MMORPG Archives - Page 272 of 399 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Hardcore Mining

March 9, 2015 by Belghast

Quest for Airships

Since the detail was first teased during the Las Vegas Fan Festival, our guild has been focused on making sure we can get a Free Company airship. The biggest concern however is that when Yoshi-P calls something “prohibitively expensive” it gives us serious pause. This is the man that thought 6-30 million gil for housing was “reasonable”, so if something is prohibitively expensive… what in the world could that be? Over the weekend a Polygon article came out with some quotes from the man himself, and I talked a little bit about this yesterday. Unless you did not have time to read the article, let me focus in on the part I am actually interested in.

“Once you have the workshop, you decide on what you want to make,” Yoshida says. “For example, if you’re going to build an airship, you go part by part. You start with the engine. Your free company teammates gather the materials necessary to build the engine. The crafters within the free company form a party, and then it’s a group effort to build the engine.”

Yoshida says the free company crafting system will grow and expand throughout content patches for the expansion — what he is calling the “3.X series of updates.” To create their ship, free companies will have to combine different engines, bodies and other parts. The ships will have different stats depending on the combinations made, leading to unique ships for different groups depending on their focus.

“Having as many options as possible is a good thing,” he says with a smile.

So our biggest concern with this statement is the fact that he says that you will need a party of free company crafters to complete some of these actions. Now currently we have at least a “light” party worth of Omni crafters, meaning that they have every single profession to max level. But since he doesn’t specify my concern is that it might require a “Full” party of eight crafters to do some of the things related to crafting airship bits. If that is the case we are pretty screwed, because while some of our members have embraced the rabbit hole that is crafting, there are players like me that have completely avoided it. I guess for me my reasoning was that I wanted to make sure I got my combat classes up and geared before diving too far into the crafting system. That said I have WAR, PLD, DRG, BRD, and WHM all geared to ilvl 100 or better… so I guess I have done what I set out to do.

Hardcore Mining

So this weekend I embarked upon the mission to finish leveling mining. At the beginning of the weekend I was sitting around level 30, and last night before going to bed I had just hit 44. My hope is that maybe I can finish leveling to 50 tonight before raid time. Right now I am out in Coerthas doing mining leves, and the leveling is going fairly quickly. My goal is to finish leveling mining and then start in on another Disciple of the Land class probably logging next. My original plan was to level all of my harvesting classes to 50 before setting in and actually leveling crafting proper. I thought this might make life a lot easier to funnel resources into the “making things” professions. My goal is to be able to help the guild craft that airship, and while it is probably going to cots me several points of sanity… I care that much about the end result.

Mining is pretty much pure tedium, in that it involves a lot of running around and clicking things repeatedly. As such I opted to hang out downstairs on my laptop and catch up on various television options while I repeated the same process over and over. Yesterday was all about watching the various episodes of Star Wars Rebels that I had missed. I have to say that show is absolutely phenomenal, and if you are not watching it yet… I highly suggest you do so. I am pretty happy with Disney’s leadership so far of the Star Wars brand. That show is chock full of really interesting characters, and it gives this whole guerilla fighters against the empire feel which is excellent. The danger of their situation is constant, and they managed to create an extremely insidious villain in the form of “The Inquisitor”.

Quietly Amazing

This morning when I went to log in and take a screenshot of me in my awesome mining regalia, I was greeted by this screen. Yup it looks like Cactuar was in fact full at 6 in the morning, and I am thinking this is pure insanity. I know for some time Cactuar has been locked from the creation of new characters during prime time hours. However I wonder if we are starting to reach that state of permanent lock status? That is going to be horribly unfortunate for anyone wanting to join our Free Company and the great little community we have built there. My hope is this is some sort of fluke, and they were doing maintenance on part of the servers in our cluster. I know our Free Company and me specifically has been the cause of a bunch of recent transfer and new character creation activity on our server, and I don’t really see that as something that is going to change. I love our folks, and they have been so amazingly helpful to the new people starting.

When someone asks for a dungeon, it seems like people stumble over themselves ready to help them out. At one point earlier this weekend I was going to DPS one of these dungeons, until another member who was working on their first character said they could use it too. I bowed out of the run to let the folks able to get experience that really matters get in on the fun. That seems to be the Final Fantasy way, quietly and unassumingly… being awesome. I mean at this point Final Fantasy is the second most popular MMORPG of all time… and it just kind of happened without folks really realizing it. Having over four million active accounts is a pretty great feat in this world where supposedly Wildstar didn’t even sell a million boxes at launch. Sure the expansion was pushed back a little further than I would have liked it, but I love the fact that there is content planned to cover that gap. Now that I am embarking on the madness that is crafting, I am also admittedly looking forward to having more time to work up crafters before the expansion hits.

#FFXIV #Mining #Cactuar

Heavensward Hype

March 8, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 47 – Scrabble is for Olds

Last night is another case of us sitting down, saying we had nothing to talk about… and then ending up talking for an hour and a half about everything imaginable. We talked about Ashgar and the insanity he is currently going through working on his Relic Novus in Final Fantasy XIV. We talked my recent journey back into Bravely Default and how that game requires a certain measure of degenerate play to defeat encounters after a certain point. We talk about Tam’s brush with near death as he decides that no one should ever be bit by a Black Widow spider because it hurts like hell. I talk about my experiences in Blackrock Foundry and the World of Warcraft selfie toy filling up my twitter feed. I talk about hitting level 80 on my first character in Guild Wars 2… and how empty it feels since the last 15 levels or so were essentially given to me for logging in daily.

Our longest discussion however that spawned the quote that I am using for the title of this show was about board games and miniature gaming. We talk about “long” board games, those taking several hours to play out… and the frustration of having to devote that much time to a game you are essentially “behind the curve” in the entire time. We talk about games that require less time to get into and play, and that can be played for a number of times in a single evening. This also spawns a discussion into miniature gaming talking about the problems with Warmachine and Warhammer 40k contrasted with some of the strengths of Infinity. As always it is a long rambling discussion between a bunch of friends, and since you apparently like that as AggroChat listeners… then this should be a banner episode.

Heavensward Hype

Yesterday was a pretty huge day for Final Fantasy XIV in that Yoshi P was at Pax East giving a presentation on the upcoming expansion. Thankfully it was live streamed to the internet, and you can check out the entire presentation from yesterday over on their twitch video on demand page. Honestly at first I thought it was going to be a disappointing repeat of all of the information that had come out of the Tokyo Game Show back in December. The show started with essentially revealing the same information about the Au Ra race and the three new classes that happened during that show. However quickly it segwayed into showing us things like the amazing level 60 class sets. The above image is that of the Warrior set, and while I still intend to play Dark Knight as my main… I have to say I will be rapidly leveling Warrior as well. Instead of breaking rocks with axes… they seem to have just skipped a step and made the axe itself out of a rock.

Since this is essentially the expansion of the Dragoon… you would expect the level 60 class armor to be amazing. As the above image shows it was well worth the wait. My biggest hope is that they don’t have the female “belly hole” problem that the earlier dragoon armor had. I have to say though that I will continue poking things with a spear if for no reason other than the collect this gear. As usual I was not quite so amped about the caster sets, but then again I never really am. I have no clue what is going on with the Black Mage set , at least the current set is something I would happily wear. This set is a bit more “demon lady gaga” than anything else I can think of. If you want to check out all of the new class armors you should hit up this youtube video that shows each set in action. I am happy that maybe just maybe I will finally have a Bard set that I am not ashamed to wear.

Not a Spring Release

The biggest news to come out of yesterday is a firm and concrete release date for the first Final Fantasy XIV expansion… Heavensward. Within the next few weeks they are apparently releasing a brand new benchmark application to allow us to test out the Direct X 11 changes, and play with all of the racial customization options on the Au Ra. If this works like the previous benchmark it should allow us to export our saved characters and then import them into our actual game client. On March 16th the pre-orders will open and like usual the physical collectors edition is going to have some sort of a big dragon statute pack in. Apparently earlier they had announced that we would be getting a flying dragon mount as part of the collectors edition as well, which in truth are the type of rewards I care a bout. All of this time we had heard “spring 2015” for the release date, but it turns out that the game will be launching on June 23rd with early access starting June 19th… so not spring but summer.

It turns out that they apparently did have a May date in mind for the launch, and they tried to make it. However as Yoshi P apologized they wanted to make sure they had a very polished product for launch. I for one support pushing back by a few weeks to make sure we have a really polished game, because really… the first expansion is a crucial time for any game. I want to make sure they are able to keep this quiet momentum they seem to have going into the new content. That said we also still have one full major patch waiting in the wings, and I am not sure there would have been enough time for us to really get to complete that content before the expansion anyways. I feel like that is the prime difference here as there is with other expansions. Most expansions land at the tail end of a six month or longer lull with no new content. In the case of Warlords of Draenor it was at the end of a 16 month lull… even with the impending expansion… they still have content releases planned up to the moment 3.0 launches. So in the mean time I will be working on my crafting… because it sounds like we are going to need a team of crafters to complete our free company airship.

The Bunny Incident

March 7, 2015 by Belghast

I have a pretty bad habit of wanting to spawn a feature on my blog and then having it die after a few posts. Anyone remember Steampowered Sundays for example? That one I still want to get back to eventually, but with the whole editing and posting of aggrochat often times spilling over into Sunday morning I simply ran out of available time there. All of this said the other day I was working on providing some information for Sypster on a feature he is working on. It got me thinking how many tall tales from the mmoverse I have in me. There are many stories that at the time were frustrating but become more humorous through the lens of nostalgia. I think we as gamers all have thousands of such tales in us, and with this new feature my goal is to try and devote some time to committing these to paper. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but one that is fun to wallow in every now and then.

The Bunny Incident

Wrath of the Lich King was both an amazing and an extremely frustrating expansion for my raid. We had some of our greatest moments, but also some of our most frustrating experiences. All of which lead me to be a very grumpy person a good deal of the time. Most of you know me as the generally positive person that I portray on my blog and through social media. This is all an act, or at least it was when I first embarked upon the journey. By nature I can be pretty cynical and pessimistic, and it is a sheer act of will that I fight this every day striving to find the silver lining in every cloud. I spent a good deal of time “faking it until I made it” as it were, and for the most part it worked. It helped to pull me out of one of the greatest funks in my life. Today I am going to uncork the events of what lives in infamy within the guild has come to call “the bunny incident”.

When Wrath launched we hit it by storm and our twenty five man completely wrecked Naxxramas 2.0. We thought we were awesome… but the problem was that the content was way easier than we were used to. As such our raid got soft and too used to being able to walk into the zone and destroy everything around us. So when Ulduar launched… it was like a harsh reality check. Everything about the raid was infinitely harder, and required every single player to pay attention and perform to the best of their ability. This was not helped by the fact that during this time we had a lot of politics in the decisions behind our raid composition. We had a number of situations where we had one extremely highly performing raid member, tied to a piece of dead weight… that we were forced to drag along with us in order to get the high performing member.

The Bad Times

Additionally during Ulduar we went through a revolving door of tanks, making it a constant struggle to try and teach a third tank that was drastically undergeared how to survive the completely silly amount of damage that the encounters in Ulduar were heaping upon us. None of this made for particularly happy times for me. When the going got tough… people started flaking out and simply not attending. There were many nights that people would be available for the farmed content, but when it came to a progression night full of wipes we were barely able to scrape together twenty five people. It seemed like every step forward, caused us to take a giant leap backwards. We spent a lot of time during this period wiping to content we had already had on farm because we lacked the resources to really keep going.

We did what any raid would do… and went into overdrive trying to recruit solid people to bolster our waning numbers. With this came a clash of cultures, because quite honestly we were a much more forgiving raid than most. This caused some of our new recruits to not really take things as seriously as they should. At times it felt like trying to teach a kindergarten classroom how to file their yearly tax returns… but we mostly struggled through at the cost of my own sanity. We had stabilized and were pushing forward, and one night we were making some very serious progress on Kologarn. In fact I would say the mood in the raid was pretty jolly as folks were finally starting to get how they needed to move, and when we needed to break people out of the hands. I felt pretty confident that we would be able to beat the boss that night.

The Event

I believe it was Thalen that had just finished delivering some advise to tweak things up a bit… and I in my normal antsy fashion was pacing back and forth asking if I could pull yet. I tend to get super impatient before a pull, because I pump myself up for the fight and get the adrenaline coursing… and then have to do something with the nervous energy until go time. I had just started running in when it happened. On of our players decided it would be funny to use the the Blossoming Branch on me as I ran in, turning me into a bunny. The problem is while in bunny form you can take no actions, and I could not click it off in time before Kologarn destroyed me, and subsequently wiped the raid. Looking back upon it now… it is kind of funny, but at the time I was not amused at all.

I don’t really know what I said exactly, in some way I almost blacked out during the event. All I do know is that I apparently proceeded to curse and rant on voice chat for a good ten minutes about what just happened unleashing all of the pent up frustrations I had about the raid group, the lack of effort some individuals were putting into it, and wrapping it all up in a neat rage fueled bow. I do remember saying that I would be going through the logs line by line after the raid to find out who it was that did it, and they would no longer be welcome in our raid from that point on. I think I went on to say that I would go so far as to tell the other raid leaders about the incident, because at that time in our servers history… pretty much all of the raid leaders knew each other and talked regularly. When you got blacklisted by one, you often times got blacklisted by all of them.

The Coming Down

While the guy who did it did not fess up during the heat of the moment… he did come to me later and apologize. He went so far as to mail every person in the raid some gold for the repair bill he caused. He truly felt sorry for doing it, and we didn’t end up kicking him from the raid, or anything severe. Basically this was the moment I realized that I needed to change something, because I was feeling entirely too much stress and frustration over a game. I apparently scarred some of the raid members for life, and for the rest of that expansion it was like they were gunshy that “Angry Bel” would come out again. It is still talked about in our guild, as a sort of cautionary tale… like “Don’t make Bel mad, you won’t like him when he’s angry” sort of thing. Its all in good fun now, but I know at the time I quite literally scared some of our members.

I tried really hard to take less of a direct role with some of the raid decisions. This was the era when I realized that I could not be both the friendly happy guild master everyone knew.. and be the raid leader that everyone needed at the same time. I think this was really the beginning of the end with me and World of Warcraft, but I ultimately did not leave until Cataclysm. I kept changing things up trying to keep the game viable. During Crusaders Coliseum for example I switched from Warrior main to Death Knight main, but regardless of what I did there was still a pool of bitterness there. This has been the event I think of every time I consider leading a raid again. Ultimately we have to know the limits, and know what will happen to us deep down inside when we push those limits too far. Now I am happy to be the cruise director of the guilds I am part of, and the man with the recruitment van. I strive on a daily basis to remain the “Happy Bel” folks have come to appreciate and keep the “angry wrathful god of vengeance” locked up deep inside.

Multigaming

March 5, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Maxis

I technically entered the PC gaming world significantly later than many of my peers. My family did not get a PC Compatible until 1992 when we took home a 386×16 from Sears and Roebuck with a colossal two full megs of ram. The very first game that I purchased for it was a copy of Sim City. There was just something about the idea of building my own town that appealed to me. Everything about the game was a bit cludgy including the black text on red note card that served as copy protection… but quite honestly I did not care. I was getting to build a world on screen and my enjoyment soared once I learned that I could put in a cheat and simply build freely without rules. That right there was the great possibility for Sim City, that you could color outside the lines and create some really interesting stuff in the process.

Yesterday the news broke that Electronic Arts has shuttered the Maxis Emeryville studio that was the birthplace of the various Sim franchise games that we all loved. I will admit that the last version of Sim City was the only version that I did not purchase at release. Quite honestly I still have not purchased it, because it felt too icky. Initially I set back watching as friends got frustrated with the online only functionality, and ultimately had my nose turned up at the Sims-like piecemeal DLC bonanza that started. What made Sim City so great was that it was this toolbox for us to design our own cities of the future… but when you start attaching real world price tags to those cities, it just feels wrong. Electronic Arts clearly knows what they are doing, as they still manage to turn a profit in spite of all the various heinous activities they have done in the past. I just find it deeply saddening that yet another “classic” studio has in essence been destroyed by them. They now get to party with the other dead studios like Origin Systems, Westwood, Bullfrog… and I feel like I am missing a few names from the list.

Capping Poetics

Right now I am on a bit of a mission in Final Fantasy XIV. With the current access to both Carboncoat and Carbontwine through the weekly quest, I have been trying to do everything I can to get my poetics gear quickly. I freely admit I was doing fairly good at making sure I hit the poetics cap every single week, until the launch of Warlords of Draenor. After that I fell off the deep end and only really returned to playing Final Fantasy XIV on a nightly basis after the 2.5 patch. As such my poetics gear is woefully behind where it should be had I been as diligent as I could have been. Thankfully this just means that I am essentially in the same boat as the rest of our free company. So now I am trying to at the very least get in a single expert roulette each day. Last night I spent my night running several different kinds of roulettes to try and make up for lost time seeing as I didn’t actually get any on Tuesday.

One would think that doing the highest level repeatable content in the game would mean that I would run into some assholes. I know Kodra ran into a single elitist player from the Death and Taxes guild the other night, but in truth most of my interactions have been largely positive. In Keeper of the Lake that run went as smoothly as I could have possibly imagined, with players actively conversing and talking about what needs to be done. Then I got Snowcloak and the moment we zoned in, a player said that it was their first time there. As such I took up the role of giving them the information that they need to be able to complete the fights successfully. We had a single wipe from the tank over pulling, but no one got grumpy and we just kept pushing forward. It is nights like last night that make me realize what a rare community Final Fantasy XIV really has.

Multigaming

The other day we came to the realization that our Free Company has been back playing Final Fantasy XIV for around seven months. I think I already commented on this being some what of a record for us, with quite honestly our group rarely sticking in one place for more than a couple of months at a time. We are very rarely one month players, but by the same token when a new game comes out we rarely make it past the three month marker. In truth Final Fantasy XIV represents one of the longest uninterrupted stretches of playing any game ever for me. I played World of Warcraft for about seven years without pause, Everquest for 3, and Dark Age of Camelot for 2. As such Final Fantasy XIV sits as fourth place already in this hierarchy of longevity. I think the reason why it is working so well this time is the fact that I am still playing other games at the same time, and because of this Final Fantasy XIV feels like a constantly fresh experience.

For years I have been enthralled by the schedule that Sypster keeps with his gaming, because he is the only person that I know who has quite literally a specific game that he plays on a given day of the week. The other day I realized that maybe this is precisely why this current volley of gaming has been so successful. I have a very distinct schedule, I just didn’t realize it until I started thinking about my various in game commitments. On Tuesday and Thursday for example I am raiding in World of Warcraft, so as such I tend to devote those days entirely to that game regardless of what else I might be playing. Monday and recently Saturday before we record our podcast we have been raiding in Final Fantasy XIV so those days naturally become something that I log in and devote my entire energy to that game. Everything else is pretty variable, but I tend to mix in at least a little Guild Wars 2 daily so I can get the login bonuses, and lately quite a bit of Sky Saga. So ultimately my schedule seems to have enough structure to keep me focused, but enough freedom to know that I am only a few days away from having a more freeform night of gaming. It seems to work for me, and I am hoping that means I have finally stabilized in my gaming habits… as quite honestly I had gotten tired of jumping from game to game every two to three months.