month of thankfulness Archives - Page 2 of 2

Curiosity Abated

I ended up getting into a conversation yesterday based on my post regarding the longevity I have played Final Fantasy XIV. Like I said yesterday I have been back in Eorzea since July so this will be going on four months… which for me in my recent MMO history is a really long time to be playing any one thing. I have officially played Final Fantasy XIV longer in this one stretch than I did both Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar combined if you just count time spent playing the production clients. This got me thinking and my friend as well… what my longest played games might be. So this morning I turned to Raptr, which I have always just left running in the background quietly logging time spent in whatever game I happened to be playing. When you do this you end up with some unexpected results.

For the purpose of this chart I ignored anything with less than 100 hours played, which it turns out is a surprising number of MMOs including Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2 and a few others. The fact that almost 40% of my time spent playing MMOs has been in World of Warcraft was not a huge shocker, considering I played that game for roughly 7 years without taking much of a pause. The fact that Rift weighs in at number two is also not a huge shock, considering I have played it off and on since release. What did surprise me is that I fully expected Everquest 2 to be in third place, as it is one of those titles I keep cycling back to periodically. I guess the thing is that I don’t end up playing it for terribly long before the combat system ends up frustrating me and I move in. In the year it has been out Final Fantasy XIV has shot to the number three spot in total time spent in an MMO with 536 hours. If nothing else I feel like that is pretty telling of just how much I am enjoying this game.

The last revelation is that I found it interesting that I spent roughly the same amount of time in Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars the Old Republic and Wildstar. Wildstar was the lowest of the 100 hour plus club weighing in at only 122 hours. Elder Scrolls Online was the highest with 163 hours, but were we able to include the year I spent testing that game I would have probably overtaken Everquest 2 at least. With Star Wars the Old Republic I could have sworn I spent more than 127 hours playing the game, so it really makes Wildstar and SWTOR almost exactly the same… which is strange considering that I never got a character to maximum level in Wildstar, but managed to level three in SWTOR. I guess the content grind really was that much faster in SWTOR than I realized. In any case it is interesting to look at the data and see where your time has been spent. Raptr by no means is an exact science, but I have it running on both my desktop and my laptop so in theory the data should be relatively complete.

A New Lance

For some time now I have focused on my Warrior job in Final Fantasy XIV as my main. I figured it was the one that I needed to be geared the most since I was going to end up tanking for my free company when we raided. However since launch I have also really liked playing a Dragoon, and for the purpose of Duty Roulette I almost always queue as DPS. Ages ago I got all of my jobs that I have at 50 to ilevel 90 so that they would be viable doing pretty much anything I cared to dip my toe into. However before we started contemplating raiding, I picked up a handful of pieces out of Syrcus Tower on my Dragoon placing him slightly ahead of the pack. Since the unlocking of loot in Syrcus I have been spending most of my time there trying to get him gear. Right now I still figure that most of my soldiery needs to go to finishing getting the warrior to ilevel 110 or better, however at 108 I am still leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of my guildies.

Factoring that in I figured I could splurge a little on my own wants for awhile. When playing any class my focus has generally been on getting a new weapon. It always feels like the most significant improvement, because it is that object that is most visually noticeable when you swap out a single slot. As a result it has annoyed me for some time that I still had my Gae Bolg Zenith weapon on my Dragoon. I could after all start the Atma grind, and the Animus book grind… but really in the grand scheme of things I do not have the money to get through the Novus step… so while I want to finish these for the sake of finishing them, it is not exactly a pathway to a better weapon for me. With the uncapping of Syrcus Tower it means that we have ready access to Unidentified Allagan Tomestones, the precursor step for getting the Weathered(100) and eventually Unweathered(110) weapons. So while I started out running ST over the last few days to pick up level 100 gear for my Dragoon I have ended up essentially grinding out one of the weapons.

ffxiv 2014-11-03 22-25-12-711 Last night I finished my grind to 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery and as you can see in the above screenshot I am the proud wielder of a shiny new Liberator lance. Unfortunately this happened like moments before bedtime for me, and I never really got to try it out. So tonight my plan is to run a quick Syrcus or Labyrinth to see how good it feels to have bumped up 20 levels in weapon ilevel. When I got my 110 axe on my Warrior, it was a massive and immediately noticeable difference, and I am hoping it will feel the same on my Dragoon. After dumping this 1300 “bookrocks” on a weapon, I will now return to gathering them up for the purpose of finishing out my set of Soldiery gear. That means I will need a ton of Sands of Time however to get those pieces up to 110 ilevel, which means I will still be running a truly silly amount of Syrcus Tower. In the grand scheme of things though I enjoy running it. I never see it as a grind, because it still feels very epic to me. I feel about ST the way I feel about various WoW raids that I used to solo for fun. It feels like I am doing something epic and important, even though it is content that is very much “on farm”.

This morning I am going to get by with just a two section blog post. Each of those sections took awhile to write so I figure it all shakes out in the end. This morning for my Month of Thankfulness post I figured I would talk about something fairly unlikely. Yesterday at work I had my annual performance review, and even though I am in many ways the pocket expert on so many systems we have… it is still a process that I find stressful. I think most sane and rational people have these moments where they feel like they are a giant fraud, and these seem to hit me just before I go into my yearly performance review. Yesterday was the same as every year, lots of anxiety for no reason. Once again I had a fairly glowing review, but I am kinda just beating around the bush here.

What I am thankful for is my boss. When I started out in my current position my little sub group got passed around like a hot potato. At one point I had been under six different managers, four directors and three CIOs… and had only been with the company for two years. Then my current boss took the position. I have to say when he took over I was suspicious, because I had never seen him in a managerial light, however he has done an amazing job. I really respect the focus he has placed on making our environment not only productive, but a very fun place to be. Each of us has our own “kitch” and for the most part he supports it all. It is the first time since my very first job… that I felt like I had a work family. This is also the first group I have ever willfully attended the Christmas Party for… and we do all sorts of outside activities like most recently going to the RiffTrax showings. So this today I am thankful for the effect he has had on improving how I think about my job, and the fact that for the most part I look forward to going into work each day and seeing my team mates. Sure each of the members of our team is a self starter, but it is his focus on morale that has made the entire thing work.

AggroChat Episode 28

Last night we once again rallied the troops and recorded another episode of AggroChat. This week Kodra was saddled with the dual burdens of illness and family… and as such could not attend. However we had Ashgar, Rae and Tam. The number one thing on all of our minds was experiencing the 2.4 patch content in Final Fantasy XIV which landed last Monday/Tuesday. During that time Tam has pushed up a rogue from level 1 to 50 and is now gearing it for raiding purposes. I have mostly spent my time running Syrcus Tower trying to get bits to gear out my warrior and dragoon. All of us have been slowly working our way through the brand new dungeon content. Yesterday shortly before the show Ash, Tam and myself finished the last of the three new hardmodes and I have to say I am really damned impressed.

Even more impressive is where the main storyline seems to be going. This is one of the aspects I find the coolest about FFXIV is that the story just keeps evolving and not in an artificial way. The problem with Star Wars the Old Republic is that when you reached 50… especially as a Jedi Knight or Jedi Counselor you had solved the galaxies greatest threat. There was nowhere to go but down from there. In FFXIV when you finish the main story, it is just the beginning and everything about the game tells you… you didn’t solve shit. You took out one pawn in a far greater game. So every three months or so when we get a major patch, I am always amped to see where exactly the story is going to go. Right now I am only a couple of hours into the new story content, and already they have thrown out some allusions to past Final Fantasy games that have me spooked as to where we might be going with this.

NaNoWriMo Supporter

At this point hopefully all of this years participants have at least broken ground on their new novel. Throughout the month of October I mulled around the notion of doing NaNoWriMo 2014, but in the end I have decided not to. Last year if you recall I essentially live blogged my novel and used each days writing as the next days posting on my blog. In the intervening year I have done absolutely nothing with it. I’ve not even cracked the original drive document to even begin editing it. This more than anything else tells me I am not quite ready to undergo the challenge again. Last year I won, and by winning I mean I actually finished my 50,000+ words by the end of the month. The problem is I have a chrysalis for a novel and not really something worth publishing. I need to put at least as much effort as I did writing it into editing it. At least once a week I think about digging into it and ripping things to shreds as I sort bits out that I slammed together in a rush. It just seems so damned daunting to unravel what I was only able to pull together through sheer will.

The other reason why I have decided to skip NaNoWriMo this year is that it took a hell of a lot out of me. My world for the month of November revolved around making sure I got my words done for the day. In the end nothing else mattered, and I pretty much abandoned everything else that I enjoyed. It was during the month of November that I faded away from FFXIV in the first place, because the game required too much effort from me to keep playing it while pouring out 1500 to 2000 words a day. Additionally my blog suffered because I could not keep up my daily blogging AND write that many words a day… was just not something I could juggle. This was the point that I got back into World of Warcraft, because WoW was a game I could play entirely on auto pilot. Nothing about the game made me think, and I could live in this blissful muscle memory zone where I got enjoyment without having to acknowledge the world going on around me. NaNoWriMo was all consuming, and while I think it is something that everyone should complete at least once… I have done that. I completed the competition last year, and wrote a novel… something that I can check off my bucket list. I don’t feel the need for a repeat performance… at least not quite yet.

What I plan on doing is being a cheerleader for the folks who ARE planning on doing the struggle this year. The folks that need inspiration or support as they struggle to keep up with the waterfall of words that NaNoWriMo is. Be it a word of encouragement or a swift kick in the ass when I see they haven’t done their words for the day… I will try and be there. So while I am not a participant I am very much a supporter of the process. Having actually gotten my novel finished on time last year I might even be able to provide a source of advice. I would never have finished last year were it not for the other people struggled through the process with me. They were a source of inspiration and I am hoping some of them will be taking up the challenge this year as well. It is an awesome thing, and hopefully I can play match maker between groups of friends entering the fray together.

I realize this is the second of November and not the first, but we are going to temporarily ignore that fact as I introduce a new thing that I am going to do all this month. In truth it was not until yesterdays post that I was made aware that this was a thing. My wife usually skims my posts each day to see if I have written anything about “us” in the blog, and after doing this yesterday she turned to me and said “you should have done a month of thankfulness post”. So yeah… I kind of wish I had thought about that before making my post yesterday. So this morning I pulled together a logo and am setting forth on this adventure. I’ve always liked Thanksgiving the best of all of the holidays because it isn’t about commercialization or how much you can spend to show your love… it is just about a simple thanks for the awesome things in your life. I am not going to make this out to be a big thing like Blaugust was, but I think it would be awesome if it spread a little bit around our community.

My Wife

I figured I would start off my series of posts with a post about my wife. Not only did she give me this idea but she is pretty much a constant source of support in my life. More important than that she keeps me grounded. I get absolutely engrossed in the things I am into, be it my blog, the podcast, streaming or whatever the latest video game I am obsessing over. She has a way of pulling me outside of all of this and focusing me on the real world outside of my computer and consoles. There are a lot of couples that game together, and I have always thought this would be a cool thing… but I also know it would never actually fly for me. If I had a gamer spouse the bills would never get paid, the chores would never get done… and I would ultimately end up losing my job. My wife helps me keep one foot firmly planted in reality, and keep from slipping down that slippery slope.

More than this we compliment each other nicely. She is all of the things I am not. She is a creature of logic and I am a creature of passion, and together we make this awesome pair. I can’t necessarily say that we are opposites, because we have just enough in common to make it work, but we definitely complement each other. The other strange thing is that we rarely actually fight. I mean we bicker back and forth, but there is rarely any spat that isn’t resolved by bed time. We are in fact an old married couple, and have been able to complete each others sentences for years. There are so many times we will just say a word or two before the other person agrees… because after almost two decades we know exactly what the other is thinking. Without having a place of love and stability, I wouldn’t have the courage each day to put myself out here in front of you all. For all of this and more I am very thankful for my wife.