If, one year ago, you had told me that I’d spend a year almost exclusively playing Final Fantasy 14, I’d have laughed it off. I don’t get obsessed with games like that. I tend to bounce off of things after a while and need to change up what I’m doing often so I don’t burn out or just lose interest. Or at least that was true for the first thirty-three and a half years of my life since I think the only game I’ve played for more than 500 hours, prior to FF14, was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and The Legend of Zelda franchise is an important part of my life. And now I’m approaching 2500 hours in this game, struggling to make the time to play anything else, and really not bothered by it since playing only this MMO means that I’m saving a lot of money on my entertainment every month. I’m also, you know, having a good time with it. Unfortunately, that also means I’ve got growing to-play and to-read piles that desperately need some amount of attention (I also need to get back to playing Wanderstop for the second time since I hit a moment in the game that made me want to stop playing and think about it for a while, but more on that once I’ve beaten the game) and I’m struggling to want to do it because it’s just so much easier to spend more time on Final Fantasy 14 than to spin up something else. Easier to stay invested in what has my attention in a chokehold than to need to tear my attention away from it every time I think I should do something else. I mean, after all, if I wanted to do something else, I’d do it. I’ve got so many unfinished or unplayed games still that I could probably play a similar amount of video games this year and not need to touch FF14 even once, all without spending any money. And yet the only thing I want to do is go home, cycle my retainers, do some daily roulettes, work on some crafting stuff, and maybe hang out with some folks while doing that. It’s nice to spend time with people and FF14 still remains my main means of access to others.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14
My First Final Fantasy 14 Post Of 2026
As you might have guessed from what is now over a year of precedent, I spent a lot of my vacation over the last few weeks playing Final Fantasy 14. It was a pretty busy time because there was a major patch that included some new raids, main scenario quests, and a pile of new craftable items. Lots of stuff to do for folks like me who had been champing at the bit to make new gear (most of which looks good enough that I haven’t wanted to glamour over it) and for all the raiders out there. Between that gear, a new set of raids, a new set of savage raids (that unlocked the day before this posts, which is also the day I’m writing it), and a new tier of consumables for those raids, there’s a lot of demand for supplies and people to produce it all. So far, I’ve managed to make a tidy little sum crafting gear for people, some of which disappeared into making sets for my friends now that they have jobs at level 100 (which is necessary for using the gear in question), but much of that particular demand appears to have dried up. There really aren’t a lot of people who wanted it and most of those people seem to have gotten their gear by now. I’m sure there will always be a steady trickle of demand since the gear looks pretty great, but the market is glutted right now as a bunch of crafters have produced things and very few people seem to be buying them at the moment. I’m sure more people will buy once the price drops low enough, but I don’t think there’s been all that much to be made in the market since the first few days of the patch, where crafters could basically name their prices.
Continue readingIt’s Tough To Beat The Appeal Of Social Connection
I’m in a bit of a weird position with Pokémon Legends: Z-A these days. I really enjoy playing the game and have plenty to do yet since I’m not even halfway through the game, but I stopped playing it after my trip and haven’t gone back. A significant part of that is, of course, being sick and spending all my time and attention on Final Fantasy 14 in prepared for the patch that dropped yesterday since it’s not like I wasn’t having a grand ol’ time with Z-A. As my discord friends can tell you, I have been enjoying that game immensely (and was providing regular fashion updates for a while). So what about returning to my home has left me unwilling to even boot up the game? I think a part of it is that it was a replacement fixation for Final Fantasy 14 and, now that I’ve got that back, I don’t need something else to do especially now when there’s so much going on. Part of it, though, is that my brain has filed it into “Handheld Pokémon Games” territory since I have spent 99% of my playtime for that game in handheld mode and now it only pops into my head when I see my Switch 2 sitting out (which I never do because I put it back on it’s dock every time I’m done with it) or when I’m going to sleep since I used handheld Pokémon games as my fall-asleep activity for a very long time. It no longer pops into my head as a waking-time activity or something to do to fill time between other activities. I’ve played it a bit while doing crafting stuff, but having to swap my attention back and forth meant it was really difficult to focus on the game and, even worse, difficult to avoid misclicks on my crafting macros. So now it just doesn’t have a time or a space in my mind since even my “stay in bed on Saturday/Sunday morning” time is being subsumed into “play Final Fantasy 14” time. Even with all that being true, I don’t think that’s the main reason I’m having a difficult time focusing on playing the game.
Continue readingAnticipation And Preparation For Final Fantasy 14’s Next Patch
When this post goes up, there will only be a few more days before the next Final Fantasy 14 patch. This will be the first one where I’m actually IN the parts of the game impacted by the patch. I’ve got my crafters all set for the new gear, I’ve got almost all of the main scenario quests done, and I’m just going through the last steps of completing stockpiles, acquiring supplies, and making sure I have everything ready that I can possibly think of. I have no idea what to expect and while I’m sure I could ask people for the information I need to know it all, I kind of want to go in without knowing. I want to experience the bleeding edge of it all. I want to chart my own path through unknown territory. I want to be driven into the systems of the game because none of the outside resources have the answers yet. I want to experience what it’s like to not know something along with a whole bunch of other people who also don’t know. I want to experience a massive game and the way the world of players within it shift to respond to changes. It’s possible I’m building up anticipation for something that will be ultimately disappointing. It’s possible nothing I imagine will come to pass and it will just be another Tuesday marked by the ability to more freely glamour everyone’s gear (using off-job gear now). I have no idea what to expect and I’m very invested in finding out what it will be, roses and thorns together.
Continue readingCrafting Burnout And Lines I Won’t Cross
I spent the last weekend (well, two weekends ago as this is getting posted) doing pretty much nothing but crafting and a deep dungeon run in Final Fantasy 14. It might have taken eleven intense months, but I think I’ve finally gotten tired of crafting. I’ve been making gear for people and the amount of mind-numbing macro-clicking involved in it is driving me more and more rapidly insane. I have done nothing but lose myself in crafting, the grind for various currencies, and trying to get new gear for the last month or so and it is burning me out like nothing else has. I’m not at risk of no longer wanting to play the game or anything like that, but it made me kind of glad that I had to take a week off for holiday travel. I don’t know that I’m going to be changing much in the next couple weeks as we run up to the release of the next patch, but I’m really hoping I can at least take a break from crafting a few hundred materials and gear pieces every week. I mean, I’ve still got a lot of stuff to do as I’m writing this two weeks before it gets posted: crafting and gathering food to make, a couple gear sets to wrap-up, one more set of gear to entirely produce, limited currencies to earn, and so much questing to do in order to be fully caught up for the start of the whatever comes with the next major patch, but I hope I can get at least another week away from all that before the update drops so I can do other stuff like level other jobs and work on finding some roleplaying opportunities or do literally anything other than constantly grind away at preparations for whatever the next patch is going to require of me to make the next gear sets.
Continue readingFamiliar Disappointments Still Sting
Today (the day I wrote this), was the day that tickets for Final Fantasy 14’s Fan Fest went on general sale. I’d signed up for the pre-sale lottery (to get a chance to buy tickets early) but struck out there and then struck out again when I queued for tickets and got assigned the 8000th (and change) spot. I was not able to get tickets. Which, on one hand, is going to save me a bunch of money. On the other hand, I didn’t realize how excited I was about the idea of going to the convention until I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. It was a pretty heavy blow. Much, much heavier than I expected, to the degree that losing out on this opportunity has cast a bit of a pall over my day. After all, I don’t really have a lot of stuff to look forward to, most of the time, so any time one of those things gets taken away, it hits harder than it ought to, and there’s been a lot of it lately. A lot of stuff has not been working out. lately. Siblings cancelling plans, friends getting sick and needing to cancel, missed opportunities, and so on. All I’ve really had that’s dependable is my gaming, work, and the inevitability of bills. It feels silly for this to be hitting me as hard as it has been, to rather completely sidetrack me for multiple hours today, but I have spent a large portion of the last couple years not planning stuff because of how often people flake on me or cancel last minute and I’m probably just a little overly sensitive to this kind of disappointment. I just wanted it to work out, despite all the evidence it wouldn’t, and now I have move on from this. Eventually.
Continue readingTeamwork, Bonding, And Growing Frustration
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.
Continue readingIntrinsic Motivation Doesn’t Make Me Immune To External Discouragement
After wrapping up everything but the finishing touches on my Final Fantasy 14 gear project, I posted in my Free Company’s discord that I was planning to make myself new gear right after the patch drops with all my fancy new gathering and crafting gear. I wanted to know if anyone else was interested in participating in a fun little bleeding-edge gear crafting activity. So far, I’ve gotten one bite and a lot of silence (as I’ve mentioned before, I think most of the bleeding-edge players in my group have the in-game currency to just buy whatever they want, so they will just wait until the prices drop a little bit and buy it OR just accumulate it slowly by doing the raids and whatnot), but the bite I did get has been very interested in making this happen. It’s a player I kinda get along with and have been doing more and more with as I shift into endgame content, but he’s very combat-focused and a bit less crafting-focused. He is absolutely doing a bunch of crafting still, but he hasn’t even gotten all of his jobs to level 100 yet, so there is likely no way that he’d be ready in time given how much combat stuff he does every single day (it’s exhausting even thinking about trying to keep up with him!). That said, all of his gathering skills are at level 100 and he recently requested that I help him get somemid-tier gear for his level 100 classes. That took a little time (not much, given that I’ve done it already and have higher stats than when I did it myself), but I quickly realized that I should just get him up to the current top-tier of gathering gear. It’s a bit more work on my part, but less now that I’m using all top-tier gear and it’ll be a huge help to have someone gathering the new materials alongside me. He’ll probably still do mostly the combat stuff and I’ll do most of the gathering and crafting stuff, but it’s good to have someone ready to help out.
Continue readingThe Rot That Is “AI” Keeps Spreading Into Things I Love
Square Enix, the company that publishes (and makes, for the most part, but it’s also a little more complicated than that because of how companies are structured) Final Fantasy 14, has announced recently that they’re partnering with a bunch of local academics in Japan to study current “AI” products in an effort to have seventy percent of all Quality Assurance (testing, aka the work I do) and debugging fully automated sometime during 2027. Now, this is, of course, patently ridiculous and not something that will actually work out or is even possible in the way they want it to work, but the past years of watching the tech industry get gutted and people begin to lose their jobs to “AI” bullshit has taught me the obvious lesson that it doesn’t need to work for it to be adopted. It doesn’t need to be good for people to lose their jobs. It just needs to be good enough that someone can pretend it’s great and fire all of their QA staff in order to “reduce costs” so that shareholders can get a fraction of a decimal percent more money at the end of the fiscal year. It’s bleak, I know, but all of the studies done on it, every post-mortem on “AI Workflows” and almost every single company to adopt it have all shown that it is a neutral move at BEST and a net loss in every other case. People hate needing to check over the work of “AI” because of how often its wrong. People hate being forced to use tools that don’t work properly. As I watch it chip away at the industry I work in and watch it start being focused specifically on the work I do, I can’t help but feel like I’m staring down the barrel of a loaded gun every time it comes up. Which means that, every time someone jokes about it trying to take my job, I feel like they’re joking about the gun pointed at me going off and then insisting that it will never actually happen whenever I try to talk about how all this feels or why it’s bad to have around.
Continue readingSlowly Turning My Final Fantasy 14 Project Planning Towards The Next Patch
While I still have materials to process (a couple hundred, which feels like just so much given that it’s maybe three times as much material needed for my last craft which involved five full sets of gear and this is just two), I’ve hit the point in my Final Fantasy 14 crafting and gathering projects where all that’s left is to hit macros. Currently, it takes about half an hour to do twenty-four of these long-crafting macros, so I’m trying to pace myself and do about an hour of them a day around everything else I’ve got going on. If I can do that every day this week, I should have everything done this weekend in time for… well, in time for nothing, really. It’s not like I need a lot of these materials around. Most of them only get used for this crafting and gathering gear and whatever gear drops in the next expansion will almost certainly use entirely different materials. As far as I can tell from looking at past expansions, the final set in an expansion’s patches (which is what this set will be for the latest expansion) uses a mix of brand new materials and older high-level-but-not-starred materials. I have no idea if that will remain true for this expansion, so I don’t know what to do but maybe keep stockpiling things and hope that I can flip the materials later if they prove unnecessary. I don’t know if I’ll be able, though, since the need for them will be almost entirely gone once new gear exists. I mean, the stuff used in the crafting and gathering sets I’m making will probably still sell given that there will continue to be people like me who are showing up a bit late to the party but still want to get the full experience, but I have no idea about any of that older stuff. It’ll be a gamble.
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