FFXIV: Fishing Frenzy and Net Troubles
After reading a recent interview from Yoshi-P, where he’s confirmed that battle classes and crafting classes all get the same Mentor status, I decided to change my plans and focus on achieving what I needed to finish the crafting track. I’m far closer to those requirements than I am to 1000 dungeons and 300 commendations.
Fishing Fun
One of those requirements for Mentorship is to gather 300 collectables. I’d attempted gathering collectables before on miner when I just happened to see that strange etheral node pop while I was mining normal stuff. Every time I tried, though, I failed to get anything at all. Part of that could have been that I was underleveled or that I just didn’t have the proper gear. Either way, I was turned off from gathering collectables thinking it was something I wouldn’t be able to obtain until much later.
So I did some research and discovered that fishing was a great way to get collectables. My fishing class has been lagging behind my other two gathering classes mostly because I didn’t understand collectables and how fast I could level this class if I put my mind to it. Thankfully, even if the collectable isn’t high enough quality to turn in for scrips or experience, it still counts as a collectable for the achievement. So I just downgrade the quality later and sell the fish off when I can’t turn them in towards scrips.
For the record, I am now a level 59 Fisher (I started at level 54 on Friday)! And that’s with all sorts of Internet issues and down time this weekend.
Net Woes
So I spent my Single’s Awareness Day (Valentine’s Day) with some strange guy at my house. Okay… no, not really. It was just a cable guy and only for about 20 mins. But still. 🙂
Since Thursday night, I’d noticed that the state of my Internet was degrading badly. I’d hit lag spikes in dungeons, and started getting mysteriously booted out of the game. The trouble usually began in the evening, and it began to consistently grow worse. Friday night, I couldn’t log in between 8pm and midnight. It cleared up enough to do some fishing, but with lag. Saturday was okay until about 6pm, when the game started lagging, then disconnecting, and finally the net just went out all together.
Seeing I haven’t been impressed with Time Warner’s previous support experiences, I almost didn’t even try to call them. I figured something was funky with the cold and in the lines. But I’m glad I did call.
I spent about 40 mins troubleshooting on the phone. The lady was really nice, and we went through all the power cycling and normal things they make you do, even though you’ve already tried these things before calling. She confirmed there was a super weak signal to my modem, and set me up for a tech visit on Sunday (which was surprising and nice, seeing that was the next day and I wouldn’t have to take time off work to do this).
So the tech shows up the next day, and he was super nice. Once he saw that I understood the basics of networking, he didn’t talk down to me, and gave me straight answers. He tested my inside line and confirmed the readings were really bad. He tested the signal at the box outside, and they were worse there. After calling in another fellow, they finally determined that one of the outside ports at the box had gone bad. Switching my port fixed the issue, but he warned that this often meant the second port was going to corrupt in due time, so he said he’d put in a call to get those fixed for me.
I was back up on the net, ready to roll for Crystal Tower Sunday! And fishing went smooth last night, not a problem since. Thank goodness!
FC Fun
This weekened saw an upswing in new membership for our FC, which is always great! We’ve had a slow trickle of new members come in over the past week or so, but this weekend added about 3-4 new people. They all seem really nice and like they will be a good fit for us and them.
We worked on some dungeons for relics, coached a new tank through Syrcus Tower, and had a few good CT runs in general. With the new patch dropping in about a week, I hope we’ll see some of our dormant members return soon. FFXIV seems to be the kind of game where people take breaks between the patches, which I do understand. I just still have way too much to finish to take a break!
