MMORPG

Good Morning Friends! I am not doing super well because my lungs have conspired against me. however, I am still going to post today especially given that the lack of internet kept me from doing one on Tuesday. This friend is Quarrymill in the South Shroud and it is more specifically known for being the location that you queue up for Palace of the Dead one of two Deep Dungeon systems in Final Fantasy XIV. At the time of taking this picture, it is roughly 6 in the morning CDT and there is already a fairly decent crowd of people gathered here. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out here and putting levels on alts, more specifically the 1-61 level range. Generally speaking, running 51-60 over and over has been a pretty relaxing way of putting on those early levels for alternate jobs.

However more recently I have encountered a different style of player, some working on their very first job grinding away fervently at Palace of the Dead. The Palace uses an alternate leveling system that increases by getting Aetherpool upgrades via the blue and silver chests in the dungeon. This caps out at +99 to armor and +99 to the weapon, and it is something that I have been capped at for several years now. I gradually got it there while leveling all of my jobs to 50, and the gains are extremely slow given that it was designed to gain levels as you descended through the depths of the dungeon. Folks specifically run 51-60 for experience gain efficiency, and if you are looking for fast Aetherpool gains you need to keep descending towards 100 which is considerably harder to find a group for.

That said I have encountered a number of players recently that are absolutely obsessed with getting to 99/99 as fast as they can. There have been several cases where their lust for those blue and silver chests has damned near wiped the party. Most specifically I have been seeing a lot of characters that have boosted and are now playing a Samurai or a Red Mage and attempting to grind them up through Palace of the Dead, with that character being the only one they have of any sufficient level. I’ve talked about this a few times and could not figure out what was going on, and why my super chill dungeon run game was filled with these annoying “tryhards” all of the sudden. So last night while idling in South Shroud I encountered someone pestering the fuck out of chat trying to get tips on how to level faster, so I decided to have a conversation. After that I talked to a few others and now have a pretty good idea of what is going on.

You need to understand that both Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High have a leaderboard associated with them ranking players based on solo and group play. As you progress in your save game you are given a score based on your performance and then this score is charted against other folks in your data center. Soloing Palace of the Dead specifically is considered to be one of the most challenging feats in the game and by clearing all of your way to level 200 on any job you gain a specific title… The Necromancer. More specifically you have to clear floors 1 to 200 solo without wiping and if you take a death past floor 100, that save is locked and you can progress no further forcing you to reset and start over again. Similarly, if you clear 100 floors of Heaven on High you are given the title of “Lone Hero”, and that dungeon’s point of no return is floor 30.

Now we move to the specific information that I found out, more specifically let’s talk about the above thumbnail. Roughly a week ago Zelpa one of the most popular creators in the FFXIV sphere released a video called “10 Most Prestigious Things to FLEX With in FFXIV”. More specifically the second item discussed in the video is getting the Necromancer title from Deep Dungeon. The first person I talked to was new to the game, a WoW Transplant, and was chasing the Necromancer title as a way of flexing and showing how cool he was. When he heard it was super rare and something that you could get without even having a character to max level, he set forth to make it happen. Given how many of these folks I am encountering, I am guessing this video or similar discussions lit a fire under a new crop of players to make life miserable for those of us who were just wanting a chill leveling experience.

However, it goes deeper than just chasing something rare. Another player that I talked with was going after the Necromancer title because they were always frustrated that they never managed to get “The Undying” title in World of Warcraft. This specifically was a title that existed during Wrath of the Lich King and involved completing the entirety of the Naxxramas 10 player raid without a single player taking a death at any point. World of Warcraft has had this history of taking things away from the players, and when the 4.0.3 patch landed with the release of the Cataclysm expansion the title was no longer available to players. The player I was talking with was afraid that they might miss their chance to get this title in Final Fantasy XIV if they didn’t hurry up and get it… not understanding that the game has a completely different design ethic associated with such things.

I am hoping given time that these folks chill out, but one of the things that need to be understood is that Final Fantasy XIV is not World of Warcraft. There is a completely different design to the two games, and nothing in FFXIV ever truly becomes irrelevant. Getting to level 200 in Palace of the Dead is still a massive challenge and it went into the game during the midpoint of Heavensward back in July of 2016. At this point, it is over five years old content and it is still as relevant today as it was the day it went into the game. It is highly unlikely that the Necromancer title will ever be removed from the game, largely because that just isn’t the style of the development team.

The other day I was guilty of making a tweet thread that gained more traction than I expected. However, I stand by those statements. I wish I could shake some sense into these players that are grinding FFXIV as they ground WoW… this will only end in you eventually burning yourself out. I know I’ve also tried to play Final Fantasy like I played Warcraft, and eventually, I would end up getting stuck in a grind and losing interest. This game will answer your desire for grinds and present before you and an endless buffet of tedium if you let it, but also at the same time reward you greatly for instead playing a little bit at a time. This mindset of doing a little bit of a lot of different things has been a revelation for me, and once I realized the game was actively trying to resist my grinder ways… I adapted and have been significantly happier as a result.

Getting some achievement just to prove to someone that you can… isn’t really going to impress anyone in the manner that you are hoping. Having fun and focusing on whatever brings you joy, and generally being a positive member of the community however will get you a long ways in this game.

Hey friends, apologies for the lack of a post yesterday but I had issues. At roughly 3 pm on August 16th, we lost internet and did not regain it until roughly 10 am yesterday some 19 hours later. I have no clue what happened but during that 19 hours, I received 4 notices that we were being impacted by a current outage and 4 notices that the issues had been resolved… three of these were a lie. Whatever was going on seemed to impact a pretty wide area because one of my co-workers some 20+ miles away was also impacted and had their internet magically come back at the same time as I did. During the outage, I learned that I could in fact that I could function pretty normally while tethered to my mobile phone, including but not limited to attending conference calls, remoting into work, and even playing some Final Fantasy XIV.

Something that I have come to a bit of a decision on, is that Housing Savage is not for me. Over the last several days, I had been following a housing discord and going over to whatever plot happened to be open at the time. There were a few things that I have learned as a result. Firstly housing plots are open way more often than I ever realized, and two that milling around and clicking a sign over and over was actively harming my enjoyment of the game. We have a lovely Free Company house, and this affords me the luxury of a very cheap room that I can decorate. Getting a small house would effectively give me twice as much space, along with the ability to control the exterior but it would not actively change my gameplay experience. I already have access to pretty much anything I COULD have access to, through the Free Company house.

For those unfamiliar with the current system, if you have not entered your home in 45 days the plot is reclaimed and all of your stuff is dumped on the Resident Caretaker along with 80% of the value of the plot. When a plot is reclaimed an invisible timer is started before it actually becomes available on the market, and with this, the waiting begins. There are a number of theories as to how long this timer is, but based on what little hard information I could find it seems to be between 30 minutes and 36 hours and anywhere in between. During this time folks hang out in the housing, district clicking on the sign, and a number of individuals have figured out how to bot this process. What I had done recently was hang out there while waiting on instance queues to pop and periodically click the sign in a vague attempt to get a property.

The entire process of trying to care about getting a home though was bringing me down. I would far rather be out in the world doing things, than milling around with a bunch of bots trying to win the fastest fingers first race with an indeterminate starting line. When the housing district opens in Ishgard, there is supposedly a lottery system being introduced into the game that will allow someone to plunk money down on a property and let RNGesus choose who actually wins it. This would be so preferable to the current experience. I would happily go visit a plot, throw down my earnest money, and then walk away and continue playing the game hoping that maybe just maybe the randomizer is kind to me. My fear however is that this lottery is only going to apply to Ishgard, and as much as I do not love that town… I will absolutely go for a small property there. Once you get a single small, it becomes much easier to relocate to another property.

I am still on my mission to level all of the things to 80 before the launch of Endwalker. Right now I am largely focused on Ninja and Scholar. Currently, I do all of the easy progress activities on the Ninja, and when I feel like I am down to just no-lifer grinding activities, I switch back over to the Scholar and do some Palace of the Dead. Dragoon is also fairly high up there, but is largely there to soak Faerie dailies if I don’t have any other 70 somethings available to level through them. I don’t love Dragoon nearly as much as I once did, so I am fine with letting it sit there in limbo and level extremely slowly. Scholar is being worked up largely because it knocks two off my list when I get it to 80, given that summoner is a freebie associated with the Arcanist base class.

This also means that I spent a good chunk of last night working on the Heavensward class quests for Scholar. That is one word of warning for anyone that is leveling multiple jobs. They changed the way this worked starting with Stormblood, but for ARR and Heavensward you will absolutely be missing key abilities if you did not do your job quest chain. In Stormblood you just automagically get the new abilities and the same is true with anything gained during Shadowbringer. Essentially the first quest for Heavensward on each class is going to start at your trainer from A Realm Reborn, and then often times move into Heavensward zones from that point forward. In most of the cases there has been a bit of a hand off to a new NPC, but in the Scholar quest it continued the story of Wanderer’s Palace.

I’ve also periodically spent some time over on Catghast when the Palace of the Dead grind gets to me. I just managed to get him through Thousand Maws of Totorak, and I have to say tanking right now is in the best state it has ever been in FFXIV. All of these dungeons that used to be a pain in the butt, are a breeze given how easy spamming a multi-target threat ability is. I am probably more engaged with Final Fantasy XIV than I have been since the release of the game, and I am riding this high for as long as it lasts. I am sure the shine will start to tarnish eventually, but for now I am having a blast.

Good Morning Friends! I thought I would take a bit to cover something that happens in the FFXIV community with its more populated servers. The first block of servers is a screenshot taken from around 7 pm CDT last night, showing that all seven servers were locked for new character creation. This would give someone the impression that they can’t create a character on the same server as their friends. However, the bottom block is from 7 am CDT this morning, and notice that all of the servers but one are back open if I had to guess if you had checked early enough that one also would have been open.

This is the frustration of playing Final Fantasy XIV since they don’t want “dead” servers to be a thing, they are extremely slow to add new ones. This means that if a player is trying to start the game during prime time hours, they are likely not going to be able to roll on the intended server. It is very important that as you sell your friends on this game, that you also warn them about this possibility. As always there is a nifty website that you can check to see if your target server is open for new character creation. However in my personal experience is that if you log in first thing in the morning, you should be able to create new characters without issue.

In other news, I managed to get my Dancer to level 80 on the 10th and have swapped over and started working on Ninja. I have been taking a fairly deliberate path through some of the classes I am working on, and largely it is due to the fact that I am trying to also come along behind the scenes and clean out my vault of gear I no longer need. I had leveled Bard quite some time ago and recently leveled Machinist which meant that in order to do a clean sweep of all “dex” gear I needed to then level Dancer and Ninja as well. This is an interesting class but I have to admit that the whole Ninjutsu thing is a little fiddly for my tastes. It reminds me a bit too much of the old days of memorizing fighting game movies, but I would imagine this is entirely purposeful. I know the button press combinations needed for the few really useful abilities and I am rolling with that.

At the close of the evening, I managed to get my Ninja up to 57. For the moment at least I am living in South Shroud and running Palace of the Dead over and over. It seems to be the best possible way to really push through the leveling up until 61 when Heaven on High opens up. I am of course doing my daily roulettes which help put on a few easy levels, but there is still a good deal of repetition in running “Palace” over and over again. The positive however is that it seems like a lot of people are leveling alts through this method right now, and I have had some pretty great conversations while running the randomized dungeons.

Once again I am constantly amazed at just how generally chill the community is. We had a few runs last night that went horribly wrong. There are just times through randomization that you get a bad streak of events, and there was one point where everyone but one player was laying dead on the ground and that single-player had to run to the shrine and resurrect us all. No one fell into a yelling fit and no one made a big deal about it… we just pushed forward and finished the ten floors thanking the remaining player for rezzing us. Were these other games, it is entirely likely that someone would have rage quit in the middle leaving us down a player. I had a phenomenally awful World of Darkness run the other day and we gave it five attempts on the first boss, trying to steer players towards the mechanics before someone finally quietly voted to abandon duty. There were no screaming, just constant friendly reminders of how the mechanics worked that were ignored.

Lastly, I thought I would give an update on the housing hunt. My fingers were in fact not fastest enough. I had been periodically poking the placard starting around 7 am my time. As I understand it when a house opens up it will actually be available anywhere between 30 minutes and 36 hours from when it is relinquished. So you are fighting this invisible timer that you have no clue when exactly you need to click. When I took this screenshot that I am reusing, there were only a handful of players trying for the house. By the time it actually went up for sale, there were around a dozen people. I went downstairs to use the restroom and by the time I got back upstairs it was sold to someone who had not even been there waiting with us when I last checked. I am hoping that when the lottery system goes into place, that I will be able to get a house in that manner. Once you have a house, any house it is apparently easier to relocate to another property because you are not beholden to the invisible timer. I still eventually want a small plot in The Mists, and if the world were perfect it would be lot 13, or the equivalent on the subdivision.

Good Morning Friends! I come to you with a heavy heart because last night I realized that we veterans of Final Fantasy XIV have been doing a massive disservice to the sprouts. We have been preaching for so long to completely ignore all side quests and focus only on the Main Story Quest or MSQ, that we have likely been sabotaging attempts made by the Square team to ease the player base into group content. In Final Fantasy games there is a construct generically referred to as the Beginner’s Hall, and generally speaking, it is a room somewhere at the start of the game that has a bunch of NPCs you can talk to in order to get some fairly generic tips about playing the game. When this was put into Final Fantasy XIV as the Hall of the Novice, I completely ignored it because I was already deep in the game at that point and had no desire to talk to a bunch of random NPCs.

The game however really wants us to pay attention to this system, even placing the leader of the guild in all of the starting city Inns. However, when you first encounter this system, you can’t really use it because it requires the player to be level 15 in order to register for training. It has a unique icon that looks like a sprout, so in theory that I am guessing was supposed to indicate to new players that they should be talking to this person. I have been spending some time on an alt on the Primal data center, and yesterday was the very first time I actually engaged with this system. The thing is it is shockingly good and we should probably be telling our sprout friends to make sure they don’t miss it.

This is of enough significance that Square now sends the player there as part of the revised Main Story Quest. It doesn’t however go far enough. I think that realistically it should ask the player to complete all of the missions for their class role before progressing forward. The timing and location of this Hall of Novice is extremely specific, given that it is quite literally located around the corner from the first dungeon you will encounter Sastasha. On the main story quest, you have to go in and talk to the Smith, but you don’t actually have to register for any of the training. The thing is, I knew that you could earn a pretty nice set of gear from completing the training so I went through the process of registering and completing it for Tank.

I’ve played a significant number of different MMORPGs and encountered several systems designed to try and ease a player into group roles. However, I have never seen a system that actually gives you a very firm understanding of how these things work while also setting up short scenarios to test out those skills. For example, as a tank, it fully explained what Enmity is, and how one gains it and then proceeded to put me through a series of paces that were specifically tailored for the job that I was tanking on. It covered things like how to build threat on multiple targets, and which targets to focus on first. It also had an entire chapter on how to get out of things on the ground, and given that FFXIV works slightly differently than other games it is probably a solid idea that players go through this even if they are already used to other MMORPGs.

The training is all well and good, but the real reason why you should always complete the Hall of the Novice is that you are rewarded a set of actually nice-looking gear. Early tank gear specifically looks awful, and through running this series of missions you are awarded gear that is going to probably be your main glamour for about fifty levels. Similarly for the Healer and DPS roles you are given the Acolyte and Foestrikers set appearance, which is one of the more iconic looks in the game. More important than all of this however is you are given a ring that is going to greatly boost your experience gain on all jobs going forward up to level 30. Experience boost gear is always welcome and when combined with the expansion earrings, should serve to make leveling those alternate jobs go at least a little bit faster.

Maybe I am wrong and maybe I am the only person who had completely ignored this system. However I think given how much time we have spent trying to tell people to only focus on the MSQ, that there are probably a large number of sprouts that have never engaged with it. I would also say that if you are wanting to go into Final Fantasy XIV and start dabbling with roles you have maybe never done before, this is actually a very good way of teaching you the ropes. If I were to write out a guide on how to tank, a lot of the topics I would cover are things that the series of missions goes over. We would probably all be better players in general if we ran through the missions for each of the roles. Seeing as I am going to be leveling my healers soon, I am likely going to run through the Novice Hall quest series just to see how well it does on that role as well.