Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 74 of 129

Merry Sith-ness

May 30, 2015 by Belghast

Last Man on Hulu

Last night I had one of those nights where I was just restless without good reason for being so. Every activity I considered doing simultaneously sounded awesome and horrible at the same time. So while I finished my push to 21 in each of my Final Fantasy XIV crafting professions, I didn’t really accomplished much of use the rest of the evening. I spent a good chunk of my crafting time test driving Hulu and watching the tv show Last Man on Earth. My assessment of both is rather mixed. Firstly having never experienced Hulu my very first impression was precisely “what the fuck is with all these advertisements”. I finally found a blurb on the Hulu website explaining why they have ads which comes down to a bullshit answer of needing to reduce the cost of the subscription. How about this, how about you charge an “extra-premium” tier subscription that turns off all of that crap and just lets me watch the shows.

Right now my likelihood of actually staying subscribed to Hulu past the free trial is pretty non-existent for this reason. To make matters worse it is like watching Cable “On Demand” where they play essentially the same four commercials over and over. At this point I seriously want to burn down the honey bunches of oats factory that is shown on the Post cereal commercial that they kept playing over and over and over. After having that drilled into my brain all night long while watching an already sub par television show has made me want to vehemently avoid anything products by Post while roaming around the super market. I feel like that is counter intuitive to their original mission with the advertisement in the first place. As far as Last Man on Earth… the first episode was humorous, but then once Kristin Schaal showed up it progressively went down hill. Which is sad because normally speaking I adore Kristin Schaal, I still find this skit one of the most hilarious things on the planet. The problem with both Netflix and Hulu is the shows just keep playing without manual intervention… so I think I ultimately watched one too many episodes before finally deciding I had enough of it and stopped it.

Merry Sith-ness

Around 10 pm last night I opted to try and go to sleep, thinking maybe my malaise was simply caused by being tired. The problem being the moment my head hit the pillow it is like a flip got switched in my brain and I was instantly in “super awake” mode. I tossed and turned trying to figure out a way to get comfortable, and chatted with my wife until she fell asleep. After an hour of struggling to find sleep I opted to simply get up. Thinking that if I could go do something my brain would eventually shut the hell up and let me go to sleep. I’ve suffered from bouts of insomnia my entire life, and sometimes the worst thing I can do is try and force myself to sleep. Otherwise I will have sat there in bed for three hours and ultimately just end up frustrated that I didn’t get up and do something with that time. I am not entirely certain why I ended up launching Star Wars the Old Republic other than I have really not played much of it, and they have an insane xp bonus event going on.

I would really like to play the continuation of the main storyline on my Jedi Guardian, but the hard truth there is that I have been gone from the game so long that I quite literally have no clue where to start on it. Instead I opted to log into my Sith Juggernaut that is knee deep in Balmorra hell. In theory I could do just the class quests and be off the planet, but I feel a deep need to finish all of the things especially since this is the highest Sith character I have mustered to date. I am not sure if it was surprising or not but I actually enjoyed myself, but the unfortunately thing is that I managed to stay up until 2 am before sleep finally claimed me. This is going to make for a long evening with our podcast since I was back up again at 8 am. Hopefully I will be able to sneak a nap in today, but I have a feeling that since it will be nice outside my wife will want to get out of the house. We have been suffering through absolutely insane torrential rain. I heard an estimate that over the last week we have gotten as much rain as we normally get in an entire year.

Beautifying AggroChat

One of my failings is that I have done a pretty piss poor job of advertising the fact that AggroChat.com exists and is populated full of good stuff to read. Ultimately if you are reading Tales of the Aggronaut you are going to be extremely familiar with some of the content, but not all of it. Essentially AggroChat.com was a vehicle that I came up with as a way to pull together all of the content created by the hosts of the AggroChat Podcast. Additionally this site serves as a way to connect to each of the authors and a better vehicle for receiving both the AggroChat and Bel Folks Stuff episodes. We have had some grand plans to eventually expand this site to include people who do not already have blogs of their own. For the time being however it gives you a one stop shop for the following content…

The takeaway is that through this one site you end up with a ton of content delivered on a regular basis. I personally blog every single day, and Tam blogs five times a week at least. I keep hoping to add more news commentary content and game reviews but we have not quite gotten there yet. I plan on in the near future creating a special section of the AggroChat Game Club games where you can pull in some quick commentary from each of the folks that played it, as well as a link to the show where we discuss it. Essentially we are going to keep expanding it, so I should do a far better job of promoting it. So check the site out, and I would be open to any comments and suggestions. I’ve tried to set the site up in a way that allows you to drill down into specific content by one of our Authors quickly and efficiently. As of last week I even went back through every episode of AggroChat and indexed which hosts are on which shows so that they show up in our Author category links. While there is already a lot of great content here, watch the site because I am hoping it gets ever cooler.

Last Best Hope

May 29, 2015 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff #7 – Late Night with Jaedia

I have been pretty horrible about keeping any semblance of a schedule with the Bel Folks Stuff podcast. Some months I release early in the month, and others I barely squeak out an episode before the month finishes. This month is definitely the later as with other events going on I struggled to find a good time for me to record this bonus podcast. I am extremely thankful that when I found a time my good friend Jaedia was gracious enough to make it work. What makes it even more special is the fact that Jae is recording rather late in the evening. It seems she doesn’t actually sleep, and might be some kind of new fangled android or something? Joking aside we had a lovely conversation about all sorts of random things.

Since both of us have suffered with depression and anxiety for years, we touch a bit on that. We also of course talk about gaming and what we have been up to lately. We also get into the rules of how long you have to live in Wales before you have to start calling yourself “Welsh”. Jae is recently married so we talk a bit about the transition from living together to being “married” that we both went through. Jae at one point had five different blogs so we talk about the depths of her insanity and ability to compartmentalize. We also talk about the happy medium we have found with being a general interest blogger. It was a fun show to record and I hope a fun show to listen to as a result.

[Download Episode Here]

Last Best Hope

Almost since launch folks have been foretelling the Doom of Wildstar, and not for lack of good reason. The game had extremely anemic launch numbers, and as was announced during the latest NC Soft earnings report its box sales had trickled to a slow drip. The current rumor mill of Wildstar going free to play was really spurred on by the announcement of their Mystery Box promotion. So yesterday when they announced that the game would be shifting to a free to play model, this should have surprised no one… not even the most die hard of pro-subscription Wildstar fans. While some Wildstar players are tending to wallow in the doom and gloom that comes with these sort of statements, I tend to view this as a potential new lease on life. For whatever reason gamers appetite for a monthly subscription is next to non-existent. Even World of Warcraft recently introduced the Token system allowing players to convert in game gold for subscription time much in a similar way to Eve Online does. This leaves the last pure bastion of the subscription game being Final Fantasy XIV… and I would not be shocked if we see them implementing some sort of gil to token system eventually.

I am not saying the age of the subscription is over, but I think the age of subscription being the only option just might be. I personally prefer to pay a single monthly fee for “all you can eat” buffet access to the game. Some players prefer to try and play the game for free regardless of the restrictions. Others prefer to purchase features “À la carte” and quite frankly I think in the current gaming economy a game needs to support all three models in order for it to gain permanent traction. Wildstar I feel suffered from the same issues that Elder Scrolls Online did… namely that it launched during an exceptionally tight window of viability. Too many things were being released during too short of a window and it caused the players to flit gleefully between everything that was coming out. I know I personally left Elder Scrolls Online to play Wildstar and left Wildstar to play Warlords of Draenor. Sure I set down permanent roots in Final Fantasy XIV during that time as well… but most players do not do a great job of juggling more than one game at a time.

Free to Play is Not Doom

More games have converted to the Free to Play model than I care to keep track of, and in no case has it really signaled a lasting doom for the community. If anything the opposite is true as a flood of new players come rushing into the community over a few months. When a game releases as free to play it becomes the shiny new thing in the view finder of the player base, and for a period of time everything old is new again. This is likely the phase of doom that most players are dreading, because it means that there will be more than a few “how I mine for fish” folks flooding into your gated community. The thing is… this too shall pass. Not all of these new people will stick around and find footing in the game, and often times the most heinous of players tend to be the most fickle as well. Within six months you will have a more stable population filled with the people who really do intend to set down roots in your community and stick around awhile. Many of those players will probably even convert to subscriptions, but simply didn’t want feeling like that was their only option.

The free to play model is ultimately a good thing for many games because if nothing else it lowers the barrier of entry for new players. This makes it that much easier for you to be able to recruit people into the game to join you. I know with Final Fantasy XIV once they opened the fourteen day trial accounts, it became all that much easier to get my friends to give the game a “second glance”. This also means that probably every player that played at launch is going to fire the game back up and revisit their characters. I personally found the game greatly improved when coming back recently and rerolling as an Exile. I don’t regret my decision to come back, nor do I regret snapping up cheap boxed copies of the game for months of gametime and bonus items. The game is really rather good, and my hope is that with me stepping out of World of Warcraft for awhile I can devote more time to playing it. If you find yourself in a situation where you are surrounded by “doom and gloom” folks, my suggestion is that maybe you find a more friendly place to hang out. Over the long haul this will be a good thing for a game that was so desperately trying to avoid falling into a death spiral.

Waiting for Headstart

May 28, 2015 by Belghast

Death or Double Space

This morning I am struggling to find purpose when it comes to sitting down and writing a blog post. I know as I struggle through this something will magically happen and words will appear on the page. For the Newbie Blogger Initiative folks out there, this sort of thing happens often. Last night for example I didn’t do much of anything that would inspire a story. I guess in truth that isn’t entirely true since I did record a Bel Folks Stuff podcast with Jaedia, but that is still being edited and hopefully will be released on Friday. After we finished that however I attempted to hang out on the sofa and craft, but before long found myself nodding off at the keyboard. I actually chose to do the responsible adult thing and head on to bed around 9 pm. As I said nothing terribly exciting to talk about.

I will say one of the more humorous things that came out in the twenty minutes or so before we actually started recording was that I am old. Jaedia was talking about editing my posts and that I double space after every line. This is an artifact of my age and something that is so deeply ingrained in me that I cannot stop doing it. Our editor over on MMO Games apparently thinks it is “adorable” that I double space, so I have transcended that line of being cute for my outdated ways. Ultimately I could write a search and replace to remove them… which would be simple enough but for whatever reason I find posts that double space after the end of each sentence easier to read. Throughout my entire educational career this was the “correct” way to do anything, and I have the style manuals to back me up on this one. The whole single space thing has come into vogue in the meantime. I feel like the “oxford comma” folks on this one that I am willing to die on this hill as I continue to double space.

Waiting for Headstart

For awhile now I knew that I would essentially be done with World of Warcraft on or around June 19th when the Heavensward head start happens. Admittedly I took a similar break from Final Fantasy XIV around the launch of Warlords of Draenor, or at the very least dialed back my Final Fantasy time to only a few times a week. So this is one of those things that I always knew would happen, but I realized yesterday that I should probably tell my raid leader that he essentially only has me for two weeks. I guess he knew it was coming and was extremely cool about it, but I still felt the need to actually put it in words. I was not however able to tell some of my other friends yesterday so my hope is to do that tonight when we work on Blackhand. I would love to be able to defeat Blackhand before I go. This would give me some nice closure for this phase of the expansion.

I think ultimately everyone involved with the guild knows that sooner or later I will run away again. I don’t exactly have a history of much longevity with World of Warcraft since the Cataclysm expansion. I will show up for a brief period of time, get bored and wander off again… only to be drawn back later due to some inexplicable urge to play. Right now I have just reached that place where there is nothing that I care to do in World of Warcraft. I’ve been there so many times, and it is not actually a lack of things to do. There are TONS of things that I could be doing, farming pets, farming mounts, clearing old world content, or working on achievements. The problem being that none of these things are actually driving me to log in. There are times I think this funk is essentially the side effect of me raiding multiple nights a week, and has very little to do with Warcraft itself. I think I reach a point where I simply need a break, so I wander off for a bit and do other things only to return later in a much more casual fashion.

Not Quite Done

Right now my plan is to dial back my World of Warcraft raiding time to zero as I work on leveling in Heavensward. I am still torn as to whether I will end up playing a Warrior or a Dark Knight. I am pretty damned attached to Warrior as far as classes go, but the whole leap+aoe opener thing that Dark Knights are supposedly going to have makes me super excited. I loved that aspect of the Jedi Guardian in Star Wars the Old Republic. Ultimately I will likely have both to 60 and geared up, but there is going to be some serious nostalgia drawing me back to Warrior. I have loved everything about the way that job feels, and I have to say my Malignant Mogaxe is reason enough to play one. I am honestly just pumped to wander around the new zones. Last week during the Live Letter watching Yoshi P play in the zones reminded me so much of the way Kunark felt. Granted it is much higher fidelity than the original Kunark, but I am talking more about the scale of the zones. Everything feels big and expansive and I am hoping that because of this the hard edges and zone walls will be more disguised.

In the past when I have withdrawn from World of Warcraft I have made a big deal about it. I have almost always done one of those “quitting” posts, but this time around I don’t feel the need to do that. In fact I have no plans on actually cancelling my account. I still plan on piddling around in the game, just on a much more casual level. Hell for all I know after my month or so long sabbatical I might be right back raiding the 6.2 content like normal. I do admit that I am super interested in the Hellfire Citadel raid that is just about to come out. I liked all the “fel” stuff from Burning Crusade, so if Tanaan Jungle is going to be an entire zone of that I might really enjoy it. I am just going to allow myself time to back away from the game as a whole so I can experience Heavensward to its fullest without the sense of bitterness towards Warcraft for pulling me away two nights a week. I really think this is for the best because if I force myself to raid WHILE playing Heavensward that is the surest way to get me to actually quit the raid entirely.

Flight is a Double Edged Sword

May 26, 2015 by Belghast

Skipping Content

Over the last few weeks a topic has sprung back up that I thought was long put to bed. I guess the lack of flight in World of Warcraft for the Warlords of Draenor expansion is still a divisive topic. I’ve said before that I support their decision to keep flight out of the expansion. My current malaise with Warcraft has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I can fly. So this morning I thought I would talk for a bit about the inclusion of flight in games and the strange ramifications it has on game play. Ultimately when you include flight players skip your content as simple as that. I can say this coming from a perspective of someone who has played several games with and without flight. Ultimately the first game I played with flight was City of Heroes, and it was both the most powerful “travel power” and also the most frustrating. Sure you could soar above the battlefield and move around relatively unscathed, but you did so at often times half the speed of any other travel power. The players that could fly however were able to terrain hack content, and often times find ways to level with absolutely impunity, but they did so giving up the ability to move about “quickly”.

When World of Warcraft first introduced flight it felt very similar. While you were technically going at 150% speed it felt like you were moving more slowly because in the air you lost your point of reference for how fast you were going. Additionally the flight masters still moved significantly faster than you were able to go. Even with the introduction of artisan flying at 280% flight speed you were still slightly slower than a flight master which I believe is roughly 300% speed. The problem is in both cases it changed the way I played the game. While I struggled to make the money to fly in Burning Crusade, by the time Wrath of the Lich King rolled around I had enough cash to spare to be able to outfit all of my alts with even Cold Weather Flying giving me the ability to fly while leveling. I found myself using the same sort of terrain hacking tricks that players did in City of Heroes. Instead of fighting my way to the entrance of something I simply swooped down from above and quickly poked into entrance tunnels to avoid fighting any adds. If I needed to kill a single quest mob, I would zoom straight into the hut they were located in with surgical precision avoiding the experience of clearing my way through a camp.

Flight is a Double Edged Sword

While you might be fine with this style of play it does not change the fact that you are ultimately playing the game in a way that was not intended by the developers. Someone spent a serious amount of time and resources designing the layout of the content you just leapt over the top of with your trust flying mount. Sure there are ways for developers to put counter measures in place that block you from terrain hacking the content using a flying mount, but that just adds to the problem. Instead of making new areas of the game they would be reworking areas to make sure that you cannot skip the important bits. This also destroys the ability to add content along the way like side quests and collectibles because if you are skipping directly to the end you will never actually see it. By having flight you are really handcuffing the tools that the content providers have to add to the mix, and changing the way they have to approach the content. The end result is likely a far less vibrant world.

If it were just Worlds of Warcraft I would think that maybe they simply integrated flight in a bad way. The problem being that I went through the same experience with Everquest II. Once I got the ability to fly I stopped experiencing content “as intended”. I started flying up to exactly the spot on my mini-map I needed to be at in order to complete the quests as quick as humanly possible. I pulled myself out of the game experience and essentially was robbed of the living and breathing world around me. With flight questing becomes about clearing dots off of your map as quickly as possible without spending any time really engaged in the content itself. I think in many ways this was why I enjoyed the questing experience of Warlords of Draenor so much more than I did the previous expansions. It actually forced me to spend time getting to know the layout of the zones, rather than zipping over the top of them. It is better to see the crags and crevices of the world… than a monstrosity of super pixilated trees that never quite mesh correctly.

Heavensward and Flight

As I look forwards at Heavensward I have to admit I am more than a little concerned that we are seeing the introduction of flying into Final Fantasy XIV. Firstly I hope they stand firm on the statement that there will be no flight in the original areas of the game. Secondly I hope they have thought through all of the ramifications that come with introducing a system that lets you skip over content. There has been a lot of talk about having to explore a region and learn how to harness the winds in that area before being able to fly there, and I am hoping this is actually a fairly drawn out process. This would mean that the player would need to have spent a significant amount of time in a given region before learning how to fly there. At one point Yoshi P in an earlier statement said something to the effect of having to completely explore an area before being able to learn flight. In both cases this sounds like maybe they understand the danger that integrating this system really is to a game. The problem is that flight is a Pandora’s box that cannot be easily shut after it has been opened.

Blizzard has learned this lesson and is trying to hold shut that lid with all their might. Other games like Rift have been carefully guarding their own box to make sure that no one opens it. It is with great reservation that I watch as Square Enix prepares to open their own box and see what happens. I say reservation, because this is the same development group that has managed to outthink its player base on a regular basis. They have essentially social engineered a community into treating each other with a modicum of civil decency rather than a race to the bottom to see who can behave the most horrifically. I have hope that they will be able to solve the problems that no company has to date with flight. I have hope that they will figure out a way to keep it from cheapening their content experiences. My hope is that they will make it so we are not completely alone in the sky. This is an expansion about doing battle with dragons… and dragons notoriously can fly. Maybe we will have to avoid encounters in the air just like we try and avoid encounters on the land as we traverse the world. We have roughly twenty four days before we find out, but I still stand by my stance that I am fine playing games without flying. I am even fine when a game decides that flight was a mistake and claws it back out of our grips.