Poisonga
Posted on
Final Fantasy XIV celebrated its one year anniversary last week!
I’ve been playing the game since the alpha test and loved every second of it.
Now that I think about it, I’ve been playing Massive Multiplayer Online games for a long time.
Almost eleven years!
My first memory of adventuring online with random strangers was Ragnarok Online.
Damn, life was so simple back then!
Because Ragnarok was my first MMO, I had no idea what I was doing.
Yet somehow, the poisonous grind managed to find me.
I would stay up for hours hunting down a single type of monster hoping they would drop a single type of card in order to make a single piece of my Assassin’s gear a single digit stronger.
It was a borderline addiction.
The next one will be my last!
The next one will drop for sure!
Little did I know, eleven years later I would still have the same mindset, only recently I’ve started to treat MMOs like games again instead of jobs.
I learned this the hard way, as my addition continued all throughout university with Final Fantasy XI.
I clocked over 600 days—almost 2 whole years of play time—over the course of eleven years, which is not something I am proud of.
Still, I managed to successfully graduate university with flying colours and land a job in Japan, so it didn’t eat away at my brain too much.
I left FFXI last year to focus on Crazy Sunshine full time, but sometimes log back in when there is a free trial campaign going on.
I’m just surprised it took me eleven years to realise how much of my time could be spent not chasing item levels and being creatively productive instead.
Now, enter Final Fantasy XIV.
You’re probably thinking,
Heh, this Jkun dude just never learns, does he?
Fortunately, I am a lot smarter than I was eleven years ago.
Wait, no, I’m not.
FFXIV’s charming, nostalgic theme park of an MMO has sunk its teeth deep into my shins and is never letter go any time soon.
I play on the Japanese data center, and for those who are interested, you can follow my adventures on my blog or Twitter!