As I’m starting this post, I’m struck by how often the phrase “_________ says it all” is immediately followed by a more expansive explanation that includes details that weren’t present in what “__________” was. All of which to say is that the title of this post is an accurate representation of its contents in summary. I got hired (me, personally) by the leader of my Free Company in Final Fantasy 14 to do some work to help make our company projects proceed more smoothly. I’m now the person trolling the markets for the materials we need in mass quantities that our companions haven’t been able to acquire by the time we need to start distributing materials. The leader sets a price cap and gives me the in-game money (plus a 10 percent commission that is meant to also cover sales tax) for however much of whatever material it is he needs and I run around the various data centers and servers buying it all up, keeping whatever money is left once that is all over. We negotiated the details of it over the weekend prior to me writing this (two weekends ago from when this gets posted) and I got sent on my way to buy fifty thousand each of two different things last night (as of writing this). I got my money, did my research, filled out my little tracking spreadsheet (that also calculates profit margins, my current pay total, and the quantity purchased), and spent about four hours buying it all. It was actually a lot of fun! I’ve been interested in how the game’s economics work, from a player perspective, and this was a very interesting glimpse into it that I couldn’t have gotten any other way. While I definitely still prefer to spend my time playing the game, I am kind of looking forward to the next time I get to do a shopping hunt like this one, and not just because it has been the fastest I’ve made a huge amount of money in my almost ten months of playing the game.
Continue readingSetting Up A Serious Grind In Final Fantasy 14 To Distract Myself From My Life
I’m back in the saddle with Final Fantasy 14! Back to the lowkey socialization, the focused gaming, the attention-consuming escapism, and free of the need to think about my life and how much it sucks to be me this past week and a half while dealing with biological family problems (and how much it will continue to suck to be me while I’m still embroiled in this stuff for however long it takes). After my time away, I’ve come back at a bit of a loss for what to do next! There’s gear to accumulate, levels to gain, quests to do, and so much more, all of which is very familiar! This is how most patches usually start, with a huge number of quests, the ability to get new, better gear, and at least some confusion on my part about which of the many options I should start with. This time, though, the path is more muddled than ever. Instead of being able to use the resource I’ve been accumulating the whole time, “Tomestones of Poetics” to unlock new gear that’s pretty much the best stuff you can get at that point, I actually have to dig into the mud that is the various other Tomestones and resources from raids to figure out what’s the best gear for me to get right now, so I can do the current content in order to get better gear to prepare me for the harder current content while also getting myself into a position to be able to make or otherwise acquire the next set of gear that will come out with the next patch whenever that happens. It’s a lot and it’s taken me a couple days to figure out, but I think I’ve got it thanks to some incidental advice from the leader of my FC and my own organized nature.
Continue readingYet Another Ending, But This One Feels More Final For Some Reason
It is done. After quite a while of trying to make this one every-other-week game stick around, I have brought it to an end. The campaign/group that included both The Demigods of Daelen and The Magical Millennium has concluded. Between my time off this past summer, general scheduling woes, and the slow withdrawal of half the players I’d tried to include in the campaign, there just wasn’t much left to keep alive. Especially considering how much we were probably going to struggle with getting the remaining folks together to play, a thing we wouldn’t be able to do if even one of them was missing. With only three players and the GM left, any single person missing makes it impossible to continue. We talked it over this past weekend, ironically with one of the remaining players arriving very late, and conluded that this was for the best right now. We might get the group back together in the future, when everyone’s schedule is more dependable and we’ve got more players to join us, but for now we are bringing it to an end. I’ll still have my The Rotten Labyrinth game on its every-other-weekend schedule, but now I am without one of my staple campaigns for the time being. We might yet get together for one-shots or to play games or hang out or whatever, but it won’t be on the structured, three-to-seven-Sunday-afternoon schedule we’ve been trying to maintain up to this point. It’ll be more ad hoc. Impulsive, even. Less regular. Which feels silly to say given how little this group has met. We couldn’t even get more than two people together on our play-Stardew-Valley-instead-of-D&D days.
Continue readingOne Last Letter To Bring An End To Years Of Waiting
One of the most difficult things I’ve ever done was choose to cut off my biological family. Though I’m still in contact with two siblings and briefly reconnected with a single cousin (who stopped responding and fell silent at some point last year–or maybe the year prior, I really don’t remember), I haven’t exchanged more than pleasantries with any one else in years (barring one moment of connection with an uncle I thought would be cooler about everything than he eventually was and my multiple attempts to extend a hand to my parents in the hope that they’d be able to grow enough for me to build some kind of relationship with them). Only a few still try to keep in contact and while I absolutely could do more to stay in contact with my wider family, that’s not really something I want. I cut them all off, not just my parents. I would tell pretty much anyone that my primary reason for doing so was because I didn’t want to come between my parents and their siblings, or drive any kind of wedge into the family at large, but those are things I’m currently discussing with my therapist as a result of how reflexively I say them and how they all center the well-being of my parents and family rather than admit the truth, which is that I can’t just ignore the fact that they all bore witness to the abuses of my childhood in some capacity and chose to do nothing. Regardless of the reason behind it, I still made the choice to potentially never speak to any of them ever again. I didn’t do it as directly as I did with my parents and I didn’t go as nuclear as I did with my brother, but none of them know where I live and I haven’t responded to any of their attempts to draw information out of me despite knowing exactly what all that would mean. I did, after all, set a rule in place for what it would take to reestablish contact with any of them, like I did with my parents and pretty much anyone I’ve ever cut contact with. And like my parents and most of the other people I’ve cut contact with, I knew from the outset that it was incredibly unlikely that my rule would ever be satisfied.
Continue readingI’ve Finally Committed Myself To Watching A Let’s Play
Most of the time, I’m not really one to watch people play video games. I don’t really enjoy Let’s Plays, I don’t really enjoy watching most people stream, and I even have a bit of a hard time sitting around while other people play a game nearby. This is because I have a very firm grasp of game mechanics, how to succeed at most games, and am easily frustrated by what looks like, in my eyes, inefficiency. I don’t get really backseat driver-y with video games, but I can feel my blood pressure rise as someone scrolls past an item in their inventory that they’re looking for or that they know is worthless and yet won’t throw away. It is my own personal hell, to watch someone play a game I know how to do well when they are struggling because they either haven’t grasped a core mechanic as solidly as the game requires or because their level of general disorganization is making their life difficult. I feel physical pain whenever I watch someone play a video game that involves a degree of inventory management and they refuse to manage their inventory in any kind of sensible or logical way. My heart cannot take this vibes-based “do I keep this pile of junk I’m going to throw away in ten minutes?” type play because it inevitably leads to the player messing around in menus for ten minutes while they try to figure out what precious junk they’re going to keep this time only to toss it the instant they find a cool new gun or whatever. It’s easier to handle on YouTube, with Let’s Plays, since I can just skip forward past things that will be frustrating to me, but that’s not an option for stuff like streamed video games and most people don’t want “helpful tips” from their viewers. Which I would never provide unless solicited, of course. I’d rather be miserable than make someone play a game the way I want them to rather than the way they want to.
Continue readingKirby and the Fogotten Land + Star-Crossed World Was Short But A Lot Of Fun
I played through the Kirby and the Forgotten Land Switch 2 expansion/DLC finally. I thought I’d get it right around my birthday at the end of August, when it came out, and play it immediately, but I was super hooked on Final Fantasy 14 stuff then and had my friends over, so I didn’t really need something to do at the time. Now, though, as I’ve been taking a break from FF14, that made it into the number two spot on my list, right after beating Donkey Kong Bananza. It took a couple nights, maybe five to seven hours total, to get through all of the expansion and find out what was contained within that Star-Crossed World, but I had a fun time doing it. I was incredibly out of touch with the game and it took a few attempts to really get back into the swing of it since I’d forgotten how most of the power-up systems and abilities worked, but I quickly figured it out again. It also helped that one of the abilities is basically the most powerful one you can get and while the utility of the other abilities might make them more useful in the right circumstances, about ninety percent of the expansion involved me using the Morph Sword power. I did look into upgrading it, once I remembered how all the currencies worked, but it didn’t really need an upgrade and the only way to get some of those special currencies is to run the boss rush type tournament things again and again and that’s not exactly my idea of a fun time. Especially because I’m still pretty rusty at the game, even after beating the expansion, and would struggle to take on some of the more difficult fights I did back when I was at the height of my power towards the end of the core content.
Continue readingTaking A Break From Not Playing Final Fantasy 14 To Enjoy TEA Time
After barely playing Final Fantasy for a week (especially if you exclude the time I spent making alternate characters), I returned to it last night for a few weekly tasks and my weekly Ultimate Raid event. Our group had advanced through the first portion of The Epic of Alexander well enough that we started hitting the second portion, known as Limit Cut, that requires a huge amount of coordination and practice to execute well and doing it poorly will quickly get everyone killed. Last week, when we couldn’t do much practice due to weird lag and connectivity issues between literally everyone and the game’s servers, we turned instead to a simulator that lets you run mechanics with a group of other players in order to get the coordination down without having to fight your way through the whole thing every single time. That way, if you messed it up, it wouldn’t hurt as much to have to re-do it. We spent a bunch of time practicing it last week (as of writing this) and were still struggling to get through the mechanic since it requires a decent amount of situational aware, perfect execution, and consideration of where your allies are placed in relation to yourself. Now, the simulator isn’t a perfect recreation since some parts of the mechanic didn’t function properly and not accounting for the extra steps you needed to take could get you killed in the simulator while it wouldn’t hurt you at all in the real thing, so there was a little bit lost in translation when we finally made the jump from the simulator to the real thing yesterday (as of writing this), but we managed to get through the real thing much more easily than we did in the simulator.
Continue readingA Return To Form With The Rotten Labyrinth
As this slowly becomes my most-consistent Tabletop Group (it benefits from having 6 players and only needing 3 to actually play), The Rotten Labyrinth has returned to high-form with our second repeat session post-taking-a-break. We had it all this past week! There was a combat encounter that almost went very poorly and likely would have ended differently if not for a lucky crit by one of the players! We had a bevy of traps, some avoided and some carelessly tripped! We had our first instance of the party being split! We had a creative application of some magic based on something the party had learned previously! We had glorious treasure, plenty of close-calls, and a dedication to the party’s chosen mission the likes of which I had not seen before! Everything went exactly according to plan, by which I mean that the party alternated between fucking around and finding out, and driving towards what they thought was their best path forward! Unfortuately, the first floor of this labyrinth is a maze and they may have overestimated their ability to get where they want to go by moving in cardinal directions! They found some dead-ends, skipped some interesting paths forward, and flirted with multiple instances of learning something about the labyrinth without ever pursuing it further. All-in-all, it was a pretty fun session! The first one I’ve run in months that acually used almost the whole time set aside for us to play. Today, I’m very worn out from all that talking and game-running, but I’m excited to see where they go next now that they know simply walking (map) west and (map) south will not get them to their destination.
Continue readingI Cannot Sleep For The Imagined Sound Of Roof Work
My roof was mostly replaced today. There is a bit, the only stretch of roof actually visible to me, that remains only partly finished. It seems such a small thing to be left incomplete, like an afterthought or something forgotten rather than work deliberately left until later, but I am not privvy to the minds of these roofers. I could only begin to guess why anything happened the way it did today, and it would all be me grasping at figments of my imagination and incidental observations. I did not speak to them. They did not speak to me. I barely even observed their work, instead measuring their progress in the tromp of feet above me, the grinding hum of an air compressor somewhere out of sight, the staccato five-beat pattern of their nail guns, and the occasional appearance of a worker using my balcony as a staging ground for moving materials from the ground to the roof. This happened twice–my day interrupted by the expected knock at the door and an apologetic smile from a man who probably would have felt more comfortable climbing a ladder to use my balcony rather than being told to move through the apartment building, and I still do not understand why it had to happen this way. I didn’t mind the interruption. It wasn’t like I was doing any deep or focused work, distracted as I was by the constant noise of their activity and the rattle of my apartment building as an unknown number of men walked across my roof. It was just odd, this strange set of circumstances that led to me being home all day and my brief, wordless interactions with this poor, uncomfortable roofer. None of my neighbors interracted with the roofers at all. Only me. And even then, all I did was open a door for the roofer and then lock it behind him once he was finished passing sheets of plywood up to his coworkers. It was as distant a remove as could be possible when your roof is being replaced and your balcony is needed as a halfway point for passing materials up.
Continue readingMixed Emotions About Doing Different Activities Instead Of Final Fantasy 14
Not playing Final Fantasy 14 for a few days has been a weird experience. I wrote Monday’s post about taking a break from FF14 before I actually put it into effect. I stayed up pretty late on Sunday night to wrap up the Dawntrail expansion and solidified my decision to take a break betwen then and writing my blog post the following day during breaks at work. Then I left work early so I could participate in my Monday night Ultimate raid practice, spent a few hours making alternate characters on my now-open server to combat my anxiety, spent a few hours last night working on the final raid in the Alexander Savage raid series my group is doing, and then spent another hour and a half after that hanging out online and unlocking an activity that I was planning to do tonight. I haven’t really played all that much less than normal, at least looking at it on the basis of daily participation. I did, however, stop playing FF14 every night with time enough to still do other things before bed, which I didn’t used to do. And tonight I’m not actually doing the activity I unlocked because I was at work until my personal cut-off time (8:30pm, a time I will not work past except in the case of emergencies) and had to do my grocery shopping after that because my car is going to be trapped in my apartment’s underground garage for a few days while the parking lot is filled up by the roofing company that will be spending the next few days replacing the rooves of my apartment building and the one next door that shares a parking lot. So I got home super late, ate dinner late, showered late, and was too miserable and tired to want to hop online for thirty minutes or whatever. So I’m writing this instead.
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