MMORPG

Adepta Sororitas

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Yesterday was a good day, although it wasn’t a terribly productive one. Some months back one of my good friends… legitimately probably the only friend that I am still in contact with from my High School years… moved into an apartment in the same suburb of Tulsa where I live. I legitimately don’t see a lot of people right now because still fairly leery from Covid numbers in our area. However yesterday I got out of my comfort zone a bit and we got together for about an hour yesterday afternoon. I had a little something for him and he a little something for me… though his little something is pretty phenomenal. Both of our gifts were a little self serving in that I picked him up a Magic the Gathering Commander deck because I would really like to play some in person Commander soon.

He on the other hand went to way more effort and assembled and painted me this start to a Sisters of Battle Army. Again because he would really like to get some war-gaming in soon when things calm down a bit. The only problem that we foresee is that neither of us have a large table, or really the ROOM for a large table to set up and play on. I did wonder about maybe booking a backroom in the local library every so often for a games day. I miss playing games physically and would love to get engaged in more of that… now that legitimately he lives less than two miles away from my house. The photo does not at all do justice to the models as the lighting I snapped a picture under is not exactly optimal for miniatures.

In other gaming news I have passed the Wall Market section of Final Fantasy VII Remake and honestly am not super far off from the point where I left on in my PS5 run of the game. PC gaming is just more conducive to my lifestyle right now and it is super easy for me to drop into a game. I guess I could be playing remotely through my laptop via the third party app that I have been using. That is probably how I am going to play Horizon Forbidden West but there is just something preferable about controlling these games with a mouse and keyboard for me. The only section that has been particularly awful is the motorbike combat section… where I had to contort my hands in such a way as to hit the throttle button while also steering and swinging a sword. It is nothing that changing the keybinds would not fix but I didn’t take that amount of time to figure out a new scheme.

I am poking my head into New World about once a day to loot three packages and create a sword mold for a daily expertise boost. All of the other activities are sort of a bit “much” for me right now. I am very much only tangentially engaged in the game. The servers have merged and as a result I now play on Frislandia instead of Minda given that all of Arkadia Theta merged into a single server. Everything is definitely more lively and I am sure that I could probably go back to farming outdoor content for expertise levels if I wanted to. However I just have not found the drive to return to group activity. Most of the people that I had been playing with from the larger Minda community jumped ship to other servers and the thought of trying to make inroads from scratch again… does not seem terribly compelling.

I am interested to watch the map over the next few days. When the servers merged we inherited Frislandia’s map which was largely dominated by Syndicate. The only non-syndicate territory was unfortunately Brightwood… where I have my Tier 4 house. Over night it seems that a Marauder guild managed to capture Cutlass Keys, and there are a handful of other wars brewing. According to the folks on Frislandia, the server has always been dominated by Syndicate so I guess we will see how well the upcoming wars shake out in favor of that status quo. It seems like at least one of the servers that merged in was Covenant dominant because almost all of the Wars that are queued up are team Yellow trying to seize territory.

Winter Convergence

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Tis the season for holiday events to show up in the games we play and New World was not to be outdone. Yesterday the large December 1.2 update landed and with it a new Winter Convergence event. With it came a whole slew of changes that I will talk about at least in part, but the most noticeable one is that every settlement now has a tree in the middle of it. Once a day you can loot these trees for presents… of which you are able to get 3 good ones per day. The “good” presents have so far given me 1 Diamond Gypsum per, a few Silver Bars, and 100 coins. The subsequent packages after the first three just reward winter tokens which are the currency used in game by the event to purchase items at the winter village.

Scattered around the map are the Winter Villages, which are helmed by an NPC Yeti called the Winter Wanderer. They will send you on a series of quests related to the event which involves picking up packages that spawn around the world near roads, and taking out their evil Yeti brethren in various Ice caves. There is a reputation with the event that works much like the three factions, and with it unlocks different tiers of gear that you can purchase with the Winter Tokens. The armor and weapons are equivalent to the items you can get from the faction vendors with the weapons all offering a luck bonus. For the PVE focused players… now that they made farming the PVP missions for tokens a pain in the ass… this might be your chance to get a set of 520 gear and some 525 weapons.

The biggest change with the patch however is that they have converted the ambiguous “High Watermark System” into something tangible and track-able called Expertise. For those of us who ground up our watermark a bit… this has finally allowed us to actually see where various item watermarks were sitting. Out beside each item is now a purple number which represents what the watermark for that given gear slot is. For me all of my watermarks look a little something like this:

  • Helmet – 576
  • Chest – 577
  • Hands – 576
  • Legs – 576
  • Boots – 574
  • Shield – 562
  • Necklace – 518
  • Ring – 500
  • Earring – 500
  • Sword – 535
  • Great Axe – 545
  • Hammer – 556
  • Hatchet – 544
  • Spear – 539
  • Rapier – 545
  • Bow – 550
  • Musket – 529
  • Life Staff – 554
  • Fire Staff – 562
  • Ice Gauntlet – 556
  • Void Gauntlet – 512

Supposedly more Necks, Rings, and Earrings have been added to the world to make these a little easier to watermark. It was much to my chagrin that I noticed my highest watermark weapon… is also one that I will never use the Fire Staff, while the one I use the most is sitting only at 535. Once again I say that this system is awful… but at least it is more clear how bad we are getting screwed.

They also put in kilns spread throughout the world, which are unfortunately NOT in the main territories. Instead you are going to have to trek out to the unheld north in order to find one of these. Thankfully I still had my inn bound to Mountainhome from the days when farming Myrkgard was actually viable. Various activities drop various kinds of Gypsum and you can craft this into a Gypsum Orb once per day. You can then trade a Gypsum Orb at the Kiln for a Gypsum Cast of a specific item type which acts as a lootbox giving you a guaranteed expertise/watermark upgrade. For example I made a Sword Cast which took me from 533 to 535 so this is not going to be a fast process by any means. Here are some of the sources for Gypsum.

  • Obsidian – Dropped by level 60+ Elite Mobs in the World and requires three
  • Sapphire – Dropped from last boss of Lazarus Instrumentality or Garden of Genesis and only requires one
  • Ruby – Dropped from Outpost Rush Caches and requires two
  • Emerald – Dropped from Trade Skill Aptitude Caches and requires one
  • Citrine – Dropped from Arena Caches (Siren Queen etc) and requires one
  • Amethyst – Dropped from Max Level Corruption Breach/Portal Caches and requires seven also not 100% drop
  • Diamond – Dropped from events, currently the first 3 tree presents you loot each day and requires three
  • Topaz – Dropped from level 55+ mobs in the world after consuming an attunement potion and requires ten

The Topaz is a bit weird because once a day you can craft an attunement potion, which allows for Topaz Gypsum to drop from any level 55 or higher open world mob. The gotcha there is that the potion can only be crafted once per day and requires one of every elemental “animal” aka Fire Snail, Water Fish, etc. I had a stockpile of these but if you were to try and farm them… it would take awhile not only to find all of them but to get the purple animal drop instead of motes.

All told it isn’t a bad update but it also doesn’t really reduce the overall grindy nature of the game. I still question the design decisions they have made to reach this point. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that all of the open world areas for watermarking have been nerfed into the ground. Anything that used to allow for solo watermarking is just not viable anymore. They are pushing players hard to get into dungeons and arenas, which require the crafting of keys. Keys which I am almost certain will eventually be sold on the cash shop to “speed up” the process. I’ve also noticed that every single item now has a greyed out “Upgrade” button claiming it requires something called “Umbral Shards” to upgrade the item. I have a feeling that these also will eventually show up on the cash shop.

The last bit of news that came out yesterday is an official confirmation of which servers would be merging. I had theorized at one point that they might just collapse entire server blocks because if you collapsed the entirety of Arkadia Theta where Minda is… you would still not quite end up with 2000 players based on the trends. They appear to be doing exactly this which means that all of the servers would be merging into Adlivun the most populated server in our block. That means all of our territory will default to whatever was held on Adlivun.

On the Syndicate side, currently the only company holding any territory is Fenris which has two different guilds “holdings” and “acquisitions”. Similarly the majority of Marauder territory is held by Minas Morgul which has three different companies holding territory. In theory all of these companies will be seeing a pretty big payday as a result of the merger and then losing their territory. I would expect that all of these mergers are probably going to take place next week, so if you are on a lower pop server I guess now is the time to farm materials while the getting is good. The real question however is if any of this is going to turn the tide of this game. To that I think the answer is a resounding no. Players have moved on and are unlikely to return unless something drastic happens. We’ve recently dropped below the 100,000 player peak concurrency threshold and I doubt that is going to change significantly.

Man on The Moon

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Good Morning Friends! I finished up the quest for the Zephyr last night and while I absolutely hate the design… it is cool to have a stasis element sword. I am not sure what it is about the whole Dawning design ethic, but it is awful. Like I get what they are going for… a sort of new years festival thing that isn’t dominated by either the Red/Green Christmas colors or the Red/Gold Lunar New Year designs. However there is just some about the shapes of the items that I don’t really like that much. I’ve never really cared for the “Nine” themed items either, and these absolutely seem to share a similar design ethic. I kinda wish you could create weapon skins similar to how you can create universal ornaments for armor, so I could just swap this to a weapon I don’t hate.

I am slow rolling my way through leveling my light, or whatever they call it currently. I am old… I will probably never stop calling it light level. Mostly I have been getting in, knocking out a few objectives and then calling it good for the night. I still really enjoy Gambit probably the most of all of the available modes. There is something about its specific blend of elements that I really enjoy greatly. Essentially I am getting daily bounties for Dawning and then trying to figure out who I can accomplish them the easiest. Last night I had Hive and Scorn bounties and thought since you get both of them regularly in gambit… I might be able to kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately I wound up finishing the Hive one on Tangled Shore, and the Scorn one in a Dreaming City Lost Sector. Still having a lot of fun but very much not taking anything seriously.

Back over in Final Fantasy XIV, like I have said a few times I have been purposefully avoiding the login queues by playing other games. However I think either over the next few days or over the weekend I am going to start fighting my way in again. I have some dungeons to run that I have unlocked but never done before, and I think my friend Grace also has them unlocked as well. I figure it might be good shenanigans to run around and do them together and then loop in anyone else in the free company who wants to go along as well given that we have tank and heals covered for easy queues. The above image is not a story spoiler but makes me exceptionally happy because so much of the moon is pulled straight out of my Final Fantasy IV nostalgia.

I did stumble across something pretty cool last night if you are looking for something to watch. There is a multi-part docuseries on YouTube about the origins of the Xbox and the various travails that the console went through during inception as well as various missteps. This is edited in the format of a Netflix multi-part documentary so that it almost feels like something created by No Clip. They even got Laura Bailey to do the narration for the series which makes it feel all the more legit. While watching it you almost forget for a moment how brilliant this piece of marketing actually is. It is absolutely evangelism for the Xbox brand and paints it in the light of being this scrappy “by gamers for gamers” rebel. I was not an Xbox gamer, I jumped straight from Dreamcast to playing PC MMORPGs with a brief revisit in PlayStation 2 land. I do remember my friends getting super into it however and my neighbor across the street being extremely into Halo.

I am on part four right now of what is currently a six part series, and it is just self deprecating enough to feel fair. It would never do anything to paint Microsoft in a bad light, because it is produced from within the bowels of Redmond but it does let down the guard more than a few times in very strategic ways in order to feel like the behind the scenes story. Truth is I know a few people who worked on the original Xbox and this syncs up with some of the stories they had told me. I’ve actually seen one of those original metal Xboxes that they show off in the series in person. However never forget that this is absolutely brilliant marketing. I mean I just bought an Xbox Series X which means it is working, because Game Pass and XCloud really are phenomenal deals and my old school 90s VCR model Xbox One needed and upgrade.

Sticking the Landing

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Well folks… once again I try my best to cherry pick a screenshot that doesn’t obviously show anything for a post as I am trying to maintain my stance of not spoiling anything. Yesterday I wrapped up the Endwalker Main Story Quest and let me tell you… it was a ride. With all certainty this is my favorite Final Fantasy XIV expansion and quite possibly my favorite MMORPG expansion of all time. Yesterday I talked a bit about the complicated emotions surrounding that notion, because this is a game that requires you to have lived through all of the hundreds of hours of content from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker to really appreciate the gravity of this situation. Friends… I cried so much last night, enough that my wife suggested that maybe I really shouldn’t be playing this game especially since my baby is still in the hospital right now and that has caused a massive dip in my emotions as well. They were not all bad tears…. and honestly a lot of them were the tears of remembrance and joy that you might have when visiting old friends.

Endwalker is an expansion that does not go anywhere I might have expected it to go. It was an expansion where we knew four of the six total destinations ahead of time, but even then… there were so many revelations as I played through it. The remaining two “secret” destinations really are mind boggling and I am still reeling from the impact of some of the revelations that come from them. If I had a complaint it would only be that the sixth location arrived too late and was a bit too cumbersome to traverse. It played a key role in the story… but after the first interludes it was pretty certain the path before us… and then it just took a long time for it to actually play out along those lines. Essentially the pacing of the final chapter of the game was a bit monotonous for my tastes. That does not mean that the conclusion does not feel earned or meaningful, but those final steps as we got there were a bit cumbersome.

That said I feel like they absolutely “stuck the landing”, and managed to drive home the actual final moments of the expansion. More important than the journey I just completed… I have so much hope for where we are going next. The game does a great job of teasing just how little of the world we actually know anything about and how many of the reflections we have yet to visit. I am extremely interested to see the next story and how it evolves over the course of this expansion and its patches. The only thing that I don’t fully know is the shape of the post patch content, because it honestly feels like we have tied up most of the loose ends associated with the “Ascian” storyline. In the past there has always been a dangling thread here or there that could be tugged upon, and we are really lacking that. I do wonder if they will spend the .1 through .55 patch really devoting it entirely to setting up the next conflict, instead of breaking that into an epilogue and prologue like they have done before.

Now we tread into some light spoiler territory, but Endwalker is an expansion that has made me care about every single character save one. I do not get Zenos existing past Stormblood in the Final Fantasy XIV franchise. I am uncertain if this character is just super beloved in Japan or something, but it is without a doubt the worst creation to come out of the Final Fantasy franchise. Even Kefka has more depth and he is just a murderous clown. Zenos being too painfully bored to care about anything is not interesting, and I feel like the fact that he had anything to do with Endwalker and Shadowbringers for that matter is a waste of screen time. My spoiler is this… they never manage to do anything interesting with Zenos and he is STILL the worst character. Even Fandaniel they manage to make me care about and add some depth to that character, but Zenos remains a one note tune that just has cool armor and weapons.

Now I find myself terribly torn. I want to start working on the endgame, and want to start leveling additional characters… but I also sorta feel bad in doing so because maybe I should back the fuck out for awhile and let someone else have my slot. I did what I felt like I needed to do… I completed the storyline and now have experienced that emotional roller coaster. Now I want to make sure all of my friends have experienced it so that we can have the big spoiler show about it. The problem is… it isn’t like I can actually give my spot in the line to someone else. So I am in this weird territory where it almost feels like it is my duty to stop playing for awhile until everyone has caught up… but also I don’t want to. We will see how the weekend goes and I guess I am thankful that Kenzie being hospitalized has at least allowed me to stop trying to nursemaid her constantly so that I could finish things up.

Endwalker and its story has really been a godsend the last few days, and has kept my mind off the constant worry over my baby girl. There isn’t much that I can do right now and I have to have faith that the doctors are doing what they can while she is hospitalized. They are under Covid protocols still and it isn’t like I can even go see her right now. I am getting calls from the Vet a few times a day with status updates and things are still pretty touch and go. She is improving and starting to act more like herself but she is very much not out of the woods yet. Essentially they are fighting to stabilize her blood sugar while at the same time trying to control negative reactions happening in her pancreas and liver while also fighting a bladder infection that they feel probably triggered the entire cascade reaction. I talked to the Vet three times yesterday and the first one was pretty grim, but as he progressed through the day he got more hopeful in his voice. Essentially his focus is to get her well enough to come home, so that she can rest in her familiar environment and heal faster as such. In theory that should happen at some point this weekend. So I greatly appreciate all the thoughts and prayers I have gotten for Kenzie butt, and here is hoping everything continues to go in the right direction.