Post-Success Blues

Recently I had one of those moments of "post success blues" - where you finish something that you've been working towards and instead of feeling happy when you cross the finish line, you feel down.

I had spent one night a week for the past 3 weeks working with a group of 7 other people to finish a high-end boss fight in Final Fantasy 14. I studied the positioning needed to not get dead. I analyzed my performance to find out how I could improve and help us achieve victory. I watched videos of other people succeeding so I could get ideas on how to improve even more!

And this past Wednesday - Nov 5th - we did it. We managed to finally finish the fight successfully. And then we did it 3 more times, because of course an MMO makes it so that you need to finish something really hard multiple times to get the minuscule upgrade to your gear.

And after logging off for the night, I was bummed.

When we finished it the first time, I was excited. We had done it! Something that we struggled with for weeks. But by the time the night wrapped, it felt.... paltry.

By successfully finishing the fight multiple times, it moved the achievement into the "so what" bucket. Something that seemed hard and difficult to scale was not only achievable, but something we were able to knock out multiple times.

I'm at a weird place with the game now.. One thing about MMOs is there is always more to do than anyone really has time for. Which is good, because you usually have to maintain a subscription to access the game, and if there wasn't anything to do people wouldn't pay. But I've reached an odd point where I have multiple "jobs" - you can play every type of job on one character, so you can switch between a healer, a tank, and DPS, as well as all the crafting and gathering jobs - at the max level. A handful of those are almost maxed out on gear. And I don't find myself wanting to log on to grind out leveling more things up through the same content I have been doing for ~2 years now.

Add to that there is a new set of content coming out next week, which will most likely add some gear with slightly higher stats, and it makes everything feel sisyphean.

I looked at the trap Ray, and I saw all the hamster wheels that were masquerading as fun.