One of the activities I was most excited to do with the Free Company (what Final Fantasy 14 calls player guilds) was something called “Content Rewind.” This isn’t an official activity in Final Fantasy 14, but the name given to an FC activity by the founder that the rest of us have adopted. The idea is to go back to early raids and run through them in a way that resembles what it would have been like to play through them when they originally came out. Rather than the “MINE” method (Minimum Item level, No Echo) that is the hardest possible way to do the raids, doing them “synched, no echo” is a way to include a decent amount of difficulty without making them as difficult as possible. For MINE, you’re using gear that has been scaled down to the lowest item level (which represents the gear’s power, essentially) that the raid will allow. You’re also doing it with no echo, which is the game’s feature that makes repeating a fight easier after you’ve failed it by raising your hit points and damage by a certain percent. Synched, No Echo, on the other hand, limits your items to the highest level that would be allowed and while you’d be missing the boost from the echo as well, it doesn’t hurt as much since your gear is stronger. It’s supposedly even easier than if you’d gone into the fight with appropriately leveled gear that was available back then due to the slow creep of power that has occurred over the years. I have no experience with this since I’ve only been playing the game for six months, but enough people have said it independently that I believe it. What all of this means, ultimately, is that we get a group of eight players together and work our way through a tough boss fight, one strange battle mechanic at a time, until we eventually emerge victorious.

That’s the idea, anyway. In practice, things have not gone so smoothly. Some of these fights are incredibly intense and diffcult to get through even with a full dedicated group, and our group has a dedicated core with a group of other players who come and go as they can. I was one of them for a while, since the event was originally on Mondays before I got off of work. I was able to participate in a few of them when I was working fewer hours and taking days off back in April, but that lasted all of a month before I eventually had to return to my normal schedule. Now, the Monday group meets an hour later and I can attend thanks to my adjusted schedule, so it’s less of a problem. The Wednesday group, though, has always met later in the day so I’ve been able to attend that group pretty much every week since its inception months ago (largely at my request, since I was the only one in the then-solid group who couldn’t make the Monday time). In the months I’ve been a part of this group, it has changed a few times over. While that same core has stayed more or less then same, the number of people who could attend on any given week varied enough that we spent most of that time without a solid roster. Bringing in new people, especially once we got to a raid notorious for its difficulty, always set us back a bit. Sometimes it was only a little bit because the person coming in had played this raid with us before. Most of the time, it was someone entirely new to this raid or entirely new to this mode of play entirely. The latter set us back to square one, while the former would be something we could typically overcome in that session. Usually just in time for that person to leave at the end of the night and be unable to show up again.

All of which adds up to us still doing this same raid three months later. We were originally playing it with two slightly different groups on two different nights, which didn’t exactly help us establish a solid rapport or best communication practices. Now, we’ve moved the Monday night group to a different raid set and the Wednesday group is still doing that super tough boss fight, but there’s a chance that might be changing soon as a result of some inter-party difficulties last time. Nothing horrible happened, but the stress of constantly failing at this raid was starting to wear on people and attempts to provide feedback and correction to a player’s mistakes was met with frustration and confrontation, so the raid’s leader called an abrupt end to the evening and we all split. Since then, we’re had some conversations about what to do next and how to proceed with this difficult fight, all of which resulted in a poll for the group to answer that seems to indicate that things aren’t going to change much. I’m not privvy to the poll’s specifics, so I don’t know for sure what’s going to happen, but I’m not confident that we’ll be able to proceeed as things stand right now, unless something changes. This is a notoriously difficult fight and having a group that isn’t getting along or players who can’t handle repeated failure is going to prevent us from dealing with the incredibly complex mechanics of this particular boss.

I don’t mind doing this fight over and over again, personally. I’m here to play games with my friends and the format that takes is largely irrelevant to me. As long as I can see my own play improving from one week to the next, then I’m satisfied. I mean, I just took over healing duties and I think I’m doing a pretty good job changing from being a relatively mindless DPS to playing a role that requires me to be incredibly present and focused at all times. It was a jarring first session, back when I started, as I failed mechanics I normally passed without problem. Being increasingly exhausted every single day for the last month or whatever hasn’t helped either. I was dead on my feet during our last session and made the same simple mistake multiple times. My focus was shot and it’s not looking like it’s going to improve any time soon, based on how my weeks are going. I’m still just as tired and burned out as ever, so it remains to be seen if I’ll even be able to stay conscious during a raid, let alone contribute to it. Still, exhausted as I am, it’s still probably better for me to continue playing than to swap roles around or to have to find someone to fill in for me. Give how many times I’ve done the fight, you’d think it would have become muscle memory to me by now. I just gotta adjust for my new role and focus better during the moments that require active assessment and decision-making, and that should be enough. It’ll be so nice to clear this raid, eventually. So nice.