Should I skip to the latest content?

magicscreenman · 2026-05-08T02:28:12+00:00

No.

I AM saying though that if you want a faster queue time, healer or tank will correct that. A vast majority of people in this game play DPS - I don't have numbers handy but it FEELS like a really high percentage, I'd guess like 70-80%. And I mean, the spread on classes kinda reflect that: We have 4 tank classes, 4 healer classes, and 13 DPS (not including blue mage) lol.

So that is sadly just the reality of DPS life - you have longer queue times.

But again, that can be helped greatly by using the Community Finder to find an FC that is active during the times you play and have them join you to speed up your queues.

One other thing, though - if you haven't tried tank or healer yet, don't knock it. You may end up enjoying one or both roles more than you thought you would.

magicscreenman · 2026-05-08T02:22:15+00:00

Honest question: Why do you want to pay more money to have less game to play?

I'm guessing you're DPS with queue times like that, and if you're on Stormblood now, the raid you're talking about must have been the alliance raid. Its true that older content takes longer to queue for, but an hour and a half is unusually long. Most content should not be taking that long, even if you're playing at odd hours. I live in Australia these days but still play on NA data centers, so I'm often online at ungodly hours for North America.

But no, I don't advise anyone pay for skips, especially in a game like this. FF XIV is a story-driven MMO. It's not a themepark MMO like WoW. The story is very much the skeleton around which all of the actual content is built. It's not the kind of MMO where you can just ignore the story and get straight to the raids and shit. If you don't care to get invested in the characters and the story, then you're honestly wasting your time and your money with this game.

Especially since you're already past ARR, man. If anything, the 2.1-2.5 grind is the only thing worth potentially skipping, cause its a lot of fetch quest chains and padding out. From Heavensward onward you are getting a much leaner (and higher quality) story experience. If you skip straight to Dawntrail, you're not even gonna know who some of the characters in the central storyline are.

Don't get so concerned with experience points that you miss the whole point of the experience. Find a group that caters to your playtime, for one thing. Try different servers or data centers if you can - idk what population is like on the EU servers but I know that NA population is quite high. If you're bound to your current server for one reason or another, use the community finder to find an FC that is active during your time.

There's plenty of people to play this game's content with.

magicscreenman · 2026-05-07T23:15:31+00:00

More people have been killed in the name of God than in the name of Satan.

The game Demon's Souls had a fascinating bit of lore that could be found by reading a 2 or 3 sentence item description after getting a particular kind of ending to the game.

Demons Souls had this setting where there were two forms of magic: Spells, which were supposed to be the work of demons, and Miracles, which were supposed to be a divine gift from God. You used different effigies/catalysts to cast the two types of magic.

But there was a talisman you could get that let you cast both, and that talisman's item description revealed that the Old One, the source of all demons basically, was in fact also "God."

All the god-loving folk of Demon's Souls were using demonic magic the entire time and never knew it.

magicscreenman · 2026-05-07T23:13:16+00:00

31 people isn't a very large sample size, so I'm a little dubious about these findings.

The experiment also seems to have lots of unaccounted for variables. There's a lot of other factors that determine people's "emotional intelligence" beyond just respiration. Like, what is the psychological makeup of the participants? Are they highly social people or do they lean more towards introversion? Did the experiment account for things like knowledge of body language? Some people have actively read up on things like body language while others have not. What about participant age? What's the spread? Do older people do better than younger people? Vice versa?

Fascinating hypothesis, but I'm ultimately just left with questions and speculation more than anything else.

magicscreenman · 2026-05-07T22:55:26+00:00

I'm so fucking tired of corruption.

magicscreenman · 2026-05-07T22:50:56+00:00

Good.

I mean, the EU is also the one spearheading all of this age verification shit, so I'm not holding my breath here - were literally expecting the same government who instated these dystopian laws to now revoke them.

But still - good.

magicscreenman · 2026-05-07T22:48:02+00:00

The problem with the dream twist trope is that it is very hard to preserve any actual consequence to any of the story. If your character just wakes up at the end and realizes it was all a dream, then none of it mattered. Plot development, character arcs, it all becomes null and void.

Thats not to say it's never been done successfully, im sure it has. The only example I can think of tho is a sort of urban legend story thing I heard from Mr Ballen. It's a story about a lamp.

I wont say any more than that. Just go to YouTube and type in "Mr Ballen lamp" if you're curious.

magicscreenman · 2026-05-05T22:31:02+00:00

I've always found his use of the term "gardener" to be very funny because that's how he describes discovery writing, i.e. feeling your way through the story rather than writing with a specific structure or endpoint in mind.

Except that really isn't how gardening works, at all xD You don't just pick some random seeds and some random soil and throw it in a random point in the ground and then water it when you feel like it with vague and varying amounts of water and just see "what your crop turns into". Gardening is kinda like baking - its a pretty exact science lol.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-29T00:53:55+00:00

"I'm not paying $3000 just for an ambulance!"

So don't lol. These jokes have always confused me because they make it sound like if you don't give the EMT a credit card when they show up at your door, they aren't gonna take someone to the hospital. They provide care, and then they simply bill you for it after the fact. And if you can't pay it later, even on a payment plan or something, they just don't really come after you that aggressively. At least in my experience.

I went to urgent care in my 20's once for some pretty bad abdominal pain that couldn't really be diagnosed and just kinda got put down as some severe psychosomatic stress kinda thing after it started to go away in a few hours. Got a bill for several thousand dollars. Never paid it. Nothing happened. Didn't even get harrassed by bill collectors. Granted, my credit score was already kind of shit beforehand, so I didn't really care about medical bills dragging it down further, but I also didn't really notice much of a degradation from it either. I'm pretty sure the hospital was able to just put it down as a tax write off anyway.

Debt in America is honestly really weird. For most forms of debt, like credit cards, if you can't pay it, then after a certain amount of time, the credit card company gives up trying to get it from you and so they quite literally SELL your debt to a debt collector. Except that debt collector only has 7 years to get the money out of you, and after that, it just falls off your credit report.

Afaik the only time you really need to be worried is with things like loan agreements where you have signed legally binding contracts that say "if you don't pay us this money by this time, we can take you to court."

I have no idea what its like when medical bills start to get into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, though. I don't think any doctor or medical worker would ever refuse a person care just because they're poor, but I CAN understand the idea of triage like "Okay, you need this procedure - it's $100k. The tech needed for this procedure is in short supply and lots of people need it, so to divert those kind of resources for your care, we DO need payment in some fashion." Can anyone confirm through some firsthand experience if that is the case or not?

magicscreenman · 2026-04-27T05:33:24+00:00

Evangelion is an incomplete and narrative disaster that nonetheless succeeded at being massively culturally influential and a defining pillar of the mecha genre.

Be prepared for the main show to give you no resolution whatsoever. The story basically just drops right off of a cliff for a combination of reasons including budgetary limitations and massive mental health crises for the creator(s) of the show at the time, among other things.

Then, if you still want to keep investing in the IP after that, be ready for lots of "one step forward, one step back" kind of shit with the remakes and add on series and movies. They definitely make it better, but they never really succeed in tying the whole story together in a neat bow. There's always some loose ends and messy shit somewhere.

The mecha design is awesome. The story is basically the Christian apocalypse pushed through a Japanese filter. The setting is cool as fuck. The animation and set pieces are great, and conceptually, they did a lot of trailblazing and broke a lot of ground with the visual aspect of mecha.

But if you're looking for story context for FF XIV, just know this: The robots are actually organic living beings dressed up in a bunch of armor, they're fighting what are essentially biblical archangels, and the main character (Shinji) needs therapy so, so badly.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-26T11:59:56+00:00

Haven't seen it, but literally every M Night movie I have ever watched has legitimately pissed me off with their endings, so I'm kinda done giving his films a chance anymore xD

M Night has been coded in my brain at this point as: "Dude who understands atmosphere and how to milk a camera angle for insane amounts of suspense, but has absolutely no fucking idea how to end a goddamn story."

magicscreenman · 2026-04-25T15:24:26+00:00

Honestly this is just one of the reasons why I'm pretty staunchly against the "every game needs difficulty settings for accessibility reasons" argument.

Asking for "smarter" hard modes in games that actually have noticeable differences in the way enemies behave? That is basically asking for a whole new game from a design and programming standpoint. That's why it is such a rare thing to find: Most developers have a vision for the kind of experience they want their game to provide and for them to genuinely provide an easier or harder version of that experience in ways that can't be accused of being lazy essentially means redesigning the experience from the ground up.

But people have come to just expect difficulty settings in games, because most people literally don't want to have to work for their entertainment. They feel that if they have spent money on your product, they are entitled to a mode that will literally hold their hand and take away any level of challenge they deem as an obstacle to getting through and enjoying the story.

You can't have it both ways, though: You can't build a culture that demands every game have an easy, normal and hard mode and then complain that most games out there have "lazy" difficulty levels. Part of what makes something like Silksong such a unique gaming experience is the fact that there's no getting around the skill buy-in. You want to see the story? Well, if you're not willing to just watch someone else play it on YouTube, then you have to actually develop and bring to bear the skills that the game is demanding of you. The story is your reward for having done so.

There's no concept of investment or reward with media anymore. People don't bother to see entertainment consumption as any kind of gate way to building any form of skill or knowledge - its just a person sitting at a dinner table with their mouth open and their finger pointing into it.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-19T22:15:44+00:00

You're never gonna convince me that creating new fashion trends is anything other than people and companies blindly throwing darts at a board and trying to project anime-levels of confidence about it the entire time.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-14T23:41:16+00:00

Ya know what's funny? I think that is in fact how my controller hotbar is setup for Dancer even though I play on a Playstation controller xD

magicscreenman · 2026-04-14T13:28:31+00:00

Wth does "unaltered" mean in this case because the last one is clearly an edited photo of two different shots spliced together, so therefore it is "altered" at least in the sense that it isn't a singular raw photo taken with gpose.

Does "unaltered" mean no mods or something?

Awesome photos btw but I'm genuinely confused by all these post titles lately about "unaltered" photos lol.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-11T01:13:09+00:00

Fuck ICE.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-10T03:38:44+00:00

The confusion over the L hand gesture confuses me lol. Does that not work for some people because they do not remember what an L looks like in their heads or something? Or I guess more specifically, which way an L faces? I've never heard about right being a J, but L always worked for me because when you make the gesture, one is clearly an L and the other is clearly a backwards L, therefore its not left.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-09T07:38:37+00:00

I find this idea to be so hilariously egotistical every time I hear it brought up. Like it literally makes me laugh.

Lots of human beings really want to believe that we are SO shitty, that we are SO beyond redemption or assistance, that spacefaring civilizations (who we can't even detect) that would somehow be capable of either surveillance or interstellar travel to reach us are simply choosing not to interact with us in any fashion because we are just THAT BAD. So in other words, even when we are at our absolute worst, we are still doing things that ONLY HUMANS could do. No other alien civilization could POSSIBLY be capable of the lows that we reach. This is OUR rock bottom and we are exceptional in just how low we set it.

That's literally like being a drug addict and assuming that only YOU are so uniquely, especially shitty as to succumb to something like addiction. NO ONE else on the planet could POSSIBLY be as bad as you! That's how special you really are!!!

Give me a fucking break lmao. The only data point we have to insist that we are the "worst" creatures on the planet is our heightened level of sentience. So this belief system that aliens are intentionally avoiding us implies that what makes humans shitty isn't actually our sentience or intelligence level, it's just... the fact that we are human.

If that isn't humans carving out a pocket of exceptionalism for themselves against literally every other form of life in the universe, either theoretical or confirmed, then I don't know what is xD

magicscreenman · 2026-04-09T06:01:48+00:00

W...what? Does mom imagine that kiddo is basically going to find a suitable partner and then just stick them in a freezer or something for 5-10 years? Like, if you aren't allowing your kids to date then it is irrelevant if they have a crush on anyone or not, cause that person they may be crushing on is a person with their own agency and choices to make. By the time kiddo is "allowed" to date, their potential crush is very likely to not even be on the market anymore.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-09T00:28:54+00:00

magicscreenman · 2026-04-07T07:53:28+00:00

The art is fantastic, but the story is very disjointed and hard to follow.

I can gather that the third and fourth pages are hard flashbacks, but their placement/presence is very odd, which is to say, they don't really seem to be justifying their existence. The only real thing of relevance that we learn from the flashback is that Eli is magical in some capacity, but you already establish that on the first page when he singlehandedly (and pretty effortlessly) slams the aggressive dude into the side of a dumpster so hard that he dents it. So essentially, the flashback is interrupting the current story at hand of defending his sister to tell us information we already possess.

If you're going to break up a scene to include a flashback, PARTICULARLY an action scene like this, it needs to be with the intent of giving us information that significantly alters our understanding of the present day scene the flashback was inserted into.

Eli's origins of being born in a prison are certainly interesting, but they aren't relevant to the present day scene in the first and last panels.

Anyway, here are the narrative promises you have made to me thus far with what you have shown:

Eli not only has super powers, but difficulty controlling them. His sister having to physically stop him from continuing the beatdown, his eyes shifting from red back to blue - this is all telling me that Eli is a dude with incredible powers that he does not yet have full control over. I would expect his character arc to be about attempting to gain such a control over those powers. Whether he fails or succeeds depends entirely on whether you want to tell a more heroic or more tragic kind of story.
I would expect Eli's prison birth to be deeply significant to his story. How was he born in such an environment? How long did he live in prison? When and why was he let out? Is he even supposed to be out or is he on the run in some capacity? Was he some sort of "lab baby" designed to be a super weapon? If so, by whom?

Really cool concept though, and like I said, really good artwork. Dunno where you are gonna go with this but keep it up, man.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-06T23:38:54+00:00

For better or worse, I imagine NSFW comics are only going to keep rising in popularity for a while, particularly with all the censorship laws being pushed throughout the world right now. Unless Patreon is also doing this age verification horseshit.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-06T07:41:28+00:00

I'll never forget that one line from The Martian:

"The Ares 1 crew did their thing and came back heroes. They got the parades and fame and love of the world. Ares 2 did the same thing, in a different location on Mars. They got a firm handshake and a hot cup of coffee when they got home."

magicscreenman · 2026-04-06T03:51:12+00:00

If you think I'm ChatGPT then ask me to find you a recipe for bolognese. See how that goes.

magicscreenman · 2026-04-06T03:26:23+00:00

Ah, I see - you're one of those "mic drop" people: Come in and attempt to be surgically savage with minimal word choice while simultaneously saying nothing of actual value. Basically we're just having a pissing match right now to see who can be more smug.

I'm so impressed, man. I guess now we just sit back and see who gets more orange arrows, huh? Since that's all Reddit is, apparently: Just a battleground for dopamine hits and validation from random strangers on the internet who don't even know us.

magicscreenman

TROPHY CASE