Endgame Viable

I’ve been trying to figure out the optimal length of a dungeon run. There’s a point beyond which the dungeon goes from “this is really fun” to “oh god I can’t escape and this is never going to end.” It’s usually a hard line, too. It’s never a gradual process. One minute things are great, and the next minute it’s a life-draining death march from which you can’t escape. For me I think that mark is around 30-35 minutes. That’s about the maximum amount of time I can stay focused and alert in a dungeon run. After that I just want it to be over. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never particularly pushed myself to do a lot of raiding. (The other reason being it’s hard to find guilds that are serious enough to complete raids, but casual enough not to be elite jerks about it.) (368 words.)

Have you ever wondered why there are so many MMO guides out there? Step-by-step walkthroughs and so forth? I think I know the answer. It’s because without Internet guides, most MMO game players would simply stand in one place and stare at the screen, paralyzed and unable to figure out what to do or how to do it. You can tell this from watching the global chat of a game that is in closed beta. It’s filled with non-stop questions that one might conceivably fall into the “duh” variety. How do we find this or that? How do we solve this puzzle? Where do we find this NPC? Where do we get crafting materials? How do we get past this monster? There are no handy guides to turn to, and obviously reading the quest text or any of the in-game hints are out of the question in this fast-paced, go-go-go world we live in. (234 words.)

If I’m to complete a full week of FFXIV posts, I need to think of one more topic to write about. I thought I would describe a typical play session. This one happened on a Thursday night. I login with my Miqote Archer. I’m semi-embarassed that I’m still playing the adorable cat girl with the squirrel tail that I made on a lark back when I started, but I’m stuck with her now because I’m not going back to level up another character now. Maybe someday I’ll use my change-appearance potion but I’m not sure if it will let me change my race/gender, and I’m pretty sure it won’t let me change my distinctly female-sounding name. (1052 words.)

When I first started playing FFXIV sometime around October 2013*, it was extremely quiet. Very few people made comments in the general chat. I’m sure we’re all used to a more-or-less constant scroll of adolescent jerkiness going on in MMO general chat, so it was weird and kind of nice that there was none of that in FFXIV. Most of what you saw, to be honest, was gold spam. Now, however, I see a lot more activity in the general chat. And by “activity” of course I mean adolescent jerkiness. (271 words.)

My main (and only, since you can play any class with the same character) in FFXIV is an Archer. (Or “ARC,” as they like to abbreviate class names to 3 letters for some reason - I still have trouble translating those - ARC looks like Archive to me - why is it hard to add three more letters to make “ARCHER?”) Archer is a straight-forward, low-stress ranged DPS class that’s fun to play. (472 words.)

Like just about everything in Final Fantasy XIV, seasonal events are kind of weird. I’m not really sure they should be called “events” at all. They are more like, you know, regular quests. In most games, a seasonal event is a big deal. There’s a big gathering of people. There are games and activities and daily event quests. There’s a special dungeon or a special boss to defeat. There are special mounts and costumes and occasionally some meaningful gear as rewards. (439 words.)

I’m all-in on FFXIV at the moment so get ready for wall-to-wall FFXIV posts this week! Last time I wrote that Square Enix wouldn’t do much about their guild housing prices unless people didn’t buy them. After I wrote that, they backed off a bit on their ridiculous prices, but not by much. Out of curiosity, I snooped around the guild housing areas to see just how many of the plots had been bought up already, because I assumed people would buy them no matter how much they cost or how much mindless grinding they had to do. (185 words.)

There are a lot more “early access” games now than ever before, thanks to Steam and Kickstarter. Basically what this means is that some random, poor game developer can release what amounts to a semi-playable demo of their game and then ask people to buy it for a (surprisingly minor) discount, hoping that they’ll raise enough money and interest to fund the rest of the game development. In a lot of cases that is as janky as it sounds, because some Steam developers think it’s okay to put out crap that is buggy and unplayable, but I think it’s a concept that can work well for the MMO genre, since MMOs are almost always in constant flux even after their official releases anyway. MMO players as a whole should be used to bugs and change. (535 words.)

Yeah, so we’ve been waiting for Everquest Next Landmark, right? We all thought they would start in January, right? We all bought an alpha or beta package even though we don’t want to admit it because it’s stupid to buy beta access for a free game, right? So what do you think goes through my mind when I get an email with a subject that looks like this: Ultrviolet, you’re invited to play EverQuest Next Landmark! (196 words.)

This is it. It’s all or nothing. My marmot is almost out of health. He won’t survive another round, and he’s the last one. I throw the box. I watch with breath caught in my throat as it teeters … totters … and falls down on the frog. I got it! I pump my fist and celebrate the capture of a new battle pet in WoW. My gnome jumps for joy on the screen, too. For this is not just any captured battle pet. This is a blue. A blue frog, to be specific. Not blue in skin color, mind you. Blue in rarity. That means it’s a special frog with lots of health and survivability. You don’t see blue battle pets out in the wild very often, so you try to grab them when you see them. (303 words.)