Advice

16 entries. 10,412 words.

April, 2014

• ArcheAge – Founder’s Packs, Resisting Temptation. 2014-04-28 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  • Opinion
  
  As announced on Trion’s live stream Thursday, ArcheAge Founder’s Packs are now available. They are expensive. $149.99, $99.99, and $49.99 for Archeum, Gold, and Silver, respectively. Archeum gets you into the game right now, playing until launch day, otherwise you only get to play in beta “events” starting in June. So let’s discuss. With myself. My first Russian glider! I think they are fair prices. Based on the laws of supply and demand, it makes perfect sense that it costs $150 to get into the ArcheAge alpha. If you’ve seen any of Trion’s live streams, you know that the hype and demand for ArcheAge is through the roof. I can’t remember the last game that I saw such blind, ravenous hunger for. (I’m not quite sure it’s justified but that’s another story.) People will do anything to play this game. It’s more of a cultural phenomenon now, I think. Like waiting in line to buy the first iPad. 874 words.

May, 2014

• Know Why You’re Blogging. 2014-05-05 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • Blog
  
  There’s a lot of great advice going around about blogging this month for the NBI, and if you are new to writing or blogging (or not), you should read all of it. Thankfully many of them are summarized in the Newbie Blogger Initiative Week #1 Roundup, so I don’t have to. The only thing I can add is my own personal philosophy on this blog. But first, if you want to start a blog, just start it, and do whatever you want, and to hell with everyone else and what they think. It’s your blog and nobody can tell you how to run it (unless you violate the terms of service, that is). I mention this only because a lot of “how to blog” guides tend to focus on the “business” aspects of blogging. They tend to assume you want to blog to make money through advertising. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not the only reason to blog. 553 words.
• Scheduling Posts. 2014-05-08 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  I saw this excellent post from Belghast a while back: Thumper Logic. The first part of his post got me thinking about my own publishing schedule, and as it is NBI month I thought a meta-blogging post would be a good topic. I too have tried to write one post a day-in the past. I applaud the effort, and anyone who can do it is far better at this than I am. 494 words.
• Blogging The Hardest Way Possible. 2014-05-15 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • Blog
  • Responses
  
  In honor of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, in this post I’m going to talk about “how” I blog for Endgame Viable. That is, the actual process. I don’t recommend doing it this way. :)First, I play some games. Usually they are MMORPGs. This typically happens on weeknights and weekends.After I’m done playing games, the next morning I often go to a place where I can’t play any games, which is a place that rhymes with the surname of a famous Star Trek captain. There, if I have time, I read some blogs and tweets about what else is going on in the gaming world.By this time I have some ideas of things I want to write about. I might want to make an observation or vent about something that happened in my last play session. I might want to report about something new I did. I might have an opinion about something I read on the Internets. Most of the time, these are not particularly earth-shaking thoughts, and quite possibly not in any way unique or unusual.I open a plain text editor window and resize it to be fairly small. It usually stays open throughout the day. (At this time, I’m using WriteMonkey, but it doesn’t really matter.) I prefer writing in plain text like this because it’s unobtrusive on the screen and I’m a software developer by trade, so I’m very comfortable using text editors. 1,378 words.
• FFXIV – Trials, A Cheat-sheet For Ranged DPS. 2014-05-16 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • Dungeons
  • MMORPG
  
  (Resurrected from my Drafts folder.) Trials in FFXIV are cool little instances that consist of a single boss in an arena-like setting. The normal ones require four players, and you queue for them just like a dungeon. (Or if you actually know real humans who play games, you can go in with a pre-made party I guess.) I find them quite fun. This is an 8-man Titan Hard Mode trial, but you get the idea. 607 words.

June, 2014

• WildStar – Addons I Use. 2014-06-11 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  • Responses
  
  I’ve seen some others reporting the WildStar addons they are using, so here are mine.Overall I feel like WildStar addons are going to allow people to do “too much.” I mean, there’s an addon to automate the Simon games. Really Carbine? You put that in your API? I would not be surprised if we see aimbots very soon. But in the meantime:Active: 324 words.

August, 2014

• What’s The Best Subscription-Only MMO?. 2014-08-29 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  • Opinion
  
  What’s the best subscription-only MMO out there right now? If you could only pick one to maintain, which one would it be? (By the way, the possible answers are: WoW, EVE, WildStar, ESO, or FFXIV.) This is pretty easy for me to answer, actually: Final Fantasy XIV. Hands down. No need to even talk about it. It’s beautiful, it’s fun, there’s a lot to do, it’s updated often, it does every MMO mechanic (that matters) exactly right, and it’s cheaper than the others at $12/month. The only down side is that replayability is low if you ever want to make a second character. (You don’t need to, though, since you can play any class.) 328 words.

September, 2014

• Results of Un-Learning Invert Mouse. 2014-09-09 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • Musings
  • Status
  
  I noticed that I never reported the results of trying to un-learn the use of Invert Mouse. After about two weeks, I was no longer fighting my muscle memory and could play MMOs unhindered. After about a month, I felt like I could aim pretty well again in shooters where precision is important. It’s now been nearly six months, and I feel like I’ve never played any other way. So it is possible to switch, even if you’ve played with Invert Mouse all your life. I have not attempted to play any flight simulators since switching though. I suspect I would crash and die instantly if I did. 108 words.

January, 2015

• Elite: Dangerous Opinions and Advice. 2015-01-10 4:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  • Reviews
  
  Elite: Dangerous is a neat game, however right now I see it mostly as a single-player game. I play it entirely in the “Solo” mode, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything without other people around. Thus I wouldn’t consider it a contender for 2014’s MMO of the year, despite how bad the other choices were. From what I can surmise, there are only two possible outcomes that can happen if you encounter another person: Either they can a) ignore you or b) try to shoot you down. (I suppose some weirdos might try c) start a conversation.) As far as I know, there are no group objectives to go after yet (such as world bosses), so there is nothing to “team up” with other spaceships for. So if you’re not a fan of Open World PvP I would suggest just sticking with Solo play. For me, Star Wars-style space battles aren’t what I want from a space game, so I just play Solo. (I’m not sure what I do want from a space game, but I know it’s not space battles. At least not with other people. It takes long enough to kill the AI pilots-it would probably take a good half hour to kill another person in an evenly-matched battle.) 931 words.

February, 2015

• WoW – My Favorite Addons. 2015-02-20 4:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  • Opinion
  
  I started this post in November 2014, and TAGN’s recent post on addons reminded me that it was still sitting in Drafts. So I thought I would finally post it. Addons are a fact of life when you play World of Warcraft. You can play without them (I’ve done it), and most of the gameplay basics are there, but Blizzard has consistently refused to put in any of the quality-of-life enhancements that we are all used to from every single other MMO released in the past ten years. (I’m thinking of Rift in particular here, which put in just about every quality-of-life improvement you could have ever wanted in an MMO UI.) Thus you’ll probably want some addons for WoW. Here are my favorites, not so much to recommend them but more as a handy index for later when I inevitably lose them all after a reformat. 909 words.

April, 2015

• Star Trek Online – Delta Recruitment. 2015-04-06 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  • Status
  
  I’ve enjoyed Star Trek Online quite a bit over the weekend. I’ve tried to play STO several times in the past but I could never get into it, but for some reason (boredom, probably) I’m “getting it” now. My heavily-armed away team takes on time-traveling bad guys from blue space. Perhaps it’s because they just started this Delta Recruitment event at the exact time that I began playing again. I abandoned my two previous characters (who were no higher than the STO equivalent of level 1 or 2) and made a new Star Fleet “Delta Recruit” dude. I don’t have enough STO experience to know exactly what’s different but I gather that Delta recruits level a lot faster and get bonus loot to help you along the way. I seem to gain one level (or “grade” I think they’re called) after each story mission I complete, which is pretty cool. 636 words.

February, 2016

• Don’t Feel Bad About Getting Bored. 2016-02-03 4:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  I recently saw a farewell post on My Life in Azeroth. I’m sorry to see anyone stop blogging, and I hope they resume someday, but the tone of the post got me thinking. It seems like a lot of WoW players sound apologetic or guilty when they discuss leaving that game, like they are somehow letting Blizzard or the community down. I’ve seen it in blog posts, and I’ve seen it on Twitter. Like they are admitting some deep, dark secret that they didn’t want to tell anyone. Like they are revealing some deep personal flaw in themselves. 307 words.

June, 2016

• NBI 2016 – Thoughts On Blogging. 2016-06-02 11:17 PM.
  • Advice
  • Community
  • Writing
  
  The first rule of blogging is not to blog about blogging. However, June is the Newbie Blogger Initiative here in the game blogging community, so this is the month where we throw out all the rules, talk about the craft of blogging, and try to recruit and encourage new bloggers. I technically started blogging in 1998, when I put some random notes up on my first ever web site, unless you count some Quake match updates I posted on the clan’s page in 1997. I didn’t really start blogging with any regularity though until about 2002 or 2003. The point is that I’ve been at this hobby for a while now, so I have at least a little sense of the landscape. 1,099 words.

August, 2016

• ShareX For Uploading Screenshots. 2016-08-29 7:39 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  • Reviews
  
  A while back I asked on Twitter if there was a way to automatically upload screenshots taken from games to some kind of online repository: Is there a tool/app/process that makes it easy (ie. automatic) to upload my game screenshots to some cloud repository? — Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) August 24, 2016 It turns out that ShareX has this capability. You can’t actually take the screenshots using ShareX, because it doesn’t support full screen applications, but it has a feature where it will watch certain folders and upload any new files to wherever you want. (It defaults to imgur, but there are a zillion different options.) This is exactly the kind of functionality I wanted. 215 words.

September, 2016

• FFXIV – Importing Settings From Another Computer. 2016-09-13 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  
  Documenting this with better search keywords so it’s easier for me to find next time. I re-installed FFXIV on my new PC and of course all of my settings were gone. I dimly remembered running into this before, but it took a while to dig it up. To copy your FFXIV settings from one machine to another, copy Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn to the other machine. I left out the “screenshots” and “downloads” folders. 78 words.

December, 2016

• NaNoWriMo 2016 Post-Mortem. 2016-12-01 2:50 AM.
  • Advice
  • Writing
  
  I like to write up a post-mortem about my writing projects after I’m done with them, so here are my thoughts on my NaNoWriMo 2016 draft. For reference, it’s an untitled historical fiction set in Belgium at the beginning of World War I. It’s about, you know, people, who like, do stuff. The hook might still need some work. I validated my (exactly, as it turned out) 50,000 words about 8 PM on November 30th. 1,571 words.