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Play What You Love

August 17, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 18

This week on AggroChat I am joined by regular hosts Rae, Ashgar and Tam which means we are unfortunately without a Kodra this weekend. He is off enjoying the sights, sounds and gaming opportunities of GenCon. I swear one of these years I want to go to this, because it has been like the pinnacle of all gaming shows in my head since I was a youngin reading Dragon magazine. I realize that in reality it is a fair bit smaller than likely even PaxSouth that I will be going to in January, but there is just something extra epic about GenCon. In honor of this convention we talk at length about the latest rendition of Dungeons and Dragons… the fabled Fifth Edition and why you should be excited for it. Wizards of the Coast at this point pretty much knows that they made some serious mistakes with fourth edition, allowing for the meteoric rise of Pathfinder. In 5th Edition it feels like they are trying to pay for the sins of the past with awesome.

In addition to D&D 5th, it was a pretty significant week in gaming in that GamesCom, the Blizzard Warlords announcement and SOE Live were going as well as an event for EVE and SWTOR. I talk about the things that really stuck out to me from the GamesCom feed, including the PS4 Shareplay system and the controversy over Tomb Raider exclusivity. We talk about the World of Warcraft Warlords launch announcement and the subsequent trailer, and the general feeling of “blah” we seem to have towards it. Finally we talk about Everquest Next and that it does in fact seem to be a game they are actually working on and not just vaporware. Additionally we talk about the upcoming changes in Landmark, and how it is a step in the right direction but not enough to get Ashgar interested again. It is a pretty packed show so hopefully you will tune in.

Play What You Love

Since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV and the release of the 14 day trial program, I have had a number of friends give it a shot. A good number of them have gone ahead purchasing and subscribing to the game and this is awesome. However for a handful of players it just didn’t click for whatever reason and they sent me heartfelt apologies for not being able to get into the game. This is perfectly natural, not all games are for all people… and in the current gaming climate we are in there is more diversity than ever, so there really is no excuse to play something you don’t enjoy. So I feel like each of us owes it to ourselves to play whatever it is that we love, and never apologize for doing it. Life is too short to spend time playing something you just don’t enjoy for some reason.

Right now I am enjoying the hell out of Final Fantasy XIV, and I feel like this is a game I could settle down in. However if I reach a point where I am not enjoying it any longer, you can bet I will move on to whatever seems to “feel good” to play at the time. If you stick around and play a game you just aren’t enjoying it only really leads to you either getting completely burnt out, or extremely bitter about the fact that your friends are forcing you to play something you hate. If you allow yourself to glide along through a whole bunch of different fun experiences… I feel like we all end up happier as a result. So please if you try this game or any other and you really don’t enjoy it… go play something else. All you ever have to tell me is that it just “wasn’t for you” and I will completely understand.

Blaugust Prompts

I have been rather slack with a lot of the Blaugust related things, but the biggest of these is my original intent to collect a bunch of writing prompts. While the threat on the forum has a ton of these already I still need to add a bunch more. So today here goes a few related to this weeks podcast and this weekend post.

What game do you love that none of your friends seem to enjoy? Is there a game that you keep returning to but wish your friends were playing along with you?
For me GenCon is this fabled event, what is yours? What is the event that you would love to attend but have never had the opportunity to do so for whatever reason.
What makes a good community? What aspects of a game or social community do you enjoy, and what aspects detract from it?

I am extremely proud of all the bloggers who are participating daily in the Blaugust event. Thanks for making this a truly awesome month.

#FFXIV #AggroChat #Blaugust

Death by Adorable

August 16, 2014 by Belghast

Back to School Time

I’ve said this before but the two most frustrating times in the life of a teacher spouse are the beginning of school and the end of school. It is hard to watch your spouse going through a stress filled ballet and not really having much that you can do to stop it. Here in Oklahoma it is of course the beginning of a new school year, and while my wife does have have students yet she has been back officially at work several days now. To be truthful this summer she barely got any time off at all considering she was up in her classroom almost every day. Apparently during the welcome back speech that the principal gave he mentioned this fact.

Today we are going out on that ritual of rituals… back to school shopping. It is in fact not just a ritual that the students go through. I am sure we will be hitting lots of different clothing stores in search of that “first day” outfit that we always seem to get. Back to school sales are like porn for teachers, and I am not sure if the rest of the world knows this or not. The odd thing is that this year the sales are just lacking. I am not sure what exactly it is, but so far it is not only that the stores don’t have much in the way of sales going on, but they don’t have much in the way of interesting stuff either. In the past Target and Walmart both would have these dollar sections full of all sorts of organization ideas that my wife would come away with inspired from. This year they are pretty much non-existant… and I don’t think Walmart even has their dollar section.

The biggest disappointment I have is in Office Depot. Once upon a time they were among the most supportive businesses for teachers. We had a teachers appreciation card that gave us a discount on damned near everything we bought, and while the discount wasn’t amazing… it felt like it was something. Several years back they replaced this program with one similar to that of Best Buy where you get gift cards for every X dollars that you spend. Even this has been reduced to a pittance. On top of this the stores themselves seem to have gone through a state of decline as they just don’t have the stock that they used to. I think this is the first year that I can recall where they didn’t have a teachers appreciation day, or give teachers the ability to buy more than the limit on the sales. In any case it has been frustrating to watch this, and for my wife it is like ruining Christmas morning.

Death By Adorable

For some time I had been blocked from progressing along the main storyline quest by the Thornmarch Hard primal fight. Instead of waiting for the rest of the guild to catch up so we could do the fight legitimately as an 8 man team, several of us decided to go ahead and knock it out of the way. The fourth primal of course is Good King Moggle Mog the king of the Moogles. It is a council fight of sorts, but to really call it a council fight is a bit of a misstatement. It is a fight of sheer chaos for the most part. First you are presented with a series of Moogle adds, each one representing a class in the game. Some of these are more important for you to kill than others, and as DPS I pretty much just followed the marked targets. After defeating all either of the Mooglesguard the king himself spawns and the actual fight begins.

The council aspect comes into play in that when you kill an add the King inherent their power. The Black Mage for example does an AOE ability that spreads through the entire room, the White Mage heals, the Warrior a giant version of steel cyclone, and the Paladin taunts and pulls everyone into him. These last two can be brutal in that the Paladin and Warrior and time them to happen at the same time essentially wiping the raid. This fight as a result is all about killing things in the right order and keeping the various Mooglesguard away from targets that buff them. I am not 100% sure what order we went in but I know without a doubt that Black Mage and White Mage were the first two to go down. I also know that we killed warrior, but left Paladin up in the successful attempt. However we only managed to down them because someone got off a limit break as we were wiping horribly at the time.

The fight itself is sheer chaos and the hardest part about pugging it was that no one seemed to be able to agree on the “correct” kill order. In many ways it reminded me of the Paragons fight in Siege of Orgrimmar, but at least there everyone agreed that one target was far more important than the others. I am glad to be through the fight and able to move on with my main storyline quest. That said I would gladly go back and do it another time. Extreme mode sounds like insanity, because supposedly you have to carefully dps down each of the Mooglesguard without killing them, because the king himself is immune to damage… however when any member of the Mooglesguard dies he heals all of them back to full from his own health pool. So in theory you have to burn down all of the moogles down to near death and then kill one off draining the health of the King in the process. The madness of constantly having to fight all eight Mooglesguard and deal with the king at the same time just seems like pure hell.

Syrcus Tower

The only other big thing that I did last night was work through the quest chain leading up to the next step of Crystal Tower. From what I hear Syrcus Tower is a significantly different beast than Labyrinth of the Ancients. Whereas in Labyrinth you could theoretically get a piece of loot from every encounter, each time you chose to run it, in Syrcus you are limited to receiving a single piece of loot per week. This has made it a frustrating time for a lot of people as they watch so much really good loot rot. I guess the bulk of people running it are doing so in hope of getting a piece needed for weapon upgrades. So no one actually rolls on the gear, and that means in general if you are going in there for gearing purposes you have your pick of whatever you could want.

The only problem is it takes awhile to run and I have yet to actually have time to really queue for it. Instead of doing it I ended up doing a random hard mode dungeon with the guild. So hopefully tonight I will be able to dip my toes into the dungeon proper. At this point I have progressed significantly gear wise. Right now I am sitting at 83 ilevel and the only pieces that are sub 90 are my boots, belt and gloves. All of which can be upgraded through a number of means, not the least of which are running hunts and gaining bookrocks. Additionally I could luck out and get replacements for any of those slots while running Syrcus. It seems like the hardest thing to get is jewelry as far as drops go, and as a result I have spent most of my bookrocks and hunt tokens on getting those sorted out. Still really enjoying the game and pumped to see more people joining in every few days. Our hope is that as some point we can try the actual raid the Binding Coil of Bahamut which is an 8 man duty.

#FFXIV

We Have The Date

August 15, 2014 by Belghast

That’s a Lot of Fish

Last night I did something a bit different than my normal fare and actually hung out with several of my coworkers. While I hang out with Rae at least in the virtual sense almost every night, this was a bit different. For my boss’s birthday his brother took him to a thing called Rifftrax put on by the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000. They do the same basic thing, but they do it live and stream it to theaters all over the country. Since he had such a great time he decided it would make an excellent group activity. So last night we met for dinner and then continued on to the nearby theater to watch the Matthew Broderick version of Godzilla ripped apart by the MST3K guys.

First off this is a much bigger deal than any of us realized, as we spent probably a bit too long at the restaurant and had maybe 20 minutes before the start of the film. By the time we all got to the theater and inside the place was absolutely packed. Apparently if you want to get seats together you have to arrive well ahead of time, and it almost has a tail gating mentality. Instead we all split up mostly into groups of two to find a place to sit. So this ended up with me being down on the front row leaning back in my seat and trying to watch the movie. Thankfully we didn’t really CARE about the movie… but instead the commentary. Afterwards they said that it was a bit hard to hear the dub over as you got further back in the theater so I guess the awkward angle was worth it.

This is totally something I would do again, and it has been a long while since I have laughed this hard. I guess I had completely put large sections of the Broderick film out of my memory. I mean I remember it being bad at the time, but I didn’t remember it being THIS bad. If you have the chance to see Rifftrax in a nearby theater I suggest you take up that opportunity. They do this apparently as a semi regular thing here, so I will have to follow the schedule and see what is next. It seems like the next showing is November 4th where they do that campy classic Anaconda. I will have to see what is going on but I would really like to maybe try and go.

We Have the Date

Yesterday was the big announcement for the Warlords of Draenor release date and now we know exactly when to expect it to land. Some time ago Godmother ran a contest to see who could guess the date, and I apparently came the closest along with River. I remember at the time River saying something to the effect that I looked lonely on the spreadsheet so he decided my guess was as good as any. Now that said I did have some logic behind my guess, I was not just randomly picking numbers. My general theory was that we would not see a World of Warcraft expansion until after Blizzcon. So knowing the Blizzcon dates I figured they would want to take advantage of the Blizzcon-Bump but get product out there before Thanksgiving and the holiday madness begins. I apparently was right but Blizzard threw everyone for a loop by making the release a Thursday. I don’t think anyone was expecting that.

Once again the good folks at Blizzard have managed to craft together a really awesome cinematic. Were I a horde player I would probably be cheering the awesome orc action. Instead it just seems like another really awesomely animated feature explaining the premise of the expansion. The events play out a little different than I would have thought. All along I thought that Garrosh would actually stop Grommash from drinking the blood, but it seems like good ole Grom was already making that decision. Garrosh however just gave him the backup he needed to defeat Mannorath. I feel like the events of this expansion will serve to set up for the long fabled Burning Legion expansion, since we obviously screw with the way things were supposed to work out. I figure you can’t kill a demon like Mannorath without having some pretty negative repercussions.

Overwhelming Meh

Like I said, were I a horde player I would likely be heralding in yet another overwhelmingly horde focused expansion. Thing is I am not, and I have never cared a single bit about any of the horde lore. It was just that faction filled with monstrous humanoids and a handful of people that I cared enough about to roll alts to be able to play with. Nothing about the horde is really my thing, apart from the whole “everything has spikes” aspect. I expected yesterdays event and subsequent trailer to pump me up and prepare me for what was inevitable, my temporary return to World of Warcraft. The thing is it seems to have had the opposite effect. I am even less interested in the expansion than I was going into the day, and I can’t really put my finger on the why.

I have been in Alpha/Beta for some time now, and all in total I have played somewhere between six and eight hours. During that time I have just felt like I was forcing myself to play the game. I felt obligated to test the content since friends had gotten me into it. Nothing I was doing however really did it for me, and even with the existence of some interesting ideas like the Garrisons, it all felt rehashed. The Burning Crusade was one of the most exciting expansions for me, and it was the era of so many cool things for me as a raider. I expected to be wrapped up in this whirlwind of nostalgia upon returning to it… albeit in a pre-destruction state. While Draenor is gorgeous and I can see the underpinnings of the areas I used to love… it all just feels really old at this point.

This expansion is going to be amazing for those players that are currently enthralled with the game. There are going to be a handful of other players that maybe quit wow but didn’t really play other games in the meantime… that will return and fall back in love again. However I fear for those of us who have gone nomadic and played every game that has come down the pipe… the overall game is just starting to feel its age. The systems don’t quite work as well as other games on the market, it isn’t the culmination of the best ideas any longer. Instead it is a combination of what they could get to work within the existing framework of the game. It will definitely breathe new life into the game a whole and introduce a bunch of new doodads for the players to get involved with, but so far it has all felt very hollow to me. As much as I want to be excited, I am wondering if I have actually truly outgrown the game. I had more fun doing Godmother’s survey than I have had actually playing the game in a very long time… so that tells me I was pretty much living off nostalgia to this point, and maybe that font has been exhausted.

Labyrinth of the Ancients

August 14, 2014 by Belghast

Manderville With Friends

Yesterday I had a bit of a rough day at work from the mental and emotional sanity standpoint. So I was pretty much bummed throughout the day and this carried on to coming home that night. I did have a weird sequence of events happen that lead to me meeting a new friend. When I play a game on a specific server I have gotten in the habit of creating a column in tweetdeck with the server name and the game name in it, just to see what happens to be going on in that community on social media. When I came back to Final Fantasy XIV I did that and created a column that said “FFXIV Cactuar” giving me any FFXIV posts related to Cactuar. It has been less than amazing considering that it also catches all posts about the cactuar creatures… and as a result I had gotten out of the habit at looking at it.

When I looked yesterday however there were a bunch of posts from a seemingly friendly person playing on our server. In fact there were pictures posted of the mists housing district, and I thought wow… wouldn’t it be a crazy coincidence if we ended up virtual neighbors. Turns out she is in ward 1 of the Mists which pretty much means “we bought housing the second it was available”. We friended each other in game and next thing I know she is coming to visit our house in the ward. What do you do when you have guests over? Dance the manderville of course. After a bit I got a few guildies in on the act, and she even taught us what happens when you get a bunch of Moogle pets together. After a short period of time they apparently start dancing in a circle together. With some experimentation it seems like lots of pets interact with others of the same type. When you summon a Pudgy Puk for example, all the other Puks rush over to greet the newcomer. It is little details like this that make the game so amazingly charming.

The awesome side effect of all of this madness however is that through twitter we all met a new friend. As the evening progressed she pulled two of my guildies into Syrcus tower and I think they had a pretty good time. She on the other hand seems super excited to actually know some people on during the EDT primetime. She hails from a huge guild on the server, that apparently at one point was one of the highest progressed guilds, otherwise I would totally try and steal her into the guild. It might still happen because her group is not active at all, as for whatever reason most of them went missing posts patch 2.2. In any case it was a pretty awesome random happening, and I think its always great to meet more awesome people on the server I play on.

Labyrinth of the Ancients

As far as my evening, my wife and I walked a mile and some change to dinner and when I got back everyone was otherwise engaged. So I decided to take the plunge and queue for the first of the crystal tower instances. Labyrinth of the Ancients is essentially the Final Fantasy XIV version of the WoW LFR system. You queue up individually or as a group and are matched up with other players forming three groups of 8 or 24 in total. Each “alliance” as they call it works as a team to make its way through the tower, and often times has to split apart so that each time covers a specific mechanic. The first part of the dungeon drops ilvl 80 gear, and has no loot restrictions, which makes it a pretty popular place to grind out some basic gear. Additionally each run through rewards both kinds of “bookrocks” making it a decent way to get some currency.

In total I made two runs last night through the raid. The first run seemed to be going really smoothly with us one-shotting the first boss encounter. However there was a portion that involved us splitting up into three teams and our team kept failing. I am not really sure what was happening as my role in the fight was super focused on burning down the “boss” at the end of the platform. Apparently however the adds were not getting handled and the ranged dps that is supposed to burn them down failed to do so. The end result was a slow cascade of players leaving the group until finally the game asked us if we wanted to abandon the duty since there really was no shot in hell of getting fillins. Unlike World of Warcraft the Final Fantasy duty system allows you to say “I only want fresh raids” and this is the default option…. so for the most part it is very hard to get people to join your group. In future runs I might just flag myself as a fillin to see if the queue goes any faster, as each time I have queued it took around thirty minutes.

Second Chances and Onion Knights

I took a break, stretched my legs and got a drink and then sat down to queue for Crystal Tower again when my group failed out. It was roughly thirty minutes again when I got a brand new group. At first I was wondering if this would be a repeat of the last group when we struggled to defeat the Bone Dragon encounter. However from that point onwards everything else went pretty flawlessly, and in no time at all we were through the dungeon and I was on to being flagged for Syrccus tower. Most of the look was meaningless for me, however form the Behemoth encounter a lancer hat dropped. I mostly rolled on it for the cosmetic look and that I was the only lancer in my sub team. When loot drops, it drops for your 8 man group and not for the 24 man raid instance as a whole. This means you are only really in competition against a handful of players, and so far I have been the only dragoon on each time.

I was able to scrounge up a picture of what the completed Onion Knight set looks like, so yeah I totally rolled for cosmetic purposes. In truth I would really like to get all of the pieces of the Wolfram set because I am really digging the appearance there. I seem to have lucked into the chest and helmet. The Chest was 66,000 gil and the Helmet was 80,000 gil on the Market Board, and since then I have not seen ANY piece of Wolfram gear cheaper than 150,000 to 200,000 gil. I am sure the crafter that posted them that cheaply is kicking themselves, but as a result I have some really awesome ilvl 90 gear. I will have to ask some of my crafter friends what exactly it takes to make more pieces because yeah… I could totally use some more of it. In any case I had a fun time checking out the raid instance. I think it is all of our hopes to be able to do Binding Coil of Bahamut at some point as a guild, especially since that is only an 8 man raid. I really like the encounters in this game so far, and I look forward to seeing what more of the raids look like.

#FFXIV #Cactuar #CrystalTower