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 readingVideo Gaming
I’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.
Continue readingMarking Out Some Personal Time In Final Fantasy 14
One week into the Final Fantasy 14 crafting workshop for my Free Company and things have mostly settled down. I still have to do some amount of administrative work every day to keep things rolling, to keep paying out people who bring me stuff, and keep making stuff I need to sell in order to keep my profit margin positive, but it’s getting less and less as I’m figuring out some organizational systems to manage my day-to-day activities. Unfortunately, my storage situation is currently completely borked and it is going to take a LOT of work to unbork it. A lot of work and a lot of time since half the stuff I’ve got is stuff I’m saving for specific projects, is a rare drop needed for one item I’ll want eventually, or is just crud i’ve accumulated over the past year because I thought stuff would stay relevant longer than it has. I also thought I’d go back and work my way through my entire crafting recipe catalogue at some point and while I still want to do that eventually, I don’t think that I have literally anything in such quantities that keeping it until I eventually do that work is going to save me any time at all. It’ll be drudgery whenever I get to it and having half-a-dozen ingots I think I’ll need but maybe won’t need isn’t really going to save me that much time and effort. It might be easier to just pick up what I need and then throw it away when I’m done rather than try to cycle it in and out of my storage. All of which is rather beside the point of my current efforts, other than needing to get my storage cleared out and organized so It can actually be useful for me again.
Continue readingA Small Compromise To Prop Up My Mental Health During This Horrible Week
My Final Fantasy 14 workshop has been chugging along this week. There’s new mail in my mailbox every day as people turn items in, there’s a slow trickle of item allotments being claimed in the discord, and plenty of work for me to do as I try to keep up with what people are bringing to me. Since last week’s writing on the matter, I’ve done what I can to address the stress all this has been putting on me. Complicating that, though, is that fact that it just clicked into place that I went from passionately putting in too much work for D&D and my job to adopting a brand new cause to burn myself out on the instant the D&D stuff ended. Beucase that’s what this workshop is: I think my guild in Final Fantasy 14 should have opportunities to make in-game money and, now that the FC leader isn’t doing the work anymore, I’ve taken up the mantle. I didn’t change anything, I just swapped how I was wrecking myself. So, in order to address that, I finally started modding a bit more heavily than I did before. I would argue that it’s still “quality of life” stuff, but I know that’s not what I meant the last time I wrote about this stuff. I mean, sure, being able to update the base texture of my character’s form was huge. Getting rid of the boxiness of their limbs and fingers, a thing that has always bothered me, for just a few days has left me shocked at how bad things look now when I turn the mod off. I’ve also tried out some picture-taking improvements, a mod for trying out looks and adding things to your pictures, and the one that has made all the difference: an auto-crafter.
Continue readingMy Workshop Is Working Too Well
It is done. After a solid week of pretty much constant effort in my free time, I’ve finished creating the document required to run a workshop in my Free Company in Final Fantasy 14. A lot of the basics were handled by the FC leader, in his previous iteration fo this workshop, but I’ve diversified the portfolio a bit, reworked some things, and adapted it to fit my needs and interests. It has been out in the world for two days now, as I’m writing this (and we’re rapidly approaching the deadline I set for people to let me know they’d read it before I go actively tagging the folks who’d answered my poll near the start of last month), and not only are people already sending me stuff to buy, but I’ve decided against my initial idea to hold off on starting a project until Sunday and put up a couple projects for everyone to get involved with right away. This way I get to try things out, everyone will get a little money at the very least, and I can see how much interest there is. I mean, it won’t be a perfect example of that because I’m trying to turn these things around in just a couple days and most people probably won’t want to stress out for a chunk of change, but it should give me an idea. And, if nothing else, it has spurred a bunch of conversation, gotten me some feedback about how to improve things, and taught me a lot about how to manage these things going forward. I like to learn by doing and boy howdy am I doing these days…
Continue readingThere’s Always More Work To Do For Fun
Getting a workshop, even a digital one, off the ground is a lot of work. Even if I’ve got a spreadsheet I’ve inherited from my Final Fantasy 14 Free Company leader, getting it updated and ready to be used after most of it hasn’t been updated since 2024 is a pretty significant undertaking. Adding on to it the way I want to (and have been) in order to support other kinds of projects and an “I will buy this from you” list for my own purposes is an even larger undertaking. I’ve spent at least a few hours a day on it for five days straight and I’m sure that I’ll eventually be adding more to it tonight, once I settle down to “game,” since gaming these days is seventy-five percent idle crafting while I work on this spreadsheet, twenty-percent doing my daily grind for levels, four percent doing weekly reset work, and one percent doing things that are fun. I miss doing fun stuff and I can’t wait to get back to it once I have this spreadsheet updated, a project-management process in place, and all of my new projects humming along. It’s going to be difficult to manage at first since I don’t have the kind of in-game money needed to support the more proactive of my fellow players, but if I keep it up and have picked the right items to make and sell, then I should be able to translate all this effort into even more money. We’ll have to see if it actually works out, though. I might wind up losing a bunch of money and needing to shut down all parts of the workshop other than the group-contribution efforts, or just not making the money fast enough to keep up with the influx of materials (since I can only make things so quickly and can’t flood the market with them if I want to keep prices up). Only time will tell.
Continue readingTrying To Find Balance In My Final Fantasy 14 Activities
Back in October, when I set aside everything else I had going on in Final Fantasy 14 in order to get deep into crafting (in order to avoid thinking about my relationship with my biological family), I didn’t realize that it would take me three months to get through that and everything that sort of just flowed out from it: two rounds of intense combat gear crafting, numerous rounds of crafting and gathering gear crafting (largely free of charge because I don’t like making people pay me for the ability to make/earn money on their own), the start of a workshop that has largely fallen into stillness now that the major demand for new gear and consumables has passed (though I imagine it’ll tick up again when the raiding members of the workshop run through their current stock), and starting progress on one of my alts. I thought it would be a few weeks of work and then I’d just go back to leveling other jobs, digging into older parts of the game that I brushed past in my drive to finish the Main Scenario Quests, and puttering around. Instead, I wound up getting carried away by all that, changes to my weekly activities with my FC, the slow start of a new season of roleplayed wrestling (busier now as I am the official cinematographer for the federation), and the thought of starting up a workshop within my Free Company to help give everyone the means to make some money while the thing we used to do is on indefinite hiatus. Only now, as I’ve settled in to the realization that none of my groups are going to become high-end content groups in any kind of a hurry and started doing stuff “to make sure I’m not missing out” rather than in preparation for a specific thing, have I returned to the slow, plodding tasks that fell by the wayside in my fervor to accomplish all my very specific goals.
Continue readingPokémon Legends: ZA Was A Lot Of Fun, If Not Anything Terribly New
As of a couple weeks ago, I have played through almost all of Pokémon Legends: Z-A. There’s some battling left to do, the constant siren-song of shiny hunting, and enough research tasks to keep me busy for a while yet, but I’ve caught all the Pokémon I can, cleared all but the last shreds of the story which are locked behind an “endless” battle royale that just isn’t super motivating to me. I’ve also got a few side quests centered around using specific Pokémon in battles and training up Pokémon I don’t use to accomplish specific feats, but the rewards are small and there’s really nothing left for me beyond the grind, at least in the base game. There’s a DLC out that looks interesting and adds a lot to the game, but I’m in my “financially recover from Christmas” phase right now and not buying things. I definitely will buy it either later this month or sometime next month, but right now I’m content to take a break. Pokémon ZA was a lot of fun and maybe the most… “situated-in-the-world” of the Pokémon games I’ve ever played, but there’s a repetitiveness to it that makes it difficult to play beyond reaching your chosen goals. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, since the loop you’re stuck in is a fun one, but you eventually wind up doing the grind for the sake of the grind and I can only do that for so long before I need to do literally anything else. You might argue that this is true of all Pokémon games and while I’d have to admit that you are right on a certain level, most of the games don’t really pretend to have some kind of ever-running Thing To Do within the world itself. Most of the time, Pokémon games require you to invest your time and approach them from outside the game to experience those kinds of features (online challenges, Player versus Player Pokémon battles, The Battle Tower that makes you play outside the normal format of the game), but ZA has one built in as a part of the plot and while it’s not a huge deal to keep doing it, it is asking me to do more of these nightly “royales” than I’ve actually done prior to this point in the game to get there.
Continue readingI Like To Play Support In More Ways Than One
The thing I enjoy the most about being in a Final Fantasy 14 Free Company these days is that I get to facilitate a lot of other peoples’ fun. Between all the gear crafting I do, the organization of events I help out with, the formalization of informal activities, and the encouragement to just do the dang thing, I feel like I’ve found myself a pretty comfortable spot in the group. It can be exhausting at times, especially when one thing builds up a lot (currently at the end of a busy week of gear crafting and I’ve still got a full set to do sometime today or tomorrow), but I enjoying helping other people to have fun and get a great deal of personal validation out of being able to offer help to people now that I’ve gotten myself fairly secured in my chosen activities and have learned enough to actually be a positive resource for people. I feel like it fills a bit of a gap in the FC right now, even if I’m not perfect at it, but we really don’t have a lot of people in the group who are the “let me help you have fun” type. Most of the officers only help when asked and the established members of the group tend to be the most vocal and active despite us being a supposedly new-player-friend FC, which means there really aren’t a lot of people asking open questions about what the newer players need or how they could be helpful. It’s way more work and I suspect that some degree of this pattern of behavior in the officers reflects their experiences with players who tend to come and go a bunch before ultimately vanishing, but I still think it’s worth doing even if I can’t do as much as I want and getting any kind of response is like pulling teeth sometimes.
Continue readingThe Rewards Aren’t Worth Doing Battles On Repeat For Me
There is one problem I will always have with Massively Multiplayer Online games that remains an issue in Final Fantasy 14 no matter how much I love the game. I like to do things for the challenge of them rather than for most other rewards, so when I get through something difficult, I stop wanting to do it. I’ve already finished it, you see, and proven myself capable. I might repeat it sometimes to hone my skills or make sure that my success wasn’t a fluke, but I generally don’t like repeating things too much once I’ve done that. In MMOs, though (and many other games, to be clear, as this is not an issue restricted to MMOs alone), this kind of repetition is a key part of the game. You do things over and over again for gear, for cosmetic items, for achievements, and so many other reasons, most of which have to do with the often frustrating fact that few loot drops are guaranteed. Sure, you’re always going to get something and there’s usually some kind of challenge-specific item or items you’ll get every time from the parts of the game you’ll need to repeat a bunch (something built-in so you can eventually buy whatever it is you’re trying to get), but there’s no guarantee that the thing you want is going to show up, much less that you’ll get it when it comes time to roll for loot. I’m just not that interested in doing a challenge up to fifty or one hundre times in order to get the challenge-specific variation of the expansion’s mount. Most of them aren’t that difficult once you’ve done them a time or two, which is why I just don’t have it in me to do them over and over again in hopes of getting lucky one some mount or housing item.
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