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.

It was shocking, to be sure, but it was hardly traumatizing. It was a joke made to play on how negatively everyone had reacted to my declaration that I was going to be pentamelding my gear, talking about how painful it was and how expensive it was. It was mildly painful to see that number float up on my screen, given that I knew I’d need to go buy more materia, but that’s about it. I’d spent the last two weeks mentally preparing myself for that moment and earning the in-game currency I’d need to be able to buy that much materia, so I was able to take it in stride once the shock wore off. It’s just a game, after all, and I’d already decided that the top-tier gear was worth it. What it did do, though, was create a quick, strong bond between this friend and I. We were in for an odd night, the both of us. Me with my melding and bad luck, them with their crafting and the constant DDOS attacks interrupting it (not to mention all the resources they kept burning through in order to even do that crafting). But we weathered it together, for the most part, checking in as we went, and it turned into a bit of a nice experience, to go through all that together. It’s made our week of lingering in voice calls as we continued to play FF14 after our events were done a bit more familiar. A bit warmer. It’s been nice to suffer alongside someone else, especially because the “suffering” is so inconsequential. Sure, I wound up spending about eight million gil on that specific type of materia, burning through seven hundred and change of it to fill thirty-nine slots, but that’s what the money is there for. Honestly, the worst part wasn’t buying more materia, it was the heart-breaking crunch and puff of smoke that came out of every huge failure (I had 4 that night, though the others were far less significant than that one huge loss).

It has been interesting to exist alongside the struggles of my fellow FC (Free Company, or guild) members during the last week as we’ve struggled against the DDOS attacks and tried to absorb a huge amount of work that needed doing as a result of the workshop merge between us and two other groups our leader frequently worked with. I am one of the more emotive people when it comes to these struggles, but not the only one. Almost all of them accept what’s going on with a weary sigh or attempt to stave off what they see as heartbreak and sadness in us “less experienced” players to the degree that I’ve begun to feel quite frustrated (frustrated enough to write about this two days in a row!) with many of them for always having something negative to say about my gear project (often meant supportively, but that doesn’t absolve them of the content or results of their actions). It is difficult to build solidarity and comfort amongst a group of people who will constantly tell me how I’m supposed to feel about something. I prefer to speak for myself, of course, but it’s extra annoying because I already have to perform these emotions to some extent and having someone tell me how I’m supposed to feel despite me following all the right steps to display how I actually feel is incredibly grating as a result. It’s not that I don’t feel these things, but a childhood and early adult life of emotional repression mean that I tend to not display what I’m feeling much, thus the performative nature of some of my emotional expression. I have to remember to display it in order to communicate clearly with others and not have my feelings denied, so when I’m doing it “right” and they still deny my feelings, it hurts even worse than if I had remained neutral or stoic in expression and they’d projected the way they’d have responded onto me.

I mean, I’ve been through a lot. A little wasted video game money and the heartbreaking-crack of my money going up in digital smoke isn’t going to have a lasting impact on me. Hell, it wouldn’t have had any impact on me that lasted longer than it took to register what happened if I wasn’t already exhausted and mentally drained from the last couple weeks of my life. By the next day, the day I wrote, it didn’t even register. I’d do it again in an instant. Well, I need to earn more money first, but the failures of this attempt aren’t going to stop me from doing it again in the future, even if there’s no experience or benefit to gain from already having done it. I will not be more successful next time around becaue I did it this time. I’ll just already know what it sounds like to watch my investments vanish with the crunch of glass and, sometimes, a puff of smoke. It’s just so strange to go through all of this ostensibly-bonding activity over the last couple weeks and still wind up with people telling me how I feel in so many cases. Perhaps the bonding didn’t work as well as I hoped it would with them. Perhaps I’m just going to come out of it with a bond forged in the smoke of that significant loss with my one friend. I don’t know. All I know for sure is that the only lingering feeling I have about the “negative” side of this experience is that I’m growing increasingly tired with being told how I’m supposed to feel about the goals I’ve set for myself.