final fantasy xiv Archives - Page 22 of 81

Leaving the Steppes

June 22, 2017 by Belghast

The pool guys did in fact come out and power wash the pool yesterday and now we are playing babysit the water hose. It takes an excessively long time to fill up a pool with a single water hose. In truth I am questioning if it will be done by this evening… and then we have that awkward problem of do we leave it running tonight with the fear that it might overflow? As far as gaming time went I very obviously spent some more time in Stormblood. First I have to tell you that I unequivocally love this expansion. I can’t really get into all the reasons why without a whole bucket load of spoilers but suffice to say I am super impressed with what they have done and where they are going. Heavensward was this deep dive into the culture of the Ishgardians… and for the most part except for a few notable exceptions they were assholes. This expansion before launch seemed like it would be a similar exploration of Doma and Ala Mhigo… but was I was not expecting was this wonderful journey through the culture of the Raen and Xaela Au’Ra. This is really making me hope that in future expansions they might explore the culture of the Roegadyn or the Lalafel… because really I want to know why the Lala are like the most prolific race in Eorzea. If there is someone pulling the strings… 99.9% of the time it is going to be a Lalafel.

As far as my further journeys in Stormblood, I have now made it through the third dungeon which we ran as soon as we could get enough people around to do it last night. I also ran the second dungeon again for Neph and the first trial, which the more I am exposed to it the more I like it. There are so many cool elements and mechanics going on there that I am really looking forward to learning the fight on Extreme mode. I have no clue how far away the fourth dungeon is, but I have more or less finished up in the Steppes and am returning to Yanxia for what I am assuming is going to uncover the back half of that zone. Every single bit of the story has been good, and it is making me bummed that I am currently story locked until I figure out a way to ding 67. I am roughly a quarter of a level from dinging so I have a handful of options… but the one I am probably going to take is to run back and start doing side quests in the Steppes until I can push on through. Whatever lead on the content I did have has now evaporated once I went back to following the MSQ only. In theory tonight I will spend some time collecting Aether Currents so I can fly in a third zone, and doing side quests for probably the Mol.

The Steppes of Azim might be my favorite zone in all of Final Fantasy XIV. I always seem to go for the Nagrand like zones in games, the big flowing grasslands perforated by rocky outcroppings. I thought the Heavensward zones were physically imposing, but the Stormblood zones overall feel much larger in size and scope. I am still behind as the highest progressed finished dungeon four last night, and I am just barely on the other side of the third dungeon. I have however passed a lot of other players like Neph and Ash, but still feel like I am lagging from where I would like to be. I figure this is going to be a week and a half in total to get to 70 and start gearing up for the end game proper, or in my case… start leveling the Samurai. I have what I think are several Warrior quests to do so I might simply focus on doing those at the beginning of the night and see where that gets me level wise.

Underwater Adventures

June 20, 2017 by Belghast

I feel like I have always been a bit weird when it comes to MMOs. I like underwater content… pending I don’t have to care about breathing. I took the Vashjir path in World of Warcraft and I enjoyed for the most part the underwater sections of the Nightmare Tide expansion in Rift. So it is little surprise that I am really enjoying the underwater sections of Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. I feel like they made a strong decision not to force us to screw with breath bars, and I love that they implemented surface swimming in lots of old world areas like Costa Del Sol. The real part that I loving is the fact that there are cities in giant bubbles on the ocean floor, and while sure they couldn’t help but make a slight Gungan reference during one of the quests about speeding us on our way… overall I am loving it. More than anything I feel really happy to be in love again with Final Fantasy. The rough few days at the start of this expansion really made me second guess whether or not I would actually get that magic back. For awhile now FFXIV has been a game I felt like I should play… but just wasn’t into. I would log in and go over to the Gold Saucer to play my daily scratch off cards… but then quickly log right back out. I has this hope that when the headstart began we would all get enthralled in the game once more and start playing it as our primary MMO. However in those first few days when it seemed like everything was shit, and we couldn’t move forward the MSQ… I was starting to doubt myself. I am thankful that I was not in fact wrong and I am setting dozens of happy people gobbling up content in the free company every night.

The only negative is however… that I am functionally one full day behind everyone else. That would not seem like much but it feels like I am habitually one full zone behind the rest of the crowd… or at least the folks I traditionally run dungeons with. Now because of the first timers bonus everyone is more than happy to help someone through a dungeon. Last night Void needed Xelphatol one of the 3.4 dungeons and I managed to get a sizable chunk of experience at level 63, so doing any dungeon content with the bonus is really worth it. The biggest problem I have is that I see all of the (!) icons and feel like I need to do them all. I remember going through the same problem with Heavensward and it taking one full zone before I finally realized that I should probably not do all of them and instead just focus down on the main story quest line. Now that I have shifted to a MSQ and unlock only approach I am starting to gain ground once more. At this very moment my MSQ is gated by the first Primal encounter, but I hit it at around 10:30 last night… and just didn’t have it in me to attempt to pull together a group to get it done. Today however once I get time I will probably do just that and get rolling again. All in all I am loving the expansion, and in truth it feels more “Final Fantasy” than FFXIV has at any point because we finally have a real danger in the form of the Garlean Empire. We had a few spats with them in A Realm Reborn, but that was functionally finished the moment we cleared the launch content… and while there has been a flirtation that more was to come we had not really seen it until the precursors leading up to Stormblood. Fighting against an Evil Empire is the core of the best Final Fantasy experiences for me, and I am super happy to finally have that feeling back in FFXIV.

Raubhangeddon Over

June 19, 2017 by Belghast

Having a birthday on the internet is a really weird thing. By the time I woke up yesterday morning in our hotel room I already had a flood of messages from folks. I cannot put into words the warm fuzzies I got seeing that. I attempted to keep up with thanking everyone individually but as we started roaming around Kansas City yesterday I completely lost track of where I was in the mix. By the end of the day it was just a daunting task to try and sort out who I had thanked and who I had not. By the time we made it home I was completely drained and crashed pretty hard. So if I did not manage to thank you individually I apologize and please know that every single person meant the world to me. As far as our trip… it was really enjoyable. Once again we did our thing which is to hit every single Half Priced Books store in the metro, along with a few other stops like Micro Center and IKEA… all things we don’t have in Tulsa. This is the second year in a row we have done this, and it was largely born out of the fact that getting my wife home after the AP reading turned into a very unpredictable experience. Functionally when the shindig lets out they are trying to fly a surge of 4000 or so people out of a tiny little airport. It is roughly a four hour drive from Tulsa to Kansas City with a bunch of variables that could speed it up or slow it down. The first year she was doing the AP grading there, she ended up getting flown to Dallas and then having a long layover there so that it took roughly 8 hours for her to get home. Admittedly… me driving up to get her and driving back home is still 8 hours…. but at least by spending the night it is chopped up in a few segments and lets us go do some stuff in this case Saturday night and Sunday morning. I always hate it when my birthday lands on Father’s Day because it also means everything is madness. Micro Center is normally a fun experience, but in this case there were workers stationed every few feet and just walking around the store I wound up getting asked 8 times if they could help me. I am not exactly sure why I find this so offensive… but I wish there was a system where you could get a sticker from the first person you meet that says “leave me the fuck alone”.

The other big happening of the weekend was the Stormblood launch, and in some ways it went really smoothly… and in other ways it went tragically wrong. Please note that I love Square Enix and the Final Fantasy XIV team… but you are going to get some salt from me on this post. On Friday the head start began, which is an event only available to folks who had pre-ordered the game prior to a certain point. This is really key because it is a fixed group of people, pulled from a known quantity of folks who plunked down money and purchased your game ahead of time. In order to get into Headstart it means that you needed to register a code that was sent to you by Square Enix via email with the Mogstation. Over the years there have been a number of events where the team has says that they just did not expect the numbers… namely at the relaunch of A Realm Reborn and I at least partially gave them the benefit of the doubt in this statement. However with the launch of a brand new expansion for a game with a known set of players… and a known set of preorders… that should have given them a head start on trying to figure out how much server throughput they needed for the launch. They failed this miserably and for all of Friday and all of Saturday… everyone was stuck on the same quest that required the creation of a solo instance. That means every player in a given Data Center is fighting for what is apparently a very limited number of slots available for running this quest. The result was a mixture of reactions from the players… and the creation of lines as folks attempted to go about this quest in an orderly fashion. Final Fantasy XIV is literally the only place you would ever see this solution… and it didn’t take long even here before it broke down. Granted the line concept was some superstitious nonsense given that you were not just competing against your fellow servermates… but also everyone else in the Aether data center in my case. So while Cactuar isn’t a massive server… it is large enough, but becomes completely drowned out by the size of the player base of Balmung and Gilgamesh which share the same server cluster.

Yesterday during the day however at some point they put in a fix and remedied the situation, so last night in my sleepy state I attempted to move forward only to be claimed by sleep and a server disconnect in the middle of a lengthy cut scene. This morning I popped in with every intent of taking a few screenshots and wound up playing for about an hour popping around and doing quests. I am hoping we are through the worst of the launch, but I expect another influx of players on Tuesday when the game releases in stores. Hopefully they have learned their lessons and have spare resources ready to stand up if they run into more problems. In the era of virtualized servers, leased datacenter space, and all manner of licensing options… it feels like there is little excuse not to have some resources waiting in the wings to stand up at the first sign of trouble. I have a feeling there were a lot of design decisions on the infrastructure side that maybe don’t scale terribly well in modern computing terms. The game is doing some odd things, like it came out during one of the E3 discussions that every time you move in the server… your entire player object is passed around including your inventory and armory chest as part of one huge object. This came up when they talked about not wanting to expand out inventory space too much because it might crash the server in passing around too big of an object. This just seems like a weird way of going about things, and one susceptible to memory hacks or at least rollbacks from crashes. At this point I just need to play catch up because I have Free Company members that are already 66 or higher.

Leave the Game Better

May 23, 2017 by Belghast

For real, if you wanna see more positivity in our WoW community, take steps! Take action! Be that change.

— Pandagosa 💙 (@Sammthrax) May 23, 2017

Last night as I was winding down for the evening I ended up getting pulled into a discussion about positivity and the Warcraft community. I’ve long been a proponent of doing whatever I can to try and make MMO gaming environments better for other players. I am what I would call a “world tank” meaning that I permanently run around in tanky stance while questing and often times go out of my way to “tank” things that don’t even matter to me. If I am riding through a zone and I see a squishy player fighting a boss mob… then nine times out of ten I am going to hop off my mount and charge over to help out. I don’t even care about factional boundaries here, and I am one of those players that is just as likely to help out the Horde as I am the Alliance when it comes to taking the threat onto myself and letting people kill their monsters in peace. I’ve been graced with a class that simply cannot die under most circumstances… and I sort of feel like it is my duty to help other people out whenever I can. I cannot count the number of times I have been doing a quest and had someone roll up late… and then continued to pull packs of elites just to make sure they finished their quest. They always seem sorta surprised when I send them a tell asking them “how many more” they need for the quest. Growing up I was in scouting, and even managed to get my Eagle… and there was a rule of camping that went a little something like “leave the campsite in as good of condition if not better”. I sort of have this same view towards MMOs or the world in general honestly… if I can improve the world by my presence I am going to shoot for that.

Prior to the launch of Legion, I had gotten used to some of the cultural norms in Final Fantasy XIV. Namely people talk during dungeon runs… at least enough to give a friendly introduction at the beginning and at the end. In part this is because there is a system in place over there that allows you to give a single commendation each run, to whatever player for whatever criteria you feel fit the situation. I give them out for all sorts of reasons… glorious outfits, extremely competent dps, or just someone being jovial and friendly. In part this friendly atmosphere exists… because they reward you being nice to other players, and will straight up ban you for talking about damage meters in game. It creates this weird bubble where things don’t work there the way they work in any other MMO community. Knowing this… with the launch of Legion and as we started queuing up for content… I started trying to apply the same logic the World of Warcraft and shockingly more often than not it worked. Just breaking the ice at the beginning of a run with a “Hey Folks!” seemed to go an awfully long way in improving the experience as a whole. I noticed my usual silent runs become perforated with discussion, as it was like one person saying something broke down whatever dam was there preventing conversation.

Another thing I have done this expansion cycle that seems to have helped my own attitude is that I am just not dissecting the game and tearing it apart like I used to. I am trying really hard to just take things at face value, and more often than not completely ignore the patch note cycle until I am ready for something. Sure this means I have not exactly been on top of the ball on a lot of things… like Broken Shore, and have been doing things in a grossly inefficient manner. However it also means that I am not exposing myself to a lot of external stimuli until I am actually ready to consume it. More than this however… I just haven’t shared my doubts publicly because I haven’t felt the need to. A few weeks into the Nighthold raid cycle I disappeared from the game, and faded away quietly. I just felt like I wasn’t enjoying myself nearly as much as I was when doing other things. So I simply walked away and did other things for awhile. There was a moment where I could make a clean break, and my raid had a tank to step in and take over for me. In the past I would have felt the need to explain to my readers why I did this. Instead I just left and eventually put some thoughts together in my big “regularly playing” post, but even that probably wasn’t needed other than I was catching up my sidebar… which is already completely out of date again. However because I didn’t really make a big deal about it… it was so much easier to just slide back into the game a few months later when the mood hit me again.

While it might sound odd, I think for me not writing about World of Warcraft and its failings… helped me to feel better about the game for the long term. It also kept some negative vibes out of the community. Sure I currently have a laundry list of things that bug me about the game, but I have come to a point of acceptance that World of Warcraft will never actually be the “one true game” for me. I know that I will keep venturing off to play other games because it is in my nature, and that it will still feel enjoyable to keep coming back and revisiting all of my friends in the WoW. In part this is why I am so excited that Destiny 2 is now going to be entering this same realm. For well over a decade I have cultivated a community in the Blizzard games, and it seems like it is going to be awesome to be able to take all of these people with me into another love of mine when it launches on the PC. While I would love to see Blizzard as a company make an attempt to instill a positive attitude in its players by introducing systems that reward the good apples… more than systems that punish the bad, I largely accept that it is going to be up to me and players like me to be the agent of change in the world. I know we all keep returning to the MMO space to decompress from our days out in the real world… but there is nothing keeping us from being a little nicer to one another in our adopted second home. Games tend to develop a culture of support or toxicity… and maybe I am naive but I feel like a game can change. I feel like we can slowly erase the toxic nature that has developed over the years and put back in its place one that is largely supporting of others. Now this doesn’t just apply to WoW, but is I think an admirable goal in any game you play.