Another week of achievement hunting in Final Fantasy XIV! I didn’t have any real plan this week, and kind of just messed around and went with the flow. We may or may not have also checked in on the Island Sanctuary and even the Fall Guys collab. But mostly it’s just talking.
Links:
twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ciderspider
twitter: https://twitter.com/CiderSpiderr
lalachievements: https://lalachievements.com/char/35184079/
source
Sometimes you just need to gather and think about things.
Moogle tomestones and blunderville is out until 7.1 so could always fool some idiots to run those with you, but I feel you. So much to actually do but don't want to
By no means are you obligated to share your other hobbies with us too, but if /you/ get joy out of sharing, I know there's absolutely a ton of us who'd appreciate artsy shiz too
I'm really gonna miss this series, but you deserve the break! Take your holiday guilt-free!
The way you take this so serious like a job is so respectable.
I hope I live to see the Deep Dungeon and Blue Mage title grinds.
My honest opinion, you're the only FF14 YouTuber left that I watch, mostly because it's entertaining to listen to you with the occasional sound effects. I'll eagerly watch you play other games, I really am not in the mood to watch FF14 since yawntrail, so when I watch you, it's literally your narration and humor that make me click your videos.
I've been loving watching your horror games as well as the XIV content. Frankly, hearing your thoughts on things gives me something to draw to or make crafts to. Here's to hoping you have some fun experimenting with other games on this channel soon! Who knows? Maybe you'll become a 100% style gaming channel with XIV being a long term contribution.
Thank you for the video, as always. Looking forward to the rest of season 1 and beyond
Patiently waiting for more Blue Mage content.
I know people in my FC ended up doing island sanctuary as part of the daily grind, and have or will get their achievements slowly that way. I'm currently enraptured by PvP (Rival Wings), and the conversations in the PvP community about the achievements are that they are VERY LONG because a lot of them are contingent on wins, and not just participation. You might want to join in on the events that are for keeping the content going and getting those achievements for at least a weekly participation. A win or 2, or many if you manage to stomp the enemy.
Dude, take a break. Lots of us are in the same boat and are struggling to find enthusiasm. As much as your videos have helped me find momentary motivation, the long term is at an all time low. Forcing it's the best way to make yourself want to quit. Be good to yourself, do what you want, and ignore what you want when you want. We'll keep following and enjoying your stuff, and see you come back strong when the field and lifestyle content comes out.
"We should have enough resources to finish this" he says as the symbol stating that you are short on materials shows up. That had to be on purpose.
Fall Guys is terrible for showing when things hit and I can see why people use mods. Think I got 1-3 wins, no idea how my Fc leader got Queen Bean the first time around
S P H E N E
My warrior glam is the red pvp motorbike set that got avoided for some reason, while sqeenix spammed the other two sets in the living memory zone quests. My axe is an undyed poetic pizza cutter, and I'm about 4 days from the ARR beast tribe mask for the face. I couldn't find good goggles where the eyes are visible for the life of me
FFXIV burnout is real. Only heal is.. taking a break? So go take a break and come back happier!
Weekly progress report: Lalachievements score 17,325.
A bit more active. I did most of my gathering prep for DT crafting, got both MIN and BTN to 100 and so picked up Breaking Rocks in the Hot Sun X and Fear the Reaper X, as well as An Eye for Quantity: Miner III and Botanist III in the process.
Beyond that, I've been doing roulettes more actively, mostly for XP to try and push jobs from 90 to 100, and that means more Poetics. This week, I picked up Reforged: Majestic Manderville Orrery, Bardiche, and Bayonet. I now have one relic left on that step for EW, the MNK relic, and then I'll just have the final step to do.
Don't worry about your not wanting to play. Most people I know are tired of not only the content but also the story. Take your time. Don't make your game that you play for fun a job and a chore.
BLU raiding is actually really fun. It's different enough, since technically everyone is a dps, so when the game needs to assign role mechanics it just tosses them at random and quite often that involves some pretty fun things needed to resolve. At the same time, since mechanics are random you do have to learn all the role mechanics in any given time. Quite a few of them can be cheesed, but some become way harder than normally.
Also i would totally just listen to your podcast.
A completionist doesn’t let another completionists burn out
time for a break and doing other things or doing absolutely nothing for however long is necessary
The claims of cheating and "netcode" in the Fall Guys crossover were always really overblown. Lots of people were quick to whine on the subreddit and dismiss content that they weren't instantly good at.
On the cheating front, I am fairly confident that there are no add-ons that can calculate the optimal path. Claims of that, or of the add-on running the course for you, come from a video where that is very clearly not actually what's happening. What does exist is an add-on that will show you the snapshot outlines for hazards that either don't place ground effects, like the sliding bumpers in the third stage, or where the ground effect is the snapshot, such as the yellow cannon balls in the third stage.
The reality is that this can give an advantage, in some contexts, but because all of the obstacles behave extremely consistently, if you need snapshot outlines, you're absolutely not going to be able to beat someone who is even modestly good at the course. I'm probably a slightly above-average player; I can pretty consistently make it to the third stage (which would be top 33 percentile, except that most lobbies when I play aren't full, so it's usually at least a bit les impressive, statistically-speaking) and, on occasion, even have a good run through it, but I'd guess that I'm only having a clean run through the final stage maybe 1 in 10 times, if even, because I can't be bothered to learn cannonball counting or whatever for added consistency, I just kind of wing it, and I've only gotten the second achievement (for 10 wins) despite having probably participated hundreds of times (I run once a day minimum while the event is active, and more when my friends are about because it's something silly and low stakes and fun to do together). And I can say, with absolute confidence, anyone getting anything out of an add-on that shows snapshot outlines, I would absolutely trounce. The third stage, in particular, is designed in a way where if you weren't thinking two obstacles ahead, well before you can actually see those whisper thin snapshot outlines the video showed, you're already not positioned correctly to clear the obstacle without stopping, and if you stop, you're very unlikely to win, because odds are good someone is going to have a clean run.
The main bug/exploit people were actually abusing, when Fall Guys first launched, was the glitched instance lobby where, if you join just before a new instance is created, you get put in the old empty instance, which is now closed and so no one else can join, and if you happen to be the only person in that instance, you can run the course solo and you're guaranteed to win, so long as you can beat the time limit (and with a smidge of practice, that isn't very hard). This wouldn't really be an issue, but the way a lot of people pursued this exploit was to just join and leave lobbies over and over until they lucked into a bugged solo instance (which was all the harder with so many of them doing it), and there was even some add-on to automate this process of joining and leaving until you were alone, and for everyone else, this meant that the lobby would constantly be jumping up and down in size, it'd hit full 24, and then rapidly fall back down and you'd start with say 17, which doesn't really improve your odds of winning, you'll still be running against 7 other people in the final round, but it does means the reward currency is nerfed since the lobby isn't full.
The real cheaters, I presume were using movement hacks. I say presume because, for all everyone on the subreddit griped about the mode virtually nonstop both times the event was on before, not a single person caught a move-hacker on video, and I only saw one person actually claim to have even witnessed move hacking first hand, rather than just referencing it in the abstract. I suspect that move-hacking is actually pretty uncommon, since it would presumably be pretty easy to detect server-side.
On the netcode side, well, this just isn't really a netcode issue. The netcode isn't blameless here; it's the main reason we don't have player collision like proper Fall Guys, and it is the reason why you can sometimes feel like you're in the lead on the third stage in a tight race, only for the final little ramp thingy to not accept you and second place runs past you and wins (from your perspective, you appear about a quarter second ahead of where the server thinks you are, and every other player appears about quarter second behind where the server thinks they are, for a half second apparent delay).
But netcode isn't why certain hazards feel like they hit you even though you were out of them. That's just the same snapshotting the game has used for everything*. As with basically every mechanic in the game, the snapshot and the animation are not the same thing, and can be *very disjointed, depending on the animation. I think what's going on is that the snapshot occurs as soon as the animation starts, and so the longer of a "wind-up" the animation has, the more disjointed the snapshot feels. It's a problem, and I don't know why the devs code some mechanics like this, it's just not netcode-related.
You might think that the quarter second client-to-server location delay would contribute, but as far as I can tell, snapshots are actually handled client-side. That is, rather than the server using what it believes is your current location at the time of the snapshot, it sends the client a packet that says "are you currently in here?" and then your game checks and either says "yes" or "no" (and if your client doesn't respond because you're lagging, the server just defaults to where it thinks you were). However, for whatever reason, punishment is usually delayed, so much so that I don't think it's a netcode thing. You can see if in all sorts of contexts, where you were clearly in a snapshot, but by the time you took damage, you were out of it, but it's especially noticeable in high-end raiding, because that has a lot more snapshots with meaner punishments.
All that's to say, none of the hazards behave inconsistently. Some of them have disjointed snapshots, but they always have a snapshot that is disjointed by the same amount every time. Those pistons in the red-blue-yellow second stage, if you start to run across one just as it lowers, you will always be safe, but if you start to run across one a couple seconds after that, you will always get got, with absolutely no variation; the window to safely run across one is always the exact same length, unless you're actively lagging. Same for the sliding bumpers, and everything else without ground effects telegraphing the snapshots. You can actually see this really clearly with the sliding bumpers in circular second stage, because they do have ground effects telegraphing the snapshot. There's a snapshot, it resolves, and then the bumper starts moving. If you were in the path of the bumper just before it started moving, you were snapshotted, but you don't get punished until a second later, and that's also roughly when the bumper moves, and by that point, you're typically clear of the bumper.
Anyway, run the courses a few times, and it gets much easier. There's actually very little RNG, beyond who you get matched up with. The starting position of a few hazards are randomized, which means that there isn't one optimal path through each course you can memorize, and your position along the starting line is random, which can very subtly affect which path is optimal for your, particularly in the third stage, but other than that, it's all deterministic.
I struggle a little with the spinny hand above your head mechanic, the penultimate obstacle of one of the first stages, it's a mechanic I can't consistently do quickly, so I generally just take it slow since the stakes are so low in the first stage (as much as it stokes my petty ego to be the first one to the goal in the first stage). And I have trouble keeping track of the yellow cannonball horizontal exoflares, especially while also keeping track of the Yojimbo pink vertical exoflares, on the third stage. But really, the main thing that determines victory in the end is whether you can think far enough ahead that you're lined up to not have to stop and wait for an obstacle (or get clipped by one). Most of the time, if I manage a clean run through the third stage, I win. I don't manage that very often, I usually fuck up one of the exoflares, or very occasionally I'm in the lead and past all the scary obstacles and I get hit by a smol hammer of shame because I stopped paying attention because I was too excited about being in the lead. And now and again, I'll have a clean run through the course, and so will someone else, and it'll be a tight race that comes down to which of us had the slightly more optimal path through, which of us moved strafed less.
I didn’t know the jumpscare would happen just as I hit like…
I've been ambivalent on mods for ff14, disliked raid helpers but thought quality of life stuff was neat. Cheating fall guys is the first thing that's made me think an all out attack on addons is probably healthy in the long run.