As you might have guessed from what is now over a year of precedent, I spent a lot of my vacation over the last few weeks playing Final Fantasy 14. It was a pretty busy time because there was a major patch that included some new raids, main scenario quests, and a pile of new craftable items. Lots of stuff to do for folks like me who had been champing at the bit to make new gear (most of which looks good enough that I haven’t wanted to glamour over it) and for all the raiders out there. Between that gear, a new set of raids, a new set of savage raids (that unlocked the day before this posts, which is also the day I’m writing it), and a new tier of consumables for those raids, there’s a lot of demand for supplies and people to produce it all. So far, I’ve managed to make a tidy little sum crafting gear for people, some of which disappeared into making sets for my friends now that they have jobs at level 100 (which is necessary for using the gear in question), but much of that particular demand appears to have dried up. There really aren’t a lot of people who wanted it and most of those people seem to have gotten their gear by now. I’m sure there will always be a steady trickle of demand since the gear looks pretty great, but the market is glutted right now as a bunch of crafters have produced things and very few people seem to be buying them at the moment. I’m sure more people will buy once the price drops low enough, but I don’t think there’s been all that much to be made in the market since the first few days of the patch, where crafters could basically name their prices.

Instead, I’ll probably do steady business in raid comsumables when I can find the time to actually spend on crafting. I burned myself out on it during that first week, right at the start of my vacation, because I was the primary crafter for seventeen sets of gear over the course of five days. I was so worn out by the end of that process that I had mild brain fog and was making silly little mistakes repeatedly while wrapping up the crafting. I took some time away to rest and do literally anything else (I played a lot of Pokemon ZA, played the new MSQ segment, and even did the base version of the new raids) and recovered fairly quickly thanks to that break and getting plenty of sleep for once in my life. I also formed a small crafting cooperative largely out of the people involved in the gear project and one other person who shares our interests of “having tasks to do” and “staying supplied with raid consumables to use or sell.” We’ve kept a steady stream of work going since then, mostly on food and potion production, but it’s all pretty time-consuming work to do since it is just as much work to make one of those consumables as it is to craft one piece of gear. Less time to get to that point, though, since there’s fewer pre-crafts required, but it’s still a significant investment of time and I don’t always want to sit at my desk clicking macros for more than half an hour at a time. That said, there’s a decent amount of money to be made by producing and selling those things, though, so maybe I’ll take some time to work on them right now as all the raiding groups are gearing up to start the Savage Raids today.

The only other thing of note I did during this vacation was start leveling one of my alts. I figured that would be a larger part of my vacation–I even entertained notions of getting the character all the way through the first fifty levels of the game–but there was enough stuff going on that I only got to it during the last few days, when I needed something that wasn’t crafting or Pokemon to unwind after a busy day of crafting, questing, collecting, or roleplaying (which I did quite a bit of with some of those friends I’ve made in this game). Leveling a new character scratched that itch pretty well but it isn’t so interesting or entertaining that I’m staying up super late to do it most nights. It’s very much something I will stop doing when I get tired enough, which makes it a perfect wind-down activity for my evenings, which is probably where it will stay for the time being. I need to get that character to level fifty before I can start to use her for my intended purposes of creating a Free Company I can use to funnel materials to my main character, so it might last me a while, especially since I also need to do all fifty levels of main scenario quests as well. It’s quite a time sink and will undoubtedly keep me busy for months to come, while I juggle my varying levels of in-game obligations (some of which may or may not happen anymore) as a new wrestling season starts up and I try to figure out how to resurrect my current Free Company’s workshop for non-submarine work (the leader offered me his resources, but it’s still a decent amount of work to get this process updated and rolling again).

It feels weird to be hitting a point in the game where I’m actually running out of stuff to do, but I’ve officially hit it. At this point, I am either leveling alternate jobs, making gear/consumables, or playing an alt because my only other options all fall under “find groups to join for various activities” and while I definitely want to do most of those activities eventually, I’m very shy and not sure I want to spend my limited evening time on doing battle content with a bunch of strangers. It’d be another thing entirely if it was my friends, but we’re having trouble getting some of that stuff into a good place to run it without wasting everyone’s time and I’m not certain any of these groups collectively have what it takes to get through any of this content. None of them are bad players, of course, some folks just don’t have the job stability to commit to multiple nights or regular schedules and some folks are already emeshed in other groups that take priority for them. Each group has some undesirable situation attached to it at the moment and it’s making everything more difficult than it needs to be, so we’ll see how it all shakes out once our holiday break is over and things have started back up in earnest. Which is hopefully next week, but who can say. Maybe it’ll all fall apart between now and then. I really don’t know what to expect with this stuff anymore, or what I actually want to happen, so I guess I’ll just roll with whatever winds up happening.