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100 weeks later...
76 people! Like, six hours! One winner, and that's Saiya Tayuun!
![[Image: D1bNjdi.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/D1bNjdi.jpg)
We had an extremely colorful turnout tonight. Free paladins, dragoons, former dragoons, monks, Grand Company soldiers, mercenaries, someone who's probably a voidsent, some vath, a vanu vanu...
It's safe to say the Grindstone's grown a bit in the past two years. Two years? Man, time flies by. The Grindstone doesn't turn 4 for another couple of months but it's amazing to look back on the extremely wide spread of colorful characters who've turned up and turned out for our little Thanalan party. As the game has grown (consider that 100 weeks ago, Heavensward was still only in patch 3.05!) so has the roleplaying community. Au Ra were new and exciting and still sort of feeling out their role in the world (and Stormblood has certainly thrown some of those people for a loop with how the tribes are represented!). Red Mage and Samurai were hypothetical classes. We had no idea how awesome the Alexander music would end up being.
Over the years (I can't stress enough how weird it feels to say those words when talking about our roleplay pretendy times) we've seen a huge number of people, some alts, some genuinely new, turn up to hang out with us. We've had a ton of people volunteer to help run things on the back-end. I've received probably a thousand bits of advice on how to make the Grindstone "better" up to and including removing the /random rolls and relying on an honor system (lol). Through it all, though, we've had the support and appreciation dozens and dozens and dozens of roleplayers. There are the regular folks who turn up every week to fight for glory, there are the lurkers who show up to watch just out of curiosity or amusement or whatever! There's the cheering crew for some of the folks who show up, and there's definitely strong heel/face vibe for some of the regulars. Some people fight with honor and respect, some folks try to boot you in the balls after shanking you in the kidney. It's really amazing that such a wide array of people and characters, from differing roleplaying philosophies and power levels and concepts and beliefs, agree to spend time with us. While we've had some challenges and issues and problems arise over the years with differing opinions that can't be smoothed over, by and large everyone agrees to play by our completely arbitrary ruleset.
Last time I went on about how amazing our community is, and I stand by those things. Any legitimacy we have comes from the community granting us that, and the only reason we can do what we do is because you all allow us to. I don't know what the future holds for Final Fantasy, but I can assure that there will be a Grindstone as long as people want there to be one. The turnout tonight continued the abundant show of support and we're happy and honored to continue to provide a setting for people to roleplay.
I still want to buy you all pizza and beer. Fanfest 2018, anyone?
![[Image: yEROfKO.png]](http://i.imgur.com/yEROfKO.png)
