Good morning friends, I had no intention of taking a break yesterday but this week has conspired against me. It is shocking what a difference having a good cup of coffee in the morning makes. On Monday we ran out of creamer and I had some truly heinous coffee in which I attempted to make a vanilla protein shake work… and it very much did not. During the day a whole other crisis ensued as we lost access to water for about half the day, and given that I have neighbors in visual range of my back yard the whole “peeing in nature” thing doesn’t quite work. Yesterday morning we were awoken at 4:47 by the awful sound of the next-door neighbors AC unit forcibly shutting off… as we lost power. This was off for the entire morning and given that the creamer we purchased was sitting in the fridge… I was deeply hesitant to open that in order to preserve the cold as long as possible. This morning however the dials all clicked into alignment and I have just finished my first cup of coffee the way I wanted it… and it was grand.
I am still very much grinding away towards my ultimate goal of having all classes to level 80. In fact, I have been trying to add a little bit more effort given that I know New World is going to be launching in a few days and I will be spending a significant chunk of time getting started over there. My goal is to reach a state of equilibrium where I am playing both games, but given my focus on the leveling goal that might be a little harder than I want it to be. I am updating the spreadsheet daily and there is a certain joy in seeing the numbers drift upwards. I tweaked my log scale line chart a bit to show the maximum number of total levels which is 1430 and better indicate where I am sitting on that curve.
It is still much easier to see progress on the bar chart where I am mapping each individual job and my current level. The main thing that I changed was adding level call-outs to each of the bars and changing the color of them to denote DPS, Tank, or Healer class. Visually it feels like I am way closer to my goal than I actually am. I should very easily push White Mage to level 80 today once the roulettes reset, but that would still leave me with 57 levels to go. Given that I really enjoy Heaven on High, I am working a bit on grinding out AST and BLM through those levels. Once I get to 71 Trust becomes an option, but that really is a somewhat mind-numbing offering. Trust levels go so much slower than actually running the dungeon with human beings. Getting to level 71 also opens up Bozja which is probably something that I should actually explore a bit further, but I do not find the joy in it that Asha and Waren seem to.
Another big thing that took place over the weekend is that the stars aligned just right and we were able to bring our next-door neighbor to the Free Company house and their assorted friends along for map night. In the car with me are Sigrid, Vita, and Aimi and we had a grand night of maps. I think they brought us significant luck because not only did we manage to make it to the final stage of a single portal… but we managed this feat twice. I am pretty convinced at this point that what happens in the dungeons is completely up to chance. However for the entirety of the night we each managed to clear just shy of a million gil in cash drops alone, not taking into account anything that we were able to sell after the fact.
I am not sure if there is a broad offering of bosses, but we managed to get one which a rework of Echidna from Void Ark. It was actually a somewhat challenging encounter or at least one that was pretty hectic. Another big bonus of the night is that we managed to drag along Eliyon who picked up most of the level between 79 and 80 on his White Mage. It was so good to finally be able to do something with Sig, Vita, and Aimi other than just waving and talking in Shirogane outside our respective houses.
I did not get a proper screenshot after conquering the dungeon, but I did manage to snap this one before we all exited. I kinda wish there was a higher alliance raid version of these maps, to be honest. Whatever the case I am glad we have gotten in the rhythm of running these every Sunday. They make for a really relaxing way to close out the week and a good way to just hang out with friends.
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Good Morning Friends! It is time once more for me to present you with a blend of music for the week ahead. For those who might be new to my blog, every Monday for the past several months I have been presenting you with a new Mixtape. Sure it is actually just a YouTube or Spotify playlist, but I assembled it in the loving manner that I used to assemble custom mixtapes for my friends. I am uncertain how long inspiration will keep this section of the blog alive, but it has done so for twenty posts thus far.
Melancholeidoscope
Lately, I have been struggling a bit with melancholy, but it isn’t like it has just been one unified feeling but more a kaleidoscope of feelings. So there you go… this one is a portmanteau of those two words. Sometimes you listen to down songs because you are down… but also you are not looking to be cheered up and are fine with staying down. This journey all started when I heard something on the radio that I had not heard in years… and started to piece together an album around that song… and then proceeded to edit it out of the mix in the first place. It is funny how the creative process works sometimes, and your original inspiration is chucked aside for something new. Essentially this album is a mixture of some of my favorite melancholy songs. Some have hope for better days, and some just wallow in that feeling and that is okay. Sometimes we have to be down, but it helps to have friends along for the journey. A song can be like an old familiar friend that you have not visited in a really long time, and it similarly is amazing how many emotions come rushing back as soon as you open that door.
Track List
Everybody’s Changing – Keane
Iris – The Goo Goo Dolls
A Long December – Counting Crows
Romeo And Juliet – The Killers
Someday? – Concrete Blonde
One – U2
You Don’t Know How It Feels – Tom Petty
Walking After You – Foo Fighters
Runaway Train – Soul Asylum
Yellow Ledbetter – Pearl Jam
Patience – Guns N’ Roses
High and Dry – Radiohead
Brass in Pocket – Pretenders
Listen On Spotify
Listen On YouTube
And that friend is my twentieth mix, and I gotta be honest I was not sure this series would have lasted this long. I am not sure how many more of these I have in me, but I am going to keep creating when the inspiration strikes me. Sometimes an album builds itself. For this one each time I thought of a song to add, listening to it would make me think of another song and then I simply had to cull what no longer worked. I think at one point I had almost thirty songs on the list and whittled it down to the blend that I present today. As always if you are tuning into this series late and wanting to catch up you can check out the archive below.
Featuring:Â Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This evening we are down a Grace and went through a whole carnival of tech issues before the show, and as such were delated getting started. Bel starts the show off talking about finding a batch of WoW Screenshots he thought were lost, and it turns out that no… he likely deleted them on purpose due to the cavalcade of raid drama documented. The Final Fantasy XIV Live Letter 66 was a seven-hour-long presentation talking bout the new job skills and various other system changes. We spend a good chunk of the night talking through some of the changes including the complete revamp of the Summoner class. From there we talk about Deathloop as Tam shares some of his thoughts about the game while Bel talks about almost refunding due to any sort of a single-player save system. Finally, we share the news that there will be no AggroChat next week due to reasons that involve most of the show’s cast.
Good morning friends. There is a topic that has been bouncing around in my skull for a few weeks now, and I have never really gotten around to speaking my mind about it. The thing is I am not even sure what I want to say. Patch 9.1.5 is sticking in my craw for a bunch of reasons, and I am not entirely certain what I want to say about it because I am afraid most of my thought processes are poisoned by built-up bile. There are so many changes going into the game that are needed. For example, maybe the love rocket icon should not have looked like a big cartoon penis for the first twelve years it was in the game. I am also all for the painting changes because quite frankly the artwork looked like shit, and the versions that are replacing it are rather nice.
However, 9.1.5 is shaping up to be this make-or-break moment for the game, with the devs seemingly dumping everything that players said they wanted into the game. Legion Timewalking is this giant fanservice event that brings back a bunch of things that folks had been pining for like the Mage Tower and an ability to collect a whole new set of alternate recolors. The problem is… this is an event… a limited time moment in the game where it is going to feel extremely good for players to come back and play but ultimately has an expiration date associated with it. This feels in so many ways like a lover in a toxic relationship asking you what they can do to keep you from leaving them. Players DID leave and the problem is… a single data point does not make a trend.
Then there is another part of me that is frustrated that if this could have been pulled together so quickly… why didn’t they do this years ago? The changes that are going into the game break so many of the things that I have long considered just the World of Warcraft design ethic. Previously it seemed like we could never get something just universally good for the players, without it also being horrible in some way. Like Transmog has gone through this cycle for years, with you being able to collect item appearances… but only for the armor class that can be equipped by the person looting the items. There is part of me that wants to believe that this is a shift in the direction of the game, but the cynic feels like this is an attempt to make players temporarily forget about the bad times.
Then there is the developer in me that realizes that a lot of this is unfair to the team working on the game. Even in my own job there is a long list of things that are relatively quick to wrap up, but never quite get done because there is a prioritized by management list of things that take precedence. This part of me thinks that what we are seeing is probably a combination of two things. Firstly the management is caught off balance and desperately grasping and universally good things that they can pump out quickly, and a lot of these things were probably side-projects of the devs and are now given leave to finally finish them up and get them out into the game. Everyone has a list of items that they know would be really good… but that they can never quite find the time to finish up, and I think folks are being allowed to finally work on these things.
Then there is the other part that is frustrating me right now. I see folks making their way back to Blizzard titles, when in the end… nothing has really changed yet. There have been some high visibility exits from the company, but none of the demands that the Blizzard employees have made have actually been met. To make things worse there is talk of fears over retaliatory firings, which may or may not be a thing but the rumors are there. I am just not personally ready to forgive and forget yet, and I am thankful that I had already made my break from being a “Blizzard Gamer” back in 2011 during Cataclysm. There are folks who were hurting when they were not playing the game, and there are good employees that potentially suffer as subscribership goes down… so I get that this is an extremely complicated issue. However I am just not personally ready to jump back and pretend that everything is okay.
I am frustrated that gamers have extremely short memories. Patch 9.1.5 seems poised to be the gaming equivalent of Calgon, and is fixing to take away all of the memories of bad times… at least temporarily. I guess on one hand I am happy that the folks who are capable of making good with Blizzard and returning are going to have some excellent new toys to play with, but frustrated that I can’t look the other way this time. I miss the hell out of Diablo 3, but I am not ready to come back yet.
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