Endgame Viable

Should I dive headlong into the vortex of Final Fantasy XIV endgame possibilities or should I detox and play something else?

I almost forgot, we’re still writing blog posts. I’ll elaborate on this tweet I just posted:

Trying not to get sucked into the "do all the things just because they're there" endgame attitude in FFXIV again. It always feels kind of unhealthy to get stuck doing busy work in MMOs.

Now that I’m “at the endgame” in Final Fantasy XIV again, there’s a strong compulsion to log in every day and do all the things, because that’s what we’re taught is what you’re supposed to do. Most of the role models we see in the MMORPG genre, they model a behavior of playing every day, doing dailies, doing other dailies, doing yet more dailies, doing so many dailies it makes your head spin, maximizing the efficiency with which they accumulate the tokens and currencies and experience points, and presenting this as the normal way to play an MMORPG to “fit in.”

Certainly the developers who make MMORPGs want us to play that way, trapping their players into an odd sort of daily co-dependent cycle.

It can be fun, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly healthy. In fact, I daresay it’s pointedly unhealthy.

I remember doing all this grindy progression stuff in the endgame of A Realm Reborn. Leveling all the jobs, collecting all the weapons and minions, doing all the crafting and gathering, just because it was there and it was possible. It was kind of fun. But ultimately pointless. You can’t keep up forever. Eventually you’re going to burn out and quit playing. At least I will. And once you stop, you’re behind forever, and you can’t ever catch up again, without even more work.

These mainstream MMORPGs want you to make a lifetime daily commitment to their game, a lifestyle commitment, to the exclusion of everything else, and they don’t exactly hide it either. It seems to me they’re specifically targeting people whose personality type is vulnerable to obsessive compulsiveness. Everybody yells about how manipulative lockboxes are and wants the government to fix it, but nobody seems to care about how manipulative the average top-tier MMORPG is.

I’m not obsessive compulsive, but I’m fairly detail-oriented, and I can fall for peer pressure and marketing pressures like anyone else. There was a time when I thought it was … I don’t know, not necessarily a great idea, but possible to live in an MMORPG. In the old days there weren’t that many games to play. But now there’s a hundred new games to play every day, and I don’t want to pledge my life and undying service to one game anymore.

Anyway, the point is, I’m staring at this Final Fantasy XIV icon on my desktop and wondering if I should login to do some daily Duty Roulette thing, or should I just put the game aside and detox for a while to play something else. And it seems like it would be a much more balanced life decision to play something else before I get sucked into this endgame vortex of spending hours every day on activities that are always pointless in the end.

I’ve finished the 5.1 patch story already, there’s still some two months left until Endwalker, I’ve got plenty of time to get there without rushing.

I started into the post-Shadowbringers Main Scenario Quest last night and got a whole two quests in before the game slammed a massive brick wall down in front of me.

Final Fantasy XIV is a great game. But holy wow it’s a drag sometimes. So much so that you just want to quit and move on to something else before you get sucked into the post-expansion gear grinding vortex. When staring at the potential for hours and hours and hours of mindless grinding necessary just to complete the next quest in the story, for example.

Some people like mindless grinding in MMORPGs. I dare say that the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen suggests that most people like mindless grinding in MMORPGs. It seems to be the exact thing that people enjoy about MMORPGs: The part where, after a hard day at work, you can just turn your brain off, put some dumb show on Netflix to have some noise in the background, then click your hotbar abilities for hours on end on auto-pilot, then note your numerical progress in a spreadsheet somewhere so it feels like you’re actually accomplishing something. (I have done this exact thing many times.)

Currently, I myself am of the mindset of just wanting to log in, play through some fun story quests for an hour or so, then log out again, and pay zero attention to my experience points, gold, gear, tomestones, or any other endgame currency or progression metric of any kind. Shadowbringers worked great for that. Post-Shadowbringers definitely does not, and this remains one of the biggest failings of Final Fantasy XIV to this day.

Coming out of the Shadowbringers Main Scenario Quest my item level is 414. The first story dungeon you hit post-Shadowbringers is Grand Cosmos, which thankfully still works with the auto-leveled Trust companions. But it requires item level 430. I got the level 430 Weathered gear from the underwater guy at the end of Shadowbringers, but I’m missing a belt and accessories, which wrecks the average.

I first thought I might try re-running the final story dungeon (Amaurot) with my Trust group and see if I could farm for some jewelry, but post-Shadowbringers you immediately encounter what I would consider to be a rather significant problem with the Trust system: All your Trust companions, who previously could go into any story dungeon at any time, suddenly revert to level 71 and can’t go anywhere except Holminster Switch. Now I can only use them for the most current story dungeon, apparently.

Next I thought I could unlock the first Alliance Raid and go there, because I vaguely remember doing that in previous expansions. Unfortunately my memory was faulty, because the first Alliance Raid requires item level 435, so that didn’t help me at all. (Also, as I’m writing this, I now recall you only get armor from those raids, I don’t think you get jewelry.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, I spent a lot of time running around to various vendors trying to discern a tolerable path forward. Sure I could read a guide, but what fun is that? Also guides are so often wrong that I rarely bother anymore. The first search results are always the ones written years ago that they just rush out the door so they get to be the first search result, and they never update them, and they were usually filled with misinformation from the beginning (*cough* IGN *cough*). Not to mention the infernal spamming of ads. Also the guides typically point you to the most efficient path forward assuming you want to play with PUGs and guilds and people and whatnot. I don’t particularly want my games to be social networks. I don’t even want my social networks to be social networks.

Anyway, here were my practical findings, the best paths forward for me:

I figure if I can just get to where I can run the Alliance Raids, I’ll be able to farm enough of the tomestone currency du jour to keep up with doing the rest of the story. In the past I recall running a lot of the Alliance Raid duties, which were pretty easy (just incredibly time-consuming and soul-crushingly boring). Alliance Raids are the closest thing that Final Fantasy XIV has to Rifts in RIFT, or world boss events in Guild Wars 2. (FATEs still seem to be completely dead for the player population, another tragedy they don’t seem to care about fixing.)

Indeed, the Level 3 hunts are easy, and reward a total of 75 nut bags daily. Having done them, I now recall doing this before to gear up immediately post-expansion, perhaps the only time they’re worth doing. The weekly Elite hunt was also solable, and rewarded 100 nut bags. That allowed me to buy item level 440 Ronkan earrings, necklace, bracelet, ring, and belt, which got me to item level 432, enough to continue the Main Scenario Quest. I was left with 50 nut bags, which was 5 short of what I needed to buy the next tier item level 460 Deepshadow ring, so I did the Level 2 hunts (which reward 4 nut bags each). Then I was able to buy the ring and get my item level to 436, enough to get into the Alliance Raid.

No quitting or dungeons needed after all! For now, at least.

YouTube’s API is a pain.

Ah, another morning in Blaugust. Do we try to write a new post from scratch? Or revise and restore one of the train wrecks of posts littered in the gorge of abandoned drafts?

Here’s something that’s on my mind this morning. What’s “top-of-mind,” in the parlance of my workplace.

One of my personal development goals for several years now has been to write or find a tool that will automatically upload a directory full of video files to YouTube on an automated schedule, so I don’t have to do it manually. Doing things manually is work, and bad. Letting automated tools do work for me is good, and righteous, and noble.

The other day I tried once again to write a command-line program to upload a video file through the YouTube API. By “write,” I mean I simply cut-and-pasted the sample golang code from YouTube’s web site and ran it. It worked. It successfully authenticated and uploaded a video file to my YouTube channel with metadata. Neat!

I’ve been here before, though. I had previously written something in .NET which achieved the same thing. More than once, I think.

Unfortunately, the video file that was uploaded was immediately locked and made private, with no indication of how to fix it.

It turns out you now have to go through an “audit” process so that Google can ensure you’re not doing anything nefarious with their API. I started that process yesterday. It’s painful. You have to fill out a form with a million fields in it, all designed to dissuade casual users from trying to do anything with their API.

The days of the “open Internet” are long gone, in case anyone was wondering. It wasn’t the government as we feared in the 90s, it was all locked down by corporate gatekeepers, who, it turns out, are even worse than the government. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, whoever. Can’t have anybody doing things without approval from The Corporation! Don’t forget to use our convenient phone app!

But I digress.

If I can successfully jump through Google’s hoops, I can write a script and run it with the Windows task schedular every day to upload a video automatically. Then maybe I can keep up with uploading some of the videos I record. I just recorded some 117 videos of Shadowbringers. Uploading 117 videos manually through the YouTube interface is somewhat daunting, to say the least. You think posting 31 blog posts in Blaugust is hard? Try uploading 117 videos to YouTube on 117 consecutive days. Yeesh.

It’s very easy to see why everyone abandoned YouTube Let’s Play videos in favor of Twitch “just push the start streaming button and it’s done” videos. Unfortunately I have no interest in all the weird social pitfalls that come with Twitch culture. People keep yelling about Twitch doing more to protect streamers… I’ll add to the yelling and yell for a button to completely disable Twitch chat.

I finished the first ending of Shadowbringers. The one before the long series of post-expansion patches.

So, yeah. I’m still kind of waiting for that Greatest Final Fantasy Story Ever Told.

It was okay. Possibly even good. But was it great? Fantastic? The greatest ever? I don’t know about that. I need to go back and find some contemporary posts to try to discern what everyone thought was so great about it. Because I’m just not seeing it, I guess. The great part must have been subtley hidden somewhere.

Cool dungeon, bro. But I died a lot, so not cool.

There were great moments here and there. I think I said this before. Great lines of dialog here and there, great short stories here and there, great scenes here and there, great voice acting here and there. (Mostly from Lyna and Runar and Ardbert.)

But the overall story didn’t really resonate much with me.

I personally think the story of Ardbert and Renda Rae and that group is a much more compelling story than the one that we, the player, went through. Trying, failing, trying again, failing again, giving up, trying again, then finally, after a hundred years, success and redemption, without any accolades. That’s a story arc. If my player character doesn’t advocate for a yearly Ardbert Appreciation Holiday over in The First I’m going to be very disappointed in her.

This guy saved The First, not me.

Don’t despair though, even if the story didn’t knock my socks off, I still had a lot of fun with the expansion, mostly from reading all the dialog. I got to work on a cartoon Lucky Charms Irish voice for the pixies, a sort-of-kind-of Hispanic voice for Runar, and whatever the heck Lyna’s voice is which I still can’t figure out to this day, but I think she’s an Icelandic voice actor. None of which has any practical value unless I suddenly get a hankerin' to start a D&D campaign.

Anyway, for all the folks rushing to Endwalker and calculating if you’ll finish in time, it took me about 52 hours to complete Shadowbringers from accepting the first quest to completing the last. That includes the role quests and unlocking flying, but no side quests at all.

Also that was reading every line of dialog out loud, so if you just click-click-click through everything I’m sure you could cut that in half. I did every dungeon with the Trust companions, and the three trials in PUGs which I went into completely blind. I think there were a couple of wipes on the first one, but the second two were done on the first try, and I personally was carried through them all by the healers because I died to all the dumb surprise mechanics you have to read about beforehand.

Yesterday I mentioned how much I worried that Final Fantasy XIV was staggering into their new expansion on duct tape and bailing wire, so I thought today I’d mention the MMORPGs that appear to have a much more solid technology base that I don’t have to worry about.

In no particular order, and completely off the top of my head with no research whatsoever, I’d say:

Guild Wars 2. They seem to have the most modern server technology to me, in the sense that they can expand and contract as needed, and patch the game in a way that’s (almost) completely transparent to the player with no downtime, a pretty neat trick. Well, it used to be a pretty neat trick. In 2021, I’d say it’s the stock-standard software-as-a-service delivery technique. But ArenaNet was the first to do it in the MMORPG space, that I can remember.

Elder Scrolls Online. With their Megatron Ultra Server Technology, or whatever they call it, I imagine this is a pretty similar scenario to Guild Wars 2. Easy to scale up and down as needed, no need to ever worry about merging. And it’s cross-platform, across consoles and PC and even Stadia. Still requires regular maintenance down time, though, but still: I’d vote ESO as the game that will survive long after all the other MMORPGs are dead, long after the nuclear wars and the nuclear winter, the game that the cockroaches will be playing, because Zenimax seems to have the most formulaic, sustainable strategy for continuous new content delivery on a fast cadence, which is the most important part of building an MMORPG. If you can’t build a pipeline of easy continuous content delivery into your MMORPG from the start, you might as well not bother. If one were sitting around thinking of architecting a new MMORPG, I would imagine you could do a lot worse than reverse-engineering ESO.

World of Warcraft. I’d vote WoW as the most improved technologically since it came out. They keep adding and changing the technology (graphics overhauls, phasing, server groups, etc.) to improve the experience. At this point, I’m not entirely sure why they don’t have one big mega server like everyone else. Notwithstanding the abysmal work environment, they seem to have a good software development pipeline. Or did, before everyone quit heh.

The main thing these games have in common, of course, is that they aren’t all that fun for me to play, except in very small increments. Womp womp. Great technology though.

I’m waking up to this news that Final Fantasy XIV has closed off all the North American Aether servers to new players indefinitely because they can’t handle the strain anymore.

I have a bit of technical insight into these sorts of things, and this renews my extreme nervousness about the foundational backbone on which this game runs, which I previously mentioned at some length.

For example, when I see the phrase: “We will be changing the operating system settings for the server configuration” in an official posting from Square Enix, I think, “Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.” Those words, to me, suggest the game’s servers are no more technically advanced than a series of old desktop PCs in someone’s garage, running Windows 95, where you have to manually edit CONFIG.SYS to adjust the memory settings, so backwards and antiquated does it sound.

And then I see this: “There is an ongoing global shortage and increased demand for semiconductors” as an excuse for having difficulty expanding capacity.

Are they actually building the servers themselves??? Are they … *hushed gasp* … trying to scale up and not out??

How is this game possibly going to survive the Endwalker expansion? They appear to be using the exact same technology as one would have used in, say, the year 2000, and it appears they’ve done exactly zilch to keep up with the times.

It’s probably not as bad as it sounds, but it sure sounds bad. It sounds Lord of the Rings Online levels of bad, to me, the game which I previously would have cited as having the worst technological foundation, the kind that handcuffs them creatively and prevents them from succeeding.

Granted, Square couldn’t have predicted a sudden spike in usage over the summer, but to have no plan whatsoever to accomodate such a spike doesn’t reflect very well on their technology stack.

FFXIV is still the best subscription MMORPG (seven years running now, since 2014) and it would kind of stink if it just collapsed in on itself one day.

I think we’re supposed to be writing about how we bloggers stay motivated when blogging, but I think a much more relatable topic for the masses is how we definitely, positively don’t stay motivated.

For me, if I’m not motivated, I don’t write a blog post. (Or upload videos to YouTube, as I’m currently doing.) It’s that simple. I feel no obligation to regularly bestow my vast wisdom upon the populace.

I mentioned this before: Blogging is hard, unrewarding, mostly wasted work. There are only two rewards for most people: 1) The self-satisfaction of publishing a blog post, and 2) If someone happens to discover your blog post five years later and learns something. I, myself, am usually writing for that person who finds my posts five years from now. (Which might be me.)

So sometimes I just don’t write blog posts. In fact, most of the time I don’t write blog posts. Which is fine. Not posting a blog post is way better than posting a terrible blog post, if anyone were to ask me.

The usual caveats apply if, for example, you have to post something because it’s your job, or you’ve somehow managed to eek out some money from writing a blog. But to me, a monetized blog always seems like an ever-growing house of cards, waiting to collapse at any moment. Work, in other words.

Anyway morning is over already and I haven’t even made any coffee yet so bye.

But wait! It turns out I can’t do a single thing about the catastrophic failures happening at work this morning, so I can write a few more words here.

Blaugust is a bit of an unusual circumstance because it forces me to write and publish something even if I think it’s terrible. This post, for example, is terrible. I would never publish this post in a million years outside of a “writing challenge” event.

I write a lot of half-finished blog posts that are terrible. I’ve probably started writing 50 blog posts so far in Blaugust. All terrible. Maybe they can be salvaged, but probably not. I’ve lost interest in all 50 of them anyway. I see one over there on the sidebar of my text editor cleverly titled “new-gaming-post copy 2.md.” What am I supposed to do with that?*

Sometimes I try to pull out half-finished posts and edit them so they aren’t terrible, but that’s a lot of time-consuming work. Blogging isn’t supposed to be work, because there’s no real compensation for doing it, other than a finely-crafted blog post, so I tend to throw posts away rather than try to fix the terrible ones.

Incidentally, the main thing that will cause me to throw away a post is not having a solid conclusion. If a blog post doesn’t have a point it’s a candidate for throwing away. Every blog post must make a point, or answer a question, or relate a specific piece of knowledge. Ones like this, which are just kind of rambling about nothing to fill space, almost always go in the trash bin unless it’s Blaugust.

Because I’ve said nothing yet about either a) how to stay motivated, or b) why I’m not always motivated, and therefore this post conveys no useful information.

I suppose the main idea that I wanted to convey here is that if you’re not motivated to blog, you’re not alone, and also don’t worry about it. Which could have been said in a single sentence, apparently. Twitter is a good place for a lot of one-sentence blog posts, actually.

On a related note, I’ve thrown more than one blog post into the garbage bin of history because I couldn’t find a topical picture for it. It’s always better to not post a blog post than to post a blog post without a picture. This could be one of those. I guess I’ll just use a generic “blogging” picture.

* In a surprise twist, it turns out I already posted new-gaming-post copy 2.md.

I didn’t even rename the screenshot files this time.

Sometimes they drop some geopolitical wisdom out of nowhere.

Aren't the gear drops supposed to get cooler-looking as you gain levels?

Someday I want to come back and see _this_ story.

The entire Shadowbringers expansion has been delaying the conclusion to this story.

Still waiting for the payoff for this character. Although it's pretty easy to guess.

Sure, why not.

"He seems disinclined to grant us an audience." Killing it with the dry wit, as always.

I forgot I was supposed to do role quests too.

Hey, writing blog posts every day isn’t that fun sometimes. Here’s some screenshots. From that same game again. Because they’re the only screenshots I took yesterday.

What will become of that spooky kid?

The Ascian Planetarium Exhibit.

I've come to refer to these folks as The Superfriends.

Just when we thought it was over, it wasn't over. Because we've got three more levels to go.

Come! Let us settle this once and for all! With ice hockey!

Apparently all you have to do is calmly explain to the obdurate that they're wrong, and they instantly learn their lesson.

I'm sorry to report to all the people speedrunning through previous expansions that Alphinaud is still alive. Not even any fakeout deaths for a quest or two.

I also played Quake Remastered, which is neat. And I downloaded the Diablo II Remastered open beta, but it’s apparently multiplayer only, so I immediately quit.

I was going to pull out one of seemingly hundreds of half-written posts to finish them, but then I realized I hate all of them! And now it’s evening. So here’s some screenshots. It’s from that game I’ve been playing. You know the one I mean.

I mean, who didn't screenshot this moment?

And this one.

This guy sounds very sinister.

The angst.

I mean, it's a pretty good line.

Hey wait I thought you were dead again.

I hope they like my new hair.

This is what we're so scared of?