Tales of the Aggronaut

Slow and Steady

November 3, 2014 by Belghast

Longevity

There was a point yesterday when I realized something that somewhat shocked me. I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV for longer than the combined time my guild was active in both The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. There has been a trend over the last few years where when we move into something new we last around two months and then move on again. Elder Scrolls lasted roughly two months, and Wildstar in truth less than a month before folks petered out. For Final Fantasy XIV I have been going strong since July so this will be going on four months. In truth this is the longest I have played any game in awhile without pause. I am not sure if Rift counts since I tend to always be playing that game off and on, and the period of large amounts of activity last year only lasted a few months at most before it was back to me and a skeletal crew logging in periodically. Another thing I have noticed is that I tend to turn the lights off when I finally go, meaning that I am one of the last people to leave.

In Elder Scrolls Online this was maybe a bit different, since Sig and PK were both active considerably longer after I stopped logging in on a regular basis. I however only recently actually went through the process of cancelling my account there. Wildstar on the other hand I was all too willing to cancel my account, but sadly by the time I did the entire guild was completely toast. I guess I wonder what has made us grazers of MMOs rather than large scale consumers. For awhile I thought it was just the ramifications of coming from a multi-year game like World of Warcraft, and being unfettered and experiencing some kind of options overload. I still feel like there are so many good games out that to be played, and just not enough time to really experience them. I wish I could realistically play FFXIV, Rift, EQ2, LoTRO, TSW and Landmark all at the same time. The problem is when I rampantly multigame like that I get absolutely nothing accomplished in any of them.

Slow and Steady

Right now I am enjoying making slow and steady progress in all of my endeavors in Final Fantasy XIV. Last night I managed to hit 108 ilevel on my main job which is the warrior, and in part that is because of the 2.4 patch. There is a big of a paradox going on after the Dreams of Ice patch. Unlocking the loot in Syrcus Tower means that it has gotten significantly easier to farm the ilvl 100 gear drops and the Sands and Oils of Time needed to upgrade level 100 soldiery gear to level 110. The problem is that it feels like it is significantly slower to grind out Tomestones of Soldiery than it was to get Tomestones of Mythology. So as a result I am sitting on several unused Sands of Time and a couple of unused Unitentified Allagan Tomestones because I lack the Soldiery “bookrocks” to purchase either a weapon or another slot of gear to use the sands on. At this point I am closing in on the 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery needed to purchase a level 100 weapon, which I will then turn into a 110 weapon with one of the sands, finally giving my Dragoon something decent to poke things with. Before this patch I never would have spent soldiery on an alternate job, so it makes me happy to finally start progressing my Dragoon again.

The other side effect of the patch is that it seems to have become significantly harder to gear your very first character. Previously you could hop on the “hunt train” and farm up enough Allied Seals to purchase a full set of ilevel 90 gear within a few hours. For 270 Allied seals you could purchase an entire set of gear for a new job, which in the grand scheme of things even if you didn’t do the insane hunt process was only about a week of doing the daily hunt quests. This was a huge benefit to getting new players into the game quickly. This has slowed down considerably because all of the level 90 gear is gone from the hunt vendor and replaced with the level 100 Soldiery equivalents. Unfortunately this also means that the items themselves have gone up massively in price. The pieces can be purchased for 660, 400, and 300 for the various slots adding up to a grand total of 4020 allied seals for an entire set of gear. Right now this just seems absolutely insane to me. I feel like a later patch is probably going to reduce this price but that for the time being they are trying to make it easier to get soldiery gear… but not so easy that we can cap out over night and run out of things to progress.

Active Free Company

Another awesome thing about the 2.4 patch is that it has seemed to revitalize our server as a whole. Cactuar has sprung to life as so many players I think had taken breaks before the launch of this latest patch and all of its goodness. Granted a flurry of the activity has been leveling rogues, but that seems to be slowly tapering off. Similarly there has been a resurgence of activity in our guild as folks have joined up to start working on characters on our server, or returned from their own pre-patch absences. At several points yesterday we had around a dozen players online, and that still is not including some of our more active members that were curiously missing from the fray this weekend. I know Rae was off doing work related stuff, and Kodra was sick most of the weekend… and Ashgar busy packing for his move. With all of those things factored in it seems even more impressive that we were able to field the numbers that we did. I ran several of the new dungeons with groups of friends, and have yet to actually make my way into the expert duty roulette without a premade group.

Granted I am fully expecting that the upcoming launch of Warlords of Draenor will pull a few players away here and there, but I think the majority of our group is well insulated against the effects of WoW at this point. I am generally the one who returns, and right now as it stands I have no plans of playing at launch. In fact were it not for the level 90 boost that we got from preordering so far ahead of time… I doubt I would have even purchased the expansion this time around. I kinda wish I could claw back that purchase to be honest, but I guess that is the problem with preordering going roughly a year before the release date. That seems so long ago at this point, especially considering the short periods of waiting for new content I am getting used to in Final Fantasy XIV. This game is rolling out a new major patch each quarter, and a minor content patch on a semi-monthly schedule and I hate to say it… but you get spoiled. I don’t think I could return to a game with a year between content patches again after this.

Fuzzy Children

As I said yesterday this month I am trying to come up with something each morning that I am thankful for, turning it entire an entire month of “Thanksgiving”. This morning I am thankful for my “Fuzzy Children”, aka my pets. My wife and I have no intent of ever having human children, so our babies are as close as we will get to having kids. Presently we have three cats, one kitten, and two ferrets and they are all awesome. Each of them have their own personalities, and each of them their own routines that I would not change even if I could. Animals have a way of enriching your life for just existing, and while I might complain about this or that I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I wouldn’t know what to do without one animal at my feet and another on my lap… and another wandering around my office knocking stuff over. I am thankful for my fuzzy warm bundles of happy, and the joy they bring.

NaNoWriMo Supporter

November 2, 2014 by Belghast

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.

Things That Should Die…

November 1, 2014 by Belghast

…in a Fire

This morning I thought I would take a stab and talking about some of the constructs in online games specifically that need to just go away. Over the years I’ve noticed a bunch of things that really do not benefit players in games and only serve to divide them. This is going to likely be a more free form style post than my normal 3 blocks structure… but I am just going with that one.

1) Region Lockout

There are literally an unlimited potential visualizations of the internet, because so much depends upon the activity at the moment you observe it. The image to the left is someone’s vague attempt at “drawing” the internet. It looks like many things, but you know what it absolutely doesn’t look like? That’s right there is no way to somehow match that image up to a map of the countries of the world. The internet is this grand technology that has essentially abolished borders and turned them into meaningless distinctions. I have friends in England, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Ecuador, Brazil, and more than I can possibly count in our sibling to the North… Canada.

Ultimately I want to be able to play freely with all of them, and if it was not hard enough to try and juggle time zone conflicts… game companies seem to feel the need to throw up artificial boundaries to keep players from different regions in separate bundles. This needs to stop, and while server localization is a good thing… blocking players from freely mingling between the areas is a bad thing. Region based launches and region based exclusivity also need to “die in a fire”. We are living in a global community, and its about damned time we realize it.

2) Server Restrictions

Another massive frustration is that as gamers we are still somehow constrained to playing on servers. Don’t get me wrong… I love servers. Before it went to shit I loved Argent Dawn my role-playing server in World of Warcraft, and currently I am in love with Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV. I absolutely think having a small intimate group that you see every single day is a good thing. What I don’t think is a good thing is the hard boundaries. Just because I live in the Tulsa area in Oklahoma… doesn’t mean I can’t go visit someone living in the Dallas Texas area. Essentially this is how our games should work too. There are certain games that are already doing this and it is amazing. In Rift for example you can choose to move your character between servers at will once every week, but more important than that you can choose to transfer yourself temporarily to ANY server in your cluster and you are able to group across servers freely. The Secret World has the same sort of setup, and it allows you to join up with literally anyone else playing the game.

Both of these situations represent the ideal, that you still have a server structure that gives you familiarity with other players but at the same time the freedom to hang out with anyone else who happens to be playing the same game as you. Completely abolishing servers on the other hand isn’t as good of an idea. In The Elder Scrolls Online we free floated on the same server, but the fact that player names were hidden and that you were constantly being mixed with a different batch of players… kept you from developing ties. There are friends I have in FFXIV only because we saw each other doing the same things over and over and struck up a conversation while doing it. This is important, but it is also important to be able to hang out with that person you meet five months after you started playing… and find out they are playing in a completely different server community. Your character is just data, and it should be able to flow between servers… which are also just data.

3) Faction Walls

Another thing that I find super frustrating is when you meet someone that happens to be playing the same game as you… but then you find out that you are on opposite sides of some meaningless conflict in game and as such your characters are sworn enemies. Red versus Blue mentality needs to go away. It is a very dumb way of dealing with the concept of factions, because in the end it is the players that end up losing out. I’ve never felt faction pride in a video game, because these factions have nothing to do with me. I didn’t get to choose the way that the Horde was founded in Azeroth. I didn’t choose to align to the Orcs and the Tauren and Undead and god forbid the damned Blood Elves. I was brought into a situation where those were already connected for various also meaningless reasons. Nothing about that has anything to do with me and my motivations as a player.

What is more meaningful is that for players to start out in the world with certain baseline alignments determined by their race or their class… but have those be malleable. One of the things I loved about the original Everquest was that your faction choices were personal in nature. Paineel was a city of Evil Erudite Necromancers… but by choice I aligned my Wood Elf Ranger with the city through lots of personal work. Meaning that I could go there at any time I wanted and use the city like any other city. Similarly I knew players who factioned with the giants turning Kael Drakkel… an area that is normally a raid zone into a useable player city. These are interesting choices ones that take lots of effort, but ones that also bring the player deeper into your world as a result. Setting up artificial boundaries just for the propagation of shallow player versus player combat is a horrible idea and needs to go away. Let the players choose their allegiance, and let the players decide just what they are willing to fight for.

4) Weekly Lockouts

This one is a thing that is starting to change slowly, but where it still exists it needs to go away. What I mean by weekly lockouts is that once you run something like a raid you are locked out from participating for another week. This used to create this complicated process of making sure that you stayed unlocked from this or that content to make sure you were eligible to participate in it with your raid or your guild. As a raid leader it was always disappointing to get ready to go and find out that one of your key members had locked themselves out earlier in the week. Like I said this is starting to change slowly with the introduction of the “loot locking” construct, where you can participate as many times as you like but you can only receive loot once. Even this has many forms because the World of Warcraft version is a per boss loot lock, and the Final Fantasy XIV version is a single piece of loot period from the entire instance.

In both cases however it is significantly better than being locked completely and unable to help out your friends. If you notice that is a running theme in all of these things that need to go away. Basically there are a lot of MMO constructs that get in the way of you playing with your friends. For awhile now I have had this maxim of “anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is bad” and I still stand by it. What I would like to see is that there be some reward for the players “just helping out”. Sure they can’t win the actual loot off the boss, but maybe for participating they get a loot bag at the end of the run that can contain some interesting stuff. This sort of thing would give folks warm fuzzies for helping out their friends, but also not be rewarding enough for people to abuse it by grinding the raids over and over. In any case… these are four constructs that I feel that MMOs would be better off without.

Lalafell Rescue Squad

October 31, 2014 by Belghast

Rubber Snake Attack

Instead of coming home and gaming like normal last night, I actually went out and did something sociable with actual living and breathing people! I know it is a shock to the system to fathom the ramifications of that statement. Several months ago a group from work attended the live RiffTrax showing of the Matthew Broderick Godzilla and it was an absolute blast. I have been a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 since college, and RiffTrax is essentially the same folks doing the same sort of thing… without the robots and a guy trapped on a space station construct. During that they previewed the next movie and at that point we decided that we had to attend again so we could see Anaconda… a movie that I did not remember being as cheesy as it actually was. Thankfully we learned a lot from the first time, and arrived at the theater considerably earlier. Last time none of us actually got to sit together, but instead ended up having to pair up to get us all seated. Last night we at dinner at a restaurant in the same parking lot as the theater so we were able to walk over and got there well before they even opened up seating.

Anaconda… was seriously worse of a movie than I remember, and even at the time I thought the snake looked nothing like an actual snake. The cast was disturbingly “star studded” for as bad of a train wreck as it ended up being. You had Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Ice Cube and I believe this was the movie debut of Jennifer Lopez. At the very least it was before I was actually aware of who she was, as I don’t think she had released her first album yet. There were just so many cheesy things about the movie… like the fact that every single time that we see J-Lo on screen it is apparently super cold in the Amazon because they make a point of lingering on some massive nippledge going on. Aside from the snake being horrible… it looked like they recycled a ton of footage. The Rifftrax guys pointed out a moment near the end of the movie where the waterfall is going backwards… as they quite literally just reversed a shot from earlier in the movie. Similarly they seem to keep passing the exact same snake idol a half dozen times.

I did not however attend to watch the movie, but instead listen to the RiffTrax crew tear it apart. The Godzilla show was great but this one took it to all new levels. In fact I would have to say this is probably going to go down as one of their better performances. There was just so much to make fun of in this movie, and the fact that it had both J-Lo and IceCube in it… basically gave them free reign to mix in lots jokes about their careers as a whole. This is starting to become a regular thing that we do as a group. They previewed the next show coming up December 4th which is a strange rendition of Santa Claus from the 50s. The trailer bits they showed looked absolutely insane… Santa Claus in space… fighting and army of dancing devils. Hopefully we can once again muster the troops and go as a group. Not sure we get much “team building” done, but it is a really fun time nonetheless.

Lalafell Rescue Squad

This RiffTrax overall seemed a bit shorter than the last one, and as a result I ended up getting back home at a decent hour. I decided to pop into Final Fantasty XIV for a bit and see what all was happening. After milling around a bit in the housing district a few of us pulled together a run for the new Sunken Temple of Qarn Hard mode. This was one of those dungeons that we avoided like the plague because of its frustrating “one shot death” mechanics, so I think as a whole we were at the least concerned when we saw it would end up as a hard mode. Thankfully the mechanics are not that cheap this time around. Not to spoil this for anyone, but there are no bees this time around. What is there instead is a continuation of the original story. When we cleared the dungeon the first time, it apparently made the place safe enough for groups of adventurers to begin exploring it. However a group of tomb robbers triggered yet another trap, and you are going there at the bidding of a brother who wishes you to go rescue his sister. Adorable Lalafell needing rescuing… that sounds like as noble cause as any… my people need me.

I am not as geared as I could be, but I am no slouch overall. The bare minimum for the dungeon is ilevel 80 and I went in there last night with 103. Overall I think I was managing the damage pretty well, but it definitely put our healer through a workout. I think in part he was just used to healing Paladins with their significantly smaller health pools. With group buffs I was over 10,000 hit points, and a comparable Paladin would be around 6,000. So when the final boss hit me for 2,000 it really didn’t feel that significant, however with a paladin that would be 1/3rd of their available health pool. I think Tams complaint was that it felt like his heals weren’t doing much, but that is primarily because a percentage of my health bar is quite a bit more hit points than a percentage of someone else’s health bar. In any case we made it through the dungeon without any wipes and only I believe a single death. The content is hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard that it becomes punishing. I feel like Pharo Sirius is still a rougher dungeon than this one for example.

At the end of the day we finished the run, beat the big bad end boss and saved the adorable Lalafell Adventerer. I feel like it was a good way to end an already awesome night. One of my favorite things about the new dungeons is that they drop these tokens that can then be turned in for any ilevel 90 class piece of armor. So while they did in fact remove these from the Tombstone and Hunt vendors, you can still get the gear. The fact that they shifted it to a token system means the mobs have a more shallow loot table, and as a result each individual piece is more useful. I feel like I will enjoy picking up a level 90 set way more by running these three new dungeons than I ever would by simply grinding tombstones or hunts until I had the necessary currency. This is fine and dandy for experienced players, but I still feel like this patch and its changes made it significantly harder for a brand new player to gear up. Granted maybe they did that on purpose, so players would have to spend a bit more time running dungeons before leap-frogging into end game content.

Dimension Goodies a Plenty

With all the Final Fantasy XIV goodness, I am still playing some Rift Nightmare Tide… it has just taken a back seat. At the very least I am logging in a few times a day to make sure my minions are running the 8 hour long missions. These reward some crazy stuff, and so far as a result of all of my minion missions I have literally three 28 slot bags full of nothing but dimension stuff. At some point I need to sift through it all and see what I can actually use. You get a pretty broad mix of things from basic building blocks to intricate items like the Infernal Dawn Cannon. The 8 hour long dimension missions have a chance of rewarding these chests that each have half a dozen items in them… so it feels like buying those grab bags off the store. I really like the Rift dimensions system for player housing, so at some point I really should work on building a proper home.

Rift is more than likely going to be a weekend game for me as I do laundry and watch stuff off netflix or the DVR. The pace works well there and the fact that I can pop to the guild dimension when I afk, and return exactly to the point where I last left off is a really nice feature. The content in Nightmare Tide is significantly more enjoyable for me than Storm Legion was. At some point soon I want to try out one of the new dungeons. I dinged 61, so have made some forward momentum, but still have not really touched even half of Goboro Reef. While there may only be three new zones, each of the zones is absolutely massive in scale. I’ve not actually done any of the instant adventures, mostly because it seems like an excessive amount of area to try and cover rapidly. In any case I am still enjoying the game, but just playing it as a side venture with Final Fantasy XIV being my primary focus.

#RiffTrax #FFXIV #Rift