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instant gratification machine xi
Nov. 14th, 2025 12:13 amBack when I was a kid, when I would ask my dad to buy me some new game that was beyond my monthly allowance, he would always say something like, “Son, you'll appreciate this game more if you work for it, if you save up and buy it with your own hard-earned money.” And back then, when I was like 12, I resented him for being cheap or cruel or whatever, and then, when I was a bit older, I figured he was just trying to force his oppressive conservative worldview down my throat, which made me resent him even more, but now, after playing Final Fantasy XI for over two decades, I now know he was simply trying to teach his stubborn young son a very valuable lesson.
A few weeks ago, I started playing Final Fantasy XI again. I've been playing this game on and off since the early 2000s. On my current character, which I’ve had since 2013 or something, I’ve played the game for something like 103 days, 30 hours, and 15 minutes, according to the in-game playtime tracker, but in actuality, I’ve played the game far longer than that, considering I’ve had many characters. It's one of those formative core games for me. It's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, meaning people run around in real time battling monsters, crafting furniture, gardening, fishing, and all sorts of other stuff. And while remaining the same core game over these two decades, it has changed a lot over the years, and I wanted to write about these changes because they align well with something I've been thinking about lately, that something being Instant Gratification and how it relates to feelings of accomplishment.
From the game’s debut in 2003 to the release of its fifth expansion, Seekers of Adoulin, in 2013, Final Fantasy XI was an absolutely brutal game, probably the most brutal online game on the market outside of Everquest, the game that actually inspired many of Final Fantasy XI’s mechanics. After creating your character from a list of classes and races, all with their own unexplained strengths and weaknesses, and then selecting your hometown, which provided special unexplained benefits depending on your race selection, the game would just drop you into the world of Vana’diel with no guidance whatsoever. Games were like this back then, they treated players like intelligent adults, able to figure things out on their own, rather than ADHD-diagnosed toddlers who require constant hand holding, but Final Fantasy XI took this design philosophy to an extreme. It didn’t tell you where to go. It didn’t tell you what to do. It didn’t even bother to explain core mechanics like how to navigate menus and control your character, which involved weird hotkeys, a complicated macro system with its own coding language built in pretty much, and an obtuse movement system requiring one hand on the numpad at all times. You only got a few Gil and some starter equipment at the very beginning of the game, and what you did after that was totally up to you. Many players quit within the first few hours, frustrated by all the electronic mystification going on, some demanded refunds, I imagine, and those who stuck with it were rewarded with one of the most time-consuming grinds in video game history.
The grind went something like this, if you started in Bastok, you’d wander out into the Gustaberg region and whack bees with your sword or spells or baghnakhs or whatever, depending on your job class, gaining paltry amounts of experience per kill. I think it required 500 experience points to get from level 1 to level 2, and each bee rewarded about 50 to 100 experience points, and then it required 750 to get to the next level, but with each level the number of experience points rewarded from bees went down, so you’d have to start killing worms until the next level, which required 1,000 experience points, at which point you’d graduate to lizards until the next level, which required 1,250 experience points, at which point you'd graduate to Quadavs, and so on, each level taking progressively longer, until eventually you reached level 13 or so, at which point you could no longer level up by yourself because monsters now did far more damage to you than you did to them. And at that point, many players would switch to a different job class, level that job to 13 or so, then select a new job class and do it all over again. Some would branch off into crafting and fishing, others would just unsubscribe and give up, because what were they supposed to do, just let worms and bees and lizards and Quadavs kill them over and over again? Where’s the fun in that? But the few adventurous masochists who stuck with it would eventually notice someone in town soliciting other players to form a party. They would see something like {Looking for Party} {Red Mage} 13 {Valkurm Dunes}, the brackets being the game’s built-in auto-translate feature. That masochistic player might even join said party, at which point they’d discover that the party required four more players to be efficient, preferably a healer and a debuffer and a couple damage dealers, which required more in-town shouting and private messaging. Eventually, after about an hour of soliciting, a party of six would be formed, at which point this party of six had to trek to where the good experience-yielding monsters were, Valkurm Dunes, which was very far away, and that would take another hour or so, maybe even longer, especially if one of the party members died along the way, which was very easy to do, because there were aggressive monsters all along the path from Bastok to the Dunes, and dying meant you were teleported back to town, meaning you had to start the trek all over again. You could also Level Down upon death, which was a nice added kick in the crotch. But eventually, the party would make it to Valkurm Dunes, at which point a camp had to be established, a little corner of the map where you could pull high-level monsters and defeat them comfortably, but the problem was that multiple parties were already there, at the Dunes, already using all the good camping spots, so you had to compete with other people just to find a good camp, which caused all sorts of drama and would take another hour or so, which is all to say that Final Fantasy XI did not respect your time, like, at all. Then you’d spend the next four to five hours fighting lizards over and over again, gaining paltry amounts of experience with each kill, leveling up slowly over several days, until eventually you unlocked your subjob, itself needing to be leveled sufficiently to match your main job, so you would repeat the whole Bastok-to-Gustaberg-to-Dunes grind once more, maybe several times more, until you reached level 20 with multiple jobs, but by this point you probably had a main job already in mind for your character, so you stuck with that job, say it was Red Mage, and you kept playing Red Mage, partying with other players, gaining experience, to the point where you had invested so much time and energy into Red Mage that you yourself felt like a real-life Red Mage almost, like this job class was now part of your identity, and the players you had partied with would also start thinking of you as a Red Mage, sometimes private messaging you with party invites days later, “Forrest, don’t you play Red Mage, we need a healer, do you want to party in the Dunes?” Meaning you partied in the Dunes as Red Mage a whole bunch, until eventually you reached level 20 or whatever, at which point you could no longer party in the Dunes because the monsters didn’t give good experience to level 20 players and joining a party of lower-level players actually penalized experience point gain for all of those players, so you were forced to move on, leave the Dunes, so you asked around and learned that you now needed to party at Qufim Island, which was also far away and required you to carefully trek across the vast landscape of Vana’diel, avoiding all the dangerous monsters that you yourself could not defeat. And at that point, after the long trek, you joined a party in Qufim, and you partied there for a week or so, until eventually you graduated from Qufim, at which point you needed to go to Yuhtunga Jungle, but this required an airship pass, which required the completion of a quest that involved collecting items with very low drop rates from incredibly dangerous parts of Vana’diel, incredibly dangerous parts of Vana’diel that could not be traveled alone, so you needed a party for this too, so you would solicit and solicit and solicit until eventually you found other players to help, sometimes crossing paths with the very same people you had spent hours partying with in the Dunes before. But you couldn't just level up and expect to get into any old party. At a certain point, you needed good gear, armor, weapons, rings, earrings, capes, et cetera. Gear was very important. Around level 30, if you didn't have the right gear, your battle performance would suffer, so people would scoff and jeer and refuse to let you join their parties. So you had to get the good gear, one, because you had to produce the big damage numbers, and two, because some of the gear was just cool as fuck aesthetically, like Final Fantasy XI has some of the best-looking armor sets in role-playing game history, stuff that looks super dope without being over-designed and tacky like a lot of later Final Fantasy armor designs are, and if you don’t believe me just Google the Magus Attire set and see for yourself. So you had to get the good gear, it was not optional. But the good gear was incredibly grueling to obtain. Some gear required the completion of quests that took you to locations in Vana’diel that were just not hospitable at all, places that no level 50 Red Mage could possibly survive alone, meaning you often had to party up to complete these quests. And some gear required you to defeat rare monsters that only spawned once per day and only dropped the gear like literally 1% of the time, the drop rates in Final Fantasy XI back then being insane and almost hostile to the player, and these rare monsters would be camped by other players who needed the same gear, meaning often you’d have to wait at the rare monster’s spawn location for hours while ten other people also waited at this same spawn location, everyone eagerly watching their screens, just waiting to tag the rare monster when it spawned so that they could get the good gear before anyone else, which caused all sorts of drama, but of course this was all made easier with the help of friends, which, by now, after literal days of playtime, you had made several friends, so you’d hit these friends up, ask them for help obtaining that cool rare sword you needed, Nadrs, which dropped at a 14% rate from Cargo Crab Colin who only spawned once every six real-life hours and was heavily camped by other players. And if that seems like a very specific example, that's because I did that, I farmed that crab, back when I was like sixteen. I remember my mom came into my room one morning, “What’cha doing?” and I told her I was waiting for this damn crab to spawn so I could get my cool sword, and then, like 12 hours later, before she was going to bed, she came up to check on me, and she said, “Are you still waiting for that crab to come out of its hole?” And I said, “Yes mom, I’m still waiting for that crab to come out of its hole.” And eventually I did get Nadrs, but it was only after some other players had stolen the monster from me and after I had messaged my in-game friend to come help me camp the damn thing, which was the point in my Final Fantasy XI career that I figured it out, the whole point of the game, the draw, if you will.
That was the point when I understood what made Final Fantasy XI so special, the true magic of the game, the whole draw of the Final Fantasy XI experience. I figured it out. After camping Cargo Crab Colin, and after literal weeks of partying in the Dunes, and after dying many times on my trek to Qufim, after becoming discouraged, getting frustrated, getting pissed, after all that stuff, I figured it out. I realized that although this game neither held my hand nor respected my time, it was the journey itself, the hardships, the frustrations, and quite literally the friends I made along the way that made Final Fantasy XI a truly magical experience. I realized that by being so difficult and obtuse, Final Fantasy XI basically forced me to work with those around me, forced me to build partnerships, forced me to make connections. The hardships that came along with life in Vana’diel brought us all closer together, fostered a sense of community, made Vana’diel feel like a real, living, breathing place, a second life almost. But this was not all that made Final Fantasy XI so special, there was one other thing. Accomplishment. There was this overwhelming feeling of accomplishment that came with even the simplest of tasks in Final Fantasy XI. Learning how to control your character. Killing your first bee in Gustaberg. Joining your first party. Making it to the Dunes the first time. Obtaining your first cool piece of gear. All of these things, while simple in theory, felt like real accomplishments, and they felt like real accomplishments because there was no instant gratification here. The fact that Final Fantasy XI was an utter timesink, combined with the fact that it was incredibly hostile to the player, made every little thing feel like a grand achievement, because at the end of the day, when I had just finished my long trek to Qufim, or after I had just spent twelve hours getting that cool sword from the rare crab, I could sit back and say, I did it, despite all the bullshit, I did it, and look what I have to show for it.
Now, side note, there is something to be said here about digital achievements that, when viewed from a certain perspective, can make the previous paragraph seem somewhat sad and pathetic, like surely there is some commentary that could be made here about the vacuousness of collecting what essentially amounts to pixels on a screen and how collecting such things might be a poor replacement for real-life accomplishments, and I’m sympathetic to argument, I get it, but that is not the point I’m trying to make here.
The point I’m trying to make here, the thesis if you will, is that feelings of accomplishment seem to be directly related to hardship and suffering, or what my old man would call “hard work.” It seems that the more effort you put into achieving something, the more important that achievement feels. And conversely, when something is just handed to you, that feeling of accomplishment is either diminished or just doesn’t exist at all.
You see, I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI for a long time, and the game has changed a lot over these past two decades. Around 2013, Square Enix essentially made the game far easier than it once was. At first, they added a level sync feature, which allowed high-level players to party with low-level players, which made partying much easier. And then, around the same time, they added new ways to gain experience points, which made leveling faster overall. And then later, they added a mechanic called “Trusts”, which are summonable NPC party members, meaning you no longer have to party with other players at all, you can just use Trusts instead, and this sort of destroyed the community feeling of the game in a way, making the leveling experience essentially a solo affair. And these Trusts are pretty much broken, being incredibly over-powered, so partying in the Dunes went from being a strategic thing with real people to a mindless thing with fake computer people, and leveling at this point was far faster than before, as experience yield is now super high per monster, meaning you can pretty much level a job from level 1 to 99 in a few days if you put your mind to it. But not only that, in an effort to make the game more accessible to a new generation, Square Enix made it far easier to obtain good gear, making most of it purchasable from merchant NPCs using easy-to-obtain currencies, meaning there is no longer a need to farm Cargo Crab Colin at all, unless you really want to, because you can just get a cool sword from the merchant instead. And, having played in all eras of the game, I can confidently say that that feeling of accomplishment the game once produced is just no longer there. Everything is easy now. There is no hardship. No suffering. No hard work required. Nothing. The game feels like some sort of Instant Gratification Machine or something now.
The other day, I was leveling the Corsair job class, and I wanted to wear this special race-specific set of armor. And from my experience having played the game, I knew that this armor could only be obtained by opening chests in Gusgen Mines, and these chests spawn every few hours, and they only contain the armor on specific days of the in-game week, and I had to open at least four of these chests, and to open these chests, I needed a special key that only drops from specific monsters in the Mines, but I had forgotten which monsters dropped these keys, so I went to Google. I pulled up the wiki page of the armor and saw that, as of like 2020, you can now simply purchase this entire armor set from a merchant in Bastok. This made me both annoyed and curious. So I calculated the time it would take me to farm the chests, which would be several days, and I compared that to the time it would take me to simply buy the armor set, which would take me several minutes, and then I considered the fact that I am a grown adult with children and a job, and I said, you know what fuck it, and I just bought the armor set from the merchant.
And now, I’m almost level 99 on Corsair, which took me like three days, and I’m wearing this cool-looking armor set, but I feel nothing, nothing at all.
A few weeks ago, I started playing Final Fantasy XI again. I've been playing this game on and off since the early 2000s. On my current character, which I’ve had since 2013 or something, I’ve played the game for something like 103 days, 30 hours, and 15 minutes, according to the in-game playtime tracker, but in actuality, I’ve played the game far longer than that, considering I’ve had many characters. It's one of those formative core games for me. It's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, meaning people run around in real time battling monsters, crafting furniture, gardening, fishing, and all sorts of other stuff. And while remaining the same core game over these two decades, it has changed a lot over the years, and I wanted to write about these changes because they align well with something I've been thinking about lately, that something being Instant Gratification and how it relates to feelings of accomplishment.
From the game’s debut in 2003 to the release of its fifth expansion, Seekers of Adoulin, in 2013, Final Fantasy XI was an absolutely brutal game, probably the most brutal online game on the market outside of Everquest, the game that actually inspired many of Final Fantasy XI’s mechanics. After creating your character from a list of classes and races, all with their own unexplained strengths and weaknesses, and then selecting your hometown, which provided special unexplained benefits depending on your race selection, the game would just drop you into the world of Vana’diel with no guidance whatsoever. Games were like this back then, they treated players like intelligent adults, able to figure things out on their own, rather than ADHD-diagnosed toddlers who require constant hand holding, but Final Fantasy XI took this design philosophy to an extreme. It didn’t tell you where to go. It didn’t tell you what to do. It didn’t even bother to explain core mechanics like how to navigate menus and control your character, which involved weird hotkeys, a complicated macro system with its own coding language built in pretty much, and an obtuse movement system requiring one hand on the numpad at all times. You only got a few Gil and some starter equipment at the very beginning of the game, and what you did after that was totally up to you. Many players quit within the first few hours, frustrated by all the electronic mystification going on, some demanded refunds, I imagine, and those who stuck with it were rewarded with one of the most time-consuming grinds in video game history.
The grind went something like this, if you started in Bastok, you’d wander out into the Gustaberg region and whack bees with your sword or spells or baghnakhs or whatever, depending on your job class, gaining paltry amounts of experience per kill. I think it required 500 experience points to get from level 1 to level 2, and each bee rewarded about 50 to 100 experience points, and then it required 750 to get to the next level, but with each level the number of experience points rewarded from bees went down, so you’d have to start killing worms until the next level, which required 1,000 experience points, at which point you’d graduate to lizards until the next level, which required 1,250 experience points, at which point you'd graduate to Quadavs, and so on, each level taking progressively longer, until eventually you reached level 13 or so, at which point you could no longer level up by yourself because monsters now did far more damage to you than you did to them. And at that point, many players would switch to a different job class, level that job to 13 or so, then select a new job class and do it all over again. Some would branch off into crafting and fishing, others would just unsubscribe and give up, because what were they supposed to do, just let worms and bees and lizards and Quadavs kill them over and over again? Where’s the fun in that? But the few adventurous masochists who stuck with it would eventually notice someone in town soliciting other players to form a party. They would see something like {Looking for Party} {Red Mage} 13 {Valkurm Dunes}, the brackets being the game’s built-in auto-translate feature. That masochistic player might even join said party, at which point they’d discover that the party required four more players to be efficient, preferably a healer and a debuffer and a couple damage dealers, which required more in-town shouting and private messaging. Eventually, after about an hour of soliciting, a party of six would be formed, at which point this party of six had to trek to where the good experience-yielding monsters were, Valkurm Dunes, which was very far away, and that would take another hour or so, maybe even longer, especially if one of the party members died along the way, which was very easy to do, because there were aggressive monsters all along the path from Bastok to the Dunes, and dying meant you were teleported back to town, meaning you had to start the trek all over again. You could also Level Down upon death, which was a nice added kick in the crotch. But eventually, the party would make it to Valkurm Dunes, at which point a camp had to be established, a little corner of the map where you could pull high-level monsters and defeat them comfortably, but the problem was that multiple parties were already there, at the Dunes, already using all the good camping spots, so you had to compete with other people just to find a good camp, which caused all sorts of drama and would take another hour or so, which is all to say that Final Fantasy XI did not respect your time, like, at all. Then you’d spend the next four to five hours fighting lizards over and over again, gaining paltry amounts of experience with each kill, leveling up slowly over several days, until eventually you unlocked your subjob, itself needing to be leveled sufficiently to match your main job, so you would repeat the whole Bastok-to-Gustaberg-to-Dunes grind once more, maybe several times more, until you reached level 20 with multiple jobs, but by this point you probably had a main job already in mind for your character, so you stuck with that job, say it was Red Mage, and you kept playing Red Mage, partying with other players, gaining experience, to the point where you had invested so much time and energy into Red Mage that you yourself felt like a real-life Red Mage almost, like this job class was now part of your identity, and the players you had partied with would also start thinking of you as a Red Mage, sometimes private messaging you with party invites days later, “Forrest, don’t you play Red Mage, we need a healer, do you want to party in the Dunes?” Meaning you partied in the Dunes as Red Mage a whole bunch, until eventually you reached level 20 or whatever, at which point you could no longer party in the Dunes because the monsters didn’t give good experience to level 20 players and joining a party of lower-level players actually penalized experience point gain for all of those players, so you were forced to move on, leave the Dunes, so you asked around and learned that you now needed to party at Qufim Island, which was also far away and required you to carefully trek across the vast landscape of Vana’diel, avoiding all the dangerous monsters that you yourself could not defeat. And at that point, after the long trek, you joined a party in Qufim, and you partied there for a week or so, until eventually you graduated from Qufim, at which point you needed to go to Yuhtunga Jungle, but this required an airship pass, which required the completion of a quest that involved collecting items with very low drop rates from incredibly dangerous parts of Vana’diel, incredibly dangerous parts of Vana’diel that could not be traveled alone, so you needed a party for this too, so you would solicit and solicit and solicit until eventually you found other players to help, sometimes crossing paths with the very same people you had spent hours partying with in the Dunes before. But you couldn't just level up and expect to get into any old party. At a certain point, you needed good gear, armor, weapons, rings, earrings, capes, et cetera. Gear was very important. Around level 30, if you didn't have the right gear, your battle performance would suffer, so people would scoff and jeer and refuse to let you join their parties. So you had to get the good gear, one, because you had to produce the big damage numbers, and two, because some of the gear was just cool as fuck aesthetically, like Final Fantasy XI has some of the best-looking armor sets in role-playing game history, stuff that looks super dope without being over-designed and tacky like a lot of later Final Fantasy armor designs are, and if you don’t believe me just Google the Magus Attire set and see for yourself. So you had to get the good gear, it was not optional. But the good gear was incredibly grueling to obtain. Some gear required the completion of quests that took you to locations in Vana’diel that were just not hospitable at all, places that no level 50 Red Mage could possibly survive alone, meaning you often had to party up to complete these quests. And some gear required you to defeat rare monsters that only spawned once per day and only dropped the gear like literally 1% of the time, the drop rates in Final Fantasy XI back then being insane and almost hostile to the player, and these rare monsters would be camped by other players who needed the same gear, meaning often you’d have to wait at the rare monster’s spawn location for hours while ten other people also waited at this same spawn location, everyone eagerly watching their screens, just waiting to tag the rare monster when it spawned so that they could get the good gear before anyone else, which caused all sorts of drama, but of course this was all made easier with the help of friends, which, by now, after literal days of playtime, you had made several friends, so you’d hit these friends up, ask them for help obtaining that cool rare sword you needed, Nadrs, which dropped at a 14% rate from Cargo Crab Colin who only spawned once every six real-life hours and was heavily camped by other players. And if that seems like a very specific example, that's because I did that, I farmed that crab, back when I was like sixteen. I remember my mom came into my room one morning, “What’cha doing?” and I told her I was waiting for this damn crab to spawn so I could get my cool sword, and then, like 12 hours later, before she was going to bed, she came up to check on me, and she said, “Are you still waiting for that crab to come out of its hole?” And I said, “Yes mom, I’m still waiting for that crab to come out of its hole.” And eventually I did get Nadrs, but it was only after some other players had stolen the monster from me and after I had messaged my in-game friend to come help me camp the damn thing, which was the point in my Final Fantasy XI career that I figured it out, the whole point of the game, the draw, if you will.
That was the point when I understood what made Final Fantasy XI so special, the true magic of the game, the whole draw of the Final Fantasy XI experience. I figured it out. After camping Cargo Crab Colin, and after literal weeks of partying in the Dunes, and after dying many times on my trek to Qufim, after becoming discouraged, getting frustrated, getting pissed, after all that stuff, I figured it out. I realized that although this game neither held my hand nor respected my time, it was the journey itself, the hardships, the frustrations, and quite literally the friends I made along the way that made Final Fantasy XI a truly magical experience. I realized that by being so difficult and obtuse, Final Fantasy XI basically forced me to work with those around me, forced me to build partnerships, forced me to make connections. The hardships that came along with life in Vana’diel brought us all closer together, fostered a sense of community, made Vana’diel feel like a real, living, breathing place, a second life almost. But this was not all that made Final Fantasy XI so special, there was one other thing. Accomplishment. There was this overwhelming feeling of accomplishment that came with even the simplest of tasks in Final Fantasy XI. Learning how to control your character. Killing your first bee in Gustaberg. Joining your first party. Making it to the Dunes the first time. Obtaining your first cool piece of gear. All of these things, while simple in theory, felt like real accomplishments, and they felt like real accomplishments because there was no instant gratification here. The fact that Final Fantasy XI was an utter timesink, combined with the fact that it was incredibly hostile to the player, made every little thing feel like a grand achievement, because at the end of the day, when I had just finished my long trek to Qufim, or after I had just spent twelve hours getting that cool sword from the rare crab, I could sit back and say, I did it, despite all the bullshit, I did it, and look what I have to show for it.
Now, side note, there is something to be said here about digital achievements that, when viewed from a certain perspective, can make the previous paragraph seem somewhat sad and pathetic, like surely there is some commentary that could be made here about the vacuousness of collecting what essentially amounts to pixels on a screen and how collecting such things might be a poor replacement for real-life accomplishments, and I’m sympathetic to argument, I get it, but that is not the point I’m trying to make here.
The point I’m trying to make here, the thesis if you will, is that feelings of accomplishment seem to be directly related to hardship and suffering, or what my old man would call “hard work.” It seems that the more effort you put into achieving something, the more important that achievement feels. And conversely, when something is just handed to you, that feeling of accomplishment is either diminished or just doesn’t exist at all.
You see, I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XI for a long time, and the game has changed a lot over these past two decades. Around 2013, Square Enix essentially made the game far easier than it once was. At first, they added a level sync feature, which allowed high-level players to party with low-level players, which made partying much easier. And then, around the same time, they added new ways to gain experience points, which made leveling faster overall. And then later, they added a mechanic called “Trusts”, which are summonable NPC party members, meaning you no longer have to party with other players at all, you can just use Trusts instead, and this sort of destroyed the community feeling of the game in a way, making the leveling experience essentially a solo affair. And these Trusts are pretty much broken, being incredibly over-powered, so partying in the Dunes went from being a strategic thing with real people to a mindless thing with fake computer people, and leveling at this point was far faster than before, as experience yield is now super high per monster, meaning you can pretty much level a job from level 1 to 99 in a few days if you put your mind to it. But not only that, in an effort to make the game more accessible to a new generation, Square Enix made it far easier to obtain good gear, making most of it purchasable from merchant NPCs using easy-to-obtain currencies, meaning there is no longer a need to farm Cargo Crab Colin at all, unless you really want to, because you can just get a cool sword from the merchant instead. And, having played in all eras of the game, I can confidently say that that feeling of accomplishment the game once produced is just no longer there. Everything is easy now. There is no hardship. No suffering. No hard work required. Nothing. The game feels like some sort of Instant Gratification Machine or something now.
The other day, I was leveling the Corsair job class, and I wanted to wear this special race-specific set of armor. And from my experience having played the game, I knew that this armor could only be obtained by opening chests in Gusgen Mines, and these chests spawn every few hours, and they only contain the armor on specific days of the in-game week, and I had to open at least four of these chests, and to open these chests, I needed a special key that only drops from specific monsters in the Mines, but I had forgotten which monsters dropped these keys, so I went to Google. I pulled up the wiki page of the armor and saw that, as of like 2020, you can now simply purchase this entire armor set from a merchant in Bastok. This made me both annoyed and curious. So I calculated the time it would take me to farm the chests, which would be several days, and I compared that to the time it would take me to simply buy the armor set, which would take me several minutes, and then I considered the fact that I am a grown adult with children and a job, and I said, you know what fuck it, and I just bought the armor set from the merchant.
And now, I’m almost level 99 on Corsair, which took me like three days, and I’m wearing this cool-looking armor set, but I feel nothing, nothing at all.
