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The Madness Continues

May 24, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #58 – Eight Is Enough?

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

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

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

The Madness Continues

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

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

Poking My Head Out

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

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

Fear of the Unknown

May 23, 2015 by Belghast

MMO Nostalgia

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

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

Fear of the Unknown

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

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

Players Together, Not Against

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

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

Mistakes Were Made

May 20, 2015 by Belghast

Thing that Happened

The last few days have been extremely strange for me, in that I have been processing a sequence of events. I wrote over the weekend that we had a bit of car trouble and found out there was a recall on our Pontiac Torrent related to it. In a sequence of events we also found out that an earlier repair was in fact the source of a recall as well, so in theory we should be getting reimbursed for that work also. Monday we scheduled an appointment with our local GMC dealer to get the new recall taken care of, but in the meantime my wife started looking at vehicles. Both her Torrent and my Jeep Grand Cherokee had been paid off for well over a year and we were just reaping the benefits of no car payment. Other than the recent recall however hers was in extremely good condition. Mine on the other hand had some issues. All of which were largely minor: cracked windshield, broken drivers seat, and in desperate need of new tires.

As a result I had been looking for some time and kicked around all sorts of ideas for vehicles. That said I have always been extremely happy with the Pontiac Torrent and fully intended at some point to get around to looking at the Chevy Equinox the modern cousin. In my wife’s searches she stumbled across a phenomenal deal, the kind that you can’t really say no to. So part of me felt like the time table of events was extremely quick, but by the same token I also felt like we had to jump on the deal while it was available. As a result I am now the proud owner of a shiny new 2013 Chevy Equinox with a truly silly list of amenities that I never actually expected any vehicle I owned would have. I mean this has silly things like heated seats and a backup camera that makes driving a car kind feel like an arcade game. I have yet to even figure out half of the things that are in it because I really have not driven it enough for it to feel “really” mine yet. Last night I turned over the keys to my Jeep and I admit I was a little sad to do so, mostly because I guess I was more attached to that vehicle than I realized. I think more than anything I am just trying to wrap my head around the notion that I have a new car.

Crafting to Eleven

Before the World of Warcraft raid I managed to pop into Final Fantasy XIV long enough to push Culinarian to eleven. This means I now have every craft to that tier, and can start getting rid of my early gear. In fact it just dawned on me that other than fishing I have started literally every class in the game. Right now my sights are set on pushing everything past fifteen, which is apparently where the interesting and unique abilities come into play from each crafting profession. Up until this point they have all seemed to have exactly the same things: a success buff, a durability heal, and an ability to increase quality. The positive about this setup is that right now all of my hotbars look essentially the same, so through muscle memory I can hit the ability that I need when I need it. One of the things that I do like about crafting is that your control points seem to regenerate each time you craft an item. I was half expecting them to work like gathering points and regenerate over time or per harvest. This makes crafting a much shorter game, which I like significantly better.

While I have joked for some time that crafting in Final Fantasy XIV is a black hole… I am here to report that this is actually a literal thing that happens apparently. I cannot tell you the last time I ran an expert dungeon for poetics, nor can I really tell you the last time I was in non-crafting gear. Because of the whole automobile thing, I ended up at a car dealership Monday night instead of attending our raid. So quite literally for the last several times I have played the game I have done nothing but crafting. The thing that shocks me is just how surprisingly “okay” I am about this thing that is happening. I am finding that I really do enjoy the crafting system, and there is something oddly gratifying about it. I expect by the time I hit 50 in every profession I will have a serious hatred for some aspects of it, but other than the fact that it is a constant gil sink… I am completely fine with turning money into crafting ability. I keep thinking about the final destination being an amazing place where I can craft anything I need on a whim.

Mistakes Were Made

I did a thing last night that I knew better than to do… but ultimately did it anyways. First off I feel like I need to get some baggage out of the way. The Witcher franchise and I have a very checkered past, namely I have been told by friends that I trust that it is this amazing experience… then I attempt to play it and it feels like shit. The first Witcher game without a doubt has the most cludgy controls I have ever experienced, and I quite literally have not made it out of the tutorial fight even though I have tried to play it multiple times. So I thought I would just skip the first one and start with the second… the problem being for whatever reason I cannot get Witcher 2 to load on my machine at all. It will boot up, but never actually starts and apparently this is a known issue with Windows 8 and that game. So I had planned to completely write the series off and skip the third one, given my lack of success with the previous two. Then several weeks back I ordered a new video card, and low and behold it came with a free copy of Witcher 3 delivered through the GOG Galaxy client. Of note I have to say I am a big fan of the Galaxy client so far, it is extremely clean.

Last night after the raid I decided to fire up the game, expecting to play for only a few minutes. The end result is that I played for an hour and a half without pause, and also without realizing it. The game is really good, like Skyrim good and runs beautifully on my system. There is a certain amount of narrative faffing that happens in the first few minutes of the game, but quickly you are dumped into a living world setting with only some vague suggestions on what you should be doing. From there you can choose to follow the directions on the map, or just wander off on your own finding interesting things in the countryside. Given my history with Elder Scrolls Games, I immediately hopped off the beaten path and started wandering around. I found a Wraith guarding a place of power, defeated it… claimed the power of the location and apparently earned my very first ability point. The entire sequence of events felt extremely natural and engaging. Additionally I completed a handful of quests that involved using my “Witcher powers” to find clues. Again it felt extremely nice, and I am finding myself getting enamored with the game without actually meaning to. I’ve been switch hitting between 360 controller and mouse and keyboard, and honestly I think I like the 360 controller the best so far. Looking forward to playing a good deal more of this over the coming nights.

Madness Intensifies

May 18, 2015 by Belghast

No Getting Used to It

By the time yesterday afternoon rolled around I had well passed my stress quota. If I were a pinball machine the tilt sensors were going off. The previous week had been one of the more stressful experiences in part because I don’t really handle change as well as I could. That said my workplace right now is in a constant state of flux as we are going through a fairly massively floor rebuild. We have folks tearing down one cube only to take the pieces that were used to make it, and use it to build up a brand new cube. The positive is that I now have a pretty sweet set up with a more private cube that has an entrance hall of sorts, but getting to that process involved moving out of my office before going to lunch one day… and moving back in a few hours later. When you combine the fact that we had to cram all of the mothers day festivities into this weekend, we had car troubles, and had at least one partially sleepless night due to dodging tornados by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around I had just checked out.

So as I was sitting there on my sofa mindlessly crafting away last night it was pure dumb luck that I happened to look down and notice that the tell I had just received was from an actual person and not another gold spammer. It turns out that I happened to be sitting there crafting in the Alchemists guild in Ul’dah next to someone who was apparently an avid reader of my blog. I’ve been lucky enough to experience this a few times now, and each time it is this mixture of pride, awkwardness and confusion. I have somehow lulled myself into this state where I feel like I don’t actually have any readers, so when I write my post each morning I can be just as open as I want to… because I am ultimately just talking to myself. So when I am confronted with the fact that this is absolutely not the case I never know quite what to do. I snapped a photo with my reader and told him that he would have to be less of a stranger in the comment thread, also threw out a friend invite and said to holler if they needed anything. My friends joke about me being “THE Belghast” but man… that is not a thing I will ever get used to. I’m just a guy who does a few different things and tries to squeeze as much enjoyment out of the games I happen to be playing as I can. The big point of pride however came when my reader said that I was for the most part the reason why they were playing Final Fantasy XIV right now, so if my joy can be infectious then maybe I guess it is okay.

Madness Intensifies

The only real concentrated playtime that I had this weekend were either during the podcast on Saturday evening or starting about 4pm on Sunday afternoon until I went to bed. During that time I focused on getting all of those tradeskills that I managed to get to level 5/6ish the other day up to 11. At the point of going to sleep last night I had managed to get all of them up there except for Culinarian, which I will hopefully take care of tonight. I will say that so far I definitely agree with the notion of this being the ideal way to level tradeskills, but man… it also means that my entire life right now is pushing tradeskills. There is no way in hell I am going to cap my poetics especially since they have now doubled the cap to 900 per week. The positive however is that I am actually finding myself really enjoying the black hole known as crafting. I like the fact that I am for the most part relatively self sufficient. This was always the big reason why I pushed crafting up in other games is that when I wanted something for an alt… I didn’t want to have to pester someone else to make it for me.

It is going to be so amazingly nice to be able to repair my gear while we are in instances, or knock out random glamour prisms as my whims suit me. Right now I am taking no small amount of pride in the fact that I have been crafting all of my upgrades WHILE working on crafting. The cool thing is that each time I hit a plateau I can have a fire sale of everything that I used to get to that point. So when I finally bring Culinarian up to level 11 I will be shedding all the early level crafting gear that I have laying around. The other nice thing about doing it this way is that I have been able to select the cash reward item from each of my crafting quests. The negative is… that I am struggling to remember which quests I have actually completed. I am pretty sure there are one or two of the level ten quests that I still need to go back and do. I am really enjoying the chill nature of crafting, and I am liking that it gives me plenty of time to watch some Orphan Black. I managed to watch through the first seasons and just started the second season last night before stopping to watch Game of Thrones. I doubt I will make it to cap before Heavensward but I am hoping to at least get close.

Forced Engagement

The biggest problem with crafting right now is that it is feeding my instincts to check out mentally. When I am stressed I tend to disengage from the world, and while I am so focused on crafting my way through the levels… it is all too easy to simply not watch free company chat or anything else for that matter. One of the things I am going to have to work on this next week is trying to find a happy medium between my super engaging “lets run all the things” side and my “lets just nest and craft” side. I am hoping that now that my group at work is done with the moves that I can start to chill back out once again. The fact that every single day my world was changing significantly made me want to cling to something calm and relaxing in my game world. Tonight will be a return to my raid schedule so that should help significantly. There is still some stress in the real world around a potential car purchase that might be happening, but hopefully the big stressers are past me.

Mostly I want to apologize to anyone who was looking to run anything this weekend. I managed to run a Sunken Temple of Qarn with Liore, but past that I pretty much ran nothing at all. I had all these grand hopes of doing some pony farming, but that fell through when we tried to cram a visit with my folks in Friday night. Saturday was pretty much an entire lost day other than rushing home to podcast under the threat of severe weather. Hopefully as the week goes on I can do more fun stuff with the Free Company because I could use the activity to get my mind off other things. As we talked about on the podcast Saturday night, I really hope we down turn nine tonight… but in the grand scheme of things I think we are still a few weeks away. We are just now consistently getting to the dive bomb phase, now we just have to figure out what to do with the dive bombs. On our best attempt I think we got to around 35% which isn’t too shabby. I hope you all have a great week, and please if you are an avid reader of the blog… don’t hesitate to ping me in game sometime and say hi.