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Waiting for Headstart

May 28, 2015 by Belghast

Death or Double Space

This morning I am struggling to find purpose when it comes to sitting down and writing a blog post. I know as I struggle through this something will magically happen and words will appear on the page. For the Newbie Blogger Initiative folks out there, this sort of thing happens often. Last night for example I didn’t do much of anything that would inspire a story. I guess in truth that isn’t entirely true since I did record a Bel Folks Stuff podcast with Jaedia, but that is still being edited and hopefully will be released on Friday. After we finished that however I attempted to hang out on the sofa and craft, but before long found myself nodding off at the keyboard. I actually chose to do the responsible adult thing and head on to bed around 9 pm. As I said nothing terribly exciting to talk about.

I will say one of the more humorous things that came out in the twenty minutes or so before we actually started recording was that I am old. Jaedia was talking about editing my posts and that I double space after every line. This is an artifact of my age and something that is so deeply ingrained in me that I cannot stop doing it. Our editor over on MMO Games apparently thinks it is “adorable” that I double space, so I have transcended that line of being cute for my outdated ways. Ultimately I could write a search and replace to remove them… which would be simple enough but for whatever reason I find posts that double space after the end of each sentence easier to read. Throughout my entire educational career this was the “correct” way to do anything, and I have the style manuals to back me up on this one. The whole single space thing has come into vogue in the meantime. I feel like the “oxford comma” folks on this one that I am willing to die on this hill as I continue to double space.

Waiting for Headstart

For awhile now I knew that I would essentially be done with World of Warcraft on or around June 19th when the Heavensward head start happens. Admittedly I took a similar break from Final Fantasy XIV around the launch of Warlords of Draenor, or at the very least dialed back my Final Fantasy time to only a few times a week. So this is one of those things that I always knew would happen, but I realized yesterday that I should probably tell my raid leader that he essentially only has me for two weeks. I guess he knew it was coming and was extremely cool about it, but I still felt the need to actually put it in words. I was not however able to tell some of my other friends yesterday so my hope is to do that tonight when we work on Blackhand. I would love to be able to defeat Blackhand before I go. This would give me some nice closure for this phase of the expansion.

I think ultimately everyone involved with the guild knows that sooner or later I will run away again. I don’t exactly have a history of much longevity with World of Warcraft since the Cataclysm expansion. I will show up for a brief period of time, get bored and wander off again… only to be drawn back later due to some inexplicable urge to play. Right now I have just reached that place where there is nothing that I care to do in World of Warcraft. I’ve been there so many times, and it is not actually a lack of things to do. There are TONS of things that I could be doing, farming pets, farming mounts, clearing old world content, or working on achievements. The problem being that none of these things are actually driving me to log in. There are times I think this funk is essentially the side effect of me raiding multiple nights a week, and has very little to do with Warcraft itself. I think I reach a point where I simply need a break, so I wander off for a bit and do other things only to return later in a much more casual fashion.

Not Quite Done

Right now my plan is to dial back my World of Warcraft raiding time to zero as I work on leveling in Heavensward. I am still torn as to whether I will end up playing a Warrior or a Dark Knight. I am pretty damned attached to Warrior as far as classes go, but the whole leap+aoe opener thing that Dark Knights are supposedly going to have makes me super excited. I loved that aspect of the Jedi Guardian in Star Wars the Old Republic. Ultimately I will likely have both to 60 and geared up, but there is going to be some serious nostalgia drawing me back to Warrior. I have loved everything about the way that job feels, and I have to say my Malignant Mogaxe is reason enough to play one. I am honestly just pumped to wander around the new zones. Last week during the Live Letter watching Yoshi P play in the zones reminded me so much of the way Kunark felt. Granted it is much higher fidelity than the original Kunark, but I am talking more about the scale of the zones. Everything feels big and expansive and I am hoping that because of this the hard edges and zone walls will be more disguised.

In the past when I have withdrawn from World of Warcraft I have made a big deal about it. I have almost always done one of those “quitting” posts, but this time around I don’t feel the need to do that. In fact I have no plans on actually cancelling my account. I still plan on piddling around in the game, just on a much more casual level. Hell for all I know after my month or so long sabbatical I might be right back raiding the 6.2 content like normal. I do admit that I am super interested in the Hellfire Citadel raid that is just about to come out. I liked all the “fel” stuff from Burning Crusade, so if Tanaan Jungle is going to be an entire zone of that I might really enjoy it. I am just going to allow myself time to back away from the game as a whole so I can experience Heavensward to its fullest without the sense of bitterness towards Warcraft for pulling me away two nights a week. I really think this is for the best because if I force myself to raid WHILE playing Heavensward that is the surest way to get me to actually quit the raid entirely.

Flight is a Double Edged Sword

May 26, 2015 by Belghast

Skipping Content

Over the last few weeks a topic has sprung back up that I thought was long put to bed. I guess the lack of flight in World of Warcraft for the Warlords of Draenor expansion is still a divisive topic. I’ve said before that I support their decision to keep flight out of the expansion. My current malaise with Warcraft has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I can fly. So this morning I thought I would talk for a bit about the inclusion of flight in games and the strange ramifications it has on game play. Ultimately when you include flight players skip your content as simple as that. I can say this coming from a perspective of someone who has played several games with and without flight. Ultimately the first game I played with flight was City of Heroes, and it was both the most powerful “travel power” and also the most frustrating. Sure you could soar above the battlefield and move around relatively unscathed, but you did so at often times half the speed of any other travel power. The players that could fly however were able to terrain hack content, and often times find ways to level with absolutely impunity, but they did so giving up the ability to move about “quickly”.

When World of Warcraft first introduced flight it felt very similar. While you were technically going at 150% speed it felt like you were moving more slowly because in the air you lost your point of reference for how fast you were going. Additionally the flight masters still moved significantly faster than you were able to go. Even with the introduction of artisan flying at 280% flight speed you were still slightly slower than a flight master which I believe is roughly 300% speed. The problem is in both cases it changed the way I played the game. While I struggled to make the money to fly in Burning Crusade, by the time Wrath of the Lich King rolled around I had enough cash to spare to be able to outfit all of my alts with even Cold Weather Flying giving me the ability to fly while leveling. I found myself using the same sort of terrain hacking tricks that players did in City of Heroes. Instead of fighting my way to the entrance of something I simply swooped down from above and quickly poked into entrance tunnels to avoid fighting any adds. If I needed to kill a single quest mob, I would zoom straight into the hut they were located in with surgical precision avoiding the experience of clearing my way through a camp.

Flight is a Double Edged Sword

While you might be fine with this style of play it does not change the fact that you are ultimately playing the game in a way that was not intended by the developers. Someone spent a serious amount of time and resources designing the layout of the content you just leapt over the top of with your trust flying mount. Sure there are ways for developers to put counter measures in place that block you from terrain hacking the content using a flying mount, but that just adds to the problem. Instead of making new areas of the game they would be reworking areas to make sure that you cannot skip the important bits. This also destroys the ability to add content along the way like side quests and collectibles because if you are skipping directly to the end you will never actually see it. By having flight you are really handcuffing the tools that the content providers have to add to the mix, and changing the way they have to approach the content. The end result is likely a far less vibrant world.

If it were just Worlds of Warcraft I would think that maybe they simply integrated flight in a bad way. The problem being that I went through the same experience with Everquest II. Once I got the ability to fly I stopped experiencing content “as intended”. I started flying up to exactly the spot on my mini-map I needed to be at in order to complete the quests as quick as humanly possible. I pulled myself out of the game experience and essentially was robbed of the living and breathing world around me. With flight questing becomes about clearing dots off of your map as quickly as possible without spending any time really engaged in the content itself. I think in many ways this was why I enjoyed the questing experience of Warlords of Draenor so much more than I did the previous expansions. It actually forced me to spend time getting to know the layout of the zones, rather than zipping over the top of them. It is better to see the crags and crevices of the world… than a monstrosity of super pixilated trees that never quite mesh correctly.

Heavensward and Flight

As I look forwards at Heavensward I have to admit I am more than a little concerned that we are seeing the introduction of flying into Final Fantasy XIV. Firstly I hope they stand firm on the statement that there will be no flight in the original areas of the game. Secondly I hope they have thought through all of the ramifications that come with introducing a system that lets you skip over content. There has been a lot of talk about having to explore a region and learn how to harness the winds in that area before being able to fly there, and I am hoping this is actually a fairly drawn out process. This would mean that the player would need to have spent a significant amount of time in a given region before learning how to fly there. At one point Yoshi P in an earlier statement said something to the effect of having to completely explore an area before being able to learn flight. In both cases this sounds like maybe they understand the danger that integrating this system really is to a game. The problem is that flight is a Pandora’s box that cannot be easily shut after it has been opened.

Blizzard has learned this lesson and is trying to hold shut that lid with all their might. Other games like Rift have been carefully guarding their own box to make sure that no one opens it. It is with great reservation that I watch as Square Enix prepares to open their own box and see what happens. I say reservation, because this is the same development group that has managed to outthink its player base on a regular basis. They have essentially social engineered a community into treating each other with a modicum of civil decency rather than a race to the bottom to see who can behave the most horrifically. I have hope that they will be able to solve the problems that no company has to date with flight. I have hope that they will figure out a way to keep it from cheapening their content experiences. My hope is that they will make it so we are not completely alone in the sky. This is an expansion about doing battle with dragons… and dragons notoriously can fly. Maybe we will have to avoid encounters in the air just like we try and avoid encounters on the land as we traverse the world. We have roughly twenty four days before we find out, but I still stand by my stance that I am fine playing games without flying. I am even fine when a game decides that flight was a mistake and claws it back out of our grips.

Obsession with a Skillet

May 25, 2015 by Belghast

To Achieve Self Sufficiency

There are a lot of reasons why people craft in online games. Some start down the path because there is an item that can be created that is better than something that they can get through other means. Others start down the path to earn money, or be able to play the market. For me I have always been the type that crafts so that I don’t have to rely on anyone else. I have the most awesome guild in the world, and in it are a group of individuals that would drop whatever they happened to be doing to craft me anything that I might happen to need. The problem being I hate asking people for things. I am the type of person who would give away anything to anyone that might need it, but when it comes to me asking for something… it goes against every bone in my body to impose on someone else.

As a result I tend to level crafting so that I can make my own gems, brew my own potions and enchant my own gear. In World of Warcraft for example I have one of every single craft at maximum or at least near maximum level. This has allowed me to basically take care of my own needs and it makes me pretty happy. In Rift I have the same thing, in fact I spent a large chunk of my bonus currency when they converted to free to play unlocking all of the trade skills available on my main character. So self sufficiency is an important mission to me, and it is a bit strange that until last week I had not actually touched the crafting system in Final Fantasy XIV. In part I had watched lots of my friends fall into the black hole that I am now in and wanted to avoid doing so until I had at least leveled one of every combat role I might need.

Obsession with a Skillet

Like I wrote yesterday I have now left the territory of being able to purchase goods from a vendor and craft those up in rapid succession. You can get to fifteen in a given crafting profession relatively easily. Sure it takes a lot of time and getting to fifteen in all professions took me roughly two weeks of piddling at leveling off and on to get there. Now however it seems like the challenge is not the leveling portion but the acquisition of items to use in crafting. While my friends seem to think I am insane in doing this my strategy falls along the lines of picking a single item and then farming up three for four stacks of materials and mindlessly crafting a given item until I ding. This worked extremely well for leatherworking in that I simply gathered up enough aldgoat skin and allumen to be able to craft up four stacks of aldgoat leather. Sure it was pure tedium to craft that many items in a row, but I did so while watching television so it ultimately was not that bad. The crafting system while more involved than just pressing a button and crafting an entire stack of items, is simple enough that you can pretty much do it through muscle memory.

Last night I spent crafting mortar by combining stacks of limestone and fine sand, both of which I mined up myself. This pushed me from 15 in Alchemist to 21 over the course of the evening, watching Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, Veep and Last Week Tonight for a reference in just how long it takes to push a profession. After that I started work on Culinarian by crafting a bunch of salted fish. I purchased three stacks of fish from the market place because it was relatively cheap, and the table salt I crafted by combining rock salt and distilled water. I managed to make it to 16 last night before heading to bed, and as soon as I finish writing this blog post I will begin the journey once again. Ultimately I decided to push Alchemist and Culinarian first because they are ultimately the professions I like the least. The strange thing is… that each step I make towards 50 makes me happy because I am that much closer to being self sufficient. While honestly I am not to the point of being able to make all that many useful things… I know eventually I will get there.

To Lost Causes

At this point I have 25 days to push eight professions from 15ish to 50, and I don’t feel like there is a way in hell for me to make that work. Even if I took that month off from work and did nothing but craft full time… I don’t think I would be able to make it. Even knowing this fact… I am still going to try. If I can at least get to 40 by the time Heavensward launches I will be happy enough. There are so many other competing things that I would like to accomplish but right now I am as my friend put it past the “event horizon” and the only way out is through. Crafting has dug its hooks into me and I am currently obsessed with getting caught up. I wish I had not waited so long to make the push, but in the grand scheme of things I tend to only feel the drive to do something… when pushed on from external forces. The impending launch of Heavensward is the catalyst that makes me want to do this, and for that I guess I am thankful.

Right now I am so thoroughly amped about the launch of this expansion, more so than I have been since potentially the launch of Shadows of Luclin in Everquest. That was really my “first” expansion launch, and I was so unbelievably excited about what it might hold for me. Everything I have seen about Heavensward is making me feel that excited about it all. I think this expansion is going to be just as game changing, because the new content feels so vast. The scale of everything seems to be amplified, and that makes me so happy. The world building of Everquest embraced the feeling of everything on a large scale, and my hope is now that the team has proven their mettle with a smaller experience that we will see them branching out and building worlds on a bigger scale. My hope is that with the introduction of flight that we will see less hard edges in the world. I admit I am leery about flight because in both World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 it changed the way I played the game potentially for the worse. In both cases I skipped content because I could simply fly over the top of it… and I am hoping that Square can approach flight from a slightly different direction.

The Madness Continues

May 24, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #58 – Eight Is Enough?

This week we explore the age old question of podcasting.. just how many hosts can you have before a show descends into madness? As the title suggests we ended up with eight hosts on this weeks AggroChat and I think for the most part we exited on the other side with our sanity still in place… or what little we actually had of it to start. This week Ashgar and Kodra are both travelling, and as such I made plans to cover for them if they were unable to make it for the show. However because they are the consumate professionals that they are… they figured out a way to podcast remotely. This left me with the choice of either backing out on the folks I had arranged or just push forward into madness. Like usual I chose the path of madness.

This week we have quite possibly our longest show to date as we aske the question if Eight is Enough? This week we talk about Kodra’s trip to Canada, and his descent into Pathfinder Online. This spurs a discussion about the recent crop of MMO nostalgia titles and how they all somehow miss the boat on what made those early MMOs so interesting. Since all of us literally are playing Final Fantasy XIV we spend a good deal talking about our two groups working on turn nine of the Second Coil of Bahamut, as well as contrasting WoW and Final Fantasy raiding experiences. Grace talks about her experience leveling a ninja and how this game causes us to play things we didn’t think we would ever like playing. I talk about my complete and total embrace of the black hole that is the crafting system and how I have managed to push all classes to fifteen this week.

On top of this we talk Sword Art Online in both the Anime and Game forms. We talk a bit about how each of us is trying to wrap up our time in Shadowrun in preparation for next weeks show. We talk Mad Max Fury Road and to a lesser extent Orphan Black. Ashgar talks about his continued experiences with Radiant Historia, and Thalen ventures into Broken Age. Dallian and I talk about our experiences this week playing Witcher 3, and how the Hearthstone mobile app doesn’t work nearly as well as we would have hoped it would. Finally we wrap things up with some discussion about Moonrise and the impending steam early access. It was without a doubt one of the biggest shows we have recorded but also extremely enjoyable to participate in. It seems we somehow were able to juggle eight people on a show without complete chaos.

The Madness Continues

The insanity that is the Final Fantasy XIV crafting system continues. It was a rainy day here in Oklahoma so I spent most of it curled up on the couch watching television and banging away slowly on crafting. As of yesterday evening I had managed to push every single crafting profession to fifteen, which essentially signals the end of “easy mode” crafting. During those first levels everything you need can be purchased off of a vendor and it is simply an act of brute forcing your way through the levels. Now I begin a trek through the dark territory that involves copious farming of materials. Last night while podcasting I farmed up three stacks of allumen and aldgoat skin for the purpose of leveling leatherworking. I was not sure just how much Aldgoat Leather I would ultimately need to get through to 30 but I suspected it would be quite a bit. Towards the end of the podcast and while editing I crafted up the entire stack of materials, making some 410 Aldgoat leather and it pushed me from level 15 to level 21.

In theory if I can just find something like this to farm at each step of the way I might make it through the 50 levels of crafting with ease. It seems that in leatherworking at least there is an item like that every 10 levels that can be mass farmed and crafted up. The ones that I worry the most about are Alchemist and Cullinarian because they seem to be the most fiddly of the professions. Right now I am farming up Limestone and Fine Sand to make a ton of Mortar because I actually need some to hand off to Cylladora to craft a Moogle themed wallpaper for me, for my personal room. Yesterday in the mix of things that I ran I helped some guildies get through Good King Moggle Mog and managed to get the rare crafting material to drop. Who doesn’t want Moogle themed wallpaper for their personal room? Anyways I am finding the whole crafitng thing oddly soothing but it has absolutely consumed every last moment of my play time. Now that I am having to farm up materials however I am at least venturing out in to the world some.

Poking My Head Out

Yesterday was quite literally the first day I have done something other than craft for the last two weeks. Maybe it isn’t quite that drastic, but the majority of my time in game has been working on some craft or another. Yesterday I ran Haukke Manor with some guildies and got to play my rogue. I have to say that class is just fun to play in that the animations are amazing. While it is only 28 right now I am thinking it might be the next class that I push to 50. A huge chunk of this desire admittedly is the fact that I have a pair of Moogle themed daggers waiting for maximum level. Mog weapons make everything more enjoyable, as I am using the mogfork on my dragoon and mogaxe on my warrior. Other than Haukke I ran an expert with Grace and Tam, and then later that night ran the Battle at Big Keep and The Chrysallis with guildies. It was good to actually stretch my warrior muscles a bit after all of the crafting. I feel like at this point I have more than I could ever actually accomplish still to do before the launch of Heavensward. There are only twenty six days until the Heavensward head start, and there is no way in hell I am going to finish a lot of my side projects before then.

Quite literally I feel like I could take a month off and focus on nothing but Final Fantasy XIV and still have things that are left unfinished before the expansion. Right now it seems I have opposite problems between Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft. In Warcraft there is nothing I really want to do, but in Final Fantasy I have what feels like dozens of competing desires. It is actually hard getting used to the notion that I will be going into this expansion with a lot of unfinished baggage, but I guess in the grand scheme of things that gives me reason to keep poking my head back in on the old world. The things that I absolutely want to finish before Heavensward is that I want to complete the Post Moogle storyline. I feel like I really just need a good afternoon to work through all of that content, so I am wondering if maybe that is going to be my mission on Monday. Put on Orphan Black on the television and quest my way through to one of the coolest hats in any game. Even writing this… I am realizing just how much content there is in this game yet to do.