Final Fantasy XIV

Readyish

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Readyish

Some time ago I started a thing.  The first piece of information you need to understand this… is to know that Final Fantasy XIV for whatever reasons does not have an idle kick.  I remember this causing so much issue during the launch during, and them finally having to implement one.  However at some point they turned it back off and sometimes we abuse the hell out of it.  Kodra is notorious for staying logged into things… and Final Fantasy XIV is not exception.  I remember there have been times when he has stayed logged in in some hub like Mor Dhona for literal days.  One night he happened to be AFKing and I decided it would be funny to update the guild MOTD to say something to the effect of finding Free Company members AFK and taking awkward photos with them.  This was something that regularly happened in World of Warcraft, and most of the photos were questionable to say the least.  Sita however has decided to turn this into an art form and the photos just keep getting better.  As you can see..  I made the mistake of going afk right out in front of our guild house.  I had been alt tabbed doing other things and it wasn’t long before a number of photos of me and other people showed up on Sita’s twitter feed.

Readyish

You have to admit they are pretty great.  Sita has caught a bunch of Ashgar, Sol, and Kodra as well over time.  As far as Final Fantasy XIV goes…  we are now in the great outage that is preparing everything for the headstart launch of Stormblood.  In theory at 2 am PDT or 4 am my time on Friday the servers come back up… and we officially transition into 4.0.  Am I completely ready for this?  Truthfully no.  I feel like I have done very little to prepare for the launch of an expansion, but I did manage to mostly clear out my bags and also put a dent in some of the stuff that had been clogging my retainer.  The biggest problem right now is I don’t remember at all where the MSQ last left off.  If I had to guess… the Rising Stones in Mor Dhona since everything seems to take place there.  I am not nearly as pumped for this launch as I was for Heavensward, only because I have so many other things to distract me.  I am still spending a significant amount of time in World of Warcraft doing random stuff and enjoying myself.  I think part of my trepidation is that I know the moment I log in Friday, my character will have changed.  Warrior from all accounts is one of the least changed classes, but with Heavensward I knew that more or less I was only going to be adding tools to my kit rather than swapping for a slightly different kit.  Functionally those first few levels are largely going to be me getting accustomed to driving a new character, and I am hoping I pick it up quickly.

Readyish

I think the part I am looking forward to the most however is seeing all the faces show up and seeing the Free Company be a thriving hub once again.  That is the part of an MMO cycle that is the hardest to really put into words, is how awesome the launch of a new batch of content is.  Folks you might not have seen in months suddenly show up and are interested in doing stuff.  I’ve been in one of those cycles where I have simply not been around, and I am looking forward to digging in and getting involved in shenanigans.  That said I don’t really want to launch of Stormblood to stall any of the other things I have going on.  For example I still want to keep moving the whole RoboSquid thing forward and continuing to take down dungeons with minimal gear and level.  I am probably going to take a few weeks off of the Friday night thing in World of Warcraft, but ultimately I want to return to that as well because I still enjoy hanging out with that group of friends.  Then there is the huge backlist of things that I really need to play that are not MMO based. E3 had this weird effect of making me want to play games that are already out, more so than making me long for the games on the horizon.  Well that is other than Destiny 2…  I kinda want access to that now.  That said it will have released before I realize it.  The older you get the faster time seems to move and right now entire months evaporate before I realize it.  Stormblood seems like it was still off in the distance… and now instead it is launching tomorrow.

Turtles and Failknighting

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Turtles and Failknighting

Over in Final Fantasy XIV they are having this Make it Rain event, which in truth is a really short quest that leads you to the Gold Saucer where all MGP winnings are increased by 50%.  For awhile now I had been closing in on the Adamantoise mount just by doing the weekly and daily cactpot options.  However last night the between the free 20,000 MGP you get for the quest and hitting a 1/2/3 combo for 15,000…  I finally pushed over the line and was able to purchase it.  Now I know Ashgar is holding out for Fenrir but for me… it was always about the turtle.  Since I was a little kid I have had a connection with them, largely because I grew up slightly out in the country and spend a good deal of time playing with random terrapins that wandered into the yard.  I am the sort of person who will swerve wildly to miss a turtle…  or honestly any animal for that matter.  What makes this mount even better however is that it can fly…  pending you are in a flyable zone and not sitting outside the free company house.  Add this to the pile of mounts that Lalafel look adorable on, and I figure I will be riding it in place of my standard Chocobo for the time being.

Turtles and Failknighting

After that I logged into Belgrok and started pushing towards 110 in World of Warcraft.  For the most part it took finishing up the back half of Stormheim, going back to Val’sharah and doing Bradenbrook…  and finally doing the first tiny bit of High Mountain for me to hit the level cap.  From there it was all about trying to get some gear from whatever quests that were available at the time.  In the most questionable of ideas…  Grace and I decided to take our freely 110 characters over to the invasion happening in Val’Sharah.  This is normally a perfectly reasonable idea, but on a low population server everything that is in the world becomes a little bit more difficult.  We were mostly doing okay until we reached the part where we had to do the scenario.  At which point we got queued with a super chill rogue who did not call us horrible at all…  even though we kinda were.  There was this epic fight at the top of the tower where the rogue solo’d down the boss there with an over abundance of skill.  He himself was pretty minimally geared, but was obviously far better at survival than either of us were and kept running away from the boss and using columns and such for line of sight…  just long enough for his self heal to be up before engaging again.  The yakkity sax madness largely continued when we got up to the final eyeball boss…  but all in all we managed to finish things up and get some gear in the process.

The unexpected thing about this low population server… is that it seems like someone had flooded the market with really cheap 835 plate armor.  I managed to get my item level up to 814, which hoping we have another night of some upgrades through world quests might actually see me able to get into heroics.  Right now I really need 2 rings, 2 trinkets and some shoulders…  because all of those slots are bringing down what would otherwise be a reasonable position to be in.  In the grand scheme of things the only reason why I want the ability to do heroics…  is that the queue times for those are generally far shorter than the queues for normals.  I am up to the point in the Order Hall campaign where I need to run a bunch more dungeons and I am not really looking forward to doing so with 45 minute queues per dungeon.  Whatever the case I am now in the phase where I begin gearing… which tends to be the phase that I enjoy an awful lot as everything is potentially an upgrade.  I need to go ahead and unlock the Broken Shore…  but the truth is that I am not sure I would even be able to survive out there.  A lot of my success with that area has been due to the fact that I am normally playing a grossly overpowered protection warrior.  I am sure it is going to be a miserable time as an extremely undergeared dps deathknight.  Side note I took the screenshot above before I reapplied my transmog just to show off what a mess that a freshly dinged 110 looks like.

Leave the Game Better

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Last night as I was winding down for the evening I ended up getting pulled into a discussion about positivity and the Warcraft community.  I’ve long been a proponent of doing whatever I can to try and make MMO gaming environments better for other players.  I am what I would  call a “world tank” meaning that I permanently run around in tanky stance while questing and often times go out of my way to “tank” things that don’t even matter to me.  If I am riding through a zone and I see a squishy player fighting a boss mob… then nine times out of ten I am going to hop off my mount and charge over to help out.  I don’t even care about factional boundaries here, and I am one of those players that is just as likely to help out the Horde as I am the Alliance when it comes to taking the threat onto myself and letting people kill their monsters in peace.  I’ve been graced with a class that simply cannot die under most circumstances… and I sort of feel like it is my duty to help other people out whenever I can.  I cannot count the number of times I have been doing a quest and had someone roll up late…  and then continued to pull packs of elites just to make sure they finished their quest.  They always seem sorta surprised when I send them a tell asking them “how many more” they need for the quest.  Growing up I was in scouting, and even managed to get my Eagle… and there was a rule of camping that went a little something like “leave the campsite in as good of condition if not better”.  I sort of have this same view towards MMOs or the world in general honestly…  if I can improve the world by my presence I am going to shoot for that.

Leave the Game Better

Prior to the launch of Legion, I had gotten used to some of the cultural norms in Final Fantasy XIV.  Namely people talk during dungeon runs… at least enough to give a friendly introduction at the beginning and at the end. In part this is because there is a system in place over there that allows you to give a single commendation each run, to whatever player for whatever criteria you feel fit the situation.  I give them out for all sorts of reasons…  glorious outfits, extremely competent dps, or just someone being jovial and friendly.  In part this friendly atmosphere exists… because they reward you being nice to other players, and will straight up ban you for talking about damage meters in game.  It creates this weird bubble where things don’t work there the way they work in any other MMO community.  Knowing this… with the launch of Legion and as we started queuing up for content… I started trying to apply the same logic the World of Warcraft and shockingly more often than not it worked.  Just breaking the ice at the beginning of a run with a “Hey Folks!” seemed to go an awfully long way in improving the experience as a whole.  I noticed my usual silent runs become perforated with discussion, as it was like one person saying something broke down whatever dam was there preventing conversation.

Another thing I have done this expansion cycle that seems to have helped my own attitude is that I am just not dissecting the game and tearing it apart like I used to.  I am trying really hard to just take things at face value, and more often than not completely ignore the patch note cycle until I am ready for something.  Sure this means I have not exactly been on top of the ball on a lot of things…  like Broken Shore, and have been doing things in a grossly inefficient manner.  However it also means that I am not exposing myself to a lot of external stimuli until I am actually ready to consume it.  More than this however…  I just haven’t shared my doubts publicly because I haven’t felt the need to.  A few weeks into the Nighthold raid cycle I disappeared from the game, and faded away quietly.  I just felt like I wasn’t enjoying myself nearly as much as I was when doing other things.  So I simply walked away and did other things for awhile.  There was a moment where I could make a clean break, and my raid had a tank to step in and take over for me.  In the past I would have felt the need to explain to my readers why I did this.  Instead I just left and eventually put some thoughts together in my big “regularly playing” post, but even that probably wasn’t needed other than I was catching up my sidebar…  which is already completely out of date again.  However because I didn’t really make a big deal about it… it was so much easier to just slide back into the game a few months later when the mood hit me again.

While it might sound odd, I think for me not writing about World of Warcraft and its failings…  helped me to feel better about the game for the long term.  It also kept some negative vibes out of the community.  Sure I currently have a laundry list of things that bug me about the game, but I have come to a point of acceptance that World of Warcraft will never actually be the “one true game” for me.  I know that I will keep venturing off to play other games because it is in my nature, and that it will still feel enjoyable to keep coming back and revisiting all of my friends in the WoW.  In part this is why I am so excited that Destiny 2 is now going to be entering this same realm.  For well over a decade I have cultivated a community in the Blizzard games, and it seems like it is going to be awesome to be able to take all of these people with me into another love of mine when it launches on the PC.  While I would love to see Blizzard as a company make an attempt to instill a positive attitude in its players by introducing systems that reward the good apples…  more than systems that punish the bad, I largely accept that it is going to be up to me and players like me to be the agent of change in the world.  I know we all keep returning to the MMO space to decompress from our days out in the real world… but there is nothing keeping us from being a little nicer to one another in our adopted second home.  Games tend to develop a culture of support or toxicity… and maybe I am naive but I feel like a game can change.  I feel like we can slowly erase the toxic nature that has developed over the years and put back in its place one that is largely supporting of others.  Now this doesn’t just apply to WoW, but is I think an admirable goal in any game you play.

Level Scaling Tech

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Level Scaling Tech

I am in this place with SWTOR Knights of the Fallen Empire where I am honestly not sure what more I can say without my blog turning into a massive spoiler fest.  There are a lot of events going on and many of them have surprised me.  This is a little shocking given that I consume a lot of gaming media and that KotFE has been technically out since October 2015.  I am not sure if I purposefully ignored SWTOR articles… or if I just didn’t come across that many.  Whatever the case essentially everything from Shadows of Revan onward has been a completely new story experience for me without me knowing any of the elements ahead of time.  So while I recognized characters like Theron Shan or Lana Beniko…  I knew nothing about them going into this recent binge of playing the game.  We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but returning to an MMO and seeing years worth of content laid out in front of you is a pretty great thing.  Especially in a situation like SWTOR where they have a reasonable level scaling system.

Yesterday Syp posted something over on his personal blog Bio Break talking about level scaling systems.  His specific discussion centered around whether or not level scaling systems were good for games, which was brought on by his recent journeys in LOTRO.  Over time my own feelings about the systems have changed.  You can scan through the backlog of this blog and find me talking about Mentoring systems, where games allow high level player A to drop down to the level of player B and run content with them.  This seemed to me like the most elegant solution to the problem of being able to run content with your friends.  That was until I encountered Guild Wars 2, and the fact that no matter where you go your character is scaled down to the level of the world.  The concept of evergreen content is a big one for me… because I like when a game expands over time rather than contracts.  While Guild Wars 2 is not the best example of this… because of the fact that there is plenty of content that you will never be able to play again in that game…  it did make me appreciate level scaling as a replacement for mentoring.

The only problem there is that when the world is constantly the same level as you, it robs you of one of the quintessential MMO experiences of leveling up and becoming more powerful.  The world always feels the same to you, because you are functionally always the same relative ability levels to it as you level.  In situations like that the levels themselves feel like a completely extraneous concept.  Why even have a number that goes up if the world is always going to be functionally the same difficulty.  When we started playing Final Fantasy XIV they had an extremely elegant solution for this in the form of their dungeon finder.  Each dungeon had a functional level range from the moment you first were able to zone in… to the moment that it considered was the upper bound of levels.  So if the average mob level in an area was 35, then functionally the maximum level the game would allow you to be was 40, scaling everyone over that level down to that point.  The only negative here is that this ONLY applies to dungeons, and in truth it would have been interesting to see this same sort of system just work out in the world as a whole.

That I guess is functionally what is going on in Star Wars the Old Republic, and I am loving it.  Each piece of content be it planet, flashpoint, or something else… has a functional level range attached to it.  Once again it is functionally along the lines of being five or so levels over whatever the maximum level of encounter for that area.  Then the game rewards you as though you were fighting something your own level in terms of both experience and loot drops.  This means that you can go anywhere and do anything without feeling like you are getting nothing from it.  At launch this was absolutely a problem with SWTOR and it was extremely easy to out level an area, and reach a point where the experience gain was no longer worth the time you spent on a planet.  This was especially true as I remember on Tatooine which in itself was a huge planet with lots of side content.  By the time I “did everything” I ended up several levels ahead of the curve and functionally kept getting more and more over-leveled as I went through the rest of the planets.

Now there is a certain measure of freedom in being able to just go and do the content without having to worry about level… and in many cases gear.  While leveling my Imperial Agent, there were a few points where I went 10 levels without upgrading any of my gear… and really did not notice a significant amount of power drop off.  Then again I did exit the class storyline at level 58… so there was some significant over-leveling going on there that might have been easing the transition.  The thing with this system is however that while you are gaining power and you FEEL powerful… there is never a point where you are just waltzing through  field of enemies gently tapping them and watching them explode.  When you run someone through a low level dungeon in World of Warcraft for example on your level capped main… you can functionally breathe on mobs and they impale themselves in a shower of loot.  SWTOR feels like a happy medium, of letting your power level increase without completely trivializing the game.  Sure most of the time I am not actually afraid of death, but I still feel heroic doing content…  because I am having to use my abilities to take things down rather than a single auto swing.  As a result I have somewhat shifted my focus from user driven mentoring systems…  to seeing more games adopt this sort of level scaling.  The best part about Legion honestly was the way that content has scaled to the player while leveling through it, and if only Blizzard had applied this tech to the world as a whole… it would be a much more enjoyable experience.  I like knowing that I can revisit those areas that I enjoyed so much in the past, and still having an interesting time.