housing Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Housing Savage Defeated

January 23, 2023 by Belghast

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!

AggroChat #419 – Coastal Wizard Decimates Foot

January 22, 2023 by Belghast

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

Folks… after a year of trying to win the housing lottery in FFXIV, Belghast finally gets a house and in the same lot number that we used to have an FC House in Mists. From there Kodra talks about the tabletop game Middara and how it contains one of the best tutorials for a game that he has seen. One of the negative side effects of recording massive two-part games of the year show is there are hot topics that end up getting thrown on the back burner. From there we finally talk about the situation happening with Wizards of the Coast, the Open Gaming License, and the entire community abandoning ship. We talk a bit about Fog Sudoku and Kodra explains what exactly it is. From there we finish out the night talking about Marvel Midnight Suns and how in some ways it is a perfect game, and in other ways, it completely misses the point.

Topics Discussed

Housing Windfall in FFXIV
Middara is a Great Tutorial
Wizards of the Coast Burning
- Self Own of 2023
- Misunderstanding their Community
- The rise of ORC and fall of OGL
Fog Sudoku
Marvel Midnight Suns

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Chateau Belghast

February 13, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bizarre one. We are still very much under the gun of a release date, and I attempted to do whatever I could to further that goal. However for all of Saturday our building was without power, and I was instead on call just in case something went wrong. The building power went down at 6:30 in the morning, and by the time we started recording AggroChat we had not yet gotten the all clear. I was just hoping that things would cycle off of the generators as successfully as they did cycling onto them, and that I would not end up getting interrupted during the podcast. Sunday was a mixed bag of work and doing all of the other things that we ultimately put off until Sunday like laundry and various errands. The weekend as a whole wound up being a very random mix of games as I played whatever I could during the brief moments of downtime. As you can see by the Chateau Belghast image above, I started fiddling around with Fallout 4 once again, and scrapped my old house and built this one instead. The inside is largely unfurnished but I am digging the outside quite a bit. It took me far longer than it should have to sort out how best to attempt centering the neon text, but in the grand scheme it seems to look okay. The frustrating bit with their neon font is that is is in no way monospaced with the characters all varying pretty wildly in width.

In Final Fantasy XIV I am still very much getting back in the swing of things, and have fallen into the pattern of doing Beast Tribe dailies. In theory I started down this path because I wanted a reliable source of ventures for my retainers, so that I could keep sending out my gatherers on field exploration. However I also really like mounts, and over the course of the last week or so I have been pushing up the Sahagin, not necessarily because I love the mount, but more because it was the next closest faction. For a long period of time, it was the faction I was spending the rest of my daily allowance on while working on the Sylph. Yesterday however I managed to push Sahagin across the finish line and now have my truly bizarre Sapsa mount to ride around on. I figured what better place to take a picture of it than in the waters of The Mists, where the Free Company house is located. Next up should be the Kobolds as once again… they are the next closest given that I had been spending my extra ventures on them while working on the Sahagin. I mean I know there are lots of other things I SHOULD be doing… but I just can’t bring myself to pug dungeons yet. After a string of bad experiences with Palace of the Dead… I don’t much feel like pugging that one either. The problem there is as we talked about on the podcast, is that if you fail… you lose all progress gained which seems deeply punitive for a random group activity.

Finally I spent a good amount of time this weekend playing Elder Scrolls online. I failed to take any screenshots so instead you get an interior shot of my home. I pushed forward the story line in Malabal Tor a bit, but the big problem with ESO is that I tend to wander wildly. I find it extremely hard to stay focused and instead I wind up going after the next object on the horizon that looks interesting, and as a result never seem to end up getting my objectives accomplished. There is always a fallen log to harvest, or an outcropping of ore to mine. Whatever the case I find myself continuing to move steadily towards 160 champion levels, which is the current item cap. Unfortunately I have a feeling this is probably going to change with Morrowind, but for the time being getting there.. and being able to craft a set of gear that will last me for a bit tends to be my focus. The other thing that I am realizing is that 160 champion levels is just a drop in the bucket given that quite literally every build I find expects you to have at least four or five times that amount. There is a part of me that wishes I had never actually faded away from this game, because at this very moment I am so impossibly behind the curve. Then again I think that overwhelming amount of content is what has been drawing me there much in the same way as it did for A Realm Reborn until we caught up. I know there is more to do than I have time to do it… and in some way that is insurance from ever really getting bored.

Fallout First Impressions

November 11, 2015 by Belghast

Non-Spoiler First Thoughts

War Never Changes…. and neither does Fallout, and that is a statement I mean in the best possible way. When a sequel to a beloved franchise is released, you never quite know if you are going to get absolute greatness like Skyrim… or if you are going to be stuck with a Master of Orion 3. For those who loved MOO3 I apologize… but that game was horrible and broke from far too many of the tenets of the original franchise. Fallout 4 however… keeps all of the best features from Fallout 3 and New Vegas… and applies a next generation coat of paint and features to it. If you have been an aficionado of Bethesda games for very long you will notice that several of the really nice features of Skyrim have been implemented into this engine. Everything from the loading screen item previews… to the ability to favorite weapons and swap between them quickly in combat… are direct lineage to Skyrim. What you also get is some genuine evolution of the engine, in the form of just how content dense the world is and how much of it can be fiddled with.

At this point according to Steam I am roughly four hours into the game, and I have to say… that was the fastest four hours of my life. I mentioned yesterday that I did not stay up Tuesday night to play the game, but instead had to wait until after work yesterday. Additionally we have contractors coming to the house to put a door in our bedroom today… so we had to do a lightning round of cleaning before I finally got to sit down and play with my precious. From the moment I set down… every time I was aware that time had passed… it was an hour and not fifteen minutes like I had thought. Most of that time was spent not actively doing any quests or following the story line really. The first handful of events happen to play out in a pretty organic fashion, and I apparently followed the story line to a point… without really meaning to. I remember watching the demo footage from E3, and I have for the most part made it through the sequence that they showed… which happens pretty early in the game. It gives you a neatly framed vignette that allows you to understand some of the forces in the world that you are contending with.

Packrat Friendly

For me at least the best part of this game is that they have taken things to essentially their logical conclusions. If you are living in a world with limited resources, then essentially everything you come across could be useful. In the past I was a horrible packrat and constantly on the brink over being overburdened. Why was I carrying fifty coffee mugs…. who knew… but I might need them someday. Those tendencies are absolutely paid off in full in this game because quite literally every piece of crap you find in the world is useful either to modify your weapons and armor… or to construct things for the new base building side game. Pretty early on, you end up in the neighborhood you once lived in. This then becomes your base of operations allowing you to scrap materials there, and build new structures. As you venture out into the world you find survivors that you can invite back to your little sanctuary, and in a fashion very reminiscent to State of Decay you have to watch after their well being and their defenses. I am assuming as your settlement gets bigger you will become the target of raiders and the like trying to take your hard earned resources.

The other big noticeable change in this game is that everything seems more dangerous. Radiation is a real problem this time, because instead of causing you to lose health over time… it reduces your maximum health pool. All of the old baddies are also more deadly… Bloat Flies move more erratically, Mole Rats can burrow under ground and pop up when you least expect them…. and move insanely fast… and there are new dangerous like giant mutated mosquitoes. All of this and more I have encountered within a short radius of where you actually start the game. Everything I am talking about is within visual distance of the Vault 111 entrance. Essentially this is a game that is going to eat every waking moment for a long while… because right now I feel like I have not even begun to unwrap the wrapping of the game… let alone actually dip below the surface. The big takeaway is that it is the Fallout game play that you either love or hate… with more advanced systems and more fluidity of character movement and actions. Everything “feels better” and I know this largely because I played quite a bit of New Vegas Tuesday night as a sort of placebo for Fallout 4 while waiting on it to unlock. The changes are extremely noticeable, even from the level the engine was at during Skyrim. I’m now going to shut up about my impressions… and launch the game and lose myself in it again.