Good Morning Folks! Today was a rather fortuitous day… that quite honestly I was not expecting. At the beginning of this year, I lost my first home in Final Fantasy XIV. I got busy with Christmas and the New Year and just was not logging into the game… and apparently completely missed the email warning me. I was more than a little heartbroken, but I played it off as best as I could. There was something always weird about that plot of land though, because specifically, I went after plot 13… aka the plot that we used to have as a Free Company in The Mists before we upgraded to a Medium in Shirogane. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance however because my mind expected it to be our old home… but no matter what I did it never would be again. Nor did I have a fucking clue at all what various options we had set because Solaria the Guild Mom took care of all of that.
Pretty much every week since coming back before Dawntrail I have entered the housing lottery. What shocked me was just how much turnover there is on a server like Cactuar in the Aether Data Center. There was never a week where I did not have at least two or three different plots in different wards to choose from. I can only remember one week when there was nothing available on The Mists, aka my ward of choice. Hell, there were even three times that a version of Plot 13 came open again. I had been hitting this Timer website periodically to tell me if a new period opened or if it was time for me to check to see if I had won. Yesterday I was completely out of it and thus missed the opening of the results period. So this morning I logged in expecting to get a refund of my downpayment but instead… I had won the plot.
As such I have spent most of this morning getting things set up to where the home is functional again. The inside is extremely bare bones, and just has the necessary vendors and amenities like a guest book, summoning bell, and aesthetician… all of which I saved from my previous home. The outdoor furnishings are starting to get there, but I am sure I will continue to tweak and add little details. I’m in Ward 28 Plot 3 of The Mists on Cactuar, which is right around the corner from the Apartment building. This creates this funny situation where I have a market board to both sides of my home and an Aetheryte across the street from it. The neighborhood is really well built up, and so far I have seen zero signs of any nightclubs… so hopefully it is a chill relaxing place. There are a few nearby Free Company homes with extremely nice setups. One of which has all of the Gold Saucer machines in the basement… but alas I think only the FC members can play them.
I’ve had assorted visits from Free Company members this morning as they logged in to check on various things. They’ve also checked in on me to see how I was doing, given that I am still very much in the deep recovery mode with COVID-19. I am not doing much better, but I am also not really doing any worse so that is something. Here is a nice shot of me and Ammo hanging out on the roof… because being able to stand on your rooftop is really important for player housing. I have a phenomenal view of the entire district. I had to place some of the things just right so that I could jump up there since I did not have a nearby roof to drop down from above as I have had in other setups. More importantly, I have now set up a recurring calendar notification to remind me that I need to log in… with plenty of time to spare. When I get extra stressed out I can lose focus on pretty much everything in the world.
Now that the outside is starting to feel nice and cozy, it is time for me to begin to sort out what exactly I want to do for the inside. Speaking of cozy… ignore the fact that I am sitting out in the pouring rain on my stargazing deck. Essentially my game plan is to build out the downstairs as sort of a bedroom/training room/gear warehouse sort of feel befitting a warrior. Then the upstairs is going to be more of a public area with all of my vendors and maybe a bunch of bookcases and such. It will come together over time, but the outdoor features are always the most important so that I don’t stick out like an undecorated eyesore in my neighborhood. I am not going to try and do all of it over night, but I do want to keep poking away at it. Maybe this is what will finally drive me to finish training all of my crafting professions so that I can start making things rather than buying them.
Anyways… on the health side. I have two more days of this steroid dose pack of Prednisone, so I am hoping that today I will start to turn the corner. If not I will reach out to the doctor and maybe try and get either an extension or some other course of treatment. I am not doing any worse, but I certainly don’t really feel any better yet.
The post Cactuar Landed Gentry Again appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks. There has been a lot of discussion over the last week about the release of Concord and how poorly it is doing. Right now it has a 24-hour peak user count on Steam Charts of around 260 players with an all-time peak since the launch of 660. Granted this only represents numbers on Steam, but can be used as a way of extrapolating how well a game is doing in general. If it is performing poorly on PC, it is likely performing poorly on Playstation 5 where it is a console exclusive. Across the board, this seemed like a game that no one really wanted that was released into an already packed hero shooter genre, put up against games that were free to play as opposed to its $40 buy-in price. I remember briefly getting excited about the trailer only to lose all interest when I found out it was “yet another live service game” and more than that… focused on PVP combat. The trailer was this really cool science fiction heist thing and I felt like it could have been a really interesting game along the lines of the Guardians of the Galaxy game that came out a few years ago. Unfortunately, it was not and was part of the larger forced march that Sony seems to be on towards trying to mint a live service goldmine.
Why do we find ourselves on this path? The answer is simple… FIFA Ultimate Team exists and it was enough to make the financial types stand up and take notice and believe that live service games were an infinite money glitch. This feature went into FIFA soccer in 2009 and has been the prime revenue earner for Electronic Arts almost since that point. Just like World of Warcraft levels of success poisoned the waters for future MMORPGs, every game now is seemingly expected to produce “FUT” numbers. Just so you understand what this means… in 2020 during peak pandemic spending FIFA Ultimate Team brought Electronic Arts 1.62 Billion Dollars. That is from selling what are effectively digital trading cards that come along with a stat package for your game.
It was not until yesterday that I realized just how much money Sony has seemingly poured into trying to make Concord a thing. Secret Level is an Amazon Prime Streaming project from Blur Studios… aka the people who created pretty much every big-budget game trailer you have ever loved as well as the popular “Love, Death & Robots” anthology series. In the teaser trailer the text flashes by “15 Stories Inspired By Your Favorite Games”. So let’s take a look at the list of games that are going to be included.
● Armored Core ● Concord ● Crossfire ● Dungeons & Dragons ● Exodus ● Honor of Kings ● Mega Man ● New World: Aeternum ● PAC-MAN ● PlayStation (Highlighting various PlayStation Studios beloved entities) ● Sifu ● Spelunky ● The Outer Worlds ● Unreal Tournament ● Warhammer 40,000
There are a few of these that don’t really fit, that “your favorite games” bit. Firstly you have New World: Aeternum which I am guessing was included because Amazon is at least in part bankrolling the project and that they really want their console rebrand to work. Honor of Kings was new to me, but apparently, it is a really popular MOBA in mainland China from Tencent. Similarly, Crossfire is wildly popular in the South Korean market. Then you have Concord, which I am assuming was included in the list as part of the Sony marketing push behind this project or potentially part of a larger deal to allow for other properties to be included. This feels like an awful lot of money to put behind a product that had not been released and that is an IP that is unproven.
There has been a spate of large-budget flops lately. Suicide Squad for example looks like a massive winner compared to Redfall and Concord and reportedly it was an over 200 Million Dollar loss for Warner Brothers. Redfall cratered hard enough to effectively destroy the studio because Arkane Austin is no more. Concord will likely destroy Firewalk Studios as that seems to be the stakes that are on the line currently when a large game fails to find its market. 2023 was a brutal year for Video Game Studio layoffs and closures, and this year has reportedly already surpassed it. I don’t exactly revel in the death of these studios, but I do think that we have been on an untenable trajectory for a while. Video Games have been financed through the cult of green candles, and the belief that the line will always go up.
Even games that were large successes are beginning to flounder. Helldivers 2 was a massive success, but then as Sony pushed some unpopular practices like required use of the PlayStation Network…. it began to shed players. Recently they have been shedding players due to balance decisions, proving once again that a live service game is only one bad patch away from failure. Similarly, the title that Sony bought to herald its new Live Service push was Destiny 2, and it has been bleeding players for years. I know I used to be a massive supporter of the game but left more or less permanently after they removed the Forsaken content from the game. Now that the game has entered what is effectively maintenance mode after the release of the Final Shape and what is reportedly the last major expansion for the game, it is similarly shedding players.
The weird thing about “Live Service” games is that while the big budget money grabs are failing to gain purchase… a lot of the existing games are trucking along and doing just fine. If you search for “best live service games” you will find a ton of listicles and the vast majority of the games listed are all around ten years old. Warframe for example is potentially the best looter shooter on the market, and it has pioneered a business model that seems to have worked for them. Sure they do not generate FIFA Ultimate Team money, but they have reached a place where it is sustainable for the studio. Similarly, Path of Exile is doing amazingly well hitting brand new peak concurrency numbers for the Settlers of Kalguur league. Similarly, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and hell even the often-panned Fallout 76 seem to be hitting their strides. This leads me to believe that “big business” has been bad for games as a whole because they do not care about the sustainability of platforms… only about extracting the maximum amount of value out of the players.
I am sure this is terribly naive of me, but I would love to see more “Indie Darlings” like Last Epoch which is financed in large part through supporter packs similar to the model that Path of Exile pioneered. They are not massive successes necessarily, at least not in the billions in the sales department… but they are functional and enough to keep the studio churning out new content. Games have been a bubble and I am sure it will continue to burst, but my hope is that what is left in its place is something that makes more sense. The zero-sum game that we have been playing over the last few decades clearly is not working as intended.
Unfortunately, we are probably going to lose a few more studios before this tale is finished. Bungie recently laid off a massive number of employees due to “underperformance”. In this, they canned several projects leaving themselves with only Destiny 2 which is on life support, and placing all of their eggs in the Marathon basket which is an IP reboot turned extraction shooter. The thing is… it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of hype surrounding Marathon, in part because just like Concord it is attempting to launch itself into an already packed genre. The only people who really remember Marathon were Macintosh gamers from the 90s who subsisted on playing it when everyone was playing Doom. You know what a bunch of 40 and 50-somethings are probably not big on… extraction shooters. Those who are into that genre are already probably Tarkov stans. I feel like this is maybe not the right play for the already stratified ecosystem that the game is launching into.
Maybe I am being overly hyperbolic, but I feel like a lot of these games would have made really fun single-player and co-op PVE experiences. Suicide Squad, for example, seemed like it was itching to be the next game in the Arkham series, with similar gameplay. Concord, the game that started this post… at least based on the trailer felt like it really wanted to be a PVE game where you built up a team and planned and pulled off successively larger heists until you uncovered some plot where you had to save the world. Redfall similarly felt like given a bit more time baking and a story-driven focus… it could have leaned on the best parts of that Arkane DNA to create a memorable experience similar to Dishonored. It feels like these games are failing because they are being pushed into a mold that relies on massive player engagement to succeed.
Anyways… I am done rambling and yelling at the clouds. Maybe I am off my base, but Concord feels like a gauge of customer sentiment more than some of these other games. We went from “low interest” to what feels like “no interest”. All of this said… what the hell do I know? I will very likely be over here in my corner playing the same damned games that have been out for the last decade or longer, and enjoying myself doing that.
The post Live Service Gold Farm Over? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I am a bit late getting a post started today because work things got in the way early early this morning. Friday was the launch of the Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile and I have been having a blast. I was a bit slower going through the campaign than I normally would be, largely because I spent a lot of time doing the league mechanic once it unlocked upon arriving in Lioneye’s Watch in Act 1. Normally I don’t invest heavily in the league mechanic until I have made my way into mapping, but I feel like doing it while campaigning was the correct choice because a lot of the upgrades end up being time-gated. As a result, it took me roughly 20 hours to finish the campaign which was Friday evening, off and on throughout Saturday, and then finishing my 3rd lab and killing Kitava early Sunday morning.
As of this morning, I am 44 maps into progressing my atlas and very smoothly running through white and yellow maps without significant upgrades. I’ve actually kept track of my expenditures this time around so that I would be able to recap in a blog post. Currently, I’ve spent 51 Chaos on everything I am wearing, including an -15 Immortal Flesh (1c), Cloak of Flames (5c), Rise of the Phoenix (2c), a Fire/Chaos/Dex Helm (3c), Chaos/Fire/Life Ring (20c), and Chaos/Fire/Life/Dex Gloves (20c). I had a bit of a windfall pretty early on where I sold an influenced base for 80c, and an Enlighten support for 260c. On top of that, I have picked up miscellaneous Chaos Orbs and 2 raw Divine Orbs. I’m not in a real rush to buy items but it feels good to know I have some spending money when I ultimately want to replace most of my rare gear. You can get a ton of life on items right now, and I hope to end up replacing pretty much everything with at least 100 life rolls on various slots.
What has kept me from needing to buy a ton more gear is the fact that the league mechanic produces a ton of really good items. While it isn’t generating a ton of raw currency it is producing a lot of items that have relatively high tier rolls, including lots of really good resistances on them. I was kind of screwing up the shipping mechanic a bit, but Sunday a bunch of videos came out explaining how it works or at least how to improve your results and I hope to see a big payoff at some point either today or tomorrow. Essentially each port city has a hidden faction system, and you unlock higher tiers of faction by fulfilling their requested goods. When you fill all of the items on an order it unlocks a new higher tier of demands and again… just by shipping only those items you are basically guaranteed to get more return than you are sending.
I’ve gotten some truly wild items out of this. For example, never did I expect to have it in the cards to be using a one-handed axe right now instead of a scepter but…. that is where we are in the league. I got this axe back from a shipment that had +18% Dot Multi, and +24% Fire Dot Multi on it… which was infinitely better than the scepter I had been using. I threw the new Ignite enchant on it and crafted the Fire Damage/Ignite Combo Betrayal mod on it. This is pretty much better than anything I could get for less than six or so Divines at the moment. Sure the physical attack damage doesn’t really do anything for me… but also I might end up recycling this item into some sort of a fire-based melee build later once I can afford to craft or buy a “forever” scepter.
Legitimately I am having so much fun with the shipping mechanic, and a lot of the items it brings back… might be useful for throwing into the recombinator later. Right now I am using my cast-offs to feed into the disenchanter as arcane dust seems to be a premium commodity that a lot of the upgrades require. At some point, I need to spend some time hiring and firing better people, because I have a bunch of workers that are less than optimal. You can get these combo workers that have lots of different skills… but you end up paying a premium for each additional skill level that they have. I would be better off replacing those with single-stat workers to hopefully bring down my total gold sink for the town a bit.
I’ve not made it super far into Delve, largely because… you can’t gather resources down there. You get a heck of a lot of gold in a short period of time which is good, but I keep running dry on the various ores that are needed to feed shipping. As a result… I might be spending a lot more time mapping this league instead of plumbing the depths for cities. I’ve found my very first city, but it is at around 80 depth which means that the payoff is not amazing. I am still working on spending Azerite to unlock things because if nothing else Delve is amazing for producing sheer quantities of bubblegum currency… something that I find myself tragically lacking. For example, I have zero of my flasks automated at this point… because I don’t have the Glassblower’s Baubles to quality them… nor do I have the Instilling Orbs in order to craft on the auto-use enchant. Both of these are problems that will likely be solved by delving more.
What makes this league so great is honestly the virtuous cycle that takes place between mapping/delving and then returning back to town whenever a shipment comes in. Right now I have two ships going one that is working the 45-minute routes nearest to Wraeclast and one that is working the 2-hour routes that are furthest away. This gives me two distinct reward horizons that look forward to, and nothing feels quite as good as seeing the pop-up in the corner of your screen indicating that it is time to go back and see what the journey brought. It puts me in this pattern of trying to see how much I can get done before the ship comes back and the two cycles feed each other. Mapping and Delving generate gold and resources that I can then invest in my town and keep moving forward. I legitimately hope this system goes standard because it is pretty freaking great.
Honestly, I am super glad that I went ahead and stuck with old and reliable Righteous Fire because it has given me more mental bandwidth to explore the league mechanics without also having to figure out my damned build. Are you playing Settlers of Kalguur league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Settlers League is Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! I legitimately did not expect to grow to like Roegabel… but I gotta say I am digging it. Tanking random dungeons feels specifically fun because I am ginormous and can play fully zoomed out while also knowing exactly where my character is in relation to effects. I also really dig this outfit I have assembled… which admitted was a bit of a challenge given how few cool armor sets I have access to right now. Yesterday I dinged level 65 and will probably hit 70 before I finish up the ARR post-patch content. Ace remembered the existence of silver chocobo feathers which allowed me and them to purchase two pieces of level 60 gear significantly upping our performance. I also picked up a level 70 weapon for when I finally ding that eventually.
Last night we wrapped up the Crystal Tower series and had what was quite possibly the smoothest Syrcus Tower run I have ever experienced. It is all made up by the fact that we had maybe the worst World of Darkness run that I have seen in a while. I was essentially main-tanking everything… and off-tanking whatever I could at the same time because none of the other tanks appeared to be willing to do anything. We had a moment on Cerberus where I died… because no one was tanking the Wolfsbane and I came back up assuming that one of the other tanks picked it up… only to find out that it was running amok and I had to taunt it back on me. We got through it and I maybe feel more positive about my tanking prowess when it comes to larger content. I mean I raid tanked for years but I am rusty as fuck. We also cleared Leviathan which is SO MUCH easier than I remember it being.
I also got far enough in the Manderville quest line for me to unlock the Battle at Big Bridge. I’ve gotta say… while I low-key find Hildebrand annoying… I LOVE the trial fights associated with the series. Fighting Greg was probably the highlight of the evening for me, and I look forward to unlocking the next trial. On my Cactuar main I am nowhere near caught up on the Manderville quests and did not even realize that there was a Shadowbringers Trial and an Endwalker Trial… so I guess I need to get through those so I can see if they are anywhere near as good as the ARR trials.
In other notes I have been in this morning after the patch and unlocked the first wing of the Arcadion. I expect tonight Ace and I are going to challenge this, and I might ping Masto to see if anyone is interested in joining in the nonsense. I have no clue when we will be doing this, but I am figuring fairly early in the evening. I need to figure out what items I want to focus on trying to get. I REALLY need a new ring, so I will probably run things until I end up winning one of those. So I guess I am specifically trying to snag “Light-heavy Holoearring” which is the token used for accessories. I noticed that at least as of this morning there was not a new bookrock type, so I am wondering if they are waiting until Savage goes in for that to happen.
In other news, the sign-ups keep rolling in for Blaugust 2024. At this point, we have a little over thirty folks signed up with still half a month to go until the event starts. You can as always find all of the links in a condensed form on the Media Kit page, but if you are interested in reading my yearly post you can find that here. I’ve seen so much traction in the Fediverse that it is charming to behold. I am hoping that converts to folks actually signing up and participating in the coming weeks. Once again huge thanks to folks like Massively OP for covering the event and lending some additional visibility. More importantly massive thanks to all of the participants who keep returning year after year and are the real reason why I keep this going.
The post Roegabel is Pretty Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
