After four weeks of updates and tracking and filling out my tables and monitoring inventory, my latest workshop project in Final Fantasy 14 has concluded. I spent hours making the items over the weekend and now they’re up for sale, to be replaced as they’re bought out, in an effort to maintain a stock level rather than just craft a random assortment of things. I’m hopeful that this will all go according to my plan (the market is pretty low on available housing exterior options at the moment, so I was putting the only item up for a lot of them and could name my price), both in terms of how much all this stuff sells for an how much easier it will be to maintain a stock level than try to predict what is going to sell at any given time. It required an immense amount of up-front work, between adminstering the project and participating in it, but we managed to reach the end with only one miss-delivered item and my record-keeping made it easier to figure out what went wrong than to fix it (and fixing it was very easy). If I’d gotten more participants, I think it would have gone faster, but that would have also meant the work I did would have been more concentrated than it was and it was already enough to make me so tired that I am considering dropping the workshop stuff entirely. After all, the main people doing it don’t need more money and I’ve got my own means of earning money, so this just seems like a waste of time and effort sometimes. Less so if my pricing scheme works out (establishing a more controlled price across the board for some of these housing things rather than playing the “set the price lower than any current listing” thing most people seem to do), but I’m not super confident that it will. It’s worth a try, just like this entire project has been, but I’m not sure there’s much of an end-point to this other than me just quitting or turning it all into personal work rather than work for my Free Company.

Part of all of this is the thoughts I’ve been having about the role of this Free Company in my gameplay. Currently, all it really affords me is the workshop all this work takes place in. The actual mechanical ability to make all this stuff, I mean. And if I didn’t have access to it, I’d be actively working on getting my own set up, a thing I’m still doing and that is taking a really long time because the character I’ve already poured so much time and effort into such that they can do the stuff that levels up FCs easily at vast quantities is in an FC that is gaining all those benefits that I will never touch. I’m not sure of the exact amount since I’m not tracking it at that level (and I’m not sure it’s possible to do that), but I’m pretty sure I’m the reason the FC has millions of those points we can use to buy FC buffs and that my FC leader is surely going to turn into a bunch of resources he’ll sell for personal enrichment. I don’t much like the idea of being so productive for someone else’s benefit when they don’t even play the game, but I’m not sure I want to pursue this line of inquiry since it will rock the boat enough that I’d probably wind up leaving the FC unless everyone handles it way better than they’ve handled literally anything else that has happened.

The whole FC has been relatively inactive lately, too. We even had a “conversation” about it in the Senior Resident chat that was more of a venting/”please comfort me/tell me I’m not a bad person” thing than an actual conversation that ended up with me pointing out that no one really does anything and, as the officers, why would anyone else be doing stuff if they’re not? Which, of course, has all of them trying to do stuff again without examining why it burned them all out, fell apart, or hasn’t really gotten any buy-in from people. There’s a lot going on in this FC, between a content lull and most of the discord moving all of their video game chatter to another location, and absolutely none of it will be addressed by everyone going back to what they were doing before that led to this silence. I tried to make the point that they need to be doing this because it’s something they care about rather than because I pointed the problem out to them, but it fell on deaf ears and now patterns will continue to play out without change.

I don’t know that I want to leave, though. That’s a pretty big decision that I can’t really take back. I mean, I could always rejoin later, but it would still mean a shift in several of my relationships within the group that I’m no sure I want to change. I do still like some of the people and don’t mind (at worst) the rest, so I’m not prepared to deal with how that weirdness would play out, even if I know I’d be able to get my side-FC up and running in a matter of days at most. Well, days and then however long it takes me to buy a house to set the FC up in. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that I don’t really have a compelling reason to leave, nor do I have a compelling one to stay, so all I will do for the moment is keep things going, keep my workshop work up until it either becomes too much work or not worth doing, and slowly chafe under the restrictions I feel during the brief moments they’re on my mind. Well, more than that I suppose, but it’s hardly a horrible thing, to not be completely and totally optimized in every regard and possible manner. I just… I don’t know. I have been spending a lot of time trying to remove things that are just drains on my life, to stop doing work for people or institutions that won’t work for me in return, and I can’t help but really wonder what I am getting out of this arrangement other than the ability to do a bunch of work I’m mostly doing for other people’s benefit. It’s been a long time since I used any of the resources the FC made available to me and I’ve long since turned from someone taking to someone giving, so I hardly feel obligated to it any more… I don’t know. Clearly I need to think about this more. Which I can hopefully do now that all the heavy workshop labor is done.