The “What Now” Problem

Good Morning Friends! Last week I finished World Completion on my new Necromancer main, and this weekend I wrapped up the Living World 3 story. I have some deep concerns about where things are going, and I realize that everything is essentially resolved for the players that are caught up on End of Dragons but for me… I am still chewing through years-old content. I just have deep concerns that I might be raising a monster, but that is all I am going to say on that point for now. One of the main things for me and an MMORPG is that I am pretty good at focusing on an end goal. That goal might be pushing through all of the storylines, or doing a damned fool thing like chain leveling all of my jobs in FFXIV to level 80. The problem is once I achieve that goal I am always left asking myself… okay… what now?

Generally speaking this causes me to flail around for a bit trying to find a new purpose, only to end up bouncing shortly after because either I am lacking a good grind or the ones I have to feel too “overwhelming” to tackle. After finishing the Endwalker story I tried to return to pushing through leveling everything to 90 but ran out of steam quickly. This is honestly one of the greatest gifts that Guild Wars 2 seems to have is that it is almost a nesting doll of systems, each one of them filled with a smorgasbord of both short term and long term goals and objectives. I thought maybe finishing up World Completion and getting my Gift of exploration would be an action that stopped me in my tracks, but instead, I just shifted that same drive towards slowly chipping away at my Gift of Battle in World vs World.

I think one of the things that I am finding interesting about the experience is that everything I do, is sort of moving me forward towards my goal of eventually crafting the Legendary Sword Twilight. When I do craft it, that weapon will become available to all of my alts for them to use as well. The thing that makes this fairly compelling is knowing that I am working towards a fixed point that is not going to suddenly become useless by the time I get there. I also don’t necessarily “Need” the item so there isn’t the strong desire to bankrupt myself in the process to make it faster, because I already have access to crafting Ascended weapons (and have crafted them) which share the same strength. This is a mission about opening up new playstyles and opportunities and not necessarily a purely cosmetic mission. That has always been my problem with Relic weapons in Final Fantasy XIV is that I will never be serious enough to do them while they are relevant which means the ones that I seek always just end up being cosmetic fodder.

A highlight of the weekend is that I finally got some time to run Fractals with friends. Since we are not recording the podcast for the next few weeks, we ended up repurposing that same time slot for Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. Fractals are just about the right size to be honest because you can do a bunch of them in a row before feeling like you need a break. Tam and later Ash lead us through a number of them and I saw some that I had done before, and others that I had never experienced. I would like to do way more of these but they require a stable group, though maybe not as many as originally thought. Ash talked about doing several of these with only three people so maybe just maybe I could muster a group to do more during a more East/Central timezone-friendly time.

A cute thing that happened is that I did not even notice that one of my party members had changed their tag until I got this achievement. I really like how this one works in particular because it is just a sort of nice to have fluff thing. In Destiny 2 you got all sorts of rare emblems and such for running with the devs of that game, which meant that it was a highly sought out thing. This is just a simple acknowledgment in the list that is in itself not worth any achievement points. This is really the way this sort of thing should be done, and I applaud ANet for not pinning any rewards to it. I do however want to try and collect the full set of these, which means I am going to have to drag a said friend into other activities.

So my current modus operandi is to keep moving forward in the Path of Fire story, while doing various assorted zone activities. Then once a day I am trying to knock out any of the easier World vs World… which I am finding out is called both “Dub Vee Dub” and “WuvWa”. Knocking out a few achievements gives me both time in zone and the little potions that give you instant progress towards your rewards track. Both of these serve the goal of getting me closer to that Gift of Battle. I am finding out that any one thing in this game can seem overwhelming if you focus on it too hard. However, if you do it along with a bunch of other things, that variety means you are going more progress towards more things at once. Admittedly this was also what I landed on as my best means of leveling characters in Final Fantasy XIV, by doing a bunch of varied activities that made it feel less grindy.

“What Now” is likely always going to be a question I am asking myself each time I finish a goal. However, Guild Wars 2 seems to be exceptionally adept at answering back with something that is just within reach. I went down a whole new rabbit hole this weekend of listening to some videos on the underground economy of Guild Wars 2, and honestly… if I could make the right connections it seems like something I could excel at. I’ve never done a great job of the high-speed trading nature of auction house flipping in a game like World of Warcraft. However what I do excel at is grinding out resources, and Guild Wars 2 seems to be a game about providing the right resources to the right people. If I descend further into this madness I will let you know the results.