MMORPG

Housing Savage Defeated

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Those who have been around the blog for a while might know that I have been trying to get a house in Final Fantasy XIV for quite a while. When I returned to the game in 2021, I gathered a decent holding of gil and got the itch to try and purchase a house. This is when I found out about the sorry state of affairs that was the housing system at that point. Essentially at any given time, there might be one or two plots available on the entire server, and they would come available at a random time. So you were forced to sit there clicking the placard hoping that you would be lucky enough to time it just perfectly and get the property before the others also swarming the plot had a chance to purchase. Shocking to no one… it was a time rife with botters and those of us who were not botting would do all sorts of things to try and trick them into doing dumb things.

With Patch 6.1 this changed significantly and introduced the Housing Lottery system. Essentially every nine days the game would go through a cycle of placing bids and accepting results. If you wanted to buy property you would find an open plot during the bidding period, and place down your earnest money in escrow by clicking on the placard of that property. Then it was simply a waiting game to see if you lucked into winning the property. For the last year, I have been riding the cycle of bid and results periods, logging in to go plot shopping and then logging in on results day to get disappointed that I did not get yet another property. I think maybe I missed a single bid period because I was just too disheartened after losing to the closest odds I had seen to date. Most of the time it was me up against over 200 other bidders and then treated to another happy message wishing me more luck in the future.

All of that changed last week and I honestly did not want to talk too much about it ahead of time for fear I would jinx it. With the release of the 6.3 patch Square Enix added 1800 plots to the game by adding six new wards to every housing area. Since the very beginning I had one wish above others… to get the same plot that we used to have for a Free Company house in the Mists district of Limsa Lominsa. So when the bidding period started after the release of 6.3 I opted to bid on Plot 13 in Ward 26. When I logged in the day before the end of the period… I was the only bidder on my property. When I logged in feverishly after the bidding period ended, I was happy to see that I did in fact win. While it is not the same Ward as our old Free Company house, it makes me exceptionally happy to have the same relative position in the new area.

One of the things that are exceptionally cool about this whole process is the fact that EVERYONE that is populating this new ward, is someone who had been anxiously trying to get a house. I’ve had many random conversations with my neighbors while slowly working away on getting everything set up. I made friends with the folks who own one of the large homes in the area and they were roaming around chatting with everyone who was fiddling the other day. I’ve similarly had conversations with many of the folks surrounding me, and it is bringing back memories of when we first bought the Free Company house in this same location. I remember there was a welcome committee of sorts that welcomed us all to the neighborhood. I kinda want to maybe revive a tradition and create a linkshell for all of the inhabitants of the district.

It is going to take me a very long time before I get everything exactly how I want it, but the front yard is starting to come along nicely. Huge props to Sol for helping me out with some of the finer points of understanding this system… that I never really engaged with before. I mean I’ve had permission to fiddle with shit in the guild hall for years, but I never wanted to mess anything up since Sol spends so much effort getting things just so. The tree house that I am standing in while taking these screenshots was a housewarming gift that was super sweet. It does make me want to maybe start working on my crafters and use the house as an excuse to set goals for leveling them in order to make items. Thankfully I have all of my gatherers to at least level 80, so acquiring items for leveling purposes does not seem too taxing.

The inside is considerably more spartan. My idea currently is to arrange the upstairs as the office of an adventuring company and then the downstairs as my private quarters. At the moment I just have functional decorations. I’ve placed four NPCs, a retainer bell, an aesthetician bell, a guest book, and an orchestrion. I kinda think I will probably be working on little vignettes as I did in the front yard. I need to acquire some mannequins at some point, because I know I want them configured for different gear sets representing all of the jobs that I play. Right now I picture them up on some sort of a stage immediately across the room from the guildleve counter.

Downstairs I have done almost nothing other than swap the walls, and flooring, and put up a maelstrom ceiling fan. I know I will want some aquariums for down here, but past that I am not really sure what I want this area to look like. I am probably going to put up some walls to partition off an area to put a bed, and have another area that is for seating and various collected items like the miniatures that I have gathered over the years. I swear the hardest part about all of this is trying to decide what the heck I want my house to look like. I will say… after having used a number of housing systems the one in FFXIV is not what I would consider “good”. It already feels like I have to fight it more than I should to do simple things like select an object when it is overlapping another object. I am sure with time I will get better at cheesing the system, but for now, it feels extremely cumbersome.

Part of why I opted for a Shirogane-style roof is so that I could climb up on top of it. This is one of my favorite pastimes in the district we have a Free Company House. Being able to climb up on my own roof and watch the world go by, is extremely heartening for me. It is so weird to be writing this post after so much frustration and disappointment trying to acquire a house for so long. I am really hoping that maybe this will be the action that brings me back into the fold and gets me engaged with the game again. There is a good deal of content that I have never experienced and I should pick up and start working on the main story quest chain again. After leveling all of my jobs to 80, and then leveling through Endwalker almost immediately following that… I just burned myself out tremendously. I still have so much affection for this game, that I am hoping maybe being grounded in the Housing system will give me goals to engage with the rest of the game.

The Mists is traditionally one of the more popular housing areas and even in my ward, there were a number of properties that did not get bid on. That would tell me that if you were ever hoping to get housing, and were disappointed by the process in the past… you might throw your bid in when the coming period opens on the 24th. There still should be a number of really good properties available. Notice that there is some prime beachfront real estate that did not even get bid on in my ward, and there are even more properties still open when you shift over to the subdivision including a number of mediums and even a large. I’ve spent so much money over the last few days that I am going to have to figure out what actually sells on the market and start listing things again to build back up my nest egg. Thankfully there really isn’t much that you actually need to buy in Final Fantasy XIV.

I cannot tell you how happy I am to be posting a screenshot from the beach of MY housing district. Soon I think it will be time for me to go roaming around and looking for more guestbooks to sign. One of the coolest things is that I found out one of my friends got a property in the same ward. They opted for the subdivision, but I bumped into them the other day at the housing vendors while trying to figure out how to actually build a house. I need to scan through the list a bit more thoroughly and see if there are any other names that I recognize. I wish you all a wonderful week and if you wade into the lottery system waters, I wish you luck in the upcoming bidding period!

Harrow the Ninth

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Good Morning Friends! I opted to take yesterday off because for me it was a holiday and I was off work, and also I was feeling like complete shit. I am either fighting off allergies turned asthma attack, or I have picked up something… but for the latter, I’ve not really been around anyone to catch anything. Over the weekend I finished up my second book from the Libby App, and it was a wild ride. I think last I said I had started Skin Game by Jim Butcher, but I abruptly paused that because my library hold came up on the next novel in the Locked Tomb series. Harrow The Ninth was a hard book to get through, because it has you questioning the events of the first novel… which ended on a bit of a frustrating cliffhanger. During at least the first fourth of the novel, I was going back and forth about whether or not Tamsyn Muir had a fucking clue what they were doing with this story. Thankfully it paid off in the end and the story that was woven between the two tales is extremely good.

Essentially between the two novels, there is a character perspective shift, from the very likable Gideon Nav to the very unlikeable Harrowhark Nonagesimus. It feels like a massive “bait and switch” at the end of the first book and the beginning of the second book, which knocks the reader off balance. However, I would assume this was all on purpose to make you now start to deeply care about Harrow and move her from the Villain column more solidly into the hero column. Now I just want to read the next one the sequence, Nona the Ninth… but the Libby App tells me it is going to be about a six-week wait. Granted the last book told me it would be a four-week wait and that is why I had started Skin Game, but my hold suddenly came available after about a week. I figure I will finish Skin Game and evaluate where I am at that point, but I might end up just buying this next book so I can consume it faster.

In other random events this weekend, it appears that Tam and a few others have been screwing around in Lord of the Rings Online. I opted to go ahead and install the game and start a brand new character, a Guardian named Belglaive on Landroval. Immediately stepping into this game feels like I went back two decades in MMORPG design, which has its ups and downs. I opted to start the recently released new character starter experience, and honestly… I think I like the Shadows of Angmar option a bit better. This is really slow-paced and I feel like I am completely disconnected from the rest of the game at the moment. With the previous experience, I could at least rush to Bree and train professions, and I guess in theory I can probably do that now… but I am trying to follow the breadcrumbs that are laid out in front of me. All told though I am enjoying myself in what feels like an anachronistic jaunt into MMORPG gaming.

In Path of Exile, I spent a bit more money… swapped out some gems for Awakened versions, and got my flasks in order so that now I am much tankier even than I was before. Righteous Fire is still really bad at bossing, and as such, I have continued trying to tweak my Fire SRS Necromancer to set it up as my bossing character. In the grand scheme of things it works… most of the time. I did a Maven Invitation last night and wrecked it as the Necro, something that I would have struggled at length on the Juggernaut. I’ve done several invitations, but it just takes forever whereas on the Necro I kept a pretty good pace as the new bosses were being released. I could pour some more funds into the character and improve this I am certain. I think my short-term goal is to keep getting levels on the Juggernaut, and I would really love to hit level 100 this season.

I officially have more currency than I have ever had before in Path of Exile. That catch is it isn’t mine. Thalen lucked into an Unrequited Love card, that at the time was going for 18 Divine Orbs. However since he got it, and when he decided to have me sell it… the price dropped considerably. I originally priced it at 18, hoping the price would go back up but in the meantime, a number of 17 Divine cards have created this price barrier that I knew we would not be breaking anytime soon. I priced it at 16.5 Divines and within moments had sold it. Now I am essentially acting as a concierge broker and Thalen sends me a link to something he wants, and I attempt to acquire it for him. I’ve set aside all of his currency and my purchases from it in a stash tab to keep it separate from everything else. This also allows me to just ignore that tab when running Exilence to see if I have any other high-value items that I should be trying to sell.

I made a bit more progress in Grim Dawn on the Soldier/Oathkeeper combination and I have to say… I am not sure if I like the build at all. I am not really enjoying myself that much, so I might fall back on playing my original level 42 Warder character which is Soldier/Shaman. I also need to try some ranged and caster options because at the moment I am just not feeling the game. I feel way more squishy than I want to feel, so I either need to kill things much faster or have better layers of defense. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as active of a community as say Path of Exile, and while there is a build guide website it is much harder to gauge how successful a given build is going to be. Admittedly that is my lack of knowledge of the game because I am sure if you are already well indoctrinated into Grim Dawn it would be fine.

Anyways I hope you all had a most excellent weekend, and now if I can just kick this crud life would be grand. As is often the case I have way too many gaming irons in the fire at the moment. It is a much better problem to have than languishing in that “nothing I want to play” feeling.

Righteous Fire Juggernaut

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Man wearing lots of armor that is red and black themed standing in a desert region staring up at a giant pyramid with a floating inverted pyramid on top.
Brimstone Sands from New World on PC

Good Morning Friends! It has been a while since I have done one of these roundup posts but that is what you are in for this morning. Over in New World, I feel like I am running on fumes a bit. I do this thing where I get an idea in my head and then I obsess about that idea and when it is eventually accomplished… I end up fairly burned out as a result. My new world version of this was the gear farm series, and now that I have largely finished that… I am struggling to find my next goal. With the start of Winter Convergence, I ground up my faction and now in theory need to spend copious hours following the train and grinding tokens to get kitsch. I’ve also started Brimstone Sands for the first time and lord is that an interesting area. I think I need to just focus on questing out there to get my feet back under me and get to a place where I am deeply enjoying the game again.

The Tequatl World boss fight from Guild Wars 2 where a giant undead dragon attacks the coastline and several dozen players have to take it down in several phases.
Tequatl World Boss from Guild Wars 2 on PC

I’ve also been poking my head back into Guild Wars 2 again and while I am mostly rudderless there I am at least trying to get back in the habit of collecting my daily freebies. Occasionally I do so in a timely enough manner to be able to catch the 6 pm CST Tequatl. This is still my favorite event in the game and quite possibly the first thing I ever did that really sold me on the grandeur and possibility that group content can really have. I need to get back enough into the swing of things to start doing the meta for Cantha and get my siege turtle. I have been growing Kelp in my personal instance for a while now and am hoping that I have enough stockpiled to feed my babby turtle when I finally get one. I greatly appreciate the drop in/drop out nature of Guild Wars 2 and how I can spend an entire evening following the world boss train if I want to… or just not and that is also okay.

Heavily armored warrior wearing red and black gear with a braided brown beard, an eye patch, and a glowing red eye standing in a scrubland region dotted with ornate houses.
Elsweyr in The Elder Scrolls Online

I’ve been visiting The Elder Scrolls Online again and as much as I really want to get back into some questing there because I love the story… I am struggling with it a bit. Mentally I keep comparing the combat in ESO to that of New World and ESO keeps coming up on the losing end of that association. To be completely frank… combat in ESO feels sorta boring. It is a lot of light attacks and heavy attacks with a lowered emphasis on hitting abilities. The time to kill seems way too high for me to enjoyably rip through encounters. Granted I have always played a tank and maybe I should focus more on one of my other characters. That said I am not really sure that anything is going to feel great now that I have seen what a more action-oriented MMO can feel like. Like I am certain that the New World style of combat is not everyone’s jam, but the interplay between weapon abilities feels far better than what ESO is providing currently.

Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut build for Path of Exile

I think I have landed on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut for the Path of Exile league starts tomorrow. I contemplated a lot of things including a more spin-to-win style build of the cyclone that a friend shared with me. Righteous Fire is something I tried a few leagues back but never really converted from the leveling skill over to RF… which I think was a massive mistake on my part. I went off in my own direction because I happened to be enjoying the Wintertide Brand play style and should have actually tried the proper RF build instead. This time with a new take in the form of the Marauder version, I am going to give it my all and make sure I actually follow the guide completely. I might try Cyclone later in the league if I find myself wanting to do something else. Essentially Righteous Fire gameplay reminds me of another one of my favorite classes which is the Thorns Crusader.

User Interface overloaded with Spell Gems in Path of Exile on PC

There has been discussion about setting goals for a new Path of Exile league and I think my goal will be to stop picking up every spell gem I happen to see in my journies. I spent a while yesterday trying to organize my inventory and collapse some of my remove-only tabs into something that makes sense. Granted I will probably never actually play standard, but I hated leaving it in a total mess. For those unfamiliar when you end a league in PoE it gives you a copy of every tab from that season with the suffix (Remove Only). Basically, you can leave it alone indefinitely and to the best of my knowledge, GGG has never deleted these tabs. One of the suggestions I saw for dealing with them was to create a folder named after the league that just ended, and shovel all of the new remove-only tabs into it. I’ve more or less followed this idea with Maps being held out only because I want to convert them and store them when the new league begins. Others like Spell Gems I opted to dump into my inventory and then migrate over to the proper working tab.

I think I am as ready as I am ever going to be for Forbidden Sanctum. If you are planning on doing the league start either tomorrow or in the coming days, shoot me a note. I will be updating my where to find me page once I have my new set of characters.

Winter Convergence 2022 Guide

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Good Morning Friends! The Winter Convergence is upon us and all of Aeternum is feeling the chill of the Winter Warrior… or whatever this storyline actually is. Like much of New World’s story the winter event has the most loosely strung together of themes where basically two Yeti are duking it out… one wants to freeze the entire world and the other wants to protect us from this fate. What it means for the players is one of the most detailed events that take place in the game and features activities that everyone can participate in. This is the second time we have seen the Winter Convergence event and a number of things have been added to improve things. They seemingly have learned a lot from the recent Halloween event and carried forward some improvements.

Daily Presents

In the center of every town that can be held by a faction, you will find the Winter Convergence tree, as well as the entire town decked out in holiday-themed kitsch. One of the key benefits of this event is that you can go up to every tree in every settlement and collect a package each day. The first three packages will include bonus rewards that are effectively the same as the turkey bags that we just had from the Thanksgiving event. Essentially you are going to get some cash, Winter Tokens, and a chance for the various crafting patterns to drop. This is also how you are going to get your Diamond Gypsum for those who are level 60.

Town Board Quests

Every town has new projects that involve upgrading the tree through doing seasonal activities like crafting ornaments or baking cookies. As the town upgrades its tree, the daily rewards will keep getting better with higher token drops and a better chance at patterns. If nothing else they are a very easy way of getting some bonus town reputation each day.

Lost Presents

Scattered around Aeternum along its many roads will be piles of lost presents. You can reclaim these for faction with the Winter Wanderer, and then redeem them for Winter Tokens at the Winter Villages located in Monarch’s Bluff, Everfall, Brightwood, and Weaver’s Fen. Each package nets you 5 faction points so it isn’t a great way to complete the event, but it is the sort of thing you casually collect as you are roaming around and doing other activities.

Floating Packages

I remember when I first encountered a floating package last year I thought it was a bugged spawn. Essentially you will see a glowing pile of packages rotating in the air and if you shoot these down you get a whopping 250 faction with the Winter Wanderer. I am sorry that it is super hard to see in the screenshot, but keep your eyes on the skies and be watching for these. Well worth your time and worth me breaking out a crappy green bow I had in my inventory to shoot them down.

Gleamite Meteors

I’ve not seen one of these this year, but given that I see the ability to trade these in on the Winter Village shops I assume they still exist. Essentially if you hang out in lower-level zones at night time and watch the skies it is possible to see a meteor streaking across the sky. I found this video from last year showing what it looks like so you will know what to watch out for. Essentially when the meteor lands it destroys everything surrounding the impact crater and spawns a number of Gleamite nodes that can be mined for resources you can turn in at the Winter Village as well as some faction with the Winter Wanderer.

Winter Village and the Winter Wanderer

As I said above there are four Winter Villages that you can find spread throughout the world Monarch’s Bluff, Everfall, Brightwood, and Weaver’s Fen. They all for the most part function the same with a few carts in the town that let you trade lost presents and other doodads associated with the holiday event into friendly Yeti helpers in order to gain winter tokens. The Winter Wanderer himself will have a few quests for you. I believe since I did the original series in 2021 I don’t have access to those in order to do them again. However listening to a friend of mine talking about the event, makes me think they are still available. This year he has a new quest to hunt down the Winter Warrior and stop him in his tracks, which is a big boss fight that hops from zone to zone and is marked on your map similar to how the Halloween Boss and Turkulon were.

Winter Convergence Shop

Doing things associated with this holiday gives you a reputation with the Winter Wanderer aka a faction called the Holiday Regent. This works similarly to leveling your other factions, and there are various breakpoints, each unlocking different tiers of items available. At the highest tier which I reached last night, you have a number of somewhat ugly holiday-themed skins as well as a bunch of item-level 600 crafting patterns for every gear slot. You can also get a number of other skins like a replacement for our boring tent, and some extremely festive musical instruments.

Crafting Patterns

One of the really cool things from this year is a number of item-level 600 patterns for pretty much every slot. The huge benefit of this style of the pattern just like the ones that came from the Halloween event is that they can be crafted by anyone without a base skill requirement. The negative is that the materials required for these patterns are going to be extremely costly if you can’t craft them yourself. Each item tends to sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 150-300 coins each so the Great Axe that I crafted yesterday would have cost me around 10,000 coins worth of materials if I was not already capable of making them myself. The benefit with these patterns however is since you crafted them… they operate much like a named item and do not suffer any expertise drain for not having leveled your expertise to 600. A huge boon over the Halloween-themed patterns is it seems like you can choose your primary stat, so you can tailor the item to fit your specific build needs. If you can afford it, this is a fast way to catch up on your gear at level 60.

The Winter Warrior

As I said before the Winter Warrior now spawns in various locations around the world and is marked on your map. This is a large raid encounter and requires a significant number of players in order to take it down. There seems to be some sort of a breakpoint on these each day where the first handful of them reward you 5 Warrior’s Hailspikes and the subsequent kills only reward you 2. At least that seemed to be the case for me… it could simply be RNG. Each one of these can be handed in at the cart in the Winter Village for 10 Winter Tokens, so this becomes the most efficient way to not only farm reputation for the holiday event but also rewards.

Join the Zerg

It is almost guaranteed that your server will have some sort of semi-organized zerg going on while this event is active. Getting everything is going to require copious amounts of farming and as a result, I think this is going to be the case for the majority of the event. Essentially look in your recruitment channel for discussion of WB or World Boss and what zone they are heading towards. Once you are running with the train stay on the sequence as long as you like. Word of warning, however, the Winter Warrior can spawn in multiple locations in every zone in the game, so it is going to pay off significantly if you already have all teleports unlocked. I did not have any of the ones in Brimstone Sands since I had not ventured out there yet, so I took a bit last night and unlocked all of them to make the farming more efficient.

Ice Caves

I guess one last thing I will mention in case the 2021 quests are in fact available. There are a number of Yeti Ice Caves that have spawned around Aeternum and these stay up year-round and were brought into the game after the first Winter Convergence. These are marked on the map with the silhouette of a Yeti, but one of the easiest ones to get to is in Windsward due east along the coast. The lower-level quest will involve going around and killing the Yetis guarding these caves and I believe they are all somewhere in the 25-35 level range. I believe you can farm these caves for reputation but since I capped mine last night I was not able to test this theory.

All told it is a fun event with a lot of stuff going on, and some pretty tasty rewards that can be had if you are diligent in farming over the next few weeks. In theory, this map link should provide you with the locations of all of the Yeti Caves, Winter Villages, and possible Gleamite meteor spawn locations. For me, I am mostly planning on farming the Winter Warrior whenever it suits my fancy and trying to get most of the permanent rewards from the event. Even though the cosmetics are fairly ugly… I am very likely to spend time trying to farm them.

Hopefully, this guide helps players who are unfamiliar with the event get started. If you have any direct questions feel free to drop me a line below or reach out over social media.