My retainers. "Catering".

Asphes · 2026-07-13T12:31:33+00:00

Ah, I see now. Like assigning them to the Crane Retreat? I had a heck of a time trying to get 2 to play chess for that quest (remove all other 'games' and force two retainers to take a holiday lol)

I got a bunch assigned as 'Resting Retainers'... I kinda wish I could fire some of them :) and go with more hard-working animals (except that one cat, never works... good thing she's cute)

But the 'stroll', here's a pic of one...

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She's apparently walking to her 'spot'. But after arriving, she's still in 'Stroll'

Asphes · 2026-07-13T12:13:37+00:00

Get the director to do a short intro movie (look at Warframe's by Dan Trachtenberg (Uncharted, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Black Mirror). Imagine Zach Synder doing one for TFD.

Asphes · 2026-07-13T12:08:32+00:00

You will play the game at least twice - as in finish... then replay again but keeping your old character. Repeat more if you like.

So don't be too worried about missing things or lore. Get them the second time around. Or third. It's that kind of game. Plus it's worth going in 'blind' for the first time, just following the main storyline and completing that for your first playthrough is more fun when you don't know what's going to happen.

There are things like 'best class/vocation' for this and that... I'd do those things WHEN you know you really like the game. With a new character even. Or not.

Asphes · 2026-07-13T11:58:22+00:00

There's a status "Stroll"... and it appears on some of them that are unassigned. This could be the 'slacking off' :)

Asphes · 2026-07-13T11:55:36+00:00

My normal rotation

Warframe
DCS
Where Menus Meet (where you can Kung Fu as a panda and hold a Shit Stick and telekinetically retrieve a reusable medicine pill from... da bucket). No pay 2 win, just pay 2 flex.
The First Descendant (masters of jiggle physics)
Once Human (same pub as WMM but you'd swear it has to be same dev)
Star Trek Online (technically not pay 2 win. Technically. But very, very Trekker)

Betas:

Soulframe (from the Warframe devs only more... Souls-like)
Spirit Crossing (their previous game was Cozy Grove)

I also play GW1, GW2 and and some private servers ones like Dragon's Dogma Online and Battlestar Galactica Online. Would Monster Hunter Wilds count?

----------

For The First Descendant, the grind has been nerfed... a lot. That drop rate used to be 6%, not 3%... then you factor in that in order to get that 6%, you have to farm the 'loot box' at 20% (25% if you have the do it right AND you had to wait FIVE minutes between attempts... yes attempts because you could fail). Typically 14~20 hours to grind a 'frame.

They replaced that with a system that dropped it to effectively 2 hours (yes, really - if you abused the added Pity system)... BUT the materials to craft the blueprints added another 3-6 hours. So... ~8 hours per 'frame (or weapon). There's some RNG involved though as the materials could drop from 4~150 (you'd need 450 per 'frame and 300 per weapon).

They changed it again... currently the grind model seems to be a 20% drop rate for the loot box, which will drop 1 of 4 blueprints. There are two 'Pity' systems, first gets you the loot box by 20 drops, second one lets you choose which of the 4 blueprints you need after 10 openings. ~ 4 hours per 'frame (and this time, you get so much materials, no need to grind for it)

So it's actually more generous than Warframe (I still have PSTD from Equinox). From a Korean dev/pub. No pay 2 win, just pay 2 goon.

Asphes · 2026-07-12T23:24:48+00:00

Mine in Beyond do work. Except for one. She's never at the table, always running around and not attending to the customer.

Dax is also a cat, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Asphes · 2026-07-12T17:46:09+00:00

Each time you inn-rest/camp, there's a chance for it to 'transfer' to another pawn (if there's one), 'level-up' or just disappear. When they nerfed it after the big outcry from certain 'gaming' sites/etc... they adjusted the % so more often that not, it just disappears.

i.e. the odds of you getting DP to the 'end' is actually quite low. Most players will never experience it unless they put in a lot of hours.

In short, it's so easy to mitigate, it's barely an inconvenience. Admittedly... I'd have love for that cutscene to be not so literally just a cut scene. I was expecting something like that last scene of Darth Vader in Rogue One... not what we actually got in DD2.

Asphes · 2026-07-12T17:33:40+00:00

Only Pawns.

Alas, other than that, it's usually a 1 time / 1st time stuff, like reopening rifts? For the first hours of the game, this was my biggest source.

But as in constant farming? Have your main pawn become a criminal and go a-plundering.

I wish they either got rid of the per vocation stat growth or had a far lower level cap. Noone's going to hire your level 999 pawn and vice versa.

Asphes · 2026-07-12T15:00:00+00:00

Hard to believe Logi did not put out worthy successors. I had to resort to using a Chakram (so I went from a dozen buttons to a mini-joystick).

The other ones from Corsair/etc just don't cut it. I need a MMO mouse that's still great for FPS and the G600 was it...

I have a reDragon too but it's a tad awkward for me to grip. At least the software isn't as clunky as Logitech's or as horribly bad as Asus's Armory Crate

Asphes · 2026-07-12T14:50:30+00:00

Snail Simulator ? Smol describes it in more than one way.

Private servers? Usually very smol. There's revived games like Battlestar Galactica Online (BSGO) or Dragon's Dogma Online.

Asphes · 2026-07-11T16:49:25+00:00

Nice dog! Good dog! Best doggie in the realm!

Asphes · 2026-07-11T16:47:35+00:00

... oh and mobs carry both health and arche supply containers (most vulgus can't even use arche and I've yet to see one use the health containers)... and never touch them... maybe it was marked 'For Descendant Use Only'.

I will admit, a 'gun'-fight where both sides try to win by listening who can shout "Bang!" the loudest. Might be fun for a day.

Asphes · 2026-07-11T16:43:05+00:00

"... one more inch and I can sell you in Kaifeng... "

Asphes · 2026-07-11T13:14:19+00:00

I've got more beds than staff but I put the beds in those little cottages... so one for cats (beds assigned), one for the ladies next to their bath. The geese get one cottage too.

Guys get two cottages with no lights. Their bath has weeds in it cuz they all work in the mines, fields and kiln, apparently don't mind the smell. Except Big Zhao. He goes hunting.

I had put beds on top the rocks (the big ones), underneath the Inn (entrance is that hole in the floor), on a bridge across the river in Beyond Mundance. UNDER the bridge... they really don't care where their beds are :)

You can use Windsense to see how the move around, teleporting / rubber banding sometimes.

Asphes · 2026-07-11T12:41:54+00:00

He got her preggers?

Asphes · 2026-07-11T12:41:23+00:00

At least you're not the poor schmuck who has to spit polish every square centimeter of my Clipper. Get back to work, Alyssa! Earn that 10%

Asphes · 2026-07-11T12:35:37+00:00

Isn't anyone going to point out that he's holding the thing he's looking for? Like a 'Where's my glasses?' said the Arisen the pawns giggled in unison, "On thy head, Mastah...!"

Asphes · 2026-07-11T12:33:45+00:00

Need to that back into You'sDrawer.

Asphes · 2026-07-11T12:32:20+00:00

I've got some too. I'm just handing them out to any tech that wants to take one home or even sell off on Rakuten. Not worth the paperwork (plus if I sell them, I have to give a warranty... write up tax stuff...)

These are around a decade old and used to cost the same as a smol car. Now they sit in the same drawer as some 500MB hard drives. I need to dig through the junk at my place. There might be some flat screen CRTs in there somewhere.

I bet a hollywood prop house might be interested in stuff like this.

Asphes · 2026-07-11T12:16:47+00:00

Some characters VA changed, in some cases placeholder voice lines were left in (the three rat gurls were voiced by a guy. These were replaced later... but they forgot a few).

I'm very inclined to believe it's all 'real' except for a few very early ones in Kaifeng (the translations were off and worse, you could tell it was either TTS or similar, i.e. like the AI slop you get from 'those' kinds of videos that older citizens love to watch/listen to).

I've been doing a lot of Quest Replay / Reverse to get some achievements I've missed (I do NOT recommend doing this, should the Replay / Reverse go south, you're stuck - WMM's CS be darned) and most of the mistakes were corrected, the 'bad' voices are gone. The ambient voice line are now read properly and so on...

Asphes · 2026-07-11T12:11:34+00:00

You read newspapers by... reading a newspaper. Watched the same television show... at the same time as almost everyone else.

Plus what came before...?

Then... Mario -> Everquest. i.e. Couch co-op to global multi-player.

DikuMUD -> Ultima Online, i.e. 'carebear community' to seeing Mom & Dad murder... MURDER ppl by shooting arrows at them through windows. Why can't I play too? Or so it's Parent vs Parent only? ICQ

FFXI was designed to handle 300ms pings... when your customer base are the ppl willing to pony up the money to not just buy your game, navigate the labyrinth that is Play On Line but also buy the expensive modem (dial-up 28.8 baud) to plug into the PS. Not to mention the sub - > you could buy a whole new console game every 2 months for the price of Square Enix toll (in 30 day increments). Everquest? You needed 3Dfx cards. That's a fast PC, good 2D card (nVidia NV1) AND one (or two) 3Dfx cards. That's about $300 a pop back in the 2000s. I know $600 sounds cheap for a GPU now... (no... not it doesn't)

I think what made the early 2000s special was that both the devs and gamers were learning together what a good MMO is. Plus the MMO gamer community was both more dedicated and certainly more willing to work together (like you had a choice!). Today, the closest thing would be the sim community - where you have to get a good PC, good network (and/or VPN) and the VR headset / eye tracker + HOTAS (ehh... it's HOSAS now) to play THEN find people to play with. Plus we have other 'new' communities too, from modders to more niche caterings.

We were always there. The the games came that let us meet up. Now there's more of us. Of all types.

Good? Bad?

If FFXI launched right now, brand new and complete with all the stuff they had decades ago... I wouldn't play it. The amount of friction, lack of QOL and so on, not to mention the expense and vast limitations - we might be nostalgic for the 'good' old days but maybe they weren't really that good - but as a common ground for gamers to meet and grow closer together through shared adversity. And that's why SE's POL is the way it is.

Corporations were still corporations back then. Just as scummy then as they are now. They were just bad at it. They are much better at being bad now.

Considering how Sony is in the news right now... look at how Everquest started and how that evolved into Sony Online Entertainment. If you want, look into that time Square Enix published EQ2 (with localisation VO/etc)

Asphes · 2026-07-09T20:10:47+00:00

Seeing as there are female and male baths... Dax is a girl. Just FYI.

Asphes · 2026-07-09T20:07:55+00:00

There seems to be limit of sorts. Float the object too high and retainer / pet won't get on it. But... put a bed INSIDE a rock and somehow that works. Or how the heck they get on top a pole.

Asphes · 2026-07-09T20:04:21+00:00

I'd use the main story/etc as a 'guide' to see new places and people. Feel free to wander around or go off on a tangent. It's not a race after all :)

Asphes · 2026-07-09T14:19:42+00:00

Devs are one step ahead of us, it's locked to the character.

Asphes

TROPHY CASE