I bought the starter in 2019 after Heavensward, spent 2 or 3 hours getting the game to work, made two characters (one of my favorite parts of any game with customization), and quit before level 10 - that's where the extra few hours is from.

Introduction

Hello everyone! Hope my title doesn't look too much like a light novel title (lol) - just wanted to share my experience, which, by the playtime, you can probably tell was positive overall. Now, I'm of the opinion that experiences vary wildly person-to-person, often due to the surrounding circumstances - so here's a bit of nonpersonal info about me:
Early 20's
Male
Work a salaried job for a large corporation - hours not terrible
Favorite childhood FF game was Tactics A2
Was big on MMO's when I was ~10 to 14. Haven't really gotten into them in a big way since.
Played maybe 2 or 3 hours of games a week before this.


I know it's against the rules to post personal info, but I hope that's vague enough to show my situation and what I enjoy, giving context for how I went about the game. Why did I get FF14? Was watching youtube videos, saw a famous WoW streamer get into FF14, thought it'd be fun to play a FF game again. I did not go into it hoping to throw my life away for an irl week and a half - that was a happy accident.

Let's begin.

The Purchasing Process

Everyone complains about this. I will too. I downloaded the launcher from Steam, then went to the FF14 website to buy a sub. It told me account didn't exist, so I made a new one. Then it told me the new one wasn't compatible with Steam accounts, but that I could link it. I tried to link it and failed - after a while, I realized that it actually meant that I could link it to the mogstation account - which is the one I had had from 2019. After I did that, I went to log into mogstation, and fumbled around with the newly made account for a while before I realized I had to go to my old account - then after I bought the sub, I went to launch the game and was unable to log in because I didn't have a one-time password!

I then reset my password thinking Square Enix would send me an email with a one-time password. It did not. After looking it up online, I learned that it was actually FF14's 2FA system - great. A little bit of time back on mogstation, and I was up and running. Once I actually bought everything and set up 2FA, actually getting into the game was easy as pie.

This was set up on the afternoon of Friday, the 9th, for reference, and I forced myself to stop going hard Sunday the 18th because it was affecting my pace at work.

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