It is still a metaphor, even in Final Fantasy 14, though perhaps a more true one than usual given how much of the crafting I’ve been doing in this game actually involves my character using a grindstone. Unfortunately for me, the actual heavy work for the crafting workshop I’ve been running these past two weeks has been the day-to-day administration of it. There’s a lot of stuff moving around, a lot of things to be tracked, and so very much that needs to be stored for eventual use that it is a significant undertaking if one of the other players participating in the workshop submits a few claims and then the items from the claims in quick succession. Which one of the players, an officer in the FC, has been doing. She has so very much time to work on this stuff that it has become a regular occurrence that, despite my efforts to put systems in place to prevent this from happening, I am getting quite burned out on it. I mean, I set this up with a ten-claim limit, with restrictions on the high-value items to one-per-ten-claim-set, to hopefully force people to pace themselves so I’m not constantly updating this set of tables and worksheets, but I also set it up so that people were supposed to be claiming on resource per set of things being produced as “one claim” and the first person to take work didn’t do that, so no one else has either, which is why this has taken so long. I’m not terribly surprised that the spirit of the whole thing got missed in the rush to get the financial gain side of things. But I persevere because this will put the workshop in a good spot so I can just do maintenance crafting projects in the future rather than have to spend time each week planning what to craft (and hoping that this isn’t the week that those things turn unpopular).