housing

Guildmom Shade Victim

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Good Morning Folks! I am not sure why I used an exclamation point other than habit, but it isn’t that I have terribly exciting news to talk about. I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing some Final Fantasy XIV and along with a lot of roulettes and trials with my friend Ace, I also spent a bit of time unlocking the Endwalker Alliance Raid. I have these memories of playing Final Fantasy XIV super seriously… but they all stem back from ARR and Heavensward. I am realizing from Stormblood onwards I have very much been in a holding pattern of doing the expansion content and then disappearing until the next expansion release. I would love to figure out a way to more “sustainably” play Final Fantasy XIV in the future where I level up and do content as it is released rather than in one big burst at the end.

I gotta say though, what I have seen of it so far… I am really digging the Alliance Raid. Heavensward, Stormblood, and honestly Shadowbringers all had annoying Alliance Raids. This one however seems super chill and along the lines of the original Crystal Tower series before it was watered down massively. Alliance Raids SHOULD be chill experiences… it is the World of Warcraft LFR equivalent. Mathbot can die in a fire because no matter how many times I run it, I cannot seem to grok what the fuck I am supposed to be doing during that encounter. Dun Scaith… is a nightmare and starts with the hardest boss up front and center and then gets gradually easier after that. I’ve only done the first part of the Endwalker 24-player raid, but so far I am digging it a lot.

I’ve leveled the Gunbreaker to 87 at this point and there should be no possible way that I do not hit 90 before the expansion drops. This means I should be able to continue cleanout out tank gear that I do not want for cosmetic purposes. All in all, Gunbreaker is still “fine” and feels more dpsy than the other tanks. When it comes to a tank I really care about two things… how easy it is to generate threat quickly and how many survival tools I have on my toolbelt. Nothing really beats the Warrior, especially in that second column so as such that is the tank I tend to gravitate towards constantly. It was fun taking an expansion and playing a lot of Paladin, but I will be happy to get back to smashing things with an axe when Dawntrail drops.

For those curious… I did actually finish doing my class quests on the Gunbreaker. It took Solaria logging in Sunday morning and throwing shade at me to actually get off my butt and do it. The weird thing is I already had continuation on my hot bars. However at this point I am a “real” Gunbreaker and the combo options it opens up are nice, but also… don’t explicitly fit into either of the columns that I really care about for tanking. If it had given me another off-global cooldown heal… I would have picked it up sooner. I figure though if “Guild Mom” is willing to give me shit about it, then I probably should take care of business. Truth be told… once I ding 90 I likely will never play Gunbreaker again until I am trying to level it to 100.

In the larger column of “oh god why did you do that Bel”, I bid on another house. Truth be told there just isn’t much to spend gil on in this game and I am still bummed about losing my previous house. I found a plot that I like in Limsa again and will know in a few days whether or not I win it. I won’t be devastated if I don’t get it, and honestly, I don’t have a clue what I will actually do with it if I do win it. However, there is always that whisper in the back of my skull telling me that I need a house. I think maybe what tarnished the experience last time is that I found what I considered to be my perfect plot… aka the first Free Company house plot we ever had. The problem is… it wasn’t that house, and was mostly an empty shell that did not bring back all those memories… nor were any of the neighbors the same. I was trying to recapture a moment in time, more than build my own new moment. With that in mind, I think a house will feel more mine if it isn’t in that historic plot.

In the column of “things I remember that exist” is the Blue Mage. At some point, I really want to finish leveling this up and do more content with it. I still really dig the glam that I came up with for it. I also want to pick back up where I left off in the various Relic weapon quests and do some more of those. I think they might be my long-tailed grind in this game like trying to get Legendaries are in Guild Wars 2. It has been weird coming back this time, because on previous return trips I was still very much in that mental block mode against group content. I plan on raiding in Dawntrail and am actually looking forward to doing at least the normal mode every week. This has all reawoken something in me, and it is odd to say the least. I will probably still play ARPG seasons as they release but I think I have made my peace with MMORPGs again.

To be truthful I think Ace is feeling the same thing. There is this part of ourselves that was super vital to who we are as gamers that we both had sort of put up on a shelf. Now that I have taken it down and dusted it off… I am finding that it still mostly fits.

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!

AggroChat #419 – Coastal Wizard Decimates Foot

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.