It’s been a couple of days since my last nerding out about Final Fantasy XIV, so here’s some more of it. Eventually I will get back to my usual quality posts.

Mind you, my “usual quality” posts are mostly pictures of random terrible food and waxing enthusiastic about fanservice, so I can’t imagine anyone actually WANTING me to get back to those.

I’m still pushing my way towards the pre-expansion level cap, which is 50, and I’m doing it while alternating between two “jobs” (for any other MMO, these would be “classes”), so I’m definitely taking more time to reach the level cap than I would if I’d buckle down and focus on just one. It’s not AS bad as you’d think, though, because you get a 100% XP bonus when playing any job other than your highest-level one. I’m also alternating between Tank and Healer roles, which means that the delay between thinking “I would like a group to run through a dungeon with” and “I am zoning into the instance” is very short. If I don’t want downtime, I don’t need to suffer downtime.

Along the way, I have been fortunate enough to experience a VERY polite community, which is something of an outlier in any online game. It’s not a very talkative community – most people don’t want to stand still and chat when they’re clearing an instance – but players say Nice To Meet You at the start of every instance and Thank You or Good Game at the end.

I’ve also made a few mistakes along the way, and haven’t yet gotten raged at for doing so. Part of that may be the result of playing on an Oceanic server, but I’d like to think that it’s just something about the player base.

With a little luck, I should be 50 in both jobs in a week or so, and that’s usually the point where MMO content spreads out like so much pancake batter across a griddle.

And this is where I surpress the urge to make pancake-related jokes. It’s a good visual image, dang it, it doesn’t need to be ruined by puns.

I’m more than a little tempted to evangelize the game to friends, especially since it’s got a PS4 client and I could theoretically recommend it to friends without gaming PCs, but the difficulty of getting them on to my play server is the biggest thing preventing me from doing this. I may still pick up a few copies in December to slip into stockings, because nothing says “you are important to me” like “here, have a game that will consume your life.”