Tales of the Aggronaut

Gallivanting

September 15, 2013 by Belghast

Ohman… it is morning and I am legitimately typing a blog post like I am supposed to on a weekend! Apologies again for the huge lag in getting yesterdays post out the door. Unfortunately from time to time I get busy… and I really don’t like pre-writing a post very much and setting an embargo date. I tend to keep my blog posts fresh and reactional in that I just blather on about whatever happens to be in my mind at the time. I can tell that this is not everyone’s cup of tea as my subscriber base has pretty much been stable and unchanging for some time now.

I Love my Grandma

The title of this sub-section will make absolutely no sense to anyone… but I am chuckling immensely. Dates back to High School Spanish 2… when I kid pestered me for a translation of what was written on the board. I told him it was “I love my grandma” and I don’t remember what it was honest at this point… only that I told him a completely laughable translation. Sure enough the little slacker got called on to provide the translation, and he proudly strode to the front of the class with all the cocky confidence you would expect of someone who was dead certain of the answer. He delivered his response and immediately riotous laughter spread throughout the room. I just shrugged and said “you should do your own translations from now on, my Spanish is a bit rusty”.

Though I really and truly do love my grandma… and this week was her 84th birthday. We had all intentions of going up on Wednesday night to see her, but for starters my wife got home extremely late from work that night. After calling up she was not feeling great after having oral surgery the day before, so we opted just to talk to her for a bit on the phone and come up Saturday to see her. The above card is me being bored while waiting on my wife and freehanding something with a bunch of sharpies. I thought it turned out fairly well and Grandma seemed to like it.

We went up yesterday and hung out with her for about an hour or so before my parents arrived, which lead us to spend another hour or so catching up with them. She is looking pretty good and my mother took the opportunity as always to take a large number of photos. We have finally weaned her off using a standalone point and shoot camera and just taking photos with her Galaxy S4. Cool thing about that is it let us grab her phone and text the best of them to ourselves. I have to say they are some of the best family style photos we have had in awhile. I would post them, but I am not sure if I am quite ready to post photos of myself online.

Gallivanting

After leaving my grandmothers, we set out on a cross country trip of some hardcore gallivanting. Essentially from my hometown we went over to Bartlesville first. Recently all of the stores surrounding us have had some massive clearance sales, which I think are essentially the “lets clear everything out so we can stock up for christmas” sales. So far we have found all sorts of things, namely school supplies and Legos. Since we really had no plans yesterday we decided to roam around the surrounding area checking various stores… namely all the different Wal-mart super centers.

It has admittedly been a really long time since I have spent much time in a Wal-mart store. Like I will pop in and get ONE thing at a time, that only they carry… but I have not really spent a ton of time “shopping” in one for some time. We saw several funny things along the trip yesterday that I just have to share. Firstly is the image at the beginning of this section. Apparently you can get a wedding set at Wal-mart for around 10 dollars. They are as fake as is humanly possible… but at first glance they totally pass as the real thing. I didn’t even know that was a market, that folks needed cheap fake rings… but apparently like always they are filling a perceived need.

Next up over right justified we have the adult women’s… super girl footie pajamas. Just not the type of thing I expected to exist at all… let along be proudly displayed for sale at the local Wal-mart. The funny thing is they come with a little velcro cape that attaches to the back. The best ones I didn’t see until later in the day at another store, were the batgirl pajamas. I tried to convince my wife to buy a pair. I could totally see her loving a pair of footie pajamas… but she thought they would simply be too damned hard to get out of when she needed to pee in the middle of the night. Probably best to air on the side of caution there.

Half a Tank of Gas

The above image is a screen cap of the route we took yesterday. Nowata to Bartlesville to Muskogee to Wagoner to Pryor to Claremore and finally back to Owasso. We ended up burning through half a tank of gas, and hit a ton of stops between. Did we find much of anything in the grand scheme of things? Not really… but it is mostly the thrill of the hunt. The entire event started in part because a few weeks back we had found all sorts of cool stuff at the clearance section of the Muskogee Wal-mart. I had opted not to pick a few things up, as had my wife and we had been kicking ourselves ever since. So from Bartlesville we decided to head over to Muskogee and see if they still had it.

I have to say we struck out 110%, because not only did they not have what we were wanting… they had zero signs of ever having this massive clearance section in the first place. I wandered around the store trying to find any place it could have gone… but I am guessing more than likely after two weeks they had shipped it all off to be written off by Wal-mart… which is essentially how Sooner Surplus gets all its stuff. While we were in town we ran by there as well, but there was nothing really new to look at, and since we didn’t need mens suit coats or scooters… their newest acquisitions… we went on our merry way. It was at this point we got the brainstorm to meander our way back to Owasso through all the towns along the way.

What was fueling my wife in this endevour is visions of school supplies dancing in her head. Friday night we had to run out to the Owasso Wal-mart for something… and back in the home and garden section they had all of their back to school leftovers piled up in a huge heap and discounted down to truly silly prices. As a result we ended up with 20 index card boxes for 10 cents each, 40 plastic rulers for 10 cents each, 6 packages of her favorite flair clone markers for a quarter a piece, 11 really nice 8 pocket file folders for a quarter a piece, misc notebooks for around a quarter, gluesticks 4 for a quarter, and a really nifty storage ottoman for the loft for 5 bucks. All told we walked away with a massive amount of stuff for less than 40 bucks.

Quality not Quantity

While I did not necessarily find a huge stockpile of stuff in our trip, I did find some definitely awesome items. Friday night at Target I did one of my routine trips through toys to look for clearance, and found they finally marked down the Fury starfighter from Star Wars the Old Republic. This is the one that comes with the Darth Malgus mini-figure and is the same star ship that Sith Inquisitors and Warriors pilot in the game. Of all of the Lego sets that have been on the market, this is hands down the one I have wanted the most. The problem is it debuted for like $120 and there was no way in hell I would ever purchase that. However target had it marked down to $60… so I snapped that puppy up.

While on our whirlwind trip of Wal-mart clearance, I did encounter one really nice thing in Wagoner. When the Hobbit movie sets were released, the on that I knew I immediately had to have was the Unexpected Meeting set that included a model of Bags End. I have always loved Hobbit architecture and the Baubleshire was hands down my favorite area of Everquest 2. So since a Hobbit hole existed… I had to have it. This set originally debuted at around $60, and Wal-mart had it marked down to $25 so it was a completely no brainer to pick it up for that.

So while I did not find a large volume of sets, I got two of the ones that I had been wanting the most, so I call our half tank of gas a complete success. My wife on the other hand picked up a handful of things, included several scarves that she had been hunting for at the Claremore Wal-mart. The thing we keep marveling at is just how grossly inefficient the pricing is. We would see the exact same product on clearance at three stores… and in each case it would be a completely different price. There were several cases where we might have picked an item up at another store… had it been priced the same way it was at a previous store. I remember seeing the same action figured priced for $7, $5, and $4 at three different stores in the clearance bin.

I am assuming this is because each store has a certain amount of autonomy in their pricing practices. However as a consumer, I find it all a frustrating mess. Granted I am likely exploiting the hell out of these practices by hitting multiple stores in the same day and sampling the best prices at each. I just find it humorous that I never see this level of chaos at say a Target, where everything is marked down in a neat and orderly fashion based on a specific patterned schedule. If you see something for sale at one store, you can go to any store in your area and are almost always going to find it the same price.

Wrapping Up

Even though we did not necessarily find a ton of items, we had a fun time wandering around the state looking for things. It was a nice drive, we just wish we had brought our cameras for it. Today on the other hand I hope we pretty much just chill out close to home. My allergies are still killing me, especially after being exposed to that much “outside” along the tip. I am just about to get up and take something, and hopefully that will make things better. I hope you all have had a great weekend and that you have a good start to the work week.

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.

I Love Loot

September 13, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy denizens of the interwebs. Getting a slightly slow start this morning, as I was trying to find my old pair of 10 eyelet Doc Martens. Not sure why, but lately I have been wanting to wear them. Positive is I found a pair of Docs, but negative is I did not in fact find the ones I was looking for. I guess that is what happens when you don’t wear them for a decade. Today is going to be oddly busy, with coffee in the morning with some local web developers… and a dinner at night for a friend of hours. Hopefully all the points in-between are relatively uneventful.

Web Games

This week a few significant web based games have been in the social discussion mill, namely folks remembering Glitch fondly and talking about the official launch of Card Hunter. Both of them are extremely fun little games… but I think in both cases they miss the boat a bit by being web based games in the first place. By day I am a web developer, and I maintain a large infrastructure of websites… so I am deeply committed to the “web” as a technology, but I simply do not feel like it is a great platform for the delivery of games, or at least it is not for me. I guess I should explain my position a bit more than that.

Essentially the only time I can play a web based game, is when I am sitting at one of my computers at home. I have web access almost 24/7, but I sadly do not have one of those jobs where I can fuck off all day long playing web games. So this pretty much leaves my time to play these games when I am sitting at home… and if I am at home I have access to hardware that will run “real” games. So in that case, there is almost never a time where I would prefer to play a browser based title than something more engaging and visceral.

Glitch was a really awesome game, and I actually logged a couple dozen hours playing it. I was one of the beta testers and forced myself to sit down at least once a week and spend a few hours engaged with it. The great tragedy of that game for me… is that it was not mobile based. If I had that game on my phone, I would still be playing it… and likely it would have had none of the funding issues that eventually lead it to close. Mobile is totally the ideal platform for this type of game, because I can access it in a way when I am in the break room, or standing around waiting for my wife to finish shopping… essentially I can play it when I am NOT near a real computer.

Card Hunter I fear will be a similar tragedy. It also is a really fun game, but when I have to choose between playing it and playing a “real” game, it is going to lose out every time because quite frankly the experience is not good enough to compete with FFXIV, Rift, Borderlands 2, Diablo 3 or whatever happens to be my current game of heavy rotation. It is a super cool concept, and I love the D&D red box era artwork and nifty feel of it all. However the fact that it is a completely flash based game, means it will always be relegated to the land of novelty, and not something folks will seriously latch onto… since for the most part just like Glitch it will be unplayable on mobile devices.

For the longest time I thought I was maybe the only one that felt this way, but the other night talking about Card Hunter among my friends… we all expressed a similar feeling of “rather play a real game” if we had access to our home computer. The niche for these games seems to be for people who can play them at their workplace to be honest. Since that is often considered bad behavior and is punished in most workplaces… I feel like that is maybe a bad niche to latch yourselves onto. The problem with anything web based is generally that as a society we see web content as “free”, so I feel like trying to extract a viable payment model from anything web based is going to be a long term challenge as well.

Quite honestly I wish Card Hunter the best of luck. I think it is a really compelling game, I just wish I had it on my phone or tablet rather than having to play it on a computer. I would love to be able to say that I will likely play it…but I know based on past track records it is the type of game I would play one night on a whim and then never play again. If I could boot this up while out in the world and waiting on someone… then hell yes I would likely be playing it. I just think this is going to be the long term issue with web based games that cannot easily be played on a mobile client. I hate to say it, but I think Flash is just dead as far as a viable game development technology, unless they can get broader mobile device support.

Shiny Seeker

Today is ending up as a day to talk about all the things I have wanted to talk about… but just have not quite made it to doing so. These all seem like partial themes left on the cutting room floor. Lately I have been blogging a lot about FFXIV, and how much I have been enjoying it. This is still very much the case and last night I had fun running Sunken Temple of Qarn as my Warrior and then later on switched to my Dragoon to dps Brayflox’s Longstop. The simple fact that is something I can do without switching characters… is pretty awesome by its own light. Today however I am not going to gush on the game… but instead talk about one of the problems I have with it.

One of the things that hooked me on Everquest and MMOs in the first place was unpredictable loot. As much as I might complain about random number generators… I have always loved that rare chance of getting something truly amazing from killing a monster. All thought my life, I have had a fascination with randomized systems. When I worked in a card and comic shop, I used to have an uncanny knack for being able to pull that rare foil card from a pack, or getting whatever happened to be the high priced rookie card. Randomized loot in MMOs is this same thing multiplied over and over, and I love it dearly.

The problem with Final Fantasy A Realm Reborn… is there really is no loot to speak of from killing monsters. Sure you can get crafting material drops, and these end up cluttering your bags… but you will never get a piece of useable gear, a rare pattern or an adorable pet from killing monsters. In fact the number of opportunities for you to get items from your adventures is extremely limited at all. Essentially you can get them as quest rewards, or from chests that spawn while doing leves and dungeons. The chests give me a little shot of randomized loot goodness… but it almost feels too few and far between.

I Love Loot

While I truly do love this game already, and I can see myself playing it for a long time. It will never fully replace games like Rift for me. Even now I am more than happy to log into rift and roam around killing random things… because with each mob I kill I have a chance of getting truly phenomenal. I have talked at length about my bloodlust when it comes to games… the desire to see what the next mob might drop feeds into this immensely. While I am still likely to kill random mobs, I find it to be happening far less frequently in Eorzea since I am neither sufficiently rewarded by experience or by loot for doing so. So it turns out that my bloodlust is a fairly complicated formula that does in fact take reward into account.

Honestly all they would really need to do to make me completely happy, is make it so that there is a random chance of one of the chests spawning after killing a mob. Even a 1 in 100 chance would be more than enough to make me happily roam the countryside slaughtering families of goblins and kobolds. Randomized loot is the thing that keeps me going out into the world and killing things for the off chance of getting something really cool that I can use on an alternate spec. So my ultimate fear is that there will be a time where the novelty of this loot-less system wears off and I simply don’t want to play any longer.

Confused Economy

Another huge concern of mine is the economy in general. The only way to get Gil, is from doing quests. Killing random mobs out in the world never rewards you any money. The best source of cash are Guildleaves. These are short quests that involve you going out into the world and completing some objective. These often reward random gear as well, but primarily they are a good source of money and an okay but somewhat lackluster source of experience. The problem is… you are limited to doing 6 of these per day. These allowances stack up until you hit 99, so if you are not playing for a few days you can still do them.

The challenge is these leve allowances are used by tradecraft, battlecraft and the guildhest system. After a certain point, these are essentially the only “quests” that you can do in the game after you have completed all of the normal quests. The only other repeatable source of money is from grinding FATEs, which are Rift like random events that occur in zones. The result of this is that the economy is extremely front loaded, in that you can gain lots of money from doing the initial quests… then after completing those… your prospects for gaining money tend to dry up significantly.

As a result, many players are finding themselves grinding up multiple characters only to view them as disposable vessels only for the purpose of taking money from them. I myself have contemplated this if I run into dire straights. Essentially every quest you do has a “cash” option, that allows you to take essentially trade coins that can be sold on the vendors. Since all of the quested gear is exactly the same as the crafted options… and you seem to be able to buy crafted items far cheaper than the money reward from a given quest… I find myself always driven to take the money payout option from each quest. Right now I am leveling faster than our crafters can keep up… but soon there will be the option of just having one of the guild crafters make my gear.

Essentially I am concerned with how the players will keep up with the expense of playing the game. This last patch they greatly reduced the repair costs… but there will be a certain amount of upkeep that is just required as a player. Last nights Sunken Temple of Qarn run I considered extremely successful… but I still took 5 deaths thanks to some rather bullshit mechanics… namely an ability that seems to have no cast timer and will one shot a player if not stunned constantly. Essentially I just feel that this loot less and cash less combat system… is inventive but deeply naïve… and so much of me hopes they will patch the game and make it work like every other MMO on the planet.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap up because I have a coffee date with a group of community web developers. I am not really looking forward to it, nor am I looking forward to the evening dinner date with friends. All I really want to do is go home and hang out on the couch, and maybe order a salad from Rib Crib. We have eaten fairly poorly all week, so this weekend it is going to be our attempt to do better. I am still down roughly 60 lbs since my start so I am doing okay… but we have to be constantly vigilant. I hope all of you have a great weekend ahead of you.

One Room Dungeon

September 12, 2013September 12, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people of the digital domain. Last night at least in one way did not go at all like I had expected. My wife and I originally planned on travelling to my hometown last night to go visit my Grandmother on her birthday. However my wife got held up at work, and didn’t end up making it home until six thirty or so. I called my mother at some point to find out “how late is too late”, only to find that she simply was not feeling well today and had been sleeping a lot. Tuesday she had oral surgery so I think she was simply recovering from that. As a result I made a long call to her, that way she could continue resting rather than entertain guests. I figure we will make a trip up to see her over the weekend.

The Event

September 11th has a weird significance to me. Sure I remember watching as the World Trade Center events unfolded, but I am not talking about that at all. Nor am I necessarily talking about my Grandmothers Birthday… which unfortunately the World Trade Center bombings have made the easiest date for me to remember ever. For me… 9/11/2012 was the single worst day I have ever had to experience in my career. I found out yesterday that a coworker never really understood why we called it our “9/11 event”… we were not being metaphorical… that is simply the literal date it happened.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the day that we completely burned down our web infrastructure, and had to begin rebuilding it all from scratch. Essentially one of our security personnel mistook a routine network intrusion scan, from a company that we pay to do exactly that… as an actual breech of our network. 9/11/2012 is the day the decision was made, by forces other than our department to shut everything down… take all the sites offline… and ship the machines off for federal investigative forensics. It was the single worst overreaction I have seen in my history as an IT professional.

The result of all of this meant the beginning of a very dark period of that involved lots of 60-70 hour weeks trying to rebuild our infrastructure from the ground up. Additionally it was the beginning of one of the biggest lapses in content my blog has experienced. Much like the real 9/11 has completely changed the culture of the United States… this event completely changed the culture of our company. From that point on… even though we realized within a few days that we essentially cried wolf and that nothing at all had happened that was not included in a network intrusion service that we pay for… all things going forward carried an undertone of extreme security.

We have survived and I feel like the department as a whole is better off, but it was an extremely bad period to be me. It did allow us to “reboot” several things in the way our processes work, and shed old code that had been sitting around since the early 90s. The irony is… that a year after the fact we are still not completely done rebuilding everything we demolished that day. We have rebuilt all of the important infrastructure, and added numerous new things to the mix… but there are still a handful of minor legacy systems that we have not addressed. You can only do so much with a staff of three people to completely rebuild two decades worth of infrastructure.

One Room Dungeon

Last night was another guild night Wednesday over in Rift. Originally I thought I was going to be considerably late due to the whole visiting my grandmother thing. Instead I got home at a decent hour after taking my wife out for dinner and running a few errands. When I logged in, we had a large assemblage of players available so I started asking for volunteers for a little mission. Archive of Flesh is a level 57-60 dungeon, that supposedly has a chance to drop a doodad that is required to upgrade the depleted chest piece to its third state, and level 57 spec specific chest piece. What I gathered up for volunteers was Caithris 57 Tactician support, Delariond 60 Mage dps, myself playing a 57 rogue, Lukian a 60 cleric tank, and Psynister a 56 cleric healer.

What we experienced with that group composition was almost raid like difficulty. However over the course of multiple wipes… we managed to struggle through, learn the encounters and completed the dungeon. The odd thing about Archive of flesh is that in essence it is a one room dungeon. Everything of any significance occurs in the room pictured above… or the upper pathways over the room. The room changes slightly over the course of the encounters as new bosses are revealed, each one slightly changing the rooms dynamic. But I just found it interesting that you could make a completely compelling dungeon.. without involving any crawling at all.

To some extent the Trial of the Crusader raid in WoW did exactly this. However that really never felt like a compelling experience. It felt more like a slipshod raid that allowed the designers to roll something out quickly, rather than spending much time on creating a new zone. This on the other hand felt like a completely story driven experience so that you almost forget that you have not left the entrance to the dungeon. Weird thing is… Golem Foundry… that we ran directly after this dungeon… had almost the same kind of thing going on. Single room with various shafts and hatches that reveal new encounters. Both of them felt really good, and I really enjoyed the essentially “trash less” dungeon experience, without making it feel overly cheap like the Crusader encounters.

It was a fairly good run, as most of us walked away with extremely significant upgrades. Unfortunately the upgrade doodad did not drop, so none of us were walking away with a really nice upgraded chest piece out of the ordeal. Rae (Caithris) and I both walked away with half a levels experience towards 58. I hope I can catch my rogue up and push it to 60 within the coming weeks. This is largely selfish I realize, but since my warrior is already raid ready… I would really like to start running my rogue that actually needs some loving with the various guild dungeon runs. Additionally I really like playing rogue for support than I did playing Warrior. Bard and Tactician just feel better overall than the somewhat confused Beastmaster role.

Overall though it was a really great night. We got in… ran a couple of dungeons and had a blast doing it. I hope we can continue to do this as a regular thing. The only frustration is we had a large number of folks that showed up after we had already pulled together a group. As a result we were two short of making a second group. So here is hoping that we can get a few more higher level folks up there and start running two groups on Wednesday nights. I know we have the folks in our numbers, it is just a matter of getting people online during the time period. In hindsight we should have broken apart our group between the two dungeons and tried to get some of the folks waiting in the wings in the process. But quite honestly at the time none of us really thought about that.

Wrapping Up

This feels like a really odd post… breaking a lot of the normal formatting that I do with my blog. Hopefully it is still overall readable. I figure tonight will be a return to FFXIV after the server maintenance. I am really hoping that Cactuar will be unlocked and some of the folks who have been waiting to roll there can start their characters. My goal for tonight is to run Cutter’s Cry and maybe another Sunken Temple of Qarn. I really want to see what is in the “treasure room” that we completely missed. I hope you all have a great Thursday and that it serves as the gateway to a really awesome weekend.