Okay, so, I wanted to check my playtime in FF14, you know, just to see how much of my life I’ve actually poured into this game. Turns out, it’s pretty straightforward.
I started by typing “/playtime” in the chatbox. I hit enter, and boom, there it was. The game showed me exactly how many days, hours, and minutes I’ve spent in Eorzea. Pretty cool, right?
But then I got curious about my subscription days. There was some chatter online about the days remaining and I’ve been seeing mine consistently, but today something was weird.
- Checked my subscription status. I logged into my account on the Mog Station, just to make sure everything was in order.
- Tried some weird fixes. I remember seeing someone mention something about Internet Explorer settings affecting the launcher. I mean, who even uses IE anymore? But, just in case, I reset the settings. No change.
- Messed with the game files. There’s this FFXIV_* file. Some folks online said changing the browser setting in there might help. I tried switching it from 2 to 1, then I tried deleting the whole file. Still nothing.
- Considered third-party trackers. I thought about using Steam or some other tracker to see my playtime, but I wanted to see it within the game itself.
Here are some things that I tried and some weird stuff I found:
Eventually, I realized that the game has its own clock. It displays local time by default. I found out that you can switch to Eorzean Time. Maybe that has something to do with the weird subscription days’ thing.
In the end, checking playtime was easy. But this whole subscription days thing got me scratching my head. It seems like there’s some weirdness with how the game calculates it, especially with Steam. Oh well, at least I know how many hours I’ve sunk into this game!
Also I stopped playing the game almost a year ago, I redownloaded it today and I see this on my character page. That’s why I started this check in the first place!
