2 Months Later…

Friday November 19, 2010

Ok, granted 2 months is quite a lapse of time. In my defense, time is a comodity of my hectic schedule. Not only do I work full time, I take 4 college classes per 4 month session with Devry. I have 2 kids and a wife. Topped with various other committments such as additional training for my job, birthdays, holidays, friends and nearby family, ect AND the fact that I have still managed to level my Pugilist to level 38 and this blog (which no one reads… yet) has a tendency to take a back seat on the list of priorities.

Thursday December 2, 2010

Errrrr…. Ok so I don’t have a proper excuse as to why the above blog did not get completed back in November. Initially it was going to chronicle my place in the game at that time but since that was about 2 weeks ago, I will just start from THIS place in time now.

State of Durti MonkeyToe

Ding! r40 Pugilist! I just hit that last night as a matter of fact and once again my goal of being 45 before the December update doesn’t seem as lofty anymore. It would be ambitious to say, “I will have 41 by tonight!”; Ahhhh, screw it, I am an ambitious person anyway! I WILL HAVE 41 BY TONIGHT! Between the newly refreshed leves tonight and maybe a little well paced grinding, I think I can manage it… maybe. I am only 7k into rank 40. Unfortunately my delete key is jammed so the ambitious post will just to to stick around :p

Just for the sake of recording my playing history, here is a list of Durti’s current equipment:

1. Main Weapon -
2. Body -
3. Legs -
4. Feet -
5. Belt -
6. Head -
7. Hands -
8. Ears -
9. Wrists -

At the time of the writing of this blog, my body piece is the best to be had by a PUG on the server!

State of the Game

I am not going to spend a whole lot of time going over the state of the game. If you play or read any forums you will know the underlying issues of the SP QQing. As for me, I don’t find the new system that burdensome and encouraging for group play, that’s my opinion of it.

One Week In – Blog Entry #2

Tuesday Night – Sept 28, 2010

I was actually glad that the Bodhum server went down at around 11:30 on Tuesday night, frankly because I needed the shower. I destroyed one of those triple bladed, throw away razors shaving off the beard I had been growing for nearly a week. It took me almost a full half an hour to shave the thing off so that I would be ready for work the next day. Even so, once I had shaved the things away, leaving my skin baby smooth, I was right back into the thick of grinding my way to level 18 in the Gridania wilderness. 6 days of gaming and I had accomplished 31 levels (18 Pugilist and 13 Leatherworking). I am still nowhere close to my goal of being level 20 for the general release on the 30th of September, but it will have to do. The 29th marks the end of my carefree vacation and the start back to real life.

Wednesday Evening – Sept 29, 2010

As expected, work is nowhere near as exciting as whiling away the hours playing my new obsession. My thumbs are itching to continue mashing at the buttons of my game controller and spurring my character onwards towards greatness. Even so, the tasks that need to be completed today as my work day sputters to an end is daunting and I will have to be extra cautious to control myself on my way home to prevent the possibility of getting a speeding ticket. I loved FFXI and FFXIV has enough of the same elements that I am overcome with nostalgia and hopeful for the future. With that being said, there have been high points and low points.

The Journey Thus Far

Though I am not where I wish I was for release, I am happy with my progression as a level 18 Pugilist. Luckily my wife and lifelong partner in crime rolled Conjurer which has led to hours on hours of happy grinding. Still, I regret the fact that the current state of the game doesn’t support larger groups of players to go out and get good experience. So far what we have seen is that, as the group gets larger, the experience gets smaller. And as the amount of experience to gain each new level increases, a 4-5 man group getting 20-50 experience points for each kill is just not acceptable. Unfortunately, that means people tend to resort to duoing/trioing camps, which seems to defeat the point of an MMO.

Leve quests are fun, at least the first few times you run them. Some of the rewards, such as guild marks, are well worth it as well, and having a huge group of 10-15 guildies running through each leve is definitely more social than most of the game. I just wish that the experience for doing these quests was more viable for the long run!

Transportation seems to be a major issue. Anima regenerates, supposedly, at the rate of 1 for every 4 hours. I’m not sure if that is for every 4 hours of time logged into the server or not. FFXIV covers a pretty large area and running from location to location can take up a lot of time.

I would also love to see what NMs get put into the game, and start fighting them!

All in all, I think the launch of FFXIV has gone relatively well. There is still plenty of ground for me to cover however and I am anxious to get to the point where I can start doing some level 30 Leves and also some of my Class Quests as well as continueing the Main Quest line for Limsa Lominsa.

Lets hope some good stuff gets put into today’s maintenance/patch!

My First Blog

An Introductory Post

This is meant to be a simple blog, chronicling the journey of a simple adventurer, Durti MonkeyToe, on his adventures through Eorzea. I am by no means an elite level player. In fact,  between a full time job, studying for my bachelor’s degree, and heading up a family of my wife and out two children, I have a small sliver of time left for gaming, and, now, and even smaller sliver of time for blogging about it, but I will do what I can. Thankfully, my wife, LoenStar, also plays which allows us to spend quality time together while playing FFXIV.

Past Experience

I have played various games in the past to various degrees of dedication. My first foray into MMOs was Everquest (Well, if you don’t count games like AOL’s Dragons Gate, which I had been playing since I was a teenager). I was instantly smitten with the expansive world that let me play a game amongst a slew of other players. Though I genuinely enjoyed playing Everquest, I was at a point in time that I couldn’t afford my own subscription and so my time in that game was short lived.

I spent the next few years experiencing life’s ups and downs. I joined the Army, did a year long tour in both Germany and Iraq, before moving back to the U.S. to live and work in Tampa, FL (though still in the Army). A friend I worked with was always talking about a game called FFXI. At the time, I knew what Final Fantasy was and what MMOS were about, and soon enough I loaded up on a new PS2, FFXI, and both of the expansion packs that had come out. I spent a lot of time playing FFXI with my friends Spongehunter and Kahluaa and their linkshell on Gilgamesh, Koruption Inc. Unfortunately, I only had enough time to level my THF to level 40 and my WHM to level 49 before one of my friends was deployed, taking much of the fun out of the game for us. Soon after, we quit playing all together.

Since that time, Spongehunter and I tried to recapture the enjoyment we found in FFXI in a series of other games such as Dark and Light (a French disaster), Age of Conan (Where we joined and later help found a clan going by Apollo), Warhammer, and Darkfall. None of them were able to keep our interest for very long.

When we learned of the announcement of FFXIV, though, our interest was instantly sparked. And from the ashed Koruption Inc will rise again.

Koruption Inc

At the point in time when Spongehunter, a level 75 WHM at the time, was managing Koruption Inc on the Gilgamesh server in FFXI, KI was building prestige both as a HNM and Sky linkshell. I unfortunately missed out on much of these events and a lot of the end game content. Hell, I didn’t even complete the quest that would let me level beyond 50! But then again, I didn’t start until years after the original release. Most of the Linkshell had already maxed their characters out by the time I even joined, so I was behind from the beginning.

Though, for this incarnation of KI, composed of a mixture of former FFXI Koruption Inc members and the best that Apollo had to offer among other select individuals who have been invited to join us prior to the games release, I will have been a part of its very inception and I hope to never be very far behind the level curve of the guild so that we all can hit the end-game together, whatever that may be as it is unkown at the time I am writing this blog.

If you manage, check us out on Bodhum sometime. We’re not elitists, but we aim to be quite a force to be reckoned with on the Bodhum server!

Beta Impressions

I’m not going to go into a bunch of stories, computer specifications, or specific examples of content from the closed and open beta. Mostly because I am lazy, but also because I prefer to look to the future rather than the past, and the future is Sept 22, 2010, a mere 5 days away. I will say that the Beta has caused bot excitement and frustration. The excitement comes from a wave of nostalgia in playing a game that is, in many ways, so much like the original that I fell in love with. The frustration mostly comes from the idea that I am going to have to go back and go through all these damns level again upon launch, for the 3rd time >.<