Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 117 of 129

2013 Retrospective

January 1, 2014 by Belghast

Grand Experiment in Review

2012 was an extremely horrible year for me and at least professionally I would rank it as quite possibly the worst year I have ever had. I would put it as worse than the year I was out of work for six months after the dotcom crash. On September 11th 2012 my company suffered what they thought was a network attack, that only later the security guy pulled his head out of his ass and realized it was a regularly scheduled security scan… that he himself authorized. The results of this was a massive overreaction that caused me and my team to spend the rest of the year and a good chunk of the beginning of this year rebuilding damned near everything that touched the web. Why did we have to do this? Because they quite literally pulled the servers out of the racks and sent them to the FBI, leaving us next to nothing to work off of.

So next to that year, this year has seemed like an absolute dream. However it has been more than that for me. 2013 has been a year of personal growth and exploring new things. In April when I finally pulled my head above water after the “faux” security incident, I really wanted to make a break back into blogging. I fell off of the planet shortly after the security event and simply could not bring myself to write about anything. Coming back I devised what I called a “grand experiment”, namely to blog each and every day even if I didn’t think I had much to write about. At this point there are 237 posts categorized as “The Grand Experiment”, and without fail I have blogged every day even when it was a struggle to do so.

Has the experiment worked? Well functionally yes I have managed to blog every day, but more importantly has it provided an interesting stream of content? Quite honestly I don’t know. Most of the time I feel like I am a little kid writing to a make believe audience. When I talk to someone who mentions something I have written… I am always shocked. I feel like no one actually reads my stuff, that I am mostly just writing it for my own benefit. People seem to enjoy what I write, and I have a regular stream of readers… but I will never have the type of audience that the bigger bloggers have. I am just too rough around the edges for that sort of thing. For the most part I am happy with the results of a year of blogging and my long-term goal is to make it at least one full year of posts without pause. That of course will be up April 26th of 2014, which seems like it is far in the future right now. However I don’t see myself losing steam at any point soon.

A Healthier Me

Another big change in my life over the course of 2013 is that I am considerably lighter. In March my wife and I began to shift the way we relate to food. I say it in terms like that because really we have completely changed our relationship to food as a whole. To say we went on a diet doesn’t really encompass the level of change. Diets are about the short term, but we wanted to make permanent and long-term changes in the way we ate. Namely we focused on trying to find a new and sustainable way to live. At this point I am 70 lbs smaller and have hit a bit of a plateau over the last month. However the fact that I survived both Thanksgiving and Christmas without breaking that plateau makes me happy enough.

My wife on the other hand continues to lose at a steady pace and is now down roughly 60 lbs. At some point I need to get super serious again, as I have become lax of late. However the current weight seems to be a place I can comfortable stay without any real intervention. I have reached my goal and it is time for me in this new year to refocus myself and set a new one. I will never be a small man, I come from a long line of really big people. I am however happy enough being able to say I am a “smaller” man. The thing I was not expecting to be honest were the health benefits. As a whole I am far healthier than I was a year ago, and the primary benefit is that my Asthma that I have struggled with my entire life… and have even been hospitalized for… is really a mere nuisance these days. I can go months on a single inhailer, and that is not a thing I have ever been able to do in my life.

Professional Growth

In the last year I have grown more into the role of the manager of my group. I have learned to delegate more, which is something I have always struggled with in my life. I was good at accepting assignments, but never very good at passing them on to my troops, instead trying to take them all on myself. My team is pretty amazing and I would be lost without them. I guess in some small way I have learned to have more faith in them, and trust that they will do as much diligence with an assignment as I would have. As a result I have shifted more into the architect role for my group and part-time project manager and full-time traffic cop. Making sure all of the assignments are going to the right places and all seeing at least some progress.

We usually have 50-60 active projects for a team of three people. So it involves lots of juggling. Various forces in my company want me to move up into a permanent management position. However I simply do not want to distances myself from the “real work” enough to take them. Additionally right now I am responsible for three extremely highly functional people, and I don’t think I could cope with being put over less functional people that I would some how have to whip into shape. I am not really great with confrontations, and as a result I think I would flounder. Either that or it would be similar to me as a raid leader, and I would turn into a real asshole. For the time being I think I am happy with where I am and what I am doing.

I Wrote A Novel

One of the things I have always wanted to do in my life was to write a novel. I made several false attempts at various times over the years but never could seem to push myself to do it. This November I joined the NaNoWriMo event, and over the course of the month knocked out my first novel. I have no idea if it is actually any good, because honestly I have not even read it since finishing it up. I plan in the new year to tear it asunder as I edit it, and fix any issues. However regardless if it completely sucks, I have accomplished a goal. I managed to write a novel, and that is a thing most people can’t say about themselves. I didn’t do it to get famous, or be published, I did it mostly just to prove to myself that I could.

The weird thing about it is, November seems like a lifetime ago. The whole concept of writing 1500 words per night was just absolutely draining. My entire life revolved around that novel for those thirty days, which is honestly longer than I have stuck with anything like that in my life. More than anything I feel like it was a venue of personal growth. I did a thing I never thought I could, and I did so in a methodical way in which it felt like success was assured from the moment I started. Sure I faltered a few times along the way, and there were a few days I didn’t write a blessed thing. However I kept moving forward towards the eventual 50,000 word count goal and I achieved it. I think more than anything I am proud of this accomplishment from 2013.

A Year of Gaming

This is a gaming blog afterall, so during 2013 I played a lot of games. I played way more games than I can ever manage to remember, but I will try and run down a few of the big ones. The list of major titles is as follows.

Oddly enough I am beginning this new year not entirely differently than I began the last year. January 2013 I was still involved in the launch of Mists of Pandaria, and it was not until April that I really began to distance myself from that game entirely. World of Warcraft and I have this love/hate relationship. I get frustrated with it so much, because it seems that they always seem to take the most short sighted solutions to problems, and there are so many games that there that do various things it does…. so much better. However as a total package I feel like the game is unbeatable. It offers the most good things in one package. The realization for me however after my 2+ years of absence from being serious about the game is that it is not about the game at all. World of Warcraft is about the people playing it, and I had missed the ragtag group of people known as House Stalwart immensely.

The game I probably played the most often during the year however was Rift. I want to love rift so badly, the promise of the game is really great. The problem is it just lacks something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It is a technically superior game in every aspect, but it is like it lacks a cohesive narrative that makes me care about the world every single day. The dragons were a thing I thought I could get behind. But now that we have systematically killed each of them off, I cannot say in a single sentence what the world of Rift is. I think that might be the problem, there is no one clear narrative to the game. You cannot say “this game is” and have even half of the people agree on it. I still play it occasionally and there is still an incarnation of House Stalwart there that Psynister and Fynralyl are keeping alive. I thank them so much for being there, but I just can’t seem to care about the game right now. I am sure at some point I will again.

Final Fantasy was another major force for the year. This was a game I never intended to like because really I feel like me and Japanese RPGs had a messy divorce quite some time ago. I had a group of friends actively wanting to play it, so against my better judgment I went along for the ride. What I found however was a really well crafted narrative and dungeon experience. If I could have kept experiencing new bits of immersive content, I would have likely stuck around. However once you reached the end of the game, it was exactly that… the end. All paths lead to massive amount of grinding, and for whatever reason… while I can stomach grinding all day long in World of Warcraft… I could not stomach the particular FFXIV brand of grinding. Namely I blame this on the overall lack of meaninful drops in the game. If I have a chance of getting something cool while killing mobes, no matter how remote the chance… it feels exciting to me each time I open a loot window. There was nothing that could drop from mobs in the world that I would ever care about. Additionally gearing up to get to a point where we could raid, was just not a bridge I was willing to cross.

Games for 2014

There has been a game I have been in super secret closed door testing since February. I cannot name the game by name, but I have to say I am still extremely excited about it even after most of a year testing it. I have watched the game grow from something that felt polished to something that really is amazingly rich and polished. I don’t think I will quit WoW this time for another game, because I have set down some pretty solid roots there again. However I know I will also be playing this game, at the very least two to three nights a week. It is probably the least wow-like game I have played in a long while, and because of that I feel like there is room in my heart for both games to have a unique space.

Past that I am really not certain what 2014 will hold. I know that I am not really interested enough to purchase a PS4 or an XBox One, so I think I will be exiting the console mainstream once again. I am mostly a PC gamer to be honest, and since my gameloft has been taken over by my wife I am okay with not having access to the consoles. More than anything I am looking forward to the various stores beginning to liquidate their stocks of PS3 and XBox 360 games, so I can pick up the titles I always wanted to play but didn’t have the desire to pay for. Additionally there are still a lot of things on the DS/3DS that I want to play, and I am looking forward to picking up the newest Zelda game. I am sure there will be a number of surprises along the way, games that catch my fancy enough to deserve lots of blog posts.

I hope that 2014 will be as positive force in my life as 2013 has been. Additionally I hope each and every one of you out there can say the same. My friend @AlternativeChat has declared 2014 the “Year of Faff”, and I am down with this notion. I think we all need to learn how to faff about in the game worlds we are in, because stopping and smelling the roses is the only real way I know to break the cycle of burnout. I have tried my best to embrace this concept, and hope to continue to do so in the year to come. More than anything, I feel like I am sick of jumping games every three months, and I get the sense that the gaming world as a whole is somewhat sick of that as well. I hope we can each embrace our own faff, whatever that might mean.

Social Justice

December 26, 2013 by Belghast

Happy Holidays?

Yesterday was a mixed bag, I am not going to get into the awkwardness that was Christmas with my family. I should have taken a picture of the gallon jug of holy water that my grandmother for some reason seems to think she needs, however I did not as it would have been too obvious. Suffice to say it was fine while it was just my parents and grandmother, but once people started showing up the fight or flight instinct kicked in and I had to get out of there. We stayed long enough to be socially acceptable, or at least long enough to see everyone and then got back on the road. I really don’t deal with large groups of people in confined spaces very well.

When I finally got home that night I went back to my LFR madness. I really would have thought that the holidays would have made people better natured, but instead it seemed like only the worst people were running dungeons. I guess it makes sense, as most of the “good” people probably have families and such that they would rather be spending time with. The highlight of the evening, as far as horrible goes came when my Downfall group finally got to Garrosh. We had a few people drop like usual, and one of the warriors that joined in immediately started moaning that he had waited in queue for an hour and missed the entire dungeon.

Instead of doing the right thing, and just dropping group and taking the deserter debuff… he proceeded to pull Garrosh while we were still getting prepared screaming “For Mother Russia”. Obviously his ploy was to get us to kick him which doesn’t cause the debuff to happen. He was running across the screen just about to aggro him again when the kick happened saving the day. The problem is… there needs to be a better way of managing this. The systems in place don’t give us a way to flag this guy letting other people know that he will likely screw their group over if things don’t go his way.

Social Justice

League of Legends has had in the past the most notoriously toxic community in online gaming. As a result they knew that this was ultimately hurting their product and keeping players from participating on a deep level with it. Instead of sitting back and saying “pugs will be pugs” they took matters into their own hands and tried to devise a way of dealing with this. As a result they created two systems that work hand in hand. The honor system allows players to provide “endorsements” that are positive, such as Teamwork, Friendly, Knowledgeable, and at the same time provide a venue for reporting bad behavior. When a player has received enough negative reports they go into another system called the Tribunal.

One of the problems with social reporting is that there is a sea of false positives and downright minor infractions that clog the customer support staff. As a result the Tribunal system is innovative in that it brings each case before a jury of “peers” aka other players who have signed up to be willing to sit on these peer based juries. You can view all of the results on the public Tribunal page if you are logged into your league account. The image on the right side is an example of a tribunal ruling. Of course warnings for language should apply as it states exactly what the player said during the match to warrant being reported.

Be Proactive Blizzard

These systems really do seem to work out in the wild, in fact with the big 2.1 patch in Final Fantasy XIV Squaresoft introduced a very similar endorsement system with some big rewards that can be gained through this positive behavior. In the past there were unofficial systems on the servers that permanently labeled disruptive players as pariahs from the social circles. There was a time where you could look at the guild a player was in and have a fair shot at gauging whether or not the player would be a positive influence on your group. Additionally just talking to a player for a moment before inviting them to fill a group gave you a good idea of their future behavior. When Blizzard introduced systems to automate these processes it completely removed the element of social ramifications, and such the “greater internet fuckwad theory” came true.

When it is perceived that there are no consequences for bad actions… players tend to behave worse. Sure there are awesome people out there that are awesome all the time regardless of who is looking… but that is quite simply not the majority of people. These systems work to bring a tally of someone’s misdeeds to bear each time they step into a group. The guy who wiped the LFR because he didn’t want to be there… would bring with him a black mark from each and every player that flagged him for doing what he did. I feel like blizzard does an excellent job of policing and banning players who are actively exploiting the game.

However it is quite literally against their best interest to ban players who are paying them a monthly subscription. Each time they ban one of these players they lose his money, and over time it adds up. What systems like the tribunal do is introduce a neutral third party, the player. The tribunal works because no only does it hold players accountable for their actions, but it also holds the players who are making these decisions accountable. Every decision that is made, and the players who participated in making it is posted publicly for the world to see. Since this relies on the players justice is usually far more swift than waiting for customer service to sift through their backlog of cases and deal with it. It is my hopes that with the rollout of Warlords of Draenor, they will investigate a system like this, and hopefully make it applicable to ALL battle.net games..

Richer Than You Think

December 19, 2013 by Belghast

A Patch Awoken

Monday evening the Final Fantasy XIV servers were down to deliver the brand new 2.1 patch. This is the one that everyone had been waiting for, that was supposed to deliver a ton of new content. At one point I was anxiously looking forward to this update, because it held the promise of player housing as well as new dungeons to run to collect what we lovingly refer to as “bookrocks” aka Tomestones. Now that the patch is live, I find that I can’t seem to be bothered to actually patch the game up. Tuesday and Wednesday night I spent a bit of time hanging out in mumble with my friends who are still playing it, and they seem extremely excited about it overall. The video below shows all the reported changes, and I will admit it seems pretty staggering.

However several of these things seemed to be tarnished by somewhat bad design. The biggest of these that I have heard of is the housing system. Currently it is oppressively expensive, the day it was released I saw a tweet (that I seem to be unable to find at this moment) stating that they gained the first million gil towards their house… only 99 more to go. That apparently is cheap… here is a listing of the housing prices on the various servers. We are in group three, on Cactuar so right now it would cost 125 million gil to purchase the largest home… aka the one suitable for a guild house. Considering prior to 2.1 there really was no way to make money at 50 other than crafting… this seems insane. The highest I have ever gotten with my character was 200,000 gil, and repair bills and components for my artifact weapon whittled that down to around 75,000 gil the last I checked in on the game.

Supposedly they have added in a bunch of new ways to earn money, which I guess is a positive. However it does seem silly to roll out such an expansive and impressive system… that no one can actually use on day one. Supposedly over time the housing prices will fall, but that still puts the large house at 100 million gil at the absolute cheapest possible price. Listening to my friends, they seem to be enjoying the new content. The new dungeon Pharos Sirius seems to be genuinely difficult and to the best of my knowledge they have not beat the final encounter. That was one of the interesting things about FFXIV dungeons, is that they had a 2 hour timer to get through them. I feel like I should be excited about the prospects of the patch, but I just fine myself not caring at all. Whatever magic I felt towards FFXIV seems to be gone for me, in the same way it has flickered away for so many other games.

Richer Than You Think

This morning I achieved a personal goal… too bad it comes 2 expansions too late to be terribly impressive. I have never been extremely successful at making money in MMOs. I guess in the grand scheme of things it just has never really been a priority. As a result I have always thought that I was broke, or at did not have a ton of liquid assets in game. While I am still not anywhere near some of my guild members, I am was apparently doing better than I ever thought. Awhile back I installed Titan Panel again, to help organize a lot of my informational gadgets in one place. In trying to keep track where I was with all of my tokens I installed a Currency addon. Interesting thing about it… is that it started to keep track of all of the money spread across all of my characters.

As of last night it showed that I had 25,000 gold distributed among all of my alts… five of which are 90 and in various stages of “raid ready”. No character had more than 5,000 gold on them specifically, but spread out among all of the characters it added up. Because of this I decided to realize something that had long been a goal for me. With Wrath of the Lich king they added what has been ubiquitously referred to as the “Repair Mount”. Since I do a lot of random killing out in the world, and solo farming of dungeons/raids… I find myself constantly searching for a repair vendor. So many times I have thought to myself “man it would be awesome to have that mount”, but even with faction and guild discounts it was still 14,000 gold… which seemed like an insane amount.

I never would have purchased this back in the days before account-wide mounts… but the idea that I just gave every single alt the ability to repair whenever they hell they felt like it? Sure 14,000 seemed like a reasonable price, especially considering I have branched out onto a second account of characters. So this morning before sitting down to write my blog entry I shifted back and forth between all of my characters and began pooling my money on Belgrave to make the purchase. I knew for certain he was exalted with Kirin Tor, the faction the mount vendor is sold on. I have to say… I am freaked out a little that I just spent all that gold on a single mount, but within a few days that will pass and I will be happy with my decision. There really is very little I want to purchase in the game at this point that my army of alt crafters cannot eventually make. So I figure thanks to the mount I will be able to farm up more goodies to fill the coffers again.

Lucky Streak

Most of the yesterday evening I spent working my way through Siege of Orgrimmar. The first section of the dungeon went extremely smoothly and the loot gods seemed to be smiling upon me. I managed to get a usable drop off three of the four bosses there. Of course the first drop of the evening was a neckpiece… after purchasing the one with honor last night. That seems like it is always the way however… when you upgrade a piece, you end up getting a better one almost instantly. The second part of Siege however went extremely slowly as I had to complete it in two passes. I was on the second boss of the first pass when my wife came home last night and needed my assistance. After killing Iron Juggernaut I bailed from the LFR and did what she needed for a bit.

After coming back that meant sitting through another 30-60 minute queue and repeating the first two encounters without loot. However that second run went far more smoothly than the first, and we had no wipes at all until folks lost focus during the Nazgrim fight. That is not the type of fight that you can “burn down at the end”, since the not dealing with the adds means he very rapidly heals back all of the damage you are dealing to him. During the second attempt however, folks stayed focused on the adds and we managed to defeat him in near record time. My hope is tonight to come back and finish out the last two parts. At 11pm I attempted to queue for the third, and it looked like roughly an hour queue so I gave up and went to bed. Still no love for a weapon, but this next segment has the chance of dropping a weapon I believe. So between it and my nightly habit of running a Heroic Scenario… I might have a chance.

Pre-Endgame Game

October 29, 2013 by Belghast

Limited Time Stuff

First off I guess let me open todays post with a complaint. I really had nothing much to talk about as I sat down at the keyboard, so I did what I normally do and sifted through my RSS feed. I spent most of yesterday super busy and really did not have time to read anything much. One of the first posts was over on Rift Junkies talking about how apparently there was a new mount available for only four hours on the Rift store. They are apparently calling this unstable artifacts, which is a clever excuse to make something super limited that costs a hell of a lot on the store.

I am not against the 2700 credit price tag, but I am against the concept of limited time items. I hate when something goes into game only to be pulled out swiftly keeping anyone else from getting the item. I honestly don’t care about the red Kirin at all, because I think the mounts are ugly, but for me it is more a principle of it. When a game starts doing one time only things, I really lose interest quickly. I get extremely frustrated anymore when I am asked to play a game on someone else’s schedule. With the recent rapidly expiring world event each phase lasting only two days… this seems to be the direction that Rift wants to move in.

The more of this type of content goes into the game the less and less interested I am in it. There are so many things about Guild Wars 2 that I think I would enjoy, but the fact that content expires roughly every two weeks keeps me from wanting to dig in and try it. I don’t want to ONLY play this one game, and in order to farm up every new thing in the world… I would really have to do just that. The whole playing the same game every single night concept just seems foreign to me. There are so many different games I want to experience, so knowing I will go into a game missing out on things… makes me think my time is better spent elsewhere.

Pre-Endgame Game

I guess while I am complaining, I might as well not stop with Rift. Onwards to FInal Fantasy A Realm Reborn! We absolutely lucked out as a guild and had eight of us reaching 50 within a few days of each other. Well that is not true I guess, we had one super impatient gamer rush through to the end game and sit there without any additional support for about two weeks. However the majority of us arrived at the end game at roughly the same time. This made the sequence of three eight man instances seem not that horrible in part because it was fresh content for all of us. However now that we have another three characters up to 50, I am realizing what a slog it really is.

So much of the end of the main storyline in FFXIV reminds me of the trials and tribulations of having to key players for various raid instances in both EQ and WoW. Be warned there will be some spoilers, so if you care about that sort of thing, I would stop reading. I will try my best to do as few as possible, but it is going to happen. Essentially when you hit 49 you start down a sequence of events that leads to the finishing of the main storyline. The first of these is Cape Westwind, yet another trial. We have done this now three times… and quite honestly I cannot tell you exactly how the mechanics work. The biggest pain is getting eight players online at the same time.

Next you run through a few quests and end up unlocking Castrum Meridianum… which is surprise surprise another eight man dungeon. This takes a little over an hours time normally if you are not doing the speed run chicanery… and now that every mob in the instance drops decent money there really is no reason why you would. These places are decent money. Once you finish up in there, you do a few more quests and wind up stalled on The Praetorium… yet another 8 man dungeon. This one takes quite a bit longer than the previous one and is a wee bit trickier at times. Finally after finishing this sequence of events you can finish the main storyline and unlock Amdapor Keep.

We have been working our way through these for Cyl, Opo and Tivo… and the problem with an eight man dungeon is trying to accommodate eight different play schedules. We really only seem to have time to do one of the dungeons in the sequence per night. Last night we were trying to figure out when we could pull together a group next… and the problem is we are unlikely to be able to get ALL of the necessary players online until next week sometime. As we started going through the days, there was one player that could not attend on each of the nights. While the final storyline is extremely cool… it just seems like a lot of bullshit to have to slog through to even begin the end game grind.

Norrath Calling

Towards the end of the night I ended up logging out of FFXIV and popping into EQ2 for a bit. I have said it before, and I will say it again… sooner or later I always return to playing EQ2. I am not sure if I am ready to be back in it yet, but I did some questing out in Withered Lands and enjoyed the relaxed pace. My friend that recently returned was telling me excitedly about the guilds plans to start doing heroics, and while I think that is cool I don’t want anyone to factor me in their gaming decisions yet. I already have a game where I am a key resource for running instances… I really don’t want another one.

That is not to say that I don’t enjoy tanking dungeons, because I do… otherwise I wouldn’t keep returning to playing that role. I just find that tanking takes more out of me than it used to. I cannot chain run instances like I once could. So I find myself needing something else to play so I can have a bit of peace and quiet… and more importantly downtime. Everquest 2 has always been a good filler of this niche. I would like to get my Shadowknight up to 95 so I can be prepared for the new content when it releases as well. I still feel like in many ways I am running from WoW, because I know that will only end up in tears of frustration. I continue to ignore its sirens call by playing other things… just not sure how long that will work.