Tales of the Aggronaut

Too Much Chaos

August 28, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. No its okay… I promise I won’t be grumpy, ranty Bel today. Quite honestly my initial rage over the horrible infrastructure of Final Fantasy XIV is over for the most part. I said many things in my anger yesterday, that I wish I could take back… namely had a few choice fights with friends. Today’s post is my attempt at an apology. Hopefully I will be able to mend whatever fences that berserker Belghast tore down in the process.

Dealing Poorly

Yesterday at the time I wrote my post, and subsequent posts I made on the Stalwart guild forums… I was a very pissed off Bel, filled with lots and lots of righteous indignation. I had to vent out that anger in the only way I felt was safe to do it… with my words. The problem is that has long lasting negative repercussions as well. My words tend to have a lasting effect long after the anger that caused them has subsided. So this morning while I am pretty chill about the whole situation… the reverberations of my anger are still bouncing around.

As a young adult I had issues with anger, namely because I didn’t feel like I really could express it. I felt like I had so many expectations on the way I should act and behave, so as a result I would keep packing down the frustration and rage somewhere beneath the surface. I guess I had hoped that it would just fade away. The problem is it never really did and there was a buffer of only so much crap I could take before it would all come spilling out in a torrent towards whoever was the last person who pissed me off. The “last straw” never ended up being someone worthy of my rage… just the last unfortunate soul who ended up adding something to the stack.

Then all these frustrations would come spilling out in a pyroclastic blast targeting whoever happened to be in the way. I remember there was an incident I am not proud of at all… where a friend had been picking on me about something… working a sore nerve over and over. The kid was not a bad kid, nor did he really mean what he was saying… but it finally reached a point where it had built up over the course of a few days and I just snapped. I ended up picking him up and next thing I knew I had thrown him down a flight of stairs. Thank god he was okay… but it was at that point I realized that I could actually hurt someone with my anger.

Too Much Chaos

Basically at that point I realized that I could no longer afford to keep packing the powder keg and holding in every little bit of anger… because when it finally exploded I really had no control over the direction the explosion would occur. For the most part the idea of venting more often has worked for me… but at times there are just things that I can’t vent about. So lately I have been packing the powder keg once more… and the accumulation of little frustrations and anger here and there that I just could not react to have been building. While I don’t really think of myself as an extremely ordered person… I feel like I can only really handle so much uncertainty and chaos in my life. I am good at dealing with small variations in my daily life… but for the most part I need the majority of my routine to remain unaltered.

The last month has been a combination of so many chaotic situations clashing at one time. Firstly my work environment has been insane… until Monday morning we had 61 active projects divided up among 3 employees… myself included. The bulk of these projects involve me juggling my time in a way so that I get just enough done… to keep from pissing any one business unit off. Every single one of these projects is some business units “number one priority”… so quite honestly I take a lot of the chaos on myself to protect my team mates from it. My thought has always been that if I could keep them focused on individual tasks… and me working on the random occurrences we could get more done than if all of us were being interrupted constantly.

Added to this… my home life has been a mess lately as well. My wife is a school teacher, so the last month and a half has been entirely about the preparation for going back to school. This involves accumulating materials, with our weight loss finding clothing, and finally all of the responsibilities of day to day living shifting back onto me. She literally ends up working 80 hours per week once you factor in all the after hours work… so as a result during the school year I pick up the slack with household chores. But each year there is a massive adjustment period as I try and deal with her being in a state of chaos as she gets used to going back to dealing with school work 24/7.

On top of this our weekends have been pure chaos lately as our neighbor… decided within two weeks to get married. So my wife was pulled in a completely different direction just as the height of the back to school crap was starting, in trying to help out with the planning of that as well. Additionally I got put in a position where I had to photograph my very first wedding. All of which were things I just could not say no to. Now that the wedding is over… the neighbors daughter has had to have emergency surgery… so the chaos continues on in helping deal with that. I say neighbor but they are basically our family… when I had the massive bleed out incident a few years back… she was the one that cleaned up the mess while I was in the emergency room. Likewise any time anyone has ever gotten hurt… we have been the ones that got called and rushed to the hospital.

Finally… we have the Final Fantasy XIV launch. With all the rest of this chaos in my life… I just could not take the one sanctuary I had left… my gaming world to be thrown into a disarray as well. So yesterday I blew up in a whole bunch of directions when I finally reached my peak of crap I could deal with at one time. Quite honestly I think I made myself sick in the process… and after I had exploded out my rage… I just felt woozy and sick to my stomach. I had essentially done what I have tried not to do… I packed the powder keg and let it explode on its own. All of the things I could not react to… because I had to be a “good guy” and take it in stride… just came pouring out and the failed game launch became my target.

After the Storm

So as I said… this is my way of apologizing to the people I offended yesterday… and the ones that got in the path of my rage. Since I spent the last two days complaining about the Final Fantasy XIV launch… I felt like there was a point that maybe I had not given enough time to. The game itself is extremely good, when you can get into it and actually play. Last night after much frustration, a group of players managed to make their way through the login lottery and we pulled together a dungeon group. At a point in the main story arc, you are lead through the three level 15ish dungeons available to players: Satasha, Tam-Tara Undercroft, and Copperbell. This is going to be a point of content for some players… because the main storyline quest halts until you have run all three.

I had not been able to do any of the quests, and there were various other members of our party that were missing one or two of the later dungeons. So as a result last night we just ran the entire quest chain back to back. I have to say… I am surprised at just how well our group managed. The marauder is a seemingly extremely capable tank. Essentially I used a combination of overpower and the cross class gladiator flash skill to hold AOE aggro on multiple targets. There were many cases where when pulls were timed correctly we could get single mobs, instead of chaining large groups. The dungeon style was somewhere between Burning Crusade “Crowd Control Everything” and Wrath of the Lich king “AOE Roflstomp”. Essentially they felt just about perfect.

Basically in each of the dungeons there was a golden path you could take.. that would get you from point A to point B the fastest… or there was a more indirect route that would lead you past a large number of treasure chests along the way. We chose to take the more winding path and while most of the chests gave us potions or crafting materials… we did manage to get a few pieces of pink gear in the process. The dungeon design as a whole felt extremely solid, and I look forward to seeing the later ones as the difficulty ramps up. I hope soon to run the same three dungeons, but this time as gladiator to get a feel for which tanky class I like better.

Really Damned Good

Basically the problem with FFXIV is that it really is amazingly good. The game lands somewhere for me between World of Warcraft and Rift… in that you have a WoW like world… that happens to be filled with lots of random events and various event style quests that you can do. Additionally everything scales downwards… and as a result you can continue to do all of these events as it will sync your level. When we stepped into the dungeon last night… it synced us all down to level 15 without any player intervention. The only negative about their system however is the fact that you actually lose abilities… rather than just scale them downwards. Everquest 2 used to do this same thing… and it was extremely frustrating losing an ability that you had come to rely on.

It is that the gameplay is really great that makes the poor infrastructure at launch all that more of a tragedy. I have teetered back and forth on the edge of whether or not I would be playing this long term for some time. Ultimately I want to find a way to mix in playing this and playing Rift at the same time. Tonight for certain I will be back in Rift, as there are lots of things I want to do there… and the worst part about playing FFXIV has been the absence of all my guildies from Rift. I think tonight I either want to kill many rifts, or try and do a dungeon. I have not tanked in Rift in ages… and I want to dust my spurs off and get back in the action there.

Anyways where I was going with this… was that I hope my rants over the last few days do not permanently sour people against Final Fantasy XIV. It is a really solid game if you can get past the infrastructure and just play it. My only suggestion would be to wait until the server problems have worked themselves out in the next few weeks before taking the plunge yourself. Since dungeons automatically scale, you will likely always be able to find support for the early dungeon running. The world is amazingly populated despite all the issues logging in. I think more than anything, they have had a far bigger response than anyone ever could have imagined from a re-launch of an originally failed game.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to get out the door and on the road. Lots of crap to do today… and lots of issues that need to be dealt with. I plan on playing Rift tonight, because quite frankly I miss it. Now that the madness and the anger over not being able to play FFXIV has subsided, much of the “omg I have to log in” has as well. I feel like I need a chill night of just piddling around in Telara. I hope you all have a great day, and that this midpoint in the week goes smoothly.

Login Lottery

August 27, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. I am up roughly 30 minutes early today, so here is hoping I can still ramble out something vaguely intelligible. I am going to warn you… today’s post is going to be pretty ranty. If you are susceptible to that sort of thing you might simply skip it. Additionally if you are one of the legion of Final Fantasy apologists that seems to have sprung up on the forums… you might also want to skip the post.

Login Lottery

The above animated gif pretty much displays the last three days of trying to play Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn. I have gone through this process hundreds upon hundreds of times attempting to play the game since Saturday evening. Originally I accepted this as being a weekend problem that they could not fix while the united states data centers were in “weekend” mode. However we have now had a full work day in the US and as of last night the problem is still present. Ultimately what I take the most offense to is the fact that I have no real hope of logging in unless I waste my entire evening following the above sequence of events for hours… hoping to finally win the login lottery.

I find it completely inexcusable that a game like this does not have an actual queue system. To the best of our knowledge the upper bound of the queue is roughly 500 players. Sunday evening we saw a few queues in the 400s so we are guessing that 500 is the nice round number it is set to. You would think that you could simply just spam away at trying to login until you saw a queue… and you would be wrong. At three points last night I got into the queue… and all three times I was in it only for a few minutes before being returned to the dreaded 1017 error. While we have not reached the category of “worst launch ever”, I have to say they are taking the cake for the most incompetent infrastructure already.

The Root Cause

This the sanctuary hub in the middle of the Central Shard near Gridania. This is the sight you see at almost EVERY single city or hub in the game… players afking en masse. Since the ability to log in at any given time is uncertain, players have taken to NEVER logging out as a way to combat this. Since the logins are strictly locked to a specific number of players on the server at any given time… we end up competing for a smaller and smaller number of slots on a nightly basis. Apparently it is standard eastern mmo practices to NEVER idle kick a player from the server. As a result US/EU players are abusing the hell out of this and simply leaving their game running 24/7.

Essentially the crisis we are playing under is the epic conclusion of a bunch of really poor game decisions. If they implemented a 15 minute idle kick that alone would likely clear up almost all of the issues. Combine that with a real queue that you could functionally wait in knowing that eventually you would get into the game… and it would lower a lot of the aggression of players. Right now based on the temperature on the forums and social media in general… we are reaching a point where we the players want blood.

The Apology

Yesterday Naoki Yoshida issued an official apology… and quite honestly it is falling on deaf ears.

On behalf of the FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Development Team, I would like to extend my deepest apologies to those Early Access participants who have had difficulty using the NA/EU data centers.

In response to a variety of issues, we have conducted emergency maintenance several times over the past few days. The first instance, which was conducted six hours following the beginning of early access, was for the purpose of addressing the errors 90000 and 3000, which were first discovered during phase 4 of the beta test.
Our server team then began taking measures to improve the performance of the lobby and duty finder servers. The subsequent emergency maintenance was necessary to implement their changes.

This maintenance proceeded as planned, and afterwards we verified that the stability of instanced battles and the duty finder was much improved. However, we then discovered that certain lobby servers had been improperly configured, and we were forced to conduct another brief maintenance to resolve this issue.

Although we have successfully addressed a number of serious issues in the past several days, we have nevertheless decided to implement login restrictions for the time being due to the extremely heavy load being placed upon the servers. In this way, we can ensure that the maximum number of players can play the game without risking a server crash. I know no one wants to wait to log in, but I hope you all understand why we believe this precaution is necessary.

Once again, I would like to sincerely apologize to all our players who have been unable to enjoy Early Access due to the tremendous congestion, the ensuing issues, and the frequent maintenance.

Everyone on the development and operations teams is dedicated to providing the best possible experience for our customers, and we will continue to do our utmost to resolve the remaining and any future issues.

FINAL FANTASY XIV Producer/Director, Naoki Yoshida

Essentially this apology while reasonably sounding… says absolutely nothing. There is no course of action that they are taking to improve the problems. Instead they say they are continuing to throttle the server logins… without showing any signs of doing anything to fix the root problems within their game. What makes this all the more heinous is this is the second life for this game… a second chance to make it success… and so far they are squandering it with some pretty horrible support practices.

Right now I expect some sort of compensation for the head start that wasn’t. We preordered with the expectation of being able to get in and play and that simply has not been the case for a hell of a lot of players. This is just not an acceptable practice and I expect that the preorders should receive some sort of compensation for the lost head start time. Essentially if you cannot log in during non-peak times… you cannot play period. Ultimately my choice is either to join the problem and never log out… or to give up on being able to play at all. Last night I finally gave up because at that point I had wasted two and a half hours clicking the 0 key over and over trying to log in.

Wrapping Up

Here is hoping that they pull their heads out of their collective asses and get some competent infrastructure staff on board that can fix their issues. I wish to god the game were not enjoyable, otherwise I could simply write it off… however when you ARE able to get in it is rather fun. Ultimately it was the multi-classing that sealed the deal for me… and I am quickly falling behind my friends that can log in and off peak hours and play. I just hope they fix something… because right now the current state of the game is ridiculous.

Bad Launches

August 26, 2013August 26, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… it is the beginning of another work week and I still feel sore as hell from the weekends adventures. The odd thing is my thighs are killing me… and I am guessing it was from all the random times I had to squat down to take a shot throughout the wedding festivities. I still need to sift through the photos and cull it down to a final set of “wedding pictures”. As I just reached up to scratch my forehead… it appears that the sunburn is starting to peel… so I have that itchy mess to look forward to over the next few days.

Pre-launch Problems

The above animated image pretty much sums up my experience with the weekend pre-launch of Final Fantasy XIV a Realm Reborn. Essentially I got to play a bit before the wedding madness started on Saturday morning, and then at almost every point afterwards I received some form of an error trying to log in. Essentially I think all of the issues encountered can more or less be chocked up to the poor infrastructure we have seen at various points during the other tests. Almost everything about this weekend could have been reconciled if they had the forethought to include an actual login queue system.

Sure there is a sort of queue that exists, but the highest number in queue my friends and I have seen is somewhere in the 400s… which leads me to believe that the queue is limited to something ridiculous like 500 members. This leads to the very fun process of spamming a character login only to get the ubiquitous 1017 error stating the world is full. That is hands down the most frustrating part about the whole experience. It seems like complete blind luck as to whether or not you are going to make it in.

Bad Timing

Ultimately another large portion of the failure that was the FFXIV head start, was the fact that they were holding it entirely over a weekend in North America. Normally pre-launches begin on a Thursday night and continue on through Friday… at which time they can begin to see what the scaling issues are going to be like and adjust accordingly. Holding it on a weekend essentially means that all infrastructure resources in North America are closed for the weekend. I feel as though if they could have thrown a few more servers at this issue a lot of the problems would have been resolved.

Instead the game team and infrastructure resources are operating on a significant time lag. An example is that Sunday evening… at what would be 8:30 am Japanese time… they managed to stabilize the JP servers. As a result I was finally able to roll a character on the Japanese network of servers and at least spent a little time before going to bed playing around on Ultima. My friends think that this morning we will see the EU/NA servers stabilize similarly. I still question whether or not they actually care about customer service, but that is part of a much larger issue.

Bad Launches

So far this is probably the worst game head start I have experienced. Normally when a game launches, we get a few blissful days of stability during the head start as only the pre-orders get to play… and then can chill out for the first day as the servers burn around us knowing you already have characters that are pretty far into the game. Quite honestly this is the first time that I can remember ever experiencing large periods of not being able to play the game at all… during a head start weekend. Lots of head start experiences have been riddled with lag or other issues… but the game was at least partially playable. During the entirety of the weekend I got roughly 2 hours of gameplay.

One of the things I found interesting however is that while talking to friends over text and mumble… I did not realize just how subjective a launch experience was. For me I herald the launch of Rift as quite possibly one of the smoothest I had experienced. However talking to one of my friends… he remembers tons of issues during that launch. This lead me to crawl back through my forum posts and blog posts from the time… and I literally found no mention of any issues brought on by the launch. Did I just not notice the issues because I was enjoying myself… or did I really not experience the problems that he had made note of.

So this makes me wonder… how many of the bad launches I have experienced are purely subjective? For example, I considered Guild Wars 2 an extremely solid launch since it was playable for me the entire time… albeit I spent most of that time on the overflow shards. However the simple fact that we could not really play on our “real” shards made it an extremely frustrating experience for certain other players. Do they consider that launch a failure… whereas I consider it a pretty solid success? Additionally I struggled with massive amounts of lag during the SWTOR launch, but my friends consider that to be one of the more successful launches to date. It felt like a rocky start to me, and as such I got extremely frustrated by it.

King of Bad Launches

So far the two worst launch experiences I have played under are both from the same company. World of Warcraft has gone down in history as the rockiest start. I can remember the game being more or less unstable for a solid month. I remember almost always being able to connect to play the game… but functionally the server side lag made it next to unplayable. There were times I could level without issue… so long as I never attempted to loot anything I did not already have in my inventory. Likewise the launch of Diablo 3 was essentially an unplayable mess for the first few weeks and constant error codes. I had far less forgiveness in me around that launch, because after the rocky wow start… they should have had better preparations in place for another blockbuster success.

The thing is… at the launch of WoW more or less the gamers dealt with not being able to play the game… because it was in so many ways leaps and bounds ahead of what else was currently on the market. It was “worth” waiting for. I feel like companies simply do not have the luxury of time to fix their problems. I posted a complaint about the Final Fantasy launch over on G+ and immediately people brought up the failure that was Diablo 3. Gamers tend to hold a grudge against the games that floundered and while some of them will develop a short memory and return to your game happily once the issues are resolved, there is a certain percentage that will never again trust your company.

With these catastrophic infrastructure failures… I feel as thought Final Fantasy XIV has roughly a weeks time to fix everything and get the servers in a relatively permanent state. The roughest part is the fact that this is occurring during the pre-launch and we are not even seeing the final launch day crowds. Right now every one of these frustrated players has the opportunity to log into amazon, or green man gaming and cancel their preorder. I know of a handful of players who have done just this. The rough reality is that other than the Final Fantasy diehards, the title is just not good enough overall to make the masses wait to play it. There are way too many other games on the market, and many of them without the subscription fee.

Wrapping Up

Here is hoping that the next few days see massive improvements in the stability of Final Fantasy XIV. Right now I am extremely disappointed and this probably goes down as the worst pre-launch I have experienced. The next few days will determine if it can compete with Blizzard for the worst launch category. Hopefully they can throw enough hardware at the problem to fix it quickly. I hope you all have a great week, and that you were able to get in more playtime than I have to date.

Wedding Daze

August 25, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks… I return once more to my morning posts and am doing so in an extremely groggy fashion. Before I went to bed last night I took some Motrin PM… and while the box says you should be prepared to sleep 6 to 8 hours… it seems as though my body wanted more like 10 to 12 hours. As a result my thoughts are not entirely cogent, and I am spending a good deal of time just staring off in random directions searching for some purpose. I just finished probably the worst sausage roll I have ever had, and now it is time to make words happen.

Wedding Daze

Yesterday one of our oldest and dearest friends got married… and since for the most part they were trying to do the wedding on the cheap and quickly… I got tagged to take the wedding photos. If you read any of the posts leading up to yesterday, you could tell I was extremely nervous about the prospect of being responsible for recording a once in a lifetime type event for a good friend. I would have simply hired one of my friends to do it… but I wanted to make sure that the family had full access to all of the photos without having to worry about re-ordering through someone else. Ultimately I will write up a letter saying it is okay to reprint the photos and then they can take them literally anywhere to get larger photos made.

At this point… my everything hurts… literally. Yesterday was a lovely day more or less, but an extremely hot and humid one. The wedding was slotted to be outdoors and in an area without much shade. Our friends decided to get married at her parents house… and they set up a nice makeshift altar… and were planning on having people seated on straw bales. Again I have a massive problem with the concept of straw poking me in the ass when I am attending a wedding, but I understand the idea since straw is relatively cheap. To make it a little bit more palatable they covered the bales with various vintage bed sheets. As the photographer however I was literally on my feet from roughly 10 am until 1:30 pm or so when we took the final photos.

Respect Thy Father

After yesterday, I have a brand new respect for my father. Essentially all of my life I have been attending weddings as my father shot a fair number of them each year as I grew up. When I got into high school, I would attend them as his assistant, manning a camera from the balcony or some other stationary position getting long ranged shots of the key members of the ceremony. So I grew up having the big moments of the ceremony ingrained in my head. The only problem is… I am not my father… I just don’t enjoy taking pictures of people, nor do I really know the first thing about how to light them properly.

However even more than that… I simply do not have the juggling skills he always did. The photos you take before and during the wedding are the easy part. Sure I had to spend a lot of time running around to get the right angle at the right time and kneeling a lot to get the right shot… but this was all like riding an amusement park ride since the flow of the ceremony dictated a certain time frame. Getting people to cooperate after the wedding was finished… that was the pure hell. Everyone wants to derail the proceedings… and as a photographer all you care about is trying to get everyone to stand together in the right number of groups for the correct pictures.

While they don’t seem to care about getting the right shots… they most certainly care about them when you are done with the pictures and months later they realize they were left out of the pictures. The key problem yesterday was the extreme heat and total lack of shade where the altar had been set up. Everyone wanted to sneak away and get out of the wedding clothes. It was 94* with pretty high humidity and next to no cloud cover to speak of… as a result everyone was having to combat the heat while wearing stuffy clothes. Ultimately after making it through the family shots, and the brides family it was decided we all needed to take a break and since most of the grooms family was already eating… we would ultimately have to wait until after they finished.

Dehydration

In part the “waiting for them to finish” was a call I made because quite frankly I myself was in pretty bad shape. I opted to wear a black shirt… since the inevitable sweat would not show on it… but in the heat that just made everything worse. I allowed myself to get rather dehydrated over the course of the day, and at one point while taking pictures I kept bordering on blacking out from what I can only assume were the beginning stages of heat stroke. My vision would go completely blank for a moment then recover… to say blacking out would be a misnomer I guess… since my field of view went completely white as thought I had just seem a huge explosion. There was a wheel barrow full of water, and I downed three of them to try and catch up on my water consumption… but quite frankly it scared me more than a little bit.

Like I said above… I have a new found respect for my father because he always made this look so easy. He would expertly juggle the distractions of the family members and burn through the photos in what felt like record time each time. All the while doing this wearing a suit, even when the photos were taken outdoors in the heat. I guess a huge difference is that my dad always had my mom there as the manipulator in chief… lining up the shots and making sure the right people were standing by waiting. My wife was taking her own photos, but since neither of us are really good at dealing with human beings… we lacked that role of someone greasing the wheels and making sure everything was rolling along smoothly.

Ultimately I have a lot of respect towards both my parents and their ability to make the process of photographing a wedding appear effortless. Ultimately we got the job done… and got all of the shots I thought we needed to make the family ultimately happy when they go through them later. Now begins the hard process of culling down 1038 shots I took yesterday into a narrative that tells the tale of the wedding. Encountering some technical difficulties this morning, as I realize that a Google album has a maximum of 1000 photos. Essentially my normal process involves uploading everything to Google and then deleting out the photos I don’t view as “keepers” until I have a nice visual story to work with.

Wrapping Up

The order of business for today is to recover… and right now I am planning on planting my ass on this comfy couch for most of it. I will be spending my time in a mixture of Rift and FFXIV and trying to do as little as humanly possible that actually “matters”. I walked away yesterday with a pretty decent sunburn and I am hoping as the day goes on the pain fades. Right now it is manageable and I can ignore it more or less. Hoping you all have a great rest of the weekend… and you too can do as little as humanly possible that actually matters.