69 Challengers

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The Anook Thing

Blaugust is officially upon us, and with it comes a deluge of people posting to the Nook.  I just wanted to take a few moments to highlight a few things as far as that goes.  First off Lonrem made an awesome post on how to get the most out of posting on Anook.  Also of note the very awesome Green Mushroom aka Void has been creating forum posts each day to collect the various daily posts.  This is a pretty great idea as it makes it easy to read everything that has been happening for that day in one place.  While this is amazing idea I also highly suggest that you advertise your post separate from this forum thread.  The Anook Community prize is going to be solely based on how many hearts various posts get from the Anook Community as a whole.  Our forum is a great place for collaboration and communication with other Blaugustians, but the only people that will actually see it are people who are following the nook.

Basically you have two options to make a post see larger circulation.  You can either create a blog post on your profile page, which will allow you to attach images and keywords as well as associating it with a game.  This however takes some time, and feels a little repetitive when you are already writing a separate blog post.  What I tend to do however is to click through to the Blaugust Nook, and at the top of the screen is a box that says “Share What’s on Your Mind”.  Generally speaking I open this box, link to my blog post… write a quick blurb about the post and then associate it with a game.  This will create a post automagically shared with the Blaugust nook and also associated with the individual game nook.  From there if you so choose you can click the Megaphone icon to share it with any other nooks that you might think would be interesting.  My key problem generally is that I tend to write posts that cover multiple games… which makes it really hard to determine which to associate it with.

69 Challengers

At the time I am writing this Saturday morning… we currently have 69 Challengers.  As we went on through the month last year we picked up steam, so that at the end of the proceedings we had fifty people who had either participated or won the challenge.  I am completely blown away by the support I have seen thus far, and I am amped to see what the end of the month will see our numbers at.  I have to admit there was a period of time when I didn’t think I would do Blaugust again.  For some people it was this amazing experience, and others… it ended up causing them to take several month lags in their posting.  The last thing I wanted to do was contribute to bloggers…  not blogging.  However as we got closer to August this year more and more people asked me if I was running it again because they were really getting excited.  At this point… I am absolutely happy that I did because apparently this challenge strikes a primal chord with folks.  The happiest moment however is that I am watching it branch out of my little circle of blogger friends and helping to discover brand new circles that I didn’t even know about.  I think we are going to have really great things happen this month.  Now…  for the updated list of participants as of Day One.

Returning to Norrath

EverQuest2 2015-07-31 18-21-14-24 As I mentioned during the Games of the Week post, I plan on diving back into some of the games I am linking to as well.  I am mostly focusing on free to play games, that have no barrier of entry for folks to pop in.  That said however… as I delved back into Everquest II last night…  I had a barrier of entry.  It turns out that the time locked progression server Stormhold is for subscribers only, so for the moment… I am once again subscribing to EQ2.  This has always been one of those games that I have had rose colored lenses for, because I have this deep connection to Norrath.  In many ways it was my first MMO World, because in truth… Phantasy Star Online doesn’t really count when it comes to the whole “rich lore driven world” aspect.  It had been since March 2014 that I had poked my head into Everquest II, which is a bit of a long absence for me.  This is one of those games that I have tended to play every few months, and in spite of having it installed I really have not given it much loving.  I have to say…  maybe that was for a reason.

In many ways this game is a time capsule locked in a different graphical era.  I’ve never been a fan of the “new” models that they released in an attempt to sell the game in Asian markets, but I have to say the original models look extremely dated at this point.  It isn’t so much the models as the fact that they are animated so poorly as compared to modern titles.  I guess in the time I have been away I have gotten accustomed to the way the other worlds looked.  In truth this game ties back to a time when the fact that we were playing online at all… was miraculous and as a result we simply accepted that a lot of things didn’t look nearly as clean as the console counter parts because we were getting huge worlds to explore.  Another thing that nostalgia does is makes you look back upon experiences as better than they actually were.  I remember having all of these fond memories on the Isle of Refuge…  but unfortunately the act of playing through it again is something entirely different.  The later start zone experiences work so much better than the Isle, and I found the whole experience of leveling through it again to be cludgy and annoying.  Even worse was the transition to Freeport, because quite honestly I am not a big fan of the redone versions of Freeport and Qeynos.  I miss the small dungeon zones attached to Freeport as way of leveling through to 10 and being able to survive the commonlands.

For the time being I am running my Iksar Shadowknight just outside the gates of Freeport in the Commonlands, and I am able to take down level 9 and 10 mobs at level 6.  My working plan is to grind my way to 10 and then start questing in the commonlands proper again.  The problem being…  I just ran out of drive to make this happen last night.  I finally logged into Final Fantasy XIV and worked on my hunts there instead of continuing the leveling process.  Another thing I had forgotten, is just how slow the leveling curve in EQ2 used to be.  Getting to 10 is going to feel like a significant accomplishment, since I am not dual boxing this game the way many other people are.  Basically this time locked server experience is reminding me that you can never actually go back home.  You change and your home changes… and things are never quite the same.  I still had some fun poking my head into Norrath again, and if I can get over this hump I think I will enjoy myself again as an “off night” game when I am not feeling like much human interaction.  I have definitely been going through one of those slumps lately, where I am perfectly fine to chat with people over twitter but somehow grouping up and doing content together just seems to taxing.  I need to get past this however because I need desperately to cap Esoterics this week.



Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
69 Challengers

Blaugust Day 2: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

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One of the things that continually impresses me about Final Fantasy XIV is that the developers are very good at learning from their mistakes. Sometimes systems don’t work quite how they were intended to at first, but improvements get made and the game develops over time. One good example of this is cutscenes.

The storyline in FFXIV includes a lot of cutscenes throughout, many of which can be fairly long. All well and good, but at first those cutscenes would often be in the middle of dungeons. If not everyone in the dungeon wants to watch the cutscene, then you end up with some members of a group either having to wait for the others to finish, or running on ahead and starting fights without the person who was watching the cutscene. The very worst offenders were the final two 8 person trials in the initial story, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium. It is entirely possible for a player to watch the cutscene triggered before a boss in one of those trials and find that by the time the cutscene is over the rest of the group has already defeated the boss and moved on without them.

In the content that was added in later patches however, mid-dungeon cutscenes are noticably rare. When they do exist they are usually very short. Cutscenes at the beginning of dungeons are usually quite short as well, with the long ones almost always placed at the end of dungeons where watching them won’t hold the rest of your group up. The lesson was learned and adjustments were made to avoid repeating the mistake.

I’ve been working on my crafting jobs recently, and I’ve noticed the same sort of thing there, where choices appear to have been made to address weaknesses in the crafting system or to fix elements that don’t have the expected effect.

Crafting in FFXIV is a mini-game that involves using various abilities to fill a progress bar while also trying to increase a quality bar as much as possible to improve your chance of producing a high quality verison of the item you’re making. For final products a high quality item is noticeably better than the normal version, having higher stats across the board. You have a limited number of actions to do this with as well as a limited amount of crafting points to spend on your abilities. To complicate things even further, your craft has a material condition which can vary over the course of the craft, adding an element of randomness to the process.

In theory, one needs to pay attention to material condition and react differently depending on the current condition since it heavily affects the amount of quality added by abilities. In practice, at most points in the process changing which ability you use would result in wasting the effects of previously used abilities or using too many crafting points and running out too soon. Thus, condition ends up just being something you don’t pay much attention to that occasionally greatly helps you or screws you over.

In Heavensward, all the crafting jobs get a new ability at level 53, Precise Touch, which increases item quality. This ability is identical to the very first quality increase ability you receive, Basic Touch, with two differences. Precise Touch can only be used when material condition is Good or Excellent, and it adds a level of Inner Quiet to your Stack. Inner Quiet is a status you can stack that increases the effectiveness of all you quality increase abilities.

That’s useful in and of itself, of course, but more importantly that stack can then be spent to fuel the ability Byregot’s Blessing, which increases quality by an amount dependent on the size of the Inner Quiet stack.

What this means is that any time you would normally use Basic Touch, it is better to use Precise Touch if possible. Now you need to pay attention to material condition so you can use the better ability. It’s not a huge change, but a small step to slightly more complex crafting. Of course, whether you think that’s a good thing or not will depend on whether you view it as interesting complexity or not. I’m still not entirely sure on that point, but it’s at least an attempt.

Blaugust Returns, Day 1

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I originally started this blog on the first day of Blaugust last year, so I suppose it’s somewhat fitting that I return to it on the first day of Blaugust. I’m not really certain why, but I just haven’t felt much inspiration to write in recent months. Time for a fresh start though, and to see if I can keep things going this time around. We shall see.

What are you hoping to get out of Blaugust this year?

Belghast posted that question as a writing prompt for the first day of Blaugust, and it seems like a good question for me to answer. What am I hoping to get out of this? I’m certainly not it for the phat stacks of blog cash. I have a day job that works just fine for me; this will only ever be a hobby. I think I mostly want to blog as a way to think about my ideas and get them out into a more concrete form.

That’s why I blog (when I do), but why Blaugust in particular? I’ve found that I tend to work best with concrete goals. That’s one of the reasons that I’m a big fan of in-game achievements; they provide me suggested goals to work towards which give me sufficient structure that I’m not just flailing around wondering what to do. Blaugust serves a similar purpose, setting a goal of one blog per day for a month. I’ve done it once, but this time I’d also like to try and use that month to come up with some ongoing structure to keep me going. One of my friends had a few suggestions for ongoing features I could write each of which could run for a year or more if done on a weekly basis. I may try to do one or more of those and see how that goes.

In any case, Blaugust has come and the challenge has begun. Let’s do this.

Daily Chores

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I hate dailies. My tolerance for the extends exactly as far as is required for me to access whatever content I’d like to get into and basically no further. It’s the fastest way for me to burn out on a game. The obligation to log in every day and do [whatever] loses me instantly.

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At the same time, I understand the need to pace out progression in some sane way. FFXIV has a great system in its daily leve allowances, and I wish that would extend to other things. Let me run a week’s worth of expert roulette on Saturday, rather than needing to log in every single day to max out my currency income.

I haven’t logged in much to FFXIV this week because I’d been grinding every day to reach i170 on my Summoner. I know I can get higher than that, but it’s just not enticing to me. I’ve come to lack the overriding desire to make all of my numbers as high as possible, I’m more than happy with “high enough”, because there’s other stuff I want to do. I appreciate how lightweight the Law grind was in FF, especially right after the levelling process, but I’m not terribly motivated to jump right back into it to chase the gear treadmill a little further, especially because I know my current state is sufficient for what I’m doing and, furthermore, the investment required to move forward to the current “best” tier will drop here relatively shortly. I’ve chased the cutting edge of content before, and I don’t have the interest in doing it again that would motivate me to grind dungeons until I achieve the absolute best [numbers] I possibly can.

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What motivates me is interesting new stuff to do. I am, at my core, an Explorer-type, though I don’t fall into the category of Explorer that people tend to think of. Wandering around geography isn’t interesting to me; I want to explore the story and the gameworld and see how everything plays out. I don’t care about finding the secret hidden treasure chest in a cave on a mountainside, but I will jump through nearly any hoops to get all of the possible endings to something. I’ve only played one Kingdom Hearts game, but I did get the ‘true’ ending for it, and I played through enough Chrono Trigger to see every way that game ends (it’s a lot).

Exploration for its own sake doesn’t interest me– I want something to find. In the same vein, progression for its own sake rarely excites me: I want to be progressing in order to see something I haven’t previously seen. It’s something I miss from older MMOs– current games want to make sure you don’t miss anything, so there’s rarely anything to find by wandering off the beaten path. You might get some cool screenshots or something (which other people really love, and I appreciate, but don’t care to chase after for myself), but by and large you’re not going to find anything meaningful at the top of that mountain if the game didn’t expressly tell you to go there.

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It was my biggest disappointment with Wildstar– for all it claimed to encourage exploration, I still felt like it was taking me on hikes along well-trodden paths, not rewarding me for forging across the wilderness. The coolest part of the Explorer subclass was finding hidden quest areas that weren’t apparent to other people, but they felt thin; I didn’t really find exciting stuff in there, just a challenge and maybe a single quick quest. It wasn’t the life-changing revolution that was expected.

That being said, I continue to feel like we’re on the cusp of a big sea change in MMOs, but of the various directions it could go, I’m not sure yet which one I think is likely. I hope we get away from games and back towards experiences that feel like worlds. I find I miss the sense of being a denizen of a vast digital world, versus a player in a multiplayer game. The difference is, as always, progression. In worlds, you can make progress in a variety of ways and they’ll all benefit you. In games, if you’re not spending your time progressing in one of a relatively set number of ways, you’re kind of wasting your time. I miss feeling like I could spend my time doing whatever and still be productive.



Source: Digital Initiative
Daily Chores