New adventures killing stuff

I have mostly been doing quests with Vivacia. She had her 10th level birthday today! Yatta! She celebrated with a shower in this lovely waterfall.

I have noticed that a lot of quests are "kill 5 of this kind and run back". It's a bit underwhelming, story-wise. There was a cool event with the chick in red boots and her little lallafel friend and this sequence was actually voiced! But other than that, it's been a lot of standard running around killing 5 of each kind of creature that the world provides. When I see a new kind of creature I think "oh, lovely, I wonder how many of those I will be sent to kill?"

A bit of variation wouldn't have been the worst!

I also messed around with the graphics settings and de-pimped the combat graphics. I no longer look like a bloody fireworks factory when I shoot squirrels! Also, I updated my graphics routines, so hopefully the game will be a little prettier. I have a GeForce 650, it shouldn't look like vanilla WoW.

However, exiting the game to update my graphics routines... placed me in the tough situation of trying to get in again. Without a queue system. I keep getting the 1017 error when I try to log in. Try again later, buttface! Argh. Frustration.

Get the freaking server queue system up and running!

So far FFXIV is only grinding

Still no new weapons! In order to make myself a new axe, I need to become a better blacksmith. In order to become a better blacksmith, I need materials. In order to get materials, I need to mine. In order to mine I need to run around for hours and hours looking for mining nodes. Level 13 marauder and I still kick around with my level 1 waraxe of not-so-much doom!

See, it sucks so much I even got my pretty little behind kicked by a FLOWER! Yeah, that's right, a flower kicked my ass and it hurt bad!

So, to recap:

• My underwear is still broken, since I can't remove them and I haven't found any repair vendor yet.
• I still use my level 1 noob axe because crafting a new one is too hard and buying one is impossible since the market has no search function.
• I have trouble progressing with my crafting professions due to co-dependencies (simple recipies require materials from other professions, sometimes high-level stuff).
• Gathering materials is a chore since the yield is extremely random.
• I constantly need to run back to town to exchange items with my retainer since a) my inventory is too small to handle materials for multiple professions, b) there are no vendors at the quest camps that I can sell trash items to.

All in all, I am not terribly impressed with the game mechanics. The graphics is nice, and the world has a nice "feel" to it, and I love the look of the scenery and the characters... but sometimes the game simply feels too hard!

I have only played for a week, and instead of adventure this is about 99,9% grinding.

I must admit that I am somewhat disappointed. I had expected this to be more of a social adventure MMORPG and not so much mind-numbing grinding... yet, grinding seems to be the only way to progress. Even the quests are disappointing... almost the only kind of quest available are what the WoW-nerd would refer to as "dailies", ie repeatable quests that you can do over and over again.

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