Belghast

Hip to be Mean

May 26, 2015March 26, 2015 by Belghast

Jackals and Idiots

This morning I had this post in my head that I was going to write, talking about my present funk with World of Warcraft, and how I would not be still subscribed were it not raiding. I was going to talk about the ramifications of this expansion and how it is weighing heavily on my guild and the activities of its players. While it feels like I had written this same post numerous times in the past, I thought like maybe I had new things to say about it. I said I “was” going to write it because at some point yesterday I started reading a post linked to me by a friend. While it took me several tries over the course of the day to actually finish it… I am glad that I did. In the post a blogger/journalist/whatever you want to call it interviews someone who makes games. We don’t know what role they play, or what company they worked for… but as the interview unfolds none of that really matters since they are largely talking in generalizations.

As a blogger, and podcaster, and now writer for a professional games site… I could find a lot of offense in what the person had to say. He calls folks like me Jackals, and the folks playing the games idiots… but I can’t hold any real venom for the person because were I in their shoes I probably would feel exactly the same. I am not really sure how it happened but over the years I have met and become friends with a lot of people that work in the industry. I have listened to horror stories of working in the trenches, and tried to be a positive ear to turn to when they knew layoffs were looming over their heads. I’ve heard just how personally some reviews effect them, and how helpless they felt as they had to make this or that decision for the sake of getting a product out the door. While I don’t think that I would feel the “press” were Jackals per se, I would definitely have an opinion that many of them are opportunistic and prone to their own flavor of “band wagoning” as a game is taking on water and sinking. After years of having your livelihood depend upon the good nature of strangers, I am sure I would have a pretty poor opinion of the enthusiast press in all flavors.

Hip to be Mean

I feel like one of the root problems is that somewhere along the line it became hip to be mean. If we are operating in the gaming space it is a fact of life that we are nerds and geeks or at least former nerds and geeks. You don’t spend your time writing about a very intricate and detailed thing without being at least at one time in your life… extremely devoted to it. I feel like each of us are in some way vying for some undefined “street cred” in the things we say, and there are absolutely times where I have to stop myself from falling into that trap. There is a quiet game of one-ups-manship that happens when you get a bunch of gamers together in a room. It starts as simple as nostalgia… when someone starts reminiscing about the games of the past… and someone else has to throw down that they started in an earlier era… and the instinct is to escalate from there. So if you started in Nintendo, I feel obligated to point out that I started with the Atari… and then someone else will feel obligated to point out that they played pong. This literally happened casually in the course of five minutes the other night in our WoW raid, without any of us really realized it. No one meant anything mean by it, but there is this constant and subtle battle for relevance when you get gamers together.

When you take this natural instinct and magnify it, I think you end up with rant bloggers and you tubers that seem to like nothing at all in the world. It is like being mean and ranting about a subject is a “cruise control for cool”, and frankly I am tired of it. I used to be a pretty negative person, and in fact it is deeply rooted in my core to be pretty pessimistic. I expect the worst out of most situations and am pleasantly surprised when things do not go horribly wrong. About three years ago I made a conscientious effort to change this, to focus on the joy we should all be feeling while playing games rather than the mountain of negativity that is so damned prevalent. Even if you are bitter and jaded, at some point in your past you had to have felt the spark of sheer magic the first time you played a game. I remember being absolutely transfixed by these shapes dancing across the television screen, and being in awe when I realized that my hand on this crude object could control what they did. There is magic in the process, and as someone who has tried to make a game I still have a sense of wonder when I realize just how much work went into the creation of even the worst title.

People Make Games

We have this modern tendency to think of the people that make the things we use as nameless faceless corporations. So we think of Electronic Arts for example as this evil company that is trying to fleece us for our money and give his horrible games in return. When in truth Electronic Arts is an assemblage of hundreds of really hard working and well meaning people who just want to make something awesome. They grew up on the same dreams we all did, wanting to make video games for a living… and unlike most of us they held onto those dreams and chased them rather than accepting something else for their fate. The people that make video games are my equivalent of a professional athlete, they are the people that fought hard enough to achieve the goal of creating that thing they love so much… for a living. So having known developers in all forms over the years, and listening to them talk about what they are trying to do… and the games that they are trying to make. I have a hard time viewing these companies as the evil empires they are made out to be. No one sets out wanting to make a horrible product, and no one deserves to feel like they are hated by the people that are supposed to be their fans.

So knowing that there are people and families depending upon the games I play, gives me a slightly different perspective on what would otherwise be a failure. I find it harder to rage about this game being horrible, and everyone who created it being horrible by association. The irony of this post was that I had originally planned on writing about my frustrations with a game, a post that could very much feed into this same cycle of hatred. The difference is I try my best never go indulge in the rant, or at least not fully indulge. I’ve been told that my angry posts are nicer than some peoples regular posts, and while I have a hard time believing that… I have heard it enough times to assume it is largely true. In part I have to think that the empathy I have for the people who are making the experiences that I still very much do find joy in… is the difference. So if I talk about Blizzard being dumb for not doing something… I know that behind the scenes there are countless heroes struggling every single day to try and create the best possible game they can given the struggle of working with what is now a fifteen year old code base. We started playing these games because they made us happy, that they gave us a bit of joy… and let us indulge sometimes in a bit of escapism. I try my best to focus on that, and the tingly feeling I still get when I play something really good. Maybe it is simply that I am now staring down the barrel of 40, and that I don’t want my legacy to be that of a raving asshole. In any case I am going to still struggle to remain a positive voice in an otherwise sea of negativity… and I am hoping over time more people will join me in my lifeboat.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Hip to be Mean

Bel Propaganda

May 26, 2015March 25, 2015 by Belghast

Guild Infrastructure

It has been an insane ride with our free company. It is like the floodgates have opened and folks are now recruiting themselves. More truthfully it seems that when someone gets a foothold in our free company, they tend to recruit their friends to join it as well. As a result some strange stuff is happening, like last night it was pointed out that apparently we are now ranked 15th on our realm and climbing as far as activity goes. That is apparently up from 70th on our realm… which is absolutely insane, needless to say we are a guild on the move apparently. What is awesome about this is just how damned friendly everyone is. Each time a new infusion of people join the guild there is so much happiness in guild chat, with everyone welcoming the new players. My biggest hope is that we can keep this general sense of joy going forward. What is even more awesome is just how many of the new people are perfectly comfortable hanging out with us on voice chat each night. We are now contemplating the very real possibility of being able to field multiple serious 8 man groups at the same time, which a few months ago would have seemed crazy.

As a result of all of this… Tam and I had a discussion yesterday in which we released we were getting far too large to not have any guild infrastructure. When it was just a handful of us that were in constant communication… it worked more or less to not have any semblance of a guild website. However now that we have all of these new people we are having to create something resembling a modern guild. When we came back in July I stubbed out a site on Anook but we never really populated it with anything. As of yesterday this is changing, and I hope that we can get the rest of our guild to sign up and join in the fun there. Largely I am choosing Anook, because a lot of people already have accounts there… and dealing with running a forum is a pain in the ass. Forum software is often one of the largest attack vectors on any site, and if you do not keep a rigorous schedule of constant updates… it is liable to get compromised. I simply don’t want that sort of liability any more, and since Anook offers a fairly robust forum, shared image galleries, an event calendar, and a nifty way to link guild streams together… it seemed like a really nice fit. Not to mention that Lonrem is amazing and has been willing to support damned near any hair brained scheme I have come up with. Folks have already started populating the shared image album, which is awesome.

Bel Propaganda

Another thing to come out of yesterday is something of a recruitment piece. Over the last several weeks I have been giving essentially the same talk to everyone that joins the free company. Not that I mind having this conversations, but I felt like I was spending a lot of time repeating myself just getting the most basic information out there. I got to thinking… if I could condense this talk into a single page I could create something easy to link to new people. It is by no way an attempt to stop questions, but more to give players that are new to our group a quick info dump about who we are and what we are like. After creating this I realized… that I also created a tool to let people entice their friends. So as such I thought I would offer up the link here this morning for any of my Free Company mates that might be reading. You can now go to belghast.com/grey101 and get a quick dump of a bunch of information about our free company and our basic guidelines. So when your buddies ask you about your free company, you now have a quick thing you can link them to explain further. I used it yesterday afternoon and so far people seem to dig it.

While on the topic of propaganda… I had to include the above photo that Rae sent me. She was feeling out of sorts on Monday night, and while the bulk of us were raiding Turn 9… it seems she was up to shenanigans in our housing zone. I am really not sure how this happened but apparently an impromptu pony parade occurred where everyone broke out their favorite pony mounts and rode around our housing zone. I absolutely love that this sort of thing happens. A large number of us idle in the housing zone when not doing anything, and we have developed this awesome community of players that do the same. The night we bought our house, we were welcomed by a bunch of neighbors from the houses around us and over time we have gotten to know several of them. It is awesome logging in and running to the market board, only to get /hugged several times along the way. Cactuar is a truly amazing place, and I am so happy that we apparently chose correctly when we rolled there over a year ago.

Heroic Hans and Franz

Trying to mix things up a bit, and get our folks upgrades… my Raid has been working on some of the Heroic encounters in Blackrock Foundry. Last week we made significant progress on the Hans and Franz encounter, and had some lessons learned that we took into this week. Namely two things really lead us to this victory. Firstly better awareness of who was getting the body slam attack, and for them to move out of the raid making sure the tank did not take the debuff. Secondly better self awareness in trying really hard not to get pinned down by the crushers as they came through. Last night we had some of the worst possible luck as far as RNG goes and the patterns we could potentially get. There is this one pattern that was killing me damned near every time because the boss would be in the center of the room… and the only free space on the far left edge. On the last few tries, including the one when we managed to down them… I started prioritizing my own survival to damage time spent on the boss and I feel like the rest of the raid did essentially the same thing.

We managed to pull out a fairly narrow victory, but I have a feeling that since we now believe we can do this fight… future attempts will be much smoother. From there we moved to work on Beastlord Darmac, and had a few heartbreaking attempts getting him within 2% on our best. That fight… is just madness on heroic with so much shit in the room being on fire during the later phases. There are several things we need to work on, but I feel like we CAN improve and potentially down them next week. Largely the spear maintenance needed to be better, both in folks moving so they do not get pinned and folks breaking out individuals who did get pinned. The amount of time you have is really tight, and this needs to be an all raid effort when someone is gets stuck. Secondly I feel like during the last phases we needed to move the boss more often, because the amount of flame surrounding him made it damned near impossible for melee to dps. If nothing else we made solid progress and I feel like with a bit of polish we can knock this one out as well.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Bel Propaganda

We Like To Help

May 26, 2015March 24, 2015 by Belghast

Reluctant Roulette

I thought I would take a few moments this morning to address a few things we are noticing among new recruits to our Free Company. I believe for the most part the majority of this group reads my blog at least sometimes, so here is hoping that my post will find it’s audience. If nothing else this serves as a good reminder to anyone new to Final Fantasy XIV or considering playing it. The first behavior I am seeing an awful lot of is an absolute reluctance to EVER use the Duty Roulette system at all. It seems like most of the players have come from several years in World of Warcraft, where “pugging” has become a dirty word. I fully understand this and quite honestly I was scared to use the Duty Roulette system… that is until another FC mate tiptoed into the water and reported back that it was actually pretty awesome. I dislike random groups in other games more than most people, and I will be the first to say that the community in this game is simply better.

The other thing you should know is that those of us who are veterans are using the Duty Roulette system constantly. On a given night if nothing much is going on I will be queuing for either Hard Mode or Trial Roulette, and at least once a day I am trying really hard to get in at least one Expert Roulette. Sure you occasionally stumble onto an elitist, but it is nothing like other games where you are belittled and kicked from the group for not instantly being amazing. More often than not when a player says they are new, someone will take the time to explain the encounters to them. Honestly I often give my player commendations to new players for having the strength to stand up and tell the group. It makes the run go so much smoother when you know for certain if a player is going to have the requisite ancestral knowledge to understand the common way a given fight is done. More than anything I suggest you give Duty Roulette a chance. I’ve actually met several people on Cactuar through the roulette system, and it makes me happy to see them around.

We Like to Help

One of the other behaviors I am seeing a lot of is players not asking for help. I realize that in some groups this might not be the norm, but in our Free Company for the most part people enjoy helping others. Now there might be times for this or that reason that someone cannot help, and that is perfectly fine. However if we don’t know a given player needs something, it is impossible for us to read minds. Our hope is that this creates an atmosphere where people are freely saying what they need to do, and others are responding that they can help out. A prime example is that we have known for a bit that Neph needed Dzemael Darkhold, so when she popped on the other night we ran the dungeon to make sure she got it. Similarly we have done countless primal fights or lower level dungeons to help our dps players especially fight their way through the queue system. Self service and the Duty Roulette are always valid choices, but when you are confronting a thirty minute long queue… please speak up and pending it is not a raid night folks should be able to pull together a dungeon pretty easily.

Running dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV is not quite like running dungeons in other games. The fact that the game auto scales your level to match the dungeon, and rewards you with money if you are max level… means that running lowbies through dungeons is always a positive prospect. In other game my primarily problem with running low level dungeons was that it ended up feeling like I was babysitting players, because at max level I could just one shot most of the encounters in the zone. In Final Fantasy XIV, these dungeons are still viable, and it feels like you are doing something meaningful regardless of the level range. I will never get tired of running places like Haukke Manor or Stone Vigil, and Primal fights like Garuda still end up being a challenge for our scaled down groups. It is interesting trying to remember how you functioned without your high level abilities, and this alone makes a lot of things far more interesting than you might think. So please if you need help, be it a dungeon or help with some crafted gear… speak up in chat. Right now Tam is doing an interesting census of players to find out if they are interested in raiding, so I highly suggest you fill that out from the guild message of the day.

A Night with Nael

Last night was a bit of a refresher night in many ways. Namely we had a few people out, which meant we snagged one of our new recruits to help out with turn nine. The problem is our group does things a bit different than the “norm” for turn nine groups. So there was a bit of adjustment, similarly it had been over a week since I last set foot in the zone, and I was more than a tad bit rusty myself. I still feel like we made some progress, but we are hitting this wall on the third phase where we are just not pushing Nael hard enough to keep from getting two dragons. In our attempt to push harder, we are getting this awkward transition to phase four and getting a dragon at the same time… which is leading to a wipe. I feel like I am simply not doing enough dps on my Dragoon to really make up the difference. My tank is level 122 gear wise, but my dragoon is only 112. Honestly I never expected to be dpsing in a raid situation, so my Dragoon has essentially gotten table scraps as far as gear goes. I have been pushing to grab a piece of 120 gear our of World of Darkness each week in the hopes of boosting my dragoon dps just a little bit.

This however means repeating World of Darkness over and over without seeing any drops. Last night represented my sixth and seventh run of the week, and thankfully on the final boss I saw a piece drop that I did not already have. Sure it was only the belt, but at the 11th hour on the night before reset… I will take quite literally anything. I was just about to reach the point where I was going to start rolling on everything just to get a piece of gear before the zone reset today. Largely I feel like I am being a boat anchor on our group with this fight. We need more dps, and I am just not going to the extreme lengths that Kodra is willing to to tweak his dps. The optimal dragoon rotation is twenty seven steps long according to the guides I have read… and quite frankly there is no way in hell I am going to be able to pull that off flawlessly every single time. Instead I do a much more simplified and repeated sequence, but when we are on this razors edge of being able to do it versus not being able to do it… it feels like I am failing the group. As such my answer is to try and pour gear into the problem, and as soon as World of Darkness uncaps on the 31st I will be running it until my eyes bleed farming a full set of gear.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
We Like To Help

Night Means Business

May 26, 2015March 23, 2015 by Belghast

Weekly Caps

Another weekend down, and I have somehow managed to cap poetics at the 11th hour. I did not get near as much playtime as I would have liked over the weekend, and I was pretty horrible about managing to do an expert roulette every single day. That said I still managed to cap without a whole lot of issue yesterday evening while watching television. This meant that I also managed to get a second item this week in the form of the ironworks neckpiece. Right now this only leaves me with the ring that is sub 120, as far as the full set of poetics gear I still need a chest and a belt. One of those will take multiple weeks to get, so at this point I am trying to decide whether or not to go after the expensive piece, or to go for another 375 item and upgrade my final 110 item to 120. I really wish that World of Darkness had a shot at dropping jewelry, or at the very least rings since that seems to be the problem item for all of my classes.

The problem with rings in Final Fantasy XIV is that they are unique equipped. Now there is a slight trick to this, that the unimproved and improved version of the same ring count as two separate items. This means I could buy a second ironworks ring now that I have an augmented one and get rid of that last 110 slot that way. This always feels wasteful since you are essentially never going to use that non-augmented ring for anything other than a bridge to slightly higher stats. This is one of those things that I hope they work around in the expansion, making more ways to fill that second ring slot without resorting to wasteful spending of tokens. Another thing I would love to see is for max level players to get a few tokens for running free company mates through low level content. I was honestly concerned that I might not make the cap this week because I spent most of my weekend tanking lower stuff for friends. I wouldn’t change a thing, but it would have been nice to know I am slowly inching towards the cap when we were running Dzemael Darkhold or Aurum Vale.

Lower Content

Other than the stress about hitting the 450 poetics weekly cap, I had a blast this weekend running free company mates through lower level content. Over the course of the weekend I tanked a few primal fights, a couple of trips into Stone Vigil, a couple of trips into Dzemael Darkhold, and if I am remembering correctly at least one trip into Haukke Manor. Essentially anytime a guildie needed something run, I stepped up and offered… sometimes with some caveats attached like that I was already in a run. What makes me even more happy is it seems like most of the guild is doing the exact same thing. Our folks really genuinely seem to enjoy helping, and this makes me extremely happy to see it in action. I find it interesting that even though we are spending a lot of time running content below our actual gear levels, that they still feel fresh and challenging each time we sit foot in them. That is a real testament to just how good their dungeon content is, that after running Haukke for what has to be close to the 100th time, it still feels just as enjoyable.

The awesome thing is that thanks to all of this dungeon running we have a whole new flock of players getting close to hitting the level cap on their first classes. I believe Syl hit 47 on her Black Mage, and I know Grace is somewhere in the 46ish range after our various runs throughout the weekend. What is so awesome about this is that doing 8 player content is going to be all that much easier as we keep adding new folks to the mix. The awesome thing is, there is a possibility that at some point we can actually be running two full parties at the same time. This is going to be great for offering lots of different content options to the group as a whole. It is a super exciting time to be playing Final Fantasy XIV in the Greysky Armada, and all of it just has me pumped to log in each night. I am thoroughly enjoying the game and really looking forward to June and the Heavensward expansion. That said also really looking forward to the 2.55 patch coming March 31st.

Night Means Business

I spent some time yesterday afternoon playing the Final Fantasy XV demo, otherwise known as “Episode Duscae”. The demo starts our cast of road trippers a bit into the content from the sounds of it. Their vehicle has broken down and they are having to make some cash to pay for repairs. This serves as a way to teach the player about combat. The other thing that it should have taught me better was that the day/night cycle means serious business. I did what I always do in games, and went wandering off the path looking for combat wherever I could find it. I took on packs of Saberwolves, and foolhardily a giant pack of what I think were called “Gerdua”. They were these huge lumbering tusked calf things, and somehow I managed to aggro around a dozen of them. I got a lot of practice using the parry options to take them down. As night fell the game reminded me that I really should camp for the night. The problem is it did not really message well where i should camp or even how I should go about doing this. On my map was a house icon, and an exclamation point there saying something about making camp.

So I wandered off in that direction in the middle of the night, and from out of the sky came a horribly bright light signaling an enemy drop ship was just about to flood me with baddies. After dispatching the first party of four heavily armored troopers, I started getting attacked by Goblins. The goblins were no big deal because they had minimal hit points, in fact after some time I started really enjoying wrecking them. That was until a second and third drop ship showed up… so I started trying to juggle eight heavily armored troopers and a half dozen goblins running in to fight me. I was actually holding my own for a bit, until the Saberwolves started showing up… and at that point I was pretty much done for. I thought to myself “That Escalated Quickly” and it really did… one minute I am doing just fine and feeling like I have a chance and the next moment the entire world seems to be attacking me. So when this game tells you to camp… I suggest you camp.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Night Means Business