Server Transfer Concerns

It seems we are staring down the barrel of server transfers in New World and I have to admit I have a lot of concerns surrounding them. For those who have not been keeping up with this topic you can check out the Q&A thread that Amazon posted on the forums or the 1.0.3 Patch notes from the patch that was seemingly applied last night at 10 pm PDT. Essentially when the system opens up it will be limited to servers that are not currently flagged as “Full” and when it goes live you will be limited to only servers in your region. The first part isn’t really a big deal because at the time of writing this not a single New World server is currently showing as “Full”. The second part is a little more frustrating because we have a small contingency of players that rolled on a US West server when the rest of us are US East, and there is no real ETA on when we can join up together. As it stands Minda the server that we are on has not been “Full” for quite some time and seems to run around 1400-1600 players during peak hours. So it seems to me that there is still plenty of room to soak transfers without returning us to a land of queues. However I have to admit that the worst part about the New World player experience for me personally has been the community. The problem that I have is that I have zero faith that the grass will be any greener on the other side of a transfer. This is a game that has attracted all of the hyper competitive super abrasive PVP players and brought them to the forefront of the game since so much of the systems revolve around winnings wars and taking territory. While there are plenty of great folks playing on Minda, Global chat is full of human trash-fires.
The problem is I have no real faith that any other server environment is going to be better, so I am not sure if trying to transplant everyone to more favorable shores is reasonable. Ultimately you are going to need an active server to survive in the endgame, and thus far we seem to have a fairly thriving ecosystem of territories that are active. However that said we are already experiencing issues with the less traveled territories are falling into disrepair. So many of the territories on the outskirts of the central core no longer have town board projects active, and the company that holds the territory is no longer trying to upgrade anything which means they are either stagnating or worse actively downgrading through failed invasions or missed upkeep payments. I knew holding a territory cost a lot of money, but it wasn’t until the YouTuber Demone Kim went over the costs that I fully began to understand it. This morning I could not find the specific video, but Demone spent some time going over just how much it costs for his guild Trinity to hold a territory. We all know that the initial territory buy in is around 200,000 gold which is pretty wild for a company of 100 players to rapidly come up with. However even if you got your territory through combat you start needing to pay an upkeep cost every seven days that is based on the quality of the upgrades to your territory. These include any defensive upgrades that you have made to your fort and any crafting machine upgrades. He stated that the higher end town board projects cost the company holding the territory around 15,000 gold to start not counting any contribution from players completing the quests. He showed his companies upkeep screen and for a town that had mostly Tier 4 crafting machines it was around 45,000 gold every seven days.
The harsh reality is that any town that is not Everfall or Windsward is not viably self sustaining without having outrageous taxes. If you crank up those taxes however you drive players out of the town entirely and cause them to find someplace cheaper to live or do business. Each time an invasion rolls through a territory since they are currently bugged it downgrades four items in that territory spread between crafting machines and defensive upgrades. So if they are 15k gold each, that means a single failed invasion can cost upwards of 60k in gold to get the town back to the state it was before that invasion. Failing to meet that upkeep payment which for his guild was 45k gold, means that it has a similar impact of downgrading facilities and making the territory less attractive to players. This gold burden is being then spread out among only 100 players mind you… and a total maximum server population of around 3000 active players maybe? Ultimately all of this means that most servers are not going to be viable once you level up your crafting past a certain point. So much of what I am seeing from folks arriving at the end game is going to revolve heavily around tier 5 crafting to gather up resources and craft your own legendary items. Most of the towns I am frequenting right now on our server that is pretty bustling… can’t support Tier 5 crafting. Even Everfall and Windsward struggle to keep a full compliment of Tier 4 crafting machines. Those towns are being supported by the most active PVP guilds on the server so the hard truth is that we need those sorts of folks to make sure that territory is held and kept updated. While the PVE players make the backbone of the commerce… someone has to foot the bill to keep everything maintained for us.
So while it might be extremely appealing to think about traveling to some backwater server that is quiet and friendly… I am already at a point where that just isn’t viable. I am now mining Orichalcum and I am not even sure what town I am going to need to travel to just to be able to refine it. I know without a doubt that Windsward the town I spend most of my time in, does not have the facilities to do this. I know Everfall is in a similar situation… and that is from a server with active towns. I’ve heard stories from friends who rolled on lower pop servers that maybe only have one or two territories held at all. Basically I don’t love Minda and its community, but I am deeply concerned about leaving and trying some other server where we might be stranded without the resources needed to progress.
As of last night I am 57 and am likely to hit 58 today, which means I am starting to enter that final crawl to proper endgame levels. In my 40s however I started encountering issues of not being able to find the right kind of crafting machines in order to craft the items I needed to craft. One of the core problems with New World is the fact that you only have two character slots period, which makes it extremely hard to shop around for a potential better server to land on. For the foreseeable future we are going to be getting a single server transfer token, which makes that a fairly scarce commodity and as such a pretty serious choice. We’ve already had a few people bail out of the company in preparation for server transfers, but I am deeply hesitant to act immediately. For the time being I still feel like the best call is to stay where we are and see what the transfer climate looks like.
I don’t know of a better server currently. Everyone that I have talked with says many of the same things about their server as I do about ours. I’ve spent plenty of time reporting bad actors and at least one of them has spontaneously disappeared from the server. I can only hope that maybe just maybe the reports actually worked. I am concerned that anything smaller than the server we are playing on currently won’t be able to support players when they get into their 50s and hit 60. I am already running into some minor issues in that department and I can only imagine that a smaller and lesser progressed server is going to have more of those issues. Say what you will about Minda, it has a fairly thriving community when it comes to defending territories. So far we have at least two companies on the Green faction and two on the Purple faction that have been pretty great Stewards of the territories that they hold. Essentially I have reached a place where I am willing to swallow down the absolute awful names and quietly report the flagrant abuse… because I sincerely doubt that this game is going to attract the sort of players I am used to playing with in enough concentration to have a phenomenal server like Cactuar somewhere out there. If you find a magical greener pasture out there let me know. If there is a fabled land where all the crafting machines are Tier 5 and every single territory is held by Purple… that would probably trigger me to transfer. For the moment however I am not sure it is worth gambling to try and find a better server. That said I am absolutely open to suggestions, but for the very moment staying where we are seems the most stable. The post Server Transfer Concerns appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Dropping Hot Rocks

Since I caught so much general shit from the Final Fantasy XIV for my continued assurance that Blue Mage was not a real job… I am in fact slowly working on leveling it. I still stand by my assessment that it is not a real job and literally does not count for any of the battle job achievements, but to quell the uprising I am going to try and make it be orange as well in my jobs list. While recording the podcast I pushed it up to level 55 largely through the repeated application of Choco Meteor which involves dropping a giant Meteor over and over on my targets. In theory if I could convince a friend to help me I can supposedly do this in a matter of minutes by fighting low level Shadowbringers mobs, but honestly I am fine slowly pushing up my levels through dropping big rocks.
Shocking to no one I have been spending most of my time in New World. Now that things have more or less stabilized I am focused on getting my character to level 60. There are a bunch of things that I have found out recently that has made me want to just push to the endgame. Firstly apparently leveling weapon skills becomes significantly easier post 60, because every mob that you kill is treated as though it were “on level”. Additionally there appears to be some sort of gold to xp conversion which means random world jobs are dropping something like 5 gold each. Yes I know it is technically “coins” in game but that sounds weird as fuck so I will continue to refer to it as gold. Lastly I am really looking forward to reaching a point where I am working on gear that is going to last me more than a few levels.
I did however get my first legendary drops, and I am wishing I had gotten one of them when it was actually relevant back around level 40. My friend Rob aka Grakulen released a video showing off a pretty easy and lucrative mob farm in Brightwood. This involves killing an Angry Earth tank named Meldue, Soldier of Blight and they have a pretty interesting static drop table including all of the items shown above. In about two hours of killing this mob I got all four of the items, a duplicate of the sword, and I believe twelve vials of azoth along with a slew of other BOE blues. I would kill Meldue and then hop the wall and kill one of the wood wolves. By the time I had killed and harvested it with logging to get Wyrdwood it would be time to kill Meldue again. If you are nearing level 40 and can handle the camp, then I would highly suggest popping over and getting some items. Sadly I have not figured out how to replace the gem in the necklace, so I hold onto an item I got from the Boar camp for when I am tanking.
My little hovel is coming along nicely, but I wish I had bought in Everfall instead of Windsward. It isn’t that Everfall is a better town for crafting, and more that Windsward is held by Team Green on my server, and Everfall is the entry to the Purple Empire of the North. Were Windsward to flip Purple this would all change, but it would be lovely to have access to all of my vaults in Purple territory from my main crafting hub. I am closing in on level 55 and have been slowly pushing up Furnishing. Warenwolf has this theory that when we craft multiple items at a time, we are not getting the full benefit of all of the experience gains so I am going to do some testing around that. As of last night I can mine Orichalcum so I am probably going to spend some time working on Engineering again so that I can make myself a full set of Orichalcum tools. The post Dropping Hot Rocks appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #363 – Pacifist Tomato Conquers All

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Tonight apparently there is something funky going on with Bel’s Mic and he fades in and out at weird times.  First off we talk a bit about Paizo and their efforts to Unionize.  Bel talks a bit about having reached level 80 in all of his battle jobs in Final Fantasy XIV.  From there we talk about Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Unsighted, and revisit Wildermyth.  We talk a bit about what happens when you make cataclysms happen 100 years earlier in Stellaris.  Then we finish things out with some New World updates.

Topics Discussed

  • Paizo Unionization Efforts
  • Bel Finishes FFXIV Battle Jobs
  • Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous
  • Unsighted
  • Wildermyth
    • Ballad of Brey and Royhen
  • Stellaris
    • Adventures in Turning Up the Crisis
  • New World Updates
The post AggroChat #363 – Pacifist Tomato Conquers All appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

All 80 Before Endwalker

Good Morning Friends! I realize that for the last few weeks I have pretty much talked about nothing but New World, but that does not mean that I completely abandoned Final Fantasy XIV. In fact while I knew the launch of New World would slow me down, I wanted to keep making slow and steady progress on my goal. I am not exactly sure when I set it into my head, but at some point I decided that I was going to try and make it to level 80 on all standard jobs before the launch of Endwalker on November 19th. While this does in fact net you the Amaro mount that I am riding in the above screenshot, it wasn’t necessarily about getting the “CamelBirb”, but more that I just wanted to have leveled everything that Final Fantasy had to offer class wise. In fact without the sentimentality of having experienced Shadowbringers… the mount isn’t that spectacular… unless that is mine begins to talk to me.
I came back to the game on July 3rd of 2021 after a very long absence and the top chart represents where I was with all of my jobs at that point. I figured the easiest way to get back into the game was to start leveling one of my lower level jobs, and since I favor tanks… I started working on my Paladin and managed to get it to 80 in pretty short order. After that I noticed that my Red Mage was already 73, so I might as well invest a bit of time and work that up to 80. That sequence I guess triggered something in me that wanted to see just how close to leveling everything I could get before the next expansion dropped. It was some years ago, prior to the launch of Stormblood that I decided to get all of my characters to level 50 so I could begin to jettison some of the gear in my bank. I did this largely by “no-life-ing” my way through Palace of the Dead but it felt like a significant accomplishment.
It was part of the way through this process that I realized, I had been pretty regularly posting screenshots of my progress on all of my jobs. This made me decide that I should probably spreadsheet this to see how fast I was leveling. The above curve represents me taking all of these data points, and some that I specifically collected after that point and charting it. If my napkin math is correct at the point of dinging I had been back in the game one hundred and three days and in that time I had put on three hundred fifty three levels. That averages out to be a little bit more than 3.4 levels per day which sounds like a lot… but in truth I have simply been exploiting the daily bonus system to do a few things each day and earn several levels for doing it. If you are curious about this process you can check out my post on leveling alternate jobs that I made some time back.
There were a lot of these that I did not do every single day, but in the very least I tried to do three of them. The first of course is the Main Story Roulette, because it is such a huge boost in experience. More important than that however I tried to get Praetorium specifically, because the amount of bonus experience is just so much higher than Castrum. This means that there were days that I got Castrum bailed and then waited out the 30 minute timer for abandoning only to get Castrum again and wait through another timer. I tried to save things like my daily hunts as something that I could do during this time frame to make the wait a little less painful. On top of that I tried my best to always do the Faerie daily quests if I had a character that was in the 70s. Lastly the PVP Roulette is similarly important in that it is a very quick way to add over half of a level worth of experience. If I had time and patience left I would do the Alliance raid next but there were plenty of days that I neglected to do it.

What About Blue Mage?

Throughout this entire process, especially as I got towards the finish line… folks have kept asking what about Blue Mage. Blue Mage does not count, both literally and logically. Blue Mage is what they call a limited job which means that I cannot do any of the things that I have been doing to level it. There are no roulette bonuses because you cannot queue as a blue mage unless you are going through the party finder… with an entire group of other blue mages. Additionally Blue Mage is nowhere in the stack of achievements for leveling all of the Magic and Melee jobs or for the Amaro mount. Blue Mage is enjoyable in its own right, but it more or less involves a lot of grinding and I am not super concerned about getting it to cap. That said now that I am finished with over a month of time to spare, I will probably see what damage I can do in grinding out the last 20 levels of that job.

What Job Did I Like Least?

So another thing that people have asked is what my least favorite job was to level. The truth is there isn’t a single job that I found that I hated, and they were all interesting in their own way. That said… I thought for awhile that Black Mage might be the class that broke me. It is doing nothing that I want to do in an MMO because I have this long standing feud with “Finger Wiggler” classes, and as a result I tried to finish off all of my casters leaving myself a melee and a tank as the last two things I had left to level. Black Mage though… has no mobility… is squishy as fuck… and is basically the antithesis of the sort of class that I enjoy playing in a game. It does some really interesting things and I created a super sweet glamour for it, but there is never going to be a case where I choose Black Mage over Red Mage for example.

What Job Surprised You The Most?

Another thing that I have been asked is what Job I enjoyed the most, or what Job did I enjoy that I didn’t expect to enjoy. That crown goes to Machinist because I fully expected it to be a real slog to level. I had tried Machinist during Heavensward and hated it. However since then it has been reworked a number of times and the current version feels awesome. In fact this is very highly likely going to be my DPS main for Endwalker, or at least the first DPS that I push up to maximum level. I really like the mobility of the class and the animations just feel great. Additionally who doesn’t love summoning a literal robot to come fight by your side? Machinists are a bit disappointed that the Job doesn’t seem to be getting anything flashy and new going into Endwalker, but I think that is largely because they were in the best shape after their most recent revamp.

What Is Your Endwalker Main?

For years I had been a Warrior main in Final Fantasy XIV, and liked being the dude with the huge hitpoint pool and the ginormous axe. However over the last few expansions they have leaned more and more into the “Blue DPS” fantasy and honestly that has never really been my jam when it comes to tanks. I want all of the aggro and I want to be a massive bulwark against the oncoming storm. Leveling Paladin has made me feel the way I want a tank to feel and it plays more into my tanking fantasy than Warrior ever did. I am not sure why I shied away from Paladin early on in the game other than it was a pain in the butt to tank low level content as Gladiator and that they got their Aggro Stance late. However now that I have found Paladin in its most recent form, I am holding on with both hands and this will be my main going into Endwalker.
The embargo on the Endwalker influencer media tour has lifted and there is so much content now available to hype us up for the expansion. My personal favorites of these are the interviews with Yoshi P. He gives big kindly uncle vibes and I am so there for it. Listening to the way he talks about the game gives me so much hope for the future. While I am currently focused on getting to level 60 and gearing up in New World, I am also super ready for the launch of Endwalker and for them to punch me straight in the feels again. I am super glad I went through this little experiment and now with the launch of Endwalker I will have two new classes to level from Scratch and 10 more levels on every other class to add on. I figure I will be busy for quite some time to come. The post All 80 Before Endwalker appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.