After wrapping up everything but the finishing touches on my Final Fantasy 14 gear project, I posted in my Free Company’s discord that I was planning to make myself new gear right after the patch drops with all my fancy new gathering and crafting gear. I wanted to know if anyone else was interested in participating in a fun little bleeding-edge gear crafting activity. So far, I’ve gotten one bite and a lot of silence (as I’ve mentioned before, I think most of the bleeding-edge players in my group have the in-game currency to just buy whatever they want, so they will just wait until the prices drop a little bit and buy it OR just accumulate it slowly by doing the raids and whatnot), but the bite I did get has been very interested in making this happen. It’s a player I kinda get along with and have been doing more and more with as I shift into endgame content, but he’s very combat-focused and a bit less crafting-focused. He is absolutely doing a bunch of crafting still, but he hasn’t even gotten all of his jobs to level 100 yet, so there is likely no way that he’d be ready in time given how much combat stuff he does every single day (it’s exhausting even thinking about trying to keep up with him!). That said, all of his gathering skills are at level 100 and he recently requested that I help him get somemid-tier gear for his level 100 classes. That took a little time (not much, given that I’ve done it already and have higher stats than when I did it myself), but I quickly realized that I should just get him up to the current top-tier of gathering gear. It’s a bit more work on my part, but less now that I’m using all top-tier gear and it’ll be a huge help to have someone gathering the new materials alongside me. He’ll probably still do mostly the combat stuff and I’ll do most of the gathering and crafting stuff, but it’s good to have someone ready to help out.

It’s been an interesting experience, reaching this pinacle of crafting and gathering ability. Not a lot of my fellow FC members are bothering to push this far and outside a chunk of the FC’s officers, I am one of a very few people who have all their crafting and gathering jobs at level 100. I might be the only one who has top-tier gear. I haven’t checked everyone yet, of course, but it’s been surprisingly rare. I see plenty of other players out in the world with the same tier of stuff as I’ve made for myself, but this is also a pretty skewed perspective because of COURSE I’m going to find other people who have this gear collecting the stuff I’m collecting and doing the activities I’m doing. Compared to the vast population of the server, though, the number starts to seem incredibly small. I’ve also started to recognize a lot of the same names as I visit during similar times and find myself wondering if they’re the people keeping the market supplied with these materials or the gear we use. I’m really not sure what else they’d be doing unless, like me, they’re putting their abilities and gear to use making things for other poeple who don’t have it yet. All of that’s beside the point, really. All activities that are as focused as collecting specific materials tend to result in seeing the same people over and over again (even if the cast tends to change every so often). What makes this so strange is finding out just how few people find this kind of stuff rewarding.

Every time I mention my top-tier gear project in my discord, I get a lot of people telling me that it isn’t worth the effort. That I should just buy the stuff if I want it and that I don’t even really need it since you can get by for most things with lesser gear and just upgrade later. No matter how many times I repeat that I’m doing this FOR FUN or that I’m doing it for the sense of personal satisfaction, every comment I make about it winds up with someone trying to do an “I told you so” of some kind or a “it really isn’t worth it” type remark. It’s honestly been really discouraging. I set myself a difficult goal that isn’t some combat challenge and, through a great deal of effort on my part, achieved it, but I can’t even talk about it in the discord of an FC that supposedly started as a crafting group without someone raining on my parade. And I’m not even trying to have a parade! I just want to share my excitement for achieving my goal! And I can’t even do that without getting negativity. It’s just so exhausting. I mean, when I first started playing this game, I had people tripping over themselves to create gear for me and encouraging me to aim for the stars, all of whom have now discoraged me from actually going to the stars once I figured out how to build my own rocketship. I know it’s because I’m intrinsically motivated when it comes to this stuff, so people who set up goals in order to get external rewards (like social prestige or the ability to craft and sell things for a lot of in-game money) want to warn me away from something they experienced as a fruitless venture, but I’m incredibly sick of repeating myself about doing this for my own satisfacation.

So many more of the members of the FC are interested in the combat trials and challenges. There’s some discouragement there, from people who think us “new” players aren’t ready for the big challenges, but mostly it’s people coming together to achieve those goals. No one wants to do that for crafting though. The most united we get in that regard is coming together to work on projects that the FC leader has negotiated for large quantities of whatever. It’s great to get paid and there’s a lot of fun chitchat that happens when everyone’s gathered around the FC house and quicksynthing away at whatever thing we signed up for, but it’s not cooperative. There’s no teamwork element. We’re all just individuals working alongside each other. There’s solidarity and fun there, sure, but that’s about it. I guess I’m just frustrated that no one seems willing to share my enthusiasm for the stuff that I find rewarding, fun, or interesting. Almost no one is actually interested in this stuff, even to the extent that they can engage in crafting to support their combat activities. I can’t even ask people to help me get stuff together for crafting potions and food items that I freely share with the FC without them commenting about how it’s unnecessary or not worth the effort. All while ignoring that the pile of food we’re constantly pulling from never seems to disappear solely because the FC leader and I keep adding to it (and probably just me, soon, given how busy he’s been with stuff in his personal life).

I’m not going to stop because I value this kind of work and I’ve always been one to invest in infrastructure, but it sure would be nice if I could get more than one or two other people who see the value in someone actually doing this kind of stuff. I mean, we’ve also had a flood of new members and most of them seem like genuinely new players rather than more experienced players using alternate characters (alts), so it feels even more important than ever to have someone around who’s doing this kind of stuff. That’s the whole point of this FC after all: to help new players get their footing and figure out what they like about the game. I mean, I only got as far as I did in all of this because I had people making crafting gear for me when I was too new to be able to work through it all on my own. I leaned pretty heavily on the FC’s resources when I started out and I don’t want that kind of support to be isolated to just the new players. There’s so much cooperation and support going on as players try to get through the combat encounters and activities. I just want to foster the same thing with the crafting side of the game and I keep getting shot down whenever I try to start a conversation about it.