Bel Folks Stuff – Episode 7 – Featuring Jaedia

A Discussion with Jaedia
Hey Friends! This morning I woke up and realize that I had committed a travesty and am trying to right that wrong. Almost two years ago I had this grand idea of rebooting Bel Folks Stuff… and had even recorded a few new episodes as part of the process. I had this entire plan of re-releasing all of the original content since it never existed on YouTube and then this giving me a ramp to start recording new content. Then like everything that happened early in 2020, it was derailed by the pandemic. I mean on one hand being stuck at home should have been the opportune time to record something like podcast episodes with so much of the populace now working from home. Instead I personally found that the pandemic and the constant fear of death… pretty much sapped whatever creativity I had in me and left me this hollow shell. The end result is that I never actually got around to re-releasing the episode featuring my good friend Jaedia, and since today is her birthday I thought I would fix that today. Her blog Dragons and Whimsy is now on its third revision and quite honestly there are so damned many accolades I could throw out here. Many of you specifically may know her from her work that she did on MMOGames.com from 2015 through 2018. I would provide links to profiles, but it is grossly incomplete because the site seems to have a habit of replacing “by lines” and several articles I know she wrote now show up as someone else. I may or may not have pent up bitterness about my brief time writing for the site as well. Not at all where I intended to go with this discussion, but here we are nonetheless! This episode was recorded in May of 2015, so an awful lot of things have changed in those six years. The discussion that was had though is just as relevant today as it was when it was first recorded. I hope you can enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoy revisiting it in my memories. Here is hoping that this will also act as a catalyst for me actually releasing some of the episodes that I have recorded already as well of the new rendition.
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Silence in Lieu of Spoilers

Friends… it is becoming progressively harder to cherry-pick screenshots that are vague enough as not to be filled with spoilers. Truthfully it is also becoming progressively harder to talk about Endwalker without massive spoilers as well. This expansion keeps changing on me when I am not looking, and the places it is going… are shocking to me at least. So this morning you get this gem of a screenshot which taken completely out of context doesn’t really spoil anything at all. Last night I unlocked the level 87 dungeon and dinged level 89… which means I will hit 90 well before I have come close to finishing the Main Story Quest. This means I am going to taper off doing any of the side quests, even though they were bringing me an awful lot of joy… just because it will feel real bad to be sitting at the level cap but not able to do any of the level cap things. I vaguely remember going through a similar situation where I hit the Tomra area of Shadowbringers and feeling like I needed to push forward the MSQ because I was just about to ding 80. It has been a pretty phenomenal expansion other than the whole “scared to death to actually log out” aspect of it. I was kinda hoping that as we got into the actual launch week that things would have calmed down a bit… but that doesn’t appear to be the case. In fact today is the day that anyone who did not get early access for some reason… is going to be starting the game. Like I was uncertain that Square could create a better expansion than Shadowbringers, and pending they stick the landing… they have absolutely accomplished that feat with Endwalker. As I said I am just about to do the level 87 dungeon, which means I still have a lot more main story quest to go before I see the end of this… and an entire area I have yet to discover. So we could be going anywhere now because we have already gone places that I was not at all prepared for. That is about all I feel like I can say… but lord am I looking forward to our AggroChat full spoilers show at some point in the near future. Which reminds me I really need to work on getting the few FFXIV spoiler shows that pre-date me putting things on YouTube up on the site so I can create a proper playlist. If you are curious in our spoiler shows you can find most of them linked in this post. I think our first show was for the ARR post expansion content, and then have done one each expansion going forward. With that I am going to bring to a close this morning’s post because I feel like there is a whole lot that I just can’t even talk about because spoilers. There may just be an unexpected gap in content for awhile because I am not sure how I am going to keep up these daily posts if avidly avoiding spoilers. The post Silence in Lieu of Spoilers appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

EndWalker Early Thoughts

Good Morning Friends! It has been a wild weekend. Initially I had expected to drop a post on Friday with my early thoughts about the game… and that never really happened. I was too busy playing the game and also by reference too scared to log out because the queues kept getting larger. When I logged into the game around 8 am there was only a queue of 30 people, and as the day wore on that just kept getting bigger. I read some analysis of the Steam data and apparently there is a roughly 400% increase in the peak numbers from this same time during Shadowbringers. Admittedly Steam is the wrong way to play the game and as a result you have a tiny portion of the overall population playing on that platform, but still some extrapolation should be able to be made about the massive increase in players that we are experiencing.
There has been a pretty constant flow of information coming out of Square and more specifically Creative Business Unit III, and the most recent is that they will be giving free play time as partial compensation for how rough the situation is currently. I get that this is probably still a bitter pill to swallow for the folks who have been unable to play at all. For example as bad as the situation is for the North American Data Centers, I hear the European Centers are even worse. I’ve heard discussion of over 10,000 player queues happening over there to try and get in and play. The worst I have personally seen myself was over 7,000 the other night when I logged in just to see how bad the queue was after our podcast.
Worse than the queues however has been our old friend the 2002 error. Now I have been bit by this in the past, and thankfully thusfar because I am logging in extremely early each day… I have yet to encounter it. However most of my friends are struggling constantly with getting punted from the queue and having to rejoin it… in the vague hopes of doing all of that fast enough to get back their position in the line of players waiting to get in. Honestly I think a lot of folks would feel better about waiting if they knew that sitting in line would actually guarantee them eventually getting in. However that login infrastructure is being used by ALL of the players, and it is getting pounded to death. Quite honestly I am not sure what can be done because right now it is extremely hard to get your hands on enterprise grade servers. I know in my own line of work our move to the cloud has been accelerated by the fact that anywhere we tried to acquire them… we were looking at at least a six month wait.
If you CAN play however… the expansion has been great so far. Prior to the release of the expansion Yoshi P said something about a major shock coming around 83, and I can verify this occurrence. I am grossly over leveled due to the side quests… because they are so freaking great this expansion. However were I just focusing on the MSQ I would have hit this spot around level 83… and quite honestly from this point forward I am not sure what is going to happen. All of my predictions for the shape of this expansion and what would happen… are now out the window. This game and this team are one of the few teams that can really throw me for a loop like this. Every single expansion there are several things that just come from out of left field and challenge my notions about the game and this expansion is no different.
There is one thing that I have found really frustrating, and I am going to try and address this in as low spoilery as a possible manner. In video games and MMOs specifically there are two mechanics that I absolutely hate. The first is being asked to play someone other than my character and the second is being forced to do stealth mechanics. I play a tank for a reason and that reason is I never want to have to sneak around in order to accomplish things. So far this expansion has given me two unskippable duties where I had to do both of these things at the same time. Were it not for the fact that the queues were so freaking long… I probably would have rage quit out and played something else for awhile. I don’t invest hundreds upon hundreds of hours in a character… and then not want to play that character and I detest stealth mechanics in games in general. Putting both together and putting them on a timer… another thing I hate… was almost too much for me. I made it through it and I hope that is the last I see of that stupid bullshit for the rest of this expansion.
At this point I am maybe a third of the way through the story… maybe even less. I know there are two areas that are shown in the Aether Current system that I have yet to visit. It seems like there is a mountain worth of content still ahead of me, and last night when I stopped for the evening I had just unlocked the level 85 dungeon. I do not however think I am even vaguely close to the mid point of the game. Some shit is happening and I have to deal with it, but also I have no clue HOW we will deal with it. Right now the game is doing a phenomenal job of keeping me in the dark as the player character and there are a few paths ahead of me… and I am not really certain WHICH of those are going to come to pass. I am not sure yet if this team is going to do what I think they might do, and that is a good thing. I am constantly guessing… which is all the more reason why I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone else.
One of the things that I did years ago, is create a “quiet time” tab in my chat interface. Essentially it acts as a second general tab but with all of the public channels turned off. I felt like this was probably a good idea given that there might be accidental spoilers that happen in zone chat. Essentially turn on only the things that you feel you need the most so for me I have tells, party, free company, and a few specific linkshells turned on. I highly suggest you create your own limited chat because honestly more than anything it cuts through the noise and lets me focus on the game itself. Once I have finished the story I will go back out into the public channels, for the time being however I am just hugging my friends as I pass them but largely ignoring most of the world. The post EndWalker Early Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #370 – QueueWalker

Featuring: Ammoasrt, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we start the show with a discussion of the Endwalker Head Start…  which may or may not have started depending on if you can make it through the queues.  We talk about our early struggles with the game and some general impressions in a fully non-spoilers way.  From there Kodra talks about his process of learning how to speedrun Celeste.  A topic that has been on our list for awhile is a discussion about Homebrew and House Rules and why this exist or when they go wrong.  Ash talks a bit about Fuga: Melodies of Steel and how it appears to be a passion project for CyberConnect2.  We wrap up with a discussion of New World’s latest patch on PTR and how they are making it impossible to avoid the Watermark Grind.

Topics Discussed

  • FFXIV Endwalker Early Access
    • Nearly 400% increase in Steam over Shadowbringers
    • Five Hour Queues
    • Early Impressions
  • Learning to Speedrun Celeste
  • Homebrewing
    • When Designers Get it Wrong
    • House Rules and Negotiation
    • Enhancing Fun
  • Fuga: Melodies of Steel
  • New World December Update
    • Killing Value of High End Crafting
    • Forcing the Watermark Grind
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