Final Fantasy XIV

Good Morning Friends! So for the last month and some change I have been enjoying the heck out of Final Fantasy XIV. I have to admit that I rode the wave of nostalgia to get back engaged with the game and have seemingly grabbed hold with both hands. Maybe it has grabbed hold of me instead… whatever the case I am having a blast. I have also managed to get over a severe mental block that I had built up for myself over the course of the last three or four years against doing group content with strangers. The thing is… there are a lot of strangers in the game. Right now the game is flush with brand new players experiencing content for the first time and it is exceptionally easy to blend in with that crowd. I never really sat out to make content for the purpose of new players, but then I started the whole Super Dungeon Friends thing and find myself in the position of answering a fair number of questions. There is one point that I keep seeing asked in various places, and I thought I would talk a bit about it. Final Fantasy XIV has a copious amount of content, and by copious, I am meaning several hundreds of hours worth of story content. One of the interesting choices that the developers have made is that you are required to get the “Main Story Quest” in order to unlock several bits of content along the way. For example, you cannot ride a mount until you have reached a certain place in the story. Additionally, the vast majority of dungeons and trails will unlock as you wind your way towards them as part of the overarching narrative of the game.

The above image is an infographic that Redditor Cyberfunk3 created showing all of the quest content in the Main Story Quest (MSQ) and other key story content in the game. One of the delightful things about the game is that it has released content over the years with a predictable cadence. Essentially with each expansion, you have the content available at release and at the end of that, you see a game credits screen. Then there is a large amount of content that is patched into the game finishing out the central conflict and setting up the events for the next expansion that represents roughly half the story of the initial release. Once you finish this you get a second credits roll and the events of that sequence lead into the opening moments of the next expansion. When you spread the content out on an infographic it represents a shocking amount of content. Over the years Yoshi P and crew have greatly streamlined some of this content in order to make it flow better but it still will represent several hundreds worth of hours of work to see the final credit roll. Truth be told I am level 80 and happily playing the game and still have yet to quite catch up on the most recent patch content. One of the truths that I am going to share with you, that you need to keep in the back of your head as you approach Final Fantasy XIV. It is a game about the journey and not the destination. There is no mythical place at the end of the content where “the real game begins”. The story content and all of the little vignettes of action along the way are the real game. There is not a second game that unlocks when you have collected enough unobtainium in order to bypass some gate-check at the end.

Many of you that are arriving on the shores of Eorzea will have likely been playing World of Warcraft, and I think it is important to understand that you are entering a different sort of game. Right or wrong over the years, the Warcraft team has positioned that game in a way so that only the last 5 to 10 levels worth of content are actually relevant. Often times this is even more limiting with only the last patch or two actually bearing any relevance on the day-to-day lives of the player base. There are probably thousands of hours worth of quest content available in World of Warcraft, but the team is only actually focused on the most recent content. What this means in practice is that a player can comfortably boost a character all the way to the beginning of the latest expansion and not really feel like they actually missed anything. In truth old content is often buggy because he had been abandoned by those who update things long ago. You encounter NPCs that no longer make sense within the context of the current story arc, and in truth, everything you are doing is funneling you into the “Endgame”. So it is easy to understand where this feeling that we as players need to rush our way through the content as fast as we can in order to start playing the actual game located just behind the final level of content.

One of the most curious things that Square Enix does is allow players to skip the story entirely for a fee. They understand how daunting it is trying to play through all of that content and I believe these were originally designed for players who wanted to start a second character on a new server but didn’t want to have to push through multiple hundreds worth of stories to get to where their other characters were. However, it seems the mindset that World of Warcraft has instilled in us as players, is catching new players in a trap thinking that they can skip straight to the endgame and be instantly relevant. Please understand that this is a massive mistake and if you choose to do this… you will never understand any of the subtlety or nuance of the storytelling that is happening. Final Fantasy XIV is a game where every moment, every morsel of content is being placed in a very specific manner and often times gets referenced later. You will see NPCs that you maybe have not seen in thirty levels showing back up and treating you like old friends. You will see moments that happen in the first seconds of the game, referenced again later for emphasis. The story that is woven in Final Fantasy XIV is deliberate and has a slower pace but it also has managed to deliver some of the most shocking and unexpected moments of storytelling I have ever experienced in a game. So often players are spending so much of their effort trying to catch up or “waiting for it to get good” that they end up squandering the moments when the game is trying its best to ease you into this world.

The content difficulty is additive in Final Fantasy XIV and I spent some time over the weekend pondering this point. There are several fights that I have experienced recently that at the time it was released I thought were some of the hardest mechanics I had ever encountered. The thing is… I’ve gotten used to them and seen them so many times at this point that a certain level of “muscle memory” has been developed allowing me to now navigating them with ease. FFXIV is exceptionally good at building player skills through throwing very clearly delineated mechanics at them and always using the exact same indicators so that you can look at an attack and know exactly what it is going to do. For example, almost always the first attack that a boss throws out is going to be the “tank buster” or the attack that the tank is going to need to apply some sort of mitigation to in order to smooth incoming damage. Knowing this means you can watch the cast bars of the boss and understand when exactly you are going to be taking a significant spike in damage. It also lets the healers know what they should be managing around in order to top that health back up. This education starts with the first dungeons you encounter and continues to ramp up difficulty and number of mechanics as you make your way through the content. Skipping ahead means you are also skipping all of this time spent training that muscle memory. Folks don’t spend a lot of time explaining mechanics in dungeons because FFXIV has taught them a very specific encounter language throughout those hundreds of hours worth of leveling.

It is a phenomenal time to start playing Final Fantasy XIV. Currently, the game is available with a massive discount so that you can get all of the content currently available for only $24. The thing is those story skips are also heavily discounted and you can pick one of those for $18. I would caution you against doing that because ultimately you are robbing yourself of the experience of playing Final Fantasy XIV. I get that there is that drive to catch up to your friends who have been playing for years, but the thing about this game is that no content is ever outdated. Yoshi P and crew understand that it is important that players are running content from all levels of the game in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem and as a result, you never really say goodbye to a chapter of the game. I queued for leveling roulette over the weekend and got thrown into Sastasha, aka the very first dungeon the game has, and honestly had a great time experiencing that content over again. What you are getting with Final Fantasy XIV is a game where pretty much all of the content in the game remains viable. Gearing exists in this realm where there are heavy catch-up mechanics and it is a token-based system that allows you to save up for exactly the item you need. This means they can attach the awarding of that currency to things like duty roulettes and have you run what is effectively ancient content and make it still feel rewarding. The other aspect of the game is that most of the fights, especially trials and just plain fun to experience. The high-end content is a dance that you perform with your friends and not a wall that you bash your face against. Sure learning that dance is hard sometimes, but once you have the patterns committed to that muscle memory it is shocking just how easily it comes back.

I talked about this in yesterday’s post, but I spent a decent chunk of the weekend going back into old extreme trials with my friends looking for rare drops. It was a lot of fun and while we were doing it with four players rather than eight players… the challenge was still there enough to keep it interesting. We still had to pay attention to the mechanics and still had to perform things in a certain manner in order to get through the encounters. The dance came back as we made our way through it, and so often while I am doing roulettes I get thrown at a dungeon that I have maybe not run in years. It is fun to dust that memory off and experience it fresh with brand new players. However that whole experience is additive and without having gone through all of that content leading up to it, you will be at a disadvantage. For me at least, it seems the surest way that you will bounce off of Final Fantasy XIV is to boost your way through it. There are characters in this game that I love and I feel a deep lasting attachment to. The reason why is because I have lived with them for eight years. We have gone through high points and low points and so many side adventures that they feel like living breathing beings to me. I reached that point however because of all of the story this game provides and the excellent storycrafting. That is not to say that there are not plenty of super cringe moments, but the cumulative total of the experience is phenomenal. Final Fantasy XIV is about the marathon and not the sprint. It is a tale told in hundreds of hours and not a rush to the most current content in order to stay relevant. The story skip will rob you of that experience, and it is highly unlikely that if you didn’t like the story… that you will find something that keeps you engaged. The post Maybe Don’t Skip the Story appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good morning friends. So it isn’t so much that I want to talk about the horrific situation with Blizzard this morning, and more that I feel like I can’t really talk about my weekend without doing so. For those who have been reading this blog for a long while, you will know that I love Diablo 3. More importantly than loving Diablo 3, is the fact that I love doing seasonal starts with my friends. I go so far as to completely arrange my calendar around the fact that the Friday night a season opens, we are going to be spending that evening grinding until we fall asleep. Admittedly as we are aging… the point of falling asleep at the keyboard comes a long earlier than normal. Diablo 3 Season 24 started on July 23rd and we had been making plans to do our normal grind… right up until the point that the news broke last week. Do you know what I didn’t do Friday? I didn’t play Diablo 3 because I just cannot bring myself to participate in anything Blizzard-related right now. This is not me telling you that you should boycott Blizzard, because for starters gamer boycotts never actually work. Gamers will talk a big game, but when it comes to actually miss out on something that they enjoy… those words never really translate into actions. Even then a potential boycott feels super bad for other reasons, namely that I still have a large number of friends who are currently stuck dealing with this situation from within the walls of the company. My not supporting the games that they create is actively harming people that I care about deeply. When I say I am not playing, it is very much a personal decision that I cannot separate the game that I love from thinking about the scope of the harm that was caused.

What I did instead was screw around in Final Fantasy XIV and eventually had my friends Grace and Byx join me for some nonsense low level content. I think we all realized that the ritual of playing Diablo 3 was more a ritual of hanging out together and shooting the shit for several hours rather than the game that we were actually playing. Byx had only a level 30 character on Cactuar, so we did a lot of lower pressure content in order to have a thing that we were all participating in together. The truth is I had a delightful evening and I am super glad that we still did something. Even if none of us were really in the position mentally to be doing the thing we had originally planned on doing. Friday evening did serve as the gateway to what was an excellent weekend of group activities in Final Fantasy XIV.

At the close of the evening, Grace and I ran a few extreme primals as she needed two more ponies in order to get Kirin. We killed two primals, got two ponies… and this intense luck streak gave me an artificial feeling of how difficult it is to get a specific pony to drop. So much so that I volunteered that we get my friend Sparkz her mount as well. For a specific chunk of Saturday afternoon, I was throwing myself at primal encounters and when I left we managed to get Ramuh and Garuda to drop. This bolstered Sparkz confidence and she managed to get Leviathan and Titan on her own, and then struggled a bit with Ifrit. It was around this point that the rest of the FC stepped in as I was busy and managed to get her the Ifrit whistle on their first kill. So that is two Kirin mounts achieved in a single weekend, which seems pretty solid to me.

This lead to Rae, Thalen, Waffles and me to have several impromptu groups over the weekend. The next set of mounts are the lanner whistles, that we more or less collectively refer to as “birbs”. To the best of my knowledge the only one that actually dropped last week was off Nidhogg and Rae managed to win the roll. We also made a number of attempts on Sophia, which was its own battle just to learn the fight… or more so re-learn the fight. Throughout the course of late Heavensward and Stormblood there are a good number of encounters that I unlocked but never actually completed. Sophia Extreme was absolutely one of these and I think we only actually downed the boss twice before needing to take a break. The vast majority of that time was spent learning the mechanics of the fight, because raid wipe mechanics are still raid wipes even though we overgeared the content.

Lastly we closed the weekend of fun with a planned night of treasure maps. Right now we are pulling together maps somewhere around 7pm CDT on Cactuar in the Aether data center. We start filling the group with the Free Company and then reach out to other folks who might be available until we hit 8 slots. It took a little while to get the group rolling, but were able to include Sparkz who had never seen any of this content. It is complete luck that we managed to get a portal on our very first map, but that is when tragedy struck. I am guessing the server was deluged at the very moment that portal open because we started encountering an error anytime Rae attempted to transfer us into the dungeon. The portal eventually timed out, and we ran another map as a test to see if it was endemic of larger server problems or just a glitch.

Something we did not realize is that when it timed out the portal… the map itself was returned to Rae’s inventory. Opening clicking on the map again… it just straight up reopened the portal allowing us access to our first dungeon of the night. I think in total we did something around six or seven different dungeons, including one that we managed to get all the way through without being ejected. That was the first time we had actually managed to do that as a group. I love maps night largely because it is just good silly fun, with content that is just challenging enough to be interesting, but not so challenging as to feel like we are grinding our faces against anything. What I was not prepared for really is just how lucrative these maps end up being. There was one chest we opened that dropped 100,000 gil by itself and all told I probably cleared around 500k gil for the evening.

The weekend had a bit of a rough start, in not knowing exactly what we would do in place of the Diablo 3 seasonal start. However it ended up phenomenal as I got to spend a lot of time doing things with my friends and I am extremely happy I chose to come back to this game. Sure it was nostalgia that got me to return, but I somehow managed to break what had been a three or so year long mental block against doing group content with strangers. Now I queue for dungeons every single night and enjoy my time spent greatly. It feels like I have repaired some rift in my psyche that now allows me to appreciate just how good it feels to do group content again. I am really wanting to figure out a time and a place to at least start dipping my toes into doing raid content again. I am not yet sure what night would work for me, but I will probably be reaching out to some of the usual players to determine what might even work as a schedule. The post No Season but Much Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends! A few weeks back I had this idea for a Friday mornings series where I talk about something that is special to me. In the first post in this series I talked about my bunny hat, and today I am talking about another item that has deep sentimental meaning to me. I don’t do one of these every week but I do plan on weaving them in from time to time.

Enbarr Whistle

The Enbarr Whistle is an item that drops from Whorleater Extreme, one of the original extreme primal fights introduced with the subsequent patches to A Realm Reborn. Most specifically this is the fight in which you tackle the extreme version of Leviathan, and was generally known to be fairly tricky given that it has a mechanic similar to Extreme Titan where players can be knocked out of the fighting arena and cannot be recovered by resurrection abilities. Essentially this means that all of the players have to execute on all of the mechanics in a timely fashion to keep from being knocked off of the barge that the fight takes place on.

Each Primal fight in the sequence had a rare chance of dropping a whistle to summon an elemental pony-themed after that specific encounter. Enbarr, for example, was themed after the color palette of Leviathan and as it runs you can see water splashing up at its feet. These were heavily sought after mounts not just because they look cool, but because while you are riding it the musical theme of the boss plays in the background. For anyone who has never experienced FFXIV boss music, this might not mean a lot… so I challenge you to listen to this banger of a track and not get excited. As you explore the world, this became your soundtrack and each pony allowed you to vary it up.

The Primal fights were just difficult enough to require attention to mechanics, but not so difficult as to feel tedious. Since each of them dropped a Whistle that summoned a different themed pony, we would occasionally do nights where we farmed a bunch of the fights in the hopes of getting drops. Enbarr specifically is special to me because it was the first of these whistles that I got. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have gotten it on 4/25/2015 and I wrote about it the next Monday in a post titled Splashy Pony. It is also extremely special to me because we farmed it with our original crew and while it was still an extremely challenging encounter. I dug up the above picture… and I believe it is from the same night I got my pony to drop. This is the beautiful thing about having my blog as a memory archive and lots of screenshots to go with it.

Among the Primal Ponies there is one that is significantly rarer than the others. Nightmare has a chance of dropping from any of the original A Realm Reborn Primals, but that drop chance is pretty low. We continued farming Ponies throughout other expansions, trying to complete sets for our members. On one of these Primal farm nights I managed to not only see this mount drop but win the roll. As a result I had it in the back of my head that I now needed to complete the entire set. Slowly over time I gained addition primal whistles. Xanthos from Garuda, Gullfaxi from Titan, Aithon from Ifrit, and Boreas from Shiva. I never had any luck with Markab from Ramuh, in part because that fight was never terribly fun to run and we just didn’t repeat it as often as the others.

Coming back recently I was told by my friends that I could probably easily farm Extreme Primal fights, specifically for the purpose of knocking out Wondrous Journey stamps. This leads me the other night to make an attempt at Ramuh Extreme and wouldn’t you know it… but on that very first kill I managed to get Markab the only pony missing from the set. One of the cool things about the primal pony set is that if you manage to collect them all, it triggers another quest that starts from the Wandering Minstrel in Mor Dhona. You assemble all of the Primal Ponies and it summons a new mount… Kirin. There is a neat cutscene from which the above screenshot is taken. The end result however is that you walk away with a brand new fairly rare steed.

Here is a picture of me riding Kirin, which has a really nice wing animation. The thing is though… Kirin isn’t the mount that is special to me. The one that I think about the most is good ole Enbarr because it sent me down this path and gave me a journey to follow. As gamers, we look for projects and missions in these MMORPGs because that is ultimately the driving force that keeps us engaged. For me, the Pony farm was an equip journey spread out over the course of several years. Now that I have completed it though… there are several more similar journies ahead of me. With each expansion they have introduced a new series of Primal mounts so I feel like I need to collect all of them. The next target is the “Lanner” collection from Heavensward which are a series of giant eagle like birds. So far I only have one of these but I am wanting to start farming the rest. Side note if you want to join in this madness at some point hit me up. More than happy to help folks complete pony sets or come along as I start trying for the other mount series. The great irony here however is that I mostly just ride my Chocobo. The post Favorite Fridays – Enbarr Whistle appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good morning friends. I come to you with a heavy heart this morning because sometimes I get tired of seeing the same shit play out over and over. I wish I could just say it was a games industry thing, but it absolutely is not. If you have no idea what I am talking about then I suggest you check out this post from Bloomberg Law or even this summary over on WoWHead. Here is the important fact that needs to be taken away from this situation and everyone that has happened since the dawn of time. This kind of abuse continues to happen because somewhere along the chain of events there is a woman who was not believed. This person confided in someone and that confidence either kept their mouth shut, tried to diminish the impact of what happened, or just flat out did not believe them. Things cannot change until we accept that it is each of our responsibility to make sure the abused are safe from the abusers. We need to be better. Our gaming communities need to be better. Our workplaces need to be better. It is around this time that someone generally brings out the “what if it was your wife or daughter” nonsense. It shouldn’t NEED to be that close to home for you to care about it. You should care because everyone deserves to be safe. The thing is, your wife and daughter already have their own history of stories to tell about events that have happened to them. This is happening every day and in almost every environment and needs to stop. I hate having to make public comments, but I also feel like if I don’t use whatever platform that I do have I am failing each and every person that is hurting. If I stay silent, the abusers assume I stand with them, and the abused continue to feel isolated because they question if I am going to hurt them.

So I spent my night alternating between doomscrolling and feeling horrible about the world on Twitter, and tabbing back into my Free Company and feeling good about my friends there. I am doing more with my FCmates and it is enjoyable. Last night Rae, Waffles, and I ended up running a bunch of roulettes together and it was super great. I have enjoyed my time running with random players, but I have to admit that I understand WHY I reached a point where I was mostly just wanting to run with at least a known healer. It felt so great to tank instances last night with a healer I wholeheartedly trusted to keep me alive. Previously I would end up hedging my bets and maybe using a few too many cooldowns just to make sure I survive a pull. With Rae at the helm, I was able to just be the tank I knew I could be. There is also something special about the role of the tank when the ones you are with are your close friends. Like there is an instinct in me to be protective of my friends. Dungeons are so much more enjoyable when that protective instinct is rewarded in trying to get all of the hatred and protect my party when it is actually people that I care about on the line. That is really when I am most in my element when playing an MMORPG. I like being the tank and I am extremely happy that I have somehow managed to navigate the mental block that kept me from being able to enjoy that style of gameplay for a while. I’ve yet to get comfortable enough to start tanking Trials and Raids through the roulette, but I am sure at some point I will throw myself at those as well.

It is probably strange that I am starting this post the way that I did and then interspersing screenshots and comments about Final Fantasy XIV along with it. The thing is… for me video games are how I cope with the wrongs of the world. It is another world that I can sink into where the problems don’t seem quite so big anymore. I think this is the truth for a lot of people and I really feel for the folks who are reading this news and now feeling like they are cut off from this thing that they loved in World of Warcraft. I myself am struggling with the fact that this weekend starts a new Diablo season, and I am not sure if I feel right participating in it. The pain of that decision however are this is also the time that I and my friend Grace spend hanging out and catching up as we both focus on the same shared goal. It is something that I look forward to more than pretty much anything else on the calendar. Right now however I just don’t feel right giving Diablo or Blizzard any oxygen right now. The reaction from the company in an official statement last night only made this situation direr for me on a personal level. I know the right thing to do is to say “fuck this” and stop participating in any Blizzard product, but also I know my actions don’t change anything and only serve to damage our “once every three months” binge of “diabbling”. I also deeply feel for my friends who work at Blizzard because the coming months are going to be awful to be there. When something like this happens everyone who was doing the right thing and acting properly is taken down with the individuals who caused the harm. That said it is almost impossible to be in one of these environments without knowing the lay of the land and understanding just who the abusers are. There is one last piece of advice that I feel like I need to impart. When a situation like this occurs, I hear people talking about the failing of the Human Resources department. What you as an employee need to understand is that Human Resources is not there for your benefit. Sure they are assisting in your benefits or helping you with leave, but their core mission is not to be the advocate of the employees. The role of Human Resources is to make sure everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing, but not for the greater good. Ensuring that policy is followed takes place in order to limit the legal liability of a given company, which means when a bad situation happens they are always going to side with diminishing the impact of that event. Often times the only way change happens is when one of these stories makes the press, because it puts the company in a posture where they finally have to deal with it. The post Please Believe Women appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.