akhmorning

To The Edge with the Warrior of Funk - Community Spotlight: Alex Moukala

Read the interview here with the ever wonderful and talented Alex Moukala!

https://www.akhmorning.com/news/community-spotlight-alex-moukala/

THIS MONTH FOR AKHMORNING: SEPTEMBER 2020

Good AkhMorning!

As we turn the corner from the end of Summer to the start of Autumn and people return to work or school, we hope that everyone out there is staying safe.

We have a pretty packed month ahead of us with much to cover, so let’s dive on in, shall we?

WHAT TO EXPECT FOR SEPTEMBER 2020

• Content News
• Community Spotlights
• Future Website Changes
• Merchandise & Patreon Rewards

CONTENT NEWS

There’s quite a lot of content this month in the pipeline! Let’s break it down:

Job Guides

As per popular demand with tanks being the most requested jobs to add - Dark Knight (DRK) and Gunbreaker (GNB) are underway.

Our ideal timing is to have both jobs fleshed out by the end of the month or as soon as possible.

Raid Guides

Memoria Misera (Extreme)

Memoria Misera (Extreme), or Varis (Ex), is a great intermediate step between easier Extremes and Savage encounters with its modern encounter design and challenges.

The idealised i480 loot is also a solid stop-gap source of gear for alt jobs or players returning after an extended break.

In collaboration with Joonbob.

[E5S] Eden’s Verse: Fulmination (Savage)

The first step into Eden’s Verse (Savage) and as such the most run encounter for the current savage raid tier globally.

Whether you’re brand new to savage or looking to refresh your knowledge of the encounter, this guide is being released in mind with the removal of savage’s weekly loot restriction.

We hope that our guide helps remove some of the intimidation factor that surrounds savage so that more players can enjoy some of the best content FFXIV has to offer!

In collaboration with Joonbob.

Eden’s Verse: Refulgence (Savage)

The final encounter to Eden’s Verse (Savage) and the source of the strongest weapons available, finishing E8S remains a goal for many players who have been progressing the tier.

We want you to be able to beat and farm this encounter reliably with a good knowledge of the options available in Party Finder (PF).

In collaboration with Joonbob.

Ultimate Job Guides

Continuing in our series of encounter advice guides that have been really helping players in clearing the Ultimate encounters, we are proud to reveal that The Weapon’s Refrain (Ultimate), aka UWU, is being worked on for SMN.

Please look forward to our new guides!

COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHTS

We had a lot of positive and constructive feedback over our first Community Spotlight featuring Rin Karigani which lead to a lot of styling and bug fixes for the new format.

AkhMorning is happy to announce that we have more in the works getting to know more of those within the global community of FFXIV.

Rumour has it the next introduces someone known for his funky beats…

FUTURE WEBSITE CHANGES

Quite a few things are on our list for the development team.

Here’s a summary of what’s being covered for this month:

Content Management System Updates

This has been a much requested feature for our content contributors that will further enable guide autonomy.

Currently the framework is integrated with Forestry but not in a manner that allows the most intuitive of edits when not familiar with the site’s markdown and its required formating.

As such, the developers and I have been working on improving the existing system to simplify and better facilitate our current content management for our contributors.

It has required some complex syntax changes within the framework due to the multi-column nature of the site, however, it is looking promising and our developers are pretty happy with how it has turned out.

To our team: I hope it delivers, and if there are problems, we will remedy them as they come up.

Guide Page Table Of Contents

One of our most requested features from users.

We will be featuring a new block for easier navigation between guide pages in the form of a guide table of contents block.

Please see the example concept mock up below:

The block will be tested and fine-tuned so that it will up to your standards.

HTML Minification On Build

As an optimisation step in our website build process, AkhMorning will be minifying (minimising code and markup) our files to reduce their sizes and improve the site’s speed even further for a better user experience, especially for people on limited data plans.

WebP Generation On Build

As an additional optimisation step in our website build process, AkhMorning will be converting and generating images to the WebP format resulting in dramatically smaller image file sizes. One of your most pertinent points of feedback was regarding data and our use of images resulting in pages taking longer to load.

I hope that these measures will help address the data use concerns.

MERCHANDISE & PATREON REWARDS

September is an exciting month for AkhMorning and our Patrons!

All of our merchandise orders for the Patron rewards (and future purchasable items) have either arrived or are due in the very near future. The First Brood artwork will also be completed by the ever so talented WhyMaige and will be featured in AkhMorning’s First Brood gallery!

Once October 1st hits we will be shipping out our rewards to everyone that has been so generous to support what it is we do.

We’re continuously thinking of more ways to bring value to you all. Do let us know what you like and would like to see more of in future!

If you would like to support what we do please know you can through the aforementioned options. The value you give to us we promise to return with content you want to benefit from.

As always, know you can contact us through feedback@akhmorning.com or through the website-feedback channel on the AkhMorning Discord. Your insights and suggestions drive our changes.

Thanks and have a good September!

~Nemekh

Concerning the recent "Job Role expansion" Patreon Goal

Hello everyone,

Nemekh here to discuss a recent point of contention over a change that happened along with the addition of the First Brood tier - the Job Role expansion goal. 

I have recently removed the goal from Patreon. This is not because expanding to more jobs isn't happening, but due to the wording of the goal being insufficient and unclear. The ambiguity that arose from what at the time was a quick and unfortunately short-sighted edit to the old "Bahamut Emoji" goal, has raised concerns from various parts of the community. As such, this post will further clarify the matter.

My purpose is not to tie content behind Patreon money. Not now and not ever. For several years all of the information my colleagues and I have published both as caster resources and theorycrafting from Allagan Studies has been free for all for years, with an adamant belief that none of our information is ever to be gated behind a paywall. 

The previously listed goal could be interpreted as "when we get enough money we'll add x!" when the reality is that the tank role already was in the works of being added to the site. That content getting made was already in the pipeline and always has been. It is not being transposed from another source, but being written anew. Tanks are next on the horizon.

The old goal was edited after researching means to improve patreon listings and its edit was to gauge and garner interest in support for the website and what we do. This was done poorly and with haste. For that, I am sorry. Future goals being listed here will have a much greater care into the optics of how well they will be received. 

I always consider the "Cost, Time, Quality" triangle, or “Scope” triangle. If you want a project to be done quickly and be of quality, it will cost more. If you want things to be of quality and cost less, it will take more time. This is why you employ professionals. If you have a project finished quickly and want it to not cost much, chances are the quality will not be ideal. I do not want to ever settle for subpar quality in our work, which leaves the matter of time and finances. While I'd love to be able to deliver all of the content as quickly as possible, it's a simple reality that projects with properly planned milestones and finances will go faster. 

It takes time to create, format and test new content before going live, and even when live, chances are there will be more things to fix. I do try to address things as soon as they become known; however, it takes me much longer to address technical fixes than if I were to delegate said items to development. Their understanding of the templating and framework are much more knowledgeable, given that they wrote everything from scratch from my specifications. As time goes on, I hope that as we iron the kinks out with newer additions future content will not only have fewer issues, but also will have these issues be resolved much more efficiently and in a more timely manner, while still releasing quality content. 

Our Content Management System is currently being changed to be accessible to contributors without them having to learn how to parse the framework's nuances and templating. This means that their ability to update and change content will be seen directly on our staging server, without the risk of errors and pages failing to compile due to incorrect indentation and typos. The bespoke CMS was quoted at 6 hours of professional development time. As someone with much less experience with Liquid, trying to implement it alone would take weeks. 

This is an example of where support makes a genuine difference in accelerating updates and functionality to the site.

That's how we come back to Patreon, and to you, AkhMorning's supporters.

No content is being withheld due to support or funding. Nothing will ever be paywalled. Your support goes back directly into features being released in an expedient manner. More has been achieved in months than would have been achieved in years -- and this is all thanks to you. As we grow, I am better able to say thanks to you and our team in a way that you all truly deserve. For that, I am eternally grateful.

I hope this helps clarify matters and leads to a better understanding of our future goals and plans. With this in mind, as of the start of September and the start of all subsequent months, AkhMorning will be outlining next steps along the roadmap for the current month to keep you up to date on where things are heading.

Our plans are not set in stone, and with your input and support, will adapt as necessary. They are a part of our dialogue and conversation with the community about how we want the site and community to grow moving forwards. We will also have non-binding polls for Patrons about what they would like to see prioritised. While this cannot currently be done on the main site yet due to development requirements, we aim to give everyone the option to participate in the feedback process via polling. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you have any more questions or feedback, please contact us here, in the Discord, or at feedback@akhmorning.com

~Nemekh 

AkhMorning Mouse Mats!

Next to arrive from our rewards pool - our AkhMorning mouse mats!

Let Bahamut carry your gaming to victory with our quality branded mouse mat featuring the AkhMorning logo.

Available as a reward from our $20 Wyrm Patreon tier along will all previous rewards.

AkhMorning Sticker Sheets!

Our AkhMorning sticker sheets have arrived!

If you enjoy Stacia's Catbuncle and REE-Egi emojis, or just want to style up your surfaces with the Dreadwyrm himself, these sheets are for you!  

Available as a reward from our $5 Patreon tier

AkhMorning: A Website Reborn

AKHMORNING 1.0

June 26th 2019. The official launch of a year long project only 2 days before Shadowbringers Early Access.

What came to light was akhmorning.com and its sister site allaganstudies.akhmorning.com (then theoryjerks.akhmorning.com).

Originally created for aspiring and veteran Summoners, as well as friends to Bahamut, AkhMorning as a site has seen considerable growth with not only fleshing out more content for the Summoner job but adding our sibling casters to the roster with Red Mage in February 2020 and Black Mage in June 2020.

In that time, since the site’s original launch, our analytics traffic has since exploded from double digit visitors, to hundreds of unique visitors, to the current state of thousands of unique visitors every day from all over the world benefitting from our resources. That number is still growing as you read this article and I hope continues to do so!

Allagan Studies too, after its rebrand from TheoryJerks, has seen considerable interest from players across the globe wanting to know more about the game, with nods to our work from the Japanese community and Yoshi-P himself as the overseas players who figure things out.

Despite a healthy growth trend one thing became very apparent:

It was time to have Bahamut blow up the old and bring in the new just like Legacy to ARR.

AkhMorning and its sister sites have long been a personal project with growing pains from my limitations as someone who can develop but isn’t a developer and as someone who can code but isn’t a programmer. There had been a few bugs in newer functions added and frankly while the original design was functional it was inelegant and dated. This had to change.

GETREKT LABS

Back in March I had contacted the British firm GetRekt(tm) Labs about a desire to strike the iron while it’s hot to rebrand AkhMorning with a new lick of paint to better serve the FFXIV community.

GetRekt(tm) have worked with some big names in the gaming influencer circles, such as Arrekz of Arrekz Gaming/Monster Hunter fame and Gladd from Destiny 2, as well as many others known and lesser known. Having seen the work GetRekt had done for them I knew I was in capable hands.

Initially I was pensive as AkhMorning, being a website focused on content creation and news updates, was not like their more typical client of emergent streamers and influencers looking to bring more life to their streams, videos and brand. Having joined their community I was rubbing shoulders with some names very very familiar to me from other games and streams. I felt a bit out of place!

I had come to know some great people within GetRekt's Discord server who I’d discovered were also very much into playing Final Fantasy XIV, notably Cami who had just begun her story journey discovering A Realm Reborn for the first time (and also loves dragons!) playing through as a Scholar, and Serrated Viper who mains Warrior.

June came and so began the design process of the new logo. The brand scientist etSki was assigned to my proposal and he was very receptive and attentive to the outlined design ideas and coming up with examples. Relaying the examples to AkhMorning’s team and Patrons, eventually we went through several iterations until we settled on what is the logo you see on this website today.

Then began the work on the branded social banners for Twitter, YouTube and Patreon, as well as the motion graphics work for a video intro. The latter also went through several iterations and after an idea from one of our Patrons resonating really well with me, we settled on a final concept that after adding some really cool sound effects to, will be unveiled in a video soon!

THE WEBSITE REDESIGN

Part way through the project with GetRekt I looked around for potential professional JAMstack web developers who were familiar with AkhMorning’s original framework Hugo.

Eventually I found a very talented Australian developer by the name of Cameron with whom I spent a long time hashing out details and evaluating the scope and hours my vision for AkhMorning would take to complete. It’s really nice when an experienced developer is enthusiastic for your ideas and vision, which reaffirmed my decision to give the website a new lease of life.

After weighing the pros and cons of our available options we decided to migrate to the Jekyll framework.

I presented my mockups and ideas and I realised some of my design concepts could benefit from a professional design touch. He recommended I get in touch with a personal friend and colleague of his. So we brought on the Japanese designer Kanae who has been in the industry for a long time.

Kanae was wonderful to talk with about ideas and plans for the website, as well as how she played Final Fantasy as a child in Japan with her brother and that FFXIV’s community being so international was really interesting to her given Square Enix’s Japanese roots.

With Kanae’s design work bringing those concepts to life and the quality coding efforts of Cameron and his work partner Tara, we’re now at this point where I can proudly relaunch this much shinier, optimised and more functional AkhMorning website. This is definitely not the end of working with them!

Rumour has it there may be an easter-egg in the site somewhere.

WHAT’S NEW WITH THE WEBSITE?

The new AkhMorning website comes with a more polished, modern design and styling in addition to the new logo and branding.

It features a customisable banner at the top of each page, News tiles and parallax backgrounds.

We now have author boxes showing the teams behind the content pages. in addition to social icons so you can more directly find their Lodestones, Twitch and YouTube channels. More link buttons may be added at a later point, such as FFLogs and Twitter.

Like our endgame guides, the website has been optimised to be better and will have improved performances across all devices.

On the topic of endgame guides we have added the following to help you further in your pursuit to beat XIV’s encounters:

• Red Mage UCoB Guide
• Summoner UCoB Guide

There is a search function in desktop view in the Navigation Menu, where typing into it lets you find appropriate pages for your search. (This needs some styling tweaks, but works)

We’ve fixed the breadcrumbs to work as intended, while looking more the part. Each step links correctly to their appropriate page.

The Table of Contents, in the sidebar for larger viewports, has been revised considerably to be dynamic. It will:

• collapse all categories to make for a tidier table of contents
• expand the current category you are viewing
• highlight the current heading(s) you are reading with the golden styling
• soon have a progress bar to show how far in a total page you are

There are some sections that are still a work in progress and may not be 100% on smaller viewports such as Tablets or Mobile. If you find any bugs, broken elements or things that look out of place please let us know via contact@akhmorning.com or post it in the AkhMorning Discord #website-feedback channel.

Currently known bugs:

• ToC glitches with Accordions (Opener pages)
• Various mobile quirks. Mobile is tricky
• Styling of certain elements on certain pages

WHAT’S PLANNED FOR THE FUTURE?

Lots of cool things are in the pipeline! Here’s a list of what’s in the works:

• Applying the new theme and framework to Allagan Studies. Let’s give the theorycrafting site a similar lift.
• Filling out any gaps to make our content pool even more robust. Fewer soon(tm)s and more goods!
• More Ultimate guides! We know how much you’ve benefitted from the existing ones. Let’s add UWU to the list soon!
• Localisation into FR, DE, JP, ZH and KR languages. This is a big project and will take a while, but one I want to aim towards.
• Job streamer pages, so that you can find players of the job of your interest streaming to watch and learn from.
• New video concepts in the works for job guides and discussions, including collaborations with some incredible talent
• New articles interviewing players that make FFXIV’s community. See our interview with Rin Karigani 
• Covering additional areas of the game. If the community wants AkhMorning to cover more areas of the game let's see what we can do.
• and more!

BLACK LIVES MATTER TO AKHMORNING: REDUX

Some of you may remember during the rise of the global movement that I started a fundraiser for the Black Lives Matter Global Network on behalf of AkhMorning as it is very much a topic of significance to me.

It came to my attention that the charity on Just Giving and various other fundraising platforms was not the Black Lives Matter Global Network, but a small operation based out of Santa Clarita. BuzzFeed and I had correspondence in light of this article. Effective immediately from then I froze the fundraiser until there were answers and resolutions.

JustGiving promised me that none of the funds have gone to the Black Lives Matter Foundation and that all funds are guaranteed to go to the Black Lives Matter Global Network through Thousand Currents, the organisation handling BLM’s finances. While the JustGiving page has still yet to be updated to reflect this, I will keep chasing them up to ensure the listed charity becomes its intended recipient.

When more is known I will post an update.

THE COSTS OF KEEPING THINGS GOLDEN

The massive and ever-increasing undertaking that is providing the FFXIV community with good quality accessible resources comes with some costs in terms of time and finances.

AkhMorning, the 4 years as staff within The Balance and working on materials and resources has been essentially a full time occupation of mine on top of being a freelancer with care obligations to my family.

With the growth of AkhMorning, my main reason for hiring professionals was from the knowledge that trying to make my plans real by myself was never going to work out.

When it comes to business I’m a big fan of the Time-Quality-Cost triangle, or “Scope Triangle”. In hiring quality and hoping for expediency I knew that it was going to cost a pretty penny.

The rebrand, redesign and development costs would be in total around $9k+ USD including taxes and currency conversions. In addition to that, there are the domain and hosting fees in addition to other expenses for the sake of the site. On a project this important to me, while I had to be realistic with budget constraints, it was worth it and I would do it again.

I have plans to continue working with such fantastic people, finances permitting, to further polish and improve AkhMorning and its sister websites. Allagan Studies is next in my sights so that such an important theorycrafting resource can be even better.

With that all said this brings me to an important topic:

SUPPORTING AKHMORNING

I will begin with my base desire to try to keep AkhMorning as free of advertising banner creatives as possible. What I would be prepared to do is have banner zones solely for community members to advertise their wares and services, such as an FFXIV artist looking for players to commission them, but if the costs outweigh the income then ad revenue will have to be considered at a later time. I would prefer to avoid this scenario where possible.

To help keep that a reality, you can support AkhMorning in various ways through the following:

Patreon - Monthly Support

AkhMorning’s Patreon has been revamped with the new branding and revised with new tiers as a way to give back to the community with perks, recognition and tangible goods in merchandise.

Guaranteed monthly income helps immensely with stability and you can help from as little as $1 a month.

Nothing would make me happier than seeing members of AkhMorning’s community proud to wear a golden pin badge at Fanfests.

Rumour has it there’s a final tier that has yet to reveal itself. It will be reminiscent of an old group project that was once discussed back in 2017.

Ko-Fi - One Off Support

AkhMorning’s Ko-Fi has also been given a new lick of paint with the new branding.

For the price of a coffee, or in my case a nice cup of tea, you can contribute 1 or more instances of £3 GBP in support of AkhMorning.

PayPal - Monthly or One Off Support

AkhMorning also has a dedicated PayPal for direct donations.

Discord Nitro Boosting

Last but not least, given the presence of Discord globally and AkhMorning’s Discord’s roots as a social/emoji server, Nitro Boosts are a nice way to give back to the community to give the server better resources and the ability to have a more custom, homely feel.

Look After Yourselves First

Times are tough since the pandemic of Covid-19 has hit us.

Please make sure you’re supporting yourself first before any fansite or other individuals.

CLOSING

This was a lot to write about! These past few months have been a wild ride for many reasons. I didn’t anticipate being able to keep on time with the planned relaunch date of August 1st, in light of recent family losses to covid. But through these trials we’ve come out stronger.

I hope you like this new version of AkhMorning as much as I have been excited to work on it, and that our resources bring you further fun and enjoyment in FFXIV as you play the game. There’s so much to look forward to.

Thanks for your time reading and have a Good AkhMorning.

~Nem

FFLogs Census revived for 5.0!

I loved this site back in 2017 and was sad to see it left inactive and abandoned since Sigmascape. In time for Edengate Savage I have since revived KaiserKyle's original project with current 5.0 fflogs data so that we can better see how things are.

Please look forward to what's coming!

Allagan Studies Website release!

Wanted to share that I've now released the Allagan Studies website for FFXIV Theorycrafting resources just in time for 5.0. Please look forward to all our new findings with the new FFXIVShadowbringers expansion!