Rift Archives - Page 20 of 43 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Garuda Sucks

September 22, 2013 by Belghast

Casey Jones?

I was extremely slow starting this morning, continuing to fall back asleep from 7 am til roughly 9 am. When I finally got up and around I did what I do every morning, and ran off to forage for food. Generally I run to QuikTrip for sausage rolls, which is a gas station chain based in Tulsa. If you do not have the miracle that is QuikTrip… you won’t really understand how gas station food can be that amazing. On the way back into the neighborhood I saw two young boys, one chasing the other. I could see he had something in his hands, and as I drove closer I noticed it was a rubber katana and a golf club. My immediate thought was… whoa is that kid playing Casey Jones?

I think of the Turtles as being a figment of my childhood, as I can remember buying the original indie black and white comics, and the first series of playmates toys where all the turtles had trademarked red bandanas. But the longer I thought about it… the more I realized that sure enough that kid COULD be playing Casey Jones. The TMNT franchise has been rebooted every few years to a point where kids of almost any age could easily recognize everyone’s OTHER favorite psychopath with a hockey mask.

As a tween I thought Casey Jones was the coolest, some kind of cross between a ninja and the punisher (another favorite character of mine). Likely the two boys were just fighting with whatever they happened to have their hands on. I remember my friend and I used to sword fight with baseball bats. That was when I learned that a wooden bat can pretty much cleave an aluminum bat in two…. but that is a tale for another day. Seeing the two kids running around like that made me super nostalgic. I remember my cousin and I went through a phase where we went NOWHERE AT ALL without a slingshot and a bag of rocks. Granted I grew up in the country… so that was entirely reasonable given that I have used said slingshot to thump a bull and get him to go the other way.

Tokyo Game Show and FFXIV

This week the Tokyo Game Show has been going on, and unlike the various western game conferences it has been pretty closed door to the public… or at least closed door to anyone who does not have a fluent understanding of Japanese. Luckily Dual Shockers has posted a pretty good write up of the various 2.1 announcements for Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn. The awesome part is… there is a TON of content expected to release for the first patch. So far the items that have been confirmed… Good King Moogle Mog primal fight. New extreme modes for Ifrit, Titan and Garuda… and after doing normal mode Garuda last night, I don’t want to see what Hard mode looks like… let alone Extreme mode.

Additionally they are adding player housing for each of the three grand companies, daily beast quests, and treasure hunting mode… neither of those two I understand but they both sound extremely enticing. Additionally they are adding a pvp arena system at Wolfs Den, one completely new dungeon, and two new hardmode dungeons with new boss strategies. They also announced that there would be limited time free transfers to a server of your choice in October, to help join together the various people that were split up by the server caps. Finally later this year they announced that there would be cross over events with Dragon Quest X and Final Fantasy XI both of which appear to reward unique pets for FFXIV.

That is a lot of goodness, but I have not heard a timeframe for 2.1. Considering I have yet to cap out, and I have an army of alternate specs to level… I am sure I can hold on the current content for awhile. I have always loved the art style of the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest games… so I am looking forward to collecting the cute little golem pet. Here is hoping they do this as a duty… and not some random spawning fate. The whole random drop pet/mount thing has not really worked out too well for any of us in Rift, and most of us have not collected more than one color of Hellbug.

Garuda Sucks

Both Ifrit and Titan were extremely enjoyable encounters. They introduced us to the concept of a primal fight, and I believe eased us into the difficulty of the encounters. In both cases there was this one thing you had to watch, and if you did it… you pretty much won. As various guild members have gotten up in level I have looked forward to tanking or dpsing these encounters to get them through. They are both extremely fun fights to participate in. Last night we took on Garuda… the third primal encounter… and I have to say no one will be looking forward to repeating this one.

The problem is… I am trying to think of ways to explain how big of an increase in difficulty the fight was from the other two without really spoiling the fight OR the other two. We have tried really hard to go into every fight cold and figure things out on our own. This of course has meant a lot of deaths as we figured out just what the mechanics were doing. I think we had somewhere less than ten deaths last night… but not sure just how far from that number we were. We latched onto one of the central concepts of the fight extremely fast. As Tam said… this is not our first rodeo… so if a fight gives you a thing to hide behind… chances are they want you to hide behind it at some point.

The big problem that I saw was the sheer amount of damage I was taking as the tank. The various people in the know have all said that they wait until they have completed their 45 class quest to do this fight, since that fight rewards you every piece of an armor set but the chest piece. Additionally I could have outfitted myself in at least a full set of the level 45 heavy mithril armor set… which self buffed gives me about 300 more hitpoints from what I did the encounter with.

Being the stubborn bastards that we are, we pulled and pushed and prodded on the encounter until we finally beat it. I just have to say though… this is the hardest fight to date… filled with “all manner of fuckery” as Tam commented last night. I have so much fear and loathing about what the various hard mode version of the primal fights could bring, especially considering how close a call making it through normal Garuda was for us.

Wrapping Up

Well time for me to finish this up and get on with the day. I am sure I will be logging into FFXIV to hang out with the guild, maybe even venturing into Rift to try and finish up 58. Yesterday we did a lot of running around town, so I think today for the most part will be a stay at home day. We have to go out this afternoon to meet someone to buy my wife another Miche shell. For those not familiar with this concept… it is a weird purse with changeable appearances. My wife has suddenly become enthralled by them… and since she is always so damned good about my Lego expenditures… I figure it is only fair that I am cool about her growing collection of purses.

Game Jumping

September 20, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I am struggling more than a tiny bit to stay focused long enough to actually write up a blog post. I feel like this is a side effect of my odd night. Firstly I was feeling extremely drowsy last night, so I had a few cups of coffee… which never fully woke me out of my slumber. What it did however is make me completely oblivion to the fact that it is past midnight and I was not in bed yet. Combine this with the fact that my wife woke me up in the middle of the night over essentially nothing, and we have a recipe for a groggy Bel. Here is hoping that I can focus long enough to make something intelligible.

Game Jumping

My post about being a content locust the other day, made me sit down and think. I am sure I have a bunch of friends who simply do not understand why I and a lot of my friends jump games so regularly. This is going to be my attempt to understand why the process is so alluring. Basically launch day is like Christmas morning for me… the game is so full of possibility. Everything is new, or at least new enough to lure me into a feeling of being on some grand exploration. The dungeons are all new, and there are no real guides to get in the way of figuring things out yourself. Every mob pull is unexpected, every level gained a treasure waiting to be opened as you find out what new abilities you get to play with.

The other thing that makes a game launch absolutely intoxicating is the fact that EVERYONE is playing it. Everywhere you turn there is a viable group combination, and everyone is excited to be doing them. Guild chat teems with “do you want to run X dungeon?” and a chorus of “hell yes we do!”. Everyone is excitedly talking about this thing they found or this trick they just learned. Lunchtime becomes a discussion of specs and strategy, and every single person is looking forward to getting home and logging into the game to experience more of it. The launch of a game is like a massive sugar rush where everything is sunshine, rainbows and magical flying ponies.

The Crash

Like any good sugar rush… you know there is a crash coming, but at the time you simply do not give a shit because it is just so pure and enjoyable. The problem is… an amazing game experience causes each of us to play in ways that are simply unsustainable for the long run. We might neglect to do this or that chore, knowing that eventually this will snowball and become a weekend we have to be COMPLETELY offline to take care of. Additionally we are all logging hours in a mad push to keep up with each other as we barrel through the content at breakneck speeds in search of the next new game high.

When the crash comes… it is sudden. We go from 30 players online one night, to 15, to 5… as everyone falls into recovery mode. Some recover their gusto for the game experience a few days or even a week later… but others still are just spent from the climb. Now is the point that the reality of the game sets in. As a player you start to notice the features that don’t work quite right, or are generally short sighted or outright missing. You start to complain politely that the company is not addressing whatever dire need you feel is there. Finally the feedback loop of players starts to become a chorus… and ultimately a handful of players will determine the game is unplayable and move on.

The Feet Draggers

In every game launch, there are a handful of friends that for whatever reason will not allow themselves to commit and jump head first into a new game experience. They have all manner of reservations, namely that folks will not stick with this one… but in essence they are missing the point. We are not necessarily looking for the next hundred year game… I think most of us are chasing the high of the launch. Launching a game is extremely intoxicating… everything is fresh and new and unsullied… and jumping into that experience is unlike anything else in gaming. Those timid souls who watch on the side lines, until seeing their friends having so much fun becomes unbearable… they are ultimately missing the best part of the game experience.

By the time they commit and download the game… they have missed the game in its heyday if you will. They have missed the times when everyone is excited to be doing something, even to the point of begging to do it. They have missed a time when we did not quite yet have figured out what spec did what, and what ability worked the best. They have missed a time when every loot drop was full of possibility, and we never knew what wonder might be lurking around the corner. They have to become excited in a time period when everyone in the guild surrounding them is becoming progressingly less excited.

I always feel the worst for the feet draggers. They are sold a tale of an undiscovered continent, but by the time they actually commit to getting the game they are delivered a depleted territory instead. I have a number of friends who will hem-haw and drag their feet trying to keep from committing to anything new that comes around the corner…. only to eventually end up buying it and wondering where the magic went. The magic is always spent in the hazy days of launch and the weeks leading past it, and that experience where everything literally IS magic and new… is worth any sticker price.

Pax Guildana

After the initial wave of pioneers have faded away, or at least returned to sustainable play times… we have a period of the guild that I like to refer to “Pax Guildana”. A quiet peaceful time when those of us who enjoy soloing, cast off the flurry of activity that a launch brings on and return to piddling around with some friendly guild chat to bind us together. This is the quiet after the storm, and usually remains this way until the excitement builds about a brand new launch on the horizon. As much as I love the thrill of being a pioneer into a brand new game world… I like this as well. I like logging in to a peaceful and friendly guild chat, not really knowing what I am going to do that night… but more than likely doing something completely devoid of stress.

Dungeons and group activity still happens, but more out of a sense of needing to get someone this or that thing… or through a quest, than out of the sheer excitement of doing them. Then one day someone comes to guildchat, talking about how they have discovered some new and amazing continent littered with riches everywhere the eye can see… and the process begins to build again. The first waves of scouts leave the mainland and soon after the second and third waves are off exploring this new land, plundering its bounty. This of course… leaves only the foot draggers to hold down the fort hoping that the excitement will return. If the basecamp was built well enough… folks often WILL return… but not in every case.

Home Base

For me right now, Rift is my home base and Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn my forward camp. I can say that my intent is to keep it this way… but at no time can I ever really say for certain how things will change. Sometimes the forward camp becomes the new home… and we discover a new territory on the horizon. Other times we fall back to home only to find out the new territory was fallow and uninhabitable. For the time being, my intent is to play these two games and enjoy each of them as much as I can. However with so many games on the horizon… at least one of them… Elder Scrolls Online… a game I have been anxiously awaiting for what feels like years. I am not sure if Final Fantasy will become the new home, and we will embark from it for the shores of Tamriel… or if that adventure will be sent out from Telara.

Regardless of from where the ships launch, I know that they WILL launch… and likely launch again for Wildstar. As much as I try and claim that I don’t have interest in a certain game… I too often get caught up in the thrall of the addictive nature of a big game launch. Having seen these events play out all too many times… it is just too enticing to not join in the fun. As always I feel horrible for the foot draggers… because they never get to experience a game in its purest form… but instead are always resigned to get the slightly used version of the game in the process. I keep thinking one of these days… one of these games they will get hooked on the launch process as well because they will jump into it whole heartedly with no reservations. It will only be then, that they truly understand why people jump from game to game.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to get on the road, but before doing so I need to pack my laptop and feed the animals. This Friday I have traded the super awkward coffee for a super awkward meeting. Not terribly looking forward to it, but we must do what we must do. I hope you all have a great weekend. Tonight I will be participating in something NDA restricted, so tomorrow morning I will have to come up with something interesting to say… that is in no way related to what I did last night. Hopefully inspiration will find me between now and then.

Stalwart Locusts

September 18, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. I am having one of those mornings where I am questioning why exactly I put myself through this every day. Not to be an intentional bummer, but this takes a lot of fortitude to keep doing this every single morning regardless of if I have something to say or not. I am just afraid if I stop it, for even one morning I will slip back into month long absences. I feel like I need the routine to keep me moving forward. I would really like to get a full year of daily posts, so for now that is my goal.

I’m a Jerk

I have to say, lately I have been feeling progressively worse about myself, so maybe this is just a downer of a post. Primarily the source of my lament, has been that I have been essentially non-existent over in Rift. I put all this effort and time into building an amazing instance of House Stalwart over there… and now so many of us are playing Final Fantasy XIV that it has almost over night become a ghost town. I feel like each and every one of us still like Rift and still enjoy it, we are just wrapped up in the thrall of the new shiny object in front of us.

To make matters even worse… Fynralyl and Psynister are being their amazingly awesome selves like normal… and ended up pushing the guild bank fund over the top and we were able to afford the third guild vault tab. However being the absentee leader like I have been… it took me a few days to pop in and purchase it, then forgot to give anyone access to it. I apparently did a piss poor job of promoting them to officers, only hitting a handful of characters for each of them. So generally I have been a pretty lousy person of late.

I feel generally conflicted. Firstly I still love Rift and enjoy it, and want the guild to be doing awesome things. Much like Everquest 2, Rift is one of those games that I have always cycled back to… and since the release of the game there is only a three month stretch where I have not been playing it. So I guess in the back of my mind I know it will always be there waiting for me. The problem is… the people currently playing it may or may not. Even if I am not around much, I still think breaking out and forming a permanent House Stalwart guild was a good thing for those times when the guild is super active.

Stalwart Locusts

The sad truth of House Stalwart is it is really a tale of two guilds. The first is a group of WoW players that have remained thoroughly devoted to that game since release and continue playing it or returning to it. The second guild is the large roaming band of “content locusts”, that consume the content in a game only to move on to the next tasty field when it presents itself. So as a result this guild is this massive amorphous war band that roams across the countryside pillaging things in our wake. It might not be the most pleasant metaphor, but considering we now have about 30 people in Final Fantasy XIV whereas we had around 30 active people in Rift previously… it seems appropriate.

In part this is my fault, but in part this is just the nature of most “post-wow” players. Once we dissolved the ties to one game, it changed the way we viewed games in general. The fact that Stalwart is so large and so broad and ever changing… means we always have a group of people playing whatever game the people seem to want to be playing. So when a new game comes out there are always a dozen or so people amped and ready to play it. It doesn’t so much feel like we are jumping games, but more than we are just continuing the same ties we have always played with… somewhere else.

For me personally… leaving WoW changed my perspectives a lot. Essentially I made a promise to myself that I would play whatever happened to be the most enjoyable for me at any given moment. As a result I have played a ton of cool games, and met an ever expanding cast of characters in the process. I now have so many life long friends that I have today, that I NEVER would have had if I had not given in to my wanderlust and experienced new worlds with different groups of new people. But all of this said… I still feel like an ass when I am off playing something other than a fragment of Stalwart is playing.

Big Apology

I guess in part, today’s post is a huge apology to those playing Rift that have noticed the active player base in the guild shrink significantly over the last few weeks. I don’t think any of us are “done” with Rift, this is just something that happens from time to time with Stalwart. We find a new shiny and go off and play it together. I have a years subscription to Rift, so I won’t be going anywhere forever, I just have so many things that I want to do in Eorzea. So many new sights to see, experiences to experience and adventures to conquer.

I still plan on trying to marshal the troops to logging back in on Wednesday nights for dungeons or rifts or whatever happens to occur. My hope is to single that out on the calendar as “Rift night”. Additionally as the leveling curve winds down a bit in FFXIV, I hope to push my rogue up on the weekends… because quite frankly leveling in Rift is a relaxing experience for me. Most of the time in FFXIV has been a LOT of dungeon running, and since I am one of two tank mains… I feel deeply obligated to all the friends that are playing the game.

This is ultimately what always complicates my gaming experience. The feeling of constant split loyalty… since there has never been a period of time when ALL of my friends happen to be in the same place at the same time. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view… I am the leader of House Stalwart agnostic of whatever game folks happen to be playing. It has and likely always will be a multi-gaming community, more so than just a single gaming guild. As games come and go the important thing to me is the community of players that we have cobbled together. That is what is eternal, and so long as we remain friends there will always be another opportunity to play together around the corner.

Wrapping Up

Sitting down this morning I had no intent of writing a post like this, but I guess it has been weighing heavily on my mind. Hopefully it was not too big of a downer for the majority of my readers. It still feels odd most of the time that anyone reads these ramblings. I will be over in Rift tonight, trying to dislodge anyone I can from FFXIV in the process. I have no clue at all what we will be doing, but I figure some opportunity will present itself. I hope you all have a great week, and those of you who are playing it… I hope I see you in Rift tonight.

Trade Cartels

September 14, 2013 by Belghast

Forgive me father for I have sinned… it is roughly 8 pm before I am sitting down to write today’s blog post. In my defense I have been out running around all day. Firstly to my hometown to go see my grandmother, and then later gallivanting all around the countryside in search of cheap Legos. But that is a tale for another day… namely tomorrow. Today I have a topic I have been wanting to write about since yesterday afternoon. I just have failed miserably at being near a computer today to be able to do so.

Trade Cartels

Yesterday a number of us got into a rather length discussion over twitter relating to my loot commentary, or on the lack thereof in Final Fantasy XIV. Shortly into the back and forth I got this comment from @DesslynStorm. Essentially to paragraph, they believe that all loot should come from crafters. I guess in an idyllic situation this would probably be an alright thing. The problem is that I have seen far too many games where a specific branch of crafters got a monopoly on a specific item and abused the hell out of it.

I love crafting systems and by extension generally love crafters, but in every game I have played where specific items were ONLY obtained through crafters, the Trade Cartel has reared its ugly head. Essentially this is when a group of crafters collude to price fix a specific item so that everyone can turn a specific profit on it. Without a doubt the most heinous of these has generally been the bag makers in each game I have played.

The Threats

On Argent Dawn in World of Warcraft, my warrior was a bit of an oddball. He was an enchanter and tailor, namely so that I could have someone to make bags. Bag space is one of those things that I put a premium on in whatever game I happen to be playing, and will generally go to whatever lengths it takes to make sure my characters have a decent amount of them. I occasionally made a bag and threw it up on the auction house undercutting the competition by a large margin. It was at this point I was approached by my first trade cartel.

A seemingly reasonable mage mentioned that I really should price my bags higher. I told him that I was making a profit and I wanted them to move quickly, so I was fine with where they were priced. This is the point at which the threats started pouring in… another crafter joined sending me tells. Going so far as claiming that they would ruin me on the server. Something that I laughed off because at this point I had been the leader of one of the largest guilds on the server for roughly three years. I was in a pretty active raid and knew the guild leaders of most of the other larger guilds personally.

The Retaliation

But the I am pretty sure that had it been real life, the next step would have been them trying to send someone over to my house to break my knee caps. They proceeded to start buying the bags and relisting them whenever i posted a new one. So at this point I made it my life’s work for the next few days to flood the market with cheap bags. If I was online I was farming humanoids for cloth and turning around and dumping them on the market at cost. No one puts babby in a corner! For awhile they were ravenously snapping them up, but at some point they lost their fervor and simply waited for me to get bored.

I imagine that I had run them out of their current gold, and probably made a handful of enemies for life. But I have encountered to a lesser extent these price fixing schemes in several other MMOs. Each time my instinct is to break the regime because I have seen what it is like when someone has fixed the market. Early on in the life of Argent Dawn, there was a single player that had almost all of the rare enchants. He was part of a big raid guild on my server, and as a result he had a few of the raid drop only patterns that no one else seemed to have. Additionally he could do crusader in a time when it was not commonly known where that dropped.

Since he had 100% of the market on these enchants, he charged truly ridiculous prices. When I finally figured out where Crusader dropped… I decided to break up his monopoly, but standing in Ironforge (the only auction zone at the time) and offering free crusader enchants so long as mats were provided. Again came the threats, because I was cutting into his profit margins. I am sure I had nothing to do with it, but as more people started offering free enchants with mats, he ultimately quit the server and went elsewhere. Functionally I just really dislike when someone tries to profit unfairly on others.

Exclusivity is Bad

If you had a game where the only source of gear were through the crafters, the average player would end up having to pay far more than they do currently to outfit themselves. I realize that Desslyn’s experience comes mostly from Star Wars Galaxies… and I feel that game is vastly different from the modern MMO in innumerable ways. Additionally I feel like the average player within that community had a level of altruism that we will likely never see again. So I feel like what worked in SWG will never likely work again in another game.

An example in Everquest 2, crafters can create what is arguably the best available gear in many occasions, the Master-crafted sets that occur every 10 levels. These require some rare materials, but not so rare that they are unattainable. Since only crafters are the source of them, they have total control over the market for them. On the brokerage system, almost all gear is extremely reasonably priced, however a level 10 set of Mastercrafted gear will go for several hundred times the amount of gold a level 10 character would ever have to spend without buying currency. Crafters have priced the privilege of having a good matched set of gear out of the hands of most players.

Multiple Paths

My personal stance is that all games should have multiple paths to acquire your gear. I feel like different kinds of players want to play the game in fundamentally different ways. Players who deeply care about crafting for the sake of crafting…. will always do it regardless if they can profiteer from it. I feel like there should be viable options for end game gear through Crafting, Quests, Exploration, PVP, Dungeons and Raiding. Any given player may like a mix of those things, and giving multiple options to achieve their goals in a game, allows each person to tailor their journey to suit their own tastes.

I have always thought it would be great, if you could really gain the best possible gear… by doing a series of extremely long and arduous epic quests. By the same token I think it would be cool if crafters could complete a series of trials to synthesize rare materials and with that craft top end gear as well. I see it as a risk vs time type equation. Dungeon and Raid loot might be instance, but it requires a large group and repeated running to get everything you want. Whereas with quests and crafting, it is more a cast of slow and steady wins the race… the end goal is achievable but likely takes a considerably longer amount of time.

Fallacy of Profit

I feel like the hidden root of the whole concept that all good gear should come from crafters, is that crafters by default should be able to make large amounts of profit from their trade. This is just a foreign concept to me. I am one of those people that crafts because I enjoy the relaxation sometimes of crafting. I am not a rabid crafter, but when I do craft I tend to do it because I like outfitting my friends in gear. In Rift I regularly farm up cloth to set new players and new characters up with a full set of 24 slot bags to begin their journey. I enjoy making things for people, and making them happy in the process.

So to view crafting from the point of a cold profit based calculus just makes no sense to me. Sure I feel like crafters should be able to get their money out of the items they make and maybe make a meager profit… but I feel if you go into a trade skill with the purpose of making money you are likely crafting for the wrong reasons. Crafting and the self reliance that it gives you should ultimately be its own reward without any need to tie it to monetary gain. So I guess I question the notion that a certain class of crafter has that they should automatically be able to get rich quick through their crafting endeavors.

Wrapping Up

I feel as though I rattled on more than enough. Additionally I am tired and sore from the days excursion. Right now I want to relax on the sofa and boot up Final Fantasy. One of my good friends managed to get onto Cactuar so I want to get him invited to the guild. Tomorrow hopefully will be a much more relaxing day. I hope all of you had a great day and that the weekend has turned out to be awesome.