Yesterday, while talking about the final steps of my Final Fantasy 14 crafting project in our discord, I joked about a bit of bad luck on my part traumatizing another player and myself. You see, the final step of making my top-notch crafting and gathering gear in Final Fantasy 14 was putting little stat-boosting things called “materia” into the gear. Most gear has one or two slots that you can place materia in without a problem, but it is also frequently possible to add more materia to a piece of gear via a process called “Advanced Melding,” which is how you wind up with gear that is “pentamelded” (meaning it has five materia melded into it, which is the absolute cap on melding). The reason most people don’t do it is because there is a decreasing chance of success with every subsequent Advanced meld, with the 4th advanced meld having only a five percent success rate, and that innocent little five percent number only means that you have a low chance of success, not that it will happen five out of one hundred times. Everyone who has done pentamelding has a horror story of burning up a huge chunk of materia in an instant (you can check a box to make the game just keep trying until it succeeds so you don’t have to click through the activity so many times) as your luck turns bad and you go from spending one to twenty on an attempt to spending over a hundred. Which almost always means that a significant amount of money also just vanished into smoke. Which is why, when I burned through 1,260,000 gil (FF14’s in-game currency), my friend (who was crafting other stuff next to me and had helped me acquire all the materia) and I simply froze and stared at the chat window’s little read-out. It was so much. Fully a third of what I’d bought in that round and I burned through it in an instant.