FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test Will Start on Sep. 1!

We would like to take this opportunity to provide an update regarding FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test, which was announced to be postponed on Aug. 31, 2010.

Along with the completion on investigation and correction of the critical issue, we have decided to begin FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test on Sep. 1, 2010 at 19:00 (PDT).

Starting on Sep. 1, 2010 at 19:00 (PDT), acquisition of registration code required for FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test will be available.

We are looking forward to your participation in FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test!

Also if you were in closed BETA open your client and download the recent patch!

Related posts:

1. FF14 Open Beta Postponed, But We Got a New Video!
2. Final Fantasy 14 Open Beta Starts…
3. Last Names For Your FF14 Character

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Post tags: FF14, final fantasy 14, new date, open beta, postponed, start date

So… it looks like we’re waiting. Here’s hoping it starts soon. But… while we wait… why don’t we check out video #6 in Eorzia – Making of a Realm. This one shows the music and an interview with the composer, Nobuo Uematsu.

Related posts:

1. Open Beta for FF14 to Start September 1st.
2. Final Fantasy 14 Open Beta Starts…
3. Making of FF14 – The Realm of Eorzia – Youtube Vids

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Post tags: making of Eorzia, open beta, postponed, video, youtube

Kraken Club

While made by Harrison Krix, he had a painter create the weathered worn look using iron powder and water based paint. It actually rusts because of this even though it’s made of resin. Check out his flickr account to see pictures of the steps he took to make it.

Light Staff

Now.. this one is awesome. Check out his blog for the steps he took to get to this amazing staff. Or check out his flickr account. Guess what he used for the long part of the staff.. a pool cue! Ha! Who’s jealous of the person who got this staff?

No related posts.

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Eorzia – The Making of a Realm #1

This one is about character creation, emotes, etc.

Eorzia – The Making of a Realm #2

This one shows the creation of the creatures and monsters.

Eorzia – The Making of a Realm #3

This one shows the equipment, weapons, shields, armor, etc.

Eorzia – The Making of a Realm #4

This one is about the world itself, creating backgrounds, and the enviroment.

Eorzia – The Making of a Realm #5

This one is about creating the cut scenes.

Related posts:

1. FF14 Open Beta Postponed, But We Got a New Video!
2. Open Beta for FF14 to Start September 1st.
3. Last Names For Your FF14 Character

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Post tags: Eorzia, FF14, final fantasy, final fantasy 14, the making of, videos, youtube

Closed BETA officially ends tomorrow (Aug 25th) and all of our characters will be deleted.

For those of you GoSers that don’t follow me on Twitter (and why not?!) Gray Fox gave me for our 2 year anniversary a pre-order of FF14 Collector’s Edition. Yep, we’re gamers. Anywho, have you seen what all you get with the collector’s edition? Check it out:

I get my very own onion helm. All my characters receive this in game item. The effect it gives is : Quickens recovery following KO. I just hope its for more than just a few seconds.

And, yes, it will look adorable on my Taru.. Lalafell. Cough, different races, different names…cough.

Along with that cool in game item I get these:

Early Access: I get to play 8 days prior to release.
Behind-The-Scenes DVD: I get a DVD that shows the makings of FF14. Pretty neato in my opinion. I think it’s at least an hour long. Or so I read somewhere.
Security Token: I get an authenticator! Now I don’t have to worry about gil farmers. Which silly enough if you do a search for FF14 6/10 sites that show up are for FF14 gil.
Travel Journal: A 160 page journal that includes concept art and a map. I guess it might be handy for writing down craft recipes… but that’s why I have alt-tab.
Right of Passage: Now this is silly. I get a certificate in the mail with my character’s name on it.
30 Days of Play: I get my first month of play included.
Guest Pass: And finally I get to give a guest pass for a friend to try it out. Unfortunately this has Gray Fox saying he’ll use this rather than purchase the game… How am I supposed to get him addicted if he doesn’t even purchase it!?

Pre-purchase yours.. we can be journal buddies… in the corner.. with no friends.. but at least we have each other!

UPDATE:

The details for the FINAL FANTASY XIV Open Beta Test are described below.
Operating Procedure Schedule: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 19:00 (PDT)
*The Open Beta Test will be online continuously for 24 hours a day.
*Maintenance and any other announcements will be posted accordingly.
*Information on testing dates and times will also be posted on the official FINAL FANTASY XIV Twitter feed.
http://twitter.com/FF_XIV_JP
http://twitter.com/FF_XIV_EN

http://twitter.com/FF_XIV_DE

http://twitter.com/FF_XIV_FR
Log-in Capacity:
During the initial stages of the beta test, the number of players allowed to be logged in at any given time will be limited, with capacity to gradually increase as adjustments are performed on server load. Should the maximum capacity already be reached when you attempt to log in, a message will appear indicating that the world is currently congested, and you will be asked to try again in a short while. At this time you will be placed on a waiting list in the order of attempted log-in time. To maintain your position on the waiting list, you must initiate the log-in procedure again within ten minutes of your first attempt.

Related posts:

1. Open Beta for FF14 to Start September 1st.
2. FF14 Open Beta Postponed, But We Got a New Video!
3. Final Fantasy 14 Character Creation E3 Video

© Kirei for A Gamer of Sorts Blog, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: authenticator, closed beta, collectors edition, dvd, FF14, guest pass, journal, onion helm, open beta, open beta date, pre order, security token, september

I can really see a nice change with this. You can change hair color, highlights, eyes, beauty marks, size, and even voice. You’ll see familiar hairstyles from FF11 so if you want to make a replica of your old character you certainly can. But with so many choices why would you limit yourself?

As you can tell from watching the video you first choose your race, sex, and choice on a clan. Clans have different markings and lore.

Try to enjoy the video, it doesn’t have everything that’s in BETA at the moment and they also hinted that they haven’t released all of the sexes or races yet… Which is either a line of bull to try to get players thinking they’re gonna add something new, or the more popular theory of male Mithras.

Skip to 1:47. And WOW could this girl make an uglier character?? I mean.. wow.

Related posts:

1. Final Fantasy 14 Open Beta Starts…
2. FF14 Open Beta Postponed, But We Got a New Video!
3. Open Beta for FF14 to Start September 1st.

© Kirei for A Gamer of Sorts Blog, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: character creation, e3, ff11, FF14, final fantasy 14, final fantasy online, video, WoW, youtube

For some reason it wouldn’t accept my first game’s data so some of the story was a little backwards, but I was excited to see Kaiden since he was the love choice of my character. Unfortunately he can’t be my new love choice as he’s apparently mad at me. And no offense to Jacob, but you sir are a poor man’s choice. They attempted to make him like Kaiden, but in my opinion failed. So that’s what I’ve been up to. I haven’t played too much HoN lately because a lot of other games have fallen into my lap.

With Jon’s homecoming a few months ago he received a PS3. For some reason I despised looking at it. It’s odd how I’ve developed a sense of Xbox360 fanboyism. Before, my consoles lived harmoniously together, my PS2 parallel to my Xbox.  But for some reason.. this PS3 disgusted me. In an effort to get me over this Jon purchased Little Big Planet knowing my love for customization and building. We’ve only just started and my hatred is beginning to slow.

Speaking of Little Big Planet, anyone know how I can get the Final Fantasy outfits that I see screenshots of?

No related posts.

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Post tags: fanboys, kaiden, mass effect 2, ps3, xbox360

Whenever I get asked about doing a guest post for my blog 9/10 I have to provide a list of things that I need them to sign up for. Now, the list I send out includes things for my blog specifically, but I thought I would provide a wider range of items for the list below that are a good idea for you to sign up for when you start blogging.

Social Media Platforms
Social Media allows you to share your content easily.

Twitter

Everyone is on Twitter. Well, just about. Twitter offers yourself so much exposure. When you tweet a post you not only share it with your followers, but if they retweet it they share it with all of their followers too and so on and so on. It’s a huge marketing tool to where some “pro” bloggers even have sponsored tweets. Companies will pay them to tweet an advertisement of their company. That’s how big it is. Even if you only use a Twitter plugin to tweet when you post a new article it’s still a useful tool.

Facebook

This is something, in my opinion, optional. I don’t use Facebook as I fear a lonely life of Farmville addiction. I have seen others use their Facebook accounts very well with their sites and have gained followers from Facebook. I have also seen people feel this was too much of an evasion of privacy and later regretted allowing people they didn’t know into their facebook lives. So the choice is up to you.

Commenting Systems
One way to gain followers is by posting on other blogs in your niche. There are many different commenting systems and while most have come with the times and allows you to log on with your Twitter/Facebook account some do not.

Gravatar

Sign up and forget about it. Gravatar is a globally recognized avatar on supported sites. It automatically shows the avatar you’ve selected whenever you enter your email address for comments. I also use it on my site for the author box at the bottom of every post. It’s nice for guest posters as I don’t have to upload more than I have to. It also allows you to have a familiar face among many blogs that people will start to recognize.

Disqus

Disqus is a commenting system that I used to use on this site. (Nothing bad about it, this theme just makes it look ugly and I’m trying to get it back.) Disqus is fairly popular and unless you want to use your Twitter/Facebook login for it I suggest you sign up for an account.

Intense Debate

Intense Debate is like Disqus, just another commenting system. Like Disqus you can log in with your Twitter/Facebook accounts.

Stats and Tracking
Tracking visitors, RSS subscribers, and site up time is essential for keeping track of what works and what doesn’t.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the go to for visitor tracking. Everyone uses it. Some use more than one tracking tool and compare the two because while it may be the most popular there are times when it’s not the most accurate. Even if you do choose to go to another tracking site you should still pick up analytics for the backup.

FeedBurner

Google Feedburner allows you to keep track of RSS subscribers and add additional items to your feeds including ads, comment counts, social media, and others. It also allows you to customize the look and make your feeds compatible with various feed readers.

SiteUptime

If you are self-hosting your blog it’s a good idea to get a separate monitoring system so you know the up time of your site. I use SiteUptime, they provide a free service that will check my site every hour and will send me an email when it’s down. For me it’s a nice reminder that I have 99% up time each month.

WordPress Plugins
You may not be on this platform, but these are essential if you decide to take the dive and go self-hosted with WordPress.

SEO

I personally use All-In-One-SEO plugin. There is both a free version and a paid version. It’s fairly “out-of-the-box” with minimal setup required. It automatically inserts META tags into your posts, but offers you the choice to create your own. It’s also nice that I can change the title for search engines without actually changing the title of the post or the URL. So for search engines I may have a “Nerf Changes to Priests” while my actual title is “OMG WHY BLIZZARD WHY?!”

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a great way to get indexed by google. Google XML Sitemaps keeps up your sitemap automatically leaving a no fuss forget about it plugin that does wonders for traffic.

Social Media Submitters

Since I mentioned how popular Twitter and Facebook are now a days you should probably have some social media icons around to help people share on their favorite platform. Sexy Bookmarks is a popular one that shows at the bottom of every post. GetSocial is another that I see often. It follows the post as the reader scrolls down.

There are many more that people consider “essential,” but I tried to keep my opinion out of it and throw in some general items. Have any more that you’d like to share? Comment below!

Related posts:

1. So You Want To Blog? So Do It!

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Post tags: analytics, beginner, blogging, facebook, feedburner, google, gravatar, sitemap, social media, twitter

- Greatly optimized client performance on all systems
- Optimized various interfaces to run more efficiently (9000% more efficient!)
- Fixed an issue causing F6 to re-set the position of the scoreboard
- Fixed various crashes that could occur during gameplay
- Fixed experience popups to off-set from gold popups, such that they do not overlap
- Added a new music track to Caldavar, entitled “Encounter at the River”
- Fixed in game match stats screen to display the correct XP/Min, such that it will not calculate time spent playing after reaching level 25
- Fixed a crash that could occur when exiting the game
- Fixed an issue causing FPS hitching when new music is loaded
- Added hero selection announcements for bubbles, chipper, doctor repulsor, gauntlet, and tundra
- Pre-match time for all game modes changed from 1 minute 15 seconds to 1 minute 30 seconds
- Fixed several interface crashes
- Fixed advanced game mode filter on public game interface to correctly save values.
- Fixed animations getting stuck when rewinding replays
- Fixed rewinding tree deaths in replays
- Fixed projectile orientations
- Fixed attacking buildings and towers without sight of that building or tower
- Fixed duration of deny animation glow

- During modes that use alternating pick (Banning Draft, Banning Pick, etc), once a player selects their hero it will instantly switch to the other team (rather than waiting the remaining time)
* Each player now has 40 seconds to select their hero, from 30
* Transition time between banning and picking is now 15 seconds, from 20
* The time after the hero picks has been reduced from 2 minutes to 45 seconds
- Hero selection time in all pick reduced from 2 minutes to 1 minute

== Mac Bug Fixes ==

- Fixed a crash in OS X when a user quits by closing the HoN window
- Limit AA to 4x on OS X client to avoid all white/black screens caused by higher settings

== Items ==

New Item – Striders
- New boots added to the Initiation shop
- Marchers + 300 (Recipe)
- 50 Movespeed. No other bonuses.
- When out of combat for 6 seconds, increases movespeed by 100 over the next 2 seconds, for a total of +150 movement speed (including the base).
- Bonus movespeed is removed when the owner takes damage, casts a spell, attacks, or uses an item.
* Using Non-combat items such as Wards, Bottle, Mana, or Health Potions will not remove the bonus speed

Blood Chalice
- Now requires a Mark of the Novice (+3 int) and Crushing Claws (+3 str) instead of a Scarab, granting +3 Str/Int
- Grants 150 mana for 150 health. Mana is no longer lost after a duration
- If an enemy hero dies within 15 seconds and 700 AOE of the user, the user is healed for 150 as the chalice uses the enemy’s spilt blood to pay the debt.
- Cooldown lowered from 35s to 25s

Nullstone
- AOE abilities (Such as Witch Slayer‘s Graveyard / Pyromancer‘s Phoenix Wave) no longer proc Nullstone when clicking directly on a target

Savage Mace
- Illusions will no longer proc a ministun. They still can get the +100 damage.

Stormspirit
- Now only ‘stuns’ allies, letting them queue up abilities. Enemies it is used on can not queue up abilities or items while cycloned.

== Heroes ==

- Updated many recommended items
- Reworked how many projectile-based abilities interact with eachother
* This fixes strange behavior when two skills that try to move a unit interact, such as a charging Kraken getting hooked by Devourer who gets tossed by Pebbles

Flint Beastwood
- New Hellbourne Agi hero, based on DotA’s Sniper
- Skills:
* Explosive Flare – Deals damage in an area immediately, then gives vision over that area and slows/reveals any enemies who come within the vicinity
* Hollowpoint Shells – Gives a chance that an auto-attack will deal bonus damage and apply a mini-stun
* Deadeye – Increases attack range
* Money Shot – Channels for a brief time then fires a massive shot, dealing high damage at a long range to a single target

Chronos
- Damage from Curse of Ages proc from 20/40/60/80 Magic to 15/30/45/60 Physical

Doctor Repulsor
- Increased vision range on first skill to from 300 to 800
- Fixed an issue with sounds on the first skill where some super human players could hear high frequencies
- Radius of tree killing on ult lowered from 150 to 100
- No longer disarmed while using ult

Engineer
- Turret is now killable, dies in 3 hits. Units can only get hit a maximum of 8 times, down from 10

Forsaken Archer
- Crippling Volley range from awful/awful/decent/800 to 800 at all levels
- Crippling Volley immobilize time from 1.75/2/2.25/2.5 to 1/1.5/2/2.5
- Skeletons no longer apply the DoT

Gladiator
- Flagellation will no longer deal double bonus damage to buildings
- The visual effect on Call to Arms now matches the actual area
- Damage taken from Call to Arms is now spread over 5/6/7 seconds instead of instant
- Increased speed of Call to Arms from 650 to 750

Nymphora
- Nymphora’s Zeal damage from 55/90/130/160 to 50/85/120/155
- Nymphora’s Zeal stun duration from 1/1.3/1.6/2 to 0.75/1/1.25/1.5

Rampage
- Can now target and affect Magic Immune heroes with all of his abilities

Slither
- Poison Spray range from 1000 at all levels to 600/725/850/1000

Soulstealer
- Cast time for Soul Burst increased from 1s to 1.4s

Tundra
- Ranged pet attack cooldown from 1.5s to 1s
- Coldblooded replaced with Cold Shoulder
* 300,400,500,600 Range, 40 Manacost, 12s cooldown
* Last winter, Tundra had two distant relatives teach him how to charge his enemies correctly, coating them in ice on contact. The ice makes them easier to hit, increasing everyone’s attack speed against that target.
* On use, charges the target, dealing Tundra‘s Attack Damage on impact. Applies Cold Shoulder to them for 8 seconds.
* Cold Shoulder Effects: Increases attackspeed against this target by 15/30/45/60
* Attackspeed will linger for 2 seconds after changing targets
* The Brothers of cold send their regards…

Vindicator
- Silence aura will no longer be disabled by skills like Devourer‘s hook, Chronos‘ ult, Pebbles‘ Chuck, etc

Related posts:

1. 3.5 Heroes of Newerth Patch Notes
2. Heroes of Newerth 1.0.7 Patch Notes
3. Heroes of Newerth Patch 1.0.2 Notes

© Kirei for A Gamer of Sorts Blog, 2010. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1.0.9, flint beastwood, Heroes of Newerth, hon, patch notes