Blaugust – Page 55

Liebstered!

August 5, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 5

On Sunday I finally caught that infamous blogging disease, the Liebster Award! Thanks Noctua and Mylex at Gamers Decrypted!

11 Random Facts About Me:

I love origami, and can fold a mean shark.
I have never played KOTOR, to my shame.
I have 3 cats and only one of them hates me.
My mom is the one who inspired and enabled my nerdiness. She still always calls me to make sure I don’t miss an episode of Doctor Who or a particularly cheezy made-for-Syfy movie.
I came to MMOs relatively late, and WoW was my first MMO. I never played in vanilla.
My first computer was a Commodore 64.
In school I had to learn typing instead of programming due to my schedule. I hated and resented it right up until I realized that knowing how to type is amazing, and programming I could teach myself.
Hands down, my favorite movie of all time is Pacific Rim. It is like it was made just for me and my childhood kaiju love.
I absolutely hate wearing dresses or skirts. But I always end up playing casters in video games so my characters are constantly wearing dresses even though I won’t.
I love Star Wars and Star Trek equally. Don’t drag me into your arguments, I won’t choose sides!
My favorite food is cheese. If you don’t like cheese I will fight you.

Now to answer Noctua’s questions:

What about writing do you love the most? Writing a blog is great because it forces me to reflect more deeply on what I’ve been doing, and connects me to the world of other game bloggers outside my social circle.
Which is your favorite gaming console of all time? I’d have to say the original Playstation. It marks the point where I was capable of buying games I wanted without having to beg my parents for them.
Do you believe in good and evil? I’m going to go with the sage words of god, or a computerized space probe that collided with god: “Right and wrong are just words, what matters is what you do.”
What are your worst and best qualities? I can be overly competetive sometimes, but I make a mean spaghetti sauce.
Are you an achievement, immersion, or social focused player? I’m definitely achievement focused first and foremost. I enjoy escaping into games, but once I’m there I need some objective to chase.
What is your most beloved character of all times from a game? If this means my personal characters, it would definitely be my forsaken priest in WoW, so many memories there. In terms of actual written characters, probably Sam from Gone Home. Never before had a game made me just outright weep at the end.
What is your favorite book? This one is almost impossible to answer, there’s too many great ones! My favorite of what I’ve read recently would have to be One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire because it is full of sea fey.
Which is your favorite fictional villain and why? I always love villains that are smart and scheming. My favorite Disney villain is Ursula, because she’s amazing and because her design was based on Divine.
DC or Marvel? I’m not a comics fan at all. I’d have to answer Marvel to this question though, just from enjoying their movies and playing lots of Marvel Heroes!
What about maintaining your blog do you find the most difficult? Coming up with new things to say, and believing that my opinions are worth posting for everyone to see.
Which is your personality type? INTP, the classic absentminded professor archetype, I guess it makes sense. I most certainly am an introvert.

Now for my questions for my ~~victims~~ awardees:

Why do you blog?
What was your favorite childhood cartoon show?
Fantasy or Sci-Fi?
What’s the most amazing place you’ve ever been?
Pizza: Chicago or New York?
If you could only pick one game genre to play for the rest of your life, what would it be?
What inspired your character name?
What is your greatest gaming moment or achievement?
Do you share your love of games with your real-world friends and family, or keep it to the internet?
Have you ever had a really weird pet?
What is your favorite type of environment/biome in-game and IRL?

Phew that was a workout! I’ve chosen a couple of my Aggrochat buddies who are also participating in Blaugust to answer my questions and share their 11 random facts:

Ash and Thalen consider yourselves Liebster-ed! I look forward to seeing your answers.

I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know me a little better!

#Blaugust Day 4: Making Connections

August 5, 2015August 4, 2015 by Thalen

My primary reason for blogging is to express my thoughts and get some of what I think about into a more finished form and in front of an audience. In addition to that though, there's also a desire to better connect with a community that I'm a part of but don't always interact with. I'm an introvert by nature so I have a tendency to lurk at the edges. Blogging is one step towards counteracting this but I also want to be better about commenting on the blogs of others.

Liore's post about the importance of comments is what really got me thinking about this. I rarely comment on blogs. To a great degree this is because I second guess myself and end up deciding that what I was going to say is silly or obvious. I've often written a comment then deleted it and moved on rather than hit the submit button. But even the least comment says 'I read this and thought it interesting enough to remark on', which is a nice thing to see in response to something you wrote.

I've decided to make a deliberate effort to comment on multiple blogs each day of Blaugust, and hopefully get in the habit of doing so more in the future. I have to imagine that with something like 80 blogs participating at least a few will inspire a remark from me each day. At the same time I'm going to try to make a point of engaging with those who comment on my blog. It seems only right to let those who went to the trouble of responding to my thoughts know that I value their input.

Blaugust Day 3: Master of Magnetism!

August 3, 2015August 3, 2015 by Thalen

Marvel Heroes is another game whose developers seem to be very good at learning from their mistakes. Most recently they did away with multiple story mode difficulties. Where previously you had to run through the entire story 3 times to get all the available rewards on a particular character (most importantly power points) a single run through the story now takes you from level 1 to 60. Previously you would expect to be around level 25 the first time you fight Doctor Doom. Now you'll be nearly at the level cap when you reach Doom.

I decided to test this out by pulling out one of the characters I have unlocked but a level 1 and seeing how the leveling felt in this new system. I considered a couple of options, but ultimately decided on Magneto.

Those are some impressive guns for a 90 year old.

I played through the first 4 chapters of 9, and had hit level 33 by the time I defeated the Kingpin. Based on a little time spent in Midtown Manhattan, that seems to still be a quicker way to level, but Story mode is definitely a more viable leveling option than before.

I did notice that villains in events had a lot less health than before, resulting in super-villains often being defeated almost instantly when they appeared. On one hand, it's nice that I can complete those events by myself without it being a multi-minute slog now. I think maybe they need to be adjusted back up a little though, as it's pretty much not worth trying to get to one unless you were near it when it spawned.

As far as Magneto's gameplay, I had a lot of fun floating around hurling metal shards at people and listening to Magneto's haughty comments whenever other heroes ran by. Magneto uses 'debris' as a secondary resource for his attacks which recovers slowly over time or faster through wrecking up the place. I tend to destroy anything around in any case just for fun, so that works out well for me. I also really like the white costume they chose as his default, though if his costume from his time as Headmaster of the Xavier School ever gets added to the game, I'll be picking that up immediately.

Blaugust Day 2: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

August 2, 2015August 2, 2015 by Thalen

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.

Blaugust Day 2: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

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.