Good morning folks! So I thought I would start this morning’s post with a little bit of a tip. In New World, there are a lot of resources nodes that come in various shapes and sizes. This is not just a cosmetic thing, the larger the node the more resources you will get from it. This means that if you ever roll up on a cluster of nodes, always focus on clearing them from largest to smallest. What is often going to happen is another player will roll up and start to harvest a node beside you, which means you are in a race to gobble up as many resources as you can as efficiently as you can. This for example is Iron and it is among the most hotly contested materials and given that your mining skill, your strength, your faction standing cards, and the quality of your tools all determine how fast you can gather as compared to other players. Always start on the big node and work your way down from there.
Yesterday I spent most of my time wandering around and mopping up lower-level quests that I probably should have already taken care of before now. Of course, while going on a walkabout… I would discover resource nodes that would distract me from my goal. This is the core gameplay loop for me and honestly what I enjoy about this game and games like Skyrim or the modern Fallout series. I set forth on an adventure with a goal in mind, but the process of traversing the distance in between provides a real meaningful journey. The truth is in these sorts of games I tend to use fast travel or mounts very sparingly because it is that cross country trek that really provides me with joy. In New World, I like that I pretty much still need resources that I can find rarely out in the fields and forests on the way to my destination, so stumbling across a stand of hemp for example means I am always going to stop and gather it before continuing onwards.
So far surprisingly I have only really encountered a single bugged area, and that is surrounding a quest where you need to kill a named mob down in a cave. The problem with this quest is that it seems like folks are camping the area constantly and the spawn time so infrequent that whenever we do get a pop… it is almost immediately killed by splash damage. I am uncertain how much interaction is needed in order to earn credit for a quest, but it seems like I am always short because I am pretty sure I am interacting and dealing damage but never actually finishing the quest. I am hoping to roll over there really quickly after publishing this post and maybe just maybe the early morning crowd has moved on past this area.
At this point, I have made it to level 23 and I am thinking about maybe taking a bit of a break from the game and returning to my leveling over in Final Fantasy XIV. The key turn-off right now is knowing that I pretty much have to idle with the game running in the background all day if I have any hope of actually getting some playtime that evening. Then what makes that worse… is knowing that it is highly unlikely that any of the people that are starting the game are going to be able to roll on our server and join us. This whole only 2000 characters per server thing is a pretty debilitating problem, and it threatens to kill the experience for a lot of players out there that will likely bounce, or spend two hours in queue and be unable to return the game. I think someday this will be a great experience, but until they sort out the technical limitations it feels like a really fun game that is only available for a limited few players who can manage to land on the servers in a reasonable manner.
As far as the server goes, the other company still holds First Light but is at risk of losing it. There is a war that has been declared because Marauders have taken the fort and make war on the territory to claim it. Based on what I just raid on Twitter it sounds like the Marauders are playing dirty as the Trading Co. has just had a number of their highest level members given temporary bans. I guess this is the problem with contested territory and games that more or less have automated enforcement systems. I have no clue which group is gunning for the territory because the fort doesn’t say which force claimed it, but I am going to guess it is the Spartan Legion that controls Windsward, and that they are going to be taking their progress in that territory and beginning to take over the map. Honestly, I would be completely fine with that group taking more territory because they seem to be charging fair tax rates. As a citizen of Aeternum and not a combatant… I have a completely different view of these territories because quite honestly all I care about is having a beneficial overlord that isn’t going to charge odious taxes.
I am greatly enjoying the game, but the fact that I cannot reliably play with friends… because my friends cannot reliably get into the game is somewhat damaging the experience. As I said earlier, I am getting tired of feeling like I need to stay connected in the background in order to save the said connection for the moments I can play the game. There is simply no viable way to make it through the queues during prime time hours and I think for the moment I might just move on to doing other things with my time and hoping that at some point the server sizing problems are fixed and we can all move forward together. As much hype is surrounding this game can easily turn bitter if these growing pains are not resolved quickly. More servers are not the answer… bigger servers that allow more people to play together are the only path forward. If Amazon cannot provide that, then this game will die on the vine. Otherwise, folks are probably just better off playing something like Valheim if they can’t actually experience this reliably with friends who didn’t take off work to log in at non-primetime hours.
Well, folks, we colonized the New World yesterday and… I have to say on some level it is exactly what I would expect a land run on new territory would look like. For those who managed to log in, I think the experience was pretty solid. There was EXTREME resource scarcity for those who were there at 8 am when the servers turned on, and while everyone was trying to crit path their way to choosing a faction. I know largely because I was there with them because a last-minute change of heart meant I too was trying to get things set up and running and get a company functional for invites. Mind you I had no intention of doing this thing, but as we got closer to the launch of the game I started feeling that maybe that big company wasn’t really my scene.
All in all, though it was probably a good thing I had that last-minute change of heart. While we did not get as many invites as I wanted… it wasn’t for lack of desire. There were a lot of folks who just simply gave up on the server queue, and since I logged out around 9:30 pm CDT I also wasn’t really around for invites. I’ve tried to pass out officers to a bunch of people, but far as I can tell there isn’t really a way for people to see who is on in the company if you are not already in the company? One of my big takeaways the social structure of this game needs some tweaking. For example, I don’t have a Message of the Day set because if I start typing… the second I hit space my character jumps and it exits out of the interface. It also doesn’t support cut and pastes… so I can’t even “jury rig” it into working that way either.
Other than just some general concerns I had about the attitude of the leader, my main concern and what ultimately prompted my action is knowing that we were dealing with a very limited pool of possible invites. From what I understand the larger company filled up without actually managing to get everyone in that had signed up on the roster. I knew in my case that I had friends who were wanting to play this game that might not be able to create a character until the weekend, or god forbid a week late… and there would be nothing I could do about it. I refuse to adopt a “got mine, fuck you” attitude towards my friends. Back in World of Warcraft, I had a top tier raid guild courting me for one of their main tank slots… but I ultimately gave up on that notion and helped found a “friend and family raid” instead because it felt wrong to go off and abandon the people who helped me get where I was. I didn’t want to lead a company… but doing so absolutely made me feel better about the whole situation.
This is what our territory map looks like on Minda, the server I am playing on… and it is nowhere near as Syndicate dominated as I would have feared. Right now the Marauders aka Team Green controls the territory I hang out in Windsward as well as Monarch’s Bluffs. Over night the big company that I was going to join managed to snag First Light, which was the last of the four starter zones to be claimed. I am guessing they went for the route of raising 100,000 gold in order to buy the claim. Everfall is likely going to be in a constant state of flux because I believe when I was last there yesterday it was held by Covenant, and now is held by a Syndicate company with a pending War. I am impressed that Cutlass Keyes has been taken, but not shocked given that zone has a lot of higher-end resources in it and is ultimately in heavy contention. The rest of the zones are probably not held simply because folks are too low level to reasonably venture there.
As for me, I rushed ahead to start the company started and then idled in the background since I knew there was no way in hell of getting back into the game. It took me about 30 minutes in the morning and then I spent several hours last night leveling and managed to hit 18. There is something to be said about familiarity and knowing more or less where various resources are. I’ve had so many starts in this game in all four of the territories, but I think I lucked out and Windsward is probably my favorite. As a result, though I pretty much knew the critical path to get what I needed, and for example by the time I hit the first town I had already collected my 40 stone, 40 wood, and 40 leather for the later quests.
My real focus however has been getting my trades up so I could start making my own gear. Given that they changed things up quite a bit I am now focusing on Engineering because I really want to be able to make my own crafting tools. Ultimately I want to be able to craft Azoth Extraction tools in order to keep a steady flow of that for crafting or teleports. At some point, I will probably focus on Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing, but with everything being so freaking cheap on the market board I can pretty much buy whatever I want without denting my bank account. My hope is by the time I do get up there in skills… the glut of cheap items will have ended and I can actually start making goods for profit.
All in all, for a launch day it went pretty smoothly. The only larger concern I have going forward is that I am not sure Amazon fully understands the importance of being able to play with your friends. Right now it appears that the servers are capped at around 2000 players, combined with Companies, in general, being capped at 100 players… makes me question if they understood properly the scale of a large MMOPRG or if we misunderstood what sort of game they were going for. 2000 players and 100 per player unit… is more like a larger Rust or Ark than a proper MMORPG and I wonder if that is ultimately what they thought they were building here? My hope is that the 2000 player thing is an artificial metric to help force players to spread out a bit, and that given time they will increase that limit. However for pretty much all of the servers last night, the queues were as large if not larger than the population of the server based on what I could see from this third-party tracking website.
My hope is that they do some shifting and buffing of resources and that we can all actually get on the server we want to be on and play together. Ultimately that is the most important part of the MMO experience, is being able to play with a group of people that you enjoy playing with. I am glad I started Greysky Expedition, and I am happy that we are going to have room for folks… pending they can actually get on the server. So this was not a bad launch but there are some structural concerns I have going forward that would keep me from calling it a perfect launch. Did you manage to get in? What server are you playing on and what was your experience? Drop me a note below.
Hey Folks! I am a liar apparently, but a completely unintentional one. On the 23rd I created this long post, largely in my head as a justification to why I was not leading a Company going into New World. I tried extremely hard to follow that plan, but something just didn’t feel right. I am certain that everyone over in what is intended to be the East Aeternum Trading Company is great, but I just could not go through with it. Part of this is that I am old and stuck in my ways, and part of this is due to the fact that after hanging out in discord for a while I started to question if it really was my scene after all. I adore Grakulen, and thought that I would be joining a company lead by him… someone I trust. Instead, it was lead by someone that I had significantly less faith in after quietly watching them in chat for a few days.
I am sure they are probably a lovely person, but PVP crowds tend to be a little rough around the edges and I just am not terribly used to that anymore. It was very clear that there was a difference in focus, with all of the discussion going on about rushing to get money and claim the territory as fast as we could and making sure that we had a strong PVP team at the ready to defend it. So much so that they locked new membership yesterday in part because you can only have one hundred members in a company and partly because they needed to make sure those last few key invites were PVP-focused. Then there was a discussion about everyone needing to rush and make 1000 gold and donate it to the Company on that first day so that they could acquire said territory.
The cold reality is… not a single bit of that interested me. I want to be a super chill casual in this game, break rocks, beat zombies, and skin all of those bodies that people are leaving behind. I played New World completely by myself in several Alpha and Beta phases and had a grand ole time. The major benefit of the launch was the idea of being able to hang out and be dumb casuals with my friends. However, if I was part of a Company that already was locked against new players… what about my friends that don’t feel the need to rush around on day one? What about those friends who purposefully askew the concept of launch day, and the hustle of trying to fight for mob spawns. Are those friends just going to be permanently left out in the cold?
Instead, I am going to do my own thing, and with that comes an invite to anyone who is interested. I am still rolling on Minda and going Syndicate, but instead of joining up with the main force of folks… I am quietly forming the Greysky Expedition. I took the Greysky bit from Greysky Armada our Final Fantasy XIV Free Company and tried to set the name in this world. It is the age of sail, and I figured we would be the expeditionary force of the Greysky Mercantile Company looking for new exotic goods to ship back to the old world and sell. The fact that we are also a front for the Illuminati aka Syndicate is just a coincidence because I have a feeling that we are going to be spending most of our time exploring Aeternum and looking for new and interesting things.
Do I feel bad that I am abandoning Grak and his company? Yeah, a little bit. However, my dreams did not align with their dreams. I was not really into the whole funding the war effort thing, and I am more about roaming around aimlessly and picking daisies… in between smashing zombie skulls. I am on the same server which still makes me available for nonsense at a later date, but I am just not super interested in the territory game or honestly being super serious about the game in general. I want my chill crafting game with combat and to occasionally run some of the expeditions, but also don’t want to do it in a super organized manner. I am hoping that as soon as the servers are live I see lots of territory held by that group because I wish them all of the luck in the world. However, I am going to be over here doing my own thing, and now that I have rushed ahead to create a company… I plan on chilling the hell out.
I could not have wished for a better start to the game. I ended up with Windsward as my starting zone, which is ultimately where I was planning on migrating to eventually. It is one of the zones that end up being the most active as far as the market goes. Given that I want to focus on crafting and PVE, it makes for a pretty solid base of operations especially as it is also close to the higher level areas. As far as the company I am going to open it up to any friends and their friends and family. Basically, the sort of thing that House Stalwart started out as and Greysky Armada is. If you are interested in being casual as hell, then hit me up in-game on Belghast. However to summarize I am going to bullet point all of the important bits below.
Name: Belghast
Server: Minda NA East
Faction: Syndicate aka Team Purple
Company: Greysky Expedition
Ping me over various social channels if you want more information. I wish Grak and the East Aeternum Trading Co. the best of luck. I hope to see lots of territories taken for the Syndicate in their name, and with me bowing out that makes room for them to recruit more folks to help support their initiatives. For now, I am just going to be a chill dude hanging out on the sidelines of the larger conflicts.
Good Morning Folks! This morning I am going to venture forth into a topic that I admittedly am no real expert on. However, I also know there are a large number of folks out there trying to figure out how to make money in Final Fantasy XIV. For me personally, it was a shift in my mindset and I am going to talk a little bit about that going forward. What I feel is extremely important as evidence is that when I returned to the game on the weekend of July 4th, I had roughly 100,000 gil to my name. Essentially the entire time I have played Final Fantasy XIV, I have hovered in that 100k-200k range and never really understood how people managed to make the sort of money that they did.
There are regular folks who have amassed over 100 million gil and the truth is… I have a feeling at some point I will join those ranks. As of this morning before sitting down to write this post, I am sitting on around 12.9 million gil. So in a little less than 3 months, I have amassed over 12 million gil. Like I said for the most part this has just been me being extremely active with the game and making tweaks to the way I interacted with it. This doesn’t involve a lot of effort or any significant amount of market manipulation, just changing how you view the game. Once again please note that I am by no means a gil making expert, I am just doing some simple things to hopefully someday be able to afford a house.
Sell Everything
At the end of a night of adventuring, you are going to walk back into town and open your bags and see a bunch of nonsense. The thing is there is something key that you need to understand in Final Fantasy XIV and once you do… it will shift your perspective. Nothing drops from a mob that is not used in some way, and most of these items are used in the game’s vast and complicated crafting system. Farming materials from mobs takes an awful lot of time… I know this because I have done it and it is oftentimes mind-numbing. As a result most crafters simply buy materials from the market board, because after about level 25 you can’t buy the items you need from vendors.
What this means is that all of those Teeth, Skins, Furs and countless other nonsensical drops have significant value. While my inventory in the above shot is pretty much pruned from these because I sold them all last night… I often time have several items that are worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 gil apiece. Granted this is pricing on the market board and not vendors because the mistake is usually to just walk up to a vendor and liquidate everything for pennies on the dollar. Once I started actively engaging with the Market, I noticed just how freaking thriving it really is. So many times I will post an item and then in mere moments I get a message from the system telling me that item sold. As I have branched out into alts on other servers, I am experiencing the same sort of rapid turn on even low-level crafting materials so it is absolutely not just a Cactuar thing.
Ultimately you need to become acquainted with the Market Board interface because it is pretty powerful. When you go to list an item on your vendor it will bring up a dialog allowing you to set the price of the item you are listing. The challenge here is you are likely going to have no clue what the value of that item is, but the game provides you with a nice system in order to look up every item that is currently selling and view all of the recent histories of items that have sold. Check out the area I marked in green on the left labelled “Compare Prices” this is going to bring up the dialog labelled “Search Results” and show you all of the items currently for sale with the same name as the one you are listing. If you want to delve further you can click the item I have highlighted in green on the right side to bring up the History dialog showing the recent prices and when an item has sold.
Based on these and my knowledge that these items are needed for a quest in groups of 4, I priced my item at 6000 gil because someone buying them for the quest is going to be likely looking for the exact number. There is someone setting 25 for 3000 gil each, but that also means that a player is going to have to buy ALL 25 of them, and most people are not going to be willing to flip those slowly 4 at a time to make up the difference. There is another player that has 8 of them and 2 of them… but my listing would be the only one at the exact amount needed in that 6000 gil price point, which means more than likely my item is going to move extremely quickly. I will talk more specifically about the item I am selling later and how to acquire it, because it is pretty easy for even lower-level characters to get these.
Be Active In The Game
This is probably my single largest source of gil… just doing activities in the game and letting the game reward me for doing it. For example each day I do one of each of the roulette and collect the reward bonus both for levelling purposes and for gaining gil. This has been my key to leveling my alts as fast as I have, is that each roulette rewards a huge chunk of bonus experience. However, there is also a decent cash bonus as well. For example, yesterday when I completed my Main Scenario Roulette I noticed that the cash reward was over 16,000 gil. Do enough of these over time and it just adds up to a large sum of money. I’ve found that I have less and less need to actually spend the gil, and this steady trickle means that my bank account is constantly growing.
Another thing that you should be ignoring is the Challenge Log items. For example, I have not run a lot of FATEs this week, but in doing so I am leaving a ton of experience and a decent chunk of gil on the table. At some point, I need to go do some fates because if I do 10 that will be worth roughly 2.5 million experience and 3,000 gil. A good number of these happen organically while doing other activities, but you should probably spend at least a moment before the reset on Tuesday looking through your Challenge Log and seeing if there are any low-hanging fruit that you can finish up quickly. FATEs are absolutely something worth doing, so I have a feeling at some point I will do some of the ones in Il Mheg on one of my level 70 characters, since those tend to be pretty active and will be paid for doing so.
Don’t Cap Currency
One of the things that happen over time in this game is that you start to cap a few currencies. One of these is Grand Company seals, which are used to upgrade your reputation with your grand company but also can be used to buy a bunch of things. There are a lot of sources for earning these but probably the easiest and most overlooked is delivering gear that you don’t need that is green or better. Turning these in at your grand company rewards you anywhere from hundreds of seals to thousands of seals depending on the level and rarity. So as a result when I am running activities I always greed on gear regardless if I need it or not. Most players pass on everything because they don’t want the items clogging their inventory, and you can turn this instinct into paydirt by converting these items directly into grand company seals.
However, if you want to turn them into gil directly there are a few ways. I exclusively use grand company seals to make sure I have enough ventures in order to send my retainers out on missions. However, if you want to buy items to flip on the market you are given a few options. The best of these are the items I spoke about earlier and that I have highlighted in green. There is a step in the Heavensward relic chain that requires you to turn in 4 of each of the items highlighted. These can be crafted by trade skills but are annoying enough to make that crafter don’t usually do so anymore. So far I have had the best luck with Kingcakes, but in theory, each of these sells in the neighborhood of 5-6k gil each and you want to sell them in stacks of 4 at a time. As a result, this becomes a pretty easy way to convert 20,000 grand company seals into 24,000 gil.
What About Poetics?
This one becomes a bit more tricky. There are lots of things that you can spend poetics on, and in truth, I would highly suggest you buy tier sets for your alts as you level them. Having done a lot of this recently in my grind go 80 on all characters, I have learned that you can very easily make it all the way to the next major decade milestone in leveling off of the best tier set from the previous expansion. So when I ding 60, I outfit a character in the Shire gear from Idyllshire and that will take me all the way to 70 when I buy a set of Scaevan gear from Rhalgar’s Reach. Later as you get into the legendary weapon quests you are going to constantly find yourself needing poetics to buy various things and different steps in the chain. However, if you are just wanting to liquidate your poetics quickly and painlessly I do know a few ways.
This first method is by far the most direct and requires access to either Ishgard and the Rowena vendor near the teleport, or Idyllshire. Essentially you want to find an item for sale called Demicrystal. This costs 25 poetics each and sells for 50 gil, so you can buy 80 of them for your 2000 poetics and straight-up vendor them for a grand total of 4000 gil. It is sort of the most brain-dead option for converting poetics into gold and requires no access to the Market Board. However, there is a significantly better option if you are willing to put in the effort.
This will require you have access to Idyllshire at the end of the Heavensward story campaign. There are two items also available on Hismena called Unidentifiable Shell and Unidentifiable Ore. These can be purchased on pretty much any place a Rowen representative exists, but you are going to need access to Idyllshire specifically for the next part. These are used for a weapon quest eventually, but they serve another use. However, since we are specifically talking about them, you can buy them for 150 poetics each which means at maximum if you are capped you can get 13 at a time.
If you go next to Hismena over to Bertana, you can convert the Unidentifiable Shell to Grade 3 Shroud Topsoil, and Unidentifiable Ore to Grade 3 Thanalan Topsoil. So to understand the value here, each time you need to plant an item in either your Housing garden or one of the individual Pots that you can place in apartments and personal rooms, you are going to need to consume soil. This means folks who are actively growing things are going to need a lot of this, and most folks are going to be seeking the highest grade soil available. In my experience prices fluctuate wildly on soil, but lately, it has been going for the neighborhood of 1000 gil each. That means if you can buy 13 items for your 2000 poetics you can potentially flip them for 13,000 gil.
What About Doman Enclave?
Earlier I said nothing drops in Final Fantasy XIV that does not have a purpose, and that you should avoid vendoring things if at all possible. Some of you were probably thinking “But Bel, What about the Gil bags? Aren’t they designed to be sold?” and on some level, you are absolutely correct. The Gil bags that you can get in lieu of items from quests are absolutely designed to be vendored. However, what if I told you that you could get twice the amount of value from them? At the end of Stormblood, an area opens up called the Doman Enclave, and you are effectively building a town by donating items to the cause. One of the best items that you can donate is the bags of gil, because you are given a gratuity for donating to the cause. This starts out being half of the value and over the course of leveling up the area eventually caps out at doubling your money.
There is a weekly limit to how much you can earn from this system, but it might benefit you to save up those gil sacks until the Tuesday reset and then pour those resources into leveling the Doman Enclave and essentially earning you some free gil for just teleporting there and doing some hand-ins.
Do Some of All of the Above
Basically, I am extremely active in the game and through doing my roulettes and some of the above I am earning way more cash than I can possibly spend. The biggest shift for me personally was to stop vendoring the trash in my bags, and instead first checking to see if any of it is valuable on the market. For me personally, I tend to sit a 100 gil limit to how much it is worth my time to actually flip. If an item is only going for 50 gil or so on the market, I am probably just going to vendor the item and be done with it. However, if I can turn 2000 gil for posting an item I am absolutely going to do that every single time. You will need to sort out how engaged you want to be in this process, and then there is also the challenge of market board space since each retainer can only sell 20 items at a given time. Most crafting materials flip pretty quickly, but you are going to need to keep evaluating your prices in order to make sure you move things.
I hope this helps someone out there. There is a version of me that used to hoard every single material I got, but in truth, the economy is so fluid in Final Fantasy XIV, that I have little to no doubt that I could easily buy back whatever I need whenever I need it. If you take nothing else away from this post, I would say the “Sell Everything” mindset is the biggest shift that put me on the road to riches. If you have any direct questions I am more than willing to field them, but also know that I am by no means an expert.
