ffxiv

Housing Savage Defeated

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Those who have been around the blog for a while might know that I have been trying to get a house in Final Fantasy XIV for quite a while. When I returned to the game in 2021, I gathered a decent holding of gil and got the itch to try and purchase a house. This is when I found out about the sorry state of affairs that was the housing system at that point. Essentially at any given time, there might be one or two plots available on the entire server, and they would come available at a random time. So you were forced to sit there clicking the placard hoping that you would be lucky enough to time it just perfectly and get the property before the others also swarming the plot had a chance to purchase. Shocking to no one… it was a time rife with botters and those of us who were not botting would do all sorts of things to try and trick them into doing dumb things.

With Patch 6.1 this changed significantly and introduced the Housing Lottery system. Essentially every nine days the game would go through a cycle of placing bids and accepting results. If you wanted to buy property you would find an open plot during the bidding period, and place down your earnest money in escrow by clicking on the placard of that property. Then it was simply a waiting game to see if you lucked into winning the property. For the last year, I have been riding the cycle of bid and results periods, logging in to go plot shopping and then logging in on results day to get disappointed that I did not get yet another property. I think maybe I missed a single bid period because I was just too disheartened after losing to the closest odds I had seen to date. Most of the time it was me up against over 200 other bidders and then treated to another happy message wishing me more luck in the future.

All of that changed last week and I honestly did not want to talk too much about it ahead of time for fear I would jinx it. With the release of the 6.3 patch Square Enix added 1800 plots to the game by adding six new wards to every housing area. Since the very beginning I had one wish above others… to get the same plot that we used to have for a Free Company house in the Mists district of Limsa Lominsa. So when the bidding period started after the release of 6.3 I opted to bid on Plot 13 in Ward 26. When I logged in the day before the end of the period… I was the only bidder on my property. When I logged in feverishly after the bidding period ended, I was happy to see that I did in fact win. While it is not the same Ward as our old Free Company house, it makes me exceptionally happy to have the same relative position in the new area.

One of the things that are exceptionally cool about this whole process is the fact that EVERYONE that is populating this new ward, is someone who had been anxiously trying to get a house. I’ve had many random conversations with my neighbors while slowly working away on getting everything set up. I made friends with the folks who own one of the large homes in the area and they were roaming around chatting with everyone who was fiddling the other day. I’ve similarly had conversations with many of the folks surrounding me, and it is bringing back memories of when we first bought the Free Company house in this same location. I remember there was a welcome committee of sorts that welcomed us all to the neighborhood. I kinda want to maybe revive a tradition and create a linkshell for all of the inhabitants of the district.

It is going to take me a very long time before I get everything exactly how I want it, but the front yard is starting to come along nicely. Huge props to Sol for helping me out with some of the finer points of understanding this system… that I never really engaged with before. I mean I’ve had permission to fiddle with shit in the guild hall for years, but I never wanted to mess anything up since Sol spends so much effort getting things just so. The tree house that I am standing in while taking these screenshots was a housewarming gift that was super sweet. It does make me want to maybe start working on my crafters and use the house as an excuse to set goals for leveling them in order to make items. Thankfully I have all of my gatherers to at least level 80, so acquiring items for leveling purposes does not seem too taxing.

The inside is considerably more spartan. My idea currently is to arrange the upstairs as the office of an adventuring company and then the downstairs as my private quarters. At the moment I just have functional decorations. I’ve placed four NPCs, a retainer bell, an aesthetician bell, a guest book, and an orchestrion. I kinda think I will probably be working on little vignettes as I did in the front yard. I need to acquire some mannequins at some point, because I know I want them configured for different gear sets representing all of the jobs that I play. Right now I picture them up on some sort of a stage immediately across the room from the guildleve counter.

Downstairs I have done almost nothing other than swap the walls, and flooring, and put up a maelstrom ceiling fan. I know I will want some aquariums for down here, but past that I am not really sure what I want this area to look like. I am probably going to put up some walls to partition off an area to put a bed, and have another area that is for seating and various collected items like the miniatures that I have gathered over the years. I swear the hardest part about all of this is trying to decide what the heck I want my house to look like. I will say… after having used a number of housing systems the one in FFXIV is not what I would consider “good”. It already feels like I have to fight it more than I should to do simple things like select an object when it is overlapping another object. I am sure with time I will get better at cheesing the system, but for now, it feels extremely cumbersome.

Part of why I opted for a Shirogane-style roof is so that I could climb up on top of it. This is one of my favorite pastimes in the district we have a Free Company House. Being able to climb up on my own roof and watch the world go by, is extremely heartening for me. It is so weird to be writing this post after so much frustration and disappointment trying to acquire a house for so long. I am really hoping that maybe this will be the action that brings me back into the fold and gets me engaged with the game again. There is a good deal of content that I have never experienced and I should pick up and start working on the main story quest chain again. After leveling all of my jobs to 80, and then leveling through Endwalker almost immediately following that… I just burned myself out tremendously. I still have so much affection for this game, that I am hoping maybe being grounded in the Housing system will give me goals to engage with the rest of the game.

The Mists is traditionally one of the more popular housing areas and even in my ward, there were a number of properties that did not get bid on. That would tell me that if you were ever hoping to get housing, and were disappointed by the process in the past… you might throw your bid in when the coming period opens on the 24th. There still should be a number of really good properties available. Notice that there is some prime beachfront real estate that did not even get bid on in my ward, and there are even more properties still open when you shift over to the subdivision including a number of mediums and even a large. I’ve spent so much money over the last few days that I am going to have to figure out what actually sells on the market and start listing things again to build back up my nest egg. Thankfully there really isn’t much that you actually need to buy in Final Fantasy XIV.

I cannot tell you how happy I am to be posting a screenshot from the beach of MY housing district. Soon I think it will be time for me to go roaming around and looking for more guestbooks to sign. One of the coolest things is that I found out one of my friends got a property in the same ward. They opted for the subdivision, but I bumped into them the other day at the housing vendors while trying to figure out how to actually build a house. I need to scan through the list a bit more thoroughly and see if there are any other names that I recognize. I wish you all a wonderful week and if you wade into the lottery system waters, I wish you luck in the upcoming bidding period!

AggroChat #419 – Coastal Wizard Decimates Foot

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Folks… after a year of trying to win the housing lottery in FFXIV, Belghast finally gets a house and in the same lot number that we used to have an FC House in Mists.  From there Kodra talks about the tabletop game Middara and how it contains one of the best tutorials for a game that he has seen. One of the negative side effects of recording massive two-part games of the year show is there are hot topics that end up getting thrown on the back burner.  From there we finally talk about the situation happening with Wizards of the Coast, the Open Gaming License, and the entire community abandoning ship.  We talk a bit about Fog Sudoku and Kodra explains what exactly it is.  From there we finish out the night talking about Marvel Midnight Suns and how in some ways it is a perfect game, and in other ways, it completely misses the point.

Topics Discussed

  • Housing Windfall in FFXIV
  • Middara is a Great Tutorial
  • Wizards of the Coast Burning
    • Self Own of 2023
    • Misunderstanding their Community
    • The rise of ORC and fall of OGL
  • Fog Sudoku
  • Marvel Midnight Suns

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Buzzer Beater

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Good Morning Friends. I am what I would prefer as a buzzer-beater. I get things done, but almost always end up doing them right before the deadline. I am the sort of employee that drives their managers insane when it comes to compliance items. If you tell me something is due on a specific date, I interpret it as being done at the close of business on that date and will hand it in without fail at the last minute. It is this way with seasonal events in video games, and last night I finally got around to checking out the Halloween event in New World. You technically can receive the quest at 35, but given how fast I got my ass handed to me by the roaming 60s I decided I would come back later. The problem is that “later” never really happened until last night.

When the fight begins properly you have a big boss called Baalphazu and a few types of smaller adds that spawn around it. The most common are these little pumpkins, which you can destroy and get a pumpkin bomb that you can throw at the boss. Essentially I think the plan is for those who are lower level to be picking up the pumpkin bombs and chucking them at the boss, which lowers its defenses and starts a burn phase. The larger challenge with that however is when it is doing a burn phase, it is also dealing massive AOE damage. The strategy seems to be to dogpile everyone on the boss and throw down enough healing circles to allow everyone to effectively shrug off the damage. When it worked it went well and 30-40 players showed up at the spawn point. When it did not go well, we struggled to burn down the boss until reinforcements arrived.

There were a number of rewards for the event that now makes me wish I had started this a bit earlier. There were three helmets, the one shown above, a pumpkin head, and a witches hat. There was also an armor set featuring a chest piece and helm that are designed to make you look like Baalphazu, as well as a “pumpkinling” that you could get for your home. The bigger reward is that after you had completed the event a few times you got enough faction with the vendor and could start buying item-level 600 weapon patterns. I ran enough of the event yesterday to pick up the cosmetics and greatsword, sword, and shield crafting patterns. Doing the event drops bags of loot that contained the lower-end versions of the weapon patterns, and I believe I managed to get one of those for all the other slots. All told it was a good event and I wish it was sticking around a bit longer, and that more level range variety could have easily participated.

Other than that I continue to quest my way through the game. Right now I have a few competing goals the first of which is to continue harvesting up all of my banks full of material so I can do another massive crafting session. The next is to gather up gold and territory standing so that I can purchase a Tier 4 house in either Brightwood or Mourningdale. Weirdly on my server… the guild that controls Brightwood seems to not care much about leveling up that territory so I am starting to lean heavily toward Mourningdale. Whatever the case I have to hit 30 faction in that territory in order to unlock that max-tier home. I think I am about to wrap up questing in Mourningdale, and not certain where the game will send me next. I would assume more than likely it would be Ebonscale Reach.

In other news… I lost yet another lottery in Final Fantasy XIV. I know a while back I said I was hopping off the lottery train, and I did for a few rounds… but alas I am back to doing the four-day wait. I do not understand why Square did not seize the opportunity with the Island Sanctuary to give us all an instanced housing plot. That seems like it would have been perfect to just have those hidden among the island somewhere and function essentially like a housing district for one. Right now on my server at least, it seems we are all vying for the same plot each week, so the likelihood of me ever winning one is pretty minimal.

If nothing else I guess it gets me logging into the game every week, though I almost always stay parked at the placard awaiting the sad trip back into the game when the results are posted.

AggroChat #384 – FFXIV Endwalker Spoiler Show – Part 3

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Friends!  It is finally that time where we record our big full spoiler show for Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker expansion.  It has become tradition to record one of these when all of our crew have played through the expansion and yesterday afternoon Kodra finally finished it.  We also ended up recording for far longer than we have EVER recorded for one of these shows.  We started about an hour early and still finished up two hours late for a grand total of around four hours of podcast to edit.  

The end result is that we are chopping this down into three separate shows which is a first for us.  We have a storied history of double episodes but never a triple.  This week we have the final of this sequence.  Hopefully you enjoy the show, and if Final Fantasy XIV is not your jam then I guess we will see you hopefully in a couple weeks for more live shows.

Topics Discussed

  • Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker

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