The thing I enjoy the most about being in a Final Fantasy 14 Free Company these days is that I get to facilitate a lot of other peoples’ fun. Between all the gear crafting I do, the organization of events I help out with, the formalization of informal activities, and the encouragement to just do the dang thing, I feel like I’ve found myself a pretty comfortable spot in the group. It can be exhausting at times, especially when one thing builds up a lot (currently at the end of a busy week of gear crafting and I’ve still got a full set to do sometime today or tomorrow), but I enjoying helping other people to have fun and get a great deal of personal validation out of being able to offer help to people now that I’ve gotten myself fairly secured in my chosen activities and have learned enough to actually be a positive resource for people. I feel like it fills a bit of a gap in the FC right now, even if I’m not perfect at it, but we really don’t have a lot of people in the group who are the “let me help you have fun” type. Most of the officers only help when asked and the established members of the group tend to be the most vocal and active despite us being a supposedly new-player-friend FC, which means there really aren’t a lot of people asking open questions about what the newer players need or how they could be helpful. It’s way more work and I suspect that some degree of this pattern of behavior in the officers reflects their experiences with players who tend to come and go a bunch before ultimately vanishing, but I still think it’s worth doing even if I can’t do as much as I want and getting any kind of response is like pulling teeth sometimes.

I know it can be intimidating to join a group with a lot of active members and strong personalities (I mean, I barely said anything for weeks when I first joined the discord and in my first month as an FC member), so I am not terribly surprised that all the new people who have joined us aren’t diving in to every poll I’ve put or answering every question I’ve asked. It is, though, a little frustrating to sometimes get little traction in a group setting with an idea that a lot of people talked about wanting in smaller conversations, which is what is happening to about half the things I try to get up and running. We’ve all got such varied interests that it kind of makes sense that a lot of stuff struggles to get off the ground. We’ve got up to half a dozen people interested in just about everything, but some of these things only make sense to do at scale, so we struggle to make those activities happen. For instance, I’ve been trying to find people who want to do level their crafting jobs and while there are plenty of people who want to do that, finding ways to support them are difficult because doing it one-person at a time is almost as time-consuming as supporting a whole bunch of people at once. And if you do it the right way, you can use those efforts to feed into other kinds of leveling (other crafting jobs, gathering jobs, and gearing up). I just can’t get anyone who seems to want to put a focused effort into that work. No one seems to want to formalize their leveling but all of them still do want some kind of support, which leaves me in a bind when it comes to doing anything.

Other stuff there’s less of an issue. Sure, it stinks to have four or five people who one to do current content, since typically you need eight, but there are ways to find people and build parties without having enough people interested from the jump. Not so much for the crafting thing, considering just how much of it relies on the use of FC buffs (that XP boost is no joke when you’re trying to bust out some levels!) and is made easier through FC-or-Discord-based coordination. Battle content is also easier to support since you know going into it what pretty much everyone needs. The right food, the right potions, and fully-repaired gear. Anything else isn’t really something you can help with at scale without a degree of preparation that is its own thing entirely, like doing daily content to earn the currencies needed to buy gear or to buy the materials needed to make the gear. Still, you kind of know what you might need to do based on what level everyone’s at and what kind of battles you’re doing, so it’s fairly easy to plan ahead and support folks if you’re organized and know what’s going on. The only thing other than crafting that’s difficult to support, really, is roleplaying, and that’s its own entire beast. That’s a blog post on it’s own, if not an unending series of blog posts about what it means to roleplay with people and create characters and so on.

Other than that… I mostly like to play support jobs in the game. Tanks and healers. Their jobs are often more difficult in battles, which appeals to my desire to overcome challenges and support my fellow players. What it also means is that I’m in a good position to help my fellows get through queues faster. Being a healer or a tank means that you get put into whatever it is you want to do more quickly, generally speaking, and you can usually bring some of the damage-oriented players along for the ride. It also allows you to pay special attention to folks who are new or doing something for the first time and, if you’re good or focused enough, help them live through things they might otherwise not survive. I’ve done this with a lot of players, saving some of my damage mitigation abilities as a healer to drop on a player who got lost during a mechanic and might die because they’re in the wrong spot, or making sure that if only one person of a set is going to get healed enough to survive something, it is them. I generally try to avoid picking favorites in any of the difficult content (though, as a good healer, I should prioritize the higher-dps jobs or the ones who can also resurrect people), but it’s usually fine to do that during the basic, Main Scenario Quest stuff and that’s the perfect time to keep first-timers alive so they can get through the experience feeling good about it. This is also why, outside of this blog post, I generally try to avoid telling people about it (with rare exceptions). Which… Well, I’m sure none of the people I’ve done this for (save the rare exception) read this blog so it’s fine. I just like to help people have a good time, is all. In whatever form that takes.