#{ Choco Meteor is it is KWEH~! }

[voidsentprinces]

"Kill them with kindness?" Wrong, CHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEORCHOCOMETEOR

[aerinis]

A Demographic Survey of 1200 Chocobo Races

The other week I finished up the achievement for participating in 3000 chocobo races. For the last 1200 of those races, taking place over roughly a month, I took demographic data on the other players I encountered. But first, here’s a timeline of my progress:

The fastest possible race time I was able to achieve with the Super Sprint/Choco Cure III combo was 1:17:xx. This is assuming optimal conditions – zero interference from the other races, and at least one stamina-restoring item used. Assuming I solo queued into a race (which happened approximately 75% of the time), the max queue timer of 30 seconds, combined with the loading screen in and out of the race, and the forced waiting at the start and end of the race, each race lasted approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds. This means the 1200 races took me about 50 hours of pure gameplay. My chocobo was completely maxxed out by the time I had participated in 600 races, so that’s about another 50 hours of gameplay. Those 600 early races would have been much much slower, so I can confidently say that this achievement will be at least a 120+ hour time investment.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Over the course of 22 days and 1200 races, I encountered 89 unique chocobo names. I raced against other players 342 times (this doesn’t mean 342 discrete races – several races would be against 2 or 3 additional players). Of those 89 birds, 24 (27%) were named after their coat color, 3 (3%) were a dirty joke, and 62 (70%) were miscellaneous. Surprisingly, in my 1200 races, I didn’t see a SINGLE JoJo’s Bizare Adventure reference (that I was aware of), which is strange because before I started recording data I saw Star Platinums and Stardust Crusaders constantly.

Of those 24 birds named after their coat colors, red was the most popular color. I kind of wish I had specifically recorded the color of every player’s bird, but unfortunately 1.) there’s approximately 5 billion coat colors that I don’t have memorized and 2.) I use a blue light filter at night that messes with color accuracy

Of the 89 birds, 10 (11%) had alliterative names, and 6 (7%) of them had chocobo-terminology names (i.e. wark, kweh).

Chocobo names are created by picking from hundreds of different pre-selected words from 19 categories. Colors were most popular as a first name, while the land and sky category (which includes words like comet, meteor, and proper nouns like Uranus) were the most popular as a surname. Surprisingly enough, the Eorzean category (which includes location names such as Gridanian, Sharlayan, etc) was not represented in either category.

TRIVIA BREAK

Did you know this guy here is a reference to FFVII? If you pay close attention during R300 races, you can see him riding Teioh, one of the most challenging birds in the bracket. In FFVII, he’s called Joe, and he also rides a black chocobo named Teioh. In that game however, the pair “cheats” in the sense that their racing stats will always be better than the player. While their FFXIV counterpart is quite fast, they thankfully seem to cap out at the player’s max speed. 

MGP Winning first place in the R300 bracket awards you with 1,009 MGP. Assuming we go off of that 2 minutes 30 seconds race time I calculated earlier, this means that chocobo racing gives you an effective MGP of 404 MGP/min or 24,216/hr. During the course of my racing tenure (along with the daily mini Cactpot, weekly Jumbo Cactpot, weekly Fashion Report when I remembered to do it, and the frustratingly rare MGP cards from Khloe), I was able to buy every single registerable item except for the Gold Paper Parasol (200k MGP), Angel Wings (500k), and the Blackjack mount (4mill). Speaking of the mini Cactpot, I started doing it when I started chocobo racing. I’d say I did it near every single day – I have a lot of fun doing it, it’s like a little daily brain teaser – and over the course of the year I’ve gotten very close to finishing the final achievement for it. I’ve gotten 2 10,000 MGP rewards several times, but I’ve never seen a 3 streak.

In my opinion, I think chocobo racing is probably the best way to actively farm MGP if you’ve exhausted your weekly challenge log. If you run the Super Sprint/Choco Cure III build it’s incredibly hands-off and braindead. Just pop Netflix on a second screen and go to town, you don’t even have to hold W!

In conclusion, I was incredibly impressed with how in-depth the chocobo racing system was. I think the only thing I’d change about it is making it so that players could sell their chocobos in some way, either to the Gold Saucer itself or to other players as a sort of endgame. Imagine what sort of emergent gameplay we’d see if you were able to sell chocobo coverings to other players!