It is done. After a solid week of pretty much constant effort in my free time, I’ve finished creating the document required to run a workshop in my Free Company in Final Fantasy 14. A lot of the basics were handled by the FC leader, in his previous iteration fo this workshop, but I’ve diversified the portfolio a bit, reworked some things, and adapted it to fit my needs and interests. It has been out in the world for two days now, as I’m writing this (and we’re rapidly approaching the deadline I set for people to let me know they’d read it before I go actively tagging the folks who’d answered my poll near the start of last month), and not only are people already sending me stuff to buy, but I’ve decided against my initial idea to hold off on starting a project until Sunday and put up a couple projects for everyone to get involved with right away. This way I get to try things out, everyone will get a little money at the very least, and I can see how much interest there is. I mean, it won’t be a perfect example of that because I’m trying to turn these things around in just a couple days and most people probably won’t want to stress out for a chunk of change, but it should give me an idea. And, if nothing else, it has spurred a bunch of conversation, gotten me some feedback about how to improve things, and taught me a lot about how to manage these things going forward. I like to learn by doing and boy howdy am I doing these days…

I’m kind of worried about how much of my life this is going to take over. I don’t want to spend all day every day crafting a bunch of stuff in order to keep up with the powergamers who are just gathering a huge quantity of my pair of “no ceiling” items, especially if no one else is buying the limited items. I need all that stuff to do these crafting projects, so people just spamming one thing are going to really unbalance my inventory. Thankfully, I’ve got a means set up to show that I’m no longer buying things and enough disclaimers about my limited funds that I should be able to turn off the fire hose of corn-to-be-turned-into-corn-oil when I’ve hit a reasonable cap. That will hopefully force them to accquire the smaller-quantity items so I can actually do all the crafting that uses these things, but I won’t be surprised if we eventually reach a point where I’m just not buying things anymore because I can’t keep up with the production powers of these players. It’s not a good outcome if I’m chucking all my money at the two players who are probably the richest after our FC leader because of their penchant for doing exactly this: delivering things in ridiculously high-quantities when someone is buying without a set limt.

I took a break from writing the above paragraph to go get some water and discovered that someone had actually filled another quota already. And then, after writing that last sentence a notification from discord just told me that it was actually for my OTHER crafting workshop. The one focused on making mostly the same consumables but that is more of a shared repository than a warehouse for my own eventual profit. From the fervor with which my FC mates are running through my buy-list, I suspect I am going to need to close the list before long. They’re so hungry for gil! I mean, I love a monotonous task more than most, but this is ridiculous. People have been actually looking at the list for less than half a day and I’m already worried about how much my personal wealth is going to drop before I cut them all off… Having a group working at a scale that is used to providing for a huge submarine crafting operation is probably more than my poor pocketbook can handle. And is definitely WAY more than I’m willing to craft. Hell, it’s more than anyone could craft even if they could do it without stopping. I might have to reconsider my stance on crafting-assistant plugins… Which kinda stinks. I recognize the slippery slope I’m on. Sure, it might start out as “I don’t want to click this macro every five seconds to make this basic ingredient at the high quality I need it” and “I can click a single button and craft this high-level food item already, so what does it matter if I set myself up to craft a ton of it and then go to bed or do something else while the program clicks the button for me?” But it won’t be long before it becomes “I don’t want to have to figure out this difficult crafting challenge, so I’m just going to throw this program at it.”

I know I can just not do that. I posses the discipline and genuinely enjoy doing most crafting stuff, but the way things are going is at an entirely different scale than I expected. I thought I’d get little interest in the personal buyout stuff, given that it’s in relatively small quantities, but some people just want to gather I suppose. CLEARLY all these people need more work to do. I’m going to struggle to keep them employed given the relative smallness of my own operation and it really doesn’t seem like our FC leader is going to get back into running the submarine workshop any time soon… I’ll just have to open and close my buying list in controlled bursts. Maybe get more specific and plan things out a little bit. Turn it into more of a “claim a chunk of labor” thing than a “sell me stuff I want” thing. I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll figure it out once I’m no longer exhausted and overwhelmed. Turns out that I probably should have started slower than I did and aimed smaller… I probably wouldn’t mind as much if more players were getting a cut of the action, rather than just all the same old crew as always. All of whom are richer than I am, actually. I’d rather funnel the money towards people who need it and don’t have nine digits of personal wealth, you know? Be a river to my people? But it is what it is and I can’t make people want to do this kind of work for in-game money. I should just focus on the profits I will be able to make once I get a handle on turning all these expenses into products to profit from…