Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 55 of 129

New Beginnings

July 6, 2016 by Belghast

Turning A Bad Situation

Yesterday was an extremely odd day, where a good deal of it I spent sifting through horrible IRS interface documentation, and then the rest googling phrases in said documentation to try and find better documentation. That alone had me at the literal end of my wits… which we all know are of limited supply in the first place. Then something happened… something that could have been extremely bad. I had an interaction with with a player that I really do not like, that I finally had to distance myself from to keep from losing my shit. Several years ago I wrote about the infamous “Bunny Incident” and I felt like I was nearing the threshold of unfocused profanities flying freely. So I stepped away and went to lunch, then when I finally came back to a device I found out that apparently I was not the only one who had been feeling that way. So what could have been a horrible incident… actually turned into something completely different. I know I am vague-booking here a bit, but I don’t really want to drill too far into the who and what because that isn’t terribly important in the truth because I am focused on what happened afterwards. For awhile now I have been back playing MMOs after what felt like a several month long break from them, but I have been back largely playing by myself. I have been enjoying my time in Rift and ArcheAge, but enjoying things as a solo venture is just different from playing with a large group of people who seem to be equally happy to be playing with you.

So this negative event has seemingly acted as a bit of a catalyst, in a measure that I wasn’t sure was possible. What happened last night is that a large number of us logged into Final Fantasy XIV and spent almost the entire damned evening running content together. It was truly glorious, and was originally focused around the concept of getting people caught up in the storyline but eventually filtered into so many different areas. So from the moment I got home from work, until about 10 pm I spent that entire time hanging out with friends and tanking various things that people needed. I lost track along the way what all we ended up running but I was literally down for anything anyone needed. I helped people get caught up in 3.2 story content, 3.3 story content, the Void Ark, Alexander four… basically a bunch of stuff that folks didn’t want to do solo but were more than willing to tackle with friends. The end result was this amazing blur of laughter and the best aspects of what can happen when you are playing with your friends. Instead of letting one negative event pull us down, we have seemingly galvanized that one interaction into something that I hope will last past the one night.

In talking with my friends throughout the night it seems like we were all waiting for the same thing. For the bulk of our original group to return to playing the game. When you have spent a year and a half struggling together… playing without those folks seems like a hollow proposition. I am thankful for the folks who have kept the home fires burning in the Greysky Armada during this extended absence, because it means we have a free company to come home to. The bulk of yesterdays strife is rooted in a simple miscommunication, like so many conflicts seem to be. Namely there were ground rules set that were never communicated to those of us who had been returning, around what was expected. So when the person in question gave some rather ham-fisted edicts and unfortunately we took them in the worst possible way. I am not really ready to bury the hatchet completely here, and for the time being I really want nothing to do with that person. However what happened as a result has reinvigorated my feelings about Final Fantasy XIV as a whole. I am certain to keep playing Rift, ArcheAge and Destiny… but for a bit I am focused on trying to help my friends get back engaged in the game. Last night really felt like we were getting the band back together, and it was seemingly noticed by the social structure of Cactuar. Tam and I were both welcomed back with open arms by a bunch of folks that we used to interact with on a nightly basis. Just like returning to Rift has felt very much like returning home… coming back last night and playing Final Fantasy XIV with my friends was also very much returning home. There is a level of joy in gaming that I felt last night that I have not felt in so many months… and it was intoxicating.

Regularly Playing: June Edition

June 29, 2016 by Belghast

Back in May I decided to make a monthly ritual of “truing up” my “Regularly Playing” widget on the sidebar to more closely represent the games I quite literally was playing on regular rotation. Given that it is that time again… here is the list of things for June. I added a few new games into the mix and also removed a few more… even if one is really only temporary. Doing the thing where I write a blurb about what I happened to be doing in each of them.

Rift

In a weird bit of nostalgia, I decided to come back to Rift and give it another push. There has never really been a period of time when I have not actually at least dabbled in this game, but so many times I failed to gain traction. This time around I somehow managed to push from 61 to 65 and have started on this mad mission to raise all of my tradeskills. Now having almost accomplished that I will be pushing into the Planetouched Wilds and giving it a real amount of effort. On top of this I am focused heavily on my crafting dailies, which often times means I need to venture out into the world in search of Sarleaf and Thalasite. With the shift of WoW to the Garrison for most of your farming needs… I had forgotten just how much I really did love going off and ore farming. There is just something relaxing about wandering around a zone with a purpose, looking for the next ore pop and trying to get to it before anyone else notices. It is this weird game within a game that actually seems to work well for me. I spent many an hour flying circles around Icecrown or Sholazar Basin in Wrath… and now am loving doing the same thing for Gelboro Reef. Largely I am focused on that zone since, firstly I know it pretty well… and secondly the mobs are low enough level that I can go afk as needed and make it back to the keyboard before something actually kills me. I am certain that I could be farming ore while wandering around the Planetouched Wilds, but the mobs out there are truly brutal. Whatever the reason… I am deeply invested in Rift and its community once more and loving it.

Destiny: The Taken King

While I have slowed down considerably in this game, there are still regularly sessions of it… namely because I have been trying to get fellow AggroChat member and good friend of mine Grace settled in game. Monday night we managed to get her to level 40, and pushed through the Taken King quest content… which means that there is an entirely new world waiting for her of endgame stuff. With Iron Banner going on this weekend, I highly expect that the two of us will be working on that or at least attempting to show her the ropes of the event. We also have several more steps in the recruit a friend process, but as we get her gear level up there it should get easier to do cooler stuff. Other than that other games have taken priority over the last few weeks, namely with my return to active duty in FFXIV and running stuff in Rift. Hopefully the Iron Banner will be a good event to get me back into focus and moving forward in Destiny once more. I feel pretty disconnected, and I miss the Thursday night Challenge of Elders stuff horribly, I just had a few crazy weeks with the St Louis trip, and Kansas City trip… and a bunch of other random occurrences that knocked me out of my schedule. Hopefully I can start to rebuild said schedule and get moving forward once more.

ArcheAge

In a similar fashion to Rift, I have suddenly become involved and attached to the ArcheAge community as well. Right now I am largely focused on leveling, but at some point I plan on doing all the tradeskilly things in this game as well. Last year the AggroChat crew made a serious push into this game, and while we faded into the background… I still found it extremely enjoyable. Additionally like I said yesterday, many of the early toxic aspects of the community as a whole seem to be gone. Right now I am trying to get back in tune with the game and try and remember how the hell to do half of the things. On the positive as I grind away at questing I seem to keep getting really nice drops for weapons and armor… however I remember that most of the best stuff I had was crafted. I just happened to time my return to coincide with some welcome back campaign, and I keep accruing rewards into my inventory that at some point I will figure out how to use. Mostly I would like to hit the level cap before worrying too much with them, but I believe some of them are xp bonuses that I might as well use now. If you are actively playing I am Belglaive on the Tahyang server, but I am not sure what all it requires to actually friend someone in game. I am not sure if cross server friends lists are a thing there like they are in Rift.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

I spent most of the month deeply frustrated with this game, namely because I was sitting at what felt like an artificial gear cap and being prevented from progressing in the story. Since then however I managed to get a Void Ark run with some friends and got over whatever anxiety I happened to have about tanking it. As a result I am now sitting at 205 gear score, and bumping up against the Nidhogg trial in the story. It is my hope that at some point this week I can get a few friends together and run this and hopefully complete the 3.3 patch story. I am still enjoying the game, but I lack the drive to play it… that I have in say Rift or ArcheAge right now. For at least the foreseeable future my activity in game is probably going to be limited to our Tuesday night activities, or the occasional expert or other event that I organize with friends. I love playing this game… but right now I only seem to love playing it with a group of friends logged in at the same time. It is still an amazing game, but it has shifted into the sort of role that World of Warcraft has been in the past… that game that I only played when there was an organized activity.

World of Warcraft

This one admittedly is barely making the list, and keeping its space on my sidebar. Right now I am occasionally logging in to run Garrisons and get my free gold, but not doing much more other than that. There has been talk of myself, grace and a few others doing random old world content for transmoggy bits and honestly… that right now is about all I am interesting in World of Warcraft as a whole. I feel like I am in a “desperately waiting for the Legion pre-patch” mode. Largely because I am tired of not having any bank space, and removing any of my outfits is simply not an option. I am not joking when I say that right now the only important thing to me in this game… is looking cool with my collection of old raid gear littering my bank vault. If the new transmog system were actually patched in… I would more than likely go through a flurry of activity as I once again do awesome old world content for cool threads. However I quite literally have hit a point where I maybe have 15 bag slots total between inventory, bank and void storage…. so I simply cannot play Belghast anymore without risking removing something. So instead… I run the occasional garrison mission as I alternate through my army of alts… and then log out once again.

Things Removed From List

Overwatch

Zero clue why on this one… but the game released and I just have had no desire to really play it. I am amped about just how excited everyone else seems to be about this game, but honestly it feels like I am more interested in talking about the world and the characters… than actually playing it. If the player versus bots game were more compelling I would likely play it more often, but right now it feels like to enjoy it I need a group of friend to play it. Ironically I have a huge group of friends playing it… but I think I am going through a “quiet time” phase where I just want to piddle around on my own in games rather than do a lot of organized play. The few nights I rode along with people… I lasted 3 to 4 games before feeling the need to run and hide again. I am certain at some point I will once again get the Overwatch bug, but the truth is I am just not that into competitive games.

Diablo 3

Removing this one again temporarily because well…. the season is over. I have accomplished everything I could ever hope to accomplish, and now is the quiet time until the next patch. This will be returning once again as another season starts and we all go through the crazy happy madness that is a season launch. For a bit I was still farming for pets and such, but with the addition of several games this got removed from the docket. I still very much love this game and look forward to adding it back to the list, but for the moment we are in the off season and the game for me at least is dormant.

High Center

June 14, 2016 by Belghast

Gear Barrier

For months I struggled to find meaning in MMORPGs and wrote about my feelings a little over a month ago. Then something changed, and I am not exactly sure how or when it did. Now I am suddenly finding myself caring an awful lot… and even more than that thinking about what I am going to be doing that evening. The only problem is… I have found myself struggling nonetheless. Life was going rather peachy in Final Fantasy XIV that is… until I started trying to catch up in the patch content. Last week they released 3.3 patch content and I happily quested my way through both the tail end of 3.2 and 3.3 until I hit a road block. That road block being that in order to do the first dungeon introduced by the new content… I have to be sitting at 200 item level. Now when I took a break several months ago I was sitting at 190 item level and that was just about as good as was humanly possible to get at the time, or more so as good as you could get without the really painful grind. Upon coming back I have been having a blast farming ponies with the guild and slowly working my way through the relic weapon quest. I’ve also attempted to keep running experts but failed miserably at doing them on a regular basis.

The end result is that I have managed to pull my item level up to 195 but 200 still feels like it is a very very long ways off. One of the problems is in the past when they have introduced a new item cap like this to continue the quest, the previous set of dungeons provided gear that was of sufficient level to breach it. However the last set of dungeons in this case only dropped 195 level gear, which were upgrades in a few slots but in no way good enough to bring me up to fighting levels. The answer of course is to run Void Ark over and over until my eyes bleed, however I find myself struggling to do that when I don’t have anyone else to run it with. Tuesday is the night we run group content as a free company, and on that night the guild is active as can be. The only problem is the rest of the week it is a ghost town. So I struggle to push myself to do activities with strangers, which is going to be a common theme in this post. My entire time in MMO gaming I have always had this wonderful social support structure, from the moment I set foot in Everquest to modern times. If I needed something done there was always a ready supply of friends that I could pester to come do it with me. When I am missing that I am finding that I don’t exactly know how to function.

Social Barrier

This brings us to game two that I am struggling with. Over the weekend in a fit of nostalgia and such I dove head first into Rift and am having a really great time. I’ve started participating in the Rift discord community, and picked the brains of several friends as to all of the things that I should be doing now that I am back. The item that kept getting mentioned is that I really should start working on the weekly quests out in the Planetouched Wilds area. So being a dutiful follower of instructions I wound my way through the quest content and hit a big stubborn wall. There was a quest on top of Lantern Hook that involved killing a bunch of mobs essentially before they killed me, and quite frankly I was overwhelmed. I tried it in a few different specs before eventually asking for some help. The only problem is by that time in the Discord community, everyone was busy doing their own thing and not watching chat… so I got nothing but crickets. The challenge with Rift is that it is not that I have minimal social structure in that game like the way I do in Final Fantasy XIV… it is that I suddenly have none at all. Over the years all of that structure has eroded to where I am left with just one single channel that once or twice a night has another person in it with me. The majority of the time when I say hello to said other person in the channel I get no response telling me… that it probably scrolled by so fast on their screen that they didn’t even notice it.

Rift does a great job of providing a ton of things that I could be doing solo, but unfortunately there are still times where I absolutely need other people to do content. What I ultimately did was start watching the level 65 channel until I saw someone that seemed nice enough and that was playing on the same server as me. I pushed myself so far out of my comfort zone and asked them for help… to which I was shot down. However I politely thanked them anyways, and about thirty minutes later while I was still sitting there struggling to figure out a way to do the quest by myself… I got a message from them again saying that they were finished with their raid and that they could come help me. So massive thanks to Domasca from Faeblight for assisting with the quest and pushing me past that obstacle. I continued on about my business and finished another set of quests only to return back to Lantern Hook to be handed yet another quest that I had no way of soloing. It was at this point I gave up for the night and went to bed, frustrated. Basically I am already standing on a precipice with this game and have a handful of choices in front of me. Either I can start rebuilding my social network within Rift a single player at a time, and in doing so force myself into anxiety ridden territory. I can research specs and try and find that one magical spec that lets me solo silly hard content like I have done in the past. Then of course there is always the option to just quit the game again… which is the one that I am trying to avoid as hard as I can. Rift is this wonderful throwback to an era in MMO gaming that I miss greatly… the only problem is that era is one when you needed lots and lots of active friends to support you through all the random things you needed to accomplish. So in truth… I need to figure out how to meet new people in this extremely well established and already stratified community.

Farewell Flower

June 2, 2016 by Belghast

First Casualty

One of my big concerns about our trip last weekend was not so much the long lag in blog posts… but the lack of ability to take care of my “flower babies”. I have become oddly emotionally invested in the lives of our flowers, and while our animals are super hardy and resilient… flowers seem to constantly teeter on the brink of death. Some of our more thirsty flowers I had been watering morning and evening just to make sure they were nice and happy, and unfortunately it is an insane request to ask someone else to do that. So we left Friday hoping everything would be fine, and my flowers would survive until I got back. For the most part things are fine but we have a few of these “c word I cannot pronounce” plants… I think it is something like Catharanthus. We got them as hanging plants… and the purple/pink mixture and yellow/orange mixtures are still thriving. However over our disappearance the red/white mixture started to struggle. In fact the entire red plant withered and died, and in truth given how happy the others seem to be I don’t feel like I can really blame it on the care.

The plant probably would have struggled even if I was there babying it along. However it still is a little sad to see it… and while we removed as much of the dead plant as we could… and by dead I mean spaghetti brittle stems… the white half of the planting seems to be struggling as well. My hope was that by removing the dead plant it would give the thriving plant more room to spread out. The other awkward problem we are having is… it is raining constantly and it is hard striking a balance of when we should and should not water ourselves…. and when the rain water is good enough. I realize the plantings that we have currently are annuals and at some point they will all die out, but I am not looking forward to seeing it. Of the two of us… I am definitely the nurturer, and I just want to take care of the flowers so that they live forever. Even thought I know that is not something that is actually going to happen. The other flowers are lovely however, and if the white half of the planting does die as well we will likely replace it with something else in that planter.

Senor Sabotender

As far as gaming goes, last night I split time between Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV. I feel like I am still getting into the swing of things after returning from our trip, and as a result I have wound up getting super tired significantly earlier than normal. I am sure the extra sleep isn’t hurting me either, so I am largely indulging in the earlier bedtime. As far as Destiny goes I spent a bit of time piddling around on my Hunter and running strikes to knock out some quests. On both the Warlock and Hunter I have really done very little of the post level cap missions that the game throws at you, and as a result I don’t have legendary artifacts on either of them. This is the single slot that is dragging down my gear score the most, so I attempted to solo some Court of Oryx. Unfortunately I kept getting the twins, which for whatever reason is very hard for me to solo as a hunter. I initially summoned thinking that folks were actively running court, however as soon as I popped the coin I saw the familiar animation of them going to orbit. I did however knock out several strikes towards the “run 5 strikes” quest.

As far as FFXIV goes I decided I should probably spend my evening working on the current event that is going on in the Gold Saucer. There is a murder mystery that ends up rewarding you an /eureka emote that makes you look like the stereotypical MMO quest giver with an exclamation mark over your head. Instead of showing you this emote however I am showing a picture of Memusu Tsuuma who I happened to log into the game the other night standing right beside. I love seeing orange names while I am out running around, though so many of them I cannot remember exactly where I knew them from. That was not the cause with Memu however, how I have absolutely abducted into all of my regular multi-game shenanigans. Something I noticed about hanging out in gold saucer…. random people come up to me and give me a hug. I am guessing it is the Bunny Samurai thing, which has become sort of my trademark look. As far as the questing went, it took a long time to gather up all of the evidence needed for the mystery… but thankfully the game will tell you when you have found all ten of the items with a little message saying that you cannot find anything else of use. Now I just need to devote some time to finishing out the 3.2 story line to be ready for when 3.3 lands on supposedly the 7th.