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 readingVideo Gaming
Intrinsic 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 readingFiguring Things Out In Outward
True to my previous statements, I decided to start playing Outward to see if what I feel is inefficiency and impracticality on the part of a Let’s Play I’m watching is truly those things or if the game really is just that punishing. I’ve even got a friend playing it with me, so we can really replicate the recorded experience. Albeit with the benefit of having watched the stream and having a wiki open on my second monitor. So it’s not exactly the same, but it’s similar enough that I’m pretty sure that some amount of what I’m seeing in the LP is the players’ reach exceeding their grasp. I’m sure some amount of this is the constant awareness that what they’re doing is being recorded and will be put online for entertainment purposes, so they don’t want to spend forty hours doing incremental small journeys out into the wilds to safely collect resources, earn money, and buy skills before they really strike out into the world. I mean, I haven’t done that yet, either, but I am in the process of doing that, to the tune of buying all the basic skills available to me in the starting city that meshed with my chosen sword-and-shield approach. I will probably buy more, yet, just to keep beefing up my repetoire of abilities so I can bust out the appropriate weapon as needed, but I think we’ve hit the point of being as ready as we can be to really make a go of things in the wider world beyond our small town’s gates.
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 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.
Continue readingI’ve Finally Committed Myself To Watching A Let’s Play
Most of the time, I’m not really one to watch people play video games. I don’t really enjoy Let’s Plays, I don’t really enjoy watching most people stream, and I even have a bit of a hard time sitting around while other people play a game nearby. This is because I have a very firm grasp of game mechanics, how to succeed at most games, and am easily frustrated by what looks like, in my eyes, inefficiency. I don’t get really backseat driver-y with video games, but I can feel my blood pressure rise as someone scrolls past an item in their inventory that they’re looking for or that they know is worthless and yet won’t throw away. It is my own personal hell, to watch someone play a game I know how to do well when they are struggling because they either haven’t grasped a core mechanic as solidly as the game requires or because their level of general disorganization is making their life difficult. I feel physical pain whenever I watch someone play a video game that involves a degree of inventory management and they refuse to manage their inventory in any kind of sensible or logical way. My heart cannot take this vibes-based “do I keep this pile of junk I’m going to throw away in ten minutes?” type play because it inevitably leads to the player messing around in menus for ten minutes while they try to figure out what precious junk they’re going to keep this time only to toss it the instant they find a cool new gun or whatever. It’s easier to handle on YouTube, with Let’s Plays, since I can just skip forward past things that will be frustrating to me, but that’s not an option for stuff like streamed video games and most people don’t want “helpful tips” from their viewers. Which I would never provide unless solicited, of course. I’d rather be miserable than make someone play a game the way I want them to rather than the way they want to.
Continue readingKirby and the Fogotten Land + Star-Crossed World Was Short But A Lot Of Fun
I played through the Kirby and the Forgotten Land Switch 2 expansion/DLC finally. I thought I’d get it right around my birthday at the end of August, when it came out, and play it immediately, but I was super hooked on Final Fantasy 14 stuff then and had my friends over, so I didn’t really need something to do at the time. Now, though, as I’ve been taking a break from FF14, that made it into the number two spot on my list, right after beating Donkey Kong Bananza. It took a couple nights, maybe five to seven hours total, to get through all of the expansion and find out what was contained within that Star-Crossed World, but I had a fun time doing it. I was incredibly out of touch with the game and it took a few attempts to really get back into the swing of it since I’d forgotten how most of the power-up systems and abilities worked, but I quickly figured it out again. It also helped that one of the abilities is basically the most powerful one you can get and while the utility of the other abilities might make them more useful in the right circumstances, about ninety percent of the expansion involved me using the Morph Sword power. I did look into upgrading it, once I remembered how all the currencies worked, but it didn’t really need an upgrade and the only way to get some of those special currencies is to run the boss rush type tournament things again and again and that’s not exactly my idea of a fun time. Especially because I’m still pretty rusty at the game, even after beating the expansion, and would struggle to take on some of the more difficult fights I did back when I was at the height of my power towards the end of the core content.
Continue reading