Last weekend (as of this post going live) was incredibly eventful for my little group in Final Fantasy 14. As I’ve been playing more and more over the last few months, I’ve gotten to know more and more of my Free Company (or guild, for those of you more familiar with other Massively Multiplayer Online games) as they’ve made me gear, helped me with quests, I’ve done work with/for them, and we’ve just hung out together. It’s been really nice, finding a community, learning people’s names, occasionally hanging out in voice chat, and just really digging into the social aspect of the game beyond running into random people around here (many of whom are very nice and not at all creepy: one of them gave me some free stuff the other day while I was working on a project near a market). Because of that and being a very active and friendly member of the tight-knit group, I’ve been getting involved in more and more stuff as time has gone on. I’ve always been a regular at the group’s wrestling outings, but I’ve done what I can to try to attend every single group event so that I can become a bit more emmeshed in the group before my friends, the couple who got me into the game at this particular moment in time, disappear for their delayed honeymoon. All of which amounts to me attending three roleplaying events with the group in a twenty-four hour period from Friday night to Saturday night. They were all a lot of fun, but that was a lot of socializing via text and, for part of it, voice chat, which left me drained. I don’t regret my choices, but I do wish I had a bit more of a social battery these days.

It all started on Friday night, as I finished picking out and preparing my look for the FC leader’s character’s wedding to his real-life wife’s character. Rather than sit in silence while I waited for the event to start, I joined a growing group of people hanging out in our discord’s voice chat to just kill a few hours while we waited. It was nice to get to know some of the voices and people behind the characters I’ve spent so much time interacting with. I learned how to make use of my bardic performance ability from one of them and started putting in the work to get that all properly set up for myself, even if it felt a little intimidating to do given how completely new it was for me. From there, we all gathered with the rest of the guests near the venue, goofed around some more, attended a lovely event that took about an hour, got some lovely pictures, and then attended a garden party where I was able to put my newly learned performance skills to use making music for the event. The two other bards and I had such a fun time that we talked about setting up a band. We’ll see if anything comes of it, but I enjoyed the idea and I think at least a few other people were interested as well. It was difficult to tell, though, since I was at my sixth consecutive hour of voice chat and active socializing with people who’d been largely strangers to me prior to the start of the evening. I was worn out and exhausted, so I ducked out for the night and tried to get some rest.

Unfortunately, I had to be up for the next morning’s event and didn’t wake up until just before it was scheduled to start. That morning was the grand opening of a little brunch shop one of the players in the group had made and they wanted to host a roleplaying event there. Since I’m trying to get into the roleplaying scene of the game, a little bit at a time, I rushed through my morning routine and made it to the event only half an hour late. From there, after a break for real food in the real world, I was back in the game for skill training and general hanging out before the wrestling event later that evening which, again, ran for four hours and was a little overwhelming. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, but it’s so draining to be that actively engaged all the time. There’s so much going on, visually and via the text descriptions, and that’s without even getting into the audience side of things. It’s too much, sometimes, and while I want to keep practicing my socializing so I can hopefully one day not get wiped out by a single Dungeons and Dragons session, I’m not sure if these wrestling events are really going to do it for me. There’s slowly expanding my capacity through increasing exposure and then there’s just overwhelming myself for a loud, noisy, but fun event.

Aside from all this socializing, I spent a lot of time working on my crafting skills. One of the main things my FC does is crafting or gathering projects. Right now, we’ve got a bit of both happening. Our leader negotiated a congract with some big shot who is paying us to mass produce certain items, collect huge amounts of other items, and spend our time doing labor that he doesn’t want to do. Or is maybe too busy with other stuff to do. At the quantities this guy is buying stuff, I don’t think there’s enough for sale across all the various worlds of this game, so it makes sense that he’d need to hire people specifically to do the work. In order to participate in that, though, I had to do a lot of crafting to get my skills to a position where I could actually make the items in question. It took a while to get there, since I was training them all up at the same time, but I managed to get there and get some appropriately leveled gear together in time to start participating in crafting stuff in the week between writing this post and it going live on my blog. It pays alright, though not enough that I’d want to do it in place of actually playing the game. I just might have it running while I do other computer stuff in order to make some money along the way. Which, you know, is a great way to play the game when I’m not actually playing it. Now that I’ve committed to some ridiculous hour count, I’ve determined to get it as high as I can as quickly as I can. Who knows what it’ll be at by the time the year has reached the halfway point? It’ll be a real experience no matter what, that’s for sure.