June 2017 – Page 4

Into the Steppes

June 21, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was the last of my vacation days, and I attempted to get in as much play time as I could. However the first priority of the day was putting together the sideboard table we picked up at IKEA when we were in Kansas City. All in all we put it together “mostly” correct, with one piece getting turned the wrong way in the process and neither my wife or I figuring it out in time. Everything still works mostly as intended but we were not able to attach the backstops to the drawers… which in truth isn’t a big deal given that the cabinet is up against a wall and the drawers can’t really go out the wrong side. Then on top of that we have been dealing with the pool some more. We had been fighting one of the worst algae blooms I have seen in awhile, and finally the we suggested just draining it and starting from scratch. We had not realized that we had essentially been running on the same water since we resurfaced the pool a half dozen years ago. It was probably time to drain it and power wash it and start fresh, which before was always something we had done every few seasons. It is shocking just how fast a pool can drain when you have two pumps working on it.

As far as playing catch up, I did a lot of stuff yesterday. The above screen is a shot from the second dungeon, and when Tam woke up he decided we should run it. Earlier in the day I managed to run the first primal fight which is tied to the main story quest, and I happened to luck out there and catch Spiral and crew about to run it for some of the Syv members. Later in the day I ran it again to get Ashgar through it, and this time I got what was explained to me as the more complicated job… but in truth it is the easy one. There is this one phase where the off tank picks up orbs… but other than that it is just pretending to be dps in deliverance stance. I am assuming in Extreme mode there will be some sort of a tank swapping mechanic. At some point I shifted into the mode of ignoring side quests and largely just barreling forward with the MSQ, and that has allowed me to gain some ground. By the end of the night I had caught up to dungeon three and we made an attempt at running it. I say attempt because on the final encounter we started being plagued by disconnects from various group members. We went through a period of fifteen to twenty minutes of trying to get everyone online and stable… only to wipe at 5% on an attempt because half of the party disconnected again. My hope is tonight we can get in and run it while the servers are not screaming.

So far Stormblood feels like a much better expansion than Heavensward was, in both story and zone variety. Time will tell if that comparison holds up once we enter the “end game” content and see how long it takes for us to tire of it. The other odd thing that is happening is that I am feeling like I want to finish off the Warrior so I can start in leveling the Samurai properly. I really wish they had patched in Red Mage and Samurai ahead of the launch of the rest of the content allowing folks to have a bit to level them to at least 60 before starting the content legitimately. Right now mine is sitting at 53 and other than some thoughts about doing a few beast tribe quests with him… I think he is going to remain there stalled until I push the Warrior to 70. We have so many tanks right now that the pressure to keep pushing so I can viably group with my friends is very much a thing.

Underwater Adventures

June 20, 2017 by Belghast

I feel like I have always been a bit weird when it comes to MMOs. I like underwater content… pending I don’t have to care about breathing. I took the Vashjir path in World of Warcraft and I enjoyed for the most part the underwater sections of the Nightmare Tide expansion in Rift. So it is little surprise that I am really enjoying the underwater sections of Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. I feel like they made a strong decision not to force us to screw with breath bars, and I love that they implemented surface swimming in lots of old world areas like Costa Del Sol. The real part that I loving is the fact that there are cities in giant bubbles on the ocean floor, and while sure they couldn’t help but make a slight Gungan reference during one of the quests about speeding us on our way… overall I am loving it. More than anything I feel really happy to be in love again with Final Fantasy. The rough few days at the start of this expansion really made me second guess whether or not I would actually get that magic back. For awhile now FFXIV has been a game I felt like I should play… but just wasn’t into. I would log in and go over to the Gold Saucer to play my daily scratch off cards… but then quickly log right back out. I has this hope that when the headstart began we would all get enthralled in the game once more and start playing it as our primary MMO. However in those first few days when it seemed like everything was shit, and we couldn’t move forward the MSQ… I was starting to doubt myself. I am thankful that I was not in fact wrong and I am setting dozens of happy people gobbling up content in the free company every night.

The only negative is however… that I am functionally one full day behind everyone else. That would not seem like much but it feels like I am habitually one full zone behind the rest of the crowd… or at least the folks I traditionally run dungeons with. Now because of the first timers bonus everyone is more than happy to help someone through a dungeon. Last night Void needed Xelphatol one of the 3.4 dungeons and I managed to get a sizable chunk of experience at level 63, so doing any dungeon content with the bonus is really worth it. The biggest problem I have is that I see all of the (!) icons and feel like I need to do them all. I remember going through the same problem with Heavensward and it taking one full zone before I finally realized that I should probably not do all of them and instead just focus down on the main story quest line. Now that I have shifted to a MSQ and unlock only approach I am starting to gain ground once more. At this very moment my MSQ is gated by the first Primal encounter, but I hit it at around 10:30 last night… and just didn’t have it in me to attempt to pull together a group to get it done. Today however once I get time I will probably do just that and get rolling again. All in all I am loving the expansion, and in truth it feels more “Final Fantasy” than FFXIV has at any point because we finally have a real danger in the form of the Garlean Empire. We had a few spats with them in A Realm Reborn, but that was functionally finished the moment we cleared the launch content… and while there has been a flirtation that more was to come we had not really seen it until the precursors leading up to Stormblood. Fighting against an Evil Empire is the core of the best Final Fantasy experiences for me, and I am super happy to finally have that feeling back in FFXIV.

Stormblood Stuff

June 19, 2017 by Grace

Stormblood is finally upon us and boy did the early access weekend have an extremely rough start. On Friday I woke up at butts-o’clock so I could log in and get a head start on things before I had to go to work. I did as much as I could of the main story quest until I ran into the roadblock of the first instanced solo duty. Being an optimistic sort, I ran to work and figured that I’d pick up where I left off when I got home. I spent all day at work worrying that my friends who had taken the day off were going to race past me and I’d be playing catch-up all weekend. By the end of the day I discovered that was not true. The instance servers were still overloaded and after a lengthy queue to get in my reward was being disconnected immediately when I tried to start my story quest.

All of Friday evening and Saturday I smashed my face against that quest, along with the thousands of other people milling around the questgiver and giving “insightful” commentary in the zone chat. In some other games this road block wouldn’t be quite so bad, but FFXIV gates their content heavily with their story. That means that all the new group content and zones were locked until we could get past this quest. On the plus side, I got some IRL crafting done, finished off my dad’s fathers’ day gift, and got to watch a movie. On the down side, I was so frustrated and angry I was about to just go play WoW and swear off FFXIV for a few weeks until I could calm down and they could fix the game.

Luckily, on Sunday morning when I got up the quest let me through on the first try. After that was a full day spent catching up on all the questing and dungeons and things I had wanted to do earlier in the weekend. I’ve seen the first dungeon and the first trial, and as much of the story as I can through level 64. The next step of the MSQ requires another level, and I’ve unlocked the second dungeon so I suspect I’ll be running that a few times until I can progress again. Some of my friends are doing all the side quests, but I prefer to level through group content if I can, so that those side quests are still around when my other classes need to be leveled. I greatly enjoyed the first dungeon, and ran it quite a few times as my friends got to that point in the story.

The story has been good so far. It is far too early to be posting spoilers, but I will say I am enjoying myself more than I thought. It is no secret that I didn’t care much about where the initial Stormblood story was taking us, but the MSQ is doing a good job of making me care. Also getting to travel around with Alisaie and Lyse has been one of the highlights of questing in any game I have ever played. The story leading up to the first trial was a joy, and if they swap out Alaisaie and make me go back to traveling with Alphanaud again I might never forgive them.

Raubhangeddon Over

June 19, 2017 by Belghast

Having a birthday on the internet is a really weird thing. By the time I woke up yesterday morning in our hotel room I already had a flood of messages from folks. I cannot put into words the warm fuzzies I got seeing that. I attempted to keep up with thanking everyone individually but as we started roaming around Kansas City yesterday I completely lost track of where I was in the mix. By the end of the day it was just a daunting task to try and sort out who I had thanked and who I had not. By the time we made it home I was completely drained and crashed pretty hard. So if I did not manage to thank you individually I apologize and please know that every single person meant the world to me. As far as our trip… it was really enjoyable. Once again we did our thing which is to hit every single Half Priced Books store in the metro, along with a few other stops like Micro Center and IKEA… all things we don’t have in Tulsa. This is the second year in a row we have done this, and it was largely born out of the fact that getting my wife home after the AP reading turned into a very unpredictable experience. Functionally when the shindig lets out they are trying to fly a surge of 4000 or so people out of a tiny little airport. It is roughly a four hour drive from Tulsa to Kansas City with a bunch of variables that could speed it up or slow it down. The first year she was doing the AP grading there, she ended up getting flown to Dallas and then having a long layover there so that it took roughly 8 hours for her to get home. Admittedly… me driving up to get her and driving back home is still 8 hours…. but at least by spending the night it is chopped up in a few segments and lets us go do some stuff in this case Saturday night and Sunday morning. I always hate it when my birthday lands on Father’s Day because it also means everything is madness. Micro Center is normally a fun experience, but in this case there were workers stationed every few feet and just walking around the store I wound up getting asked 8 times if they could help me. I am not exactly sure why I find this so offensive… but I wish there was a system where you could get a sticker from the first person you meet that says “leave me the fuck alone”.

The other big happening of the weekend was the Stormblood launch, and in some ways it went really smoothly… and in other ways it went tragically wrong. Please note that I love Square Enix and the Final Fantasy XIV team… but you are going to get some salt from me on this post. On Friday the head start began, which is an event only available to folks who had pre-ordered the game prior to a certain point. This is really key because it is a fixed group of people, pulled from a known quantity of folks who plunked down money and purchased your game ahead of time. In order to get into Headstart it means that you needed to register a code that was sent to you by Square Enix via email with the Mogstation. Over the years there have been a number of events where the team has says that they just did not expect the numbers… namely at the relaunch of A Realm Reborn and I at least partially gave them the benefit of the doubt in this statement. However with the launch of a brand new expansion for a game with a known set of players… and a known set of preorders… that should have given them a head start on trying to figure out how much server throughput they needed for the launch. They failed this miserably and for all of Friday and all of Saturday… everyone was stuck on the same quest that required the creation of a solo instance. That means every player in a given Data Center is fighting for what is apparently a very limited number of slots available for running this quest. The result was a mixture of reactions from the players… and the creation of lines as folks attempted to go about this quest in an orderly fashion. Final Fantasy XIV is literally the only place you would ever see this solution… and it didn’t take long even here before it broke down. Granted the line concept was some superstitious nonsense given that you were not just competing against your fellow servermates… but also everyone else in the Aether data center in my case. So while Cactuar isn’t a massive server… it is large enough, but becomes completely drowned out by the size of the player base of Balmung and Gilgamesh which share the same server cluster.

Yesterday during the day however at some point they put in a fix and remedied the situation, so last night in my sleepy state I attempted to move forward only to be claimed by sleep and a server disconnect in the middle of a lengthy cut scene. This morning I popped in with every intent of taking a few screenshots and wound up playing for about an hour popping around and doing quests. I am hoping we are through the worst of the launch, but I expect another influx of players on Tuesday when the game releases in stores. Hopefully they have learned their lessons and have spare resources ready to stand up if they run into more problems. In the era of virtualized servers, leased datacenter space, and all manner of licensing options… it feels like there is little excuse not to have some resources waiting in the wings to stand up at the first sign of trouble. I have a feeling there were a lot of design decisions on the infrastructure side that maybe don’t scale terribly well in modern computing terms. The game is doing some odd things, like it came out during one of the E3 discussions that every time you move in the server… your entire player object is passed around including your inventory and armory chest as part of one huge object. This came up when they talked about not wanting to expand out inventory space too much because it might crash the server in passing around too big of an object. This just seems like a weird way of going about things, and one susceptible to memory hacks or at least rollbacks from crashes. At this point I just need to play catch up because I have Free Company members that are already 66 or higher.