There were some pretty good suggestions in response to last week’s Final Fantasy XIV column asking for people to suggest topics, but Ghost Shark’s suggestion got the nod in part because it was a column that I definitely would not have thought of or written otherwise. And there are reasons for that as well as good reasons to think about the premise more critically, but that just makes it more interesting to look at the game’s Triple Triad collection and ask if there is, in fact, a problem.

Let’s start by examining the basic components. First of all, there is a very specific mount that you can only get for collecting the first 300 Triple Triad cards available. Second, several of these cards are locked behind RNG. From these principles, the derived conclusion is that this is a kind of degenerate grind, since the collection requires doing nearly every piece of content in the game up to those first 300. Is this a fair assertion? Are the premises valid? Is this, in fact, a problem?

Now, the first instinct on my part is to say that this is demonstrably valid because Triple Triad cards are locked behind almost everything. From my perspective, this is not exactly a new thing, but I have to recognize that I am also coming at this from the perspective of someone who has been playing this game front to back for years now. I don’t have to think about doing content for the first time because I usually do content when it comes out. That’s old news.

However, if you think about this a bit more critically, a crack starts to form when you acknowledge that Triple Triad is hardly alone in this. The same can be said about mounts, minions, and music rolls. All of these things are available all over the game. If you want a very specific minion, you usually have a fairly short list of options for getting it. Some things you can play around with at the margins, but the vast majority are pretty limited. In that regard, it seems weird to single out Triple Triad. Sure, you have a random chance to get a card drop, but you have a random chance to get everything.

But Triple Triad is a bit unique because you have a random chance when playing an opponent.

One of the things that FFXIV is designed around, in large part, is the fact that there is no level of random chance wherein you can actually be completely confident of getting something. A 20% drop rate can, in fact, just never drop for you. Sure, five runs makes it more likely that it did drop, but even after five runs you have something like a 33% chance that it didn’t show up. Twenty runs gives you a 1% chance that it still hasn’t dropped, but again, that’s not zero. So long as it remains random, there’s a chance you just don’t get it.

For most of the game, there are tools to mitigate this through a combination of not gating power behind randomness and currency. And let’s not pretend that Triple Triad cards relate to your ability to clear 95% of the content in the game. But they can relate to your ability to clear Triple Triad matches… and that’s where that randomness can start to have an impact. Because, you know, not everyone is actually any good at Triple Triad.

Triple Triad, like any card game, is a mixture of luck and skill. Skill can make up for a fair bit of luck, but it is possible for random chance to just send you into an unwinnable situation, and the reality is that Triple Triad is a game wherein some cards are just better than others. And I don’t think it’s really crucial that everyone who wants to collect cards in the game has to be particularly good at the minigame because it is a silly minigame that is there to kill time for the most part.

Don’t get me wrong; people who are not good at the game should absolutely not be winning tournaments against other players, and that’s not really a concern. But I don’t think “collecting” is the same skillset, and I think it’s valid to just want to collect the cards even if you rarely use them.

I am personally not a huge fan of Triple Triad, but I do all right with it. But I think it’s also worth noting that Triple Triad is also unique in this regard because no other collection achievement requires you to get specific cards. If you like collecting orchestrion rolls, for example, there are achievements and rewards for same, but as the game goes on, those achievements actually become easier. There are wider pools to draw from. This is actually a good thing, to me. It should be easier to get these things over time.

But Triple Triad requires not just farming content but also farming random Triple Triad matches that have a random chance of even giving you the card you want. And instead of letting you focus on collecting the things you can reliably collect, or the parts of the game that you personally find fun, the game insists that you focus on farming everything within that narrow field. This can get kind of frustrating since you can wind up having to farm matches that aren’t fun for cards you aren’t going to use because that’s just the only way to get them.

Is it a crucial problem with the game? Well… no. As we just established, we are talking about Triple Triad. This is not actually a load-bearing component of the game. You will not be locked out of a story; all you are locked out of is a mount that looks like nothing so much as a jam-covered piece of toast. At least from my perspective this is not exactly a dreadful possibility.

However, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s one of those creeping issues that Triple Triad has in a larger sense. The card game has a certain level of limitation, a bit of a ceiling in terms of how many different cards you can actually have and whether or not they remain relevant. Why even bother to grab most of these cards? If you’re never going to use them, is there even a point? Or is it just an arbitrary goal made more tangibly arbitrary because first you have to do a dozen-odd matches that don’t actually matter but you didn’t happen to get the cards you wanted the first couple dozen times?

I don’t have a good answer. But it is an open question, and it’s something that is going to need to be answered as the game keeps getting older and our list of cards grows ever longer.

Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to [email protected]. Next week, I’m going to complain about something that I also acknowledge is an objectively good thing, and that’s the never-ending stream of Moogle treasure hunts between patches. They are a good thing in that they give players something to do between major patches, and I also think their frequency makes them kind of horrible.

The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.