Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 795

On User Interfaces

May 26, 2015April 24, 2015 by Belghast

User Interface

Last night while running dungeons I got into a lengthy discussion with my friend Damai about the user interface layout in Final Fantasy XIV. As such I thought it might be useful to talk about my chosen layout this morning. One of the awesome things about this game is how adaptable the stock interface is to whatever you want from it. One of the big features that is poorly documented is that every single element can be scaled up or down. Some of these windows that are targetable can be scaled at any time, the rest can only be scaled in user interface edit mode. To Scale a window target it and hit Control and Home. This toggles through a series of available sizes from tiny to massive. As you can see in my interface I have lots of different hotbars, some of which are scaled as small as I can get them, and others a more standard size.

My layout is pretty straight forward. I tend to set up all user interfaces the same if given the option so that my main block of hotbars is stacked in the center of my screen, with my own health information and targets health information is directly above them so that I only have to look down a slightly from the center of my screen to see it. This is extremely important when you are dealing with encounters that transition at a certain percentage or something similar. I snapped this photo between pulls, but what is missing on the left side of my hotbars is the available targets window showing current emnity gems. On the right side of my hotbars is my party list which I have placed as such to make healing easier. I am right handed, so I tend to set my heal bars on the right side of the screen to make the movement more natural. All the other bits are largely extraneous like the lower lefthand bar includes all of my class icons allowing me to switch between classes faster. Pretty much every game I play has a set up similar to this, but in the FFXIV user interface I feel like this is my ultimate version of that design.

Messy Interface

Tuesday night I snapped a picture of my raiding interface in World of Warcraft from comparrison and I have to say… it is getting to the point where I struggle to play with this mess. At some point soon I need to trash everything and start from scratch trying to build something less intensive. I feel like one of the triumphs of Final Fantasy XIV is that it gives me a much more slim line interface but also manages to communicate to me all of the information contained within my World of Warcraft interface… but just in a much more compact fashion. Hell I would hazard that if I were playing World of Warcraft with the interface I have in FFXIV I would be enjoying it significantly more. This is the point when Tamrielo would chime in with some commentary about the conversations we have had in the past on user interfaces. I like a very specific design and when a game doesn’t support that layout I get frustrated quickly. So many of my complaints about Elder Scrolls Online were the fact that its interface would not support the layout I was looking for.

Once upon a time I had an interface that I was extremely happy with in World of Warcraft. On the left side of my hotbars is where I kept recount for damage and threat meters. On the right side I kept grid, an extremely combat view of the party and raid frames. The problem is grid died several expansions ago and no mod has come along to present the raid frames in quite so perfect a fashion for me. Grid gave me exactly the right amount of information, and as a tank I loved it because it would put a little red dot on any frame that was currently drawing aggro. I could at a glance tell if I had the majority of the mobs. There are other raid frames that work somewhat similar, but all of which are geared towards healers. Grid could be made to work for anyone who simply needed to see at a glance how the raid was doing. I feel at this point I need to just start from scratch, and build back only the features I actually want and need. All of the prepackaged user interfaces end up frustrating me because I don’t have full control over them. So as such for me to be happy, I am going to have to simply delete my interface folder one weekend and start over.

Interfaces are Important

This might seem like an odd thing to some, but when it comes to my enjoyment of a game I would say that the user interface ranks near the top of “most important things” to me. There are many games that I think I would enjoy, if they just had a better interface or better control scheme. Ultimately what this means however is my ability to manipulate things in such a fashion as to bring them in line with what is familiar for me. I’ve included three different games with three different interfaces, but as you can see there are some basic elements that I set up in each of them. While I am not literally cloning the exact same layout in each game, I am still bringing them closer into line with what I expect to be the case. I expect targets to appear on either side of my character and for the hot bars to be stacked in some fashion below my character. I am extremely combat focused so I want all of the important things that I need to see to be close to the center of my screen.

The things I tend to push off to the margins of the screen are the things that I am not dealing with often like Quest trackers, and hotbars for buttons that I don’t want to have to go digging to find, but that I also don’t need often. I am a creature of habit and I end up ultimately remapping things to work similar between games. If I am playing a class with some sort of a builder effect, then I will always put the “dump” ability for that effect on the 7 key. In Rift for example this is my single target finisher, on my Warrior in FFXIV this is Inner Beast. I will always place my interrupt hotkey on the 0 key that way my brain is wired to hit that key without thinking when I see something I need to interrupt. Similarly if I have an engagement ability that pushes me into combat, I will always place that ability on either 4 or 5 depending on the game… which can get confusing at times. Taunt regardless of the game however is always going to be sitting on 6, and if I am playing a stealth class… I recycle that key for my stealth ability. Because I play so many games, I have to create some sense of standardization between them. I guess in my mind I am just playing versions of the same game, and that ultimately is how I can switch back and forth between games without missing a beat. This is also why the interface is so important to me.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
On User Interfaces

Wrong About Wildstar

May 26, 2015April 23, 2015 by Belghast

More Initiates

For as frustrated as yesterdays post was, today’s is all the more hopeful. Lately on Wednesday nights I have been assisting a fledgling second static group in our free company out. While it still struggles to get a full eight people, we are making some progress. As more people level to the cap, more people will be available to join in the raiding fun and hopefully this will smooth the process out significantly. For the last few weeks we have been working on Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, aka the first major hurdle and the gateway to the second coil. Last week we made decent progress but were still struggling to get through the dive bomb phase. That phase seems to be the biggest frustration with the fight, and once you figure out the timing the rest goes smoothly. While I barded it up last week, this week I tanked it because that was the role that was needed. Since my health was significantly higher than Damai we swapped roles and I took the Twintania role and he adjusted quickly to dealing with the adds.

Now our first group of the night was less than successful because we ended up having to pug in half of the players. The positive was that we noticed that the people screwing up were not our own people. As the evening went on more people got in game and we were able to fill out the rest of the slots with some other seasoned veterans. From here I think it took four attempts before we downed the 5th turn and keyed a whole new group of players for the second coil. This is awesome for a bunch of reasons… because firstly it means that second team is progressing nicely apart from issues getting people online at the right time. Secondly however it also means we can start drawing on the pool of players available for Monday night turn 9 attempts as well. I know Grace is itching to see t9, so hopefully this will smooth out some of our own attendance irregularities. It is almost summer after all and with summer comes folks going off and doing summer things.

Wrong about Wildstar

This morning I am questioning if I have been wrong about Wildstar thus far in feeling that the game was just not for me. Granted we gave it a good shot and played this game at launch but it felt like something was off. Now coming back and playing it again I am really enjoying myself, but there are a large number of details that are significantly different that I think are effecting my enjoyment. When the initial video was released talking about the Exiles and Dominion, I naturally felt an immediate affinity with the Exiles… the problem being most of my friends had that same immediate attraction to the Dominion. I struggled with this choice until I found the Chua and for the most part enjoyed my time playing an Engineer. The problem being… I just did not enjoy that style of tanking. What I should have played was a Warrior, like I did every time I actually enjoyed myself during the beta. So this time around I am playing a Human Warrior and enjoying smashing faces and jumping around like mad. The Exile side has this whole “Firefly” vibe that works for me, whereas the Dominion feel more like playing the Empire from Star Wars. Both are interesting but at this point in my life… I feel more kinship with the rebels.

The other thing that is helping significantly is due to the whole promotion I have a hover board starting at level 1, which makes roaming around the zones so much more enjoyable. Additionally thanks to the promotion I have some spending money from selling extra items on the open market. Knowing my character is set for awhile on upgrades and spending money makes all the difference in the world. Finally the pace I am playing with makes a huge difference. Wildstar is the sort of game where piddling around feels more enjoyable than focused leveling. I am stopping to smell the roses, and boulders, and landmines… well you get the idea. Additionally I went the Soldier path, meaning I get to smash more things in the face and while I enjoyed Explorer… smashing things in the face is just more my style. At launch I had this overwhelming feeling of a need to keep up with everyone else, so that I would be viable for dungeon running. This time since I am playing all by myself for the most part… I am taking my time and poking through the content at my own speed. All of which adds up to a completely different experience for me. All of this proves that the circumstances you go into a game greatly colors your end experience. So far I am enjoying playing this game as a secondary “cooling down” from the action type game.

Wrong about Marvel Heroes

Another game that I have recently picked up that I am more than willing to admit I was wrong about is Marvel Heroes. I have avoided this game like the plague because of a whole slew of reasons. Firstly at its core it is a Diablo clone and while there is nothing wrong with that… click to move and attack games and I generally do not get along that well. Thanks to League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm I have learned to tolerate them… but my preferred means of control will always be WASD. Secondly everything surrounding this game gave the impression that it was a free to play money grab of the worst type. I played a tiny bit of this game in beta and was not terribly excited about any of the heroes I was able to play, so I filed this away in the “not for me” bin as well. The thing is over time I have continued to watch people I know and love and respect playing this game as seriously as they have played any traditional MMO. When I see something like this I start to wonder, what are they seeing it in that I am not. I’ve had these same feelings surrounding games that I just did not previously understand like Guild Wars 2, and after finally hitting my stride in that game I figured I might as well give Heroes a shot too.

Sunday I ended up playing this game for awhile, and wound up playing it for I think five hours without really meaning to. I feel like the piece of the equation that I was missing to really enjoy it, comes from the fact that I did not even realize I was in need of that Super Hero MMO fix. I happily played City of Heroes for about six months before moving on to World of Warcraft. When Champions Online launched I was extremely excited about that game… until the first patch wound up killing the combination of abilities I wanted to play with. With the launch of DC Universe Online that was yet another game I really enjoyed, but struggled to get traction in for reason I still don’t know to this day. Marvel Super Heroes seems to be just a bout the right amount of depth for me to consume as far as super hero content goes, and the ability to swap between heroes freely helps significantly. Right now I am focusing on Captain America but by the same token I have gotten rather fond of Gambit and Deadpool. All of which I really want to play more of, and ultimately this seems like the perfect sort of game to play downstairs on my laptop while watching television and movies. In fact I am hoping to do just that this weekend, and see what mischief I can get into with my shield bashing self.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Wrong About Wildstar

Bad Medicine

May 26, 2015April 22, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Nights Sleep

Monday night I did not sleep well at all. I was up late futzing and waiting on a print job for my wife, that ultimately ended up printing the wrong thing. As a result neither of us got to bed until after midnight. After that I don’t think either of us really got solid sleep, and next thing we knew it the alarm was going off at 5:30. As a result I spent most of yesterday sleep walking through it. There are just some hazes that not even caffeine can clear, and this is only compounded by the fact that my allergies are still killing me. Even the smallest task seemed like a struggle, and last nights raid was pure hell to suffer through… in part because of my present state of mind. I realistically should have just bowed out and headed to bed, but that didn’t happen.

I did however managed to get to sleep around 10:30 and last night was probably the most luminously glorious night of sleep I have had in a long time. Granted I woke up before the alarm by about twenty minutes… but I did the correct thing and just got on up instead of trying to struggle for those last few minutes of sleep. The end result is I feel more human than I have in a long time. Who knew I needed this sleep thing after all? Now if only I didn’t have to go to work I could actually enjoy my day. Today in particular is going to be a strange one as I have to go to lunch with a vendor. Working lunches make me grumpy, especially since during this one we will be grilling the vendor for information. At least maybe I get a free meal out of the deal.

Rough Raiding

Last night I was not in the right frame of mind for raiding. That is the simple fact but the end results of the night didn’t really help either. As a whole the night felt like we were beating our heads against a wall. We had fourteen people, two healers and opted to run Blackrock Foundry Heroic. I am not the raid leader so I am sure there was a reason, but it felt like we were just setting ourselves up for failure. We managed to eek out a victory on Hans and Franz with that configuration. Then we lost one healer and gained a different healer, and someone healing in their off set. We pushed forward and managed to down Beastlord Darmac in this fashion, before heading on to do some attempts on Flambender Ka’graz. There we made some swaps to the layout that seem like they might have worked, but it required a lot more work adjusting on the tanking side, so overall it was a wash and we wiped horribly.

This stagnation and continued throwing ourselves against heroic when it seems like on some level we are just not ready for it is completely destroying any desire I have to log in. I am not sure what is going wrong honestly. I am not sure if our tanks are undergeared, or if our healers are undergeared… or if the dps are just taking too much “could be avoided” damage making the healers heal someone other than the tanks. All I know is that we are having to battle rez tanks constantly, and as a matter of course which makes all of our attempts sloppier than they should be. Our Tuesday WoW raid is generally bad at adjusting to the conditions on the ground which is maddening to me, because this is precisely the strength of the Monday night Final Fantasy XIV raid. If things don’t go according to plan we seem to lose our shit completely, and end up flailing wildly… or standing in shit and dying. So I am not sure if we just have a massive case of tunnel vision or if there is some gearing problem at hand. I know for me personally I am still wearing 640 pants because nothing better will drop.

Bad Medicine

The problem is right now I am right back in that old familiar place. I dread logging into World of Warcraft Tuesday and Thursday to get a raid invite. I’ve reached that point where I am just frustrated with the whole raiding in wow experience. I have been here so many times before, and I am not quite sure how to fix it. I feel committed to “take my medicine” and log in for the sake of my friends, but I question… are any of us actually having any fun right now? Monday was won of the funniest nights of raiding I have ever experienced, and we spent it wiping like nubs to turn 9 after having taken a month off of it. So it obviously is not progression that ultimately dictates how I feel about a raid… it is the attitude of the raiders and the atmosphere of the raid. We spent Monday laughing and joking, and at the same time we made some serious progress. That is when I love to raid, when it feels like we are pulling together as a team even if we are wiping horribly.

The Tuesday/Thursday night raids just feel broken. They have about as much mirth as the waiting room of a battered women’s shelter. I log in and join the raid and I feel worse, because there is an unspoken tension going on. No one talks anymore, because key players in the raid are easily distracted by chatter. What is frustrating is, this is not the raid I joined. This is not the raid I saw at the end of Siege of Orgrimmar, or even during High Maul. That raid was excited about the prospects of this expansion, and enjoyed their evenings spent together. This raid just feels stressed and burnt out… and I have no clue how to rehabilitate it. I wish I did know honestly, because I miss that raid that existed before we set foot into Blackrock Foundry. That is a raid I enjoyed spending two nights a week with. This one… I just end up zoning out and waiting for the night to be over.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Bad Medicine

Juggling Games

May 26, 2015April 21, 2015 by Belghast

Naeling It

The Monday night raid group has had quite the sequence of strange weeks since patch 2.55 went into the game. Either we were lacking the right people, or enough people at all to do turn 9. As a result after what seems like a month we did our first night of second coil attempts. We were all exceptionally rusty going in, but the spirits were extremely high. At times I would say our spirits were too high, because holy shit were we slap happy. I was one of the worse so it is not like I can really complain much. The positive take away is that we managed to get further than we had ever gotten before last night, and were starting to work on the fire/lightning phase of the fight. On our best attempt we got Nael to 30% which feels like progress. Essentially once we learn the phase four dance, we just have to keep that up until the boss is dead.

The only regret I have right now is choosing to get my 1300 poetics weapon on my warrior. I was torn, he is absolutely my main and I intend not tanking as often as I can. The problem is on Nael the fight we are struggling with I am having to dragoon it up. That dps boost would really help, but what is done is done… just kinda kicking myself for not picking a dragoon weapon first. That said since 126 is more than geared enough for anything we are doing… I am considering focusing on getting a 1300 weapon for the dragoon now before I pick up any more poetics gear for the warrior. He still needs a chest piece and a belt, which I was going to start building towards the chest next. However since that is still going to take a significant amount of time… I might work on getting that weapon instead. I really wish that today’s 2.56 patch would have uncapped poetics… because man do I need a lot of them.

Cap and Storm

Last night after the raiding shenanigans Thalen mentioned that at one point he had created a House Stalwart super group in Marvel Heroes as a way of stopping the random guild invites. So I popped over into game and got invites. From this point we grouped up for a bit until he needed to head to bed. I have to say that I thought Captain America’s charge in and shield whirl thing was good AOE… until I ran around a bit with Storm. While I got to tank bosses, pretty much all of the trash in the entire zone died horribly to a cloud of whirling winds. That said I am really enjoying the fact that I can tank almost any world boss without much issue by keeping my my defensive buffs. I noticed last night that there was a difficulty slider so at some point I want to play with that. There are times this feels a lot like diablo on “normal” and I am wondering if there is a “hard” setting that I really should be playing.

Quite honestly I have not been even vaguely close to death other than last night when I was tanking Gorgon. There I simply used the occasional med pack and made it through that fight without much issue. The only reason why it was dicey at all was because I was essentially soloing him, which is probably something I should not be able to do at this point. As of last night I am sitting at level 15 and still really enjoying the game. I think this is going to be my go to for mindless fun, and I swear there are so many times the zone layout reminds me of City of Heroes. I guess that might be because when I played that game I kept my camera zoomed out as far as it would go, which made it feel a bit like an over the top game. The competition for spawns is a bit annoying near the entrance of a zone… but if you wander off by yourself you pretty much get the place to yourself. When I hit the island of Madripoor it felt like the pack thinned out significantly, so I am guessing most people don’t make it out of the level 10 range before moving on.

Juggling Games

The problem with juggling multiple games is that one of them always ends up falling through the cracks. Right now I wish I had the time to devote to working on my character in Wildstar and trying to hit 65 in Rift. Instead I am logging in a few times a day in Rift to run minions… and just not logging in at all in Wildstar. Honestly my playtime is really spastic right now, because I have a bunch of things that I am trying to do each day. In Final Fantasy XIV I am playing the mini cactpot each day and trying to stockpile as much MGP as I can. Then while in game I run at least one daily expert so that I can cap my poetics each week. I am also logging into World of Warcraft in the morning and at night to run my Garrison missions in the hopes of getting those ever illusive raid gear crates. I am not 100% sure how they work, other than the fact that they show up every two weeks, so I keep clearing out other missions in hopes of making room for them when they show up.

Something new added to the rotation is logging into Marvel Heroes to get my log in reward. Similarly I am logging into Final Fantasy Record Keeper for the same reason, and to get my daily item chest. Record Keeper is one of those games I mostly play while my wife is shopping or I am out eating, waiting on food to arrive at the table. It is a moment of boredom game more than anything else, but that said I am really enjoying it. It is scratching an itch that I had not quite found from a mobile game. Realistically I should be trying to log into Wildstar each day so that I can do a boom box, but I have been failing miserably at that one. The funny thing is that I am spending a lot of time in a lot of different games but not really playing any of them. Finally after doing my routine I figure out which game I am actually going to play and run off playing that one. Most of the time that is Final Fantasy XIV but over the last few nights I have been playing a significant amount of Marvel Heroes. Basically… right now I am all over the place.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Juggling Games