Monday, 19 August 2013

FFXIV ARR Beta Phase 4

Today was the end of the open beta for FFXIV A Realm Reborn. A sad day, as I was thoroughly enjoying my adventures through Eorzea with Sean - http://ffxivandthefamily.blogspot.co.uk/

What I achieved:

I leveled my Lancer to 20, my Pugilist to 17 and Leatherworking to 8. I spent countless hours lost trying to find Sean and running towards a fate only to see the message *Fate Completed*. I also participated in a guild event!! (http://digitaltoxin.com/)

I could write for months and months about the adventures we had but as they say, a picture says a thousand words.

Hope you enjoy these screenshots as much I enjoyed taking them!


First screenshot of Phase 4, hello me!

Lily Mae and Ratha XIV

Erm yeah, so Xena want to grab a drink?

Walking outside New Gridania for the first time

Lily and I before we embarked on slaying a hundred ladybugs

Our first of many Fates

Recall!

This item set was a real head turner

Lily and I again around level 10

Pugilist level 10

Enjoying the scenery

My sexy Purple gimp outfit making a second appearance

Run my beauty run

No matter what the weather, there was always a smile on my face

Chilling in Ul'dah

Guild event

/bow /cheer /clap

Another even pic

Charrrgggeee!!

My favorite spell, Piercing Talon

Peter Smith, Ready? Water traps, Ready? Traps win...

Hmm nice Egg! Oh hello Lily!

Horny Toad!

Towards the end of our story quest in Gridania

Holding hands, sunset, giant polearm...what more could one ask for!

Attuning!

Goodbye till next !

I can not describe how excited I am for next weekend and the future this game holds!

Monday, 22 July 2013

5 of my top gaming memories

1) By fire be purged!

Back in vanilla WOW my guild was progressing through Molten Core, we had a semi stable guild with a good core of players. Our main tank at the time had some pretty bad connection issues and it wasn't uncommon for him to disconnect for 5-10 minutes at a time. 

One night we were progressing hard on Raggy and he disconnected, we gave him the usual 10 minutes and there were no signs of him coming back. At the time we didn't have the best of gear and all our other warriors were arms/fury spec. This one guy steps up to the plate and equips his tank gear, his health pool goes down. It wasn't looking like the most promising of situations! One particular item of his I remember was his shield, it was a wooden plank from ZG with a snake in the middle of it, the caster version. 

The count down starts, we all brace ourselves for the fight a head, the Warrior draws his sword and board bravely in preparation to attack. Raggy activates! "The power of Ragnaros, Now you shall see it first hand!" He strikes once and our warrior dies... Never had I laughed so hard in my life, all the build up and wipes lead to this final attempt, for it to be concluded in one hit. The whole guild were in hysterics, and we continued to laugh as we all died one by one ending the raid there.

2) Hammerdin time

I was jumping around servers in Diablo 2 and I saw this Paladin, he had this huge shield and a mace which had looks which could kill, a true warrior of light. 

He was running through our Baal runs with several spinning hammers above his head smashing every mob in his path. I was in such awe after seeing this guy I decided I had make a character similar to his. After some investigating, hard work and some tricky trades I gathered all the materials required to make my perfect paladin. Shako, HOTO and Spirit all made by my own hands. I was so proud of my Paladin at the time and enjoyed nothing more then repeatedly running the Cow level with my Hammerdin.  

3) Straight to the heart, Take your mark! 

Burning Crusade, WOW. Probably one of the best expansions I've played, with great end game PVE and competitive PVP it had everything I needed from a game, including my next memory. As every guild will know unexpected drama can happen at any time and will generally have a negative effect on a guild, In this memory we turned a negative situation into a positive. 

My guild was wiping in SSC and our main tank / guild master was taking all the flack for it. As an officer I did every thing I could to defuse the tension and calm the situation down but some nasty things were said and our guild master along with some others quit the guild and logged off. This left us in a pretty sticky situation and one no guild wants to be in. Sitting on the verge of a guild disbanding and knocking on Lady Vashj's doorstep with no leader, no main tank and low moral. The officers of the guild jumped down a channel in Vent and discussed our options. 

We all agreed we had worked too hard as a guild for it to end there, I was passed guild master and I gave everyone one a 30 minute break to compose themselves while giving myself enough time to complete the raid roster. After the break we pulled the boss and executed an almost flawless kill, all the emotions of the night came out in one huge cheer as we all screamed and shouted on vent while the events prior became a distant thought.

On the high we were on we ventured to the Eye with only Kil'Jaeden left to down. Carrying forward the momentum from killing Lady Vashj we took down Kil'Jaeden swiftly achieving 2 guild firsts in one night. A night which could have turned into a horror show, turned out to be the most efficient raiding night of my WOW career.

4) "If this is all a dream, don't wake me up" Cloud

This next memory could have easily been all 5! It includes in my opinion one of the best series of games ever, Final Fantasy. Completing Final Fantasy 7,8.9, X and X-2 have been wonderful experiences and I highly recommend anyone who hasn't played them to pick a copy up and play through them all starting with 7.

I could go into why I love each one in so much more detail but I wouldn't want to spoil anything for anyone and take away the excitement the game brings. I can however say expect highs, lows, tears and laughter as you battle your way through a truly intense story line becoming immersed in several plot developments at once. With a great base of characters, wide range of items, spells, and mini games, there is something for everyone.

5) Who need sleep when you have Guild wars 2

August 28th 2012, 3am. GW2 launch day. 

A group of friends and I had been stupidly excited for the launch of Guild Wars 2. We had spent days playing in the beta and planning our leveling patterns. I had tested the class I wanted to play and made the looks I wanted for release, I was prepared! 

Jade was away for the night and I was home along, perfect! I set my alarm for 3am and I don't think I've ever woken up with such ease. I grabbed myself a coffee, couple of bottles of water and some cereal bars as I didn't plan on leaving my PC for some time. I  logged into Teamspeak to be met by about 15-20 zombies on and ready to go. We all tried to communicate to each other that morning but all I can remember is hearing "Uuuuuuung GW2" "Uuurrgghh can't log in yet". 

Spamming the game executable I would attempt to log in several times a minute until I saw it, the character screen. I was so excited and pumped, I was ready! After gloating to everyone for a couple of minutes while I was creating my character, my client crashed, oh how I facepalmed! I tried again and again to get back into the game,  hearing rumors from people on TS that they were in and playing, 

My time came and I was in! My level 1 Warrior Ratha was ready to take on the huge dynamic world of Tyria! 

The reason for this one being a memory is because I've not hit a game on release as hard as I hit Guild Wars 2, achieving cap on day 2 I had never been so focused on achieving something nor had so much fun leveling with my friends.

In 4 days I had played 75 hours, I can't lie. I enjoyed every second of it!


Saturday, 20 July 2013

My mini gamer

My son is almost 8 months old and is the absolute best thing in my life, minus the computer of course!

I could never put into words how special that little guy makes me feel! When I've had a rough day at work and I come home to his cheesy grin and beautiful personality, all my worries and concerns fade away like stars in the morning.

Hello Mummy and Daddy!

Its not all been fun and games though, Jade and I have had our fair share of hurdles to overcome but together have smashed through them all.

2 years ago if someone had told me I could live off 3-4 hours sleep, wake up to feed a baby a bottle every few hours and still find the strength to go to the work. I would have laughed and walked off, but as it is, I've managed all of the above and have lived to tell the story!

How can any child drink this much in a night?
From an early age Jade and I wanted Ted to be influenced by the things we love. By no means do we want to try and shape out Teds future for him, we just want to make sure he is the coolest kid in school!

Jade loves her science fiction and in March we had an opportunity to take Ted to a Sci-Fi weekender. This was a great way for us to introduce Ted to all things awesome, the highlight of that weekend was meeting Darth Vader.

"Pooey, the force is strong in this one! Take him back"

For me, I want Ted to learn all about my gaming. In time I will teach him all about the games I use to play, will be playing and why I play them. For now though he can just enjoy the pretty pictures and nice noises.

I also want him to find a passion for cars, as they have and will always be a big part of my life.



               
"Odd groups go left, Even groups go right!"


"1 billion dollars!!"
"Sports mode yeah?"
Some of our decisions may not have had the positive effect we wanted. After Teds experience with Darth Vader, Star wars came on.


In a box far far away


Following on from the horror Darth Vader inflicted on Ted, there was this one occasion where he had threaten to beat us with a mace and leave home. Thankfully after some TLC and the bribery of a bottle he backed down and handed over the weapon.


"What you looking at Mummy!"

So after the emotional roller coaster my family has been on the last 7 and half months. All the sleepless nights, hard work and effort has paid off and we have raised a beautiful boy who is a little angel. I love you so much Little Ted Stanley.

My sleepy little champ






Thursday, 18 July 2013

Designing a character

A challenge I face and I'm sure many others face when starting a new game is what should my character look like?

We all want to get started in game and begin leveling but do we spend enough time deciding on the right looks for our characters? I've made characters before where I have just jumped straight in and gone with the defaults making a not so attractive toon for myself to play, the adrenaline to get going took over the responsibility I had to make the perfect persona for myself.

The thought processes going through my head when starting a new character all resolve around end game. At the end of the day I am going to be playing this character for 100s of hours so it has to be perfect for me when geared up in the top end gear.

The first thing I do is research into which race is going to give me the best stats for my chosen class or which is balanced enough to allow me to customize stat allocation to my advantage. I search for images of the race in high end armour both as a female and a male to give me a good idea of what I will look like in the future and make sure I watch videos and test both sexes to see what the animations are like. The last thing you want is to make the perfect looking character and see them enter combat for the first time looking like a flailing badger with a huge axe. One final thought I always have in the back of my mind is that my character has to fit in when in a crowd, I'm not a loud person and don't want to steal the limelight with my 9ft, bright purple haired Monk in yellow Armour.

Me, I want to be boring, I want to play a human based character and I want to play a male. All through my gaming career I've played human male characters and I can't find it in me to change now. I personally don't want to be playing a Lalafell standing knee tall against a Roegadyn or being head and shoulders above a Hyur. Thankfully for me the starting stats for a Hyur Midlanders are great for my chosen class the Monk.

One feature in MMOs which is a bit of a bonus for the undecided among us is the Barber shops. Allowing us to swap and change our hair styles for some in game currency give us that extra life line if 1 month down the line you decide you need a change without having to start from scratch.

In times of need I lean on my Son for help, I asked Ted to assist me on creating my Hyur character and these are the suggestions he came up with, he told me I:

Kids know best ey!
So after taking all of Teds points on board I switched, swapped and changed my characters looks so much that I only managed to level to 15 in the Beta Phase 3 stages. I went from spiky brown hair to flat blonde hair, from being stupidly tall to ever so small. I tried different colour eyes, tattoos and scars and found myself going back to same looks time and time over. The looks of my real life self...with a better body and better hair of course!


Na naa! Boring old Hyur Male me!



Tuesday, 16 July 2013

The Beast

As PC gamers we all know the most important thing to us is our computer, some costs hundreds, some cost thousands. What we choose to use is totally our own decision and there are so many different factors when looking to purchase a new rig, or upgrade a current.

I recently purchased a new PC myself and the thought process plus the time spent trying to decide what was the best I could get for my money was a challenge I really enjoyed.

I set myself a budget of £700 knowing exactly what I wanted to get and set out of finding the best way to get hold of it.

A lot of my friends would rather build their PC from scratch buying each component and fitting them them self, I personally feel a lot more comfortable leaving the building to a trusted company and buying the whole package. I fail at inserting a USB stick correctly let along soldering a Motherboard.

My last 2 PCs had been AMD based paired with AMD graphic cards, I can't fault either of them as they both treated me well and got me through my gaming needs. For my new PC I decided after some research and sleepless nights to go for a Intel CPU. I spent along time wondering if I should invest more in a higher CPU, an i7 or go for a cheaper i5 machine. Working on a budget I didn't feel the justification for an i7 was there and in the end I went for the i5. By saving money on my CPU I was able to invest a little more on the graphics card and purchased an MSI GeForce 660Ti power edition, in time I plan to SLI this with another.

The PC I brought was a Limited edition Titan "Dragon Army" PC from www.overclockers.co.uk with a few minor adjustments. I have purchased my last 2 PCs from Overclockers and have had nothing but great experiences. All my previous and current peripherals have been brought from there also, due to customer service and delivery being brilliant, I wouldn't think to go else where.

A break down on what I got:

- Case : NZXT Phantom 410 Enthusiast Gaming Case - Black
- Power Supply: Corsair 600w PSU
- CPU: Intel Core i5 3570k Ivy bridge CPU Overclocked to 4.4ghz
- Motherboard: MSI Z77A-G45 Gaming series DDR3 Mobo
- Cooler: NZXT Kraken x40 water cooling unit
- Ram : Patriot Venom Red 8gb DDR3 1600Mhz 
- Hard Drives : Crucial M4 128GB SSD and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 64MB Cache Hard Drive
- Graphics Card: MSI GeForce GTX 660Ti Power Edition 2048MB
- Sound - 7.1HD audio






Brought back in May 2013 this is a mid level gaming system and in my opinion great bang for buck, I shall not say the exact cost as my finacée and mother/father would kill me but I made my budget! (kind of, hehe)

Those who know me will know I'm an inpatient person at the best of times but with a new PC on the way I couldn't keep myself occupied with anything else other than the thought of setting it up and playing on it all night long.

The day came and I got a text from Jade which included a photo of a box, I don't think I've ever left work so promptly as I did that day. I ran out of the office, down to my car and shot home.

I plugged it all in and installed all the drivers required to run my PC perfectly. I ran through a great Windows 7 optimization guide for SSDs and HDDs: http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds and then I installed the games I wanted to play. Starcraft 2, FinalFantasy XIV A Realm Reborn beta and Battlefield 3.

All 3 run brilliantly on maximum settings and I couldn't be more happy with my purchase!

A few pictures of the beast!


Cooler and MOBO
Love the see through side on the case

The monitors, a must!



Mum/Dad, I'm sorry!

Sunday, 14 July 2013

The Start of Something Perfect

"Joe we are going to play Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn!!"

This was a sentence my best friend told me 18 months ago. A lot has changed since then I've had a beautiful baby boy, gotten engaged to my lovely girlfriend, moved house and brought a brand new car.

Time to game? I don't think so!

Any one reading this who is an avid gamer will know the passion never goes, no matter how hard your try to subdue it.

Once I realized playing a game was a lot easier than running round a football pitch for 90 minutes I made the transition from promising young footballer into a tiny pro gamer and have been playing PlayStation, Xbox and PC games since I can remember. 

The first game I remember playing competitively was Diablo 2, I would stay up late and wake up early to get in an extra Meph or Baal run. I have a vivid memory where I really wanted to have an item called HOTO (Heart of the Oak), In order to do that you need to have 4 runes which were random drops through out the game. I wanted it so bad I got my parents to buy me the final Vex rune I needed to complete it and was so proud of my weapon. In 2001 I brought the Lord of Destruction expansion and along with that came my new love the Trap Assassin.

In 2004 I was hearing rumours of a game called WOW (World of Warcraft), being another Blizzard game I singed up for Beta and only now almost 9 years later I have finally stopped my subscription fully. I started the game playing a Mage called Joeyman, an ugly Troll with possibly the worst face, hair and tusk combo. After a month of being asked "SWE?" I gave in and created an Orc hunter with equally awful looks called Ghosthunter. Many weeks past as I leveled Ghosthunter to 60, pvping in the newly added BG WSG (Warsong Gulch) and grinding mobs as I had no clue on what I meant to be doing. Once I dinged level 60 I was lucky enough to join an MC farming guild called Spherical. Doing MC with 40 people was one of the funniest times of my WOW career, wiping endlessly on Raggy, waiting weeks to get my Hunter bow quest and eventually getting full Giantstalker set. 

There was a Nightelf warrior on my server, Rank 14, he had long purple hair and a stare that could silence any crowd. He would sit in battle grounds and gank in Tyr's hand constantly charging his way through anyone and everything. After running back to my corpse more times than I could count and waiting minutes to spawn every time, I left my hunter and my old server Bladefist and started a fresh on Frostwhisper with a level 1 Nightelf Warrior (I didn't copy honest!). The life of Ghostman began. I leveled Ghost up a lot more successfully than my hunter, achieving cap in a couple of weeks. I PVP'd the whole way through my leveling and achieved rank 8 before I dinged 60. Catching the attention of some hardcore PVPers I found myself in a WSG premade playing 8-10 hours a day grinding my way up to rank 13.

After I achieved the rank I wanted to in PVP I had to give PVE ago again, I joined a guild called Infinity with a friend of mines help and was fortunate enough to get a space in their raiding 40. I was apart of the first Nef kill in BWL and multiple others in AQ40. This character was to become my main for the best part of 4 years.

Being curious and jealous of some of my PVP friends characters, I rolled a Mage (again) as an alt and decided to dedicate him to PVP, achieving the same rank as my Warrior and farming end game content I thought I was done with the game. This was until The Burning Crusade was announced...

Rushing to level 70 and farming PVP gear in preparation for the first arena season, I obtained Gladiator rank  in 5v5 on my warrior and made a name for myself along some of the top PVPers on the server dueling outside Org taking on any challenge. Along with PVP I dabbled in PVE and found myself guild master along with some friends in a guild called Wasted. Now if I had to pick a bunch of people to play with, these would be them. I had so much fun during this part of my career. I  made some friends for life in that guild and all during leading them into Black Temple.

I could talk forever about WOTLK, CATA and MOP but I shall stop here, unless anyone wants me to carry on the story. Below are only screen shots and I have of my chars after swapping PC several times.

              
Originally NE Ghostman                  My second Warrior                      My Mage Ratha


During the past 10 years or so, I've tried a few other MMORPGs. Aion, Age of Conan, Rift and Guild Wars 2. I have always had a competitive streak and strive to achieve the highest PVP ranks I could in all of the above.

In rift i was rank 6 and then 8 when the new patch came out, in Aion I got Commander rank (ended up buying a whole new PC due to lag, damn that game!!), in AOC I think I just died a lot while trying to storm a castle myself  on my rhino mount and unfortunately GWs's PVP didn't hold me so I gave up on that, although the WvWvW was very fun.

Again due to me swapping PCs I don't have many screenshots of my game play, I have a few below of my time in GW2 though. I hit the release so hard with a couple of friends and the backing of my guild TDA (The Dark Alliance) I got max level in 2 days and was amongst the first to level 80.

     
            My first completed dungeon                                    My leveling partners, Knutti and Fiets

                     My Warrior                                                       The first huge Dragon I found

Anyway enough about games for a while and a little about me.

I'm a 24 year old IT Analyst working for a national law firm, I have been working there for 4 years now and I'm a making nice progress in my working career. I've always had a positive head on my shoulders when it comes to work and always try to go above and beyond when tasked with any challenge.

In my personal life I have a loving family which are 100 miles away, my girlfriends family and a good bunch of friends for support.



Here is a picture of myself and my Fiancée :) In case you were wondering I'm on the right :)

My baby boy and I, he is learning well.



Hopefully you've enjoyed a little insight into me, my gaming past and my personality. The following posts will be very orientated around Final Fantasy XIV and my journey with my Monk to be, Ratha Xiv. 

Below is a picture I took during the last Phase 3 beta. This is with Lily Mae (http://vanishedsun.wordpress.com/)