Crafting and gathering in FFXIV-the closest thing to old-style MMOs
One of my favourite activities in MMOs is gathering and crafting. I suspect this is mostly because I am terrible at crafting in real life, and outside of my stabs at gardening, not really the gathering type either. Most MMOs offer crafting systems as an afterthought-since everyone offers at least something basic, they stop at the basics. Usually, the sum of crafting anything is click on a name in a list, press a button and the item is made. Older MMOs show that this was not always so and didn't have to be so. My favourite gathering and crafting system came from a now dead game called Vanguard. It gave you the option to gather items in the open world as a single player or with members of your party. More people cooperating usually led to better grades of materials (they weren't just one of each type!). When you got to a crafting hall in each city, you had the choice of using your mats to make personal items like armour and weapons, or fulfil orders from the local faction. In the second option, the faction provided you with the materials. The crafting process was not the "factory line style" familiar to say, WoW. You had an array of skills that grew as you levelled. During crafting, a variety of random conditions would happen as you went through each stage. You had to figure out how you wanted to react based on the skills you had. Depending on which you used, the item you made could have different grades of quality, traits and styles. Apart from solo-crafting, there was apparently cooperative guild projects I never got to try out because I joined the game nearing the end of its life (around the mid-2000s). But these let you build ships and houses, with lots of people contributing. I spent hours of time in Vanguard just making or gathering stuff and loved it. For a very long time, no other MMO even came close to level of granularity or group cooperation. Enter Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.
We began playing this during its beta test in 2013, and stuck around for the next 7 years. We haven't stopped. The first thing to know about FFXIV is that it is a very story-driven game. Everything has a quest to get you started, from how to use the market board (auction house) to dyeing your armour. All the zones and content are in fact locked behind how far you are into the Main Story Quest (MSQ), which ties together all the different mini-stories you encounter along the way. Again, everything has a story. There are individual storylines for every single adventuring, gathering and crafting class, which you encounter when you reach set levels and complete to gain new skills. The game has 3 gathering classes (called Disciples of the Land): Botanist, Miner and Fisher. There are 8 crafting classes (called Disciples of the Hand): Carpenter, Armourer, Blacksmith, Weaver, Leatherworker, Goldsmith, Alchemist and Culinarian. Considering that this game has now had 3 expansions, with the latest, Shadowbringers, that's a lot of stories. The game likes to return to NPCs you may have met once somewhere else and completely forgot about, to help you connect to the lore and the things you've accomplished. For example, a random pirate you may have done some brief quests for when you first started playing might suddenly matter again 7 years later when you help a faction develop trade routes in new lands. I love this sort of thing and genuinely liked a number of my class trainers and their stories. The Goldsmith story from level 1-50 is by far one of my favourites, as it involves a mammet (essentially a type of clockwork robot used to perform menial tasks) that the Goldsmith Guild keeps around because it is an old faithful. The mammet gives no fucks about anyone or anything around it and is not afraid to say so. I got really fond of that cranky old bastard, looking forward to what new, terrible thing he had to say about the world around him in his discordant voice. I mean, it was darn near close to calling us flesh bags. In comparison, the Culinarian quest between level 50-60 throws you into an Iron Chef-style battle. I laughed hard when we got to the obligatory food critic who swoons in a whole animated sequence over the sublime tastes he is presented with. Then I laughed again when my husband went through the same quest and I saw his reaction to the surreal spectacle.
The second important thing to know about FFXIV is that there are no restrictions on the number of classes you can have or how far you want to play them per character. In fact, back at release and for at least the next two expansions, the only way you could get some important cross-class skills and take certain classes was to first level other classes. So for adventuring classes (called Disciples of War or Disciples of Magic) and DoH, you actually needed to try other things until you got to the level you needed. One of the aspects that really bugged me about other MMOs is that usually you are restricted to just 1 to 3 crafting class, maybe 1 gathering class and only 1 adventuring class unless you make an alt. Being able to dabble in a lot of different things and seeing what stuck was a real game-changer for me. Because I love crafting, I wound up specialising in 5 of the 8 DoH and all 3 DoL, although I levelled all the 8 DoH classes to max cross-skills and for materia-melding (think WoW gem slot). They've streamlined skills a lot in the latest expansion, doing away with the cross-class skills and cross-classing in general to access other ones. This has definitely reduced barriers to entry for newer players. I think the overall result is that crafting is more fun to do. You're not worried about having to level up something you don't want to, you get all the useful skills that make crafting interesting and it feels less restrictive even if you have only 1 class.
As you might also have discerned from the above, every single class in FFXIV has a skill set and rotation to use in their various tasks, although specifically all the DoH share the same skills. For DoL, Botanist and Miner share the same skills but Fisher is a totally different kettle of, well, you know. (I intend to write about FFXIV's secret history as a fishing MMO in its own post later.) The major reason I have been crafting and gathering in this game for 7 years is precisely because it's fiddly and random. And it's not an assembly-line, one-button job! FFXIV takes some of the detail of Vanguard-style crafting and streamlines it for a modern audience. Just like Vanguard had stages of crafting, in FFXIV, each crafting session is determined by the Durability score of the item you're making, say a Durability of 50. You also have a Quality meter that starts at 1% and goes up to 100%, which determines the chance your final product is Normal Quality (NQ) or High Quality (HQ). In general, you want everything to be HQ, as it increases the stats on the piece of gear you're making or the buffs if its food or potions. Taking as an example my previously cited 50 Durability, your job is then to achieve 100% Quality (or as high as you can manage), while also moving the Progress of that session to 100% (i.e. you successfully make the item) without getting to 0/50 Durability (a critical fail). During crafting, random conditions might occur that affect how far you can move up Progress or Quality, or affect Durability. The skills you are given and how you wield them are your tools in determining the outcome.
For DoL, your skill sets are used to determine how high quality the materials you gather are. Again, like crafting, HQ is always better. The Quality meter during crafting is pre-filled based on the amount of HQ materials you used to make the item. This in turn determines how difficult a time you'll have getting a HQ final product. End-game items are not just harder to harvest and make as HQ. Frequently, the amount of Progress/Quality you can raise per move is also exponentially lower. I won't lie. Until Shadowbringers, when they increased the amount of quality you got upfront from using all HQ materials in a crafting session, end-game crafting used to be intensely masochistic. The most Quality you got pre-filled was around 17%. The skills you have usually have a percentile of how frequently they succeed in doing what you expect. For example, Hasty Touch is a skill that has a 60% chance of increasing quality by a set amount when executed. The conditions you encounter during a crafting session and whether or not your skills work as intended are dictated by RNG (random number generator-the computer rolls your dice for you). Just because something says it has a 60% chance of successfully going off doesn't mean in any shape or form it will go off. Your level and crafting statistics (yes, we have crafting-specific statistics just like adventuring classes) can help mitigate some of the damage. But as anyone who has ever failed Hasty Touch 7 times in a row will tell you, the RNG of FFXIV is the stuff that makes you question your sanity and your grasp of basic mathematics. This was immensely improved in Shadowbringers...somewhat. If you use all HQ mats, the starting Quality percentile can be as high as 40%, which makes crafting a much easier and shorter process. It's not brainless and RNG can still kick you in the balls, but it definitely feels more rewarding to put the effort in. End-game crafting and gathering isn't for everyone precisely because of how nitty it gets, but if you love this stuff, and I do, it's just nice to see the armour you make on yourself or your friends, or see the furniture you made in your house after grinding an Extreme-mode (that's highest difficulty) boss that took you 2 weeks to learn and get the key component (randomly) from. (Note: Since some of the rarest end-game materials come from equivalently end-game fights, many of the most dedicated crafters actively pursue at least some end-game content.)
So what can you craft in FFXIV? Armour, weapons, furniture (outdoor and indoor for your personal house), minions (pets), food and potions, and their component parts. If you are part of a Free Company (FFXIV's version of guilds), you can have an FC Workshop. Here, your whole FC can contribute to projects like crafting an exclusive skin for the outside of your FC house, 24-hour FC-wide buffs or airships and submersibles, which are used for Exploratory Missions. The first and last type of projects are the most labour-intensive. It frequently requires days or even weeks of gathering and crafting the requisite parts, so it encourages people to work together to make something cool. The Exploratory Missions send craft out by air or sea to "explore" unlockable zones and come back with loot. This can be rare materials to power further FC projects, as well as rare minions, music and even furniture. Crafted end-game gear in FFXIV is usually a good starting point to qualify for raids, if not the equivalent of some raid-level gear itself. Any crafting/gathering-related tools, armour and buff potions/foods are things you have to either craft yourself or get others to make for you. These items are all sellable, so it is also possible to buy things off the Market Board. If you're a high-end crafter and gatherer, this is a great way to make gil (the in-game currency).
Which is a good segue onto my next subject, the game's first crafting raid.
The Ishgardian Restoration
In most games, you save the world, and that's the end of it. Even in MMOs, which may have continuous expansions to bolster their content, it's a matter of going to some new continent somewhere, saving that, then moving on to the next one. You might help people along the way, but once you are done saving them, that's that. As I said earlier, FFXIV likes to re-insert the people and places you meet on your journey back into the plot, which to me is important. It's not like these NPCs you saved a few years ago stopped their lives right there. More importantly, many of the places you saved are war-torn regions with a lot of infrastructure in ruins. These NPCs still need homes and jobs. In fact, dealing with the humanitarian needs of refugees is a long-standing issue the main plot of the game likes to address. Take for example, Ishgard. The city of Ishgard was the main city for FFXIV:ARR's first expansion, Heavensward. This was a city run by a lying, corrupt church that was trapped in a centuries-old war with dragons. Its people were strictly defined by class and rank. Upward mobility was practically unheard of, and the poorest people were often desperately so. As you might expect, your job as hero was to end the war and expose their false gods. This broke down some of the city's classism, creating new opportunities for a more egalitarian society, and also meant more attention to serving the most needy. Thus, in 2019, the heroes that saved Eorzea several times over (namely, us players) were tasked with rebuilding Ishgard to create homes for its displaced citizenry.
The Ishgard Restoration project was added to the game's content as a means of engaging the crafters and gatherers of FFXIV in server-wide city building. Each server (a World in FFXIV parlance) was responsible for progressing its own rebuilding of Ishgard. Players contributed to the rebuilding by crafting Ishgard Restoration-specific items or gathering its materials in a special open sand-box zone just for gatherers called the Diadem. Since this was designed partly to help players level DoH and DoL, anyone could take part from the lowest levels to max. Contributions were titrated to different tiers of player levels, so low-level players could hand in something relatively easy for them to gather/make and max level players got rather more difficult tasks.
A brief note from Expert-crafting hellHardcore end-game gatherers and crafters could enter a server-specific Ranking season held in 3 of the 4 Ishgardian Restoration phases released, i.e. a leaderboard battle for each DoH and DoL class. Players were "scored" based on the amount and quality of max-level items they contributed to the Restoration in a specific DoH/DoL class over each 9-day Ranking season. Items that gave the biggest scores per turn-in were called Expert-crafted items. Previously, I talked about how end-game crafting in FFXIV has always been to me somewhat on the same difficulty as an end-game fight. Expert crafting is the special tier of hell created for people who spend most of their time in MMOs crafting. Just like in an end-game raid, your gear and crafting stats had to first meet a minimum threshold to even begin. This helped restrict competition to people who specialised as a specific DoH/DoL and was therefore geared just for that.
To submit an Expert-crafted item, it has to be of a minimum quality percentile, which is usually about 75% or so of the Quality bar. The RNG for Expert crafts is exceptionally brutal. Moving up Progress/Quality is nightmarishly hard. Unlike regular crafting, Expert-crafting introduces a bunch of new conditions specific to it, so figuring out how to deploy your skills on the fly and being deeply familiar with what each thing does is crucial.It takes hours of practice and wasted mats to learn what you're doing. Every crafting session was a complex puzzle that had no guarantee you'd succeed, but made you feel super competent if you did. Naturally, I loved every minute of it. (Full disclosure: I ranked in the top 100 of at least 3 DoH in all 3 seasons.)
There appears to be no set time limit on how long each server's rebuilding can take, although new phases of reconstruction are generally released once all servers have completed the previous phase. Each phase of the reconstruction in turn is broken down into stages. These are open call periods for materials (gathered and crafted) divided by Concerted Works-a kind of public quest in the Firmament (the instance where reconstruction happens). The Concerted Works last for around 15 minutes. Any player in the Firmament may join at will, solo or in a party, doing small tasks like breaking up rubble and carting it off. Once completed, the reconstruction moves onto its next stage. Each Concerted Works causes a new part of the housing district to be built up. Players can actually see the results of their labour take shape around them and that's a really cool thing. Balmung, my server, has consistently led the North American servers in finishing their construction first. We completed building the whole of the Ishgard Restoration project last week. I was there the night we did the last Concerted Works. People were genuinely hyped just running around seeing the NPCs move into the houses, parks, stores-even a public bath-that we built. They congratulated each other on a job well done and completed that took thousands of us.
Because FFXIV is story-driven, the Firmament had its own set of stories highlighting the NPCs who toiled alongside you and live there. Each new reconstruction phase revealed a little bit more of the story through quests and interactions between NPCs in the open world. For me, it really made me care about the place I was building and I'm sure it did for others too, since after every Concerted Works ended, everyone immediately looked for specific NPCs they liked, yelling out coordinates for where they were and how to find them. It was just nice.
I contributed to all four phases of the Restoration on Balmung over the past year and I think my favourite part about this experiment was the sheer kindness of everyone involved. Throughout the frenetic crafting and endless gathering of materials, people put out PSAs reminding others to get up and walk around, drink water, rest and even take their meds. There were shouts of encouragement to everyone involved. Some gatherers gave away lower-level materials for free to crafters who needed them for levelling. Others gave away free copies of gifts they won in the Restoration lotteries. Taking part in a massive community-building project, whether you were participating individually or as a group, it always felt like you were included.
Finally, as a kind of "thank you" to players for contributing to the Ishgardian Restoration, the last thing built in each area is a monument to the topmost contributing crafter of each server. This monument does not name the specific player, which I think was a smart move that reduced the chance of envy. But it does show a stone carving of their DoH class. If you're wondering, on Balmung this was a set of frying pans, so the top contributor was a Culinarian. I have a day job-I didn't stand a chance in hell at being a top achiever, but I 'm proud of that person, whoever they are.
I really hope we get to rebuild more places in the future. There's plenty of potential locations in the game's lore, and I do think the process brings out the best in each server's community. It gives people a reason to talk to each other (even if that's only if they want to) and support each other. Given just how 2019 and the beginning of 2020 has been, we needed that. As someone who does love gathering and crafting in this game as well, it gave players like me a big piece of exclusive content for my non-combat classes. This was a change from just doing what I do to gear myself or friends up, or building things to showcase in our FC house. We were building something everyone could walk around in and enjoy. The game already has many options for every kind of adventurer, but this is the first time gatherers and crafters really had something raid-like only they could help with. I want to see where we go next.
We began playing this during its beta test in 2013, and stuck around for the next 7 years. We haven't stopped. The first thing to know about FFXIV is that it is a very story-driven game. Everything has a quest to get you started, from how to use the market board (auction house) to dyeing your armour. All the zones and content are in fact locked behind how far you are into the Main Story Quest (MSQ), which ties together all the different mini-stories you encounter along the way. Again, everything has a story. There are individual storylines for every single adventuring, gathering and crafting class, which you encounter when you reach set levels and complete to gain new skills. The game has 3 gathering classes (called Disciples of the Land): Botanist, Miner and Fisher. There are 8 crafting classes (called Disciples of the Hand): Carpenter, Armourer, Blacksmith, Weaver, Leatherworker, Goldsmith, Alchemist and Culinarian. Considering that this game has now had 3 expansions, with the latest, Shadowbringers, that's a lot of stories. The game likes to return to NPCs you may have met once somewhere else and completely forgot about, to help you connect to the lore and the things you've accomplished. For example, a random pirate you may have done some brief quests for when you first started playing might suddenly matter again 7 years later when you help a faction develop trade routes in new lands. I love this sort of thing and genuinely liked a number of my class trainers and their stories. The Goldsmith story from level 1-50 is by far one of my favourites, as it involves a mammet (essentially a type of clockwork robot used to perform menial tasks) that the Goldsmith Guild keeps around because it is an old faithful. The mammet gives no fucks about anyone or anything around it and is not afraid to say so. I got really fond of that cranky old bastard, looking forward to what new, terrible thing he had to say about the world around him in his discordant voice. I mean, it was darn near close to calling us flesh bags. In comparison, the Culinarian quest between level 50-60 throws you into an Iron Chef-style battle. I laughed hard when we got to the obligatory food critic who swoons in a whole animated sequence over the sublime tastes he is presented with. Then I laughed again when my husband went through the same quest and I saw his reaction to the surreal spectacle.
The second important thing to know about FFXIV is that there are no restrictions on the number of classes you can have or how far you want to play them per character. In fact, back at release and for at least the next two expansions, the only way you could get some important cross-class skills and take certain classes was to first level other classes. So for adventuring classes (called Disciples of War or Disciples of Magic) and DoH, you actually needed to try other things until you got to the level you needed. One of the aspects that really bugged me about other MMOs is that usually you are restricted to just 1 to 3 crafting class, maybe 1 gathering class and only 1 adventuring class unless you make an alt. Being able to dabble in a lot of different things and seeing what stuck was a real game-changer for me. Because I love crafting, I wound up specialising in 5 of the 8 DoH and all 3 DoL, although I levelled all the 8 DoH classes to max cross-skills and for materia-melding (think WoW gem slot). They've streamlined skills a lot in the latest expansion, doing away with the cross-class skills and cross-classing in general to access other ones. This has definitely reduced barriers to entry for newer players. I think the overall result is that crafting is more fun to do. You're not worried about having to level up something you don't want to, you get all the useful skills that make crafting interesting and it feels less restrictive even if you have only 1 class.
As you might also have discerned from the above, every single class in FFXIV has a skill set and rotation to use in their various tasks, although specifically all the DoH share the same skills. For DoL, Botanist and Miner share the same skills but Fisher is a totally different kettle of, well, you know. (I intend to write about FFXIV's secret history as a fishing MMO in its own post later.) The major reason I have been crafting and gathering in this game for 7 years is precisely because it's fiddly and random. And it's not an assembly-line, one-button job! FFXIV takes some of the detail of Vanguard-style crafting and streamlines it for a modern audience. Just like Vanguard had stages of crafting, in FFXIV, each crafting session is determined by the Durability score of the item you're making, say a Durability of 50. You also have a Quality meter that starts at 1% and goes up to 100%, which determines the chance your final product is Normal Quality (NQ) or High Quality (HQ). In general, you want everything to be HQ, as it increases the stats on the piece of gear you're making or the buffs if its food or potions. Taking as an example my previously cited 50 Durability, your job is then to achieve 100% Quality (or as high as you can manage), while also moving the Progress of that session to 100% (i.e. you successfully make the item) without getting to 0/50 Durability (a critical fail). During crafting, random conditions might occur that affect how far you can move up Progress or Quality, or affect Durability. The skills you are given and how you wield them are your tools in determining the outcome.
For DoL, your skill sets are used to determine how high quality the materials you gather are. Again, like crafting, HQ is always better. The Quality meter during crafting is pre-filled based on the amount of HQ materials you used to make the item. This in turn determines how difficult a time you'll have getting a HQ final product. End-game items are not just harder to harvest and make as HQ. Frequently, the amount of Progress/Quality you can raise per move is also exponentially lower. I won't lie. Until Shadowbringers, when they increased the amount of quality you got upfront from using all HQ materials in a crafting session, end-game crafting used to be intensely masochistic. The most Quality you got pre-filled was around 17%. The skills you have usually have a percentile of how frequently they succeed in doing what you expect. For example, Hasty Touch is a skill that has a 60% chance of increasing quality by a set amount when executed. The conditions you encounter during a crafting session and whether or not your skills work as intended are dictated by RNG (random number generator-the computer rolls your dice for you). Just because something says it has a 60% chance of successfully going off doesn't mean in any shape or form it will go off. Your level and crafting statistics (yes, we have crafting-specific statistics just like adventuring classes) can help mitigate some of the damage. But as anyone who has ever failed Hasty Touch 7 times in a row will tell you, the RNG of FFXIV is the stuff that makes you question your sanity and your grasp of basic mathematics. This was immensely improved in Shadowbringers...somewhat. If you use all HQ mats, the starting Quality percentile can be as high as 40%, which makes crafting a much easier and shorter process. It's not brainless and RNG can still kick you in the balls, but it definitely feels more rewarding to put the effort in. End-game crafting and gathering isn't for everyone precisely because of how nitty it gets, but if you love this stuff, and I do, it's just nice to see the armour you make on yourself or your friends, or see the furniture you made in your house after grinding an Extreme-mode (that's highest difficulty) boss that took you 2 weeks to learn and get the key component (randomly) from. (Note: Since some of the rarest end-game materials come from equivalently end-game fights, many of the most dedicated crafters actively pursue at least some end-game content.)
So what can you craft in FFXIV? Armour, weapons, furniture (outdoor and indoor for your personal house), minions (pets), food and potions, and their component parts. If you are part of a Free Company (FFXIV's version of guilds), you can have an FC Workshop. Here, your whole FC can contribute to projects like crafting an exclusive skin for the outside of your FC house, 24-hour FC-wide buffs or airships and submersibles, which are used for Exploratory Missions. The first and last type of projects are the most labour-intensive. It frequently requires days or even weeks of gathering and crafting the requisite parts, so it encourages people to work together to make something cool. The Exploratory Missions send craft out by air or sea to "explore" unlockable zones and come back with loot. This can be rare materials to power further FC projects, as well as rare minions, music and even furniture. Crafted end-game gear in FFXIV is usually a good starting point to qualify for raids, if not the equivalent of some raid-level gear itself. Any crafting/gathering-related tools, armour and buff potions/foods are things you have to either craft yourself or get others to make for you. These items are all sellable, so it is also possible to buy things off the Market Board. If you're a high-end crafter and gatherer, this is a great way to make gil (the in-game currency).
Which is a good segue onto my next subject, the game's first crafting raid.
The Ishgardian Restoration
In most games, you save the world, and that's the end of it. Even in MMOs, which may have continuous expansions to bolster their content, it's a matter of going to some new continent somewhere, saving that, then moving on to the next one. You might help people along the way, but once you are done saving them, that's that. As I said earlier, FFXIV likes to re-insert the people and places you meet on your journey back into the plot, which to me is important. It's not like these NPCs you saved a few years ago stopped their lives right there. More importantly, many of the places you saved are war-torn regions with a lot of infrastructure in ruins. These NPCs still need homes and jobs. In fact, dealing with the humanitarian needs of refugees is a long-standing issue the main plot of the game likes to address. Take for example, Ishgard. The city of Ishgard was the main city for FFXIV:ARR's first expansion, Heavensward. This was a city run by a lying, corrupt church that was trapped in a centuries-old war with dragons. Its people were strictly defined by class and rank. Upward mobility was practically unheard of, and the poorest people were often desperately so. As you might expect, your job as hero was to end the war and expose their false gods. This broke down some of the city's classism, creating new opportunities for a more egalitarian society, and also meant more attention to serving the most needy. Thus, in 2019, the heroes that saved Eorzea several times over (namely, us players) were tasked with rebuilding Ishgard to create homes for its displaced citizenry.
The Ishgard Restoration project was added to the game's content as a means of engaging the crafters and gatherers of FFXIV in server-wide city building. Each server (a World in FFXIV parlance) was responsible for progressing its own rebuilding of Ishgard. Players contributed to the rebuilding by crafting Ishgard Restoration-specific items or gathering its materials in a special open sand-box zone just for gatherers called the Diadem. Since this was designed partly to help players level DoH and DoL, anyone could take part from the lowest levels to max. Contributions were titrated to different tiers of player levels, so low-level players could hand in something relatively easy for them to gather/make and max level players got rather more difficult tasks.
A brief note from Expert-crafting hellHardcore end-game gatherers and crafters could enter a server-specific Ranking season held in 3 of the 4 Ishgardian Restoration phases released, i.e. a leaderboard battle for each DoH and DoL class. Players were "scored" based on the amount and quality of max-level items they contributed to the Restoration in a specific DoH/DoL class over each 9-day Ranking season. Items that gave the biggest scores per turn-in were called Expert-crafted items. Previously, I talked about how end-game crafting in FFXIV has always been to me somewhat on the same difficulty as an end-game fight. Expert crafting is the special tier of hell created for people who spend most of their time in MMOs crafting. Just like in an end-game raid, your gear and crafting stats had to first meet a minimum threshold to even begin. This helped restrict competition to people who specialised as a specific DoH/DoL and was therefore geared just for that.
To submit an Expert-crafted item, it has to be of a minimum quality percentile, which is usually about 75% or so of the Quality bar. The RNG for Expert crafts is exceptionally brutal. Moving up Progress/Quality is nightmarishly hard. Unlike regular crafting, Expert-crafting introduces a bunch of new conditions specific to it, so figuring out how to deploy your skills on the fly and being deeply familiar with what each thing does is crucial.It takes hours of practice and wasted mats to learn what you're doing. Every crafting session was a complex puzzle that had no guarantee you'd succeed, but made you feel super competent if you did. Naturally, I loved every minute of it. (Full disclosure: I ranked in the top 100 of at least 3 DoH in all 3 seasons.)
There appears to be no set time limit on how long each server's rebuilding can take, although new phases of reconstruction are generally released once all servers have completed the previous phase. Each phase of the reconstruction in turn is broken down into stages. These are open call periods for materials (gathered and crafted) divided by Concerted Works-a kind of public quest in the Firmament (the instance where reconstruction happens). The Concerted Works last for around 15 minutes. Any player in the Firmament may join at will, solo or in a party, doing small tasks like breaking up rubble and carting it off. Once completed, the reconstruction moves onto its next stage. Each Concerted Works causes a new part of the housing district to be built up. Players can actually see the results of their labour take shape around them and that's a really cool thing. Balmung, my server, has consistently led the North American servers in finishing their construction first. We completed building the whole of the Ishgard Restoration project last week. I was there the night we did the last Concerted Works. People were genuinely hyped just running around seeing the NPCs move into the houses, parks, stores-even a public bath-that we built. They congratulated each other on a job well done and completed that took thousands of us.
Because FFXIV is story-driven, the Firmament had its own set of stories highlighting the NPCs who toiled alongside you and live there. Each new reconstruction phase revealed a little bit more of the story through quests and interactions between NPCs in the open world. For me, it really made me care about the place I was building and I'm sure it did for others too, since after every Concerted Works ended, everyone immediately looked for specific NPCs they liked, yelling out coordinates for where they were and how to find them. It was just nice.
I contributed to all four phases of the Restoration on Balmung over the past year and I think my favourite part about this experiment was the sheer kindness of everyone involved. Throughout the frenetic crafting and endless gathering of materials, people put out PSAs reminding others to get up and walk around, drink water, rest and even take their meds. There were shouts of encouragement to everyone involved. Some gatherers gave away lower-level materials for free to crafters who needed them for levelling. Others gave away free copies of gifts they won in the Restoration lotteries. Taking part in a massive community-building project, whether you were participating individually or as a group, it always felt like you were included.
Finally, as a kind of "thank you" to players for contributing to the Ishgardian Restoration, the last thing built in each area is a monument to the topmost contributing crafter of each server. This monument does not name the specific player, which I think was a smart move that reduced the chance of envy. But it does show a stone carving of their DoH class. If you're wondering, on Balmung this was a set of frying pans, so the top contributor was a Culinarian. I have a day job-I didn't stand a chance in hell at being a top achiever, but I 'm proud of that person, whoever they are.
I really hope we get to rebuild more places in the future. There's plenty of potential locations in the game's lore, and I do think the process brings out the best in each server's community. It gives people a reason to talk to each other (even if that's only if they want to) and support each other. Given just how 2019 and the beginning of 2020 has been, we needed that. As someone who does love gathering and crafting in this game as well, it gave players like me a big piece of exclusive content for my non-combat classes. This was a change from just doing what I do to gear myself or friends up, or building things to showcase in our FC house. We were building something everyone could walk around in and enjoy. The game already has many options for every kind of adventurer, but this is the first time gatherers and crafters really had something raid-like only they could help with. I want to see where we go next.