Hello there, Ladies and Gentlemen

Welcome to any new readers that came from Massively to check me out!  I'm actually double glad Syp linked to me, as he mentioned the post that he made some years back that was my inspiration for my ability identification post!  For some reason I was misremembering it as something I saw on the LotRO forums.

I don't know how many folks might stick around and keep reading, but I've been considering a state of the gaming post in any case, so what better time?  Here's what I've been up to recently.

FFXIV

The 2.5 patch came out Monday, and for the first time I was entirely caught upon the various questlines.  I didn't really have time last night to try running any new group content, but I got everything unlocked and am ready to give some of it a try.  The Hildibrand questline continues to be the best thing ever, and I'm especially looking forward to the new Gilgamesh fight.

Apart from the new stuff, there's still plenty of existing goals that I'm still working towards.  I've leveled all my crafting and gathering classes to 50, but I still have plenty of better gear to work on so I can craft 3 and 4 star items.  I've been in a bit of a conundrum where I didn't want to spend a lot of gil melding materia into gear that isn't best in slot, but working on desynthesis has opened up my ability to craft the best jewelry for gathering and crafting, so that should help me move on up the chain.

I've also been working on my battle classes and have 3 of those at level 50.  Bard remains my main to which I've added Dragoon and Warrior.  I'll probably be focusing on White Mage or Scholar/Summoner next so I have a healer job available, but I haven't decided which yet.  I suspect I'd actually be better tanking as Paladin than Warrior, but I won the most absurd axe in the game off Titan a couple months back, and I've been wanting to use it ever since.

Dat Axe

Marvel Heroes

I've honestly not done much in Marvel Heroes recently apart from try to log on once a day to collect daily rewards.  I'm sure I'll swing back around to it again before too long, but for now FFXIV and occasional single player games are dominating my PC gaming time.

Shadow of Mordor

Among my Christmas presents this year was Shadow of Mordor, which I have been enjoying the hell out of.  I absolutely love Arkham City, so the basic gameplay is right up my alley, and the orc captains are a great element.  I had one poor idiot come back a total of 4 times, jumping me out of nowhere each time and looking rougher and rougher as it went along.  I do have trouble focusing on the story at all since I keep running into captains that need killing and Power Struggles to deal with.  I need to at least get to the point where I can brand captains so that getting them promoted actually benefits me.

FFX

Finally, I picked up the FFX/X-2 remaster recently and have been playing my way through Spira again.  I'd forgotten how dark that game is underneath the surface once you know what's actually going on.  So many things that were relatively innocuous the first time through have a whole new level of sad attached to them.  Really though, I guess Final Fantasy games have a history of darkness. mass genocide in VI, the whole Cloud/Sephiroth thing in VII, and Tactics, man don't get me started on Tactics.  It's like a Shakespearean tragedy told with Precious Moments figurines.

In any case I just wrapped things up in Luca and am headed out on the Mi'hen Highroad.  X is one of the Final Fantasy games that I not only beat but pretty much burned to the ground content-wise the first time around, so it's interesting seeing what all I remember and deciding how in depth I'm going to go.  I have a hard time not collecting all the things, but I don't know if I'm going to be willing to put forth the effort this time around to, for instance, get Lulu's final weapon.

Afternoon Delight

Time to try something different.  Obviously my previous plan is not leading to posts; I think in part because I generally have started writing pretty late at night and posted just before heading to bed.  Problem is, lately it's been hard to make myself prioritize writing over sweet, sweet slumber.  Today I'm starting this post on my lunchbreak with the intention of thinking about it a bit over the afternoon then finishing it up right after work.  If you're reading this, it worked, at least for today.

Part of the problem has been the immense amount of stuff available for me to do in FFXIV.  Between daily crafting quests and hunts, getting my relic weapon, and continuing the story, I've been playing later than I honestly should be.  I suppose that has positive implications for my longevity in the game; I'm not bored of it yet.

Last night I wrapped up the relic weapon quest for my fancy bard bow with a little help from Rae, Damai, and Bel.  I had already completed the Hydra trial the previous night, so all that was left were the hard versions of the Primals: Ifrit, Garuda, and Titan.  Titan in particular was not easy, though the fact that we ended up with two black mages in the party neither of whom were very useful didn't help.  The first wasn't even wearing appropriate gear, he had put on gear with strength stats to meet the item level requirement.  The rest of the party was less than pleased about that, though I was impressed that noone was actually mean about it.  More chiding and dissapointed.  I guess Bel really was right about the community being better in FFXIV.

I also won an absurd Warrior axe from the Titan fight, so I guess I need to level my Marauder class now.  It was on the short list anyway since I'd like to have tank and healing roles available to me.  My retainers apparently want me to level Arcanist as well, since they've brought me a high level Scholar book and pants.

I'm Back

I didn't specifically intend to take a break the last few days, but it turned out I kind of needed one.  I think going forward I may try for a weekday posting schedule.  We'll see if that gives me sufficient time to recharge the idea tank from week to week.

The past few days have mostly been spent in Final Fantasy XIV, trying to get caught up with the rest of my Free Company.  I made it to level 50 in the bard job on Sunday, and have already upgraded most of my bard equipment to item level 90 gear with currency from daily and weekly hunts.  I'm at the second 8-man quest in the final bit of the storyline.  Another player in the company also hit 50 today, so I think we may try to do those quests as a company tomorrow.  We'll see if that works out.  Tonight the rest of the company was busy running the Bahamut's Coil raid for the first time, so I busied myself doing my crafting dailies and today's hunts.

When I wasn't playing FFXIV this weekend, I was reading through the Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition Player's Handbook.  I'm going to be playing in a campaign with some friends from college to give it try.  Mostly it's a bunch of the same people who participated in my first 3rd ed game back when that system was brand new.  Most of us are in the same area, but one's in Shreveport and another's way up in Delaware, so we'll be using Roll20 or something like it to handle things.  Between the system looking really solid and the people I'll be playing with, I'm really looking forward to it.  I'm betting I'll get some amazing stories out of it too.

The Days of Ultima Online

This post about MMO culture and how it shifted in Ultima Online reminded me of my time playing UO, specifically my very first day in the game.  This was before the Trammel/Felucca split, when you couldn't play UO without being at risk of attack by PKs at pretty much any moment.  The Ultima series had been one of my all-time favorites for years, so the idea of playing a new online game set in Britannia was amazing to me.  A friend of mine had played previously and already had an account, but didn't have a computer capable of running it at the time, so he ended up installing it on my PC.  I played way more than him, and ended up taking over the account before very long.  But I digress.

I started out in Ultima Online in the town of Moonglow.  I ran around a bit, killed some rabbits, harvested some reagents and so forth.  Eventually, my character started getting hungry.  Okay, I thought, I have rabbit meat, I have wood.  I will build a campfire and cook the meat so I can eat.  I sat down to cook my meat, and a few seconds later another player rode up and killed me.  I found at later that campfires exercised the camping skill of anyone near them, which meant their camping skill would go up, removing points from the skills they had maxed.  So build campfires was a common griefing tactic.  I didn't know this, though.  I was a total noob just trying to cook some dinner.

Despite that, I kept playing.  When the Trammel/Felucca split happened, not too long later, I got out of PvP land immediately and never came back.  Not only did I no longer have to worry about PKs, all the new land opened up in the new world meant I could find a decent place to put a house.  If the split hadn't happened when it did, I probably wouldn't have played much longer.  Instead I stuck around for about a year.

Thinking back, I found myself wondering if I would keep playing now in the same situation of getting murdered so early in a game.  I'm not sure if I would.  Back then, UO was this amazing new thing, and pretty much the only game in town.  Now, I have more games available than I know what to do with.  I'm not likely to invest much time in a game that unfriendly to new players.  Better to find a place where I can learn and grow as a player without someone waiting to kill me and take my stuff at any moment.

A New Month

Blaugust is done, the prizes have been awarded, and now we can rest.  But here I am writing a post anyway.  Has it become a habit?  Perhaps so.  After a month of posts it would feel strange now to go to bed without having written something.

The free week of Final Fantasy XIV has ended, and I didn't have any qualms about resubscribing.  I even went ahead and ponied up for three months.  I don't have any difficulty believing I'll continue playing at least that long.  Resubscribing also got me the first few veteran's rewards, so now I have a terrifying flying eyeball to ride around on and a pet flying glove cursor to follow me around.  This game can be just a little weird at times.

This does not seem terribly secure

Also, the Lightning Strikes event was brought back this week, which is nice.  I missed it the first time around since I was no longer playing by the time it occurred.  It's basically a quick series of quests to go out and participate in public events that feature Lightning for FFXIII.  Completing the whole set gets you an FFXIII styled outfit and weapon to use as cosmetic gear.  The final quest in the line is level 45, and I'm just now level 44, so I haven't finished the lot yet.  The event runs til the 10th though, so there's no real danger of me missing out.

New Television Acquired

As it turns out, Best Buy had a pretty good deal on a Sharp 50" TV for Labor Day, so we now have a brand new television to replace the sad old one that died last night.  I need to get another HDMI cable for my PS3, so that get the full benefit with that, and at some point I should order a (sadly proprietary) Wii HDMI cable, but otherwise it's all hooked up and performing nicely.  We did have to search through the menus to figure out how to turn down the motion smoothing.  I had seen people talk about how it made movies look like soap operas, but I'd underestimated how extreme the result was.  I found Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom while flipping through the channels and was amazed at how much weirdly smooth and bright everything was.  It looked like I was watching a stage reenactment of the movie somehow.  Happily, turning the feature down a couple of notches seems to have fixed the problem.

My other main pastime today was, again, Final Fantasy XIV.  Yesterday I reached the point in the storyline where I needed to run the Stone Vigil dungeon to continue the main questline, so today Belghast, Ashgar, Tamrielo, and I ran that dungeon and two others.  That got me caught up on my Grand Company hunt log and opened up more quests.  Apparently the next big group fight I have to look forward to / dread is Garuda.  The way everyone talks about it, it's way more difficult than previous stuff.  We'll see if that remains true; I wouldn't be all that surprised if it's a bit easier a year later than it was when they all ran it originally.

And finally, Blaugust has come to a close.  It's been a lot of fun, and amazingly enough I managed to post every day throughout.  I'm not sure yet whether I'll try to maintain the pace going forward or not.  I definitely feel like I need to post on a regular schedule if I don't want to end up procrastinating, falling behind, and ultimately letting the blog lie fallow.  But something like 3 days a week or the like might be more realistic for me to maintain.  We'll see.

Adventures in Eorzea

Final Fantasy XIV has continued to be my primary gaming pastime this week, to the point that I'm fairly certain I'll be resubscribing once the free period is done.  Since I last mentioned it here, I've reached Coerthas and am level 37 in my bard job.  Most of my time has actually been spent on crafting and gathering classes, completing the Grand Company delivery jobs each day.  I need to work on pugilist and lancer some more so I can unlock more bard-usable actions.

Presumably I'll be getting to the next required dungeon in the story questline before much longer.  Hopefully I'll be able to get some guildmates to run it with me.  I'm also looking forward to being able to purchase a private room in our guild house.  It'll be difficult not to immediately bankrupt myself once I have enough cash for it.

I can't say for certain whether FFXIV will hold me long-term or not.  I don't seem to have been able to maintain interest in a single game for more than a couple months since I left WoW last year.  But we seem to have a good guild presence in game, which helps a lot, and I'm definitely enjoying it for now.  Ultimately, that's what matters.

Quiet Day

I've been trying to think of something at all interesting to write about and I'm not coming up with much of anything, so I will begin writing things and see how it goes.  Today was devoted primarily to a half-birthday party for some good friends' 6-month old daughter, and dinner with my parents.

A half-birthday party is not a thing I would have ever thought of, but apparently it's become a thing?  Obviously the baby's not going to remember it, so it's mostly just an excuse for a party.  This one was our standard circle of friends getting together, but this time there was cake.  The baby was the center of attention, but really that's pretty normal in any case.  She's remarkably adorable.

Once we got home from all of this, we intended to relax a bit.  Instead, in the process of taking out the trash, a glass spaghetti sauce jar was dropped and shattered.  Tiny glass pieces scattered all over.  Thankfully it was empty and had been rinsed out.  But still, picking up glass, sweeping, vacuuming, and mopping the floor took quite a while.  Hopefully we got it all.

Apart from that, I was able to log into FFXIV for a bit.  I advanced the story slightly and am now 36 in my primary class (bard).  Mostly I worked on filling today's supply orders since they're good for a nice chunk of crafting experience.

Returning

So much new to do in Final Fantasy XIV.  I did end up creating a new character to try and get my bearings again.  It worked pretty well, in fact; I played that character to level 10 as a conjurer then switched back to my main from the first time around, Thalen Fireheart.  I had reached level 34 as a bard previously, and was ready to face Titan.

It turned out one of the other recent returnees was at the exact same point, so we got two of our higher level players to tank and heal for us and knocked that out.  It actually ended up being extremely easy.  Apart from that I've mostly spent today running around picking up and completing the various quests connected to housing, the new challenge and sightseeing logs, and new dances.  Also some crafting to turn in today's resource and supply requests.

So far I'm really enjoying it.  I really like the art style and the feel of play.  Of course I enjoyed it for the time that I played it last time, but that wasn't enough to keep me in after the first month.  I think part of the problem then, however, is that I had just left WoW.  I don't think I was ready to pick up any new MMO; I still needed a break to just recharge and be away from the genre in general.  Life was also pretty hectic and a bit stressful at the time, so that didn't help any either.

We'll see if I end up sticking with it this time.  Could be fun.  I would like to get to level 50 and see some of the endgame.

Back to Eorzea

Final Fantasy XIV is doing a free week for their anniversary, so I decided to reinstall, patch up, and log back in.  Problem is, it's been long enough that I don't recall much about where I was in the story, what my rotations are, or anything really.  I think I had reached the point where I need to go defeat Titan?  That sounds right.

On top of that, I know there's a housing system now, and I gather chocobos change somehow?  You can switch between having it fight for you and riding it, it sound like?  I don't even know.  This is the problem I run into coming back to a game after so long away, it's just so overwhelming.

I'm tempted to start up a new character and play that for a while to maybe get back into the groove.  Of course it'll probably take me the whole week to do that, then where am I?  Plus, the Cactaur server isn't allowing character creation right now, so I'd have to try tomorrow morning, I suppose.  It seems strange that I can't create a new character on a server I already have one on.  It's not like I can play them both at once.

We'll see where things go.  I enjoyed the game when I played it originally after the relaunch.  One problem that I worry I'll run into again is the required grouping to advance the story.  Random dungeon finders are not my most favorite thing and I always feel needy asking for help in guild.  I know, that's what guilds are for, but I still do.  And with most of the other people playing being at max level, I don't know how much benefit they'd get in any case.  Maybe if they still have a battle class at that level, but how likely is that a year in?

Advice for the new Marvel Heroes player

Today, some tips for those new to Marvel Heroes.  Just some various bits of advice I've picked up during my time playing.

• Getting heroes to certain milestones gives you a bonus to xp on all your heroes.  The first hero you get to level 60 increases xp earned by 30%, the second by another 20, then 15 more for 3, etc up to a maximum of 200%.  So getting your first hero to level 60 will make leveling a second one that much faster.

• There is no way to delete your starting hero and pick another one.  If you decide you just can't stand the hero you picked and must try again, you can create a new account and pick a new hero that way.  All the starting heroes are at least decent, and it doesn't take long to earn enough eternity splinters to buy a new one, so I recommend sticking it out in that situation.

• In general you're best off either maxing out a power or putting just a single point in it.  At level 60 you can put 20 points in a power, and you have 162 points available if you've done all the story quests.  Also, your starting powers have 1 point each in them to begin with.  So that means you can max out 8 powers and have enough additional points to put 1 each in around 6 others.

• Every hero has both active and passive powers.  Passive powers give an always on benefit, so it's nearly always worth it to put at least 1 point in each passive you have access to.  

• Every hero has a way to apply the weakness and vulnerability debuffs to enemies.  Weakness decreases the damage they deal by 10%, vulnerability increases damage they take by 10%.  Often theses debuffs are attached to one of your attacks.  It's worth seeing which powers apply them.  Often it's worth putting a single point in these powers even if you aren't interested in them for damage so that you can apply those debuffs.

• Enemies drop orbs a lot.  Red are health, blue are spirit (mana), purple give both.  Green are xp.  Orbs do disappear if you don't grab them quickly, especially the xp orbs.  Saving civilians often gets you a bunch of bonus xp orbs.  For example, click on the hostages in the prologue bank heist mission to free them and get a bunch of bonus xp.

• Orange instance portals are treasure rooms.  Every zone map has two active at any time.  Inside will be some champion level enemies and a chest containing xp orbs and some loot.

• Gear you don't need should be donated to the vendors in the chapter hubs (Avengers Tower, the X-Mansion, or SHIELD Helicarrier).  Vendors level up from donations, up to a level of 20, offering more and better options with each level.  I recommend focusing on the crafter first, as that has ways to upgrade your blue gear to purple fairly cheap, and needs to be level 10 for you to make use of costume cores once you reach level 30.  Next, level up the enchanter, who lets you use runes to enchant your gear.  Mostly enchanting is a thing to do at max level, but you will get an uru item and a couple of runes as a login gift pretty early on.  You can use those to create the Seer's Brilliance runeword which gives you an xp bonus and some bonus health.

• Gear can grant a power at a certain rank, or it can increase your current rank in a power by a certain amount.  Gear that grants a power will set your level in that power to that particular rank unless you already have a higher rank in it.  This happens even with 0 points spent in the power.  This is a great way to test out powers without having to spend points in them.  Gear that increases your current rank adds additional points to that power on top of what you've spent in it.  You must have at least 1 point spent in the power though.  If you have 0 points in a power, gear that increase rank will have no effect.

Complexity and Depth

Arcadius made a good point in the comments yesterday about the difficulty you can run into in a game if you miss an aspect of play or of stat interaction or the like and end up handicapping yourself without even realizing it.  Getting into that state can lead to you feeling underpowered and getting fed up with the game.  Then, eventually, you find out you've been doing it wrong, often when you start searching around on the internet to find out why your chosen class is so incredibly underpowered.

This, I think, is a major cause of the need people feel to do a lot of out of game research.  It's one thing to play a non-optimal way by choice, it's another to not even realize that if you geared a different way, or had spent your talent points differently that you could be having an easier time.  The thing is, I think a lot of the blame for this is on designers.  The two big problems I see are complexity for complexity's sake and poor feedback.

A lot of times it seems like complexity gets added into a game for no other reason than it can be.  Possibly the belief is that a more complex game will be deeper and thus provide more play time.  The thing is, time spent trying to figure out how the game works is not play time.  It's some weird sort of meta-play time.  For some people it's fun, maybe even more so than the game itself.  But for the average player, who's not an elitist jerk, it's usually a slog keeping them away from the actual game.

Worse, complexity is not depth.  Think about chess.  Certainly a deep game, lots of strategy, people get really serious about it.  How complex is it?  Not very.  There are 6 different pieces each with a very straightforward set of move options.  The depth comes from the combination of those simple parts creating a myriad of options.  The challenge of chess is not in figuring out where you *can* move, it's in deciding where you *should* move.

World of Warcraft definitely had an increasing complexity problem for a while.  Armor penetration and reforging come to mind immediately.  You'll notice the former was removed in Cataclysm, and the latter is going away in the upcoming expansion.  There's a reason for that; they didn't really add anything to the game.  They were additional complexity that just made it that much more necessary to rely on Mr. Robot to tell you what gear to look for.

The second problem, especially when you have extra complexity, is poor feedback.  Some games do it by design, hoping to stop the theorycrafters from determining the 'correct' build.  Others just have unhelpful tooltips.  The end result, however, is players who don't have full information about how their characters function.  Players need accurate information to make informed choices.  If full information is overwhelming, that's a good sign that the game has gotten overly complex.  And hiding information to dissuade the theorycrafters just isn't going to work.  If they have to record their play and count pixels on a health bar to try and determine damage output, someone will do it.  Don't hide data because you're afraid someone will solve your game.  Make a game that resists an optimal solution by being truly deep.

10 Years :: 10 Questions

As some of the other blogs participating in Blaugust have already noted, the Godmother of Faff has questions.  I have answers.  Let's do this.

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

At the time World of Warcraft came out, I was playing Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes.  My interest in both was beginning to wane a bit.  In SWG I had mastered my initial chosen professions and didn't feel like there was much more to do.  In City of Heroes, I had reached the point where there just wasn't much interesting to do solo.  Then came WoW.  Here was a game with quests and soloable content and non-stop stuff to do!

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

The day WoW launched, I created Thalen, a dwarven hunter on Argent Dawn.  That was my main until the day I quit.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

Dwarves with guns.  It was that simple.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

There've been so many it's hard to choose.  The one Belghast recounted is certainly high on the list.  Ultimately, I think I'd have to pick my very first Molten Core raid, particularly the Ragnaros fight.  A friend whispered me out of the blue asking if I was available for Molten Core, and I actually let my interest in it overpower my hermit nature.  The raid had downed up multiple time by that point, so I found myself in a non-stop whirlwind tour of giants, core hounds, and fire critters.  I came out of that raid with my first piece of Giantstalker and a hunger for more.

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

Exploration.  Hunting down every quest and every secret that I could find.  Long before there were achievements, even before quests at max level gave gold rewards, I sought them all out just for completion's sake.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

Ironforge.  In Vanilla, my hearthstone was set to the bar near the entrance.  Even after expansions and additional auction houses stopped Ironforge being the center of the Alliance universe, I went back regularly just because.  When I finally quit the game, I took each character to a spot that seemed appropriate to them and took a screenshot before logging off.  Thalen's is of him sitting in his regular chair in that bar.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I can't check it now, but I know my /played on Thalen was over a year.  I started playing the day the game went live, and didn't quit until August of last year.  During that time I had the occasional period of burnout when I didn't log on for a month or so, but I never unsubscribed and for most of that time I logged on pretty much daily.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

Yup, always have, always will.  I want to know the story.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

Not really.  I don't feel like it ever negatively impacted real life, and I have so many good memories and friends that I've made due to WoW, that I can't say I regret a bit of it.

10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

I'm sure I'm closer to my real life friends that I played with than I would be without WoW.  We adventured and raided together for years, after all.  Without WoW, it's quite likely we would have drifted apart.  And then I wouldn't have met my wife.  So there's that.

Why Thalen Doesn't PvP

Talking about collecting yesterday got me thinking about the activities I gravitate to in games, and the things I tend to avoid.  As the post title implies, PvP is pretty high on the list of activities I avoid.  It's a bit hyperbolic to claim I don't PvP at all, but given a choice I'll pretty much go with PvE content over PvP everytime unless there's a pretty compelling carrot dangled in front of me.  Why is that, though?  I've thought about it a bit, and I think the best way to explain it is to take a look at my Bartle Quotient

For those who aren't aware, Richard Bartle is one of the creators of the first MUD, and thus one of the pioneers of online gaming.  He researched the personality traits of online gamers and divided them into four main groups: Explorers, Achievers, Socializers, and Killers.  The test I linked to tries to gauge which of those groups you best fit in, and how strong your leanings are toward each.  I test as an EASK, with Explorer way ahead and Killer as a distant fourth.

The most obviously applicable trait to PvPing is Killer.  That's what it means after all, your interest in fighting and defeating other players.  It's just not that strong in me, all told.  That's not to say I don't get competitive; I absolutely do.  But I need more of a goal than the defeat of another player to keep interest for very long.  

The fact that Explorer and Achiever are my number one and two traits is part of it too.  If you think about it, those two are pretty much the single-player traits; the ones that pertain to personal growth.  You may group with others to explore places you can't reach alone, or to fight monsters that can't be soloed, but ultimately the grouping is a means to those ends.  I enjoy grouping with friends, and I'm definitely more social nowadays than I used to be, but ultimately I want to be able to go at my own pace and do my own thing.  I'm more likely to hang out in voice chat and talk with people while I'm off soloing than to actively seek a group.

None of this is to say that I actively avoid group play; far from it.  I raided actively for years in WoW, and I doubt I would have still been playing by Burning Crusade if not for having a guild of friends and my original raid to keep me coming back.  And then during Burning Crusade Belghast lured my real-life friends and I into House Stalwart, and from then on it was those connections that kept me around.

So how about you?  Does PvP get your blood pumping or leave you cold?  Would you rather be playing in a group or running off on your own?