MMORPG Archives - Page 298 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

So Many Feels

November 9, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode #30

I still cannot fathom that we have made it thirty episodes into our podcast and are still apparently going strong. Technically it is 31 weeks since we started this adventure, because we missed one week for various sundry reasons. What shocks me the most is that we still have listeners and that it seems like we keep picking up new ones along the way. I feel Sally Field screaming “You Like Me, You Really Like Me!” but in this case its the Us that is liked not necessarily me. AggroChat is really about pushing record on the type of conversations we have always had over voice chat on a near nightly basis. We are unscripted and unprepared and yet still seem to never had a drought of things to discuss.

This week we go through a whirlwind of topics including: Magic the Gathering Online, Infinity Minatures Game, Dawngate being cancelled, Blizzcon, Overwatch, and the constant frustration over Gnomes being the butt of every joke. I think we were all caught off guard by the news surrounding Overwatch. If you remember several weeks back we speculated as to what might be announced, and while we brought up an FPS we just as quickly dismissed that ideal. The FPS genre is pretty stagnant so I didn’t see much room where Blizzard could improve upon it. Here is hoping this is not the case because the gameplay footage I have seen has me absolutely intrigued. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory was my favorite competitive shooter, and here is hoping that they bring this same level of detail and strategy to the maps. Also hoping that by some token I can manage to score a beta invite.

So Many Feels

If you recall yesterday I talked about the “Blizzcon Spirit” and how that this year I had not really felt it. Well last night it struck with a vengeance. My friend Syl mentioned the Looking For Group documentary and how good it was over twitter. I had already planned on watching it at some point, because I am a sucker for documentaries… especially fan produced ones. I have to say it is so amazingly good, and I am glad that something like that exists. The negative is I am absolutely overwhelmed with feels about Blizzard, World of Warcraft and the community surrounding it. Had it not been super late last night I probably would have logged into the game the moment the documentary had finished if for no reason other than to visit my characters. The documentary is like some crazy aphrodisiac that makes you love World of Warcraft again. One viewing and you will be wanting to scream “For The Alliance!” or horde if that is your persuasion.

Then the reality sets in… that all the same problems I have had with the game, and the players and just years of history… are all still there. If I could return to a snapshot in time, when we were still raiding Icecrown Citadel as the Duranub Raiding Compny… I would do it in a heartbeat. If I could return to a period in time when we were fighting to clear Ahn’Qiraj as the Late Night Raiders… I would also do that in a heartbeat. The problem is there are these epic vignettes of time where it would be amazing to return to and experience all the love and wonderment that existed in that little vacuum. Sad thing is none of those things exist… time happened, years of guild, server and raid drama happened. Folks don’t just stand still in one place, they evolve and move on with their lives.

Glory Days Revisited

When I log back into World of Warcraft amped up on Nostalgia… I feel just like that once upon a time Quarterback reliving their big homecoming win. That world that was meaningful to me and the people that I fought to protect and keep moving towards a goal… just don’t exist any longer, or at least they don’t exist in the same combination that they once did. I have tried to return to the game on two different times and rally the troops to rekindle the spirit that once made my guild a great place to be. Each time I end up frustrated that no one is wanting to work towards those ends with me. People are happy to exist in the comfortable place they have carved out once the epic nature of the game died away. The glory days really can’t be relived, at least not in the same way.

So here I stand wondering what exactly I will do. I know there is no going back, but part of me wishes there was. I have a paid subscription through December, and a fully paid expansion because they allowed me to order it a year ago when I was actually amped up about World of Warcraft once more. I have no idea if I will attempt to log in come release day, and start playing through the new content. One of the things about being open to change, means you can’t fully predict what you will do when a different set of stimulus is applied. I think my time leading the Warcraft House Stalwart is over, and it is time for them to find new leadership that can make them great again. That doesn’t preclude me from occasionally playing the role of war hero and popping my head in from time to time.

Feels

Since this post is in large part about feelings, and me struggling with them… I thought it was fitting to state that while often times frustrating… I am glad that I have them. It would suck to go through life with the inability to surrender to your emotions and get caught up in a moment. While society has attempted to teach me that it is somehow “unmanly” to feel emotion, and moreso be swayed by them… for whatever reason this indoctrination never actually took. I feel no shame in choking back tears during certain moments of a lot of movies. There is that moment where you just can’t help yourself, and that story of whatever you are watching has peeled back your layers of defense and landed a blow to your inner core. I embrace that I can empathize with people I have never met, and care even more deeply about them that they will likely ever realize. While it is often cool to be aloof and uncaring about things… I like to care, I like to know I am making a difference. So today I am thankful that I was raised with compassion and the ability to grant that same compassion to others.

Great Time to Start

November 7, 2014 by Belghast

Good Time to Return

This weekend is going to be a huge hyped filled occasion, and twitter will be full of news trickling out of Blizzcon from the stable of Blizzard games. However if you are not enthralled by that I have something to entertain you as well. With not surprising timing, Square Enix has announced that this weekend that officially started at midnight PST all players who have ever played Final Fantasy XIV will be able to return and play for free until midnight PST on the 10th. This means if you have the client already you just have to patch it up, if you do not have the client however thankfully Square Enix makes that relatively easy to find as well. I literally just typed in “Final Fantasy XIV Client” and was taken directly to the easy to find download link. Additionally if you are a Steam user, you can download a “demo” of the game which should download the full client as well.

For the my own purposes and the purpose of linking to friends I have maintained a playlist on my youtube account that contains each of the major patch trailers. Square does an amazing job of highlighting all of the content that they add into the game during these trailers, and some of them are over ten minutes long showing off new features. It has been two weeks now since the release of the 2.4 patch that added in a round of new stuff including the brand new Rogue class and Ninja job. This admittedly has thrown the world out of whack a bit, and be warned that DPS queues in the duty finder are a bit longer than normal… however this appears to be coming down rapidly as folks finish leveling their rogues and start playing the endgame. The positive is that this has been a slow trickle and the server is still super active with FATEs actually viable in practically every zone. This is also booned a bit by the improved Atma drop rates, making folks willing to work on Atma weapons for alts. If you haven’t played in awhile… none of what I just said probably made much sense… but just know that these are good things.

Great Time To Start

If you have never played Final Fantasy XIV before, it is now the perfect time to start as well. For starters there has been a 14 day trial system in place for a few months now, allowing you to get in and play for free. If you prefer to go through steam I believe clicking the demo option will do the same thing… but I am not sure how the billing works through steam. In theory everything has to go through the Mogstation, which admittedly the worst part of playing any Square Enix game is dealing with their extremely confusing account management system. The reason why it is such a great time to start is that right now until November 12th, Steam has the complete Final Fantasy XIV game for half off. That means the normal version is only $12.49 and the Collectors Edition that comes with a bunch of spiffy stuff including the adorable Fat Chocobo mount among other things is only $22.49. This seems like an absolutely insane deal, and I may have ninja gifted the game to a few people yesterday as a result.

One thing of note, in the world gone mad with F2P games… this is a traditional subscription model. One interesting twist however is that there is something called an “Entry” subscription that is $12.99 a month and allows you to play a single character per server. In truth this tends to be the sweet spot for most people, as you really only need one character in the game period. The job system allows you to swap back and forth between many roles at will, allowing that one character to do damned near everything there is in the game. For example right now my character Belghast Sternblade is a 50 marauder, 50 gladiator, 50 archer, 50 lancer, 40 conjurer, 33 pugilist, 26 thaumaturge, 19 arcanist, 15 rogue and 35 miner. So for awhile I have considered dialing back to the one character account because the likelihood that I will ever care about another character on my server is supremely unlikely.

Better For Not Being Free To Play

Yesterday I had a bunch of folks say essentially the same thing. “I would be excited if this was free to play”, which frustrates me a little bit… but I can see saying it. There are some games that free to play would ruin, because in truth the “free” aspect of that name is generally a bold faced lie. Sure there is some stuff you can do for free, but at the end of the day everyone needs to make money to keep their doors open. As I have watched games go f2p, I have watched two things happen. Either they greatly slow down the pace of content releases, or they start erecting paid walls between you and that content. In truth ONE of the two has to happen or quite frankly the companies end up going out of business. The once lightning pace that content dropped for Rift players feels like it has slowed to a trickle. Then you have games like Star Wars the Old Republic where each and every thing in the game has some price tag associated with it.

The thing that has impressed me the most with Final Fantasy XIV is the pace at which they have released content over the last year, and more so than that the sheer volume of content that gets released. Roughly once a quarter they release a new major patch, and roughly once a month they release a minor patch… that is not just bug fixes but serious new system improvements. For example… these are the 2.35 patch notes… that are several pages long full of new systems and usability improvements. When they add content they add it not just for the highest end players, but they trickle it through all play styles. There are new max level dungeons, new raids, new crafting recipes and materials to go find, as well as a continuation of the really awesome storyline that is woven through the game. They seem to care about all of the different playstyles that make up their community, and are wanting to give each of them a reason to keep logging in and playing. Quite frankly… free to play and having to worry about getting enough money to survive would absolutely tarnish the spirit of this game and its community.

Cactuar Server Community

I figured this was a good bookend to the post I made above. Today I am going to talk about something probably strange to be thankful for, but I am going to anyways. I am extremely Thankful for the existence of the Cactuar Server community and how awesome the people there are. Once upon a time I was deeply connected to most of the server communities I was part of when I played games. I was a huge supporter of Gaheris in Dark Age of Camelot and Xegony in Everquest… so it was not strange when I landed in World of Warcraft to get involved with the Argent Dawn community as well. The problem is that Argent Dawn broke my heart, the longer I played on it. During those heady days after release we had a vibrant and thriving community, full of lots of interesting groups of people more than willing to work together towards larger goals. Argent Dawn was a hotbed of non-guild based raiding and it was awesome. Over time, especially with the release of Cataclysm… this all changed and the old guard of players that were community focused slowly drifted off into the nether.

It was hard to watch the Argent Dawn community fall apart, so as I played other games I really never took the time to dip my toes into the larger server. I stayed fairly insular and only really cared about my own guild and its well being. This changed this summer when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV. I think in part it is because when I first renewed my account, I was the only one to do so for a few weeks. This meant I no longer had my life support system of known good players to run dungeons with, and was forced to get out and meet people in the community. I am so thankful that I did because I have met some amazing people on this server and found it to be a throwback to a simpler time when people generally were nice to each other. I’ve embraced our community whole heartedly and while it is not terribly well used yet… I’ve built a nook for the community and will be trying to get folks using it over the coming weeks. So today I am thankful for finding the Cactuar community, because it has revitalized my faith that servers are a thing that can be super important to my game playing experience.

#FFXIV #Cactuar #MonthOfThankfulness

Littlest Odin

November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 by Belghast

Flirting with Viral

Last night when I got home I had a message waiting on me, wanting to know if I had talked to a certain blogger. At which point I gave my perspective, that I thought they were trying to keep a fairly low profile lately. This started the gears in my head working, thinking about the fine line each of us walks each day when we post. I admit that I live in a small amount of fear of one of my posts ending up going viral for some reason. I mean ultimately as a blogger you want readers, but there is a limit to that. Right now I have a dedicated group of a couple hundred regular readers and this feels comfortable. It feels like I group I could reasonably have a conversation with, and remember the names and faces of each of them. I write some fairly personal posts, and this feels like a small enough community to share that sort of intimate details with.

The problem is there have been a few of my posts that have for one reason or another gotten picked up in a much larger sphere of influence. When this happens I find the whole experience stressful. While it is cool to suddenly see your readership spike, at the same time personally I feel almost invaded. Like this group of people that are not “my” people are trampling my lawn and ruining the flower beds. The group of readers that I have now feels organic, and they have one by one found my blog for their own personal reasons. Having a huge influx of people brings with it wholly different ideas of what community means, and what proper interaction between a blogger and reader is. There were a few posts of mine that got picked up by WoW Insider back when this was for the most part a WoW blog… and it was as though the Mongol Horde was knocking on my front door step.

It is awesome to feel like your blog is a popular thing… but at the same time I think most of us live in fear of our side project getting too big. That someday something will happen to cause it to grow out of control and develop a life of its own, rather than this thing that we have fought hard to develop in just a certain way. With the recent strife in the gaming community, I admit I have been more afraid of my blog suddenly being found by the “unwashed masses”. I am still uncertain if I was the target of a DDoS a few weeks back, because it seemed like only my sites on the provider were actually effected. We live in this climate where having a differing opinion to that of the riot mob has serious consequences, and that doesn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies. Still however i put myself out here every morning, hoping that the right people will see this… and the wrong people will get bored before finishing the first paragraph of one of my posts.

Littlest Odin

A few nights ago I happened to be paying attention to chat at exactly the right moment, when through one of my many social Linkshells I saw a call that Odin had spawned in South Shroud. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Odin is one of the coolest primal forces to have existed in the Final Fantasy universe. In each incarnation there is generally the mechanic that if you take too long in attempting to defeat him he will cast Zantetsuken and destroy the entire party in a single attack. Zantetsuken of course is the name of his sword which apparently roughly translates to “Sword of Vengence”. The Final Fantasy XIV incarnation is just as painful, and involves him casting massive area of effect abilities that are extremely hard to get out of, and in some cases can in fact one-shot the player. When Odin spawns it is as part of a fate, and players fight desperately in this chaotic mess to generate enough threat to qualify for Gold level participation.

If you participate at all in the fight you get an item called Odin’s Mantle, and if you manage to get gold you end up getting five of them at once. Once you have collected five, either through getting Gold once or something else multiple times you can take them to Revenants Toll in Mor Dhona and trade them for some interesting stuff. The king prize at least as far as I am concerned is Zantetsuken itself, which while no longer that good of a weapon is still an amazing item for the purpose of glamouring onto other items. Another really popular item is Slepnir’s barding, that makes your Chocobo look like Odin’s mount Slepnir. However since I actually picked up Slepnir itself from the cash shop, that was no longer a big deal to me. So this time around I picked up Hjalmr aka Odin’s trademark helm. In honor of the new look I dyed my Soldiery chest black to blend things together a bit better.

When the Dark Knight becomes a reality, I am really hoping that they release a two handed version of Zantetsuken that I can then glamour onto my weapon. Even though I am wielding an axe, I still think I make a pretty badass tiny Odin. The funny thing a bout this is that Odin actually spawns as the race of the person that landed the last killing blow. So when I fought him the other night in South Shroud, he had actually spawned in Lalafell form. Nothing says awesome like a tiny bundle of death oneshotting players left and right. Both Odin and Behemoth are really cool experiences, and while I hate that I am constantly missing them… there is something about the extremely slow respawn timers that gives them a sense of mystique. I am not sure what the actual timer is, but at least as a player it seems to be several days. In any case it is the sort of thing that I drop whatever I am doing to join in the fun… or will at least until I have gotten all of the shiny baubles that are available to win.

Dungeons with Friends

I have always liked to tank for my friends, but for whatever reason in Final Fantasy XIV I have always found the experience to be a bit stressful. I am not sure if it was just lack of confidence in my abilities, or still getting used to the subtle differences of the way tanking works in this game… but for whatever reason I have tended to prefer dpsing in dungeons and letting my friend Ash take the tanking lead. However over the course of the last few months I have been “feeling my wheaties” and with the release of brand new content I find myself actually preferring to tank. I guess this is a good thing since Ash right now is in the middle of a move and will be without internet for an undetermined amount of time. Additionally for the longest time I DPS’d in part because he had no “non-tank” jobs to play, and since I had multiple dps we could pick and choose whatever we needed the most. That however has changed as he now has a monk available, and it is allowing me to climb back into the tanking seat.

As such I have spent a lot of time lately tanking the new expert dungeons of Snowcloak, Sastasha Hard, and Qarn Hard. In fact I am starting to get requests from outside of the guild to tank for people. Last night I finally accepted one of these after turning them down for various completely legitimate reasons. I felt horrible for having to keep declining because I was generally either already spoken for by the guild, or in the process of trying to wind down enough to log out for the night. I have to say I had a blast tanking for folks that I am less familiar with, and maybe just maybe I will gather up the courage to start tanking for complete strangers as well. I am not sure what has changed but upon getting my 110 weapon threat generation seems to no longer be an issue. The encounters just stay glued to me, which allows me to have more freedom and less watching of “bejeweled” making sure someone doesn’t get eaten by a stray mob. In any case that sense of unease I had while tanking seems to be dissipating and I am enjoying myself more each time we run something.

My Readers

I would like to think that even if I had no readers at all that I would keep doing what I am doing on a daily basis. Most of the time I write my posts like I am talking to myself, but in truth it is really helpful to know that I have people listening on the other end of the line. I have always been impressed with my readers, at how thoughtful and kind they are. The moment I first knew I had a dedicated audience, was shortly after I had started my blogging each day thing. For whatever reason I did not get a chance to write my post that morning like usual, and I had intended to write it over lunch. That morning I was deluged with folks asking me if I was okay, and making sure everything was alright. They were concerned when they did not see a post waiting there for them when they did their normal crawl of blogs. I’ve always tried to respect my audience and keep my blog a mostly positive influence in their lives. Here is hoping that I can continue to do this, but please know how much it means to me that you all are dedicated to taking this journey with me.

A New Lance

November 4, 2014 by Belghast

Curiosity Abated

I ended up getting into a conversation yesterday based on my post regarding the longevity I have played Final Fantasy XIV. Like I said yesterday I have been back in Eorzea since July so this will be going on four months… which for me in my recent MMO history is a really long time to be playing any one thing. I have officially played Final Fantasy XIV longer in this one stretch than I did both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar combined if you just count time spent playing the production clients. This got me thinking and my friend as well… what my longest played games might be. So this morning I turned to Raptr, which I have always just left running in the background quietly logging time spent in whatever game I happened to be playing. When you do this you end up with some unexpected results.

For the purpose of this chart I ignored anything with less than 100 hours played, which it turns out is a surprising number of MMOs including Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2 and a few others. The fact that almost 40% of my time spent playing MMOs has been in World of Warcraft was not a huge shocker, considering I played that game for roughly 7 years without taking much of a pause. The fact that Rift weighs in at number two is also not a huge shock, considering I have played it off and on since release. What did surprise me is that I fully expected Everquest 2 to be in third place, as it is one of those titles I keep cycling back to periodically. I guess the thing is that I don’t end up playing it for terribly long before the combat system ends up frustrating me and I move in. In the year it has been out Final Fantasy XIV has shot to the number three spot in total time spent in an MMO with 536 hours. If nothing else I feel like that is pretty telling of just how much I am enjoying this game.

The last revelation is that I found it interesting that I spent roughly the same amount of time in Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars the Old Republic and Wildstar. Wildstar was the lowest of the 100 hour plus club weighing in at only 122 hours. Elder Scrolls Online was the highest with 163 hours, but were we able to include the year I spent testing that game I would have probably overtaken Everquest 2 at least. With Star Wars the Old Republic I could have sworn I spent more than 127 hours playing the game, so it really makes Wildstar and SWTOR almost exactly the same… which is strange considering that I never got a character to maximum level in Wildstar, but managed to level three in SWTOR. I guess the content grind really was that much faster in SWTOR than I realized. In any case it is interesting to look at the data and see where your time has been spent. Raptr by no means is an exact science, but I have it running on both my desktop and my laptop so in theory the data should be relatively complete.

A New Lance

For some time now I have focused on my Warrior job in Final Fantasy XIV as my main. I figured it was the one that I needed to be geared the most since I was going to end up tanking for my free company when we raided. However since launch I have also really liked playing a Dragoon, and for the purpose of Duty Roulette I almost always queue as DPS. Ages ago I got all of my jobs that I have at 50 to ilevel 90 so that they would be viable doing pretty much anything I cared to dip my toe into. However before we started contemplating raiding, I picked up a handful of pieces out of Syrcus Tower on my Dragoon placing him slightly ahead of the pack. Since the unlocking of loot in Syrcus I have been spending most of my time there trying to get him gear. Right now I still figure that most of my soldiery needs to go to finishing getting the warrior to ilevel 110 or better, however at 108 I am still leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of my guildies.

Factoring that in I figured I could splurge a little on my own wants for awhile. When playing any class my focus has generally been on getting a new weapon. It always feels like the most significant improvement, because it is that object that is most visually noticeable when you swap out a single slot. As a result it has annoyed me for some time that I still had my Gae Bolg Zenith weapon on my Dragoon. I could after all start the Atma grind, and the Animus book grind… but really in the grand scheme of things I do not have the money to get through the Novus step… so while I want to finish these for the sake of finishing them, it is not exactly a pathway to a better weapon for me. With the uncapping of Syrcus Tower it means that we have ready access to Unidentified Allagan Tomestones, the precursor step for getting the Weathered(100) and eventually Unweathered(110) weapons. So while I started out running ST over the last few days to pick up level 100 gear for my Dragoon I have ended up essentially grinding out one of the weapons.

ffxiv 2014-11-03 22-25-12-711 Last night I finished my grind to 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery and as you can see in the above screenshot I am the proud wielder of a shiny new Liberator lance. Unfortunately this happened like moments before bedtime for me, and I never really got to try it out. So tonight my plan is to run a quick Syrcus or Labyrinth to see how good it feels to have bumped up 20 levels in weapon ilevel. When I got my 110 axe on my Warrior, it was a massive and immediately noticeable difference, and I am hoping it will feel the same on my Dragoon. After dumping this 1300 “bookrocks” on a weapon, I will now return to gathering them up for the purpose of finishing out my set of Soldiery gear. That means I will need a ton of Sands of Time however to get those pieces up to 110 ilevel, which means I will still be running a truly silly amount of Syrcus Tower. In the grand scheme of things though I enjoy running it. I never see it as a grind, because it still feels very epic to me. I feel about ST the way I feel about various WoW raids that I used to solo for fun. It feels like I am doing something epic and important, even though it is content that is very much “on farm”.

This morning I am going to get by with just a two section blog post. Each of those sections took awhile to write so I figure it all shakes out in the end. This morning for my Month of Thankfulness post I figured I would talk about something fairly unlikely. Yesterday at work I had my annual performance review, and even though I am in many ways the pocket expert on so many systems we have… it is still a process that I find stressful. I think most sane and rational people have these moments where they feel like they are a giant fraud, and these seem to hit me just before I go into my yearly performance review. Yesterday was the same as every year, lots of anxiety for no reason. Once again I had a fairly glowing review, but I am kinda just beating around the bush here.

What I am thankful for is my boss. When I started out in my current position my little sub group got passed around like a hot potato. At one point I had been under six different managers, four directors and three CIOs… and had only been with the company for two years. Then my current boss took the position. I have to say when he took over I was suspicious, because I had never seen him in a managerial light, however he has done an amazing job. I really respect the focus he has placed on making our environment not only productive, but a very fun place to be. Each of us has our own “kitch” and for the most part he supports it all. It is the first time since my very first job… that I felt like I had a work family. This is also the first group I have ever willfully attended the Christmas Party for… and we do all sorts of outside activities like most recently going to the RiffTrax showings. So this today I am thankful for the effect he has had on improving how I think about my job, and the fact that for the most part I look forward to going into work each day and seeing my team mates. Sure each of the members of our team is a self starter, but it is his focus on morale that has made the entire thing work.