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Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 1

March 31, 2015March 31, 2015 by Belghast

A few days ago my good friend Rowanblaze tagged me in his post about Developer Appreciation Week 2015. To the best of my knowledge this event was actually started by Scarybooster, but I cannot for the life of me remember if I actually got a post in while it was going on. If not then this is something I absolutely need to remedy. This morning as a result my post is going to be a little contorted but I really enjoyed the format from Ravanel of Ravalation… so I am rolling with that. Thus begins my super contorted and rambling Developer Appreciation Week post.

Funcom Games – The Secret World Team

This game is absolutely phenomenal. I was lucky enough to get on board early and do one of the lifetime subscriptions and I have to say I have never once questioned that investment. Knowing that it is always waiting there for me to return to the world of the Templars and the Illuminati… makes me happy inside. While there are a lot of interesting things about the game, the part that always floors me is just how well written the quests are in this game, and how well the whole cinematic feel of them works. I greatly prefer silent protagonist games, because they allow me to substitute my own inner dialog into the scenes. What is awesome about TSW is they manage to do this is a way so that the silence feels like an answer. I desperately need to poke my head back in and try out the new combat changes, because the nightmare level content was ultimately what crushed the hopes of my group. From what I hear a lot of these rough spots have been ironed out.

Square Enix – Final Fantasy XIV Team

I am constantly amazed at just how damned good this game really is. Every detail of the game has a loving care applied to it. Once again it is the storyline that first sold me on the game. It gave me a series of characters that felt like my party in a traditional Final Fantasy game… and then made me care about each and every one of them.. yes even Thancred. What has kept me coming back however is just how good their content is, and how frequent their updates are. I’ve heard that the team is only around fifteen people… and that they are doing both the live patches and expansion development at the same time. I am floored that they can manage to crank out a new patch every month, and major patch every few months… all the while working on a brand new expansion? The way they manage to make content remain relevant to the players is pure magic, because I really enjoy running low level content with friends… and making it feel like it matters again. Last night they patched in the 2.55 content… and I am completely amped to log in and play it.

Turbine – Lord of the Rings Online Team

If there was a list of games that I wish I played more of, Lord of the Rings Online would be near the top. There is so much for me to enjoy in the game, even not factoring in the fact that I love the franchise behind it. The gameplay is a bit of a throwback to an earlier era, and more than anything it has always reminded me a bit of a modern updated Dark Age of Camelot. That said the part that has always stood out for me is just how well they have managed to create the world of Middle Earth… everything is how I had imagined it while reading the novels. There are so many moments like the above picture where I reach some fabled destination and I have to just stop and sit in awe that I am in this or that place. Another strange thing that I love about this game are the horses. They have the absolute best horse movement of any game. As you are moving around the horse feels right, which adds so much to the feeling that you are in a living breathing world… and not just a themepark.

Trion Worlds – Rift Team

This was the game that finally came along and successfully dislodged me after playing seven years of World of Warcraft, and that in itself is no small feat. What makes me love the game however is its class system. I love being able to mix and match bits and pieces of class trees to make something unique that does exactly what I want it to do. Especially from a tanking front, this game will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first game to give me both charge and deathgrip in the same build. The raid content was absolutely insane, and I greatly enjoyed the times I was able to experience it. This is one of those games that I boot up every few weeks to poke my head in, especially now that it is free to play. I’ve spent a lot of its four year history with an active subscription, and there is just something about the world that keeps me coming back. With the impending release of the new Wardrobe system I am looking forward to popping back in and playing some more. Trion was the first team to make me believe that a company could keep a monthly content release schedule, and through it all they have created some very impressive work.

SOE/Daybreak – Everquest II Team

Everquest II for me is a tale of the path not taken. With EQ2 and WoW releasing at the same time, some of my friends went to EQ2, and I and the majority of my friends went to WoW. That said this has been one of those games that I keep coming back to so that I can re-experience this ball of nostalgia that is Norrath. This game has hands down the best world building of any game on the market. I love the world of Norrath 2.0 with all its detail and quirkyness. Sure it is not exactly how I remember it from the original Everquest, but that is part of the charm for me. Every now and then you will be knee deep in a dungeon, and you will see some little call back that makes you realize “oh my god this is that place” that you recall from your memory, changed over time and presented in so much higher fidelity. While I have issues with the combat system and likely always will… this is a game that I cannot seem to keep myself away from for long. Even today EQ2 is a sort of comfort food for me… where I will hang out inside and vege out on the couch dusting off my Shadow Knight and exploring Norrath with new eyes.

To Be Continued…

I feel like I have so many developers that I want to show my appreciation for… that I had to break these up into multiple posts. Tune in tomorrow as I talk about several more developers. Hopefully this will cause your own upwelling of nostalgia and end up with you posting your own thoughts in blog form. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to use my comment space for that same mission. There is so much negativity out there, that I believe completely in this notion of the Developer Appreciation Week. Reach out and show your appreciation to those games you love.

Moggle Mog Extreme

March 30, 2015 by Belghast

Bowling Aftermath

It feels like I have been on this sequence of strange posts lately, so this morning I am trying to get back to the normal swing of things. This weekend was spent mostly recovering from Friday night, and not in the way that you might think. We had a “team bonding” outing with my co-workers to go bowling, and it had been about a decade since I had last attempted to hurl a large marble down a wooden plank. We bowled three games, and it feels like that was one too many for me. The biggest issue I had was the fact that the shoes were absolutely awful. At some point they changed from what I knew as the standard bowling shoes to these strange velcro things that I never could get to fit well at all. I have a size 13 shoe, but my foot is not all that terribly wide at least not anymore.

I am not sure if they handed me a wide width or if they just make them insanely wide to accommodate lots of different feet but in any case my foot was sliding around like crazy in them. Normally I would be able to fiddle with the laces to get it tight enough to work for me. However the hook and eye velcro strap mess just would not synch terribly tightly. Leaving my foot sliding around in the shoe most of the night. At the end of the evening I had what felt like a stone bruise and it still hurts to flex my toes. Other than that the evening was rather enjoyable, apart from the fact that I have zero skill at bowling these days. The absolute best game for me was around 100, and I am not sure if I got any strikes. The thing I did learn is that I apparently throw the ball exceptionally hard. The lanes had a miles per hour readout saying how hard you threw each ball, and most of my coworkers were in the sedate range of 10-13 mph. The hardest I saw from me was 22.5 mph, and the slowest about 18 mph… apparently I was angry at the lanes.

Moggle Mog Extreme

From an accomplishment standpoint, the highlight of my weekend is definitely Saturday night before the podcast when we pulled together a raid. One of the fights that we held in almost a state of reverence is Good King Moggle Mog Extreme. It seemed like the pinnacle of difficult fights because it was so different from the normal version. Anytime we brought the fight up, it was quickly ushered away as being too much of a pain in the ass for us to try. Maybe it is the progress in turn 9, or maybe it is something else… but when it was brought up this weekend there was more of a chorus of “might as well” than anything. What makes Moggle Mog extreme so difficult is that you have a very limited window to perform the fight. At roughly 90% Mog stops taking damage from player attacks. Instead when any member of his “court” of Moggles dies, he saps his own life healing all Moggles to full health.

From a functional standpoint this means that you need to drop the health of every single Moggle before finally finishing one off. Two make this more complicated there is a tank swap mechanic, and at certain points during the fight the White and Black Mages will cast a spell that needs to be interrupted by dealing a damage to them. You get three rounds to lower Mog’s health, before he starts channeling Ultima, which will wipe the entire raid if it casts. Mog is also immune to any damage while any member of his Moogle court is alive. This means that on the final turn you have to make sure every single Moogle is down low enough to be able to finish them off in a few hits, and jump straight on the boss and burn like hell. I am not sure if it was on our third or fourth attempt but we managed to get everything to work just right and finished the fight. It feels extremely good to have beaten a fight that all of us had declared was “complete bullshit”.

Appleanche

I spent most of the rest of my in game time alternating between two activities… World of Darkness and Botany. In World of Darkness I have once again had zero luck in getting one of the two pieces of Dragoon loot that I need to drop. Right now I am down to the boots that drop from the very first boss, and the chestpiece that drops from the second boss. This makes for some demoralizing gameplay late in the instance when I know I have zero hope of getting anything cool apart from maybe a puff of darkness minion. Sunday is a notoriously bad day for running raids in any game, but it seems like this is doubly the case in Final Fantasy XIV. The worst was a dungeon where we ended up having to fight the Cloud of Darkness boss five times before we finally did things well enough to win and get our loot. That run was fraught with other issues however so it was not a huge surprise that we were failing at the end of the raid. I spent more than my fair amount of time tanking adds a a Dragoon. Hopefully I can get in tonight and maybe just maybe pick up a chest piece before the raid.

Saturday during the podcast and last night during the 90 minute season finale for The Walking Dead I worked on leveling Botany. My goal with trade skills thus far has been to brute force my way to 25 without the assistance of leves, while I have my recruit a friend helm experience bonus. Once I hit 25 I start working on leves allowing me to shoot up quickly from that point on. During the podcast I managed to hit 25, and then last night I started working on leves in the South Shroud area. Botany has one of the best named leves I have encountered called Appleanche where you are asked to pick a bunch of Sprite Apples from this grove within a set amount of time. Not sure why but that quest just makes me happy, and overall there is something amazingly calming about harvesting flowers and chopping down trees in this game. After a few hours of Botany I found it rather easy to get to sleep last night, so maybe that is something I should indulge at the tail end of the night every night.

Bel Propaganda

March 25, 2015 by Belghast

Guild Infrastructure

It has been an insane ride with our free company. It is like the floodgates have opened and folks are now recruiting themselves. More truthfully it seems that when someone gets a foothold in our free company, they tend to recruit their friends to join it as well. As a result some strange stuff is happening, like last night it was pointed out that apparently we are now ranked 15th on our realm and climbing as far as activity goes. That is apparently up from 70th on our realm… which is absolutely insane, needless to say we are a guild on the move apparently. What is awesome about this is just how damned friendly everyone is. Each time a new infusion of people join the guild there is so much happiness in guild chat, with everyone welcoming the new players. My biggest hope is that we can keep this general sense of joy going forward. What is even more awesome is just how many of the new people are perfectly comfortable hanging out with us on voice chat each night. We are now contemplating the very real possibility of being able to field multiple serious 8 man groups at the same time, which a few months ago would have seemed crazy.

As a result of all of this… Tam and I had a discussion yesterday in which we released we were getting far too large to not have any guild infrastructure. When it was just a handful of us that were in constant communication… it worked more or less to not have any semblance of a guild website. However now that we have all of these new people we are having to create something resembling a modern guild. When we came back in July I stubbed out a site on Anook but we never really populated it with anything. As of yesterday this is changing, and I hope that we can get the rest of our guild to sign up and join in the fun there. Largely I am choosing Anook, because a lot of people already have accounts there… and dealing with running a forum is a pain in the ass. Forum software is often one of the largest attack vectors on any site, and if you do not keep a rigorous schedule of constant updates… it is liable to get compromised. I simply don’t want that sort of liability any more, and since Anook offers a fairly robust forum, shared image galleries, an event calendar, and a nifty way to link guild streams together… it seemed like a really nice fit. Not to mention that Lonrem is amazing and has been willing to support damned near any hair brained scheme I have come up with. Folks have already started populating the shared image album, which is awesome.

Bel Propaganda

Another thing to come out of yesterday is something of a recruitment piece. Over the last several weeks I have been giving essentially the same talk to everyone that joins the free company. Not that I mind having this conversations, but I felt like I was spending a lot of time repeating myself just getting the most basic information out there. I got to thinking… if I could condense this talk into a single page I could create something easy to link to new people. It is by no way an attempt to stop questions, but more to give players that are new to our group a quick info dump about who we are and what we are like. After creating this I realized… that I also created a tool to let people entice their friends. So as such I thought I would offer up the link here this morning for any of my Free Company mates that might be reading. You can now go to belghast.com/grey101 and get a quick dump of a bunch of information about our free company and our basic guidelines. So when your buddies ask you about your free company, you now have a quick thing you can link them to explain further. I used it yesterday afternoon and so far people seem to dig it.

While on the topic of propaganda… I had to include the above photo that Rae sent me. She was feeling out of sorts on Monday night, and while the bulk of us were raiding Turn 9… it seems she was up to shenanigans in our housing zone. I am really not sure how this happened but apparently an impromptu pony parade occurred where everyone broke out their favorite pony mounts and rode around our housing zone. I absolutely love that this sort of thing happens. A large number of us idle in the housing zone when not doing anything, and we have developed this awesome community of players that do the same. The night we bought our house, we were welcomed by a bunch of neighbors from the houses around us and over time we have gotten to know several of them. It is awesome logging in and running to the market board, only to get /hugged several times along the way. Cactuar is a truly amazing place, and I am so happy that we apparently chose correctly when we rolled there over a year ago.

Heroic Hans and Franz

Trying to mix things up a bit, and get our folks upgrades… my Raid has been working on some of the Heroic encounters in Blackrock Foundry. Last week we made significant progress on the Hans and Franz encounter, and had some lessons learned that we took into this week. Namely two things really lead us to this victory. Firstly better awareness of who was getting the body slam attack, and for them to move out of the raid making sure the tank did not take the debuff. Secondly better self awareness in trying really hard not to get pinned down by the crushers as they came through. Last night we had some of the worst possible luck as far as RNG goes and the patterns we could potentially get. There is this one pattern that was killing me damned near every time because the boss would be in the center of the room… and the only free space on the far left edge. On the last few tries, including the one when we managed to down them… I started prioritizing my own survival to damage time spent on the boss and I feel like the rest of the raid did essentially the same thing.

We managed to pull out a fairly narrow victory, but I have a feeling that since we now believe we can do this fight… future attempts will be much smoother. From there we moved to work on Beastlord Darmac, and had a few heartbreaking attempts getting him within 2% on our best. That fight… is just madness on heroic with so much shit in the room being on fire during the later phases. There are several things we need to work on, but I feel like we CAN improve and potentially down them next week. Largely the spear maintenance needed to be better, both in folks moving so they do not get pinned and folks breaking out individuals who did get pinned. The amount of time you have is really tight, and this needs to be an all raid effort when someone is gets stuck. Secondly I feel like during the last phases we needed to move the boss more often, because the amount of flame surrounding him made it damned near impossible for melee to dps. If nothing else we made solid progress and I feel like with a bit of polish we can knock this one out as well.

We Like To Help

March 24, 2015 by Belghast

Reluctant Roulette

I thought I would take a few moments this morning to address a few things we are noticing among new recruits to our Free Company. I believe for the most part the majority of this group reads my blog at least sometimes, so here is hoping that my post will find it’s audience. If nothing else this serves as a good reminder to anyone new to Final Fantasy XIV or considering playing it. The first behavior I am seeing an awful lot of is an absolute reluctance to EVER use the Duty Roulette system at all. It seems like most of the players have come from several years in World of Warcraft, where “pugging” has become a dirty word. I fully understand this and quite honestly I was scared to use the Duty Roulette system… that is until another FC mate tiptoed into the water and reported back that it was actually pretty awesome. I dislike random groups in other games more than most people, and I will be the first to say that the community in this game is simply better.

The other thing you should know is that those of us who are veterans are using the Duty Roulette system constantly. On a given night if nothing much is going on I will be queuing for either Hard Mode or Trial Roulette, and at least once a day I am trying really hard to get in at least one Expert Roulette. Sure you occasionally stumble onto an elitist, but it is nothing like other games where you are belittled and kicked from the group for not instantly being amazing. More often than not when a player says they are new, someone will take the time to explain the encounters to them. Honestly I often give my player commendations to new players for having the strength to stand up and tell the group. It makes the run go so much smoother when you know for certain if a player is going to have the requisite ancestral knowledge to understand the common way a given fight is done. More than anything I suggest you give Duty Roulette a chance. I’ve actually met several people on Cactuar through the roulette system, and it makes me happy to see them around.

We Like to Help

One of the other behaviors I am seeing a lot of is players not asking for help. I realize that in some groups this might not be the norm, but in our Free Company for the most part people enjoy helping others. Now there might be times for this or that reason that someone cannot help, and that is perfectly fine. However if we don’t know a given player needs something, it is impossible for us to read minds. Our hope is that this creates an atmosphere where people are freely saying what they need to do, and others are responding that they can help out. A prime example is that we have known for a bit that Neph needed Dzemael Darkhold, so when she popped on the other night we ran the dungeon to make sure she got it. Similarly we have done countless primal fights or lower level dungeons to help our dps players especially fight their way through the queue system. Self service and the Duty Roulette are always valid choices, but when you are confronting a thirty minute long queue… please speak up and pending it is not a raid night folks should be able to pull together a dungeon pretty easily.

Running dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV is not quite like running dungeons in other games. The fact that the game auto scales your level to match the dungeon, and rewards you with money if you are max level… means that running lowbies through dungeons is always a positive prospect. In other game my primarily problem with running low level dungeons was that it ended up feeling like I was babysitting players, because at max level I could just one shot most of the encounters in the zone. In Final Fantasy XIV, these dungeons are still viable, and it feels like you are doing something meaningful regardless of the level range. I will never get tired of running places like Haukke Manor or Stone Vigil, and Primal fights like Garuda still end up being a challenge for our scaled down groups. It is interesting trying to remember how you functioned without your high level abilities, and this alone makes a lot of things far more interesting than you might think. So please if you need help, be it a dungeon or help with some crafted gear… speak up in chat. Right now Tam is doing an interesting census of players to find out if they are interested in raiding, so I highly suggest you fill that out from the guild message of the day.

A Night with Nael

Last night was a bit of a refresher night in many ways. Namely we had a few people out, which meant we snagged one of our new recruits to help out with turn nine. The problem is our group does things a bit different than the “norm” for turn nine groups. So there was a bit of adjustment, similarly it had been over a week since I last set foot in the zone, and I was more than a tad bit rusty myself. I still feel like we made some progress, but we are hitting this wall on the third phase where we are just not pushing Nael hard enough to keep from getting two dragons. In our attempt to push harder, we are getting this awkward transition to phase four and getting a dragon at the same time… which is leading to a wipe. I feel like I am simply not doing enough dps on my Dragoon to really make up the difference. My tank is level 122 gear wise, but my dragoon is only 112. Honestly I never expected to be dpsing in a raid situation, so my Dragoon has essentially gotten table scraps as far as gear goes. I have been pushing to grab a piece of 120 gear our of World of Darkness each week in the hopes of boosting my dragoon dps just a little bit.

This however means repeating World of Darkness over and over without seeing any drops. Last night represented my sixth and seventh run of the week, and thankfully on the final boss I saw a piece drop that I did not already have. Sure it was only the belt, but at the 11th hour on the night before reset… I will take quite literally anything. I was just about to reach the point where I was going to start rolling on everything just to get a piece of gear before the zone reset today. Largely I feel like I am being a boat anchor on our group with this fight. We need more dps, and I am just not going to the extreme lengths that Kodra is willing to to tweak his dps. The optimal dragoon rotation is twenty seven steps long according to the guides I have read… and quite frankly there is no way in hell I am going to be able to pull that off flawlessly every single time. Instead I do a much more simplified and repeated sequence, but when we are on this razors edge of being able to do it versus not being able to do it… it feels like I am failing the group. As such my answer is to try and pour gear into the problem, and as soon as World of Darkness uncaps on the 31st I will be running it until my eyes bleed farming a full set of gear.