ffxiv Archives - Page 75 of 92 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Bribing Good Behavior

October 30, 2014 by Belghast

Better Community

Yesterday I posted this picture and said that the person dancing with Sagacyte and I was a friend of his. Turns out that apparently this was not the case. The way she waved and immediately started dancing with us, made me think that she must have known him. So yeah… complete and total stranger came over and started interacting and now she is another person on my friends list. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked since this sort of thing happens all the time. There is a community spirit that infuses Final Fantasy XIV, and I am still not entirely used to just how prevalent it is. There are lots of quests that involve you walking into an area and a bunch of mobs spawn on top of you. The mobs that actually belong to you are marked but you can help out with any of them. It is a rare occasion that someone will move on after their mobs are dead and not help you kill yours. There was this one tank the other night that I swear “tanked” five sets of these mobs as new people walked into the spawning area.

This sort of thing is absolutely commonplace now, but the strange thing is… it wasn’t. What is strange about Final Fantasy XIV is that my friends and I played this game seriously at launch for roughly three months. Then we wandered off to do other things, and upon returning were shocked and amazed at how much the community had improved. At launch it felt like every other MMO, with folks doing the same kind of selfish actions that are so common place in other games. Running a random dungeon, likely meant that you would have one person complaining that you were pulling to slow, and another person complaining that the dps wasn’t somehow good enough… even though there are no meters for that. Basically the community had the same rampant asshatery that we’ve all experienced in “modern mmos”. Upon returning however we found that this negative element was almost completely gone. Sure you will encounter an abusive player every so often, but the community as a whole seems to have done a drastic turn around.

Bribing Good Behavior

One thing that we noticed quickly that had been added to the game since we last played was the player commendation system. What makes the system interesting is that at the end of every duty, each player gets a single commendation that they can award to another player from that group. Now normally when a game has a system like this, you can queue exclusively with guild members or friends and cheat the system. However in this case you cannot reward commendations to your guildies, but have to instead use it on a stranger. The other half of this equation is that you are rewarded both your giving commendations, and greatly rewarded for receiving them. Each week there is a challenge log entry for handing out commendations that gives the player a bit of experience and some gil. As far as the receiving side they have set up a system of increasing rewards for 10, 50, 100, 300 and 500 player commendations. The final reward is the golden colored Magitech armor that you see in the above screenshot… something that pretty much everyone I know universally wants.

What has happened as a result is that players are actively trying to win commendations while in dungeon runs. As a whole they are far easier to work with, and more willing to stop and explain mechanics if you simply speak up and let them know you are new to a fight. In fact I have seen entire raid groups come to a grinding halt just to explain the mechanics of a fight to a new player. Often times another player will mentor the newer player through what they actually need to pay attention to on a given fight. The only thing I have seen much frustration really is when a group wipes because a player didn’t understand the mechanics… and didn’t speak up about it at the beginning of the run. This leads players to be more willing to speak up about things that confuse them, or things they are having issues with… which then get solved as a group. Admittedly there is some content that is the equivalent of WoW’s LFR… but even then inside each individual team there is usually some camaraderie as the run goes on.

Rewarding Communication

I have long been one of those individuals who have stated that the addition of the dungeon finder to World of Warcraft made the game a significantly worse place. Sure it made getting groups easier, but it changed the way we ran dungeons permanently. The “push a button, get a group” nature of the tool had a ton of unforeseen consequences, the worst of which is it dehumanized your interaction with other players. Instead of people that you had to communicate with in order to get a group in the first place… they became roles that enabled you to get your loot Piñata at the end and nothing more. The first thing to go with the dungeon finder was discussion in dungeons other than screaming at other players for not living up to some set of standards. Folks stopped talking while running dungeons, and most players just kept their head down and tried to make it through the dungeon all the while trying not to be called in the carpet for being “bad”. It was during this era that I stopped running with strangers, because every time the experience was just so damned maddening.

With Final Fantasy, I restarted the game a few weeks ahead of the bulk of my friends… meaning my only option was to do random dungeons or either do no dungeons at all. The first thing I noticed when I set foot into a dungeon was that players greeted each other, and once that happened the communication started flowing again. Players seemed more willing to talk about what was going on with fights, what they needed help with… and even things completely unrelated to the current dungeon run. Granted all of this might be some elaborate act in an attempt to earn player commendations… and being the friendliest in the group usually earns you at least one… but whatever the cause it is a drastic improvement over the standard MMO environment. I think we have a case of “fake it until you make it” going on here, where players might start out faking a friendly attitude, but over time of doing this over and over… something changes inside you. I find myself not getting upset at the mistakes of other players, and not dwelling on what went wrong… but focusing more on what needs to happen for things to go right.

Positive Leadership

I am not sure if I can account all of the positive changes simply to the player commendation system. I feel like the more aggressive players that make up the early MMO rush have moved on from the game, leaving behind only players that are really dedicated to the Final Fantasy franchise for one reason or another. Additionally the way that the developers of this game interact with the fans is just completely different. I’ve talked about this before, especially in relation to the way the game developers at Blizzcon interact with their fans. It often times feels like they are living out some rockstar fantasy up on stage, and there is always a tinge of condescension when they answer fans. Watching Fan Festival on the other hand… was like watching one big fan talking to a bunch of other big fans. One of my friends commented that Yoshi-P seems to treat us more like investors in his vision, than customers. Another friend chimed in and said that it was almost like he was this super benevolent guild leader. In any case the difference in interaction shows, and trickles down to the player base as well.

So I think all of these little things add up to an atmosphere that rewards the player for being helpful and showing community spirit. So much in this game cannot be accomplished without other players, and the constant fiddling and tweaking with systems always seems to air on the side of supporting collaborative play rather than competition for resources. Granted Final Fantasy XI and XIV 1.0 had really interesting communities, and to some extent the XIV 2.0 and beyond community is standing on their shoulders. Even in the midst of all the rogue zergy nature going on with the release of a new class… players are still far more polite about everything than they were at launch. At this point I don’t care if they essentially have bribed us into being nice passive team players, the end result adds up to a very positive player experience. It had been a really long time since I had felt a sense of pride in a game community, and I am damned proud to be a Final Fantasy XIV player and even prouder to be a member of the ever amazing Cactuar server community. For years Azeroth was my home base as I wandered out to explore other games, but I think at this point that new title belongs to Eorzea. There is so much awesome stuff coming down the pipe, and I cannot wait to experience it all.

#FFXIV #FinalFantasy

Roguepocalypse

October 29, 2014 by Belghast

Awesome Overload

Yesterday was seriously one of the hardest days to get through I have experienced in a very long time. When I troddled off to work the Final Fantasy XIV servers were up and back from maintenance, and as I worked all day long I would see little tid bits of information here and there about just how great this patch ended up being. For the uninitiated yesterday was the release of Patch 2.4 “Dreams of Ice” which introduced a ton of new content, not the least of which is the Shiva primal encounter that the patch is named for. It is truly staggering to think about the amount of content that has been released for this game since launch. Roughly every quarter players get a major patch the size of 2.4, that generally introduces 1 to 2 new primal fights, 3 new hard mode dungeons, new main story quest chain, new Hildebrand story chain, new gear, new glamour bits, new hair styles and in this one they even introduced a brand new class and job combination in the Rogue and Ninja. On top of that we seem to see at least one minor content patch each month, the last one added personal housing so still no slouch content wise.

So when you contrast that with other games that can go six months to an year without any new content, it is phenomenal. This patch however is not with its controversies. Up until this point everything that has been available in game has either been earned doing in game things, or through subscription rewards. The game has some pretty insane subscription rewards that include tons of interesting mounts, pets and cosmetic items. This patch however introduced the cash shop, and they sprinkled a few really awesome items on it, not the least of which is the Slepnir mount you can see me on in the above picture. There is so much gnashing of teeth over the fact that this mount is $24, and the mini-pets on the store are $5 each. At this point however a cosmetic shop just seems like the status quo. One of the more interesting things they are doing with it is that each year there are unique rewards for completing holiday events. To allow players to get previous items they are putting the older items up on the cash shop for a minimal fee. Thankfully I have managed to pick up most of the holiday items I might want, but it is nice knowing that I could potentially get the items I missed during the Christmas events.

Focused Gameplay

Though out the day yesterday I thought about just what I would try and tackle that night when I got home. My focus was going to be on unlocking the three new hard mode dungeons so I could be ready to run them as the rest of my free company became available. I could always queue for the dungeon finder and take my chances with strangers, but I would really rather experience this content fresh with a guild group. There is something awesome about having to reason your way through the fights for the first time as a team, even if you fail to make the 90 minute timer. Even with my laser focus… there are certain things any proper Lalafell must do. While wandering around Uldah I bumped into Sagacyte Luxaloix and before I knew it we were dancing the manderville as is Lala tradition. Moments later we were joined by a friend of his Lirrianna Darkholme and there in the middle of the streets of Uldah we had an impromptu Lalafell dance party. We were all very busy, but traditions must be observed and social graces administered.

For those looking into unlocking the new content, there is an excellent blog post from a Lalafell blogger I just stumbled onto this morning talking about the start of each of the new content items. After we finished with our customary dance party, I went on about my business of unlocking the dungeons. Both Sastasha Hard and Sunken Temple of Qarn Hard were relatively simple to unlock, with fairly straight forward go and talk to this guy then go to the dungeon style quests that start in Mor Dhona. For Snowcloak however it is yet another quest tied deeply into the main storyline. So I set forth beginning that chain and two and a half hours I had reached a point where I was standing at the gates of the new Snowcloak dungeon. When they put in new story content… they put in a lot of story content. This however is what makes the game so damned phenominal, is that they keep moving the story forward and giving you a reason to care about the characters you meet. As a friend said last night, it is not so much that your character is the “big damned hero” but more that your character is the social glue that keeps all of the good guys working together. You are the one person they trust due to past interactions, and the lubricant to make things happen when something goes wrong.

Roguepocalpyse

I did not actually intend to start a rogue last night, but I ended up picking up a new quest in Limsa Lominsa near the Aetheryte crystal that just happened to lead me to the guild. I figured while I was there what was the harm of going ahead and unlocking the class. The server has quite literally gone insane for Rogues and Ninjas. The above photo is a scene from inside the Rogues guild in Limsa Lominsa, and there are even more folks milling around outside of the place. The Fisherman’s Guild port has never seen this much activity ever, and really the guild does a pretty piss poor job of disguising itself with all these people swarming around it. So while I picked up the Rogue I had no plans to level it until I got bored waiting around on a group to happen. Last night myself, Tam and Ash hatched a plan to make the guild some money that we could stockpile for our guild airship. Wanderers Palace is the bottleneck for the Relic weapon quest, in that you need a bloody weapon component to craft the precursor weapon for the entire quest chain. For most classes these are common enough that you can pick up a high quality version of the weapon for 20-30k gil and just be on your way.

This means that all of these newly minted rogues will need one eventually so that they can start down the Relic quest chain. As you can see there are only two currently available on the Cactuar market system and they are holding steadily at 300k gil each. The finished weapons are holding steadily at 500k gil a piece and both are in high demand. So we thought we could run Wanderers Palace a few times and if nothing else stockpile some blades for the guild, and at best pick up a bunch to sell on the market while the demand is high. We struggled to find a fourth, as there were a handful of folks available… but they all appeared to be either AFK or in a duty already. So while we waited around for something to happen… I decided to start working on the rogue. Overall the class is really damned fun to play, and in part it is the animations that make it so enjoyable. You feel like a whirlwind of death as pretty much every attack is some sort of a spin move. Additionally the way you hold your daggers… makes me actually kinda like wielding daggers. They feel brutal and swift, instead of awkward stabby weapons like daggers feel in so many games.

The only problem is that everyone is playing a rogue. This is what every fate looks like practically anywhere in the game right now. An army of rogues, their chocobos and a blinding flurry of circular slashes as far as the eye can see. As the second shot shows, some rogues have taken to putting Flash on their bar and run around gathering up all of the fate mobs while the rest of us hopelessly chase after them trying to do as much contribution as possible. I remember fates feeling like this at launch, and in reality it is like we have returned to that post launch period at least a bit. Additionally there are a ton of folks out there doing the fates as well trying to farm their Atma pieces, and it seems that the drop rates are in fact reasonable now. I’ve heard tales of folks completing a full set of atmas in a single evening, but I still feel you need to be lucky to make that happen. While I don’t so much care about my rogue, I plan on riding the FATE gravy train with my monk to see just how many levels I can squeeze out.

Broken Roulette

The influx of rogues has lead to some serious madness. I have not actually tried to queue as one, but I saw this tweeted awhile back with someone being stuck in the queue for over 120 minutes. DPS queues previously were 15 to 20 minutes on my server, and the low level roulette queues last night were reporting around an hour. Thankfully none of this madness has hit Syrcus Tower yet, as my dragoon queue there was still near instant last night. I feel like non-ninja dps will have a better shot at getting into dungeons, especially ranged dps since the game tries to match a ranged and a melee for each four man team. In any case if you have a tank or a healer that you plan on leveling, right now is the ideal time to do it. You will get instant queues and probably get the extreme gratitude of the ninjas inside the instance who have been waiting anxiously to do a dungeon. This reminds me of the way Ifrit and Titan were shortly after launch. My friend Tam used to queue doing “community service” as he called it. One time he ran into a poor black mage who had been sitting waiting on Ifrit for 3 1/2 hours. I am not sure if I will do it tonight, but I plan on working on my White Mage to help with the influx of folks queuing for things.

#FFXIV #Rogue #Ninja

A Real Monk

October 23, 2014 by Belghast

Being Sickly Sucks

My life story is pretty simple, and can be pretty much summed up by my body repeatedly betraying me. I was born with a primary immune system issue, which is far from “boy in the bubble” territory, but mostly means I have a “lazy” immune system. Essentially all of my antibodies and defense mechanisms hang out saying “these guys aren’t so bad” until finally one of these foreign actors torches the place, and forces them to fight back and repel whatever bad things invaded my body. Throwing a sucker punch into the works I have some pretty severe asthma and allergies. More often than not what starts as allergies or an undefended against cold ends up triggering the asthma and locking me down.

Right now my lungs are betraying me and since yesterday afternoon have been struggling to breathe. I am doing the normal “take breathing treatments every few hours” thing, which is helping but just considerably slower than I would like it to. By the time I went to bed last night I was actually feeling almost human. Waking up this morning however my body seems to have rebelled against me once more. At this point I am uncertain if this is just a cold or something deeper, but in any case the initial treatment is the same, rest and medication. I am so ready for nanites to exist, I will gladly embrace our robot overlords if they bring with them the ability to fix my dumb malfunctioning body. Maybe I can have like cool cybernetic parts too… in the future I will totally be Adam Jensen.

Nightmare Tides

I was reminded yesterday by my friend RowanBlaze that it was the launch day for Nightmare Tides. I managed to get in for a bit but didn’t stick around terribly long for a number of reasons. The first was that the servers were really populated, like can’t engage a single mob without having a swarm of players on it with you. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means that the expansion as a whole seems to be pretty well received. The second was that after spending about thirty minutes doing “bag maintenance” and removing all of the old Storm Legion quests from my log, I honestly just felt drained. I was afterall not feeling amazing in the first place, and when you combine this with the fact that the once awesome build that Pkudude helped me find in the first place isn’t quite as awesome as it once was… I just lacked the oomph to go out onto the forums and find whatever it is that the latest leveling build happens to be.

The thing I did mess around with however is the new Minions system. So far I am a fan, other than I have no clue how to actually earn adventurine. The idea is that Minions are mini-pets with a purpose. My biggest disappoint is that not all mini-pets are minions… and not all minions are mini-pets. This aspect of the system is deeply confusing and they would have been far better serviced if they had simply done what Blizzard did and assign attributes to ALL existing mini-pets. That aside it is a fun little mini-game where you send your pet out on missions. The more missions you run the better xp it gains… and I would assume at some point you start to unlock more dangerous missions as a result. I got a nice jellyfish minion as part of my preorder (that also happens to double as an in game companion) but there are a number of basic mini-pets that you can pick up for 1 plat each. The other way you can obtain them is either by buying randomized packs… or by spending the Nightmare Tides zone currency on individual ones.

Admittedly I have been doing a pretty poor job of keeping track on the progress of this expansion. An awesome reader of mine hooked me up early on with beta access, and I spent quite a bit of time poking around the first zone. I did not however delve too deep into the systems because I wanted to spoil the experience as little as possible. Mostly I was trying to decide if I wanted to pre-order or not, and I enjoyed myself enough to throw some more money Trion’s way. Now I am trying to figure out all the things I happened to miss. If nothing else Minions are an interesting diversion to the leveling process as the user interface has made it super simple to hop in and out of the Minion screen, notifying you when your current missions is complete in the same place the dungeon finder tools show up. Since I am essentially done with Destiny for the time being, I might end up streaming some Nightmare Tides leveling this weekend during the Extra-Life marathon.

A Real Monk

The bulk of my evening I spent watching television and working on leveling my Pugilist in Final Fantasy XIV. I have this crazy goal of reaching 50 on all combat and crafting classes by the Spring 2015 release of Heavensward, and for some reason of late I have hung on working on the pugilist. I think in part because this is my last Disciple of War class to level… at least until next week when the Rogue/Ninja is released. For the longest time I just could not get into the pugilist, but lately I feel like I have finally gotten into the “rhythm” of playing it… or what everyone refers to as “the dance”. When I was working up my guide I declared Monk being less positional dependant than the Dragoon… and in a way this is absolutely true. Monk attacks will still land and qualify for the next step in a combo regardless of where you are in relation to the target. Dragoons on the other hand, the combo will not continue unless the attack was performed from the right position.

Saying that however leaves out the fact that a monk that is NOT doing positional attacks… is a monk that is completely ineffective and might as well just be auto attacking. There seems to be a massive damage output difference between keeping up all of your stacks and dancing around the target to just standing there and beating on it from one place. The thing I like the most about the monk so far is that the position attacks seem to be eaiser to land that for the dragoon. The Dragoon attacks have a lot of lead up time to the attack, and notoriously your tank is going to twitch the target at exactly the wrong moment… making it so that Heavy Thrust for example doesn’t land. With a monk this never seems to happen… or at the very least it is not as crippling of an event as you can still continue going to your next attack. If you miss a Heavy Thrust… you have to Heavy Thrust again… until finally one lands.

So I am happy to finally get what people like about playing the Monk. Last night I ran a really horrible Halatali for my daily roulette. If you are a Gladiator tank out there, please for the love of god do not use Riot Blade. We tried to explain to this tank three for four times exactly what he needed to do to hold aggro. However he almost willfully ignored us. At one point I actually voted to abandon the party after one of our dps bailed on us. Unfortunately the NEW dps didn’t understand why we were trying to abandon party and voted it down. After that I ran a few instances of Totorak and a few of Haukke after I graduated up into that dungeon. Finally near the end of the night I dinged 30 and was able to complete my monk quest. Now I am no longer a pugilist but a proper monk, and finally have some decent AOE capabilities. Actually looking forward to finishing leveling this job and getting it geared out.

#FFXIV #Rift #NightmareTides

All Saints Wake

October 21, 2014 by Belghast

Path of Madness

For the most part I have willfully ignored the crafting systems in Final Fantasy XIV. By all accounts it is a black hole that is easy to fall hopelessly into. The reason behind this is that pretty much every craft… relies on every other craft. Blacksmith might require something from the Goldsmith, or Leatherworking require something produced by Alchemists. The folks in my guild who have fallen deep into the system, have ultimately ended up leveling every single craft. As a result we have at least two “Omni-crafters” as they seem to be called in the community. Over the weekend while watching the live stream I started tiptoeing down this path by working on Mining. I figured raising Mining to 50 would be a good entry point, and needed to gather materials for pretty much everything else.

As of last night I am closing in on 30, and I figure that now is when it actually starts to become difficult to push forward. The positive is that the fruit of my labor actually sells really well. For a bit I was grinding ore nodes near camp drybone for Alumen, because I could sell it on the Market Board pretty much as soon as I posted it. This apparently is needed badly in leatherworking, and since it is crazy easy to get I won’t mind gathering it up again later as I actually need it. I am finding that you can actually level crafting professions pretty quickly using leves, but unfortunately you have a limited number of these available at any given time. Thankfully I started with a stack of 99, and am slowly depleting them as I push up mining.

Level All The Things

When not working on mining, I have been working on my pugilist. Since they announced that the Rogue and Ninja would be Dexterity based, I have been wanting to level the Monk so that I can get rid of all of the low level strength gear I have clogging up my bank. This is the last of the Disciple of War jobs I have left to level considering I have a level 50 Paladin, Warrior, Dragoon and Bard. Granted on the 28th this will no longer be the case with the release of the Rogue/Ninja but I can work on that eventually as well. I have this goal that I am setting out before me, to try and level all classes to 50 before the expansion hits next spring. Right now you can see on the little image to the right what I have left to level. My intent is not only to level the battle classes but also the Disciples of the Hand and of the Land.

Of course this is going to take a lot of effort and a lot of time, but I am just crazy enough to do it. As such I feel like I am mostly going to focus on this game. I will of course go off on tangents and play other games like I always have, but this is something I would really like to accomplish, so that I can be ready to push up any class I choose come expansion time since all of them are getting upgraded to level 60. Not only do I want to level all of my classes but I would like to gear out all of them as well. Right now I already have the relic starter for my White Mage, but it is my intent to get that started for the others as well. Not to mention as soon as Syrcus Tower unlocks from its single item per week limit, I expect to be in there a lot soaking up gear for various classes. Quite honestly the idea of leveling all of the battle classes doesn’t really phase me… I was going to do this anyways. What worries me is if I will lose my sanity trying to level all of the crafting classes. Mostly I just want to be self sufficient. I am tired of buying things off the Market Board… and even more so I am tired of having to inconvenience other players to craft things for me. In World of Warcraft I had max level crafters of ever type in Mists of Pandaria, and I really liked being able to take care of whatever I happened to need… and I really want to get to that position here.

All Saints’ Wake

Tis the season for Halloween events in games, and generally speaking these are my favorite events. By far the king of Halloween events is the Nights of the Dead over in Everquest 2. If you have never experienced that one, you should totally fire up an EQ2 account just to do it. My intent is to do it over the weekend in honor of the holiday proper. In Final Fantasy XIV, this will be my second year doing All Saints’ Wake which is their version of this venerable tradition. One of the cool things I am finding about FFXIV is that each year they change the events completely. This is both a positive and a negative. It is positive in that you have a whole new set of rewards to collect and brand new quests to keep you entertained. This is a negative in that you can no longer get the past years rewards, so players new to the game are at a disadvantage… at least from a nifty cosmetic baubles perspective.

However during the Fan Festival they announced that they planned on offering the previous years items on a limited time cash shop, allowing folks to buy the ones that they had missed. The two ghost costumes from last years event are among the first two items on the shop, and I believe they listed the price of each as $5 which is reasonable if you actually want that item badly. I personally missed the Christmas events, so I am more than likely going to use the cash shop to catch up on the previous years goodies. In any case… things are still attainable, but the individual quests can only be completed during a specific years event. This year the All Saints’ Wake runs from Monday, October 20, 2014 at 1:00 a.m. (PDT) to Monday, November 3, 2014 at 6:59 a.m. (PST). Which should give players plenty of time to get in and do the quest chain that starts in Old Gridania, but ends up winding through all of the cities finally finishing with a FATE that occurs in Uldah. One of the highlights of the event is that you get illusions cast on you by the NPCs, and among them are all of the various city leaders as well as Minfilia. You can see me above doing the manderville as the ever adorable Nanamo.

The rewards for doing the entire quest chain is the costume that the NPC is wearing in my first screenshot. It is a really cool looking traditional witch costume, which works perfectly for casters. These of course are cosmetic items and can be glamoured over pretty much any item. To get the other rewards you are going to have to do a little grinding. The FATE in Uldah is a parade, where you have to cast a seasonal cheer buff on Citizen NPCs that appear along the parade route. You have to avoid casting the buff on the Thaumaturges, or they will dispell your illusion. What makes this a little challenging is that the Citizen npcs run around in a specific area, and the buff is a ground targeted AOE. The purpose of the fate is to collect Demonic Cookies which are then used as currency to buy the last two rewards. Getting Gold in a fate earns you 6, silver 3, and bronze 1. The two purchased rewards are the Eerie Barding as pictured above, and the demonic Pumpkin Earrings. Both of which are really cool so it is worth the time spent doing the fate, to get both items you need a total of 16 cookies which really isn’t all that much “grinding” at least nothing compared to the various grinds for WoW Holiday items.