Good Morning Friends! It has been a wild weekend. Initially I had expected to drop a post on Friday with my early thoughts about the game… and that never really happened. I was too busy playing the game and also by reference too scared to log out because the queues kept getting larger. When I logged into the game around 8 am there was only a queue of 30 people, and as the day wore on that just kept getting bigger. I read some analysis of the Steam data and apparently there is a roughly 400% increase in the peak numbers from this same time during Shadowbringers. Admittedly Steam is the wrong way to play the game and as a result you have a tiny portion of the overall population playing on that platform, but still some extrapolation should be able to be made about the massive increase in players that we are experiencing.
There has been a pretty constant flow of information coming out of Square and more specifically Creative Business Unit III, and the most recent is that they will be giving free play time as partial compensation for how rough the situation is currently. I get that this is probably still a bitter pill to swallow for the folks who have been unable to play at all. For example as bad as the situation is for the North American Data Centers, I hear the European Centers are even worse. I’ve heard discussion of over 10,000 player queues happening over there to try and get in and play. The worst I have personally seen myself was over 7,000 the other night when I logged in just to see how bad the queue was after our podcast.
Worse than the queues however has been our old friend the 2002 error. Now I have been bit by this in the past, and thankfully thusfar because I am logging in extremely early each day… I have yet to encounter it. However most of my friends are struggling constantly with getting punted from the queue and having to rejoin it… in the vague hopes of doing all of that fast enough to get back their position in the line of players waiting to get in. Honestly I think a lot of folks would feel better about waiting if they knew that sitting in line would actually guarantee them eventually getting in. However that login infrastructure is being used by ALL of the players, and it is getting pounded to death. Quite honestly I am not sure what can be done because right now it is extremely hard to get your hands on enterprise grade servers. I know in my own line of work our move to the cloud has been accelerated by the fact that anywhere we tried to acquire them… we were looking at at least a six month wait.
If you CAN play however… the expansion has been great so far. Prior to the release of the expansion Yoshi P said something about a major shock coming around 83, and I can verify this occurrence. I am grossly over leveled due to the side quests… because they are so freaking great this expansion. However were I just focusing on the MSQ I would have hit this spot around level 83… and quite honestly from this point forward I am not sure what is going to happen. All of my predictions for the shape of this expansion and what would happen… are now out the window. This game and this team are one of the few teams that can really throw me for a loop like this. Every single expansion there are several things that just come from out of left field and challenge my notions about the game and this expansion is no different.
There is one thing that I have found really frustrating, and I am going to try and address this in as low spoilery as a possible manner. In video games and MMOs specifically there are two mechanics that I absolutely hate. The first is being asked to play someone other than my character and the second is being forced to do stealth mechanics. I play a tank for a reason and that reason is I never want to have to sneak around in order to accomplish things. So far this expansion has given me two unskippable duties where I had to do both of these things at the same time. Were it not for the fact that the queues were so freaking long… I probably would have rage quit out and played something else for awhile. I don’t invest hundreds upon hundreds of hours in a character… and then not want to play that character and I detest stealth mechanics in games in general. Putting both together and putting them on a timer… another thing I hate… was almost too much for me. I made it through it and I hope that is the last I see of that stupid bullshit for the rest of this expansion.
At this point I am maybe a third of the way through the story… maybe even less. I know there are two areas that are shown in the Aether Current system that I have yet to visit. It seems like there is a mountain worth of content still ahead of me, and last night when I stopped for the evening I had just unlocked the level 85 dungeon. I do not however think I am even vaguely close to the mid point of the game. Some shit is happening and I have to deal with it, but also I have no clue HOW we will deal with it. Right now the game is doing a phenomenal job of keeping me in the dark as the player character and there are a few paths ahead of me… and I am not really certain WHICH of those are going to come to pass. I am not sure yet if this team is going to do what I think they might do, and that is a good thing. I am constantly guessing… which is all the more reason why I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone else.
One of the things that I did years ago, is create a “quiet time” tab in my chat interface. Essentially it acts as a second general tab but with all of the public channels turned off. I felt like this was probably a good idea given that there might be accidental spoilers that happen in zone chat. Essentially turn on only the things that you feel you need the most so for me I have tells, party, free company, and a few specific linkshells turned on. I highly suggest you create your own limited chat because honestly more than anything it cuts through the noise and lets me focus on the game itself. Once I have finished the story I will go back out into the public channels, for the time being however I am just hugging my friends as I pass them but largely ignoring most of the world.
The post EndWalker Early Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammoasrt, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we start the show with a discussion of the Endwalker Head Start… which may or may not have started depending on if you can make it through the queues. We talk about our early struggles with the game and some general impressions in a fully non-spoilers way. From there Kodra talks about his process of learning how to speedrun Celeste. A topic that has been on our list for awhile is a discussion about Homebrew and House Rules and why this exist or when they go wrong. Ash talks a bit about Fuga: Melodies of Steel and how it appears to be a passion project for CyberConnect2. We wrap up with a discussion of New World’s latest patch on PTR and how they are making it impossible to avoid the Watermark Grind.
Well folks I am about as ready as I am going to be for Endwalker, and now the waiting starts. Sure there are a lot of things that I could have done to get prepared for expansion, but being completely honest… the whole grind everything to 80 sapped the will out of me. Yesterday over lunch I spent about thirty minutes turning in belts to the Maelstrom vendors for Grand Company Seals… and having to dump them periodically into ventures. So at least I should be set on running retainers through ventures for quite some time. For those who are curious the only things currently in my inventory are:
Two Stacks of Potions gained through copious amounts of Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High
A Phoenix Down – because of course you have to keep one of these around
A stack of really cheap food that I am just going to use for getting that +3% xp boost
Gysahl Greens to keep my battle buddy summoned to fight by my side
Way too many clear prisims but I refuse to get rid of them because at some point I will level a tradeskill high enough to make them into glamour prisms
Glamour Prisms and Removers because they never leave my inventory
Some Versatile Lures because I might decide I need to fish as part of a quest
I’ve had people comment about how clean my inventory is… and I beg you to please pay no attention to the bulging vaults of my retainers. I have a bad habit of just cramming things in their inventory until I absolutely cannot ignore it any longer. That said… I am ignoring it a bit longer because supposedly there are gacha boxes going in on the Grand Company vendors and turning in all of this gear should earn me a lot of them. Basically I’ve ratholed so much gear into my retainers for the purpose of leveling the jobs all the way to the maximum level. However when it came to actually doing that… I just bought a set of poetics gear every 10 levels and never touched any of the accumulated dross from my bank. So very little of it do I care about for glamour purposes, so I fully expect to convert all of it into gacha boxes.
As is often the case… I pre-ordered Endwalker so long ago that I had to log into the MogStation to verify that I had in fact set up everything to be able to participate in the head start tomorrow. Thankfully they give us this very useful screen to alleviate our fears. What I do not love however is that they make us wait so freaking long to get the actual key to register it. The MogStation being awful is a meme, but god is it true. In theory buying a game FROM Square should automate all of these steps, but nope I had to manually register the head start code, and will have to manually register the final key as well. Anyways if you are like me… and concerned about making sure you can log in as expected… maybe check your own MogStation.
Since New World is a shit show, I have been branching out and finding other things to keep me entertained until I can officially walk on the moon. Lately I have been playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077, and really this game does not deserve the stigma hanging over it. Mass Effect Andromeda and Cyberpunk 2077 are both games that were killed by the bad press that came from launching way too early. Within the first week or so enough patches had been released at least on the PC that the games themselves were extremely enjoyable to play through. Granted I am not the sort of player who goes out of his way to purposefully break games, and I largely completed missions as intended. However since launch a whole slew of patches have gone into the game and the most important of these… is your cat can now move around your apartment.
This time around I opted to start a Femme V with the Nomad Backstory. While I feel like Corpo is probably the strongest because of the quest dialog options it gives you… Nomad is pretty great as well. Truth be told that in this world… I would more than likely live the nomad life or at least it seems way better than living in the slums of the city. The Nomad vehicles are my jam because they go really fast and handle extremely well… which honestly is all I want from a game. They also have this whole road warrior vibe to them which I dig greatly. There are a lot of things that seem to have improved… and a few things that were removed. For example you can no longer get legendary quality mantis blades for free without actually fighting anything. These appear to only be available for purchase at ripper docs, but supposedly they added other legendary cybernetics items to make up for the loss of the free blades and the monowire.
My only real regret is the fact that I have started this play through… and am starting to really get into the story again… and know that come tomorrow I will not care about it at all. As a result the last few nights I have not really been moving the plot forward and instead doing a bunch of the side missions which hopefully means I can pick up at some point in the future and sink back into the life of V after the shiny has worn off Endwalker a bit. Similarly I fully expect to check back into New World, though the current trajectory of that game does not give me much hope. I found out this morning that there were apparently stealth nerfs to the crafting of dungeon keys, so that they now require quadruple t he amount of stone than they did prior to 1.1.1. So it seems that not only did they wreck open world grinds… but they are now trying to slow down the dungeon grind as well.
Tomorrow I will likely be pretty late doing a blog post. I expect to get up tomorrow morning and play for a bit before writing some of my initial impressions. I will keep things spoiler free of course and just talk about the general shape of my feelings. However hopefully none of you will actually be reading my post and will instead be enjoying Endwalker yourself.
The post The Waiting Begins appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Last night I got my last ten mogrocks and picked up the nifty satin jacket thingy. It was really the only thing on the list of available items that I felt like I had to get, and even then it waas mostly because I wanted to use it for a new Monk Glamour shown above. Essentially I ground it out mostly through repeated runnings of Praetorium which were worth 10 mogrocks each. I tried some PVP grinding but given that my heart is never in PVP and I just don’t really care about winning or losing… and clearly some people really care… it felt like a waste of time. Praetorium sure is like 50 minutes, but at least I can be watching a YouTube video or even farming things in New World while waiting through the cutscenes.
The last thing that really needs to happen before Endwalker is to clean out all of my retainers. I have ten of them because I have a problem with stuff… and on those there are a bit over 1600 items… most of which is now useless given that I leveled everything to 80. In theory I need to have a grand spring cleaning and turn in for Grand Company Seals. I also need to sift through the vaults and outfit my retainers in some proper gear while I am at it. Given how hard I am putting this off… I am uncertain that I will actually get it done by Friday. Have I mentioned how much I really hate inventory management and how I prefer to just keep digging new holes to stuff items in? If the game allowed me to have more retainers… I probably would have twenty vaults full of crap.
While prepping for Endwalker, I want to break out Super Dungeon Friends again and remind folks that it exists. If you want a long form understanding of what exactly it is… you can check out my original post on it. The short of it is that with cross server opening up at some point during the 6.* patch cycle, I wanted to get a jump on creating a community while folks can look to find groups and do things. This has worked to some extent and has at least allowed folks from certain server communities to meet new people. If nothing else it has served as a great place to ask questions and get friendly answers because we all remember what it was like to try and learn all of these systems. If you are reading this you are welcome to come hang out and join in the nonsense.
Lastly if you are unmoored and sitting on a server without an existing friend group, or starting the game fresh and need a good home… I welcome you all to Cactuar. I’ve been on the server since the launch of A Realm Reborn in 2013 and it is a pretty great place to be. There is just something special about the server and not even an influx of some of the most popular streamers could really tamp down the community spirit. If you need a good home, ping me and we will talk. Using this also as a reminder that if you are trying to create a character on a server, you really need to be doing it during off peak hours… preferably early in the morning. Last night most of these servers were locked to new character creation, but as of this morning they are all back open again. You can check the status of servers via the official page and it will show you if it is safe to transfer characters… which for those curious costs $18 and is started through the MogStation.
Last reminder is to get everything done that you need done by Wednesday, because that is the last full day of play that you are going to have. The servers are going down on Thursday in preparation for the launch of Endwalker on Friday. You can check out the official announcement here, but essentially wrap everything up Wednesday night that you want done before the expansion launches.
The post Preparing for Endwalker appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
