1708: Playing on Home Turf

Regular readers of this blog will be well familiar with how much I enjoy Final Fantasy XIV (as does Andie now, too) and, for sure, I’ve had a blast since the game’s original beta sessions last year. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to run with the same people since I started playing — the Giant Bomb Free Company — and most of them have been playing fairly constantly since launch, so there are usually some familiar faces online at any given time, and other people come and go around that stable of predictable, reliable players.

The downside to the Free Company that I’m a member of is that the vast majority of people involved live in the States. This makes things a little difficult when I want to participate in things that practically necessitate forming a group yourself rather than relying on the game’s built-in “Duty Finder” matchmaking system. It hasn’t stopped me trying, of course — and I’m very pleased to have completed both The Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5 and Ramuh’s Extreme Mode incarnation with my friends in the Free Company — but since these attempts normally necessitate staying up until about 3am at the earliest in most cases, they’re not always practical, particularly now I have a proper job and consequently have to get up at some ungodly hour in the morning in order to arrive on time.

Enter our neighbours, then — yes, they’re actually our neighbours; their Free Company house is right across the street from ours — the free company Loose Cannons, more commonly known as LoCo. I’ve seen these guys around a bit over time, but didn’t really know them that well. They always seemed to be pleasant people, though, and they were always gracious enough to wave and greet me when I passed by them on my way to do something else.

After a while, a “linkshell” — essentially a custom chat channel, for those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV parlance — was set up to allow Giant Bomb and LoCo to communicate with one another, since the Free Company chat channels are restricted to members only, and you can only be a member of one Free Company at once. You can have up to eight linkshells, though, so I happily accepted the invitation — though, being me, I was somewhat hesitant to muscle in on what I saw as already-established social groups, and thus remained rather quiet around the unfamiliar people.

The other night saw an encouraging milestone, though; it transpires that many of the members of LoCo operate in the same timezone as me, and moreover, that a lot of them are interested in taking on the game’s most challenging content, such as the aforementioned Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5, and the subsequent four-part raid the Second Coil of Bahamut. Since I’m also interested in challenging this content, but didn’t want to muscle in on the established, US-timezone groups that had already naturally formed in Giant Bomb, this has the potential to be an ideal situation for me.

I’ve never been a part of a “static” raiding group before and indeed have usually shied away from this sort of thing in MMOs because I doubt my own skills, usefulness and ability to commit to the group. As I wrote the other day, though, Final Fantasy XIV is one of a few games that I actually feel confident that I’m quite good at, and the prospect of not only challenging myself but developing some close friendships with others who enjoy the game in much the same way I do is very exciting to me. I’ve often mentioned how playing Final Fantasy XIV can be as much of a social activity as a video game, and having a regularly scheduled evening where a predictable, reliable group all shows up and we work our damnedest to try and take down Twintania, Rafflesia and whatever lies beyond that? Well, that’s something that I’m looking forward to a lot.

Is this how people on sports teams feel?