final fantasy xiv

Magic Blue Smoke

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Good Morning Friends. This is going to be a bit of a light spoiler day because yesterday I caught up with the last few Marvel movies that I had not seen. First I finally got around to watching Black Panther Wakanda Forever. I was not entirely certain how a film without Chadwick Boseman would go, but in the grand scheme of things I think it went pretty great. I’ve always liked Shuri, but what I really liked was the quirky scientist character she was allowed to be. Shuri as Panther was also enjoyable but did not feel as uniquely “her” for lack of a better term. I thought overall the film was enjoyable but lacked the clear focus that the first film had. I think that is the problem with the current crop of Marvel films… they feel like they don’t quite know what exactly they are building towards. The highlight of the film for me was further world-building and seeing both Namor and Talokan.

Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania was another big world-building movie bringing us finally to the Quantum Realm. Again I think that the movie itself was fun, but lacked a lot of the focus that the earlier outings had. It sorta felt like a D&D campaign where your GM just kept throwing new faces and locations at you without giving you much in the way of the backstory behind any of them. We know Kang is a big bad because we have been told over and over that he is a big bad, but it feels like it isn’t something that has necessarily been earned. For Thanos, we saw the effects of him long before he took the field, so, as a result, he was a bad guy that we fully grasped and respected without having to keep explicitly stating that “this dude is really powerful and bad”. I enjoyed the spectacle of the movie and the settings… but it doesn’t feel like we got enough time with any of it to really matter before booping us back to reality again.

In electronics work, there is a term called “Magic Blue Smoke” that happens when you phenomenally screw something up. There are usually some sparks, the air is filled with the smell of ozone, and a little puff of blueish-grey smoke billows up from the object. After this point, it is completely dead and no amount of poking and prodding is going to bring it back from the dead without replacing some major components. I feel like the Magic Blue Smoke has left the Marvel projects, and while they are interesting spectacles they are missing both the core focus that the pre-endgame sequence had and also missing a lot of the heart. I think this is what happens when you truly stick the landing and complete the story in a largely satisfying fashion, and anything more just ends up cheapening the experience. I’ve felt this a few times before with franchises, and I think Marvel as far as movies go is “done”. I still enjoy them for what they are, but the magic is gone and I am uncertain it will ever truly come back.

I feel similarly about Final Fantasy XIV and how Endwalker was the extremely satisfying conclusion to a ten-year journey. I’ve struggled with returning to the game because I no longer have that narrative driving me forward and making me want to crave more knowledge. FFXIV is still a technically competent game and I am sure will keep producing interesting content, but the journey I was on has finished. I am uncertain what the next journey is going to look like, but they will need to hook me in the same way they did with A Realm Reborn in order to get me to commit to following the next one. I’ve reached a level of maturity in gaming to understand that is what is happening, and not that the game is somehow “worse”. In fact the game is probably in the best state it has ever been in, but the adventure I was on has finished.

Looking back with wisdom… I think this is ultimately what caused me to peel away from World of Warcraft. At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the story had reached a conclusion and we had dealt with all of the “big bads” left over from the Warcraft RTS lineage. I know I struggled with Cataclysm but was never entirely certain WHY I struggled with it so hard. It was an expansion of changing the base world and lacked the big adventure aspect of the other expansions of going someplace we had never gone before. More than that however it featured a central story arc that I did not care about in the least. I’ve never much cared about the Dragon storyline and Deathwing just seemed like a convenient reason to revamp some of the older zones that were showing age. Arthas and Illidan were what kept moving me forward into new content, and with them forcibly retired at the hands of the raiding players… it felt like I had reached the logical conclusion of the game.

I think we’ve reached this point at least with Marvel where the best stuff is happening on the smaller screens. Loki, Wandavision, Werewolf by Night, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and event the somewhat maligned Moon Knight are doing extremely interesting things. The movies just seem to lack the same spirit and creativity that is being played out in short-run series form on Disney Plus. I mean Star Wars has also suffered from this problem for quite a while where the Dave Filoni-verse represented the best and brightest of what was available for that setting, and the movies were hollow shells. Disney will always chase big box office gold, but I think maybe that era is over. I find myself enjoying the more focused and personal stories of the series. For a while in the Marvel films I have been waiting for another conflict to erupt that feels as good as the sequence that ultimately ended with End Game, but I am no longer certain it is coming. I think maybe that was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and now that it is concluded the entire concept of what a “Marvel Movie” is needs to change.

I’ve seen a growing dissatisfaction on social media for awhile surrounding the Marvel releases, so I am pretty certain I am not alone in thinking the original focus of the films is finished. I am not sad that I watched either the second Black Panther film of Quantumania, but neither made me necessarily excited for what is to come. I am sure I will keep watching these films in the future when they come to streaming media, but I think I am done with the “going to the theater” phase of the Marvel cinematic experience. I am way more excited about what is happening on the small screen than anything I know coming to the big one.

AggroChat #423 – Why Is Bel Laughing?

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

Tonight we have a bit of a short show as we had to punt several topics to next week since Tam and Thalen were out.  Bel talks about his recent adventures since the beginning of the year with the Library system and the Libby App.  From there Ash shares his experience using Character Questionnaires to drive character development in a tabletop pen-and-paper game.  Kodra talks about streaming a day of Celeste Strawberry Jam and his experiences playing the game with a pillowcase on his head.  Bel talks about what happens when a large Mastodon instance closes and over 17,000 folks have to relocate at once.  Bel also talks about his experiences helping to administrate Gamepad.club. Finally, we talk about times when games decided to break their world or remove large chunks of content and why it didn’t work.

Topics Discussed

  • Adventures with the Library System
    • Bel gets a Library Card
    • The Libby App
    • Gideon the Ninth / Harrow the Ninth
    • The Last Watch
    • Catching up with Dresden
  • Character Questionnaires are Amazing
    • Using a questionnaire to help build character development in tabletop games.
  • Celeste Strawberry Jam
    • Beginner Lobby
    • Kodra plays with a Pillowcase on their Head
  • The Death of an Instance
    • What happens when a large Mastodon Instance closes
    • Bel helping admin Gamepad.club
  • Breaking the World Does Not Work
    • Guild Wars 2 Living World Season 1
    • World of Warcraft Cataclysm
    • Evequest 1 to Everquest 2
    • Destiny 2 Removing Content
    • FFXIV ARR did Work However

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Yup Books and Games

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One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.

One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.

I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.

I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.

What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.

All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.

With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.

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!