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.

It is still a metaphor, even in Final Fantasy 14, though perhaps a more true one than usual given how much of the crafting I’ve been doing in this game actually involves my character using a grindstone. Unfortunately for me, the actual heavy work for the crafting workshop I’ve been running these past two weeks has been the day-to-day administration of it. There’s a lot of stuff moving around, a lot of things to be tracked, and so very much that needs to be stored for eventual use that it is a significant undertaking if one of the other players participating in the workshop submits a few claims and then the items from the claims in quick succession. Which one of the players, an officer in the FC, has been doing. She has so very much time to work on this stuff that it has become a regular occurrence that, despite my efforts to put systems in place to prevent this from happening, I am getting quite burned out on it. I mean, I set this up with a ten-claim limit, with restrictions on the high-value items to one-per-ten-claim-set, to hopefully force people to pace themselves so I’m not constantly updating this set of tables and worksheets, but I also set it up so that people were supposed to be claiming on resource per set of things being produced as “one claim” and the first person to take work didn’t do that, so no one else has either, which is why this has taken so long. I’m not terribly surprised that the spirit of the whole thing got missed in the rush to get the financial gain side of things. But I persevere because this will put the workshop in a good spot so I can just do maintenance crafting projects in the future rather than have to spend time each week planning what to craft (and hoping that this isn’t the week that those things turn unpopular).

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.