As things have slowly settled and I’ve begun to adjust my expectations and workloads, I’ve decided to do a bit of stepping up my Final Fantasy 14 workshop. I finally reached my personal goal of having nine figures of in-game currency on my main character and while I’m absolutely not going to stop (I do still need to pick out a new goal now, though), I am shifting my focus a little bit. I’m going to try to put together a larger work call than usual in order to get some stuff on the market so we have fewer gaps in our offerings. It will be a lot to manage, I think, but it’ll be worth it in the end since I’m going to make a few adjustments to my rules this time around. There won’t be any radical shifts, mind you, and I’m going to be maintaining my limits on how much individuals can claim to limit how much the wealthier people in the group get, but I’ll probably wind up dropping it sooner rather than later given how some of those high-value materials are genuinely difficult to get in a reasonable time frame and only the more experience players in the group can probably acquire them quickly or easily (or just buy them outright since they have the financial stability to take the short-term hit in order to get the long-term gain). Regardless, this will be mutliple times more materials than I usually handle, so there’s going to be a bit more work required to get everything accounted for and handled.
Aside from that, I’m still not getting a lot of movement on my buy-out listings. I might just go make some of that stuff myself just to do the dang crafting and open up all the listing’s I’ve closed because I don’t can’t afford to just keep buying junk unless I get the other stuff required to turn that junk into items I can sell. I’m not going to impoverish myself or burn up all my leisure time for people who have more money than I do. It’s difficult to manage this kind of project with a buy list. I understand now why my FC leader’s version of the list was so much more limited and tended to revolve around a few specific things… Much easier to actually just go buy the stuff I can get in massive quantities and have my collectors focus on the limited-availability items. That said, I’m already in this deep and while I’m trying to avoid committing the sunk cost fallacy, I think I’ll be okay since, ultimately, I can just go get the stuff myself. I’ve just been avoiding it so that people who want to gather things have the opportunity to do that with some of the less advanced stuff. Which I should stop doing. I can’t keep being so considerate of other, hypothetical people that I’m putting myself out. If they were real people, if literally anyone had expressed an interest in doing the work, I might consider waiting, but no one has and all I’m doing right now is accumulating a bunch of stuff I can’t use yet on my already too-full retainers. So, once I clean them out and get through this current bought of heavier work orders, I’ll probably shift to finishing up a bunch of the little projects I’ve bought some of the supplies for. It’ll probably also help to have all of that stuff sorted out into its own storage location so I can more easily manage my current stock without needing to search five different inventories…
It’s very funny that I had to stop writing this last night to do other stuff and, in the time since I stopped last night and resumed the following day, one of my workshop participants jumped on pretty much every single thing that remained on the list. I still need to log in and sort through everything, make sure I’ve got the quantities I need in the right amounts to actually make stuff and determine what I should stop buying and what I can leave up for other people, but it seems like I’ll be able to start in on all that crafting sooner than expected. And without needing to spend all that time accumulating things. Now I can just spend money about it, hopefully without dropping belong my nine-digit mark, and move on with my life. This really emphasizes my need to finish sorting through my retainers and cleaning up my storage. I really need to get organized so all of this stuff is more manageable than it has been up to this point.
Beyond that, well, we’ll see how the rest of it goes. I’ve started putting together a big work order and already people are trying to jump in for work despite me saying that this separate thread I made is still under construction and not yet ready for people to claim work from it. It really is exhausting how some people just don’t read things. I mean, the person doing it even reacted to the little joke I made at the top of the thread about the thread being off-limits for the moment! It’s enough to make you start to lose your mind, I tell you what… Still, she responded well to my comments about it still not being ready yet and will hopefully not notice that, when I finally do share it, it will be during a time she rarely posts on Discord. Or, if I’ve gotten over my frustration by then, it’ll be in the early evening, when the most people post on Discord so there’s a better chance of other people getting a crack at the massive amount of work I’m going to be putting out. We’ll see. We shall see…