cactuar Archives - Page 14 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Blaugust is About Blogging

Earlier I had most of a blog post finished when my system took a dive on me. Nothing appears to be recoverable so you are going to get my rapid fire version. It seems that too many people are getting hung up on the notion of daily blogging. Yes I am having a contest and giving away prizes, and yes this entire thing started as me challenging people to take the daily blogging routine I do. That said more importantly, Blaugust is about Blogging and doing so regularly. If you normally post once a week and you begin posting three times a week thanks to this initiative, then I consider it more than successful.

If you don’t feel you can do the daily blogging thing, then alter it to fit your needs. There are a few people who have ramped up their posting in the spirit of Blaugust, and that is awesome. I feel like posting on a schedule is a valuable thing, and if you can’t make seven days a week… try five and if that is even too much then try three. The hope is that you will develop a routine that becomes far harder to break than individual one off postings. I went through huge lapses in my blog before I adopted the daily stance, and I pretty much started this without much ramp up. It was a struggle at first but over time it became significantly easier and now I can crank out a post about almost anything. Find what works for you, and stick with it.

I plan on editing back in a list of the day four blogs.

Hitbox Sorta Fixed

I guess this means that unlike twitch that can export up to two hours of video to youtube, hitbox is going to limit the users to only 30 minutes at a time? For me at least this makes the feature meaningless, and since I still cannot download the videos I have already recorded it means my various series on youtube have glaring holes as I number things sequentially. The only positive is that you can apparently embed video directly in your posts now, so here is hoping that actually works. I am wondering if trying to embed it in live writer is what ultimately crashed my system earlier, so I am going to not test the waters until I have finished today’s blog post. In any case I still like hitbox for the fact that there is no stream delay, and it makes having a conversation much easier. The problem is with the fact that I now have to record the video locally and manually upload to youtube, it has severely soured my streaming of late.

Lalafellication

Last night I took the plunge and did something I had been considering for a few weeks. As part of the preorder process I had a vial of Fantasia sitting in my inventory. This allows you to re-edit your appearance, and in practice change your race and even gender in the process. While I liked the look of Belghast the Highlander, I had long wished I had embraced the adorable and went Lalafell. I think I only made it as far as I did in Wildstar because I thought the Chua I was playing was adorable. So last night I took the plunge and you can now see the end results. So far I have no regrets.

I ran a few instances last night and everything about combat is now cute. It did take some getting used to the difference in perspective, and it may have caused me to step in some bad stuff that I thought I was well clear of. All things considered I really like the decision I made because now I can take adorable pictures everywhere I go, and participate in the ever popular “if I fits, I sits” meme. Everything I do seems cute and harmless, even when I do a dragoon jump into things. I am a fan and I am sure it will make my adventures far more memorable.

Completely Broke But Happy

The other big thing that happened last night is that all of us pooled our money together and bought a small house in The Mists, the housing zone for Limsa Lominsa. Basically it was a zone of compromise in that a few of us preferred Gridania and others preferred Uldah, but everyone was pretty amiable too the notion of the Limsa housing. The other huge benefit is that we found absolute prime real estate in the third housing ward. We are guessing that the house must have been repossessed because it is smack dab in the middle of the zone with a Market Board and Summoning Bell steps outside of our front lawn. We don’t have a lot in the house but we did manage to pick up a Chocobo Stable, Aetherite Shard and a Mailbox allowing us to cheaply port from anywhere in the world to our house. Now I will have to begin the grind to try and get the 300k gil needed to buy my personal room.

This whole experience highlights what I have been saying about the server community on Cactuar. Within moments of purchasing the house and getting the basics configured we were swarmed by our neighbors welcoming us to the neighborhood. It seems they were super happy to see the house occupied and we now have a few friends in the houses surrounding us. The guild that was visiting in the picture lived in a huge house above us, and apparently since this house went dormant they were no longer able to jump down through our plot, because they were blocked by the building bounding box. They were extremely appreciate of once again having a fast route to the market boards. Later in the night we had some other neighbors welcome us, and it is this sort of interaction that I am valuing the most about the server. This is the first time in a long time I have felt like I was part of a larger community. Final Fantasy truly is a special game, and I hope especially as more people return to it we can set down some permanent roots here.

#FinalFantasyXIV #HitBox #Blaugust

Back to Normal

This morning signals the return to my normal routine. Over the course of the math camp I have allowed myself to veer significantly from the path I normally take. This means a lot of things, including being far more sluggish about making my blog posts within a scheduled timeframe. Additionally my diet and walking regiment fell completely apart in the face of eating out so many times. That said it is time to buckle down and return the tray tables in their upright position and prepare for landing. It feels so weird to be going back to work today, and I am dreading being deluged by a weeks worth of stuff that set unsorted out.

I have only slightly followed my email while I was out, and dealt with a few fires… and postponed a few others for this week. I know I have an extremely full plate waiting on me, and hopefully my coworkers will be forgiving as it is going to take me a little bit to get back into the swing of things. Unfortunately based on everything I read in my inbox, I really need to hit the ground running today and knock out several things. I know of at least one project that needs to be out the door and ready to go by August 1st, and another that needs to follow closely on its heels. Then there is our project list, and juggling in a new person into the group. So it is going to be a stressful rest of the week to say the least.

Hitbox Frustrations

This morning I logged into Hitbox.tv and completed a ritual I have done for the last several days… so many times I have quite literally lost count. I logged into my account, went into my pre-recorded video and attempted to push the videos to youtube. Like always it gave me the popup message signifying that my videos should show up on youtube shortly. As has been the case each and every morning, I am quite certain they will not actually show up there. Right now I have half a dozen videos that I have recorded playing various games that are in essentially limbo. While there are lots of awesome things about the service… right now you cannot download videos you have recorded, upload them to youtube or even embed them directly from the hitbox service. Which basically means the videos are not accessible anywhere other than through the hitbox interface.

There are so many things I like about hitbox, but presently it is relentlessly buggy. The streaming portion they have down pat, and I would say it is one of the best experiences since you can actually chat somewhat realtime with people watching your stream. It is all of the little things that I have come to take for granted with Twitch that simply do not work at all. Previously there was a really awesome twitter integration so you could have an automated message go out to your twitter feed when you were actually live and ready to go. In the last few days since I had last streamed, this apparently broke as well. Right now it feels like we have been sold a lemon, and while I am sure they are trying as hard as they can to straighten things out… they seriously need some better public relations.

The official pronouncement from hitbox support is that things should be fixed either today or tomorrow. The problem is that “today” and “tomorrow” were three weeks ago. Instead of following up with a legitimate estimate for when things will be fixed… they just keep giving out the same “today” and “tomorrow” statements. Now as my friend Ashgar pointed out, I can in fact record local and upload to YouTube as a separate process… which is fine for anything I do in the future. I however tend to stream sequentially, in a way that someone could go back and watch the progress I made along the way. This means a number of videos are now essentially stuck in hitbox jail and there is no way that I can get them to another service. I took for granted that the estimates of when things would be fixed were actually true, so I kept recording expecting that someday I would be able to upload them to YouTube without issue.

Right now I am in a holding pattern and still using hitbox, because really the streaming functionality is excellent. I just wish everything else about the service were up to the standards set by twitch. I don’t really want to go back to twitch if I can help it, because having to live in a minimum of 30 seconds of lag, is frustrating to me and frustrating to anyone who might be viewing what I was doing. I feel like my viewers are significantly different than the normal viewers that streamers get. When I get someone in my channel it is a friend of mine, and I feel like I should interact in as timely a manner as I can, because we have connections beyond that of viewer and streamer. Hopefully tomorrow will come, and they will fix their crap and let us start moving files again. At the very least I would be happy with either the ability to download what I have already recorded or at the very least embed it directly into my blog.

Player Commendations

After dropping off our British friend at the airport, and one of our ferrets to the vet… we went home and pretty much vegetated. I had a rather glorious day playing some Final Fantasy XIV and even doing a little bit of streaming. For the most part the day was spent working on my Dragoon in an attempt to get him to level 45 and acquire the awesome dragon armor set that waits for me there. Right now my leveling method of choice is to run around a zone, this time Coerthas doing FATEs while waiting on the Duty Roulette to pop. For years I have been completely gunshy about doing random dungeons, thanks in part to just how horrible and toxic the community in World of Warcraft dungeon finder can be. That said I have to say that the community so far in Final Fantasy XIV has been an utter delight.

Sure I have run into a few players that are relatively horrible at playing their class or their chosen role, but I have yet to find a single player that I would consider rude or abusive. I can take playing with folks who struggle, but it was always the “internet tough guys” and general jerks that kept me away from the dungeon finder. The most interesting thing for me is that apparently I have made a positive impression on the groups I have been in. After I had left the first time, FFXIV introduced a system of positive reinforcement called “Player Commentations”. The idea is at the end of each dungeon run each player gets to commend a single player for their actions in the run. Generally speaking I assumed these would be limited to the tanks and healers, since they tend to run the show. That said I have managed to rack up ten of them so far through the course of my random dungeon runnings.

Granted I try to go out of my way to make the dungeon run smoother, interrupting all of the AOE effects that I can. In Stone Vigil last night I even managed to double interrupt a pack using Legsweep for one and Spineshatter Dive to interrupt a second one moments later. That said I expected this sort of thing to go unnoticed, or get attributed to the tank… since tanks also have stuns… but at least in PUGs seem to rarely use them. All of this said it feels like the community in FFXIV has reached a point where all of the negative forces have wandered off into other games, and what is left is a cohesive group of players who are bound together in their love of all things Final Fantasy. This might be a great oversimplification but so far I’ve greatly enjoyed all of the random dungeons and guildhest groups I have been a part of. People seem to be genuinely willing to talk through problems without resorting to name calling.

I closed off the night sitting at 43.5 and working on the final Dragoon hunt. Something awesome is that apparently when we were not looking they added in some extremely awesome rewards for completing the hunt logs. When you complete your class hunt log you get a ring that is honestly as good as Darklight if not slightly better. When you complete your grand company hunt log, you get a pet. You can collect your rewards by telling Jonathas in Old Gridania a “tale” of your deeds. I still think this is a pretty cool way of handling a epic turn in like this, that your character literally tells the NPC a story about how you succeeded in battle. This is going to give me the drive to finish up my Immortal Flames hunt log, so that I too can get a pet from it. So far I am really enjoying my time back in the game, and it is starting to stir the attention of some of my guildies. Here is hoping that at some point we can return to doing 8 man content. For now I will just settle with being able to do guild groups.

#Hitbox #FFXIV