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).
Continue readingVideo Gaming
First Thoughts On Pokopia… POkopia? poKOpia?
I’m not sure I’ve thought or said the same pronuncian more than a couple times in a row since I started playing this game. I didn’t even think much about it until I actually booted the game up on my Switch 2, an act that already had me thinking deeply about the game and it’s place in my life since I decided to buy a digital copy of the game. Typically, I eschew digital-only ownership because that’s a thorny proposition in this day and age of increasingly leasing products rather than actually owning them in order for companies to extorot more money from customers who just want to enjoy the things they’ve bought. I almost didn’t get the game at all for this reason, but there’s an inevitability to all of this stuff that I can’t really ignore, so I went ahead and bought it. In my mind, it’s better to buy the digital copy of the game than a physical cartridge pretending to be a “physical” copy of the game when actually it’s just the license required to allow you to play the digital copy of the game you had to download anyway. Better to be able to just play the game rather than need to swap cartridges around, if I can’t actually hold the entire thing in my hand. That way I can swap between two games without needing to get up or pick through my collection of cartridges. And, you know, not have to deal with the license relay bullshit involved in the game key cartridge if I ever, say, download the game onto a storage device in my Switch 2 that just so happens to never be in my system when it connects to the internet.
Continue readingDigital Spring Cleaning
In attempt to count the bad weather we’re having in the days leading up to the start of Spring (which has already begun by the time you’re reading this), I decided to stop putting off a significant task I’ve been ignoring for months and clear out my digital inventories in Final Fantasy 14. Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve accumulated a lot of junk that I thought would eventually be useful. Some of that wound up being true, and some of it wound up being incredibly false. It has been a real grab-bag, having all of that junk around, and while it was certainly helpful sometimes to just have the stuff I needed for whatever weird little thing I wanted to do or make, I’ve recently reached the point where I need to instute actual inventory management as I start having more and more stuff I need to sort into discrete collections that the game doesn’t recognize. So, rather than have to pick through a bunch of different inventories, I’ve reworked how much is kept where, what stuff is kept for future projects, what is kept from workshops, and what is kept around for my various “money makers.” It’s not a terribly complex system, but it’s one that works without needing a lot of management. Unforunately, that comes at the cost of actually needing to follow through on all of my “I’ll save this for crafting at a future date” promises so I can actually use some of these incredibly rare resources for their intended purposes rather than just throw them out so they stop cluttering up my virtual pockets.
Continue readingStepping Up The Workshop
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.
Continue readingGiving Arknights Endfield A Second Chance
I did actually uninstall Arknights Endfield last week after writing my post about it. I was determined not to keep playing it because I really wasn’t having fun. All of the fun bits were gated behind plot progress and it was just so dull and poorly written that I wasn’t able to enjoy any of it. One of my friends started playing it, though, and started having a fun time with it. Curious, I talked to them about my experience and asked how they coped with the problems I identified. Turns out the secret to enjoying the game was skipping most of the cutscenes and dialogue moments AND turning all of the voice acting to a language I didn’t understand (Japanese). Now, I don’t feel compelled to engage with the plot any more than I’m interested in, I don’t feel as trapped behind slow-talking characters as I once did, and I can actually focus on the parts of the game I anticipated enjoying and a few of the surprisingly fun parts of the game that I didn’t expect to enjoy. There’s been more than a few of those, to be honest, but it took more plot than I liked to get to them, and some of them are now so expansive an activity that I’m struggling to engage with them, even if they are kind of fun. This game is definitely one meant to take up most of your time, to engage all of your play hours, and I can see how the daily grind and routine of the game could make a compelling case to give it just that. Unfortunately for this game–and very fortunately for me–I just don’t get any kind of joy or pleasure from this kind of gameplay loop or loot boxes, so all I need to worry about hooking me is the constant rewards for doing daily acitivities. I’m not exactly a sucker for daily accomplishments and rewards, but they are something I enjoy enough that I am willing to consider picking them over something that feels a bit more long-term rewarding.
Continue readingMaking Forward Progress In Final Fantasy 14 Once Again
The story of my time playing Final Fantasy 14 is that there is more to do than anyone could reasonably accomplish without years of effort. As a result, every time I play, I am making choices about what gets my time and attention and what will languish, untouched, for months or even years. My previous attempts to dabble in a bit of everything spread me too thin and left me worn out, so these days I am trying to stay focused on a smaller number of things. There’s all my usual weekly stuff, of course: Island Sanctuary maintenance, side quests, acquiring limited currencies, leveling my alt, stockpiling things for future projects, maintaining my sales listings, and so on: the background work of playing a video game that is required to do the more focused parts of the game at other times. All of this can take up as much time as I give it because, while there is an end to it all, it is so far away right now that I have no idea when I’d reach it even if this stuff was all I focused on. So I try to keep it to a reasonable level, based on how I’m feeling in any given week or on any given day, and pick some other stuff to focus on when I’ve got the time and energy. Right now, a lot of that is going towards the RP wrestling season that’s currently under way, but if I had to name my focuses, I would say the Occult Crescent and leveling an alternate character.
Continue readingThe One Resource Management Game I Can’t Seem To Enjoy
I tried another gacha game. I’ve got friends who are really into some of them (the ones that are pretty high-qaulity, generally speaking), so when one showed up that included one of my favorite things ever (factory building and resource management), I figured it was finally time. Plus, I needed something else to play on my Tuesday nights that didn’t require much of an emotional or mental committment. Arknights: Endfield seemed like the perfect thing, especially after watching Let’s Game It Out’s video about it. After all, LGIO is what got me into Satisfactory, perhaps my favorite entry in the resource management and factory building genre and second only to minecraft in terms of survival/crafting games, and he made it look so fun! So of course I tried it out. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really lived up to my expectations and has even fallen further and further from them as I’ve played. Even without getting the the gacha side of things, honestly. There’s enough free stuff there that I don’t feel tempted to pay money for anything and the whole “gambling on loot boxes or random draws for heroes” thing never really appealed to me. I get absolutely nothing out of the process other than more piles of junk I need to sort through or turn into one of a couple dozen currencies. The game’s menus feel labyranthine, I frequently can’t find what I’m looking for unless I click through every single menu option and even then I’m not guarranteed to find it. For exmaple, I kept accidentally opening a menu that showed my resources in to production numbers back before I could actually automate anything and now that I’ve got a bunch of stuff automated, I can’t find that menu for the life of me. It’s so much clutter! There’s so many menus, sub-menus, limited-use currencies, weirdly expiring items, and on and on and on. It never ends.
Continue readingFinally Settling Into Comfortable Activities In Final Fantasy 14
I’ve been bouncing between a lot of different activities in Final Fantasy 14 lately. A solid chunk of my time goes towards leveling (and supplying) an alternate character who will head up my storage and resource generation FC. Another solid chunk is going toward general play on my main character. A third, smaller chunk is going towards activities for the rolaplaying wrestling league I’m part of. And any other time goes towards the general maintenance work of my various crafts, monitoring my various sales attempts, keeping an eye on the housing market, and general maintenance work that I don’t really want to do but occasionally feel like doing anyway. I’m also back to taking Tuesday nights off of the game and while I’m writing this on my second (and posting it on my third), I think I can stick with this for at least a while. After all, while it is possible that I’ll make a lot of sales on weekly refresh days, I don’t really expect to (I’m playing a long game with most of my sales, waiting for the cheaper stuff to run out and positioning myself in the middle-to-middle-top of the pack so I can get a good price for my stuff but still get sold) and there really isn’t anything in the game that is so urgent that I’d need to play on refresh night. Wednesday is my weekly island night, that I also often fill with roulettes and working on my own weekly refresh stuff, Thursdays are a grab bag of whatever, and now Fridays and Saturdays are wrestling nights. Wednesday will also be a wrestling night on occasion, but it’s mostly Fridays and Saturdays, so all the plans I can make for those are usually pretty last-minute and focused on whatever I feel like doing. It’s a nice place to be in at this point, even if I still feel a tugging at the back of my mind that I should focus up and get more done with my time.
Continue readingBreathing Space And Balancing Routine With Spontaneity
Things have settled down in Final Fantasy 14. I’m building new routines and continuing to find my fun in the game, even if I’m also thinking about playing it a bit less. Things have calmed down with the crafting workshop, largely because attendance remains fairly sparse. I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff made to slowly sell–personally and on behalf of the exterior crafting groups–a much-narrower list of things I’m buying, and I’ve even begun slowly clearing out my retainers so I have space to store things again. I’ve spent more time leveling one of my alternate characters hand-in-hand with a pair of friends who are doing the same thing, I’ve wrapped up a very long quest set that was exhausting to deal with, and even started the process of getting my storage Free Company set up so I can start churning out retainer-based materials. Which I’ll probably wind up selling eventually, once I’ve got enough stored up for my own purposes. It’s not like I want to endlessly churn that stuff anyway. And I’ve been making sure I take the time to do something at least a little fun every day I open the game, even if it is just daily roulettes with a job I enjoy playing. I’ve also started reading again, set up a day for my book club to meet, and am thinking about playing other games [which I actually did the night I wrote this blog post]. We’ll see if that latter one materializes into anything (the time away from Final Fantasy 14, ostensibly required to play other games, means I don’t generally want to), but it’s nice to think about given how many games I’ve got that I’d like to give some attention to at some point.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 37
I was going to write about the state of the world, but I got a paragraph in and my anxiety was so high I had to sit and breath and ground myself for ten minutes to stave off a panic attack (it’s difficult handle anxiety when you’re sleep-deprived and the world’s this messed up). So, instead, I figured I might write about The Legend of Zelda again, for the first time in a while. Eight months, almost, which feels pretty significant. Not that I haven’t been tired and sad since then, just that I haven’t needed to write about The Legend of Zelda about it. Anyway, I saw this video on YouTube that proposed to talk about mysterious, forgotten, or unused areas in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which seemed like a really cool idea to me. I love those little strange zones you can sometimes fine where there seems like there should be something and there isn’t for some unknown reason. Unfortunately, this video wasn’t about any of those areas and instead was about various features on the map that were not utilized in-game by any mechanics or quests. Or just were different in Tears of the Kingdom in ways that didn’t make surface level sense. It was a real let-down since the first thing the video showed is literally just good level design. There’s some “unused floors” in the ruined Temple of Time in both games, but they’re literally there so starting out players have places to stop if they decide to climb the inside of the temple instead of outside it, a thing that becomes readily apparent if you look around them at all in any way other than the carefully selected angles the video recorded. So I’m going to talk about some areas that aren’t secret or mysterious but are purposely left empty because the point of the game and its space wasn’t to have something under each rock and tucked into each corner but to build a world rich in potential for storytelling if you just spent enough time on it.
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