The AIE Podcast #373 – Is it Endwalker Yet?

On this episode of The AIE Podcast…

    Hearth and Home for our Vikings
    This war is totally Galactic
    The Fleet is going Back to the Future
    LOTRO wants your housing opinions
    And, we have Abovan and maybe Durus who are here to talk to us about all things FFXIV

All that and more coming up right now…

Podcast Audio

Raw Video

Open
Welcome to episode #373 of the podcast celebrating you, the Alea Iacta Est gaming community, the die has been podcast. This is Mewkow: To my left is Tetsemi: – (catch phrase here). And to my right is Mkallah: (Hey, folks, there are fig cakes and pumpkin pastries in the guild kitchen). This week we are joined by special guests Durus and Abovan who is here to talk to us about AIE in FFXIV Welcome!

Ok, we’ll be digging into FFXIV shortly, but first, let’s cover this week’s news…

AIE News

Community
Mandatory Fun Nights

Where the fun is mandatory but the attendance is not.

Sunday – WoW Classic 2 pm Eastern
Sunday – STO 8:30 pm Eastern
Monday – GW2 9:30 pm Eastern
Tuesday – SWTOR 9 pm Eastern
Tuesday – FFXIV (Casual Raiding) 9:30 pm Eastern
Wednesday – FFXIV (Fun Night) 9:00 pm Eastern
Thursday – FFXIV (Progression Raiding) 9:30 pm Eastern
Friday – ESO 9 pm Eastern
Friday – FFXIV (Late Night Fun Night) 11:00 pm Eastern
Saturday – LotRO 8:30 pm Eastern
Saturday – FFXIV (Maps) 9:30 pm Eastern
Saturday – Noob Raid (WoW) 11 pm Eastern

Streaming and Guild Podcast News
New Overlords – http://www.newoverlords.com/

SWTOR Escape Pod Cast 396: 7.0 Prep Part 1
http://www.newoverlords.com/swtor-escape-pod-cast-396-7-0-prep-part-1/

Winter is coming and while we still have months to go we are prepping for 7.0 and you might want to too.

Working Class Nerds – https://workingclassnerdscom.wordpress.com/

Episode 121: Night Of The Old Republic

Well Nick is sick, So Marcus takes the reins! He is joined by Intisar and Vel! Intisar runs a blog called “This Week In Aurebesh” and both guests raid with Marcus on his nightmare team. They do a deep dive into discussing SWTOR’s 7.0 expansion. They also discuss the release of the new KOTOR teaser trailer. What will happen? Find out with all the tin foil hat theories!

This week in Aurebesh: http://www.generic-hero.com/ThisWeekinAurabesh/

Fleet Action Report

Fleet Action Report Ep 61 Enemies Part 8: Yet Another Enemies Episode
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G07ryRgyC4U

This week on Fleet Action Report, Nikodas and Grebog are back with another round of enemies. We cover in this episode, Sphere Builders, Malon, Kazon, and the Tzenkethi.

Boards and Swords – https://boardsandswords.com/blog?category=Boards%20%26%20Swords

Barkham Horror, Warhammer+ Initial Opinions, Zombicide the RPG? – Boards & Swords #180
https://boardsandswords.com/blog/bs180

Was Warhammer+ worth the $6? Is Star Wars Armada over? And what’s this about a Zombicide tabletop RPG?? All this and the usual hijinks.

NOMADS
The New World open beta was this weekend and a bunch of AIE testers were in there checking out the final updates and stressing the servers. The game will launch on September 28th. Keep an eye on the #new-world channel in Discord for details on server and faction for launch, which we will finalize as soon as we get confirmation on launch server names. AIE will be hitting the ground running to get our guild name claimed. There will be a bunch of AIE joining and a ton of fun for the launch!

The Hearth and Home update is coming to Valheim on September 16. It’s a good time to hop back in and update your hearth and home in the Viking after life! Along with the building changes, there will be updates to the way food and food stats work as well as some updates to weapons. You can find the AIE Valheim server information pinned in the Valheim channel on Discord.

WoW
Noob Raid plans to venture into Normal next Saturday if we have the composition for it. Watch guild chat around 10:45 pm server time for an announcement that invites are going out if you’d like to join the fun.

WoW Classic
SSC and TK are going live next Wednesday

SWTOR
In SWTOR game news, BioWare introduced personal loot recently. This coincided with removing Master Loot. Now, during Operations, other instanced content, and some World Bosses, loot goes right into our bags, including mounts, pets, and decorations. It feels a lot more like other MMOs in that respect. Out in the world, it’s been fun trying to predict how loot will behave. We think Bioware might not be exactly done tweaking the loot system. In fact, if we were to indulge in some irresponsible speculation, maybe they are making some system changes that will be needed for 7.0. Maybe!

The big news for the guild is that next week is Total Galactic War. Early in the week, we will pick a planet to go after by earning the highest number of Conquest points. It’s always fun, and sometimes even nail bitingly close. Conquest is a system of points you earn by doing different activities in the game. If you’d like to check out swtor, next week would be a great time to do it. Just get your character into the guild before 7AM on Tuesday in order for the points you earn to count!

Join us in a galaxy far, far away to have some fun and make some Conquest points!

ESO
We spent last week’s MFN splitting up in to groups to check out some dungeons

A four person dungeon team has formed. AC/DC runs on Monday nights and is working their way through clearing all of the instanced dungeons on normal and veteran

Being lead off cliffs by Dankinia

MFN’s activities happen each week and involve either zone clears, daily dungeon runs, and/or public dungeon clears.

More dungeon fun – either instanced or public dungeons next week

FFXIV
See Game Notes

STO
The fleet is welcoming many new temporal agents. If you find yourself going back to the future, just let us know and we can get you a fleet invite. You have until October 7th to create a temporal agent, which requires you to finish the first 6 mission story arc on a TOS captain to get your transponder. This basically tracks your progress and gives you some challenges to complete for rewards that will also unlock account wide rewards as well.

The fleet had taken a big step forward with the fleet holdings; both of the big holdings, colony and starbase, are tier IV. It took us 100,000 experience in each branch to unlock tier IV, but to move to tier V, we have to go to 250,000. I mention this as it will appear our progress is going slow, but in reality it is a big step and don’t get discouraged. We will get there with the steady progress everyone has been putting into the projects. I appreciate all the hard work everyone has done to get us here and keep us moving forward.

GW2
Festival of the Four Winds is ongoing, 8 or 9 days left.

Seasons of the Dragon meta event is “Return to Long Live the Lich” in Kourna this week. Next week it is off to Jahai Bluffs and “Return to A Star to Guide Us”.

DirectX 11 Beta is also on Sept 21st. Along with the new WVW system of Alliances.

Next 3 elite specializations beta test also on September 21st.

Should be Revenant, Warrior, and Elementalist if everyone’s speculation is correct. They will reveal what the specializations are this week.

LOTRO
This past week we got our first look at the new “Brawler” class as well as 1st look at the new LI system on the test server. We are also a couple weeks away from buying a Kinship house on the legendary server “Treebeard”. A poll will be in the lotro discord for where do we want the kin house starting on Monday Swept 13th. Please vote and the winner will house AIE on Treebeard.

And with that, let’s get back to Durus and Abovan and find out what’s going on in FFXIV.

GAME NEWS
End of Shadowbringers recap.

Summer of 2019, June 28. Shadowbringers early access launch.

What an emotional and great base expansion.

Fall, Oct 29th 2019, Patch 5.1 hits, Vows of Virtue, Deeds of Cruelty
Continues the great story and emotions of the MSQ of Shadowbringers
Introduces the bulk of the FFXIV crew to the Nier universe, in which these raids are now canon in the Nier timeline.

That took us into the holidays and the new year 2020. February 18th, 2020, we have Echos of a Fallen Star.

The continuation of the MSQ and the next wing of Eden dropped. More great encounters, plot points, and coffee biscuits were added to our Final Fantasy Lives.

Then our lives were turned upside down.

The world may have paused, but our adventures and relationships in Eorzea never did. AIE still continued to flourish and the AIE Free Company still continued to move along. For many of us, this was our social interaction when in-person interactions were much more difficult or risky.

Square Enix was affected by the pandemic just as much as any other business. A traditional in-the-office company moved to a work from home configuration, and had to derive from their traditional 3-4 month patch cycle. We had to wait until August 11th for the devs to release 5.3, Reflections in Crystal. The conclusion of the main Shadowbringers story came to a epic conclusion, with further adventures into the Nier Raids.

This patch also brought us the newly changed free trial. This changed the terms of the trial to include all of the content from levels 1 to 60, including base game, the 1st expansion Heavensward, and all of its patch content. Not only did it give birth to the “Have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV?” meme, it was a huge boon for the game and for AIE in general, as it gave a great way for people to try the game with no financial commitment.

Patch 5.4 returned to the normal 3-month-ish patch cycle, coming to us on December 15th, 2020. This started to set the first few story beats setting up the Endwalker expansion along with the great conclusion of the Eden series.. April 20th brought us 5.5, Death Until Dawn. More MSQ for us to enjoy along with the epic conclusion of the Nier raid series.

Then we had our all digital fan fest. The highlights of this event was the full announcement of Endwalker. The trailer they dropped was amazing, but please, if you haven’t seen it yet, wait until you finish all of the Shadowbringer patches for spoiler reasons. But for those that have reached that far, it is an excellent trailer.

After the Fan Fest, we had patch 5.55 on June 1st to end the story of Shadowbringers.

Then, the amazing happened. FFXIV was going into its longer than normal, end of expansion doldrums, giving time for them to polish up their new expansion to be released in the fall. During this time, game attendance tends to drop, people try out other games, and so forth. But in FFXIV, it didn’t. It grew. The reason could be because some major streamers started to give the game a look or some discontent within other games, but the fact remained: Final Fantasy 14 is an excellent game and most people who give it a try, love the game. And for those of us that have been here since the unprecedented relaunch of FFXIV: ARR, we have been telling you that (on this very podcast even!) all along.

For those that gave this game a look in as part of your MMO lifestyle and leisure time with AIE. Thank you. If you are going to be continuing your virtual adventures in FFXIV with AIE, then we can’t wait for all of us to all have new adventures for the first time in Endwalker. The start of any MMO expansion is an awesome experience, made only greater by an even awesome-er community. For those that have been here for awhile, joined us during your Shadowbringers adventures, or just recently joined AIE in FFXIV, thanks you. You guys rock and are the reason why we keep on doing what we do here in AIE.

CLOSE
And that’s our show for tonight. While the chatroom begins suggesting show titles, we want to thank Durus and Abovan for joining us.

If you have a question or comment about our show, you can email us at podcast@aie-guild.org. You can also follow us on Twitter. The show is at @aiepodcast. Mew is at @themewkow, Mkallah is at @cyberwaif,and Tetsemi is at @ivorytiger. We record live with video every other Sunday at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. You can join the chatroom and play along with us on our website at https://aie-guild.org/podcast-live-stream/ and our Discord server for chat at https://aie-guild.info/discord . And for past episodes, you can see them on our Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/c/TheAIEPodcast ! Our theme was composed by the amazing Andrew Allen, follow him at @keyswithsoul! or visit his website http://andrewallenmusic.com/

And now it’s time to play all of the great AIE member segment we received this week, including…
Well, none this week, but if you want to try your hand at making a short segment, we would love to play it!

Next time, we’ll be talking to someone about something….. . So until then, AIE…

– This is Mewkow
– This is Tetsemi
– This is Mkallah

And this has been… The AIE Podcast.