“Remember when we used to talk about Three-Monthers? Ah, those were the days!” -Bhagpuss That quote from Inventory Full made me chuckle, because I had recently been thinking that it took me precisely three weeks to play through the Stormblood expansion story. And that was going slow, recording everything, talking to everyone around the quest givers, and reading all of the unvoiced text out loud for the video. I could not possibly have done it any slower. (561 words.)

I’m going to try to document here what I’ve figured out about gathering collectables in FFXIV, because there is almost a 100% chance that I will forget this someday and a future version of me will need to re-learn it. Collectables are similar to the Grand Company Provisioning missions you can do once per day, which look like this: Collectables are a bit better, though, because you can hand in a lot more every day. (By the way, my spellchecker insists that I should be writing “collectibles” but the game spells it “collectables.”) (1157 words.)

Thinking Play had a very interesting post recently about Play Personalities, something I had never heard of before. I recommend reading it. It’s a bit like a Meyers-Briggs test for how you spend your leisure time, or the Bartle Test. Here’s my self-assessment of how I fit the different play personalities: The Joker. Nope. Well, maybe a little. Sometimes I do like to poke fun at things that other people find deadly serious, much to my own detriment on Twitter. Although I am not a “class clown” by any stretch of the imagination. (508 words.)

Standing Stone Games started taking orders for the Mordor expansion in LotRO, which is “expected” to release July 31. $40 for the no-frills version.* The moment is finally here. The moment I’ve been dreading for so long: The moment when everyone else will get to experience the MMORPG cultural event of the decade, while I sit on the sidelines, peering longingly through the cracks in the fence, trying to catch a glimpse of the prize at the end of the rainbow. Or some metaphor or another like that. (927 words.)

I’m going to make an attempt here to summarize the FFXIV Stormblood story for my own future reference. There are going to be spoilers ahead if you haven’t played, although I’ll try to keep it fairly high-level and leave out every detail of how everything turns out. (That means I’m not going to tell you who lives and who dies, muhahaha.) (You can consult any of a wide variety of Wikis if you really need all the details, and may I also suggest the 58 video series I uploaded to YouTube if you get really bored and need to see all the spoilers? I just may.) (1053 words.)

I reached Bard level 70 Sunday afternoon. Yay! But that’s not all that much of an achievement in FFXIV. You can’t do much of anything with the endgame until you finish the Main Scenario Quest. And… I finished the Main Scenario Quest Monday night! After reaching level 70, you need to do the Ala Mhigo 4-man dungeon and the Menagerie 8-man trial. I finished Ala Mhigo with a relatively uneventful PUG Sunday night. Then I tried a PUG for the Menagerie, which immediately follows-this has become a tradition of sorts in FFXIV. A final 4-man dungeon followed immediately by a final 8-man trial. I think both ARR and Heavensward ended this way. In those cases, the final 8-man trial was a pushover. You just showed up, dodged a few AoEs, and won the game. Roll credits. (1042 words.)

I saw someone somewhere (FC chat maybe?) mention that they wished FFXIV would make their dungeons 5-man instead of 4-man so that DPS queues would go faster. (Belghast also recently lamented over the problems of leveling DPS.) It’s an interesting idea but I don’t think going to 5-man would significantly help the problem of slow DPS queues. I’m quite sure the ratio of DPS to tanks and healers in any given MMORPG is probably something like 25 to 1, if not 100 to 1. They would have to make dungeons into 10-man affairs with 1 tank, 1 healer, and 8 DPS to have any significant effect on DPS queues right now, in my opinion. (404 words.)

I didn’t intend to weigh in on @Sypster’s post about side quests, but apparently I did. :) In An Age and GamingSF also had some good responses. I think the basic argument Syp made is that side quests distract him from the main story, so he would prefer to eliminate them and boost the experience gained from the main story. I can understand that perspective. I’ve forgotten what’s going on in the main story of MMORPGs plenty of times. (In those cases I might argue that the main story isn’t worth remembering, though.) Syp didn’t mention which games were problematic for him, but I’ve had trouble keeping up with the main story in the later expansions of Rift and of course WoW, in which I never have a single clue what is happening story-wise. ESO used to have a main story issue, at least prior to One Tamriel, when you could only do one piece every 5 levels. (750 words.)

Puffy sheep with rat tails! Wait I thought there weren’t supposed to be any horses in Eorzea? Wait is Eorzea a continent or a planet? I don’t know this game very well apparently. *scratches head, looking puzzled* (134 words.)

I see a lot of people on Twitter and at least one person on a certain MassivelyOP podcast mention that they keep trying to play FFXIV but they just can’t get into it. I consider myself a pretty jaded MMORPG player, and I can certainly understand the reasons people don’t like FFXIV. But I thought I would try to document here how I personally overcame the biggest criticisms people have with the game. (3029 words.)