Category Archives: Games

#FF14 – Crysalis Down, Story Update

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Finished Patch 2.5 content, so only 2.55 left to do.  I will say that as the game progresses, the content gets better.  The story is more engaging and the dungeons/raids are a heck of a lot more crazy.  Each Patch seems to unlock 1 dungeon and 1 raid, plus some neat story bits.

Patch 2.4

Patch 2.4 gave me Snowcloak and Shiva to run through.  Snowcloak was a pretty neat dungeons, especially the bigfoot fight where you hit him with snowballs.  The entire group was new to the dungeon and we decided not to read up on it.  After about level 40, there are no more tank and spank fights.  If you don’t catch the mechanics, eventually you’re going to die.  But the ramp up time to learn is fairly lenient.  Learning on the fly is fun, even more so when the mechanics are intuitive enough to grasp – at least in dungeons.

Shiva was a quick run, though there was a wipe due to not killing the adds.  As a general rule in raiding, it’s “don’t step in the bad stuff, stay close to get an AE heal and kill the adds”.  At least of the majority.  I will say that that fight was incredibly neat to watch, and her ultimate is amazeballs.

Patch 2.5

To start 2.5 I needed to clear Ifrit, Titan and Garuda on Hard Mode.  I guess these guys were hard at some time, because they were each twice as easy as when on normal mode.  More skills available makes a heck of a difference, and item level too I guess.  Once that was done, I gained access to Keeper of the Lake and Crysalis.

KotL was pretty neat for the first 2 bosses.  The last one, holy kidney beans, AE city.  A massive dragon head, the floor nearly permanently on fire and then 2 smaller (still large) dragons to take out.  It was the best fight I’ve had in an MMO in a long time.  Superb.

Crysalis though, that thing is a pain and extremely dependent on player awareness.  Massive hits on the tank that I needed to pre-cast for.  Then about 30 floating balls everyone needs to tag, in a specific order to avoid taking too much damage.  If not enough are flagged, then the boss does a massive AE (again, need to pre-cast).  Then more AE from the boss, so everyone needs to be fairly close to take the AE heal (which most ranged classes don’t get and stay super far away).  Finally, he teleports you into some odd version of the moon, where meteors hit the ground for ~75% of my hit points, so the 2 tanks needs to run under them and take the blow.  Miss 2 and it’s a wipe. It took a long time for the tanks to coordinate this properly.  Nearly 10 runs.  People were chipper throughout and very happy when it was cleared.  (Can I say how rare that is?  8 anonymous people and no one was a jerk?)

It was a sad ending to this chapter though, story-wise.  There are clearly some set-up elements in place for 2.55 and I am super hyped to go through that part.

Content Stays Relevant

I think one of the highlights of FF14 design is the duty roulette system.  Every piece of group content shows up in this LFG/LFR system after you’ve completed it once (and 90% of it has to be completed in the story).  It’s split up across low level, high level, elite, trials, story and guildhests (learn-to-dungeon), with each giving a significant exp bonus every day, and some currency for gear to boot.  This means that all the content remains relevant to everyone.  You might have a level 59 in a level 20 dungeon (scaled down of course) because he wanted the EXP bonus for doing it.  This also means that the queue times are fairly steady, depending on the role you run.  Tanks are instant, Healers are near instant for dungeons, ~4m for a raid.  DPS, well I feel sorry for you guys.

And there’s no dev resources to re-jig something to stay relevant.  I don’t get served some sort of warp-of-time dungeon like it was new content I should be happy about.  Instead, they make a new dungeon.

#FF14 – Ramuh Down

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I hit 51 in the process and with Ramuh down I’m just past the half way mark of the pre-Heavensward quests since launch.  Yay?

ff14-leviathan

While the majority of these quests are fetch/talk quests, the story behind it is pretty neat.  There’s a consistent B-story in it all as well, which is sort of like a season-long storyline with each patch being an episode.  That’s pretty neat.  Plus so far, each patch has had a “raid” of 8 people.

King Moogle was the first, nothing too complex really.  I like moogles though, so there’s a certain flair here.  Leviathan was next and that one had a fair amount of moving around the map to avoid the big hits.  Nothing too crazy mind you, and the tank was pretty good (or at least “tanky”).  Ramuh though, he’s a friggin’ box of fun.  I think there was 1 person there who had done it before, which didn’t help much.  Plus I’m pretty sure I was the only one who read up on it before hand.  There’s a single mechanic where if you share this lightning link with another player, you take damage if you attack.  So you need to walk over these lightning balls to get rid of it.  I’m sure we lost 4 players on the first run and more than 2 on the last one.

ff14-ramuh

I get that particular mechanics can be tricky and that’s the flavor of each fight.  There’s always the whole “don’t stand in the fire, take down the adds” of every fight but each one has a twist or 2 to keep you on your toes.

Healing

I used to play DPS a lot, back when I was actively grouping and you needed DPS more than you needed healers.  When LFD/LFR came around, I swapped to healing to avoid the queues.  That’s stuck in FF14.  DPS-wise I can solo without really issues.  Duty-finder is pretty much instant too.  And healing itself, well that’s a bit different and for 2 main reasons.

First is the global cooldown.  At 2.5second, you need to pre-emptively heal the big hits and it’s a rare occasion that everyone is above 90%.  In the larger fights, this has a rather interesting mechanic of actual triage of targets, making DPS responsible for their own actions.  It’s a neat swap of the traditional HEAL EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME of other games.  It’s still hectic but it’s rare that you feel cheated.

Second is the group size.  At 4 people in a regular group, it makes healing a lot easier.  It’s one of my favorite parts of SWTOR to be honest.  And raids set at 8 people is even better.  Healing a dozen+ people is like having ADD and you can rarely pay attention to what else is going on.  Smaller groups means more focus and that’s fun.  I’m rather enjoying healing.

Gold Spam

I guess this is due to the expansion – sure do see a lot of new players in the game. I’m not sure Square Enix does anything about this actually.  Here’s a picture of my current Blacklist, all goldspammers.

ff14-goldspam

When an account gets banned, it gets listed as “deleted”.  Maybe gold spam is a sign of a healthy game?

Next Up

Continue on with patch 2.4 content.  There’s a good chance I’ll hit 52 before stepping into the expansion.  All of these through quests and the odd challenge log that coincides with my questing actions (duty-roulette and the odd fate).

And find a Free Company.  I’ve met a lot of neat folks mind you, and at a lot of odd hours.  Just need to find one that fits my playstyle.

WoW Raiding Done for WoD

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In a surprise move (or not if you saw the cinematic), Blizzard has announced that 6.2 contains the final raid for WoD.  This is odd for a few reasons.

Lack of Known Future

Aside from knowing that flying is coming in a “future patch”, there is absolutely zero information on what else is in store for WoD aside from raids.   Best bet is that Blizzcon has an expansion announcement and that’s in November, 4 months out.  And unless they drop an open beta that that point, it’s another 6 months until something releases.  I refuse to believe that they would let another 12 months go between content patches.

Lack of Devs

Tanaan Jungle was supposed to launch with the game and in the last few months was pulled back to polish it up.  Resources were moved around within Blizz to meet dates and quite evidently focus on Hearthstone, HotS and Overwatch.  WoW seems like the least profitable of the bunch, or at least the one they are investing the least into.

Lack of Content

WoD will clearly be marked as the expansion with the least amount of content since launch.  2.5 raid tiers, 8 dungeons, no races, no classes, Garrisons, which killed cities, Ashran which put the final nail in open world PvP, a near-complete destruction of crafting.  But we got selfies.

Items that were supposed to be in this expansion (from their Blizzcon): Shattrah raid, Bloodspire and Karabor (cities), Farahlon (zone/pvp).  You’d think that would be at least 1 more content patch worth.

What’s Next

Well aside from the already known largest subscription drop in the game’s history, I’m certainly curious as to what the Q2 numbers are. I don’t see this news as inspiring any faith in the community and one of the most tone-deaf announcements of the year.  ESO just finished launching on consoles, Wildstar announces a swap to F2P, FF14 just launched an amazing expansion, SWTOR announced a big expansion in the fall.  This just seems like that kid in the corner eating crayons.

Edit: As I posted this, I received an invite from Blizzard for a free 7 days of game time.  Irony, I love you.

Other Blogs Related

How Long Should a Content Patch Last

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Tobold is a fixture on my RSS feed.  Sure, he feeds the trolls as much as anything but when you’re posting nearly twice a day, you can’t bat 100.  (Quick aside, his D&D posts I find the most interesting).  A recent post about hitting a milestone in WoW got me thinking.  He’s done everything required to get a flying mount to work in WoD, then realized the actual function won’t be available until a later patch.

For those in the dark, WoW disabled all flying in WoD but left the door open for a later option. Then closed that door a few weeks ago.  Then opened it again, with what is basically an attunement step.  The basic gist of that attunement is that you have to complete most of the solo-player achievements (exploration, reputation, treasures, etc…)  Given the complete lack of any material for solo-players since launch, I would think that nearly everyone playing today had 90% of that done, with the exception of the 6.2 Tanaan Jungle content.  That patch came out last week and required a reputation “grind” and a couple rare bosses to kill.  Well, Tobold did all of that in about a week and aside from a toe-dip into LFR, he’s never really been a fan of raiding.  So, more or less he’s completed the major milestones for the patch.  In a week.

I think even he would agree that he took that content at an accelerated pace, acting as a sort of content locust.  At the same time, you have to wonder what’s going on at Blizzard when people have “finished” months of work in a week.  Is there some sort of formula the devs use when making new content?  Some sort of line in the sand that says “this should take them at least 3 weeks to get through”?  I may not like artificial gating but I can sure as hell understand it from a dev perspective.  Daily/weekly caps, reputation grinds, drop rates & RNG… they all prolong content artificially but they also have the side effect of keeping the population active.  Which is sort of important in an MMO, no?

I’m not so much against quickly run content, there are plenty of games that offer DLC that lasts about 2 hours.  MMOs feel like they deserve more though, or at least a bit more thought.  I’d like to think Wildstar’s patches were well thought out, with content that was group and solo-based, with artificial gates around them (usually a form of reputation).  FF14 is certainly the shining example here, with classes and housing included in patches, at at a decent pace too.  SWTOR isn’t too far behind either.  Then there’s EvE, the content king.

I guess it’s a good thing that there are so many MMO options out there.  Not only can you find one that fits your basic tastes but likely in the case of a tie, you can pick the dev that provides content at an appreciable pace/length to boot.

#FF14 – Finally 50

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I will say that the trek from 43-50 was longer than I expected.  That being because my expectations are leveling speeds found in pretty much every other game.  Then I realized I hadn’t even unlocked my Challenge Log and in 1 day I made 2 levels.

Level 50

I actually hit 50 just after the first “raid”, or at least 8 man party. It was a 1 boss battle and the LFR-ish tool (Duty Finder) took under 10 minutes to find a group with me as a healer.  Wasn’t too hard either.  Following Rohan’s advice, I bought the expansion ahead of time, so you can see that I’m a bit into level 50.  Seeing as how I can’t unlock ANY level 51 content for about 50 quests, this seems like it should be a nice head start on the other content.

Looking forward to getting my own!

Looking forward to getting my own!

Clearly I’m not very far content-wise and I’m rather ok with that.  There are plenty of other people playing at this level, most of them Machinists or Dark Knights, so the queues are pretty much instant.  And I am absolutely blown away at how those dungeon runs give you massive chunks of experience.  One a day (each takes about 20-30 minutes) gives a huge boost.  You get another boost at 3 and 5 in a week.  It’s such a drastic swap out from other games leveling pattern.

On to the next set of quests.

FF14’s Content Mountain is Good Gaming Glue

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The crux of the “games as art” argument is that both are subjective to interpretation.  And as much as there is shitty art, there are shitty games…so let’s no belabour the point too much.

Jewel over at Healing the Masses has a neat post about her qualms with the forced narrative in FF14.  While I understand the complaint, I think it’s one of FF14’s main benefits.  Here’s the logic.

Let’s say you’re a new player and you want to play with your friends who have been there for some time.  In nearly every other MMOs, you jump in, level up what needs to be done (or get carried, or buy a character) and in a week or so, you’re in the expansion territory.  FF14 takes a completely different approach.  From 1-50, you must complete the following quests to progress.  It’s not optional, you simply won’t gain other skills, jobs or be able to access other dungeons/content.  These are major gates.  And that’s just what launched with 2.0.  Once you hit level 50, you need to complete the majority of these quests in order to access Heavensward.  Jewel’s point that many of these quests have you running around the world is accurate – some of these quests can take 5 minutes or require you to clear an entire dungeon.

There are two options here. Either you look at that mountain of quests and say screw it, or you climb that mountain and meet the other folk who did the same.  This is a massive content wall, something that pushes away every 3-monther from giving it a shot.

WoW decided to open the floodgates to everyone.  Within 2 weeks of the WoD expansion, if you had never played you could have seen all the mandatory content from start to finish.  And when LFR came out, you could have cleared each wing out in a day.  A month or 2 in, and everything is done.  And then you lose 3m subscribers.   What was the record for hitting level 100?  Under 4 hours I think?

Wildstar took the crazy* approach of attunement but only at max level.  The original skill level required to attune was quite high but you could reach 50 by mostly face rolling, with some exceptions.  They’ve modified it since, but it’s such a massive departure from the rest of the game it throws people for a loop.  If there were more people playing this would be less of an issue but at current server pops, it’s a real challenge to complete.

FF14’s optimal leveling path is dungeon runs and group content.  The LFD system actually works pretty well since every single dungeon you have unlocked is available.  At 49 I was running a level 15 dungeon, and I scaled to its level.  That means that nearly all the content, in nearly all the zones, is relevant at nearly all levels.   Plus, forced grouping makes your social presence important.   This also means that people are going to quit at various parts of the leveling game, rather than reach the end and go away.  It’s a very interesting approach to “gaming glue”.

Which sort of begs the question, are you playing an MMO for the game for the people, for the mechanics, or for the game as a whole?  The 3 examples above fit into those categories.

As a final remark, I’m at 49.5 now on my White Mage.  I’m looking at that list of quests left to do and it seems like quite a task.  But the content is fun, the people are fun and it scratches a heck of an itch.

Quick Note – FF14 + GMG

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People say a lot about Steam but I find that Green Man Gaming has just as many (if not more and better) deals.  You can use the following voucher for a nice 23% off any game, for the next few hours.

GET23P-ERCENT-OFFGMG

Worked out pretty well, I just picked up the FF14 expansion for a better deal than anywhere else I could find.

Hard Lessons are the Best Lessons

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3 main topics for today!

Pre-orders

I’m not sure how many times I’ll say it but pre-orders suck nuts.  Arkham Asylum is such a mess that they stopped selling the game.  I know I wanted to pick it up and I heard the console version is great.  I also waited 2 days for the PC reviews to come out and I’m now saner for it.  At least they’re giving out refunds.

Wildstar

Free to play is coming and with it a whole bag of changes.  Stats are being revamped to more simple terms (and balance) and gear is being re-itemized in turn.  I’ll be honest, I have to play with a mod to understand heads or tails of all the stats on different characters.  This is a great quality of life change.

Dungeons are being scaled out more, so that you don’t see the first one at 20 and hit that wall.  Well, protostar games has been in for a bit at level 10 but that’s not really a dungeon as much as a tutorial.  This is good news as the dungeons in Wildstar are amazeballs.  They are also being rebalanced so that the damage from enemies is going more into telegraphs and less into standard attacks.  I’m hoping they tweak the logic of telegraphs though, as the timing on some of them is very hard to avoid. Especially when there are 4-5 effects on the ground at once.

Other items (some currently available as mods) include always-on sprint, world bosses clearly demarked, sell junk button, navigation system, revamp of the tutorials, and neighbourhoods.  This last one is pretty neat, where groups of 20 players can decorate together.  That’s pretty sweet.

All of this will be on the test realm shortly, in time for the fall conversion.  It looks quite promising.
FF14

After hoops and hurdles I finally got to play FF14 again.  I haven’t bought the expansion mind you, as my white mage was only 43.  He’s  47 now and that’s from fate grinds, main quests, levequests (sort of like random dailies) and taking down Garuda.  If there was a class that dealt the least amount of damage, white mages would be it.  Thankfully I have a tanking chocobo that I can just chain heal and he does most of the work.

From WoW and Wildstar, I’m used to a fair amount of mods.  Even SWTOR has a fairly customizable HUD, where you can resize items.  FF14…I can move the boxes around but that’s it.  Not that I have skill bloat, but there’s some tweaking I’d like to do to real estate.  Playing a healer, I’m used to a certain look and feel.  The 2.5s GCD is the most glaring change of pace to me and I’ll be honest, I struggle with it constantly.  I realize the GCD affects monsters as well, but they are already queued on their next attack before you can start yours.  Healing a smart tank is ok, healing a new one is quite painful.  The problem seems more pronounced when there’s AE happening, or multiple targets.  Triage at 0s is different than at 2s, and you’re 80% of the way through a cast…

I had mentioned this in a previous post and Rohan echoes it well enough, FF14 has a rather unique community.  The pace is much slower than other games and the rush to 50 on a new character is not a simple one.  There are many cut-scenes throughout and the mandatory dungeon runs put a huge hamper on “typical MMO” progress.  Going from something like Wildstar to FF14 is like F1 racing to a buggy cart.

Then you have the actual difficulty of the game, which to be honest, is higher than most other games. The increase in difficulty is gradual mind you, spread over the 50 first levels, but it does get hard.  And it’s not like there’s a ton of random stuff to do at max level that doesn’t include group content.  It doesn’t take much to develop a reputation on a server and it pays dividends to be nice as you’re going to need them later on.

I’ll give Garuda as an example.  I needed to clear that boss to progress and it took at least a dozen wipes and 3 groups to get it done.  First group I disconnected from due to a crappy network, but our DPS was too low on the feathers.  Group 2, the black mage wasn’t able to get their AE to work properly and again, the feathers.  Group 3 the tank was playing more of a DPS role, and was taking at least 50% more damage than the others I had healed and eventually they just quit.  The new tank was quite solid and we cleared it on the first try.  The entire run through was positive and light hearted.  No one lost their cool.  There were tips given out “have you tried this?” but never anything I’m used to seeing “oh you suck”.  There just seems to be a better level of understanding between players.

If you get frustrated easily, the odds are extremely high that by level 20-30 you’ll have burnt out on the game.  If you do manage to scrape your way to end game, you can only do it by having friends.  It’s a very interesting model where there’s a constant triage of players and it’s clearly a conscious decision.  I wouldn’t call it exclusionary, but more like it’s targeted.  Where Wildstar targeted (which they are doing an about face) the 1% of hardcore raiders and WoW targeted the grandmas and teens (which they seem to be focusing on more and more), FF14 seems to be aiming for the people who value strategy and social structures.

A few more days and I think I’ll be in expansion territory.

What’s an Expansion worth?

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FF14’s expansion Heavensward is $40.  Warlords was $60, though it included a “free” level 90, which is $60 after the fact (though really, that’s what, 20 hours of gameplay at most nowdays?).  Most expansions runs between $30 and $60, depending on what’s in it.  Even more so when you think about if the game is F2P or subscription based.  Some don’t even charge for expansions – Neverwinter & EvE come to mind.

GW2 is 2 years old and aside from that first box price, I’d wager the majority haven’t dropped more than $20 in all that time.  $50 is absolutely reasonable for an expansion, if you know what’s in it.  And I guess that’s the rub.  Asking for money on faith is always a hard bargain to make.  Certainly with mixed messages and a rather poor PR department.  NCSoft barely has any PR, though I guess it’s better than having Smed going off on some tangent.12:00

I really think this is just a storm in a teacup.  By the time the expansion rolls around, everyone will go back on their “don’t buy it” mantra and scoop it up on release.

Let’s face it, MMO gamers are always looking for the next shiny thing and no matter how much they complain, it’s still going to sell to the active playerbase.

It is popcorn-worthy to see the frothing mind you.

Back Online

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The last couple weeks I’ve just had drained batteries.  Completely kaput.  I took this week off, mostly unplugged and slept what seemed to be a dozen+ hours per day. Typically when I take time off work, I still have some contact.  I’ll check mail a few times a day, maybe take a call or two to sort things out.  This week I let my BlackBerry drop dead and just disconnected.  I think that’s honestly the first time I’ve done that in 10 years, at least in a situation where the was a signal possible.

E3

I did keep up with the news somewhat mind you.  E3 came and went, and there really wasn’t much to talk about.  If you love sequel-itis, then hey, they’ve got you covered.  More Battlefront (with an amazing deluxe package that gives you a damage boost on normal packages), Fallout 4 has a date and an iOS app, Uncharted has a sequel, FF7 is coming back (curious how that will work out), SWTOR has a neat expansion/reboot…It’s not bad news so much.  I think devs have finally figured out how to use the consoles properly now, so the games are looking pretty amazing.

Anyone taking bets on when The Last Guardian will actually come out?

Steam Sale

There was a lot of stuff on sale, holy bajeebers!  I picked up Ori and the Blind Forest, which is a cool game in the metroidvania style.  With amazing art and music.  Superb game actually, great throwback to a fun game style.

The rest of the stuff I either already had or it didn’t interest me much.  Stick of Truth I did pick up, for something like $10, so that will fill some dead time eventually.  Arkham Knight isn’t on sale but apparently it’s the best of the series.  Winter sale I guess…

Marvel Heroes

2 year anniversary on a super cool ARPG.  Syp has posted a fair bit on it and it’s well worth your dollars.  I think they have a really great cash stop mechanic, though I’m curious as to how much is left in the Marvel vaults for them to release as playable characters.

I picked up Doom with some Eternity Crystal (the droppable F2P currency) and I am quite impressed.  He has great lines, looks cool and his moves are all pretty signature.  Due to some other characters being at 60 (including Cyclops) I was able to get him to level 60 in about 2 days of sporadic playtime.  Then with a bunch of lucky drops, kitted him out for some solid damage potential.  I also took the time to level up Squirrel Girl.  She’s awesome!

Wildstar

I had mentioned before how I wanted to get back into this game.  Well, I subbed up this week and patched my way in.  I had posted about what I thought was missing from the game, and I am rather happy to say that most of that downside list has been addressed.   There’s a lot of casual/daily content now at 50, shiphands, adventures, dungeons, plot dungeons, battleplots, battlegrounds and 4 main daily hubs.  Raids have been dropped to 20 players, itemization has been tweaked so it isn’t as crazy.  Lot of classes have been balanced as well (notoriously the warrior).

There are people playing, I see them all over the place.  That said, it need more people STAT.  It’s great that it’s going F2P in the fall but there needs to be something in there now to get more people playing.  I’m a bit reminded of what happened to SWTOR in this case, where the game dropped subs like the servers were on fire. It was a 90% server merge after all.  When F2P hit, the game took a few months but picked up a ton of steam and now there’s players everywhere.  Wildstar needs that player boost.  It’s a quality MMO.

FF14

Expansion hit a few days ago.  I have an old account I played with for a couple months, and I was impressed with what was there.  I dropped out however, due to real life taking almost all my free time.  I’m curious to see what’s about mind you so I wanted to get back into the game.

Let me say that Square Enix has some of the absolute worst infrastructure/support services on the planet.  It’s is almost absurd.  Trying to log in, my typical passwords aren’t working.  Ok, now I get locked out for some reason, though no idea how long I’m locked out.  I try again in 10 minutes, same message.  A quick search tells me it’s a 30 minute lockout, and extended by some magical number everytime you retry and the lockout is still in effect.

Fine, let’s try a password reset.  Ok, none of my security answers are working.  Maybe it’s the case of the answers.  Nope… not that either.  Ok, maybe I have a token attached to the account (there’s a field there but it doesn’t tell me if I have one).  I check my mail and it looks like I tried to attach one, but there’s no success message.  Fine, let’s try it out.  The app won’t work on my iPod and won’t work on my Android tablet.  It will work on my wife’s.  Super.  Put in the data to restore it, invalid key data.  Arghhhh!!!

I end up on the support site, submitting a ticket.  Interestingly enough, it asks me for the same security questions as before to submit but doesn’t give me any errors when I put in the answers I thought were correct.  I haven’t received any notice it was sent, or that there was an error.  Just an on-screen message that it may take some time.

So at this point, I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do.  Calling them is apparently a 2 hour wait and since they are only open during “business hours”, I’m not quite sure what that will accomplish other than a massive long distance charge on my phone.

/amazing.