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Sleepy Ramble

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Last night was one of those nights where I did not get much of anything accomplished. Starting around 8 pm I was ready to sleep… even though we managed to hold out until around 9 before actually doing that. Once I hit the pillow I was completely zonked for the night and didn’t wake up until the wee hours in the morning when my brains auto timer seemed to think I had slept enough. I was able to shrug this off however and go right back to sleep… and given the slightest opportunity as I sit here at the keyboard I feel like I could still successfully doze off again.

I feel like I might be starting to fight whatever crud has been going around through the office. Initially I think we all thought it was just allergies… because even folks who do not traditionally have problems elsewhere end up developing allergies here in Oklahoma. The oppressive heat has not helped either with recent days nearing 100 but with a heat index well 15 to 20 degrees higher than the actual temperature. We are finally starting to get a break from this over the last few days, but it is somewhat sad when you consider 85 degrees to be “cool”.

Last night I put some more levels on the Red Mage and even though I am absolutely convinced I am probably playing the class wrong… I am enjoying myself. It is funny how adding a sword to a finger wiggler instantly makes it more enjoyable for me? I remember back in the day one of my favorite party comps in the original Final Fantasy was Red Mage, Monk, Thief and Warrior. I mean it is not a suggested comp by any means but when I was grinding it allowed me to use as little magic as humanly possible. Magic made me go back to town to rest, and my goal was to stay out as long as humanly possible.

I am wondering if this first Final Fantasy game ultimately set my feelings about Magic users from that point out in future outings. My preference from that point forward has always seemingly been to include as few magic users as humanly possible in my parties. The classic comp would insist on a Black Mage and a White Mage, but I often times took a Red Mage just so I could use proper weapons. In Final Fantasy V I am super partial to the Mystic Knight because it is effectively a Warrior with elemental buffs. Side note… I kinda hope that eventually makes its way into Final Fantasy XIV as an eventual job.

As far as dreams went, I did have a super lucid dream where I apparently was visiting the Blizzard games campus in Anaheim and wound up taking some sort of an assessment. I have no clue why I was taking an assessment, because I thought I was visiting as a blogger. I don’t remember a lot of the questions on the assessment, but for whatever reasons various Devs were talking with me while I was sitting there filling it out. I quickly became aware that all they wanted to talk about were the more modern games like Overwatch, and really the only thing I was interested in talking about was Diablo or World of Warcraft.

There was a time when I felt like I more holistically cared about the output of Blizzard Entertainment, and now they really are just the Diablo and WoW company for me personally. I am passingly interested in a lot of the other things that they create, but they aren’t exactly how I want to spend my time. I feel like I got the whole online multiplayer shooter thing more or less out of my system during the 90s, and once MMORPGs existed I was more or less gone. While I dabbled with MOBAs it was also not really my jam.

I feel like during the 90s there are a whole bunch of games that I played more or less because online play was somewhat of a novelty. We were still enthralled by the fact that the internet existed, and if I could play a game with other people over this new fangled invention I was going to try it. Even then… I was way more into making maps and sharing “PUDs” with my friends than I was ever into actually playing Warcraft II. However I do remember some really happy times surrounding that game.

In college, towards the end of my stay there… the campus opened a state of the art 24/7 computer lab. There were many a night when several of us would go there to hang out on IRC, because there was something special about being both in the same room with someone and being online in a shared environment at the same time. Many times however we would wind up installing Warcraft II on eight computers and engaging in a massive 8 way battle. Why? Well because we could of course and because it was new and exciting.

Now online play is more or less expected… and as a result a lot of my hook for playing some of those other games went away. Anyways… today’s post has ended up being a massive ramble. I blame either getting too much sleep or not enough sleep. Here is hoping that I return tomorrow with something resembling a normal and proper post.

Books and Bad Decisions

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I’ve been piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, but have largely languished without a real purpose. This weekend I guess I got a sense of purpose and managed to push my Machinist up to level 50 with darkest dungeon. I had been piddling around during the podcast in Palace of the Dead for a few weeks now, but largely just wound up running around the top of the wall in Quarymill while we talked. I refer to this activity as Dalaran-ing because anytime I would need to talk to someone in game I would find myself running laps around whichever incarnation of Dalaran was in World of Warcraft at the time. I find I do the same with Final Fantasy XIV hubs, and I greatly miss the running friendly walls that our old Free Company house used to have.

As it stands I have every class that is currently in the game above the level of 50, which in theory should allow me to massively clean my vaults and get rid of anything lower level that isn’t particularly cool looking or at least dyeable. I did dump a ton of stuff into ye olde glamour commode, and was pretty happy to see that we are getting an increase in storage space with the upcoming Shadowbringers update. At this point I have dumped every Axe and Katana that I care about keeping as those two classes are already at the level cap. I need to start working my way backwards through my weapon archives and saving anything that I particularly want to keep. Inventory management is the bane of my existence in most MMORPGs and FFXIV is no exception sadly.

After tooling around on my Machinist I decided to push Bard up to 60… at which point something started to bother me greatly. At the end of everything I have completed I get a warning telling me I am capped on Tomestones of Poetics. This lead me down a path of trying to research ways I can spend said Poetics… which lead me back to the original expense that I had previously used them for… Books. I never finished doing books for my Bravura Animus. In fact right now I could not tell you where I am exactly in that process, but I am working my way through a speed book that involves a FATE that apparently never spawns.

So there it is folks. I am making poor life choices and apparently drawn back into piddling around with my Zodiac weapon. I solo’d my way through several dungeons last night and at current moment find myself just needing to do Amdapor Keep and get a FATE in Coerthas to spawn that seemingly doesn’t want to. I figure at some point I will have to start farming down the FATEs that have popped since I believe every zone has a limited number up at a given time. This is apparently what I am doing with my life now… in this lead up to Shadowbringers. Sadly I have not even begun to go through madness because I still have to do my melding materia step. The good news however is that I probably won’t be able to complain about not having something to spend my Poetics on shortly.

Avarice and Guns

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Over the course of this week my blog has largely been devoted to E3 show coverage, or at least that thing that I call coverage where I talk about the things I personally cared about. In the background it has also been a pretty crazy week with a good deal of my time going to trying to catch up all on things E3 instead of actually playing games. This was only complicated by the fact that Tuesday night I went to the rebroadcast of RiffTrax live which is all sorts of wrong name-wise. Then on Wednesday night we met some of my in-laws for an early Father’s Day dinner. Which largely left Monday and last night free… but Monday I more or less spent the night cobbling together the footage needed for the Tuesday post.

Over the weekend I finally reached a point where I was ready to make a run at the Avarice Conquest. For the uninitiated this conquest requires you to hit a 50,000,000 gold streak which means every couple of seconds you need to be looting more gold to keep it active. There are a few ways to do this in game, but the most sure fire method requires copious amounts of farming. Since this takes so much time I absolutely went for the overkill method and gathered up a vault and a half worth of stuff… or in my case 8 rows of 7 caches equally 56 bounty caches.

Now the gotcha here is that a bounty cache retains a memory of what difficulty it was looted on and I started banking the caches when I first became able to farm Torment 13 and quickly worked my way up to 15 and 16… and had not really been paying much attention as to which difficulty I got them on. The key to doing this is to dismiss your companion and dismiss your pet… then stand beside your stash and be ever so careful to not touch anything until you are ready to go. I started by loading every bounty I could fit into my inventory and then reloaded the rest without moving at all. For sake of my own sanity I held down the Shift button while opening the Stash to make sure the game would not accept a movement input from me.

The real challenge however… was doing the cleanup. What you see above is somewhat of a lie, because each one of those items actually represents a stack. At this point I had completed a Solo Greater Rift 80 which I believe took my blood shard capacity up to 1300, and I am pretty sure I made twenty trips between Kadala and the bloodshard pile before I finally farmed those down. I probably crunched over a hundred legendaries and I have no clue at all how much I had in the way of crafting materials. Which is good because I also needed the various Kanai’s Cube related achievements as well. I am essentially in a point with Season 17 where I have knocked out a good chunk of most of the remaining steps, but need to spend some time playing clean up and actually start finishing them. I need two more conquests, and I have not even set my signs on what those are going to be yet.

The other game I have spent a bit of time in lately is Destiny 2 and I am largely working on getting my light level up enough to be able to feel like I have some semblance of choice weapon wise. Right now I am largely just using whatever trash happens to drop with a higher level because I do not have a great stockpile of infusion materials. Now the interesting part of this is that I have picked up some weapons that I have found I actually enjoy and probably never would have played with otherwise… like the submachine gun I am current wielding in my primary slot.

I still find it very hard to get into the Crucible, and whereas I played Gambit constantly it feels like the queues for standard gambit are extremely long. I am however trying to plug away at the various tasks that will give me “powerful gear”. Like I knocked out the planetary quest last night and did a heroic adventure… then plugged away a bit at the crucible related bounties. I will say it is really odd getting to the activity tracker off the map screen because I keep wanting to see it on my inventory. Quite honestly I would prefer if they put that tab in both places, because it takes a lot of retraining to stop looking for those items in my inventory. Still having an awful lot of fun in Destiny 2, but I probably should be playing Final Fantasy XIV and prepping for the impending launch of Shadowbringers.

What have you been playing on regular rotation? Drop me a comment below.

Curious Case of Stadia

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Yesterday afternoon was the unofficial kickoff of E3 Season, and it started with one of the more bizarre product offerings. For some time we have known that Google was making a large push into gaming with its Stadia product that serves to offer console gaming without a console. Now if this sounds familiar… it is because we have seen this same basic idea numerous times. Just off the top of my head I remember OnLive, Gaikai, Playstation Now and Geforce Now to name a few but I am certain I left off a half dozen of these product offerings. Where they have all fallen short however is in control latency and the amount of bandwidth required to create a playable experience.

Google however thinks it understands exactly how much bandwidth is required to be able to use their product and has produced a handy chart to show what level of gaming will be available and what level of bandwidth. The challenge unfortunately is a little bit more nuanced given that the total bandwidth picture is influenced by the hardware sitting between your device and your internet service provider. I’ve gone to a lot of effort to try and make sure I have more than enough bandwidth to do whatever it is that I want to do online… and I feel like I would probably fall short of what would be required to make 4K gaming on this device stable.

I have what I feel like is better than average internet for the United States. Additionally I have as much as I possibly can connected directly to a Gigabit switch attached hanging off of my AC 5400 router with two separate 5 ghz wireless bands theoretically capable of 2167 Mbps. I’ve segregated a business network and a gaming network all in an attempt to cut down on chatter. In addition to this I have 2 other AC 5400 repeaters helping to form a mesh network around the house. I use Parsec on a nightly basis and with a wired connection 4K streaming from my machine upstairs does not really work well enough to be something I would want to do on a regular basis. Similarly with all of this, none of the 4K video streaming options really feel viable and I always end up downgrading them to 1080p. Basically what I am saying is out of personal experience… their estimates are nonsense and will not produce the sort of results that they think they will.

What Google Stadia is really selling is a vision that I have long sought out myself. The ability to play the same games from any device in the house at any time I would like. In essence this is why I use Parsec, because it allows me to extend my more expensive and capable gaming desktop experience to my less than capable and aging gaming laptop. Even then however the experience works equally well when playing over my Chromebook via the native Android Parsec app, so I can see at least in theory that the vision of Stadia is possible based on my own experiences. I just question if we are at a point bandwidth wise where this level of fidelity is really ready for prime time consumption. Especially once you consider another potential monkey wrench… I am not really the target audience for this device.

That is ultimately the piece we are going to have to factor into our decisions about Stadia is the fact that most of us reading this blog are not what I feel like is actually the market for a device like this. For me personally… I own a 4k capable gaming desktop, an aging but still viable gaming laptop, effectively every console from this current generation and every console from the last generation. I’ve spent the money on hardware and accouterments required to be able to play games at a reasonable level of fidelity and with it comes a large library of games that I already own. Stadia more or less is going to require us to buy into a completely different library of games and potentially deliver a noticeable worse experience than being connected real time to hardware. Sure there will be the bleeding edge early adopters among us that dabble with this… but ultimately I expect we will all return to our comfortable world of hardware based gaming within the week.

I feel the true market for this device is the cord cutter that has already tuned their network and devices to fit a steady diet of media streaming from various platforms. The target individual maybe was a serious gamer in their youth but as life got busy they realized there just wasn’t enough time in the day to play these rather expensive consoles that used to just gather dust in their apartment. Every now and then a game comes along that through the Zeitgeist, friends and a dose of FOMO they really wish they could play… but that proposition seems less elegant when you consider playing a single game might have at a minimum a $360 outlay of cash associated with it. If this person could simply buy the game and be able to play it with a second hand direct input controller over their business class laptop… then I think you have the perfect use case for this network. Stadia is a system built for the occasional gamer and is going to be made or broken on expanding the range of gaming behind those of us who are already sworn acolytes.

I think the real tragedy of yesterdays presentation is the fact that they spent exactly zero air time talking about Stadia Base and instead made a hard push for Stadia Pro. The founders edition is $130 and includes 3 months of the $9.99 per month subscription as well as 3 months for a friend. However if you look at these charts what you are essentially getting for your “pro” money is 4k gaming and I have already stated that I think this is a pipe dream unless you happen to have Gigabit internet. What is way more impressive is the fact that they give you 1080p 60 fps stereo gaming without a reoccurring subscription and the ability to dip your toes into all of the free to play content that is going to be on the platform like Elder Scrolls Online and the recently announced as free Destiny 2 New Light.

This is going to be the real backbone of the player base… folks that purchased a single game or want to try out one of the free to play offerings. Maybe these are folks that are already mobile gamers but crave something more immersive, or maybe they just want to occasionally relive the nostalgia of their youth that their jobs keep them from on a regular basis. In those scenarios I think this platform makes a lot of sense. I do however think that “Netflix for Games” is probably a really bad way to look at this service, and I feel like the as of yet officially announced XCloud is going to be more of that since the Xbox Game Pass already does an amazing job of serving up a ton of games for the subscription fee. Ultimately at the end of the day… what makes Stadia so confusing is that the messaging seems to be targeting so called “core gamers” when in truth that was likely never their intended audience. Once you keep that in mind… the product makes considerably more sense and may just bring a brand new audience to gaming.