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Lightning Strikes

September 2, 2014 by Belghast

Anniversary Events

For the last few weeks there have been a truly silly number of events going on in Final Fantasy XIV to commemorate the first anniversary. To some extent this game is a bit of an aberration. No where else is a game allowed to fail miserably, and then rebuilt from the ground up to be a much better experience. Game simply fail and fade away into obscurity, however in the case of a Square Enix I guess they felt obligated to fix the blotch in their lineage of games. While it had a bit of a rough launch due to severely underestimating the popularity, things have generally stabilized and as a result the game truly is a joy to experience. The relationship Square has with the player base is extremely interesting. They still make mistakes, but they seem to be extremely forthright about them. For example when they released the 2.3 patch and the players ended up doing something with the hunt system they couldn’t foresee… they completely overhauled the system as a result making it significantly better.

This history of awesome interaction is reaching a bit of a crescendo during the Anniversary events. As a result they have planned a solid month of things happening in game, bringing back some of the limited time events that happened earlier in the year so that players that missed them the first time could participate. This makes me so amazingly happy, because the one event that I really wanted to participate in was the Lightning Strikes event commemorating the launch of Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns. I have a rocky past with the FFXIII franchise, in that it is one of the few Final Fantasy games I have never been able to finish. However the nifty things you get from doing the event provide some rather unique looking graphics here in Eorzea. One of my regrets was not being around when it happened the first time and not being able to collect the weapons.

Lightning Strikes

The event centers around completing a series of quests involving reports of a strange pink haired woman in Eorzea. At the request of a reporter you pick up the trail outside Limsa Lominsa by doing FATEs in either Middle or Lower La Noscea. I ran most of the FATEs in Middle where there was constantly a group gathered up at the spawn point. It feels as though they have greatly reduced the requirements needed to get Gold in a fate. During the days after launch this event would have been extremely frustrating, as during some of the times I was out there yesterday there was at least fifty players all vying for the same crab mobs. The FATE name you are looking for is called “Sister Crustacean” and involves killing a bunch of Megalocrabs as they spawn. The catch is that not every single one of these FATEs actually includes the lightning event. How you can tell is that you get a unique FFXIII themed “Fate Started” graphic at the beginning. Additionally if you roll up on it as it is in progress the music is from FFXIII not the standard FFXIV fare.

Once you complete the first step of the quest you follow the trail to Uldah where in the Steps area another reporter asks you to go off and gather evidence. This once again involves going out into one of two regions to gather clues. From this point on the fates you need will have “Lightning Strikes” in the title making them significantly easier to find. In Eastern Thanalan the one you need spawns over the highbridge and up near the South Shroud zone entrance. In Southern Thanalan the FATE you need spawns north of Little Ala Mhigo near the Eastern Thanalan zone entrance. The awesome part about this fate is you get to fight one of the really cool mechanized behemoths that existed in FFXII. These are fun fights and take a significant amount of time to whittle down, so generally speaking if you see the fate spawn you have more than enough time to run across the zone. While grinding for Atmas yesterday there were more than a few times I helped out with the FATE just to tank it.

Dangerous Machinations

The quest line picks up in Old Gridania near the amphitheatre and from that point onwards will keep working off of that same NPC. It is the reporter for the Raven that you have encountered before in other quests. These next few FATEs are more tricky, in that there are a wide array of spawn points for each. This next step takes you to Coerthas and has you fighting some strange machine that looks kinda like a walking cuisinart. It is a similarly long fate to the one where you fight the Behemoth so you generally have plenty of time to reach it. If the FATE has been up for awhile there is a chance of failing if Lightning dies in the process of fighting it. I had that happen this morning as I was taking this screenshot. In any case you collect another piece of evidence and turn it over to the reporter in Gridania who sends you out once again on another quest.

This final step of the quest chain takes place in Mor Dhona and once again has a viable spawn location. Generally speaking it will spawn somewhere near Saint Conach’s Find. During this step of the quest Lightning summons up Odin to help her in battle and you fight the FFXIII representation of Bahamut known as Chaos. While not a particularly difficult battle considering how many people were gathered up to help, I figure this would be more than difficult if you tried to solo it. Chaos has a series of almost unavoidable AOE attacks, that while none of them deal spectacular amounts of damage… it would slowly wear you down without the aid of a Chocobo to heal or an actual player healer. In any case it was a rather impressive fight, and since I was tanking I saw the boss without much issue. However there were numerous other players that complained that they could not see the encounter at all due to the number of people surrounding it.

The Resolution

After all of this effort you return to Old Gridania where Lightning is waiting on you. You are of course treated to a rather lengthy cut scene explaining what exactly is going on, and why she is visiting Eorzea. While I’ve given plenty of spoilers about how to complete the quest chain, I am going to refrain from giving any away on what actually is happening. I found the overall story arc to be charming at least, and it was fun getting to run around with one of my favorite characters from FFXIII. I am perfectly okay with Lightning being the female equivalent of Cloud Strife, and all of their lack of depth. I like the character because she tends to be all about killing things… which is conducive to my own goals. The reward for all of this is a cosmetic outfit. If your character is Male you get an outfit to look just like Snow, and if your character is Female you get to dress just like Lightning. Additionally completing the quest chain unlocks several hair options at the Aesthetician so you literally can replicate Lightning or Snow exactly if you so choose.

Additionally through the first steps of the quest chain, you get 2 Otherworldly Parcels. One will be consumed by completing the quest, but the other you can use in Limsa Lominsa next to the quest npc that started this whole event to purchase a FFXIII themed weapon. If you are like me and you wanted to get more than just the one weapon, you can do that as well. Each time you complete the events in either Middle or Lower La Noscea you get two ore Otherworldly Parcels. So by completing the fates four more times you can purchase one of each weapon. They can of course be stored in your Armoire in your Inn Room to free up Armory Chest space. While not all of the weapon graphics are amazing, I wanted to complete the full set just in case I had a later need for one of them. The Armoire is a nice way to dump seasonal stuff into permanent storage so it is available later if you end up wanting it. Overall it was a really fun event, and I look forward to doing the Dragon Quest X tie in event when it happens in a week or so.

#FFXIV

Chocobo Madness

August 31, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 20

Last night we recorded our 20th episode of aggrochat. Quite honestly it doesn’t feel like it has been long enough for us to rack up 20 weekly episodes. Rae was off traveling to visit some friends for the Labor Day weekend, so that left us with myself, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam. We started the show by bidding a fond farewell to Blaugust since today is the final day of the month long blogging initiative. Some pretty awesome content has come out of it, and as of last night we still had 29 people who had posted something each and every day of the month. That is pretty impressive when you consider just how much content was churned out as a result. Not everyone has posted daily on the Blaugust nook… myself included but still we have over 700 posts there during the month. In total I believe we had 52 different participants that in some way joined in the fun, so I a wholeheartedly applaud everyone on the job well done.

After that we started a discussion about trash mobs, or more so why exactly we refer to non-boss encounters as trash. It hasn’t always been the case there was a point at which we just referred to everything as encounters, and in part I think that is because over the years the care and thought that went into non-boss encounters was lacking. We reminisce about some of our favorite non-boss encounters and talk at length about how we feel that encounters in general can be improved. I really enjoyed the discussion last night, so hopefully you all will as well.

Chocobo Madness

With the 2.35 patch Final Fantasy XIV introduced ways to dye your Chocobo unlike quite any other dye system I have encountered. Generally speaking in other games, you buy a dye or you pick a color from a selector and you end up with your color relatively simply. It might be cost prohibitive to get the color you want, but there is very little guess work. Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand introduced a system that is sheer madness. First you have to purchase seeds for various fruits that can be found on vendors. The seed is then grown in your garden and over the course of two days ripens. You can shorten this time by doing various things and the yield can be increased based on the type of soil that you use and the fertilizer. Where the madness goes into play is that these seeds increase or lighten various color sliders starting from the base yellow.

When the system was originally patched in, the forums were of course a buzz with trying to figure out the formulas for each of the colors people might want. After lots of trial and error it has pretty much been agreed upon that the two types of fruit… the fruit that darkens a color and lightens a color are essentially on two different color mixing systems. The darken fruits are on RGB and the lighten fruits have the side effect of increasing CMY. This makes trying to mix a specific color absolute insanity. The end result are several different guides for mixing colors and others that list supposed recipes for specific combinations. The problem with all of this is that it doesn’t seem to be an exact science and there is a large random element to just how much a given fruit effects the end plumage.

The Results of Madness

ffxiv 2014-08-30 10-34-22-578

So entering into this I knew I was fairly insane. My ultimate hope was to arrive at turquoise so I fed my chocobo 15 Doman Plums and 10 Mamook Pears as a start. Doman Plums being the fruit that lowers the red value and at the same time raises the Cyan value, and Mamook Pears being the fruit that raises the Green value. The problem with this system is that you have to stable your bird and wait essentially six hours to see what the final result was. The new color is revealed to you as part of a cut scene. So before I went to bed Friday night and hoped I had made a good combination of fruits. Saturday morning I got up fairly early and was excited to log in to see exactly what the end result was. It turns out that I was pretty close and ended up with Celeste Green (R:144,G:184,B:180) which is really close to the shade of Turquoise I was actually after.

So now I have the hard decision of do I leave well enough alone for the time being, because I am actually rather fond of the color. Or do I go for broke and try and push Celeste Green to the next step which would be Turquoise the shade I was actually after. The problem is I have no clue if I just feed doman plums in the hopes of getting there, or do I need to feed O’Ghomoro Berries and Mamook Pears in the hopes of darkening both blue and green at the same time instead. For the time being, and since fruit is so insanely expensive right now I think I am going to leave things alone and just be happy I got close to the color I wanted. Now my attention turns to trying to get the Tidal Barding to go with the new color… but that is a whole different rabbit hole for another day.

#FFXIV #Chocobo #Dyes

Flourishing Communites

August 29, 2014 by Belghast

No Longer Mainstream

This morning I am struggling more than a bit to find a topic to write about. I keep coming back to a conversation last night on teamspeak regarding our identification or lack thereof with the term “gamer”. One of my friends talked about how he has slowly distanced himself from the title because it no longer really offered anything in way of meaning for him. It no longer really clearly identified his interests. I guess to some extent I am no longer a mainstream gamer either if you really think about it. When there is a big show like E3 It is evident that I no longer care about the games that seem to get the most press like the Call of Duty or Battlefield franchises. Granted there was a time where I was happy to throw money at both of these, but that time has passed.

Instead I tend to focus on the games that give me the most freedom to inhabit the worlds. The narrative game play experience is still fun on occasion but the games I tend to play every night offer some way for me to inhabit them. The top franchises seem to be mostly about fighting against other players, whereas I want to cooperate and collaborate with them in creating social environments. The thing that keeps me tied to Final Fantasy XIV right now is just how vibrant and alive the community is, and how easy it has been to find the social strata I have craved. It is something that has just been lacking from other games I have played in the last few years, and I am not really sure why exactly it is lacking.

Flourishing Communities

I wish I knew why that sense of community flourishes in some games but not others. I think in part it is due to isolation from the more negative forces of the internet. The games that have had some of the best environments, have also been games that I felt where under appreciated. In Everquest II the Antonia Bayle server community is amazing, and has a thriving role-playing and community event presence. Similarly in Lord of the Rings Online the Landroval community is equally amazing, and offers everything from casual concerts at the Prancing Pony to intricate community events. In both cases these are games that are not pulling in the big attention and I think the end result causes a much more tight knit and insular community. Similarly Final Fantasy XIV has been somewhat isolated from the mainstream and developed a community that flourishes around a love of the game.

So I guess my pondering is, do these communities thrive because the mainstream gamer has shunned them? I’ve literally seen some of my more mainstream friends turn their noses up visibly when I have mentioned I was playing Everquest 2, or Lord of the Rings Online… and I am sure the same would be the case with Final Fantasy XIV. In the case Final Fantasy XIV there is still a lot of bad blood out there surrounding the failure that was 1.0. In the case of the others, I think it is mostly because they were “not WoW”. I am beginning to be of the opinion that playing a second or third tier MMO is the best experience, pending you find a server that still has a thriving and active population. The people that have stuck around there, do so for various reasons… but it often means that the community is well established and stable… and with a little effort welcoming to new comers.

Gamer Lacks Meaning

Now to drift back to the original discussion from last night about whether or not gamer is a meaningful term. There was a time where that term meant something, a shared experience that became immediately relatable. Now gaming in general has become so fragmented that just because someone self identifies as a gamer, doesn’t meant at all that you have any shared experiences. I ran into this Wednesday at the funeral with my cousins. There were four of us nephews… of us at one time or another have self identified as gamers. However as we started to talk about them two of them immediately started talking about their latest call of duty exploits, and another pair of us started talking role playing games. So when the term gaming was summoned it meant two vastly different things. I still find myself unwilling to fully abandon the title of Gamer, even though most of the images that currently evokes no longer really represent me.

Maybe I have shifted my focus in the way my friend Tam has shifted to “Game Designer”. Maybe the fact that I am now a “Game Blogger” better denotes my interest in gaming and my point of view on it all. Even “MMO Gamer” probably does a far better job of representing my interests than “Gamer” does. I think some of the discussion is about whether or not labels are important at all, and I think they are mostly. Labels, especially one ones someone self identifies with are a kind of social shorthand. It is like a sketch of the person that they want the world to see them as, and is meaningful in trying to align interests but not much more than that. Once you get to know someone you learn their hopes, fears and aspirations… the labels stop being meaningful at all. Prior to that however they act as a way to grease the wheels of interaction. The problem with this however is that gamer is coming to represent something I do not support and do not want to be part of. I would love to think that I could reform the title and bring it back to something just, pure and true… but I think we have long crossed the point of no return and are now seeing the last death throes of “Gamer”.

The Family I Know

August 28, 2014 by Belghast

Of Large Families

I grew up Catholic which also means I come from a long line of extremely large families. My Grandfather was one of five children, and each of them for the most part had five or six children of their own. My mother for example is one of six siblings, and my “aunt” that just passed away is one of five. The end result is that the get-togethers on that side of the family where relatively massive. As a child I was completely comfortable with the way that “mom” and “dad” worked and “grandma” and “grandpa” but most of the other relationships just baffled me. As a result pretty much any adult female that was not either my mother or my grandmother ended up being my “Aunt”. No one decided to correct me so it stuck.

My Aunt Marilyn while technically my first cousin once removed, was an Aunt in every since of the word that actually mattered. She was this quiet presence in everything that happened in my life from the occasional little league game, to getting my eagle scout and to countless band concerts. She had a way of showing up at exactly the right moment. She also had this magical way of knowing exactly what was hip and trendy and whatever us kids might be into at the time. This morning I woke up to an alarm clock that she got me when I was 12 or 13, and every time I wake up to it I think of her. It was little things like that, something that she knew I would need but I didn’t even realize myself that just baffle me.

The Family I Know

At the Rosary on Tuesday night I got up to talk about my Aunt which is something I had wished I had been able to do at my Grandmothers funeral recently. I had regretted not saying something then, so I figured I shouldn’t pass the occasion now. In many ways this is the family I knew the most growing up and as a result they feel most like home. As kids my mother and my aunt Margaret Ann decided that me and my second cousins would be closer than that. As a result they tried to create as many opportunities for us to get together and play. Growing up I spent huge swaths of time either at their house or them in my hometown. When my wife and I decided to elope, it was my cousin that I called upon to stand up for me on the spur of the moment.

As we have all gotten busier we have drifted apart but seeing them yesterday was an extremely good thing. We exchanged the most current cell phones and promised to make plans to get together, and I sincerely hope we will. My generation is just going to have to start putting out the effort to make occasions to get together just like my parents generation did. As each of these members of the previous generation passes on what is going with them is more than their life. What is leaving is the glue that held us together. We will have to step in to make sure that bond doesn’t break. Each of us has reached a point in our lives where we are more or less stable, so it is time to start trying to see each other more often.

Down the Rabbit Hole

When I finally got home and put out a few fires, I was able to log into Final Fantasy XIV and check out the festival that started today. It seemed fitting that while I had been remembering family, the game had been having an in game remembrance event called the rising. For those that do not realize it, “A Realm Reborn” or FFXIV 2.0 is both literally and figuratively rising from the ashes of the previous game. When 1.0 came to a close they destroyed the world with the dread comet Dalmund and the arrival of the Primal Bahamut. The Rising event commemorates the rising of the world out of the ashes of the previous one. There is a single relatively short quest, that comes long with an extremely charming bit of storyline. Completing the quest gets the players a “Huzzah” emote that at least as a warrior causes me to jump up high into the air with my axe held aloft.

My focus over the last few days has been on getting my White Mage to thirty four so I can cast stoneskin. The problem is I have noticed I am sorely lacking another ability that comes from Thaumaturge. There was a point last night when I was healing a dungeon that I simply could not cast fast enough to save the tank who had moved out of range of my healing. If I had swiftcast which is a Thaumaturge cross class ability I likely could have saved him. Seeing the need for it I opted to start working on my Thaumaturge to at least get him to level 26. This is the way that everything seems to go in Final Fantasy XIV. In order to be truly efficient in one thing, you need a whole bunch of other things leveled as well. For the moment my goals are gearing the Bard through the hunt quests, and then working on Thaumaturge to 26 so I can continue onwards with my White Mage to the level cap.