt log. For various reasons I have shifted my focus from working on my White Mage to pushing up the Paladin. As I said yesterday I went from 28 to 35 Sunday and managed to get 36 and almost 37 last night. I was essentially minding my business and porting from zone to zone cleaning up sections of my hunt log. When I zoned into South Shroud I thought the place looked really odd. One of the cool things about FFXIV is that you can check the current weather conditions by mousing over a little icon on the minimap. When I did that I started to get excited… the conditions were “Hopelessness” which is a unique weather condition when the Odin event has spawned. I shifted to my warrior job and shouted into zone “WAR LFG” and within seconds I got an invite.

It seems that Warriors are the kings of cheesing out FATE contribution, so they are apparently highly sought after for fights like Odin. It seemed like everyone was coalescing on Urth’s Gift, so I headed that way. I had never actually managed to catch Odin in progress before, and by the time I got there someone had just pulled him. I was not quite ready for the sight in front of me, which seemed to be roughly 200 players working away feverishly to get him down. The above shot is from the battle, and pretty much represents what the experience feels like. The entire area is a wash in spell effects, which makes his attacks extremely hard to see. During the battle he periodically casts these massive AOE fields that you realistically need to run out of. I avoided most of them, and with less than 3% of his bar left I finally ended up dying. I rode out the battle before releasing and managed to get gold contribution, which means I earned 5 Odin Mantles.

What is awesome about getting gold contribution is the fact that you actually get enough of the tokens to be able to purchase something right then. Both Odin and Behemoth have a number of really cool items you can pick up for mostly cosmetic purposes. You can get barding that makes your chocobo look like Odin’s mount, or you can get a helmet and chest graphic that makes your gear look just like his. The item however that I was interested is the one that any Final Fantasy fan will immediately recognize… Zantetsuken his insane sword. While the stats on the blade are no longer that great, thanks to the wonders of the glamour system I can make any blade look like this. My good friend Ashgar has had one for some time now, but I had to scrounge around this morning to find a picture of someone wielding it. As soon as I get my paladin up to 50 I too will be rocking the blade of Odin… which to be truthful is probably longer than my Lalafell is tall.

Winding Down

After the excitement of Odin I was wandering around, and popped over to Uldah to purchase more Ventures when I ran into the ever amazing Sagacyte Luxaloix. It is always awesome to bump into twitter folk while wandering about the server, and it seems like last night was a night for doing so. Earlier in the evening Sagacyte had bumped into the very amazing Spiral Sun and posted about it as well. Thankfully the meetings were commemorated in picture, so I could totally use them… as in my rush I absolutely forgot to take one. I love bumping into folks I know while wandering about the server. When doing Odin there were a bunch of folks from the Howling Moon free company in the thick of the battle as well. I was pumped to find out that Ayla Noye also managed to get gold contribution from the event, so we will all be rocking Odin goodies in the housing zone.

On top of all of this it appears that the 2.38 patch that went in this morning has a ton of quality of life modifications to existing systems. It seems they are focusing on making some tweaks to make 2.4 go more smoothly, including some visual changes to Limsa Lominsa… which makes me wonder if the new Thief and Ninja NPCs will be located in that city. The biggest news for me personally from the patch is the new command to copy an existing hotbar. One of the big frustrations is that when you switch jobs, most of your hotbars change with you. That means when you switch from Gladiator to Paladin for example you have to reconfigure your hotbar, as it defaults to giving you ones filled with the abilities in the order in which you received them. This command will let you copy one current hotbar to a new hotbar slot in a different profile.

Another big one for me which is kinda silly is I am pumped that they added a /hug emote. In every MMO this has kinda been my default interaction with a player that I happened to meet out in the world. Apparently the Japanese are not big huggers, because after a year of the game they still had yet to put that emote in. As a result my default had been /joy which is what happens to be pictured above. So I will be happy to be able to do drive by huggings in game soon. Another awesome change is the ability to scale back the spell effects. Maybe I would have actually been able to see what Odin looked like were this system in place last night. In any case, the patch looks to be a great one and I look forward to delving into all the things they added like Personal Player housing.

#FFXIV