Being the leader of a Final Fantasy 14 Free Company (player guild) that has topped the weekly rankings twice in a row is pretty rewarding. I’m very proud of that accomplishment, considering how much work I did to make it happen and how much my life has revolved around making that a sustainable process over the last two weeks (and continues still, but to a lesser extent). I’m also proud of how much effort the community put it to making it happen as well, considering not everyone has so completely optimized their characters to the do the sort of work involved. I may have done a lot of the work, but only because I had people supporting me and enabling me to do that work. Truly a community effort, and one that I figured out how to make profitable for everyone. After all, that’s what I’m good at. No matter what, I will find a way to turn a profit. In a system like this, with predictable inputs and outputs, dependable resources, and actual rewards based on effort, how could I not? Which will come in handy since I’ve been sinking so much of my own finances into this group and paying back everyone else who spends their own in-game currency on stuff. I would like to pay myself back, eventually. And get the group opportunities to get paid, as well.

This group has two weeks of existence under our collective belts, at least in our current form, and things are settling into place nicely. Sure, my money-making scheme is still just a scheme and I will need more time yet to turn theory into practice, let alone repeatable practice, but that’s not bad considering how little time I’ve been able to put toward figuring out how to make a profit (which also has the bonus of justifying the work done to keep our FC at the top of the rankings every week). I mean, with all the work being done and stuff being produced, I was going to figure it out eventually, I just had to get to the point where I wasn’t trying to keep up with the work being done. Which also means I finally have time and attention I can turn torwards other stuff, like all my old crafting and gathering and money-making stuff. I still need to get it into shape for this new group and align it with what projects I can do and what costs I can afford. And get my alts situated enough that I can make them more self-sustaining because needing to run a bunch of dungeons in order to get what I need to keep them generating materials for the free company is a lot of work that doesn’t add as much to the process. Better if I can just weave that into the production loop like my main character is. It’s just a lot of work to make that happen. A LOT.

Our existing combat group (that we call “Content Rewind” since it’s focus is to return to older content and attempt it at the closest approximation we can get to what it was like when it first released) has made the move smoothly and is in the process of getting settled with the current tools and discord situation (experimenting with permissions has taught me some very interesting things about discord). We’re trying a few new things to better organize it and they seem to mostly be working out for now. We don’t have a lot of “Roles” in discord to get the attention of like-minded people (one of the many things on our to-do list), so having one of discord’s many bots to manage it all has been helpful. We’ve had no other combat groups pop up yet, aside from a few ad hoc gatherings I’ve done, and now me incorporating some of the FC folks into my existing content group (easier to help new folks try out difficult content if most of the people doing it know it well already) but that’s not officially anything yet. So far, it’s just a thing happening tomorrow. If it goes well and lots of people show interest, it might become more of a thing. Ideally we’d be able to get a group of interested folks together in the FC, but past efforts have failed due to burn out and personality issues, so we will have to see now that (hopefully) everyone will be less stressed.

After all that… well, I’ve got an office to decorate, a storage room/workshop to put together, and roleplaying stuff to figure out. My character’s “job” used to be a travelling purchaser for my old free company with a bunch of other stuff on the side, which then changed to being basically a project manager and finable assembler when we switched to making housing exteriors (a business I ran when the old leader stopped having work for everyone to do and no longer was sending me out to buy stuff for him). Now… I know they’re the head of a new Free Company and I think I know what this new group will do for money in the short-term, at least, but I don’t know how much of that translates in-character or how my character would feel about it. After all, I was committed to this community and will do what it takes to help them flourish, but my character was far less committed than I… They were pretty much always ready to leave and while that was also true of me, I’m not sure they’d step in to be the new leader without some nudging from someone else who sees their potential. Lots to consider in my spare moments between all my other stuff.