MABB v6.6.6

been on the outs with XIV and the people in my raid group that i've been playing with since 2007ish have been of the same mind. i unsubbed in march of 2012 (and hadn't really played much in the 6 months or so before i finally cut it off) and while i've tested the waters a couple of times in past years during free login campaigns, i never felt the itch. i guess mostly because i was still enjoying FFXIV at the time.

logged in on friday at the start of the new free period and i'm freshly re-addicted, spent most of the weekend fucking around on there. game has come a long way in terms of eliminating a lot of the pointless timesinks and horrendous grinding, seems like most everything is doable with the handful of friends that are all taking the game back up again. and it seems an ideal interest for the ongoing pandemic in that it keeps me anchored indoors where i belong

anyone else ever play any of the OG everquest-era MMOs

I fucked around with eq back in the day but never got fully into it. Wow ended up being my big time sink for a few years in the mid 2000s.

ultima online probably destroyed a good chunk of my education as a little kid

no game has ever been as good as that one for me

i played eq when i could at a friends house, absolutely loved it but i couldn't play at home because pc was trash. man i wish i could have played. i would play eq at my buddies house and spend hours just wondering around, it was so cool.

my mom bought me one of the eq expansions once thinking it was a standalone game

when the genre was still new i was deeply skeptical of it, the idea of paying a subscription fee for a game that never ends always seemed like bullshit to me. for that reason, i never tried EQ or UO. turns out all it took was tacking a familiar name onto it to get me hooked

wife was big into EQ until WoW came out. we've gone through several cycles of playing WoW for a while and then unsubscribing for several months... I may or may not be currently playing

in the age of pandemic, an MMO subscription is not only acceptable it is indeed a commendable endeavor. sub away and get your grind on, friendo

Still play WoW regularly but only got back to it last december 31st after sarding since wrath of the lich king. I’ve learned to love battle for azeroth lately and am pretty much familiar with the current dungeon/raid mechanics. I’ve got a warlock and a shadow priest that i’m currently gearing up for PVP.

PVP is a subject that has never really endeared me. the sole exception being in FFXIV 2.X back in like 2014-2015 at 50 cap, my group actually pioneered a zerg tactic that was nearly unstoppable. the way it was structured is you had three factions battling in teams of either 8 or 24 (3x 8-man parties) depending on how many people were queueing at the moment. we developed the strategy of stacking casters in the offense because their limit attack (like most other FF games you build a 'limit break' over time just by racking up damage dealt and damage taken) was an AoE that could be stacked up for guaranteed kills. a single caster LB would do heavy damage but couldn't kill from full, but two stacked on top of one another was a guaranteed kill on any class through any manner of mitigation.

with coordination on crowd control to keep people pinned, our premade group of 4-5 with random backfills making up the rest could beat back both factions (the majority of the 48 opposing players) trying to team us 99% of the time. and once you racked up a certain amount of kills, you got a bunch of really overpowered buffs that basically guaranteed you'd steamroll the rest of the match as you'd have an overwhelming advantage over the players coming back off respawns, usually single-file because people are dumb and just wanna feed you kills all day.

they of course changed everything when 3.0 came out to invalidate that strategy, and i understand why they did it, but PVP became very unfun as a result so i quit that part of the game and never looked back

Pvp was my fucking jam on wow. The restrictions of needing certain gear and set times to do it never worked for me. I could just jump in and jam a few random BGs if my buddies weren't on to do ranked ones. I would try and clear achievements for shits and giggles in between wait times.

I dropped out of wow a few months after cataclysm dropped though as I was losing interest in playing it in general. If I had kept up the big switch on the talent trees probably would have been enough to make me quit anyway.

After cataclysm the game just sucked.

Vanilla is where it's at.

Burning Crusade was the best. I had a warlock and an enchancement shaman that kicked ass back then. I still remember grinding for aldor/scryer nose picks like no tomorrow back in the day.

Hitoshura wrote: ↑

10 Aug 2020, 09:52

when the genre was still new i was deeply skeptical of it, the idea of paying a subscription fee for a game that never ends always seemed like bullshit to me. for that reason, i never tried EQ or UO. turns out all it took was tacking a familiar name onto it to get me hooked

something incredibly interesting about uo is that it was a total sandbox game. there wasn't any kind of 'quest' mechanic in the entire game. there was literally no objective other than what you wanted to do. there was so much freedom, it was silly at times.

there was this amazing mechanic where you could create 'recall runes' that would allow you to assign coordinates to an object and then you could teleport or open portals to that location. the portals were usable by anyone as well. people would open portals to the deepest level of a dungeon in the middle of town and curious idiots would walk through and end up on the other side of the world and the portal would disappear before they could get back through

it was such a mysterious game as well. it existed in a time where there weren't a million videos dedicated to every aspect of the game or tons of in depth websites. i really miss that. dark souls gives me a lot of similar feelings which is why i like it so much.

The panda bears fucking lost me back on the day. I still refuse to acknowledge them and their areas.

I don’t mind the other expansions - I just hate how easy it is to level now. Like I can start a character on a whim and hit lvl 60 in a week without even really trying. One good thing they did was the lvl scaling though so you can actually finish out quest and storylines without all your xp dropping to nothing and it still being somewhat challenging.

everything will be level-scaled in the next expansion though

zim wrote: ↑

10 Aug 2020, 22:54

it was such a mysterious game as well. it existed in a time where there weren't a million videos dedicated to every aspect of the game or tons of in depth websites. i really miss that. dark souls gives me a lot of similar feelings which is why i like it so much.

yeah, FFXI was the same way in that regard. all of the game mechanics, statistical interactions and whatnot were a complete black box, the game explained nothing. it was fascinating to watch people figuring it all out over the years and how changes in strategies developed around everyone's evolving understanding of how everything actually worked.

i agree with the noted detriments of spoiler culture

my nine-year old sister is playing through breath of the wild right now and she knows everything that will happen because she watches youtube of the gameplay as much if not more than actually playing it

it saddens me

yeah, I don't get that at all. part of what makes mmo's great is the ability to just go explore. the only times I ever look something up is if I can't figure it out and/or keep dying despite multiple attempts. don't even need video - just a good text explanation is usually good enough!

I used wowhead from time to time for rep grinds and the like

icy veins is my go-to-resource with regards to builds, azerite traits and essences but yes wowhead for the quest/grinding stuff

i remember using a site called elitist jerks for wow

prequel is better

i didn't end up biting over the summer login period, but our raid team finally disbanded a couple weeks ago because the new raid tier on XIV fucking sucks. resubbed 2 weeks ago and i can't tear myself away from the game now. quickly getting my gear up to speed and i've been blowing my gil on JP parties before bed. pay 5M gil, get 500JP to spend when i wake up in the morning. good deal, great game

WoW was basically my life during the entirety of 2020. Still playing it now...Shadowlands is

i wish i could find a new game to draw me in, literally nothing seems interesting. the few people i used to game with became toxic and no ones schedules sync up anymore

my mates and i took a break from the regular friday online gaming sessions that saw me through since april but we haven't found a good new time and date that works for everyone yet

we are waiting for BG3 to finally drop and play through that which will probably take up a significant chunk of the year (given we only get in one session per week)

if the time works out zim you should join our party. the only requirement is commitment

User wrote: ↑

04 Jan 2021, 04:18

my mates and i took a break from the regular friday online gaming sessions that saw me through since april but we haven't found a good new time and date that works for everyone yet

we are waiting for BG3 to finally drop and play through that which will probably take up a significant chunk of the year (given we only get in one session per week)

if the time works out zim you should join our party. the only requirement is commitment

let me know when it happens and i'll see if i can make it work

i see youve been playing via discord

discord outing my shameful behavior this weekend

i am still down the mines a lot

zim wrote: ↑

04 Jan 2021, 04:34

User wrote: ↑

04 Jan 2021, 04:18

my mates and i took a break from the regular friday online gaming sessions that saw me through since april but we haven't found a good new time and date that works for everyone yet

we are waiting for BG3 to finally drop and play through that which will probably take up a significant chunk of the year (given we only get in one session per week)

if the time works out zim you should join our party. the only requirement is commitment

let me know when it happens and i'll see if i can make it work

what if zim is afraid of commitment?

zim and i share a love of pizza that equates to an unbreakable bond

feel like ive broken my destiny 2 addiction, stopped logging in out of habit for the first time in years.

almost finished playing through the whole half life series, has been amazing especially black mesa which really touched me.

toozey wrote: ↑

10 Jan 2021, 05:22

feel like ive broken my destiny 2 addiction, stopped logging in out of habit for the first time in years.

almost finished playing through the whole half life series, has been amazing especially black mesa which really touched me.

i recently played a co-op mod for half life 1 and 2 which was super chaotic and fun

decided to level geomancer from scratch on monday, soloed to 99 this week and started gearing it up. made a lot of progress. felt pretty good about it until realizing it's pointless because i don't have anyone to play with. oh well. still gonna keep on grinding i guess, nothing else to do

jawn galliano wrote: ↑

23 Jan 2021, 14:28

decided to level geomancer from scratch on monday, soloed to 99 this week and started gearing it up. made a lot of progress. felt pretty good about it until realizing it's pointless because i don't have anyone to play with. oh well. still gonna keep on grinding i guess, nothing else to do

i resubbsed to wow classic recently just because a fellating lover of my plays it consistently. wish we were playing current version but it's fine to pass the time

need to try ff xi some day

it's kind of tough to recommend. mechanically it's quite deep, but it's very oldschool. it was forged in the EQ era and though it's improved in a lot of ways over the years, the basic structure of the game is probably tough to adapt to if you're not already committed. i love the game, but a lot of that is just an unhealthy attachment to something i got addicted to 17 years ago. my character is old enough to drive now!

17 years ago i may be confused, isn't there a more modern ff mmo?

yeah, XIV is the current game which launched in 2010 and relaunched in 2013 (which is when i started playing.) i was into that from the launch of 2.0 up until the current raid patch last month, but we all decided we'd had enough and finally broke the static. immediately retreated back to the old game and i've been having a blast with it though i'm mostly playing solo now.

XIV is a great game in a lot of ways, but it's very stagnant and formulaic. where gameplay and character progression is concerned, shadowbringers is exactly the same as stormblood which was exactly the same as heavensward which was exactly the same as ARR. the social aspect was the main thing that kept me going, but when we all mutually agreed we were over it that was pretty much it.

finally got my defending ring last week if i'd had one of those 15 years ago i could've flipped my account for $10k. amazingly busted piece of gear that's still relevant in the current era of the game (though infinitely easier to get now; back in the day 2-3 dropped on a server in a given year).

almost got my geomancer up to 900 combined skill, getcha high potency buffs

devised a solo strat for HTBF odin tonight that worked, i am very pleased

you sound like a god in a sea of tadpoles

well i'm coming up on full immunity so my time on here might be winding down, but i got 2 ultimate weapons and geared my main job up quite nicely. fun little time.

congratulations

have you been pwning n00bs

oh heavens no, pvp has been dead in this game for more than a decade