Tag Archives: Breaks

FFXIV: What’s next

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After the euphoria of finally finishing leveling all my battle jobs I figured I need to come up with a new plan regarding FFXIV and how I see myself playing the MMO for the forseeable future. I’ve spent a lot of time just leveling up all these classes and now I need to get myself out of that rythm of spending so much time on the game every week night. I do however have a list full of things that I still want to do in the game, but I’m not inclined to spend as much time as I have been doing anymore. This ties in to my February goals post that I will put up in a few days where I want to step away a bit from MMO’s and focus on single player games more.

So first off I’m going to cut down my time playing FFXIV drastically. I’m not sure if I’m going to log in every day anymore because there are a ton of other games I want to play and other stuff I want/need to do. When I do log on the focus will be on one of the following three things:

  • Casuallly level Blue Mage and unlock all spells there are to learn. I’m pretty sure that at some point I need to enlist the help of a few friends to boost me through dungeons and primals but for now I’d like to take my time leveling the class and learn all the spells I can do solo while doing so. I find Blue Mage to be typical and not really what I expected it to be but it’s a nice little project to be working on.
  • Casually start working on leveling up my Crafters. As I’ve mentioned before I have Weaver, Botanist and Miner on level 70 and the rest of them vary between level 20 and 40. I want to slowly get everything to 30, then to 40 etc. My main source of doing this will probably be the Ixali dailies and not much else. I want to eventually get everything to level 70 but I’m in no rush.
  • Get caught up on current content. Unfortunately my White Mage isn’t high ilvl enough to run all the current roulettes so I need to work on that. The biggest thing holding me back is the weapon, which I will probably aim to acquire via Heaven on High. I also have a ton of unfinished side content to get to including Hildibrand and more than one primal. I think I’m going to relegate working on this to the weekends where I have more time to play and queue up for stuff.
  • Get atleast one Stormblood relic done. This will probably be White Mage again. I’m currently not even done with the first zone, Eureka, but I do want to go through the relic stages at some point so I can see Pagos and Pyros and get my glowy weapon.

So yeah. These are my main points of focus for the time being. Luckily for me most of them I can do in under an hour when I do log on. Queue for a single instance, level a bit on my Blue Mage or just do a few dailies for my crafters. I don’t have to spend the silly amounts of time anymore that I have been doing and that’s nice. I still have some goals to keep me going but I’m opening up so much more time for other things and that’s definitely something I need.

Since I will be prepping to move over the coming two months I will have less time to game in general. The house I’m living in with my dad has been my home since birth and there are a lot of items I need to start sorting through. I’ve accepted the fact that I can’t take all my things with me and I will leave some stuff behind in this house but I don’t want to become like my dad and hold on to things I don’t need. Most of the things that I will be going through will be old toys but also books and maybe more recent stuff. I have full intentions to declutter to the max meaning I’m going to get rid of most stuff I encounter.
Next to this I want to spend more time playing through my enormous backlog of games. I probably have enough games to keep me busy for atleast a year if I were to take that time off so it’s high time I start playing some. Right now my focus lies on Kingdom Hearts 3 because I’ve been waiting for this game to come out for forever, but I have so much more games to play. I’ll talk about this more in my upcoming “Gaming Goals: February” post though so I’ll leave it at that for now.

All in all the main takeaway from this post is that I’m going to cut down in FFXIV time and increase my time on other things while still trying to casually get stuff done in the game.

Taking Mandatory Breaks

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When I was young, I used to practice gymnastics. A lot of my teammates used to train with either wrist or ankle straps on. I was one of the latter uses. I had weak ankles and would bruise them fast. Luckily for me the balance beam, bridge and floor parts weren’t an issue as that’s more acrobatics and balance than speed and strenght. The jump however was my big enemy and I would often bruise my ankle by either sprinting up to the trampoline or board or landing wrong after my jump. So whenever I had to practice that particular part or perform during a gymnastics match I would make sure my ankles were taped in properly so stuff like that wouldn’t happen.

Fast forward about 15 years and I’m at risk for injury once again, only this time it’s my wrist and it’s caused by excessive usage of the mouse. Especially now that I have landed a job in datamanagement/IT I notice that I can’t really game as intensively as I used to and that I need to pay attention to the signs my body gives me way earlier than I’m used to.
I got confronted with this very hard after a four hour playsession on Diablo 3 last night. Now ofcourse Diablo is a very mouse intensive game so getting your wrist hurt is easier there, but honestly it really quite scared me. The fact that my wrist still seems to hurt today only emphasizes that taking regular breaks in gaming is very much necessary. Not only because it’s better for my wrist, it’s also much better for one’s health in general to not sit down for hours at a time.
Even at work I get up every two hours so I think I really want to enforce that policy during home play aswell.

It’s not just the wrist. I notice my back and bottom start hurting after a while aswell. Sitting is literally causing harm and I don’t want that. So even though I want to do all these things in all these games, I also need to take things in moderation. Especially when I notice it’s taking it’s toll on my body. And right now on some days it really is.
I guess getting older really is starting to show. I remember playing for hours straight on World of Warcraft when i was 20 years old. I just can’t do that anymore. And in a way, that’s a good thing.