The Crysta Boss

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a local holiday and as such I got the day off work, and did not really feel like blogging. Of all of the battles that I have had in MMORPGs… by far the toughest that I have ever experienced is the Housing Boss in Final Fantasy XIV. The main problem with this boss however… is that once you have beaten it… you have to keep beating it every few weeks to keep your plot from being repossessed. Thing is… my current plot in The Mists is my SECOND time beating the housing boss. However as is often the case… life got away from me at the end of 2023 and I went two months without logging into FFXIV and my house was demolished. When I finally managed to get a house again around the launch of Dawntrail, I vowed to never let that happen again no matter what I had to go through to keep logging in. I started a weekly ritual of logging in at a bare minimum to play the Jumbo Cactpot, and at that time checking in on my house.

So as a result Sunday morning I had a minor panic attack when I tried to do my log in ritual and encountered this screen. The Credit Card that I had on file had expired, and I apparently did not get around to updating in before Final Fantasy XIV was set to bill me again. This created a whole spiral of frustration as I attempted to renew my card information only to be met with the deeply obtuse “Card Unavailable” error message. There are entire threads on the FFXIV forums talking about this particular error message, and in most cases the answer is either to buy timecards every few months or rely upon the even more obtuse Crysta system. The entire financial processing wing of most Japanese companies seems to be stuck in the 90s, because I can remember jumping through all of this dumb hoops when trying to add money to my SEGA JP account before Phantasy Star Online 2 went to North America.

I remember the Streamer Zepla running up against similar issues of not being able to subscribe to the game, and also not really getting much in the way of resolution. The forum threads are all seeming the blame the issue on Debit Cards, and since I only have one Credit Card and a few Debit Cards… I was really concerned about not being able to dig myself out of this particular hole in time before my house got repossessed again. I was legitimately desperate enough to go down the Crysta rabbit hole… but neither Paypal or Amazon Pay… the two options that were available to me were failing. Thing is… both of those options are also tied to the same Credit Card that was failing out with the subscription. In an absolute last ditch effort I tried entering one of my Debit Cards and it worked. Then I had to go through the process of renewing both my extra Retainers and the mobile app separately. Legitimately dealing with the financial processing boss is far worse than Housing Savage. I think the crux of it is that at some point Square stopped taking my main credit card, but never went through the process of updating all of the information. Because some screens show it as being accepted, and others do not… so I am guessing they swapped processors and they now only reliably take Master Card and Visa. I was legitimately to the point of going down a rabbit hole of trying to set up a virtual credit card that billed back to my main credit card.

My lovely little home is now safe again… at least for a several years. It is now up to me to continue the login tradition and keep checking in on things every week. If you are ever in my neck of the woods swing by and sign my guestbook I am in Ward 28 Plot 3 on Cactuar/Aether. I am yet another one of those folks who only half-assed their home. The front room is nice and cozy… but there is absolutely nothing going on in the basement. The yard is also pretty great, and I am proud of it. Mostly I just did not want to be one of those folks who camped out a home and then never did anything with it. At some point I need to spend some more time and effort decorating the basement, but I am not really sure what to do there. My general idea was the top floor is a store to sell all of the things I have gathered from my adventures, and the bottom floor would be a Lalafellian scaled apartment.

Since you sat through my panic attack… I figure I will share some actual useful information for anyone who does not know this trick. Essentially there is a pattern that I use each day for the Mini Cactpot, that yields the most predictable results. The Cactpot card asks you to reveal specific squares, and then pick a row to submit for the prize. If you punch your card in a Y pattern shown above on the left side, it gives you information about every single slot on the card. Essentially I am mostly gambling on which slots have the greatest chance of either producing a 1/2/3 or a 7/8/9 since they are the biggest payouts. You are always fighting randomization and there are going to be cards that have no good options… but this structured approach feels like I at least have a fighting chance of hitting the big pulls whenever they are available.

Anyways! Now that my home is secured I am way less panicked. I don’t really talk about FFXIV very much, but that is not for lack of me still poking my head into it from time to time. At some point I need to get serious about catching up on the story.

AggroChat #525 – Insurance for Cats

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Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo

Hey Folks! We are down a Thalen this week, but that is mostly because he was up visiting Bel Town, so Bel talks a bit about that.  Kodra discusses how playing a lot of Blue Prince has ruined his brain for every other game… especially Cyberpunk 2077. It is Path of Exile 3.26 Spoiler Season, and Bel talks about some of the quality of life changes coming.  Tam shares his experiences with Skin Deep and why it may not be the “sandbox stealth” game that it is purported to be. Kodra and Tam talk about their experiences playing Lorelei and the Laser Eyes “Co-Op” without official support for that. The early looter shooter Defiance makes a return, and Bel talks about that, and then Tam shares the realization that given enough time, you massively improve almost anything that you try… in his case, painting miniatures.

Topics Discussed:

  • Blue Prince Rewires Brain
  • Path of Exile 3.26 Spoiler Season
  • Skin Deep
  • Fuga: Melodies of Steel 3
  • Lorelei and the Laser Eyes “Co-Op”
  • Defiance Returns
  • Painting Realization

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Failing Can Be Fun

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Good Morning Folks! I did not post yesterday because Thursdays have become a giant mess where I have to pull together this significant report first thing in the morning. I was in a position where it was 11 am and I was still waiting on some of the contributions… for a thing that was supposed to be done and submitted by noon. So essentially… I find myself in a position where I really cannot devote the effort to blogging. In other news today is the “Dateaversary” for my me and my wife, and at this point we have been together twenty nine years. We are old… and are starting to feel it. I got up this morning and got fancy cronuts, and they were delightful. With next year being our 30th year… we should probably plan something more special than chilling out as per our normal.

Last night was another round of Fractals with Friends, and it was pretty delightful as well. I am having a blast doing these each week with Ammo, Sita, and Sol. I think maybe starting this next week we might get a Thalen as well, which could see us turning our focus to dungeons. We actually learned things from the previous round because we did a few that we had already done as a group… and they went SUPER fast. I think we might actually reach a point where we can rip through more than five in our allotted time period. I’ve been scheming about other activities we might do as a group, because I know that Sita specifically needs the Nightmare Tower for Living World 1, which I managed to solo… but was a massive pain in the butt to do so.

I was actually smart and focused on the daily fractals… which means we finished up a several daily achievements and got bonus loot as a reward. At some point I kind of hope that we can manage to get together a group for some strikes and knock out some of the dailies there. In theory I could use my Commander powers to post a daily fractals group and just force them to happen for me every day. I really should get more comfortable being a Commander… or in my case a Catmander. There is a whole lot more than I could be doing in the game were I willing to seize the reigns and lead groups. I always feel like I just don’t know enough about the game to comfortable direct people through it. I am eternally lost… and while I could absolutely lead something like Tequatl that I can do in my sleep… the things I would actually want to do I don’t have a ton of experience doing myself.

I did actually use my Commander tag last night for a brief moment in Dragon’s End. Essentially we were on a map that was going to lose. Zero progress had been made towards buffing the defenses of each area, and there seemed to be only a handful of us on the map. I only really popped into the map to farm void mobs for the weekly quest, so I decided to tag up and see if I could get at least five of us so that we could do the three escort events. By the end I think we maybe had eight total… so not enough to do the meta event, but enough to actually do some stuff and have fun in the process. I made a few new friends, specifically one person who was with me in the notion that we would fail beautifully together. It was honestly a heck of a lot of fun… which is what makes me think I should actually put myself out there more often.

I am really looking forward to the patch drop next Tuesday and the assorted quality of life changes that come with it. The big thing will be reclaiming all of the shared inventory slots that I am currently using for teleporters. It does make me wonder what exactly I am going to use for the rest of the space. Having an all in one “gobbler” makes me actually want to start working on collecting more of these. Quality of life changes honestly are my favorite changes in any game, because I love convenience items. The less friction I have towards doing what I want in a game… the more likely I am to keep playing that game. At some point though I do want to dive into the housing system and actually build some proper structures in my Homestead.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and if you make it into Guild Wars 2 say hi.

Further Incomprehensible Nonsense

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I apparently remembered that I had the Endless Kodan Tonic and decided to run World Bosses while transformed into a giant bear. One of the particularly nice things about this specific tonic is that you can actually do combat while transformed. Most of them largely turn you into a useless lump, but this one even allows you to use your glider. This has always made me wonder if at one point, Kodan were contemplated as a playable race. Right now I am very much in a mode of having a whole slew of activities that I am working on, and then just sort of picking the one that fits my current level of engagement. Specifically I have a sub achievement for Klobjarne Geirr the Legendary Spear that requires me to do a bunch of World Bosses so I decided to knock out a few of those last night.

Another way lower impact achievement series that I have been working on is the Home Sweet Homestead series. These essentially just require you to pop into a zone and do a bunch of events. Each one also has the benefit of awarding you a recipe book related to that specific zone. Weirdly I had already picked up a copy of the recipes from the Dragon’s Stand version of this achievement, but have no memory of how I might have acquired it. At some point I want to make a real push into building some of my own structures in the Homestead. Right now I mostly have the default everything with a handful of placed structures just to sort out how the system works. One of my internet acquaintances build a really cool fully underwater Homestead that is worth checking out.

Spending time doing events in Auric Basic… led to me also starting to chip away at the No Mask Left Behind achievement. This one is pretty slick because it gives you an Aurillium Node for your homestead/home instance which will of course be useful at giving me a constant feed of little bits of that currency as I do my daily gathering. This however has led me to realize… just how little of the zone I have explored. I had no clue that Auric Basic had as much verticality as it does. Verdant Brink is immediately noticeable because half of the meta event takes place on rubble platforms in the sky. However with Auric Basic you are spending most of your time on the ground completing events leading up to the taking of the golden city. I was not expecting to find entire treetop villages in this zone, which makes me also realize how little of all of the other maps in the game I have probably explored. I was not a big fan of Heart of Thorns because it felt like a massive increase in difficulty… with lots of mob types that could just straight up murder you. However spending more time exploring is making me appreciate at just how interesting these zones are.

Since I seem to be settling into Guild Wars 2 for the long haul… I’ve finally engaged in the practice of alt parking. I am really only playing my Ranger regularly, and as a result I could be stashing all of my other characters at key locations around the map where I can gather resources daily. There are many different alt parking videos out there, but this one from Laranity covers alt parking as well as a few other gold farming strategies. Essentially right now I have a few different alts parked at various large chests in Bjora Marches and another parked at the jumping puzzle in Kaineng City. There are a few other areas that might be worth parking alts, given that I have a full compliment of level eighty alts that I am not using much. I’ve just added this to my reset routine along with farming guild halls and my homestead for resources and going to beat up a naked man for his lunch money. If you ever want to follow along in this nonsense and have Teleport to Friend doodads hit me up and I can log in the character at each location and let you park one easily.

Where we get into proper degeneracy however is that I have started farming a Black Lion Key each week with one of my free character slots. Essentially… there is a thing that you can do once per week that involves creating a brand new character… running it up to the level 10 personal story quest which rewards a free Black Lion Chest Key. Most of the time when you open a Black Lion Chest… it gives you useless stuff and I would never recommend buying them. However I am also someone who pulled one of the most expensive items from a chest and sold it to effectively fund everything I have done on my account since that point. Specifically I am doing the method where you run up a Human Ranger which seems to be about the fastest method to get through this process. I wish I had honestly been doing this all this time… but alas I was too lazy. Right now it seems to take me about 15-20 minutes to complete the process at a casual pace. This video covers the entire process designed to be as optimal as possible. Do I suggest you follow along in this path of madness? Probably not.

Yesterday we got the teaser trailer for the next chapter of the Janthir Wilds story which will be dropping on Tuesday June 3rd. Since I am very much in the mindset of “do Guild Wars 2” stuff I am pretty much primed to experience this as it goes live. Probably the thing that excites me the most is that it sounds like the new zone meta is going to be similar to Dragon Stand, where you have three lanes to push at the same time. I have to admit I was pretty disappointed in the Greer/Decima meta and still feel like that needs significant balancing given that after all of this time… it rarely succeeds with random groups. I like all of the maps in Janthir Wilds immensely… but there just isn’t really a fun meta right now. Mistburned Barrens has a few fun events, but nothing to the level of a proper meta. I am really hoping that they nail the meta for this last zone.

Dragon Bash will also be starting soon, which is a pretty fun event. Mostly I just try and make sure I do the dailies associated with it. I am not big on farming the pinatas, especially given that I have one in my home instance now. Then WVW Rush is happening in July along with the expansion announcement, which will be an ideal time to farm up a bunch of Gift of Battle just to have them at the ready. I might also work on some of the WvW Exclusive legendary items during this time. The only problem with all of this is… there is a lot going on in June. There will be a new Path of Exile league dropping on the 13th, and before that Dune Awakening launches its head-start on June 5th and I will be checking that out. I wish all of these events were about a month apart, because I have no clue what I will be doing. Hopefully 3.26 in POE is a banger of a league, but I also do not want to abandon Guild Wars 2 right now either. Yesterday I decided that I was actually glad I did not score a Nintendo Switch 2 preorder, because that only would have added to the battle for my time and attention.