Holy cow, it’s been ages since I wrote anything here. So so sorry!
The last post I made was musings on the MMOs I’ve played for the last 20ish years, so let’s make a more modern update on that.
First off, some IRL updates. About a year and a half after that post I changed careers finally, and I’m now approaching the end of my sixth year in IT for real. It’s exciting and lead to the next thing. See, I drive around town and parts beyond for work on a regular basis, and this has been par for the course since I started in the fall of 2017, and I had a lot of time inside my own head both on the road and while working on site. It’s kind of amazing how loud your own mind can get when you’re alone with the relative silence. Anyway, turns out I’d been suffering with gender dysphoria for most of my life and I came to grips with that in October of 2019. I’m Juniper, and my pronouns are she/her!
So this has lead to a few interesting things. Thankfully, it’s trivial to change a character’s gender in Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars 2. Other games not so much, sadly. More on this in a little bit.
A year and a half after my last post, I transferred to Sargatanas in FFXIV and joined a small free company that was a fun place for a while. They were accepting and affirming of my news in late 2019, and while 2020 did not exactly go as I had planned, I took a short break in the spring to reactivate Final Fantasy XI, transfer to Asura, and send my character through the Seekers of Adoulin and Rhapsodies of Vana’diel stories. Now, my character in FFXI is a Male Hume, and there is no official way to change the race or gender, and at that time I didn’t know of the Windower add-on that allows one to, so I had resolved myself to send “Sir Jukor the Hero” through the rest of Vana’diel’s story and let him fade away into obscurity.
I went back to FFXIV once that was done and stayed there for a long while. I got into the roleplay scene throughout 2020 and made some good friends through it. In early 2021, things in the FC I was in got a little funky, so I left it and joined an IRL friend’s FC and stayed there until earlier this year. I got into raiding a little bit thanks to the friends I made in this FC, and we did maps almost every week which was always a good time.
I traveled quite a bit in 2021, and in the summer had begun visiting a venue on Cactuar that was touted as “ladies only”. It was a very comfy place, and I met someone at the end of June, who by the middle of August was dating, and as of this post’s writing we are still together. It’s a long-distance relationship, so it’s had its ups and downs, but it is definitely a positive thing in my life.
Anyway, at the 2021 edition of the FFXIV Fan Fest the current expansion Endwalker was announced. As a 1.0 player and FF4 fangirl, I was beyond stoked for this. I spent the rest of the year playing XIV, hanging out in venues and occasionally playing some offline games while prepping for Endwalker.
I took a week and a day off for the Endwalker launch from work, and I spent the days of early access playing for very long hours to complete the Main Scenario Quests, and once that was done, I unlocked the initial optional dungeons. After official service launched, I got my crafters and gatherers to Level 90 and did some of the first EW hunts on the server. Pretty rad.
I spent the rest of December prepping for the first raid tier as I had decided I was going to raid. I had my crafting gear melded to be able to make the initial crafted gear, so on the launch of Savage I had what gear I needed from tomestones, the normal raid, the initial two Extreme Trials, and crafted gear. I was ready.
I joined a static with some people I knew, and I should’ve understood what I was getting myself into when I was the only person to show up on raid day 1 with fully melded crafted gear. Anyway, I lasted about nine weeks then burned out.
I went back to Guild Wars 2 after burning out and played through its story. It’s actually a very fun game, and the story is pretty neat. I play a Guardian in that game, and once I found out about the Willbender specialization for it, I decided I’d play it more. I generally used the Firebrand specialization instead though.
I eventually got kinda bored of that, and in May of last year realized that FFXI had hit its 20th anniversary. Another trans friend I knew through FFXIV convinced me to reactivate, so I did and transferred back to Phoenix. She took me under her wing to get me a start on getting Red Mage, my all-time favorite job in FFXI, up to a decent level, and got me into an endgame event linkshell. I also discovered the DressUp add-on, so I appear as a Hume Female now to myself and others with the right config string. I was back in action, sort of.
The “sort of” there was that I was at a very base gear level, and all I was really able to do was heal in events. This was fine as that was what I was kind of pigeonholed into years ago, but enfeebling magic not landing often discouraged me a bit, but pretty quickly I got up to speed and was able to successfully land key spells on bosses, making me a valuable asset to the linkshell.
I eventually took Rune Fencer up and began tanking with it: this was actually pretty fun and I enjoyed it… mostly. I realized very quickly my gear was hot garbage, and after getting some gear from Odyssey I was a little less squishy, but I mostly had the problem of not having a proper mana battery and healers being a little suspect. Anyway, I played until the middle of August when I decided to quit because the loot rules were kinda suboptimal.
After this I went back to FFXIV and was on a business trip when 6.2 was released, leading to someone in my FC spoiling the “secret” trial on patch day. I decided to just go to the hotel bar and doomscroll political Twitter while drowning my sorrows.
After I got back from the trip, I played through the 6.2 story and crafted myself a set of the current gear so I could be up to date in case I wanted to try raiding again. I kept at the game for the next few months, occasionally logging into GW2 for giggles.
I took the last two weeks of 2022 off from work for the holidays, and right at the end of the year went back to FFXI, this time possibly never to leave. This was true for a time…
I quickly geared up my Blue Mage, got my Thief to 99 for utility, was going to do something with Corsair, and was working on my Dark Knight a little bit later while chipping away at the last bits for Red Mage and Rune Fencer. I had a pretty open plate for a while… Then I went to an anime con with some friends from FFXIV and the story for The Voracious Resurgence finished up… then they revealed the next stage of the Prime Weapons… and I said “… okay, that’s enough. Finish this Aeonic, finish my Epeolatry for RUN, then that’s all.”
I quit going to events in the middle of June, just logging in every 4 or so days to do the last few Coalition Assignments I needed to flag the Epeolatry quest. Once I finally hit that on July 9, all I had left was the TVR epilogue the next day, and the Mog Bonanza drawing two days later.
I’m now back playing FFXIV primarily. I had lost my house on Sargatanas in March, so I finally transferred to Adamantoise and joined a large LGBTQ+ free company then. Now that I was back playing again, I put bids in for houses in plots I had before: the first I lost, the second I won. It’s… comforting to be a homeowner in game again…
Although I still consider Vana’diel to be my true MMO home, I realize its days are numbered, so maybe this small house in The Goblet will be my MMO home for the foreseeable future.
We’re a week out from the 2023 edition of the FFXIV Fan Fest, so we will soon see what the next expansion holds, at least in part…