Can’t believe I’ve been playing this game for 4 years already. Time to reflect on things that happened in the past year.

Last year kinda started off on a bad note because of some friendship drama that was going on. This was pretty much forgotten because I met a lot of people at Fanfest and made some really good friends afterwards. So ultimately I don’t really see it as a loss and in the end everything turned out better than expected.

Things in my FC have been pretty quiet for the past year. I would often unsub, come back during the free login campaign for the end of year events, and continue to stay unsubbed as I focused on otome games. While we had a bunch of new members around last year, most of them have quit the game or returned to their alts/mains on other servers. So overall it was really quiet and being bored out of my mind before the expansion I decided to create an alt on the Japanese servers in May.

At first it was kind of lonely because ultimately I’m playing off peak on a medium pop server (low pop if you compare to NA) on a pretty low pop data center. I began leveling tank in order to get faster queues but until 4.0 hit the struggle to catch up was real. Now even off peak queues pop decently fast because more players came to the game and because they finally locked all the overcrowded servers on every data center.

One day on twitter there was a campaign going on where various FCS were promoting themselves on a bunch of Japanese servers. One of the promoters was an FC where the leader specialized in screenshot editing. In fact a lot of people in the FC were editors and reshade users like me. I thought this is it! I applied as a trial for a week (the application process was so foreign to me since we had a chat in their house all RP-ish lol) and eventually I ended up staying. Been in this FC  for about 4 months now. It’s usually quiet when I log in, but once in a while there’s a morning person to say hi to and usually I see a lot of them online when I login weekend mornings. There’s been several FC events, like fortune telling, and puzzle solving, scary story telling and photography.

While there’s still some stuff that makes me ಠ_ಠ as far as Japanese server culture (like how nobody shouts LFG for fates or hunts and people ONLY  make PFs for this), overall it sort of brought a new freshness to the game for me. Once I maxed out crafters, gatherers and my main jobs on my main character….there’s not much left to do. I don’t raid (ew) and leveling sub jobs that I will never play after 70 gets really painful (especially when you’re on round 3 of temple of quarn in a week for leveling roulette.) So to refresh the game for me, I’ve been leveling crafters, doing Ixali beast tribe quests (almost max rank now lol) and now that Youkai watch event is back I plan to at least get the basic mount on my alt.

The legendary youkai badge rate appears to have been buffed…it can’t just be me. I’ve done several fates over the last few days and it feels like I get a badge at least once every 3 fates. So while I’m only aiming for about 3 weapons, if the rate isn’t bad I could potentially slowly grind out all the weapons. Anyway we’ll see how things go. No new patch until October so I pretty much have time until then.

Anyway for now I guess my alt serves as sort of a nice “escape” from the mundane grind of my main. My FC has been pretty dead lately, nobody really ever even says hello which is actually pretty standard in Japanese FCs. It may not seem like a big deal, but even when someone says hello & goodnight in fc chat, especially in a small FC, it makes a huge difference because you’re  then acknowledged as a person in the game. When people just login & out silently it feels dead & lonely. So combined with that, I’ve generally had a negative feeling towards my main server, and my FC in general. So now I try to not let it get to me and if I still want to enjoy XIV, I just run off to my alt (which feels like my main lately) on the JPN servers.

So overall, I think it’s best not to invest yourself in relationships or friendships in XIV. No matter how long you’ve known someone, the content in the game changes people and their playstyle. Raiding turns people into raid logger zombies, the people who you once enjoyed casual content with, are no longer there to play with you. Because of cross server PF, people now have no reason to go back to their alts on my server when they can play on their mains on the same DC. Others have gone back to WOW or OW or Destiny and haven’t logged in months, some in years. So if you can’t find enjoyment in your own in game activities, it’s best to take breaks and play other games. Just can’t rely on people to make the game fun for you. At the moment I’m really enjoying FF15 so I’m gonna be putting FF14 on low priority probably until patch 4.1 hits. Enjoy below a gallery of some recent screenshots I’ve taken:

Oh yea, depressing stuff aside, I actually did enjoy the expansion story of Stormblood. It’s just you know, once the story ends, you have nothing but mundane grinding (with once in a while events to distract you) to do until the next patch, that’s really the biggest downfall of this game.