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.

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.

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.

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.

My Miqo’te archer is closing in on 50. With the crazy ridiculous bonus experience gained from a Low-Level Duty Roulette, she should get there tonight, Friday the 17th. (I write most posts in advance, by the way.) My archer has been going through some seriously odd fashion phases in the last ten levels. Everything was fine at first. She had a suitable outfit that reflected her spunky, squirrel-tailed, no-nonsense, tomboy attitude through most of her leveling.

I read a fluff article on MMORPG.com about 5 Things Rift Must Do In 2014, which got me thinking. What would it take to get me to play Rift again on a daily basis again in 2014? Well, the answer is pretty simple: Give me an expansion with new zones and more levels. (Alternately, if I totally ran out of stuff to do in other MMOs I’m playing, I would probably play Rift.

Due to a devastating blizzard of perhaps a half an inch of fine powdery snow, I had 2 extra hours one morning to look at The Origins of Madness, the new Living Story content for Guild Wars 2. I patch up, log into my Necro, and I have mail telling me to go to Lornar’s Pass. Naturally it’s one of the places my Necro hasn’t been so I can’t fast-travel there, so I get out my Norn Ranger, who has been all through those wintry mountains.

I read Scree’s A Snapshot of Pantheon, an excellent summary of the things that Brad McQuaid wants to do with Kickstarter MMO Pantheon: Something of Something. I’ll save most of my comments on Brad’s game vision for another post, or never, because I don’t think it will get funded. The part about changing the Holy Trinity model is what stood out to me today. Apologies for quoting so much of this:

I am blatantly stealing TAGN’s post subject here, which is the question of who to boost to 90 for Warlords of Draenor. My situation is a lot different than his though, because I only play WoW when I’m really bored with other games, and my highest-level character has only recently broken into the Wrath of the Lich King era of the game. Hunter? This was the second character I created when I started WoW in 2006, and my second-oldest surviving MMO character.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the news about SOE closing down Vanguard, Wizardry Online, and two other MMOs. Vanguard is a game that I always wanted to play more, but I could never seem to keep it on any kind of daily schedule. I always thought of it as a “crutch” game - I knew if there was absolutely nothing else to do, and I didn’t want to spend any money, I could always fire up Vanguard and be entertained for a little while.

I reached level 50 in Final Fantasy XIV and entered “the endgame,” that fabled zone where only the elites live. Now I can evaluate FFXIV’s version of what some vehemently insist is “the only real game.” As with any MMO (except GW2), the FFXIV endgame is a gear grind. Your basic goal is to increase the “average item level” of your gear. This in turn allows you to unlock more and more difficult instances, in which you can acquire gear with higher item levels.

In another post I wrote about your basic objectives in FFXIV endgame and what there is to do, but in this post I’m going to talk more frankly about the more practical experience of what the endgame is like when you’re not in a big Free Company with lots of people available at your level. It’s like sitting around waiting in a queue for a long time. Again. And again.

Apparently the NDA was lifted, so here’s my first impression of the game: It doesn’t have invert mouse yet, so it’s a major, major chore to play it. It literally boggles my mind that devs don’t include this in their alphas, or even their finished games. I mean, surely it must be a built-in feature of the game engine somewhere, right? Even if it’s a stupid registry key somewhere, show me where it is!

Due to a heat pump failure, my normal schedule of writing scintillating posts (ha!) was totally borked. But lucky for you, I found some posts that I have previously rejected as being totally lame and irrelevant, pulled from the dregs of the barrel of mediocrity. My LoTRO Hunter reached level 48. Normally a level like “48” doesn’t seem like that much of an achievement, but in LoTRO I feel like it takes an eternity* to level, so each new number is a major milestone.

Due to a heat pump failure, my normal schedule of writing scintillating posts (ha!) was totally borked. But lucky for you, I found some posts that I have previously rejected as being totally lame and irrelevant, pulled from the dregs of the barrel of mediocrity. My WoW Hunter has finally reached the level cap! Of Burning Crusade, that is. Which means he is now Level 70, a mere twenty levels and five years behind where everyone else is.

During the time I’ve been waiting in FFXIV endgame queues for my Bard, I’ve leveled all my other adventuring classes to 15 through a combination of FATEs, levemetes, and hunting log completion. (You’d think leveling to 15 would be easy, but in reality the time it takes to get from level 10 to level 15 seems endless.) My goal was to get all the classes to 15, then pick one to dive into and level the rest of the way to 50.

With such slow casting times, you’d think that the optimal way to play a Conjurer would be to spam Cures on the tank so he’s always full. That’s what I did in Rift, more-or-less, with the Purifier class. (Prior to Storm Legion, at least.) Welllllll, see, there’s this thing called ’threat.’ I may be completely wrong, but in my meager experience so far, I feel like healing generates a lot of threat in FFXIV.

On the issue of paying for Alpha access, I’m having a hard time getting worked up about it. On the surface it seems like an outrage, but the more I think about it, the more it sounds conceptually identical to pre-ordering. It’s long been a trend that if you pre-order an MMO, you get “early access.” I remember this was the case way back with Warhammer Online. It’s just that now, instead of 5 days of early access, you get 5 months of early access.

Don’t get me wrong, I am ecstatic to see Rift adding new “stuff” to the game, but unfortunately Dreamweaving-a crafting profession for enhancing Dimensions-is way far down on the list of things that interest me. Dreamweaving allegedly allows you to craft thingys and gizmos and whatsises for your Dimensions, but I have yet to do much of anything with my Dimensions, except dump in all the Dimension items that keep filling up my inventory.

Last Wednesday, SOE patched Landmark with a pretty significant list of bug fixes. The only part that mattered to me, of course, was the addition of an invert mouse option. Yay! I can play! I’m still not going to build anything complicated, though, because … well, it’s going to get wiped. Either accidentally or intentionally. So there’s no point in wasting the effort. So basically all I’ve done so far is run around and chop down trees or dig holes in the dirt.

In FFXIV, one of your endgame tasks is to follow the Relic Reborn quest line in order to build your “relic weapon,” which is one of the better weapons in the game (but not the best, of course, because that would be too easy). I’ve been pretty lazy about it because statistically the Artimes Bow doesn’t seem that much better than the Garuda Bow I’m currently using. But anyway the final step of the Relic Reborn quest (at least I think it’s the last one) involves retrieving some primal materials by defeating the three Hard Mode Trials.

Landmark continues to be a relaxing gathering experience. Remember when I said I couldn’t mine anything but Dirt, Stone, Tourmaline, and Agate? Well it turns out I had been running around all this time in a Tier 2 zone with a Tier 1 pickaxe. Doh! I have no idea how I got to Tier 2, but to get back I had to run to the central hub thingy-which probably has a cool name but I don’t know what it is-and click the big crystal hanging up in the air.

Zenimax is getting a lot of flak for their strict NDA, and I thought I would speculate on why they might think it’s a good idea to keep it in place, when other early games don’t. Which is not to imply that I think it’s a good idea, or a bad idea, or anything in between. I’m not a games journalist, so I couldn’t care less whether it has an NDA or not.

So apparently Zenimax lifted their NDA a day after I speculated why they hadn’t lifted their NDA. Neat. Anyway, now I can post what I wrote about ESO mainly after the second beta weekend I was in. Fair warning: The maximum level I have achieved is 7. That’s a couple of hours of gameplay. I have absolutely no idea what the endgame is like; I don’t even know what the maximum level is.

Yeah I pre-ordered the $79 Imperial Edition of ESO. Big whoop. Wanna fight about it? I didn’t do it for the Imperial race, which I don’t care about. I fully expect Zenimax to make that available for purchase later anyway. I didn’t do it because I’m an Elder Scrolls fan boy and I think ESO is awesome. (I tolerate TES and I merely think ESO is better than average.*) I mainly bought it for the horse.