If you’ve been raiding via party finder for any amount of time in Final Fantasy 14, chances are you’ve seen the phrase “Hector strats” more than a few times. Hector Hectorson—also known as Hector Lectures—has a YouTube channel with guides that bring in hundreds of thousands of views a pop, often releasing mere days (if that) after the raids themselves drop.
Turns out, as per a recent interview with FF14’s official community team, he’s always enjoyed making guides—just, for real-life students wanting to learn the mechanics of the universe, rather than how to do a Limit Cut for the nth time:
“I’m a science teacher working in an inner-city school in the UK. I started playing FF14 alongside a good friend of mine at the start of Shadowbringers and fell in love with the game pretty quickly.”
In fact, the first guides he made—private ones for his raiding static—were devised “using a chalkboard app I had used when teaching online during the pandemic … Over time, these evolved into fully-fledged “Hector Lectures” that I would make and record just for my static.” Here’s a few images, courtesy of Hector and shared by Square Enix.
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“Because I raided very casually back then, I would normally make these before our group ever stepped foot in the fight. It helped my group to all be on the same page and understand the mechanics a bit better, but mostly it was just a lot of fun to make the guides,” then, shockingly, Hector reveals that he released his first guide onto YouTube “mostly on a lark. I had made the guide just as a tool for my static, and it ended up being so useful that we cleared the fight in around 45 minutes.
“I realised there were no other guides available for the fight yet and so made it public on YouTube, on the off-chance that someone might find it helpful. The community response was overwhelming, and, because of that, I’ve been sharing all of my guides ever since.”
The production quality’s certainly increased since then—Hector makes them in Keynote (Apple’s version of Powerpoint). He’s got custom assets he gets his raid buddies to capture, and each guide takes about 15-30 hours to make “depending on the fight, with each guide featuring thousands of animations.”
“At some point in this, my static and I actually go DO the fight, but oddly enough, I find this to be one of the least essential parts in the process.”
As I recently discovered alongside PC Gamer’s own Mollie Taylor at Gamescom last month, even the easiest content in FF14 can be a struggle when you’re playing with complete newbies—meaning the game actually does a decent job of getting you up to snuff on its own.
For savage content, though, most of these telegraphs are either obfuscated or hidden entirely, and as someone who cleared an entire savage tier last expansion (please, hold your applause) I’ve made use of his tutelage more than once. Maybe I would’ve scored higher in my science GCSE’s if I’d had a Hector Lecture to hand.