Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 127 of 129

Bad Launches

August 26, 2013August 26, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… it is the beginning of another work week and I still feel sore as hell from the weekends adventures. The odd thing is my thighs are killing me… and I am guessing it was from all the random times I had to squat down to take a shot throughout the wedding festivities. I still need to sift through the photos and cull it down to a final set of “wedding pictures”. As I just reached up to scratch my forehead… it appears that the sunburn is starting to peel… so I have that itchy mess to look forward to over the next few days.

Pre-launch Problems

The above animated image pretty much sums up my experience with the weekend pre-launch of Final Fantasy XIV a Realm Reborn. Essentially I got to play a bit before the wedding madness started on Saturday morning, and then at almost every point afterwards I received some form of an error trying to log in. Essentially I think all of the issues encountered can more or less be chocked up to the poor infrastructure we have seen at various points during the other tests. Almost everything about this weekend could have been reconciled if they had the forethought to include an actual login queue system.

Sure there is a sort of queue that exists, but the highest number in queue my friends and I have seen is somewhere in the 400s… which leads me to believe that the queue is limited to something ridiculous like 500 members. This leads to the very fun process of spamming a character login only to get the ubiquitous 1017 error stating the world is full. That is hands down the most frustrating part about the whole experience. It seems like complete blind luck as to whether or not you are going to make it in.

Bad Timing

Ultimately another large portion of the failure that was the FFXIV head start, was the fact that they were holding it entirely over a weekend in North America. Normally pre-launches begin on a Thursday night and continue on through Friday… at which time they can begin to see what the scaling issues are going to be like and adjust accordingly. Holding it on a weekend essentially means that all infrastructure resources in North America are closed for the weekend. I feel as though if they could have thrown a few more servers at this issue a lot of the problems would have been resolved.

Instead the game team and infrastructure resources are operating on a significant time lag. An example is that Sunday evening… at what would be 8:30 am Japanese time… they managed to stabilize the JP servers. As a result I was finally able to roll a character on the Japanese network of servers and at least spent a little time before going to bed playing around on Ultima. My friends think that this morning we will see the EU/NA servers stabilize similarly. I still question whether or not they actually care about customer service, but that is part of a much larger issue.

Bad Launches

So far this is probably the worst game head start I have experienced. Normally when a game launches, we get a few blissful days of stability during the head start as only the pre-orders get to play… and then can chill out for the first day as the servers burn around us knowing you already have characters that are pretty far into the game. Quite honestly this is the first time that I can remember ever experiencing large periods of not being able to play the game at all… during a head start weekend. Lots of head start experiences have been riddled with lag or other issues… but the game was at least partially playable. During the entirety of the weekend I got roughly 2 hours of gameplay.

One of the things I found interesting however is that while talking to friends over text and mumble… I did not realize just how subjective a launch experience was. For me I herald the launch of Rift as quite possibly one of the smoothest I had experienced. However talking to one of my friends… he remembers tons of issues during that launch. This lead me to crawl back through my forum posts and blog posts from the time… and I literally found no mention of any issues brought on by the launch. Did I just not notice the issues because I was enjoying myself… or did I really not experience the problems that he had made note of.

So this makes me wonder… how many of the bad launches I have experienced are purely subjective? For example, I considered Guild Wars 2 an extremely solid launch since it was playable for me the entire time… albeit I spent most of that time on the overflow shards. However the simple fact that we could not really play on our “real” shards made it an extremely frustrating experience for certain other players. Do they consider that launch a failure… whereas I consider it a pretty solid success? Additionally I struggled with massive amounts of lag during the SWTOR launch, but my friends consider that to be one of the more successful launches to date. It felt like a rocky start to me, and as such I got extremely frustrated by it.

King of Bad Launches

So far the two worst launch experiences I have played under are both from the same company. World of Warcraft has gone down in history as the rockiest start. I can remember the game being more or less unstable for a solid month. I remember almost always being able to connect to play the game… but functionally the server side lag made it next to unplayable. There were times I could level without issue… so long as I never attempted to loot anything I did not already have in my inventory. Likewise the launch of Diablo 3 was essentially an unplayable mess for the first few weeks and constant error codes. I had far less forgiveness in me around that launch, because after the rocky wow start… they should have had better preparations in place for another blockbuster success.

The thing is… at the launch of WoW more or less the gamers dealt with not being able to play the game… because it was in so many ways leaps and bounds ahead of what else was currently on the market. It was “worth” waiting for. I feel like companies simply do not have the luxury of time to fix their problems. I posted a complaint about the Final Fantasy launch over on G+ and immediately people brought up the failure that was Diablo 3. Gamers tend to hold a grudge against the games that floundered and while some of them will develop a short memory and return to your game happily once the issues are resolved, there is a certain percentage that will never again trust your company.

With these catastrophic infrastructure failures… I feel as thought Final Fantasy XIV has roughly a weeks time to fix everything and get the servers in a relatively permanent state. The roughest part is the fact that this is occurring during the pre-launch and we are not even seeing the final launch day crowds. Right now every one of these frustrated players has the opportunity to log into amazon, or green man gaming and cancel their preorder. I know of a handful of players who have done just this. The rough reality is that other than the Final Fantasy diehards, the title is just not good enough overall to make the masses wait to play it. There are way too many other games on the market, and many of them without the subscription fee.

Wrapping Up

Here is hoping that the next few days see massive improvements in the stability of Final Fantasy XIV. Right now I am extremely disappointed and this probably goes down as the worst pre-launch I have experienced. The next few days will determine if it can compete with Blizzard for the worst launch category. Hopefully they can throw enough hardware at the problem to fix it quickly. I hope you all have a great week, and that you were able to get in more playtime than I have to date.

Wedding Daze

August 25, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks… I return once more to my morning posts and am doing so in an extremely groggy fashion. Before I went to bed last night I took some Motrin PM… and while the box says you should be prepared to sleep 6 to 8 hours… it seems as though my body wanted more like 10 to 12 hours. As a result my thoughts are not entirely cogent, and I am spending a good deal of time just staring off in random directions searching for some purpose. I just finished probably the worst sausage roll I have ever had, and now it is time to make words happen.

Wedding Daze

Yesterday one of our oldest and dearest friends got married… and since for the most part they were trying to do the wedding on the cheap and quickly… I got tagged to take the wedding photos. If you read any of the posts leading up to yesterday, you could tell I was extremely nervous about the prospect of being responsible for recording a once in a lifetime type event for a good friend. I would have simply hired one of my friends to do it… but I wanted to make sure that the family had full access to all of the photos without having to worry about re-ordering through someone else. Ultimately I will write up a letter saying it is okay to reprint the photos and then they can take them literally anywhere to get larger photos made.

At this point… my everything hurts… literally. Yesterday was a lovely day more or less, but an extremely hot and humid one. The wedding was slotted to be outdoors and in an area without much shade. Our friends decided to get married at her parents house… and they set up a nice makeshift altar… and were planning on having people seated on straw bales. Again I have a massive problem with the concept of straw poking me in the ass when I am attending a wedding, but I understand the idea since straw is relatively cheap. To make it a little bit more palatable they covered the bales with various vintage bed sheets. As the photographer however I was literally on my feet from roughly 10 am until 1:30 pm or so when we took the final photos.

Respect Thy Father

After yesterday, I have a brand new respect for my father. Essentially all of my life I have been attending weddings as my father shot a fair number of them each year as I grew up. When I got into high school, I would attend them as his assistant, manning a camera from the balcony or some other stationary position getting long ranged shots of the key members of the ceremony. So I grew up having the big moments of the ceremony ingrained in my head. The only problem is… I am not my father… I just don’t enjoy taking pictures of people, nor do I really know the first thing about how to light them properly.

However even more than that… I simply do not have the juggling skills he always did. The photos you take before and during the wedding are the easy part. Sure I had to spend a lot of time running around to get the right angle at the right time and kneeling a lot to get the right shot… but this was all like riding an amusement park ride since the flow of the ceremony dictated a certain time frame. Getting people to cooperate after the wedding was finished… that was the pure hell. Everyone wants to derail the proceedings… and as a photographer all you care about is trying to get everyone to stand together in the right number of groups for the correct pictures.

While they don’t seem to care about getting the right shots… they most certainly care about them when you are done with the pictures and months later they realize they were left out of the pictures. The key problem yesterday was the extreme heat and total lack of shade where the altar had been set up. Everyone wanted to sneak away and get out of the wedding clothes. It was 94* with pretty high humidity and next to no cloud cover to speak of… as a result everyone was having to combat the heat while wearing stuffy clothes. Ultimately after making it through the family shots, and the brides family it was decided we all needed to take a break and since most of the grooms family was already eating… we would ultimately have to wait until after they finished.

Dehydration

In part the “waiting for them to finish” was a call I made because quite frankly I myself was in pretty bad shape. I opted to wear a black shirt… since the inevitable sweat would not show on it… but in the heat that just made everything worse. I allowed myself to get rather dehydrated over the course of the day, and at one point while taking pictures I kept bordering on blacking out from what I can only assume were the beginning stages of heat stroke. My vision would go completely blank for a moment then recover… to say blacking out would be a misnomer I guess… since my field of view went completely white as thought I had just seem a huge explosion. There was a wheel barrow full of water, and I downed three of them to try and catch up on my water consumption… but quite frankly it scared me more than a little bit.

Like I said above… I have a new found respect for my father because he always made this look so easy. He would expertly juggle the distractions of the family members and burn through the photos in what felt like record time each time. All the while doing this wearing a suit, even when the photos were taken outdoors in the heat. I guess a huge difference is that my dad always had my mom there as the manipulator in chief… lining up the shots and making sure the right people were standing by waiting. My wife was taking her own photos, but since neither of us are really good at dealing with human beings… we lacked that role of someone greasing the wheels and making sure everything was rolling along smoothly.

Ultimately I have a lot of respect towards both my parents and their ability to make the process of photographing a wedding appear effortless. Ultimately we got the job done… and got all of the shots I thought we needed to make the family ultimately happy when they go through them later. Now begins the hard process of culling down 1038 shots I took yesterday into a narrative that tells the tale of the wedding. Encountering some technical difficulties this morning, as I realize that a Google album has a maximum of 1000 photos. Essentially my normal process involves uploading everything to Google and then deleting out the photos I don’t view as “keepers” until I have a nice visual story to work with.

Wrapping Up

The order of business for today is to recover… and right now I am planning on planting my ass on this comfy couch for most of it. I will be spending my time in a mixture of Rift and FFXIV and trying to do as little as humanly possible that actually “matters”. I walked away yesterday with a pretty decent sunburn and I am hoping as the day goes on the pain fades. Right now it is manageable and I can ignore it more or less. Hoping you all have a great rest of the weekend… and you too can do as little as humanly possible that actually matters.

Lucian Arrives

August 23, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning my happy people out in the land that is digital. I am feeling a bit better this morning, so I must have managed to get a decent amount of sleep for once. Quite honestly I think a good deal of my issues right now stem from the fact that my allergies are going into overdrive. Normally bit late August things have calmed down a bit here in Oklahoma. However all of the rain we have gotten seems to be kicking all the things into overdrive. Dear summer sun… why you no kill these weeds?

Lucian Arrives

Yesterday was mostly about League of Legends for me and some of my friends. The champion Lucian finally was available, and this was something several of us had been anticipating. Over lunch Rae and I both played him a bit in a 1v1 game to test out his abilities. Overall he feels like a much less tanky Graves, but with a few more murdery tricks up his sleeve. When we played him he felt extremely mana hungry… but apparently early in the day yesterday his Q was costing double mana… which could very well account for this.

He seems to have the same slowish building period that Graves does, but once he has a fair amount of gear his attacks become extremely potent. I know later in the evening Tam played a few games with him and really liked the end result. The Champion spotlight does a pretty good job of outlining his abilities. Personally when I played him I was constantly out of mana, because the cooldown on his abilities is far shorter than your mana pool can ever support. Essentially he feels like a bottom lane champ I could maybe get used to playing.

Seeking Bot

To this point… pretty much all of the champions I really enjoy playing have been top lane champions. Currently my favorites are WuKong, Darius, Garen, and Riven… all of which are primarily suited to the top lane… though I feel like Riven would do fine mid. Essentially the problem is… when playing with my friends I tend to always hog that one position of the map. While no one has complained… I just feel like I should branch out a bit and try and find something I enjoyed on the bottom lane.

As a result I have been playing quite a few 1v1 custom maps to play with various champions, and see which ones I could get used to. Early on Graves was a champion that Tam suggested I might like, since he played a lot of him early on. I enjoyed playing him, but I was prone to rushing things and engaging way before my items and abilities would support it. So he was a champion I played for a little bit while I was finding my own play style, but never really returned to. Lately I have dusted him back off and realized that I do really enjoy him quite a bit for what he is.

Additionally I had picked up Jayce when he was on sale some time ago but never actually got around to playing him. I have to say I really like him as a bottom lane champion and the tool kit is especially useful once the laning phase is over. The Shock Blast / Acceleration Gate combo seems extremely good at harassing other champions in your lane since you can poke at them near the turret with impunity. So far my favorite one of his attacks is To The Skies!… at one point last night I finished off a champion and stole the blue and red buffs with this little quick pounce. Essentially any champion with a “pounce” attack is a champion I like.

So combined with Lucian, that at least gives me three champions that I like on the bottom lane. I feel like there are probably more I should try. I picked up Kennen at some point because I like ninjas… but have never really played him much. The problem is… because of my dislike of mages… I tend to shy away from AP champions. Building AD feels natural to me… but the AP items all feel odd to me. I feel like this is a thing I need to get past at some point… but ultimately right now the ranged champions I enjoy are the ones that are also ADCs. The problem is that I have pretty much exhausted the AD ranged champions that I like. Ultimately I will have to get over the hurdle and start digging into some AP ranged champions to add some variety to the bottom lane.

Realm Reborn

This weekend begins the official head start for Final Fantasy XIV and I am climbing down off my fence and giving it a shot. Quite honestly a good chunk of what changed my mind was the fact that Green Man gaming has a 25% code(GMG25-OGRUH-7SM8H) that you can apply which takes down the Digital Collectors Edition to a level I am willing to gamble on. Additionally there are going to be a large number of House Stalwart folks giving it a shot. For me at least this is going to be mostly a weekend game. I still planning on playing Rift during the week because there are a number of things I want to do there. Additionally the guild is still pretty active and I love the vibe we have built there.

Final Fantasy is not really a primary game for me… the job system is really interesting… but it is still very wow like overall. Quite honestly… I know that this game will have worked its way out of our systems well before the First Quarter 2014 release of Elder Scrolls Online. I am under no illusions that this is the type of game that is going to hold the attention of our guild for very long… but it might be enjoyable to explore for awhile. Being brutally honest… the majority of folks will have burned through whatever they wanted and gotten bored of it within the first month… but for a few people it might hold some meaningful long term gameplay.

With the ability to do all the jobs and all the professions on one character… I really plan not to alt at all. Belghast Sternblade will be my only character far as I am concerned. We are settled into the Cactuar server, and I am really hoping Square pulls their heads out and fixes the server capacity issues we experienced last weekend. I was finally able to get in and register my head start code yesterday, so hopefully that is a sign that they have gotten a number of the kinks worked out. Overall the gameplay has been enjoyable, but we have struggled with infrastructure problems that never should have made it out of alpha testing.

Unfortunately this weekend I am not really sure how much playtime I will get. Friday night we have a wedding rehearsal, and Saturday morning I am photographing a wedding while my wife is a bridesmaid. Then Saturday night we have a baptism to attend. So that pretty much fucks both Friday and Saturday, leaving only Sunday to do anything enjoyable. My hope is that between the Wedding and the Baptism… we can run any errands we need to run so that Sunday we do not have to leave the house at all.

Wrapping Up

Well I have rattled on more than enough and now it is time for me to get my ass out of this house and on with the day. I hope you all had a good week and that you have a far less busy and annoying weekend ahead of you. I am nervous as hell to be honest… I have never shot a wedding. But this is a favor to a friend so I am sure I will muddle through as best I can. I am just not one for portrait photography… people tend to bore me as subjects go. But she was happy enough with the family portraits I shot for her… so here is hoping she will also be fine with my wedding photos.

The Flood

August 19, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning all you people out in digital land… I am trying to wake up enough to string cognitive words together. I did not sleep much last night, and I will go into reasons later… but suffice to say I am exhausted. In addition I have a royal mess to deal with today, so I likely will be staying home. Hopefully once I have a schedule for the day I can catch a cat nap. Here is hoping that my old friend coffee will be enough to keep me going until then.

The Flood

Today is the first day back to school with kids for my wife, and as a result the weekend was fairly stressful with her trying to prepare for everything. During the summer I pretty much get a break from doing a lot of the household chores, but with the school year starting back up it is once again my job to take care of those things as she stresses out over lesson planning and grading on the weekends. Previously there was a load of clothing that we had started but not finished… so I started that up again.

Once finished I noticed that a pet bed had come apart in the wash. So I picked up the pieces and started a second load… this time of darks… since that tends to be the load we absolutely must do each weekend. I went along about my business and an hour or so later I went in there to check on the progress… expecting to swap it into the dryer. As I was walking towards the washer I noticed that the whites were wet… but it didn’t dawn on me until I was further down the hall what was happening. Essentially the laundry room, parts of the closet, the hall, and our bedroom were soaked in water as apparently instead of draining out the water drained all over everything.

The Aftermath

So I hollered up at my wife, but while she surveyed the scene she was still in “I am freaking out because of too much school work” mode… and simply could not take in additional information at the time. One of the positive side effects of owning a pool, is that we have a ridiculous number of beach towels for when people come swimming. So I got into the closet, pulled out all of the beach towels and started sopping up the water. This got up the bulk of the water, and I gathered those up in a trash bag and took them out into the back yard to hang up.

One of our neighbors brought down his wet/dry vacuum and got up the rest of the water as well as much from the carpet and pad as he could in the bedroom and closet. Finally I brought down my big fan from my office upstairs and set it up pointing at the floor and turned it on high, hoping that the air circulation would dry the carpet the rest of the way. After that it was pretty much just up to time to see if it would dry out. My jeans were in the washer load when it blew… and it apparently did not make it all the way through the rinse cycle… so since drying them out over night was not really an option I ran to the store and picked up another pair so I would actually have something to wear today.

The Denouement

The big air mover fan… made an odd kind of white noise… and all night long I kept waking up thinking I heard something strange. I am fairly resistant to change, especially in my personal space. The addition of a really loud fan on the floor beside my side of the bed was a rather disturbing change, and I ended up waking up every thirty minutes to an hour as the night went on. As a result this morning I am feeling completely sapped. The good news however is that the carpet is dry to the touch… there is still a dark spot which tells me it is not completely dry. We will leave the giant fan running for the next few days hopefully drying everything the rest of the way.

I emailed my boss to let him know what had happened… so my day today is pretty malleable. One of several conclusions will happen. We have the phone number of a reputable repair service, and I plan on calling them at 8 am. Either after explaining what happened they tell me that they think it is easily fixable… like a clogged drainpipe or they tell me that I most likely have a dead washing machine. So we either have the repair woman out… or I go to Lowes and buy a new one that is on sale… and hopefully am able to do so early enough to arrange for same day delivery. I believe Lowes will deliver, install and haul away the old unit… and we also have a line of credit there for such situations.

The Subligar

So since everyone on Mumble was playing Final Fantasy XIV… I continued on yesterday. The above picture is the result of questing around level 10. Essentially I had picked up all of the pieces… thinking they looked odd but not really noticing it much… until I finally picked up the pants. This is in fact a matched set of the level 10 quest gear in the “Lemon Lozenge” area of the game… yes that is what I called Lima Lominsa. The leather harness thing was a bit sketchy… but it looked okay-ish with my poofy red pants… that and I had gotten used to the occasional “nipple chest” from Rift and GW2. The pants… well I wasn’t paying much attention and I picked them up… despite warnings from my friends about the existence of the “Subligar”.

Turns out this is a running joke since FFXI but having to wear it… it doesn’t feel terribly funny. Personally I find this kind of armor completely bullshit. I am sure this is some dev’s odd kink at work, but too often this is what women have to wear ALL the time. At least when I started my next set of quests I was able to upgrade to something that covered me. Maybe I am an odd duck but I feel like armor should you know… be protective. There is nothing heroic feeling about having to wear a pair of underwear while fighting monsters with a big axe. If people want this crap in game… that is fine… just don’t make it a quest reward.

Ultimately after playing for about 10 minutes… I downgraded all my gear to my level 8 set… which realistically was only a few points of defense difference. What was so disturbing about it was… that my previous set was this really amazing “leather plate” appearance, with a unique chest piece graphic apparently for marauders… then in the course of a few quests go to lemon yellow panties. I posted a picture on G+ bitching about it… and was essentially met with a chorus of “QQ More” from the women… since this is pretty much every game experience for them. I totally get that… but no one should have to wear armor like this period.

It used to frustrated the shit out of me when I would find a nifty looking pair of plate pants… only to hand it to a female character and see it turned into a shiny metal bikini. I am completely fine with the irony of having the tables turned… but remember I am one of the guys supporting you. Make the assholes that dressed their companions in SWTOR in the Slave Girl outfit wear this… not someone who farmed for days to try and get proper Jedi robes for Kira. Once I could solo it… I literally ran “The Esseles” a good 50 times until I got the orange moddable robes to drop so she could have something decent to wear as I leveled up. Anyways rant about skimpy clothing over.

The Game

I am in a really odd place about Final Fantasy XIV in general. There is a lot about the game I am enjoying greatly. Then there are other things that bug the hell out of me. I honestly do not know at this point if I will be playing once it releases or not. I have not had this much trouble deciding if I actually like a game or not since I played Guild Wars 2. There are many aspects that I really dig like the whole jobs system… but so much of the game is just messaged really poorly. Essentially you have to have some ancestral knowledge from other players to keep you from screwing your character up.

For example… DO NOT SELL ANY ARMOR EVER! I did… I regret it. So something I did not realize… when you switch classes later you go back to level 1… and a ramification of this is that you will not be able to wear any of your armor period… other than the starter gear. I sold mine long ago… thinking I would not need it. As a result I had to run around buck naked in the Gridania starter zone until I could hit 5 and actually equip some gear. Luckily I pretty much have every set of gear from that point on, but to the best of my knowledge based on what I am seeing from the vendors… there appears to be no way to rebuy that level 1 equip-able gear.

So much of the game feels deeply foreign to me… as though they set out to purposefully buck the western MMO traditions. The game is at its core exactly the same as a World of Warcraft type MMO… just nothing is called by the right names, and nothing actually works in the same ways. Essentially most of my time playing has been building this translation matrix of figuring out what a thing is called… and what it means to me. I guess to some extent… that intrigues me… that the game can be so similar at the same time as it is completely foreign.

Like I said… at this point I seriously do not know if I will be playing this at launch. If I do it will likely be a weekend thing. My friends were wanting me to rush through the content… so I could get to some point where they needed a tank. Really though I was far more happy to piddle aimlessly than to try and push through the quests to reach a point that they were already at. I tend to out-level my quests by a large margin. I am still afflicted by my desire to kill everything in sight… and that seems to be a super effective means of leveling. The only mission type that seems to piss me off are the ones that involve using some emote on a target.

I guess at this point I have to say that I begrudgingly enjoy this game. There is something about it that is charming, and despite all the jacked up characteristics… like the Subligar… there is enough here that I find enjoyable that I could see playing it. I just am not sure if I could ever play the game seriously. I definitely do not have the same admiration of all things Final Fantasy that it seems to take to really be 100% committed to this. I guess I will see how I feel about things after the head start weekend next week. That will ultimately determine if I play or not.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to prepare to call the repair woman and see if I can get an assessment of the situation. If not… I will go to Lowes and see if I can get a washer delivered today. I hope you had a much better Sunday than I did, and that you have a great start of the work week. I am going to try and take a nap after I deal with these phone calls so that hopefully I stay fully functional. Hopefully the carpet finishes drying as do the towels out in the back yard.