June 2015 – Page 3

Chain Run Dungeons

July 3, 2015June 26, 2015 by Belghast

Worst Party Comp Ever

Last night I was feeling more than a little out of it, or at least too out of it to actual do much of anything meaningful in Final Fantasy XIV. So after finishing my hunt quest and randoming my way into an Aery dungeon group… I opted to just log out for the night. For a period of time I considered simply going to sleep… and this is honestly the option I should have taken. The Four Job Fiesta is like a religion to my good friend Ashgar, and until the night before last I had not actually even registered for it officially. So as I sat there swaddled in a comfy blanket on the very comfy sofa… I opted to dig the xbox controller out of the console beside me and officially start my fiesta. The rest is history as I was up fairly late getting my start in the world. In past Fiestas my party comp has not been terribly horrible… or at the very least I have bought my way to freedom using the Jobfair donation system. This time however being I think my fourth year participating… I am just going to let it ride.

So when the game assigned me monk for my Wind job… I didn’t think much about it. I figured that would be an easy beginning to the game. When it gave me Berserker for my water job however… I started to dread this decision I had made. Then when I was assigned Beastmaster as my fire job… I realized this was going to be a really odd ride. I figure the answer to my freedom will once again be out level the content, and I have already gotten a start on that notion as I just defeated the Library of Ancients at level 21 which is about five levels or so off the normal pace I believe. Next time I play I will be going after my earth job.. and wondering if it will be salvation or another nail in the coffin on this horrible party. Admittedly I have never actually used the Beastmaster but I always hated how fiddly Gau was in Final Fantasy VI and never actually used him as a result. In theory this is going to be a return to that sort of thing, but I need to do some serious research on what all I need to do and when I need to do it, especially as I am just about to get an airship for the first time giving me a wider range of freedom to go off collecting abilities.

Chain Run Dungeons

In part the reason why I opted to log out last night instead of play is that I am sitting on a strange wall. Right now I am about half way to level 57 and I have a bunch of options on how to get there. I could go do all of the quests that I missed doing while skipping my way around the world and ignoring most of the side quests. I am sure that Square has intended me to level using these, and the fact that I am largely ignoring them is completely breaking their content design. I could always go join a FATE train somewhere, as this has always been a viable method of leveling especially now that so many people are doing it and there are almost always FATE groups in the party finder. It seems that Northern Thanalan is once again an active hotbed of FATE running, and in theory this would even be good experience for a Heavensward character. I am doing my daily hunts but they are honestly more for the currency provided and while they each provide a decent chunk of experience… there are far better and quicker ways to get it.

All of these are completely viable options, but I would far rather just run a bunch of dungeons. The problem is that my preference will always be to run dungeons with the Greysky Armada folks. Unfortunately they are either quiet about what they need for dungeons, or have not unlocked a given dungeon yet. I’ve run a few groups a night for the last several nights, but if I am going to rely on dungeons as a means of leveling I am going to have to step out into the larger community and just start random queuing. Now we get into the dilemma last night… I could have tanked a run for the guild, but I did not have the presence of mind to do so with strangers. Don’t get me wrong I love the FFXIV community, but dealing with anyone that I don’t already know inflicts a mental toll on me. My default and original state is that of an introvert… and over the years I have forced myself to be more extroverted… but doing so… drains me. Last night I was an energizer bunny that had wound down, but tonight hopefully I will begin chaining dungeons once more in order to get the last of my level so I can move forward in the story again and hopefully unlock dungeon four.

Unusually Trying Week

Not really sure why but this week has been a really rough one for some reason. In part I think it is because at the start of the week I had to deal with the being alone, as my wife was once again travelling. Thankfully only for a few days and as of Wednesday she should be home for the rest of the summer. It just seems like everything has been stressing me out far more than it should. I labored over the decision to go ahead and cancel the World of Warcraft account, just to keep it from auto renewing. I have stressed over a dozen different small issues at work, and I have been stressed that I no longer have the ability to do everything in Final Fantasy XIV. Right now I am a tank… and if the group already has one of those it means I have to sit out and watch from the bench as the group goes off and has fun. I liked that I could work my way into any group and fill whatever slot they happened to need, because in truth… running things with my guild is always the thing that I love to do the most.

The problem is that I will get there once again, but there is an almost insurmountable amount of leveling standing in the way. I have this odd relationship with grinding… I enjoy it, but only when I don’t realize it is there. If I am grinding towards a goal of some sort… then I realize how much work is going to be needed to get to where I want to go… and simply start to shut down. When I am just grinding as part of my default state of running around and attacking everything in sight… it becomes a happy and carefree place instead. The problem being that right now I know the end goal… and for whatever reason I am having trouble compartmentalizing and ignoring the finish line. I think I am just wired strangely… because so long as I don’t know where the finish line is I will keep pushing ahead blindly until I finally accomplish whatever it was that I wanted to accomplish. However once I know where the boundaries are, and what it is going to take to get there… the game changes and in a strange way goal setting de-motivates me. So long as I am on this fun romp of discovery, life is grand… but right now I need to somehow figure out how to ignore the goals and go back to playing everything for sheer enjoyment.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Chain Run Dungeons

Deeply Hidden Threads

July 3, 2015June 25, 2015 by Tamrielo

One of these days, Kodra is going to tell me to shut the hell up about comparative media and culture. He’s probably not going to be wrong about it. Lately I’ve been fascinated at the kinds of things we don’t realize we’ve internalized. Sometimes we can see things, or the shape of them, but it takes a lot of effort and a lot of really focused thought on things that we take for granted.

I’ve answered this question differently many, many times in the past, but right now I think that if I could have a superpower, it would be perfect fluency in every language. I’d love to delve into stories as told by other cultures, and see where they differ from what I’m used to. I’d love to see how the unceasing spread of globalization has caused some cultural concepts to bleed through to other places and which are the ‘core’ of a given society and resist that sort of change. I’d love to really understand what makes right and wrong in a culture entirely unlike mine.

I think it would probably make me insane. Trying to find space to process that many differing viewpoints on some very core philosophies would be next to impossible. We compartmentalize and create our own fences around whatever we consider our defining philosophies. I have a feeling this kind of behavior isn’t universally representative to the human condition, but I’m too close to the issue to be able to tell.

For something a little less abstract, in a conversation recently Kodra pointed out to me that he’s never seen an anime wherein the characters interact with the legal system– you don’t see people going to court and there’s no interaction: people are sent to the system and (it is assumed) are handled appropriately. To me, it’s a stark contrast to the American view of things, where there’s an inherent distrust in the system and a need to see justice served, sometimes (often) bypassing the legal system entirely and creating justifications after the fact. That inherent distrust of the system runs really deep– I can’t think of very many people I know who look at the system and say “yeah, it works”, and the few people I know who do are often ridiculed for being overly naive. I can’t help but wonder what the feeling is like elsewhere– what cultures implicitly trust their systems and which don’t?

I used to guiltily feel like I didn’t care much about other cultures, because I never found myself interested in cultural festivals or shows or music. I’ve been finding that that’s not true, that I’m fascinated by other places and people, but that I want to know about the philosophy and how it influences day-to-day lives. I occasionally like to say that I’m interested in finding out about other cultures by seeing what they do for fun, because how people have fun is such a good window into how they view and interact with the world. It’s a big part of why I like games– as a cultural medium, they have so much to say and I really enjoy seeing the kinds of systems people create to interact with for fun.

I’ve been making an effort lately to try to be more aware of the things that influence my opinions and reactions to things, and try to figure out both why I like the things I like and why I dislike the things I don’t like. There’s a whole subset of TV shows that I’m going to flippantly call “professionals being unprofessional” that rub me the wrong way– a lot of dramas and comedies revolving around a particular career tend to frustrate me because it bothers me to see the unprofessional, under-disciplined characters come out on top. It’s possible it’s gotten better, but a lot of early shows in that vein fit the bill of “brilliant X who knows better ignores the rules and turns out to have been right all along”. I have a hard time enjoying that sort of thing.

On the other hand, I recognize the need for conflict and difficulty in a professional drama– I’ve had Law and Order recommended to me a number of times as a seminal work that doesn’t portray trained professionals being unprofessional, and I suppose I’ll have to give it a go at some point.

haruhi disapproves of my babbling.

My thought process right now is all over the place; I’m making connections and analyzing the kinds of things I like. I just caught myself thinking about why I like cooking shows that pit chefs against one another in a fair competition but deeply dislike the ones that add on uneven variables– I adore the original Iron Chef but don’t really like what I’ve seen of Chopped. I feel like there’s a thread there, some link between why I have those opinions about cooking shows and why “professionals being unprofessional” shows bother me, but right now it’s eluding me.

Source: Digital Initiative
Deeply Hidden Threads

Content Walls

July 3, 2015June 25, 2015 by Belghast

A Different Dark Knight

So here is the point where I admit that I have never actually played any of the recent crop of Batman games. I own I believe all of them other than the latest one that just came out, because I keep thinking that they are games that I would really enjoy, but for whatever reason like so many games in my Steam backlog I never end up playing them. With all of the hype surrounding Batman Arkham Knight lately I have had this massive desire to delve into these games and see exactly what they are made of. Last night was an odd night in that I got home relatively early, but knew I would have to leave and go pick my wife up as she was getting in from our last trip of the summer. I knew I had an hour or so to kill so I opted to delve into this game and see how far I could get. So far there is a lot to like but some things that are a little bit maddening at times as well. Combat seems to take place in a three dimensional “final fight” style manner. NPC bad guys approach you in waves and you can beat on them to turn them away from your position.

The problem I have however is that the game employs a “bullet time” mechanic that I seem to have no real control over. Sure it looks cool to zoom in as your fist cracks against the jaw of a bad guy, but it is jarring in the same way that slow motion kills in Fallout 3 were. It pulls you out of the action and forces the entire world to slow down for a moment before unfreezing and expecting you to pick up combat where you left off. Hopefully this is something I will just get used to, as I didn’t make it terribly far into the game last night. I have to say the storyline and the plot are compelling enough to make me want to keep playing. I’ve always been a fan of Batman, and the dynamic between him and joker have been the stuff that has driven me to read more Batman comics than I can recall. Harley Quinn is another of my favorite characters in the universe, and she seems sufficient so far… but really I have not gotten to interact with her terribly much. Yes I realize at this point that this game is pretty “ancient” but I am going to enjoy it nonetheless.

Content Walls

I am still very much loving Heavensward but I wanted to take a moment to talk about my biggest frustration with the game so far. This game has some phenomenal story that makes you want to push forward so that you can see what happens next. The problem is quite frequently you hit a wall where you must be the next level in order to continue the quest chain. The red quest icon taunts you until you have managed to push through that next level… only to grant you access to a few more steps of story before locking you out again. I realize as I leveled my way through the original story in A Realm Reborn I experienced this… but it has been almost two years so I guess my memories had faded. Partially I think this is the fault of the way that I am currently playing the game, where I mostly focus on the Main Story, hoping to leave a lot of the side questing for secondary classes to get some experience off of. Unfortunately I think the designers intended you to do all of the new quests that open up in each area to help you push forward into the next content goal.

Thankfully I have dungeons to augment my leveling process, and since everyone seems to be comfortable asking me to tank for them… I am getting quite a lot of access to running these dungeons with my free company. The only problem being that I never know exactly how I want to level when I am left to my own devices… and have run out of story. I absolutely love FATEs but the problem being that they simply do not seem to be worth the effort. We have a running theory that they have watered down the FATE experience in an effort to force players to complete their main story content, rather than simply FATE grind their way through the levels. The whole FATE grinding to the end thing happened a lot in A Realm Reborn, and I could see them wanting to maybe nip that in the bud at least for the early players. The problem being that side quests, really don’t reward that much experience either. I’ve recently unlocked the second their of Clan Hunts, so I will have to see if they reward significantly more experience than the first tier that unlocks at 53. As it stands right now… I am hoping the first major patch gives FATEs a significant tweak as far as XP goes so I can return to doing those for my alts.

In That Old Place

This coming Tuesday in theory marks the end of our World of Warcraft raids break, and as I find myself moving closer to that date I realize… I am just not ready to resume raiding. In fact I am not really ready to play World of Warcraft right now on any level. So for the time being I will not be rejoining them in raiding, and more than likely won’t be playing at all for some time. I feel like my primary issue right now is there really isn’t anything other than the raiding tying me to the game. Sure I had some fun faffing about trying to farm mounts or doing old raid content for cosmetic gear… but that ultimately has a limit to just how long I can do that without something else keeping me rooted in the game experience. I’ve explored the new areas, and pushed three characters to the level cap in Warlords of Draenor. While the content was extremely fun to level through that first, second and even to some extent third time… the whole experience feels extremely disposable because it is also exactly the same each time you do it.

In many ways this expansion reminds me of the way I felt after leveling my third character in Star Wars the Old Republic. While the individual class quests there were excellent, it was all the other content that I kept having to repeat that ultimately wrecked my enjoyment of the experience. I thought walking into Draenor I would be awash with nostalgia about how much I enjoyed The Burning Crusade… and to some extent that worked for a month or so. The problem is it is like going back to your High school twenty years after you graduated… while some of the aspects are similar it is still very much a brand new place that does not synchronize with your memories of it. The reboot timeline just feels wrong, and with this patch and the reintroduction of Hellfire Citadel, I just find myself not caring anymore. Arthas and Illidan were bad guys I could really get behind taking down… a constant parade of grim dark future orcs… not so much. I made the mistake yesterday of checking my account to see when it would renew, and when I saw September I went ahead and cancelled it. I figure if the game has not grabbed my attention and made me want to play again in that time… it will just quietly close the door on another chapter of my own personal Warcraft timeline.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Content Walls

The Aery

June 24, 2015June 24, 2015 by Belghast

Login Boss Slain

I will admit that last night I was fully expecting to spend my night playing a lot of ArcheAge. All signs pointed to World of Warcraft 6.2 being a buggy mess, and after all of the issues that we had during the head start with the Aether Data Center and not being abler to log in.. I had set my expectations pretty low. So when I got home I started something cooking in the oven and wandered upstairs in order to attempt a login, while waiting. Much to my surprise I got right in and the servers were joyfully painless. In fact around 9:30 pm last night folks were still saying they made it through without an issue. It seems that Square Enix had something up their sleeve and actually did put a fix in place even though it did not make it into the patch notes. Once upon a time I said that I had faith that they would learn from their mistakes seen during A Realm Reborn, and it seems that sure enough they did. While we are only a single day into it, I have to say that was one of the absolute smoothest “official” launch days I have experienced. Things just worked, and I was able to keep trucking along and progressing forward.

Once upon a time there was an initial crush of new players on opening day after the headstart finished. I am wondering however if this is actually the case anymore, or if now that we are so familiar with doing so… everyone just preorders to make sure they get access to the game as soon as possible. For most of the headstart my screen had been blissfully absent from gold seller spam, but I have to report last night… I got my first third party RMT message. The funny thing about it is that it was far less intelligible than normal, so I am wondering if somehow they have upgraded their filters and the spammers have had to figure out new methods around it. The reality is that hopefully the fact that they have to have completely the 2.55 storyline will deter some of the popup spam accounts at least while in the Heavensward content. Ash was saying they placed some additional restrictions on trial accounts, so in theory that might be helping as well. In any case my screen is no longer filled with a constant stream of spammers so whatever they did the improvement is appreciated.

The Aery

My goal for the evening was to be able to get through the third dungeon called The Aery, located in the Churning Mists. This location of the map as Kodra and I talked last night seems very much like the Netherstorm region of The Burning Crusade. The main difference being that instead of being an area where the land simply doesn’t exist… this is a series of floating islands high in the sky presumably over another land mass. Traditionally I have been nabbing Tamrielo to do these dungeons, but since last night was a class night for him… I had to wait around until enough other willing participants showed up. While I have generally felt like I am behind the curve it seems that in reality I am actually ahead of several of our guild members. Eventually I was able to gather up Mor, Kodra and Liyhe and tackle the dungeon. I have to say that once again I really enjoyed the experience of pushing through this instance without much prior knowledge about it. I knew that it was essentially a giant nest of dragons, and I knew that at the end I would more than likely face off against Nidhogg… but everything in between was new and fresh to me.

My bags are quite literally loaded down with spare white mage and ninja gear, because it seems like that is the only sort of thing that I can make drop when doing instances. Last night however I finally got something else to drop… apparently a tanking skirt. They call it a “Longkilt” but in reality it actually is a skirt… but a skirt that was a significant upgrade both in ilevel and stats so I am rolling with it. I figure I will not likely be wearing it long enough to warrant spending a glamour prism on it. Most of the gear upgrades I have been getting have been coming from side quests at this point. I have had pretty abysmal luck with dungeon drops, which is unfortunate considering that there is at least theoretically a lot of really cool gear that comes from these leveling dungeons. I figure at this point I am hopefully going to be running these places quite a bit for various guildies as they reach that point in the story. Right now I am pretty much offering my tanking services to anyone who wants to take me somewhere. I have yet to resort to actually random queues, not that I have a real objection to them… I would just still rather run with my free company over just about anyone else.

The Other Game

Traditionally my morning blog posts have this three section approach, but this morning I am finding myself struggling to put anything here. Right now when it comes to Heavensward content I am just overwhelmed by the amount of new things to do and experience, and if I had limitless time I would still feel like I need more of it. As for the other major item that released yesterday the World of Warcraft 6.2 patch… I admit I logged in, got the quest in my garrison to go to the Iron Docks… apparently took the wrong flight point and after running around for a few logged right back out. I lacked the drive to go back to the flight point and fly somewhere else. I guess part of me had hoped that I would simply log in, start my shipyard building and be done with it. Unfortunately it seems you have to go through a series of quests to be able to unlock this feature and right now that might be a bridge too far for me. Its like right now World of Warcraft is a packaged Oreo cookie… good on its own right, but I have a piece of homemade pecan pie with whipped cream on top staring at me… and that Oreo just doesn’t look as tasty compared to it.

With the raid seemingly in a state of flux, and my return to it uncertain… I am starting to wonder how long it will be before I go ahead and simply cancel my World of Warcraft account once more. It is a perfectly fine game, but lacks whatever it is that I am looking for in a game. I always find myself back at this point, where the little things about the game end up annoying me. Each time I go through this song and dance however it ends up being less passionate. There was a time when I would write fiery posts about how wrong Blizzard was about this or that, but in the end much like the name reclamation thing… I am just finding it isn’t worth the effort. I feel like World of Warcraft is on this course to a destination that I just am not interested in going. The ride itself is comfortable enough, and there are interesting people to chat with on the train… but eventually you realize that you don’t actually want to go to the same place they are going. I will admit this last week not having a raid to go to on Tuesday or Thursday has been like a weight lifting off of my shoulders. This alone makes me think that more than likely I simply won’t be returning from this sabbatical.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
The Aery