Final Fantasy XIV

A Brand New Jade Mech

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Hey Friends! This morning is going to be a bit of a random mix of things because that is sort of where my brain is. There are times when I find myself juggling a number of threads and I appear to be going through one of those right now. Meet my big jade friend! I finished collecting the hero points needed to turn my fresh level 80 Engineer into a Mechanist. I’ve yet to do much of anything with it yet, but I am happy to have my robot friend. I’ve been utilizing a mechanic in World vs World to collect Hero Points for the classes that I am not actively playing.

As a result of my frequent participation, I get Skirmish Chests and one of the items that you can receive from them is Testimonies of Jade Heroics when then can be used to buy Notarized Scrolls of Maguuma Heroics allowing me to largely skip the hero points from Heart of Thorns which are all annoying. Granted I can do the same thing for Tyria, Path of Fire, and End of Dragons heroics, but I actually like doing those. This is how I have unlocked Bladesworn, Chronomancer, and now Mechanist so it is actually a fairly quick process if you are doing a good deal of WvW. The next target is probably unlocking DragonHunter on my Guardian.

In other news, I am closing in on having a full stable of professions at level 80 in Guild Wars 2. Here is a mildly modified image showing that I have everything but the Thief up to level 80. Granted I have cheesed some of these and abused the birthday rewards to push them up to level 60 before going the rest of the way. The longer-term battle however is unlocking heroic points on each of them and figuring out a viable build to go for, and then gearing them all. Right now Warrior, Ranger, and Necromancer are pretty solid, and Engineer is slowly getting there. Everyone else… I am all over the place but I am starting to click the pieces into place on the Mesmer now that I have Chronomancer unlocked.

In Other Other News… The Housing Lottery system in Final Fantasy XIV should be rolling once again based on this post from 5/13. Granted I still cannot do anything related to it, because I have to wait around until May 26th at 8 am PDT in order for this first round to be finalized. I’ve had my character parked at the plot that I am interested in over in The Mists since this all started, and at that point, I am going to be putting my bid in place and trying for the one I like the best. I am trying not to get my hopes up because housing, in general, has been a giant clusterfuck, to be honest. The lottery will be a better clusterfuck, but it is still going to be one nonetheless. The biggest problem with housing is that I am also going to be chaining myself to logging regularly so I make sure that I keep it. I do need to figure out a reasonable way to weave this game back into my rotation, however.

In my recent dabbling around in New World again, I decided to give Outpost Rush a try. I figured that maybe something flipped in my brain to make me like PVP given that I am doing quite a bit of it in Guild Wars 2. Nope… whatever indoctrination that has taken place does not appear to universally apply to all games and Outpost Rush still feels awful. In spite of all of the improvements made to New World, I have to say that the core problem with the game now resides in the generally awful PVP-focused community. I think it is probably too little too late to ever turn this game around, given that they ran off most of their PVE-focused players last year. Chat on Valhalla is better than it was on Minda, but it is still filled with the same jackasses… just in smaller numbers. It is especially shocking coming from Guild Wars 2 which is pretty great so long as you avoid the Goons.

Another thing that I have noticed in coming back is that many of the rarer resources have plummeted in value. I am not sure if I talked about this the other day but Void Ore used to be the single most valuable chase item and would go for upwards of 10k gold each. Now you can pick them up for 150 gold without much issue, and after opening a few professional aptitude caches I understand why. Essentially every third of a level after maxing a profession, you get awarded a cache of materials… and these are chock full of those orange rarity items. I took a screenshot of an example where I got 3 vials of azoth (used to go for 200g each, now 5g each), 8 of legendary cloth Blisterweave, and 6 of the other legendary cloth Scalecloth. I believe each of those used to go for around 2k gold on my original server, and now I am sure they are peanuts given how much the game is throwing at you.

Like I said before right now it is shaping up that the community is the worst part of the game. While chat is calm most of the time, you are constantly seeing nonsense like this scroll past. The Edgelord energy is strong in this community. It is fine, but it is essentially the sort of thing that I would make sure anyone asking me about the game receives a hefty disclaimer. I have a few things that I want to do… just not sure if I will actually do them. I always wanted a set of Voidbent Armor and I might finish leveling my Armoring up to make that. I also always wanted to make one of the legendary hatchets, and I might spend the time to finish leveling up engineering to make one of those as well. Past that, I am not sure how long I will be back. Harvesting is still fun and moment-to-moment open world gameplay is still fun… but it also largely feels pointless given that you can’t really use it to acquire gear score improvements other than the daily gypsum orbs. I saw someone talking about the Priest farm in Myrkgard last night, so I might need to wade in deep enough to see if those are still viable.

Final Fantasy XIV Addon Debacle

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Hey Friends. The last few days have been really weird for the Final Fantasy XIV community, and even though I am not actively playing that game… I still care about what goes down there. It isn’t like at some point I will not return to the fold like I always do. Essentially a sequence of events has started a ball rolling and it has gathered up enough momentum that I am not entirely certain where it will stop. There are a few factors in play, not the least of which is the supposed rampant cheating in the new PVP mode of the game, and reported wide use of third-party utilities during the race for Worlds First in the new Ultimate Raid. Something that should be very clear however is that Square Enix and more specifically Yoshi P and the team have been exceptionally clear over the years that Third Party Tools are strictly prohibited.

What has led to this most recent conflagration is the fact that on May 9th, SE reiterated its stance on banning third-party utilities from the game. This was then followed up by two very public bans of players a North American player (Bagel Goose) and a Japanese player (Hiroro). There is a discussion about this taking place as a result of brigading, however to me personally it sounds like a shot across the bow. The NA/EU communities and the Japanese language communities are pretty separated and if you wanted to get the message across that they mean it “for serious” this time, a banning in each would seem like a tactical play. Whatever the case this has caused the wildest spiral of the community falling in on itself that I have seen in a while. Essentially there are two camps, those who want unfettered access to addons and those who think everyone that publicly uses them should be banned.

I have to admit one of my favorite features of Final Fantasy XIV was its strict prohibition of addons and the fact that they would legitimately ban people from using them. I felt like this added to a more friendly dungeon environment since it took away the penis measuring that came with folks posting damage meters to public chat. It also stopped folks from giving “helpful advice” that they were not carrying their weight and should “git gud”, because those sorts of actions could end up landing you in the Mordion Gaol. It personally made me way more likely to be willing to random roulettes and felt like it was providing a much less toxic dungeon environment overall than those I had experienced in World of Warcraft.

The problem was that over the years that line got a little ragged as to what was allowed and what was prohibited. All of those great Instagram shots that you see from Final Fantasy players composing outrageous screenshots… are for the most part all using third-party addons and at a very minimum Reshade/GShade. The great bards that you hear every night in Limsa Lominsa… are pretty much all using an addon that allows them to feed a musical score and translate them to keypresses. If you don’t like the feel of the UI in Final Fantasy XIV and replace it with something more akin to ElvUI from World of Warcraft, then again that is a third-party addon. There are completely pure and good reasons to be running addons in Final Fantasy XIV, but there are also a number of more nefarious options like CactBot that can give the player DBM-style boss callouts. I am not sure what addon this is but I saw a video of something yesterday that was drawing out where attacks were going to go before the in-game visualization fired.

I think this has more recently reached a head with the influx of World of Warcraft players coming into the Final Fantasy XIV community. In World of Warcraft, I have not run a stock interface since 2005, and it is just accepted as part of playing that game that you are going to need to seek addons to improve its shortcomings. For example, I specifically ran an all-in-one addon replacement called BenikUI which was a fork of ElvUI… which in itself was a fork of TukUI. Addons are just the culture of that game and not running them puts you at a significant disadvantage. As more World of Warcraft players has transferred to Final Fantasy XIV, that mindset and culture have come with them. The problem here is that over the last few years mods have come from something that players did in secret and never talked about, to something being openly shown on streams now. The tentative truce between Square Enix enforcers and the players was broken… as folks started talking about fight club openly.

As Raiding in World of Warcraft has been turned into an E-Sport, the stakes of each new event have been increased as well. There has been an arms race in WoW Raiding and the armaments have been the addons that can give each team a slight advantage in specific encounters. This is so much the case that some of the large raid guilds have an LUA programmer on staff essentially to tweak and update raid call mods between attempts so that their team has an advantage. Blizzard has taken a very light touch over the years when it comes to banning mod behavior. I remember in Burning Crusade I had an addon that would allow me to bind a key so that it would automatically target whoever in the raid had the least health and cast Flash of Light. I used this to spam heal my way to being an effective Paladin raid healer, a class and role that I am very much not well equipped for. Sure, the ability to do this specific thing was removed from the API eventually, but the exceptionally clever addon developers found ways around it. Each time a function has been removed from the libraries, some clever user figures out a way to achieve the same results through a different method.

The casualty of this arms race is that World of Warcraft raid encounters shifted significantly to include more random elements that require the player to react to conditions and take the necessary action for that moment in time. Additionally, so much fire on the ground that you have to avoid to keep from dying a horrible death… I can still hear the awful klaxon of my GTFO addon. The randomness of each encounter made it so that the addons only really gave you so much information, and it required you to still execute based on the information you are getting. Running Deadly Boss Mods became a requirement, but the encounters were also designed in a way that took that assumption into account. If everyone is exploiting the mechanics of the fight, then no one is really gaining an unfair advantage.

The problem comes into play when you realize that Final Fantasy XIV encounters are not designed around the existence of addons. They are designed in a way to be equally competitive to both console players and those players on the PC, and the team has taken great care to ensure this. They also are just functionally different in the way that they play out, because if a World of Warcraft encounter is about controlling chaos… Final Fantasy XIV is about executing a dance routine with the highest possible accuracy. FFXIV bosses are tightly scripted encounters and often so much so that if you have a stopwatch running, the same abilities will be firing at the same moment in relation to some other event every single time. Succeeding in those fights is about memorizing the pattern and executing it flawlessly, and the degree of “wiggle room” decreases each time you step up in encounter difficulty. So that if you are doing Ultimates, the highest content in the game a single mistake by any one of the eight players doing the encounter can mean a wipe for the entire team.

In the escalating arms race of competitive raiding… in Final Fantasy XIV running an addon to give you exact call-outs and draw visualizations on screen is bringing a machine gun to a sword fight. The players not running addons are at a disadvantage so it starts to facilitate the need for EVERYONE to be running addons. Now we get to the situation we find ourselves in today. Square Enix and more specifically Yoshi P and crew do not want addons to be a requirement for playing the game. More importantly, they do not want an entire mode of gameplay, which are console games… to be invalidated for competitive content. I feel like they have allowed things to get into this state with their lax “just don’t talk about it” stance, and the end result is that they are going to start having to ban anyone using addons. The only way to right the ship at this point is to sweep the deck.

Folks are not reacting to this well… and shocking to no one Pyromancer who openly attacked his then World of Warcraft focused community… turns his anger on his now Final Fantasy XIV focused community. This is but one example of what is going on right now in all of the Final Fantasy XIV devoted platforms and admittedly is a more hyperbolic take… but still representative of the faction divide. My stance is the lack of addons is good for Final Fantasy XIV. We did not need them for completing Coil, and I believe the devs when they say that every single Ultimate is capable of being completed without addons as well. Final Fantasy XIV is honestly the first game of its like that I have played happily without addons, because it gave me enough control over my UI and inventory layout that I didn’t feel that I needed them.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/EasyAntiCheat-Logo.png

Essentially we are in this position where I feel that if players do not abandon these addons on their own, Square Enix will step in and solve the problem for us. As a publisher, they are already using Easy Anti Cheat for a number of games, which is absolutely capable of detecting that you are running an addon that is interfacing with the current window either by scanning memory for the executable or by looking for direct x hooks. This is the heavy-handed option, but it is an option that I feel we are on the cusp of having thrust upon us. Square will protect the validity of console gamers at all costs because they make up a huge chunk of the Final Fantasy XIV player base. If you do not want the next step in this evolution to be more DRM installed on top of your favorite game, maybe learn to live without your addons or at a minimum stop showing them on streams.

I think the only way to proceed fairly is that every streamer that can be shown to be using addons publicly, should receive a temporary ban. This is the only way that the point gets driven home. More so the official statement needs to be updated with a much clearer stance because I feel like the original point might be getting lost in translation and the obsessive politeness of this particular game team. World of Warcraft is a failed state, and there is no way back at this point to a time before the addon escalation. Final Fantasy XIV is not beyond saving, but that team is going to have to make some hard choices and take some equally stern actions. They have stated that they want every piece of content completed on all platforms and without addons, and they are going to have to back that intention up with action. I’m sorry Bards and Instagram Models… but yall are going to get damaged in the crossfire.

Thundershrimp Invasion

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Sometimes you don’t have to look terribly far to find nonsense in games… sometimes it finds you. Mistlock Sanctuary is an extremely handy place to have access to, and honestly half of the time it becomes the unofficial Guild Hall of Greysky Armada given that it tends to be where we all meet up on the regular. It is essentially a tightly condensed area that has all of the vendors and services that you might need from a town, and allows you to teleport right back to where you were before entering. It becomes a hangout spot for lots of folks within the Guild Wars 2 community, including apparently a group of Thundershrimps. I briefly joined this hivemind when I noticed there were two players glamoured to this appearance following me around the Mists… and then shortly I received an mail message with a tonic attached.

It was fun… nonsensical… and we slowly gained numbers until I believe right before I left we had six players running around as shrimp. I think this might be the highlight of my weekend and I am leading off this mornings post using it as a reminder. There are moments in MMORPGs that are completely meaningless in the scope of the game itself or your own progression… but are absolutely moments worth indulging in. The above image is from our old FC house on Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, and that night a bunch of us just happened to be wearing the newly added Dragon Quest Slime Hat… and proceeded to dance around for thirty minutes. Moments like this is well worth indulging when they happen, and I think are good for the soul.

The other highlight of the weekend is getting a new ascended weapon for free. Since coming back I have been trying to run Tequatl as many times as possible. There are days where the stars have not aligned, but more times than not… I am running this each time the server resets. I have known for awhile that there is a very rare chance of getting ascended weapons to drop, and I believe Friday night I managed to get a Settlers chest to drop. Seeing as I had crafted a Greatsword already, I opted instead to go pistol given that I am spending so much time as Harbinger of late. I immediately took it to the mystic toilet and changed its stat package to something more reasonable for the sort of nonsense I have been doing of late. I may never actually see another of these, but it isn’t going to stop me from trying each day. I could now really use a dagger and a staff.

Another great moment from the weekend is that Sunday afternoon the stars aligned and a bunch of us ran some fractals. I needed three for the first part of the Twilight precursor quest, and Thalen needed three different ones for some other quest. I’ve decided that Fractals are more or less what Mythic+ feels like in World of Warcraft. While the Fractals themselves are shorter, the pace feels similar and the fact that they scale over time also feels similar. I really think that this was the dungeon content I had been looking for, and while Tam kept telling me that… I was bad at listening because my preconceived notions of what that meant kept getting in the way. This whole experience of coming back to Guild Wars 2 and it lighting a fire in me… has also made me realize how generally closed minded I have been when it comes to MMORPGs. If the game did not fit a specific mold that I had determined was optimized for my enjoyment… I wanted no part of it.

Lastly for the weekend I spent a good deal of time chipping away at Living World Season 4. If my theory is correct, I am nearing the end of Chapter 5 and will be starting the final chapter soon. Not every new map is a winner, but I have to say LW4 so far has had far more winners than losers. I love the intricacy of each new map, and this is honestly slowing me down in my progress because I keep getting distracted by events and metas. Admittedly this is artificially causing me to engage with the content as though it were releasing more slowly, rather than just powering through it. We talked a bit about this over the weekend, but when you are powering through things you have trouble realizing that significant chunks of time have passed in game between content drops. Essentially the expansions and Living World progress in real time, meaning that a number of years sit between the end of one expansion and the beginning of the next.

It was a pretty great weekend, albeit a pretty short one. I do need to get finishing up Horizon Forbidden West but lord it has been awhile since I have been this engaged with a game. During my months of playing Final Fantasy XIV every single day… I was deeply beholden to the mission. Were it not for my quest to get everything to level 80… I am pretty sure I would have bounced much earlier. This… I just have so many different dials and levers that I can interact with and it all feels fresh. I am sure doing Tequatl for the 200th time will start to tarnish it a bit, but I really do love the encounter. I mean I managed to do Praetorium every single day and find enjoyment it in while I was grinding out those 80s.

Queuewalker

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Good morning friends! I thought this morning I would take a bit on the blog to talk about me and Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much not done with the game, but the current congestion situation that we find ourselves in has made it much harder for me to play “on a whim”. I’ve been doing my normal end of the year/beginning of the year binge of single player games. However normally when I am in this mode I am still logging in at least once a day into the MMORPGs I am playing at the same time. Generally speaking at least once per day I would log in, maybe do a roulette or deal with my retainers and then log back out. The challenge however is that I plan on the highest population data center and one of the highest population servers period.

When I was working on the Main Story Quest for Endwalker, I had a pretty rigorous routine of logging in at a specific time during the day so that I could be through the queue when I got “off work”. The queue would idle in the background and tick down as I finished out my afternoon and then could be ready to make progress in the story. The drive to do this was there because the story of Endwalker was so damned good. What has happened since then however is that I fell out of the routines I had been engaged with because I was in “vacation mode”. This means that by the time I think about logging in, it is usually early evening and the queues are already madness.

Earlier this week I tried to make my way through. I logged in as soon as I got off work, and then proceeded to go about my daily routine of fixing dinner and feeding the animals. About an hour and a half later we were sitting at the lower number. Meaning in that hour and a half I made it roughly one third of the way through the initial queue. My quick napkin math told me I had at least 2-3 more hours before I could make my way in… at which point I bailed out and gave my slot to someone else who needed it more. Finishing the MSQ took away a lot of my drive to fight through that queue because I know at some point in the future I can catch back up pretty easily. Instead I have been spending that time focused on playing games that are also bringing me joy… but can more easily be played on my schedule.

Once I burn through this current phase of single player games, if the state of the queues is still this rough I might even poke my head back into Elder Scrolls Online. I am still woefully behind the main story and sitting somewhere in Summerset at the moment. Which means I still have a mount of content in front of me before I am even vaguely ready for the new expansion that they are already teasing. So to recap…. very much not done with Endwalker and Final Fantasy XIV but the queues are making it very difficult to muster the desire to fight my way through them at the moment.