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 readingFinal Fantasy 14
Teamwork, 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.
Continue readingA Project I’ve Been Considering For Years Has Been Stymied By How Much “AI” Crap There Is
After about three years of deeply considering it (which is a long time, even for me and my whole “think about getting a tattoo for a year before I can get it” thing, or my “think deeply about my personal indentity and how I wish to be referred to, testing things out in my head for nine months before mentioning that I was considering it even once” thing), I’ve decided to get into video editing. Not in a huge way. I’m not going to change careers or even get into the super fancy stuff. I just want to be able to do some basic editing: trimming, stitching, simple visual effects (like text on the screen), the occasional blur, and maybe some audio mixing for sound effects. Nothing major, just stuff that would help turn my many video-based ideas into a reality. I mean, I still want to make my “XX Ways To Die In Hyrule” Breath of the Wild video from that time I streamed playing through BotW wearing only hats right before Tears of the Kingdom came out. I also want to take the recordings I’ve made of wrestling events in Final Fantasy 14 and clean them up a bit so I’m not stuck trying to manage the start and end of the files by clicking the start/stop recording button. It’d be nice to be able to clean those up a bit and maybe hide my Party Chat stuff from the video so I can keep it private AND actually participate in it during wrestling events. I’ve also got a lot of ideas for other things bumbling around my head that would be fun to put together, if I could find the parts I need, so I’ve finally started directing a little bit of time and energy towards figuring all that out. And no, I’m not just doing this because I hit the downhill glide portion of my FF14 crafting project and still need to keep myself distracted (well, maybe a little, but it’s entirely coincidental).
Continue readingAll My Crafting Work In Final Fantasy 14 Has Paid Off
After a solid seven evenings and some partial days, I made the set of gear I needed for my upcoming Current Content Raid event in Final Fantasy 14. Rather than buy it all, I set out to do the work required to learn how to craft it all, get all my crafting classes leveled up, get my crafting and gathering jobs geared up twice, and ultimately get myself into a position where I could craft any released recipe with the right stack of buffs and ability combos. It was a lot of work, if I’m being quite honest, but that’s part of why I did it: to distract myself from my own life and all it’s problems that require me to wait an unknown amount of time for something else to happen. I started on a Monday, with the idea of doing it at all and a brief glance into what that would entail, which convinced me it could be done. The following night, I dug into it more deeply and almost convinced myself that it couldn’t be done. Since I was looking to feel at least a little overwhelmed to combat my rising anxiety, I dug in, made lists, did research, polled my FC full of experienced crafters, and came up with a game plan. From there, I spent the next few days leveling up my crafting jobs so I could earn the resources required to get better gear for my crafting and gathering jobs, doing even more crafting and gathering to get the currency necessary to unlock the ability to gather the resources I needed for more gear, and gathering all of these new resources so that, finally, last night, I could spend some time processing the materials into their crafted versions and then put together a full set of gear for the healer job I’ll be performing a few days from now (or a few days ago as this gets posted). This is almost all I’ve done over these last few days, with some time carved out for work and sleep and actually playing the game, but I hesitate to even guess at the number of hours I spent on it, even after reducing them as much as possible by dropping a total of almost sixteen million gil (the main in-game currency) over that same period (not all of it was on this project mind you, but that was about twenty-three percent of my total gil in what felt like such a short time and I wasn’t tracking my expenses closely enough to figure out which was tied to what).
Continue readingA Whole Weekend Of Avoiding My Life Via Final Fantasy 14 Has Left Me With A Lot To Show For It
Sometimes you wake up, start getting ready for work, and then get a text message that sends you back to bed. That’s what happened to me today (the day I’m writing this). Took a day off and everything. Slept for another couple hours, lay miserably in bed while trying to doze for a couple more, and then finally forced myself out of it around noon so I could actually shower and get dressed, make my coffee, and eat some kind of food. You know, the things you do to have some kind of day. Then, instead of think about anything since my next therapy appointment isn’t until tomorrow and I’m putting off everything I can until then, I lost myself in more Final Fantasy 14 crafting hell for the entire afternoon. Or, in this case, gathering hell. Over the weekend, I spent most of my free time working through this crafting project of mine, to make my own high-level gear that is going to quickly become irrelevant, I’m sure. The instant the next patch hits, it will all be largely irrelevant, but for now it’s the baseline required to participate in high-level content that has already been released. Well, for the combat job gear. The crafting and gathering gear is probably the best stuff we’ll see for a while, so getting that stuff set up properly is going to matter a whole lot more permanently since, according to my research, I’ll be using it until the patch content of the next expansion (and I have no idea when that might even happen). Unfortunately, to make any of that, I had to acquire some mid-level patch-content crafting and gathering gear, get all that set up with stat-boosting materia, and only then could I start gathering the special materials required for the actual high-end gear. Which needs to come together soon because I have a set date for doing current “raid” content with other members of my Free Company who have finished everything the game has to offer so far.
Continue readingI Got A Job In Final Fantasy 14 And It’s More Rewarding Than My Real-World Job
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.
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