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…
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There’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.
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