ffxiv Archives - Page 14 of 78 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Restless Weekend

January 23, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, because at least for me it centered around recording our “Games of the Year” show on AggroChat. This is generally speaking a huge ordeal given that our show is made up of six very different minded people. Back during the days when we had four regular hosts it was less of a proceeding but now that we essentially have six people each picking three games a piece… that means we wind up talking about 18 games, which as it turns out divides neatly into two 9 image panels. The above image is the first of these and serves as the backdrop for our normal show card of sorts, however with the text over it you can’t necessarily make out all of the images involved so I decided to post it here. You can as always find the show on AggroChat or my method of choice for sheer simplicity of listening… YouTube. The reason why this largely dominated my weekend is because we ultimately recorded two podcasts that were both two hours long before I set down to edit them. Post edits they both clock in around an hour and twenty minutes, which really is shocking given that I did not actually time anything out in an attempt to make them work as relative set pieces. I guess however if you set out to record nine games per show… the end result comes out fairly evenly. I did make an attempt to shuffle the deck in such a way as to put the games I thought we would most likely talk the longest about divided evenly among the shows.

So we recorded from 8 pm CST until just after midnight, and then I got up around 7:30 Sunday morning and edited until 12:30… and as a result every other element of the weekend felt like it was shoved to one side or the other. Of course all of this madness has a purpose since the double episode is timed perfectly to cover the absence of myself and Ashgar as we go to Pax South. Now in theory Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen could record without me… but that would mean I had the forethought to have the mess that is our show in a state that I could easily hand over the reigns to an understudy. I have not planned ahead that far, and while I do have a series of Audacity and Photoshop projects to speed up the process… I am not sure if I could even properly explain what exactly I do each week. It is my hope however that I managed to not only publish yesterday, but also schedule everything else to publish next Sunday while I am driving home from San Antonio. Staging a publish to happen without me is always a fraught thing for me… because so rarely does it actually work as intended. Even if it does… I am literally stressed beyond reason until I see the tweets show up in my timeline from the publish process actually doing its thing appropriately. In the grand scheme of things however… it is not the most important thing in the world… but it is important to me.

As far as gaming went this weekend that was equally scattered. I patched up Final Fantasy XIV and made it far enough to hit the first instance gate, before ultimately walking away. Similarly I patched up Wildstar, created a Chua Warrior and played to around level seven before once again walking away like a bored child. As far as gaming that managed to last for more than an hour… we had World of Warcraft where I finally hit 35 points on my Protection Artifact and started pushing up Fury instead. I have gotten back in the habit of logging in each day to do my Emissary quest because now there is also a potential legendary upgrade waiting at the end of the grind. I started doing my Time Walking dungeons… but only managed to make it through the first one tanking it before once again wandering away. The game that seemed to stick the hardest was Elder Scrolls Online where I completed a good chunk of Malabal Tor, a zone where I am already completely enthralled by the storyline… even though it involves largely nothing but elves and their internal politics. I’ve decided that the Bosmer are what it takes to make me really enjoy Elves. I am really enjoying the whole lore regarding the Green Lady and the Silvenar, and I guess in truth that was an aspect of the lore that I had either forgotten or ignored in playing other Elder Scrolls games. I even managed to have a few emotional gut punches last night, when I lost characters that I actually really liked during one quest chain. In truth all I want to do right now is hide in my blanket cocoon on the couch and play more ESO, but that said I do want to at some point get a Mythic+ in for the week since I have a +5 Maw of Souls key.

Social Structure and MMOs

December 15, 2016 by Belghast

I’ve talked off and on about Imzy, and how it is filling a niche for me at least that Google+ used to in that it allows for a sort of long winded discussion that twitter just simply doesn’t. Yesterday I read a post there that made me realize something I had been trying to sort out in my head for awhile. The vast majority of my gaming time is spent playing MMOs and I tend to have several that I am in various states of active in at the same time. However I rarely if ever gain any sort of permanent traction in them, and after a few weeks of play tend to fade away again until the whim hits me to fire it back up. I go through a cycle of curiosity that leads to excitement… that leads to confusion and disillusionment that ultimately ends with me leaving once more. I will pick up a game and for a few days to weeks it is going to be the most interesting thing in the world as I get adjusted to the systems and mechanics again. However I always reach this point where an overwhelming sense of “what now” hits me. When that happens I wind out going right back to whatever it is happens to be my core game… which if we are being honest with me is an alternation of World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. I have been working on my games played during 2016… and decided to extend that out to all of the games that are easy to track thanks to my blog. There is a clear pattern of when I start getting super excited about WoW I shift away from FFXIV and versa vicea. There is of course some overlap, but you can see a back and forth pattern that emerges.

So the question is then…. what do these two games seem to have that so many others don’t. The answer was sitting there waiting for me to notice. I often talk about games having great communities… but generally speaking this is in broad terms and extremely non-specific. Most games have some excellent niches in them, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t really do much to add core enjoyment for me. I keep returning to World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV… because those are the games that I have established communities in. There was a time when I was willing to branch out and meet new people… plunk myself down in a brand new game and start growing an entirely different infrastructure. The community that I have right now… is in large part the result of me doing this over and over. Each new game I go into I meet a whole new cast of people… but at some point that began to change. As I gathered a larger and larger core of players… I stopped looking outside to the community nearly as much and instead looking to my guild. While I am still meeting a lot of new people… they are coming with the pedigree of knowing someone I already know and am familiar with… which of course speeds up the social footnotes that come from meeting anyone new.

Last night was a prime example of this happening, because we were raiding in World of Warcraft and had someone pop by and join…. that I had not personally played with in several years. My personal community in House Stalwart within World of Warcraft seems to have this ability to stay evergreen… and always have a certain chunk of the population that is active and always happy to be there. House Stalwart my guild has existed for twelve years… in spite of my actions. When I left WoW to start playing Rift I tried my best to burn down everything about the game… actively recruiting people away to play this new an exciting game. I did the same thing for Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online… and countless other games. However at its core… the guild still remains and not only that… but has remained viable for the purpose of doing interesting end game content the entire time. Similarly the Final Fantasy XIV guild… while considerably younger just seems to endure whatever boom and bust cycles we go through population wise, and in both cases…. I know that I can return at any point and will be welcomed back with open arms. In truth I think pretty much everyone who has touched either guild feels the same way… which is why folks are constantly showing up from out of the woodwork and reintegrating back into the core at least for a little while.

So the problem that exists with nearly every other game… is I just don’t have anything close to this infrastructure… nor do I really have the emotional or intellectual strength to try and forge it. There have been House Stalwart offshoots in damned near every MMO that has existed… or at least as a guild community we have chosen a specific server and faction to all roll on. However for most… these interludes serve as a vacation from the game they were already playing… and after a break most folks wind up going right back to the familiar. In a traditional MMO I need to have something that I am building towards, and that object on the horizon is usually doing interesting things with my friends. So while it is absolutely fun to pop in and play Rift or ArcheAge for a weekend… I find hard keeping motivated when I know I have no real facilities to do any of the big interesting things… other than pugging. I am spoiled to be honest, and so many years of not having to PUG has soured my experience as a whole. Any random person I encounter is somehow tarnished by the memory of all of the good times I have had with my guild throughout the years. After generations of MMOs… this has lead me to be rather insular in my gaming habits and tending to return to the folks I already know and respect rather than trying to create something new.

So now days I tend to operate in two modes. I have the games that I am active in and have deep social connections… and the games that I slink off to when I need to limit my social connectivity and turtle for awhile. I tend to gobble up whatever new content is available, and then happy drop that game by the wayside as I return to active duty again. Games like Star Wars the Old Republic, The Secret World and Elder Scrolls Online are great for this role, given that they all have deeply engaging stories that you can find yourself completely lost in… so much so that you forget that you are essentially alone in a crowd of strangers. There are a lot of games that I think I would enjoy… if I had a similar stable infrastructure. However at this point… to be honest… folks are pretty stratified in their gaming habits. I can no longer really make an impassioned argument as to why they should abandon X game that they know and love for Y game that is new and different. I know this boom and bust cycle all too well at this point… and while it is a hell of a fun ride, to some extent I am getting that fix elsewhere. For me personally… the Diablo 3 season mechanism perfectly emulates the feeling of “unwrapping” a brand new MMO and rushing with your friends to level as quickly as you can. This time however we all know it is perfectly fine to fade away once you have achieved your goals… because its a game we will all return to again and again as new seasons happen. I have been the cause of so much frustration and disappointment in my gaming career… that I guess in some part I would rather slink off alone… than get folks excited about yet another game that I am sure we will all abandon within three months time. However that same instinct… is what keeps any of these games from actually gaining traction. What I realized this week when reading the post on Imzy is just how desperately I need that social infrastructure for me to be able to enjoy a MMO.

Eorzean Melancholy

September 29, 2016 by Belghast

I find myself going through a bit of an odd patch with Final Fantasy XIV, or more so I guess one that has been dragging on far longer than I expected. When A Realm Reborn launched I was reluctantly playing because my friends were playing. However something happened along the way and I fell in love with Eorzea. We drifted apart once our little circle of friends started exiting the game, only to come back a year or so later in full force. Ultimately Final Fantasy XIV was the game that we left, without really having a reason other than simply running out of things we were able to do. Mind you… not things we WANTED to do… things we could realistically do with the gear levels we had without copious amounts of grinding. When we ultimately came back there was an entire years worth of content waiting for us to explore and it quite literally took every moment up to the release of the expansion… and a bit after it to be able to see and explore all of it. I cannot remember another expansion for any game that I looked forward to with near the anticipation that I did Heavensward. While the story content was fun to level through, it was also an expansion of limited scope. It is strange that getting two dungeons per patch cycle instead of three makes a huge difference… but it really did and it made each new set of experts feel monotonous. You would ultimately have the dungeon you liked, and the dungeon that you disliked… and it always felt like you ended up getting queued into the dungeon you really did not care for. I am looking at you Neverreap.

Once again we faded away from the game, and while I stayed subscribed this time… I pretty much only poked my head in for new content patches and holiday events. Recently we made a push to “get the band back together” and start raiding again. The problem there being that while I am interested in raiding with my friends… I really want to put zero effort into actually getting the gear NEEDED to raid properly. When I lay out the options I have before me each night… I never end up choosing to spend my time in Final Fantasy XIV. This week another content patch was released, and the game has almost lapped me once again since I was existing in “barely eligible” territory before. There are several of the new things, like the story content that I can complete right now with my item level. However to be a proper and reasonable tank I really need to get in and devote some time to gearing. Unfortunately I really just don’t want to. It is extremely hard to stay viable in a game that you find yourself only willing to play once a a week. The malaise has been strong with this game for me, and I am not entirely sure why. I have always been one to complete each and every holiday and quest that springs up… and now I have this sad line of broken quests that I never actually finished. I completed one part of the multi-part burning rangers quest… but never actually finished that up so while I have the armor I have none of the poses. The Yokai event has been started but I have not actually put enough effort into anything to actually get pets or weapons. Similarly I realized last night that I apparently completely missed The Rising, because while I kept thinking I will do it someday… I ran out of somedays to do it in. Finally the Palace of the Dead arrived… and while I have done some with friends I have yet to actually finish any weapons.

I guess it disturbs me how uninteresting all of this seems to me right now, and I have no clue why. Its like waking up one morning and realizing that you and your best friend… really don’t have much in common. So often when I fade away from an MMO there are clear reasons why, this decision or that decision that caused me to get frustrated and quit. Final Fantasy XIV however is just simply dying from my own neglect and unwillingness to visit it. On some level that makes me really sad because I am not sure what it was about the Heavensward cycle that made it so much less sticky for me personally than the Realm Reborn. I think a big part of it is my attraction to loot, and the fact that it feels like there is nothing that I can really do with my time other than hopping on the expert dungeon train. What I mean is that FFXIV for all intents and purposes is a lootless game… or at the very least a game devoid of interesting drops. Sure there are chests at the end of dungeon encounters that reward items, but I am talking about is open world free range loot. I like the fact that in other MMOs there is always a chance, albeit slim that I might get something awesome to drop when I kill any random mob out in the world. This pushes me to run amok and slaughter everything I come across… in the hopes that this one might be the one that gives me something awesome. Final Fantasy unfortunately gives me stacks and stacks of crafting materials that I don’t care about, especially since I find the auction house system and selling said materials cumbersome as hell. So what ends up happening is every mob death feels equally meaningless to me, because there are no situations being set up like that one time I killed a Giant in Stranglethorn and go`dt the Skullflame Shield.

Final Fantasy XIV has hands down some of the best group content, but similarly it is equally boring. Sure there are the occasional item that has a nifty graphic that you can pick up from roulette, but for the most part you are running dungeons not to get interesting gear… but instead to increment a number of tokens until you can then spend those saved tokens on a piece of gear. Even then, for the most part gear is an incremental stat stick, that unless you are replacing a 180 with a 220… is not immediately noticeable that the game feels immediately better. Granted this is a problem with a lot of MMOs when you pick up items that don’t do something. I am running into this problem with World of Warcraft at the moment in that every single trinket I get just seems to give me a bunch of stats and doesn’t actually do much in the interesting column. The big problem however is that I just don’t feel more awesome when I put on better upgrades in Final Fantasy XIV… largely because how I judge that “feel” is by my effectiveness to take down random stuff out in the open world. Since there is nothing actually interesting to kill in the open world… it is defusing that feedback circle for me. Ultimately I get gear to feel more powerful taking down things that maybe I once struggled. It is the “Sand Giant” effect played out in a smaller scale over and over and over for me. In Everquest there were these mobs called Sand Giants that decimated players in what was ultimately a level 20ish zone called the Oasis of Marr. However there was a moment of sweet retribution when you could come back at 45-50ish and destroy them and get all of that pent up revenge. Gearing in an MMO has this same effect for me… as I level there are always big bads that I maybe struggled to take down… and then it feels great to eventually turn the tables on them. Apart from the early raid content… I don’t have that experience in FFXIV and I think it is why the open world combat feels so dull to me. Anyways… this post has gone on far longer than I expected it to, but it still is sad to me… that for many of these reasons… I am just not finding myself playing much Final Fantasy.

Operation Hey Folks

September 16, 2016 by Belghast

For the last week and some change, I have been running at least one dungeon a night. Often time I am queuing with less than a full party. This is a situation that generally causes me great anxiety, because I like going into a group knowing that folks I know… outnumber the folks I don’t know. I said awhile back that I have been trying to force myself to be more cordial in dungeons. As a result I have adopted my common “Hey Folks” and “How Goes?” greetings. My friend Grace that I am often dungeoning with has been doing the same. Mostly we had a discussion awhile back about how this is the common expected behavior in Final Fantasy XIV, and that maybe if we attempted to treat World of Warcraft the same we might get similar results. Folks in FFXIV are largely charming and willing to help you sort out mechanics that you might not understand, all just because you spoke up and said you were new to a dungeon. My experience in the past of WoW has not been nearly that charitable, but I was willing to give it a shot either way. The awesome thing about going in with the majority of a party… it means the moment someone resorts to toxic behavior you can punt them quickly. All in all I have to say I continue to be pleased at just how well this is going, even in Heroics. If you present a friendly face, more often than not it has been met with a similarly friendly response.

Last night we had someone drop shortly after introductions… which I am hoping was just a case of them getting disconnected or being needed elsewhere. However others in the party not only were cheery but performed admirably. At the end of the dungeon run we took time to praise the Deathknight for example who did an amazing job of pull casters into the group, and pulled off a clutch rez when our healer inadvertently stood in some “bad”. All of this is really making me wish that World of Warcraft would adopt a commendation system similar to Final Fantasy XIV. I think a lot of that culture is based on the fact that at the end of a dungeon run, each player gets a single commendation that they can give to someone in their party. There is the additional caveat that you cannot give commendations to members of your own guild, meaning you have to be giving random strangers these nods. To make it something that folks are actually interested in receiving there are a number of achievements based on the number of commendations you have, and some of the rewards are things like mounts, titles and cosmetic items. Basically the system would port perfectly to World of Warcraft random dungeons, and give some additional reinforcement of good behavior. Last night for example I greatly wished I had the ability to heap tangible praise on this Deathknight for doing a pretty amazing job all around. Even the mage that ultimately replaced the dropped Demon Hunter, was deserving of commendations because for the most part everyone “mechanic’d” like a pro.

Other than dungeons, last night I spent most of my time attempting to catch up in Suramar. I had been lagging behind horribly in the questing there, namely when it comes to unlocking things in the actual city proper. I am not a huge fan of stealth mechanics, and it is foreign to me to attempt to sneak around. A huge part of me wants to simply fight my way from one side of the city to the other… but the sheer mob density here makes that not really a viable option. Similarly I don’t believe a lot of the quests are actually open to you unless you are wearing the illusion. As Tam and I have commented… Suramar is like being a High Elf Enchanter in Neriak… for those who ever had that experience in the original Everquest. The illusion works most of the time, but occasionally there is someone all to happy to murder you. As you progress however you start to build little enclaves where you are more or less free to roam safely. Last nights grind was focused on getting far enough in to be able to start unlocking some of the lucrative world quests, one of which yesterday was an epic trinket. Before I went to bed last night I managed to unlock the dinosaur quest… which is truly amazing and with it the trinket world quest. Nothing quite as fun as riding along on the back of a devilsaur and gobbling up demons and evil elves.