My leisure time is pretty much holy. We spend lots of time working, here in America. The last thing we need is to spend our leisure time stressed out about something unnecessary. God knows family, money, and relationships, do a good enough job of making us trip on the little things. We should spend the precious few moments we have somehow either enlightening ourselves, or utterly blissed-out. Or, at the very least, pleasantly numb. If you're anything like me, then you like to spend some of this time (maybe more than you'd like admit) playing online RPGs on your computer. Doesn't logic dictate that the time you spend engaged in these games be pleasant? Or, at the very least, not completely punishing?

Think about the time you spend in your favorite MMORPG. Admit it: most of the time, it sucks. Hear me out.

When I log into Final Fantasy XI, a very crushing complex sets in immediately. "My equipment isn't up to par," "Damn, I have no mithkabobs, and I'm saving for Noct Brais +1s, so maybe I shouldn't buy a stack..." The list goes on. If you play this game, then you'll know what I'm talking about -- the stigma that's attached to players who are "under equipped." At best, you'll feel inferior when in a party whose gear is up to snuff. At worst, you won't even be invited. Now, I don't think that my gear is all that bad, for a level 40 thief / level 20 ninja. I just want to be at my optimum, or, at the very least, damn near it. Of course, chances are that my party won't really notice that my gear isn't the leetest available, but on the off chance that a thief comes along that is, and out-performs me, well… I don't think I could live with that. But maybe that's just a personal problem.

"You know that I'm living... for the love of you..."

Anyway, these are the things keep me from doing what is most fun about the game: getting out there, finding a group, and slaughtering some mobs for mad XP. The combat system in FFXI is fresh, and I love partaking in it. But due to how cripplingly slow it takes me to feel "up" to doing so, it's more of a rare treat than -- what it very well should be -- the experience that I take away from the game. More often than not, an intense feeling of frustration and disappointment is I'm left with after an extended play session.

Case in point: not too long ago (about a month before EQ2's release), I harvested what I thought would be a series of crops that would fund my thief through his next ten or so levels. I had never tried gardening in FFXI, but I sure did do a lot of research (not to mention I had help from a friend very much hip to how that works), so I did what many of you would probably think stupid: I went for the big money crop. Elemental ore. My friend's recipe was supposedly infallible. Well, it guaranteed a 30 percent yield, but given how much these ores sell to hardcore crafters, even three ores out of ten would mean a hefty profit. It takes about three from the time you sow the seeds till the plants are mature enough to harvest, so it was definitely a long-haul investment. It's the kind of thing that requires you to have friends tend to your plants for you, if you're out of town, in real life. But anyhow, I diligently checked the plants on the daily, to the letter of the instructions that my friend provided. Another of my friends did the same thing, and he got just about the par, for this particular formula: a 30 percent yield. So I was psyched.