Recruitment Drive

03/03/2025

I always come back to FFXIV and I am always looking to introduce more people to the realm of Eorzea too!

In service to this unending goal, I have stitched myself a little recruitment piece - based off the popular community meme that says the same thing - so I can just show that to potential victims recruits rather than me blather on about how amazing the game is, and by the way, you can try it for free!

(Hand-stitched on hand-dyed fabric, for bonus crafter points. Fabric is a little more red and a bit less pink than the lighting in this shows but anyway.)

I feel obliged to spell this out at least once though, so here goes, the full spiel:

There's no limits on playtime, you can just stay permanently on the free trial. And that level 70? That's counted per class/job. So you hit level 70 on your Paladin? That's fine, you just switch to Warrior and you can level that to 70 too! You can level every job available on the trial to 70! And every available job is a grand total of 29 jobs. That's 17 normal combat jobs, 1 limited combat job, 3 gathering jobs for gathering materials and collectables, then 8 crafting jobs for making gear, weapons, furniture etc. So there's lots of levelling to be done before you hit that level 70 cap on everything.

You can play through the story all the way from A Realm Reborn, through the Heavensward expansion (expac), and then through Stormblood expac - half the current story and many hours of quests and plotline. Then there's side plots and random side quests, tribal societies to help out, cities to help rebuild , plenty of additional questing on top of the main story quests (the MSQ).

Combat challenge-wise, there's dungeons unlocked as you progress the MSQ and plenty of them, with harder ones available at levels 50, 60 and 70. Then there's the single-boss trials, again several of these per expac, the multi-boss 24-man alliance raids, the 8-man raids. You want to sweat bullets and have to really perform to win? Try the Extreme versions of those trails, or Savage Raids, try Ultimates to earn yourself some real prestige. Delve the depths of the Deep Dungeons with a party or try going solo for a skin-of-your-teeth experience. Explore Eureka for fresh twists on the normal combat and overworld content (plus glowy gear for bragging purposes). Earn mounts, titles and achievements as you go, or just smite squirrels for the lulz.

Not an 100% combat maniac? That's fine, level your crafters and gatherers, work towards various shiny tools, achievements, titles and most importantly: furnishings for your house/apartment and glamour gear to snazz up your outfits. Visit the Golden Saucer for mini-games and chocobo racing, triple triad card game tournaments. Collect vistas from all over the game world to fill your journal with snippets of lore and scenery.

Roleplay in pubs, cafés and clubs; form parties with your guildmates, friends and even strangers to take on new and varied challenges; chat shit in Limsa Lominsa like everybody bloody else; game the markets and buy and sell your way to riches using the market board (and some server hopping of course); spend far too long in GPose taking the perfect pictures and showing off your photography skills...

Honestly the list in endless and aside from the few restrictions that are in place, the free trial lets you sample pretty much everything FFXIV has to offer and in large quantities too, there's no skimping here.

The restrictions are: no forming your own parties - someone else can invite you into a party (group of players) but you can't start one yourself, no gil (gold, base currency) over 300k, no using the public chat (party chat etc is fine) or mail systems, no using the market board, no retainers (flunkies to fetch common materials for you), and no PvP content.

Mostly these are to prevent bot spam and bot farming (chat, gil, market board limits) and won't really effect regular play through the story or quests, dungeons and trials etc. so plenty of people stay on the free trial until they're all done with the pre-70 content that they care about most. You can easily play with friends still (especially if they're not on the trial and can form parties) and do a lot of the social gameplay stuff, you just can't loiter around Limsa talking the day away and being purely social and not much of a player.

All this to say: Try it! Dip your toes into the deep story and lore, the varied gameplay and all the different jobs. Explore all the regions with their individual scenery, landscapes and inhabitants. Chat with your teammates while you all try to pass that one boss fight you each seem to be terrible at in a unique way. Stumble upon something you so totally need and work your way up to that lofty achievement. It costs you nothing to try FFXIV out, so why not? Join us!