MMO Archives - Page 359 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Slow and Steady

November 3, 2014 by Belghast

Longevity

There was a point yesterday when I realized something that somewhat shocked me. I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV for longer than the combined time my guild was active in both The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. There has been a trend over the last few years where when we move into something new we last around two months and then move on again. Elder Scrolls lasted roughly two months, and Wildstar in truth less than a month before folks petered out. For Final Fantasy XIV I have been going strong since July so this will be going on four months. In truth this is the longest I have played any game in awhile without pause. I am not sure if Rift counts since I tend to always be playing that game off and on, and the period of large amounts of activity last year only lasted a few months at most before it was back to me and a skeletal crew logging in periodically. Another thing I have noticed is that I tend to turn the lights off when I finally go, meaning that I am one of the last people to leave.

In Elder Scrolls Online this was maybe a bit different, since Sig and PK were both active considerably longer after I stopped logging in on a regular basis. I however only recently actually went through the process of cancelling my account there. Wildstar on the other hand I was all too willing to cancel my account, but sadly by the time I did the entire guild was completely toast. I guess I wonder what has made us grazers of MMOs rather than large scale consumers. For awhile I thought it was just the ramifications of coming from a multi-year game like World of Warcraft, and being unfettered and experiencing some kind of options overload. I still feel like there are so many good games out that to be played, and just not enough time to really experience them. I wish I could realistically play FFXIV, Rift, EQ2, LoTRO, TSW and Landmark all at the same time. The problem is when I rampantly multigame like that I get absolutely nothing accomplished in any of them.

Slow and Steady

Right now I am enjoying making slow and steady progress in all of my endeavors in Final Fantasy XIV. Last night I managed to hit 108 ilevel on my main job which is the warrior, and in part that is because of the 2.4 patch. There is a big of a paradox going on after the Dreams of Ice patch. Unlocking the loot in Syrcus Tower means that it has gotten significantly easier to farm the ilvl 100 gear drops and the Sands and Oils of Time needed to upgrade level 100 soldiery gear to level 110. The problem is that it feels like it is significantly slower to grind out Tomestones of Soldiery than it was to get Tomestones of Mythology. So as a result I am sitting on several unused Sands of Time and a couple of unused Unitentified Allagan Tomestones because I lack the Soldiery “bookrocks” to purchase either a weapon or another slot of gear to use the sands on. At this point I am closing in on the 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery needed to purchase a level 100 weapon, which I will then turn into a 110 weapon with one of the sands, finally giving my Dragoon something decent to poke things with. Before this patch I never would have spent soldiery on an alternate job, so it makes me happy to finally start progressing my Dragoon again.

The other side effect of the patch is that it seems to have become significantly harder to gear your very first character. Previously you could hop on the “hunt train” and farm up enough Allied Seals to purchase a full set of ilevel 90 gear within a few hours. For 270 Allied seals you could purchase an entire set of gear for a new job, which in the grand scheme of things even if you didn’t do the insane hunt process was only about a week of doing the daily hunt quests. This was a huge benefit to getting new players into the game quickly. This has slowed down considerably because all of the level 90 gear is gone from the hunt vendor and replaced with the level 100 Soldiery equivalents. Unfortunately this also means that the items themselves have gone up massively in price. The pieces can be purchased for 660, 400, and 300 for the various slots adding up to a grand total of 4020 allied seals for an entire set of gear. Right now this just seems absolutely insane to me. I feel like a later patch is probably going to reduce this price but that for the time being they are trying to make it easier to get soldiery gear… but not so easy that we can cap out over night and run out of things to progress.

Active Free Company

Another awesome thing about the 2.4 patch is that it has seemed to revitalize our server as a whole. Cactuar has sprung to life as so many players I think had taken breaks before the launch of this latest patch and all of its goodness. Granted a flurry of the activity has been leveling rogues, but that seems to be slowly tapering off. Similarly there has been a resurgence of activity in our guild as folks have joined up to start working on characters on our server, or returned from their own pre-patch absences. At several points yesterday we had around a dozen players online, and that still is not including some of our more active members that were curiously missing from the fray this weekend. I know Rae was off doing work related stuff, and Kodra was sick most of the weekend… and Ashgar busy packing for his move. With all of those things factored in it seems even more impressive that we were able to field the numbers that we did. I ran several of the new dungeons with groups of friends, and have yet to actually make my way into the expert duty roulette without a premade group.

Granted I am fully expecting that the upcoming launch of Warlords of Draenor will pull a few players away here and there, but I think the majority of our group is well insulated against the effects of WoW at this point. I am generally the one who returns, and right now as it stands I have no plans of playing at launch. In fact were it not for the level 90 boost that we got from preordering so far ahead of time… I doubt I would have even purchased the expansion this time around. I kinda wish I could claw back that purchase to be honest, but I guess that is the problem with preordering going roughly a year before the release date. That seems so long ago at this point, especially considering the short periods of waiting for new content I am getting used to in Final Fantasy XIV. This game is rolling out a new major patch each quarter, and a minor content patch on a semi-monthly schedule and I hate to say it… but you get spoiled. I don’t think I could return to a game with a year between content patches again after this.

Fuzzy Children

As I said yesterday this month I am trying to come up with something each morning that I am thankful for, turning it entire an entire month of “Thanksgiving”. This morning I am thankful for my “Fuzzy Children”, aka my pets. My wife and I have no intent of ever having human children, so our babies are as close as we will get to having kids. Presently we have three cats, one kitten, and two ferrets and they are all awesome. Each of them have their own personalities, and each of them their own routines that I would not change even if I could. Animals have a way of enriching your life for just existing, and while I might complain about this or that I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I wouldn’t know what to do without one animal at my feet and another on my lap… and another wandering around my office knocking stuff over. I am thankful for my fuzzy warm bundles of happy, and the joy they bring.

Things That Should Die…

November 1, 2014 by Belghast

…in a Fire

This morning I thought I would take a stab and talking about some of the constructs in online games specifically that need to just go away. Over the years I’ve noticed a bunch of things that really do not benefit players in games and only serve to divide them. This is going to likely be a more free form style post than my normal 3 blocks structure… but I am just going with that one.

1) Region Lockout

There are literally an unlimited potential visualizations of the internet, because so much depends upon the activity at the moment you observe it. The image to the left is someone’s vague attempt at “drawing” the internet. It looks like many things, but you know what it absolutely doesn’t look like? That’s right there is no way to somehow match that image up to a map of the countries of the world. The internet is this grand technology that has essentially abolished borders and turned them into meaningless distinctions. I have friends in England, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Ecuador, Brazil, and more than I can possibly count in our sibling to the North… Canada.

Ultimately I want to be able to play freely with all of them, and if it was not hard enough to try and juggle time zone conflicts… game companies seem to feel the need to throw up artificial boundaries to keep players from different regions in separate bundles. This needs to stop, and while server localization is a good thing… blocking players from freely mingling between the areas is a bad thing. Region based launches and region based exclusivity also need to “die in a fire”. We are living in a global community, and its about damned time we realize it.

2) Server Restrictions

Another massive frustration is that as gamers we are still somehow constrained to playing on servers. Don’t get me wrong… I love servers. Before it went to shit I loved Argent Dawn my role-playing server in World of Warcraft, and currently I am in love with Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV. I absolutely think having a small intimate group that you see every single day is a good thing. What I don’t think is a good thing is the hard boundaries. Just because I live in the Tulsa area in Oklahoma… doesn’t mean I can’t go visit someone living in the Dallas Texas area. Essentially this is how our games should work too. There are certain games that are already doing this and it is amazing. In Rift for example you can choose to move your character between servers at will once every week, but more important than that you can choose to transfer yourself temporarily to ANY server in your cluster and you are able to group across servers freely. The Secret World has the same sort of setup, and it allows you to join up with literally anyone else playing the game.

Both of these situations represent the ideal, that you still have a server structure that gives you familiarity with other players but at the same time the freedom to hang out with anyone else who happens to be playing the same game as you. Completely abolishing servers on the other hand isn’t as good of an idea. In The Elder Scrolls Online we free floated on the same server, but the fact that player names were hidden and that you were constantly being mixed with a different batch of players… kept you from developing ties. There are friends I have in FFXIV only because we saw each other doing the same things over and over and struck up a conversation while doing it. This is important, but it is also important to be able to hang out with that person you meet five months after you started playing… and find out they are playing in a completely different server community. Your character is just data, and it should be able to flow between servers… which are also just data.

3) Faction Walls

Another thing that I find super frustrating is when you meet someone that happens to be playing the same game as you… but then you find out that you are on opposite sides of some meaningless conflict in game and as such your characters are sworn enemies. Red versus Blue mentality needs to go away. It is a very dumb way of dealing with the concept of factions, because in the end it is the players that end up losing out. I’ve never felt faction pride in a video game, because these factions have nothing to do with me. I didn’t get to choose the way that the Horde was founded in Azeroth. I didn’t choose to align to the Orcs and the Tauren and Undead and god forbid the damned Blood Elves. I was brought into a situation where those were already connected for various also meaningless reasons. Nothing about that has anything to do with me and my motivations as a player.

What is more meaningful is that for players to start out in the world with certain baseline alignments determined by their race or their class… but have those be malleable. One of the things I loved about the original Everquest was that your faction choices were personal in nature. Paineel was a city of Evil Erudite Necromancers… but by choice I aligned my Wood Elf Ranger with the city through lots of personal work. Meaning that I could go there at any time I wanted and use the city like any other city. Similarly I knew players who factioned with the giants turning Kael Drakkel… an area that is normally a raid zone into a useable player city. These are interesting choices ones that take lots of effort, but ones that also bring the player deeper into your world as a result. Setting up artificial boundaries just for the propagation of shallow player versus player combat is a horrible idea and needs to go away. Let the players choose their allegiance, and let the players decide just what they are willing to fight for.

4) Weekly Lockouts

This one is a thing that is starting to change slowly, but where it still exists it needs to go away. What I mean by weekly lockouts is that once you run something like a raid you are locked out from participating for another week. This used to create this complicated process of making sure that you stayed unlocked from this or that content to make sure you were eligible to participate in it with your raid or your guild. As a raid leader it was always disappointing to get ready to go and find out that one of your key members had locked themselves out earlier in the week. Like I said this is starting to change slowly with the introduction of the “loot locking” construct, where you can participate as many times as you like but you can only receive loot once. Even this has many forms because the World of Warcraft version is a per boss loot lock, and the Final Fantasy XIV version is a single piece of loot period from the entire instance.

In both cases however it is significantly better than being locked completely and unable to help out your friends. If you notice that is a running theme in all of these things that need to go away. Basically there are a lot of MMO constructs that get in the way of you playing with your friends. For awhile now I have had this maxim of “anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is bad” and I still stand by it. What I would like to see is that there be some reward for the players “just helping out”. Sure they can’t win the actual loot off the boss, but maybe for participating they get a loot bag at the end of the run that can contain some interesting stuff. This sort of thing would give folks warm fuzzies for helping out their friends, but also not be rewarding enough for people to abuse it by grinding the raids over and over. In any case… these are four constructs that I feel that MMOs would be better off without.

Lalafell Rescue Squad

October 31, 2014 by Belghast

Rubber Snake Attack

Instead of coming home and gaming like normal last night, I actually went out and did something sociable with actual living and breathing people! I know it is a shock to the system to fathom the ramifications of that statement. Several months ago a group from work attended the live RiffTrax showing of the Matthew Broderick Godzilla and it was an absolute blast. I have been a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 since college, and RiffTrax is essentially the same folks doing the same sort of thing… without the robots and a guy trapped on a space station construct. During that they previewed the next movie and at that point we decided that we had to attend again so we could see Anaconda… a movie that I did not remember being as cheesy as it actually was. Thankfully we learned a lot from the first time, and arrived at the theater considerably earlier. Last time none of us actually got to sit together, but instead ended up having to pair up to get us all seated. Last night we at dinner at a restaurant in the same parking lot as the theater so we were able to walk over and got there well before they even opened up seating.

Anaconda… was seriously worse of a movie than I remember, and even at the time I thought the snake looked nothing like an actual snake. The cast was disturbingly “star studded” for as bad of a train wreck as it ended up being. You had Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Ice Cube and I believe this was the movie debut of Jennifer Lopez. At the very least it was before I was actually aware of who she was, as I don’t think she had released her first album yet. There were just so many cheesy things about the movie… like the fact that every single time that we see J-Lo on screen it is apparently super cold in the Amazon because they make a point of lingering on some massive nippledge going on. Aside from the snake being horrible… it looked like they recycled a ton of footage. The Rifftrax guys pointed out a moment near the end of the movie where the waterfall is going backwards… as they quite literally just reversed a shot from earlier in the movie. Similarly they seem to keep passing the exact same snake idol a half dozen times.

I did not however attend to watch the movie, but instead listen to the RiffTrax crew tear it apart. The Godzilla show was great but this one took it to all new levels. In fact I would have to say this is probably going to go down as one of their better performances. There was just so much to make fun of in this movie, and the fact that it had both J-Lo and IceCube in it… basically gave them free reign to mix in lots jokes about their careers as a whole. This is starting to become a regular thing that we do as a group. They previewed the next show coming up December 4th which is a strange rendition of Santa Claus from the 50s. The trailer bits they showed looked absolutely insane… Santa Claus in space… fighting and army of dancing devils. Hopefully we can once again muster the troops and go as a group. Not sure we get much “team building” done, but it is a really fun time nonetheless.

Lalafell Rescue Squad

This RiffTrax overall seemed a bit shorter than the last one, and as a result I ended up getting back home at a decent hour. I decided to pop into Final Fantasty XIV for a bit and see what all was happening. After milling around a bit in the housing district a few of us pulled together a run for the new Sunken Temple of Qarn Hard mode. This was one of those dungeons that we avoided like the plague because of its frustrating “one shot death” mechanics, so I think as a whole we were at the least concerned when we saw it would end up as a hard mode. Thankfully the mechanics are not that cheap this time around. Not to spoil this for anyone, but there are no bees this time around. What is there instead is a continuation of the original story. When we cleared the dungeon the first time, it apparently made the place safe enough for groups of adventurers to begin exploring it. However a group of tomb robbers triggered yet another trap, and you are going there at the bidding of a brother who wishes you to go rescue his sister. Adorable Lalafell needing rescuing… that sounds like as noble cause as any… my people need me.

I am not as geared as I could be, but I am no slouch overall. The bare minimum for the dungeon is ilevel 80 and I went in there last night with 103. Overall I think I was managing the damage pretty well, but it definitely put our healer through a workout. I think in part he was just used to healing Paladins with their significantly smaller health pools. With group buffs I was over 10,000 hit points, and a comparable Paladin would be around 6,000. So when the final boss hit me for 2,000 it really didn’t feel that significant, however with a paladin that would be 1/3rd of their available health pool. I think Tams complaint was that it felt like his heals weren’t doing much, but that is primarily because a percentage of my health bar is quite a bit more hit points than a percentage of someone else’s health bar. In any case we made it through the dungeon without any wipes and only I believe a single death. The content is hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard that it becomes punishing. I feel like Pharo Sirius is still a rougher dungeon than this one for example.

At the end of the day we finished the run, beat the big bad end boss and saved the adorable Lalafell Adventerer. I feel like it was a good way to end an already awesome night. One of my favorite things about the new dungeons is that they drop these tokens that can then be turned in for any ilevel 90 class piece of armor. So while they did in fact remove these from the Tombstone and Hunt vendors, you can still get the gear. The fact that they shifted it to a token system means the mobs have a more shallow loot table, and as a result each individual piece is more useful. I feel like I will enjoy picking up a level 90 set way more by running these three new dungeons than I ever would by simply grinding tombstones or hunts until I had the necessary currency. This is fine and dandy for experienced players, but I still feel like this patch and its changes made it significantly harder for a brand new player to gear up. Granted maybe they did that on purpose, so players would have to spend a bit more time running dungeons before leap-frogging into end game content.

Dimension Goodies a Plenty

With all the Final Fantasy XIV goodness, I am still playing some Rift Nightmare Tide… it has just taken a back seat. At the very least I am logging in a few times a day to make sure my minions are running the 8 hour long missions. These reward some crazy stuff, and so far as a result of all of my minion missions I have literally three 28 slot bags full of nothing but dimension stuff. At some point I need to sift through it all and see what I can actually use. You get a pretty broad mix of things from basic building blocks to intricate items like the Infernal Dawn Cannon. The 8 hour long dimension missions have a chance of rewarding these chests that each have half a dozen items in them… so it feels like buying those grab bags off the store. I really like the Rift dimensions system for player housing, so at some point I really should work on building a proper home.

Rift is more than likely going to be a weekend game for me as I do laundry and watch stuff off netflix or the DVR. The pace works well there and the fact that I can pop to the guild dimension when I afk, and return exactly to the point where I last left off is a really nice feature. The content in Nightmare Tide is significantly more enjoyable for me than Storm Legion was. At some point soon I want to try out one of the new dungeons. I dinged 61, so have made some forward momentum, but still have not really touched even half of Goboro Reef. While there may only be three new zones, each of the zones is absolutely massive in scale. I’ve not actually done any of the instant adventures, mostly because it seems like an excessive amount of area to try and cover rapidly. In any case I am still enjoying the game, but just playing it as a side venture with Final Fantasy XIV being my primary focus.

#RiffTrax #FFXIV #Rift

Bribing Good Behavior

October 30, 2014 by Belghast

Better Community

Yesterday I posted this picture and said that the person dancing with Sagacyte and I was a friend of his. Turns out that apparently this was not the case. The way she waved and immediately started dancing with us, made me think that she must have known him. So yeah… complete and total stranger came over and started interacting and now she is another person on my friends list. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked since this sort of thing happens all the time. There is a community spirit that infuses Final Fantasy XIV, and I am still not entirely used to just how prevalent it is. There are lots of quests that involve you walking into an area and a bunch of mobs spawn on top of you. The mobs that actually belong to you are marked but you can help out with any of them. It is a rare occasion that someone will move on after their mobs are dead and not help you kill yours. There was this one tank the other night that I swear “tanked” five sets of these mobs as new people walked into the spawning area.

This sort of thing is absolutely commonplace now, but the strange thing is… it wasn’t. What is strange about Final Fantasy XIV is that my friends and I played this game seriously at launch for roughly three months. Then we wandered off to do other things, and upon returning were shocked and amazed at how much the community had improved. At launch it felt like every other MMO, with folks doing the same kind of selfish actions that are so common place in other games. Running a random dungeon, likely meant that you would have one person complaining that you were pulling to slow, and another person complaining that the dps wasn’t somehow good enough… even though there are no meters for that. Basically the community had the same rampant asshatery that we’ve all experienced in “modern mmos”. Upon returning however we found that this negative element was almost completely gone. Sure you will encounter an abusive player every so often, but the community as a whole seems to have done a drastic turn around.

Bribing Good Behavior

One thing that we noticed quickly that had been added to the game since we last played was the player commendation system. What makes the system interesting is that at the end of every duty, each player gets a single commendation that they can award to another player from that group. Now normally when a game has a system like this, you can queue exclusively with guild members or friends and cheat the system. However in this case you cannot reward commendations to your guildies, but have to instead use it on a stranger. The other half of this equation is that you are rewarded both your giving commendations, and greatly rewarded for receiving them. Each week there is a challenge log entry for handing out commendations that gives the player a bit of experience and some gil. As far as the receiving side they have set up a system of increasing rewards for 10, 50, 100, 300 and 500 player commendations. The final reward is the golden colored Magitech armor that you see in the above screenshot… something that pretty much everyone I know universally wants.

What has happened as a result is that players are actively trying to win commendations while in dungeon runs. As a whole they are far easier to work with, and more willing to stop and explain mechanics if you simply speak up and let them know you are new to a fight. In fact I have seen entire raid groups come to a grinding halt just to explain the mechanics of a fight to a new player. Often times another player will mentor the newer player through what they actually need to pay attention to on a given fight. The only thing I have seen much frustration really is when a group wipes because a player didn’t understand the mechanics… and didn’t speak up about it at the beginning of the run. This leads players to be more willing to speak up about things that confuse them, or things they are having issues with… which then get solved as a group. Admittedly there is some content that is the equivalent of WoW’s LFR… but even then inside each individual team there is usually some camaraderie as the run goes on.

Rewarding Communication

I have long been one of those individuals who have stated that the addition of the dungeon finder to World of Warcraft made the game a significantly worse place. Sure it made getting groups easier, but it changed the way we ran dungeons permanently. The “push a button, get a group” nature of the tool had a ton of unforeseen consequences, the worst of which is it dehumanized your interaction with other players. Instead of people that you had to communicate with in order to get a group in the first place… they became roles that enabled you to get your loot Piñata at the end and nothing more. The first thing to go with the dungeon finder was discussion in dungeons other than screaming at other players for not living up to some set of standards. Folks stopped talking while running dungeons, and most players just kept their head down and tried to make it through the dungeon all the while trying not to be called in the carpet for being “bad”. It was during this era that I stopped running with strangers, because every time the experience was just so damned maddening.

With Final Fantasy, I restarted the game a few weeks ahead of the bulk of my friends… meaning my only option was to do random dungeons or either do no dungeons at all. The first thing I noticed when I set foot into a dungeon was that players greeted each other, and once that happened the communication started flowing again. Players seemed more willing to talk about what was going on with fights, what they needed help with… and even things completely unrelated to the current dungeon run. Granted all of this might be some elaborate act in an attempt to earn player commendations… and being the friendliest in the group usually earns you at least one… but whatever the cause it is a drastic improvement over the standard MMO environment. I think we have a case of “fake it until you make it” going on here, where players might start out faking a friendly attitude, but over time of doing this over and over… something changes inside you. I find myself not getting upset at the mistakes of other players, and not dwelling on what went wrong… but focusing more on what needs to happen for things to go right.

Positive Leadership

I am not sure if I can account all of the positive changes simply to the player commendation system. I feel like the more aggressive players that make up the early MMO rush have moved on from the game, leaving behind only players that are really dedicated to the Final Fantasy franchise for one reason or another. Additionally the way that the developers of this game interact with the fans is just completely different. I’ve talked about this before, especially in relation to the way the game developers at Blizzcon interact with their fans. It often times feels like they are living out some rockstar fantasy up on stage, and there is always a tinge of condescension when they answer fans. Watching Fan Festival on the other hand… was like watching one big fan talking to a bunch of other big fans. One of my friends commented that Yoshi-P seems to treat us more like investors in his vision, than customers. Another friend chimed in and said that it was almost like he was this super benevolent guild leader. In any case the difference in interaction shows, and trickles down to the player base as well.

So I think all of these little things add up to an atmosphere that rewards the player for being helpful and showing community spirit. So much in this game cannot be accomplished without other players, and the constant fiddling and tweaking with systems always seems to air on the side of supporting collaborative play rather than competition for resources. Granted Final Fantasy XI and XIV 1.0 had really interesting communities, and to some extent the XIV 2.0 and beyond community is standing on their shoulders. Even in the midst of all the rogue zergy nature going on with the release of a new class… players are still far more polite about everything than they were at launch. At this point I don’t care if they essentially have bribed us into being nice passive team players, the end result adds up to a very positive player experience. It had been a really long time since I had felt a sense of pride in a game community, and I am damned proud to be a Final Fantasy XIV player and even prouder to be a member of the ever amazing Cactuar server community. For years Azeroth was my home base as I wandered out to explore other games, but I think at this point that new title belongs to Eorzea. There is so much awesome stuff coming down the pipe, and I cannot wait to experience it all.

#FFXIV #FinalFantasy