Mismatched Components of Fun

So what if it's easy mode?

That's the question that little parts of myself are currently warring about.

Ever notice that one seems to get a lot MORE salvage when fighting even-cons and lower? Even if you take into account that you're killing them faster, they just seem to drop more for some reason.

Today I exited from a heavy xp grind phase with Phantom Felon. See, for the past few days, since there wasn't anything very exciting at level 37, so I went into 'reap mass xp' mode by running into Warburg and doing my usual pvp mish grind, with occasional forays into newspaper missions, and the odd team or two.

I was off today, so I started in the morning with two bars to 38, and decided to sidetrek and join in a Moonfire TF. Nothing but prestige and the odd chance at a good recipe (I got a crummy Trap of the Hunter, btw.) Oh, and the badge. And the very enjoyable teaming experience with a bunch of good players (and barely passable tanks, at least they ran mudpots.)

Right after that, the warshade leader asked if we wanted to do Hess. Good team. Very tempting. So hell, why not (even though I'd run it 2-3 times before already.) This time, since we completed before 3 hours had past, I didn't even get a recipe reward. I suppose I could have kept the annoying screen up in my face for an hour or so, but it didn't seem worth the pain, and I just picked the accuracy SO.

(A little off topic, but the Hess team was generally enjoyable except that there was this very idiotic grav/rad controller who didn't use a single power from his secondary. No AM. No RI. No EF. Hell, he didn't even try to spam a heal. *sighs*)

Anyhow, later in the day, I soloed a bunch more missions to get myself to lvl 38 and Total Focus. Yay!

Then slowly, the urge to xp grind dissipated. I puttered around instead. Did some inventory mangement, cleared out nonessential salvage by selling it cheaply on Wentworths (badgebadgebadge), made a bunch of IOs and stored it in my brand new enhancement table in the SG (finally, a storage!), thought I'd splurge and improve one of my powers so I IO'ed up aid self with 5 Doctored Wounds (leaving room for 1 interrupt IO) for about 1.2 million inf...

...and realized that a) I was running out of cash. b) I had some recipes I wanted to craft that needed magic salvage at a price I wasn't going to pay for at WW.

Yep. It's 'screw xp - show me the magic salvage' time!

And I realized that I hadn't street hunted in a while. And contrary to most people, I love street hunting. So I killed two birds with one stone and went to prowl along the canals of Founders Falls, mutilating blue and green and the rare white-con CoT, and sidetreking to bonesmash any Nemesis Comet sniper who found me too irresistable a target.

And it was fun.

Then I got a tell asking if I wanted to join a team. Oh, ok. Sure. +4 DEs. *gulp* Okay... And it wasn't that bad a team. Most everyone knew what they were doing. Except, it just wasn't my day to meet controllers with a clue.

@Black Panzer aka Mariah II - the whiny bitchy ill/emp who never once used fort/CM or even was that quick on the heals. (In the end, I was keeping the peacebringer tank upright with powerboost aid-other...) She just RA'ed a lot. Then it got worse. She started to whine about giving her time before we started fighting so she could 'soften' the spawn. *groan* And by the way, it's not as if we were dying. We had two blasters (one lvl 40, mobs were 41 or so), two scrappers and a tanking pb. She made a lot of noise about aggro'ing too fast. 'Whatever happened to strategic play?'

*double groan* And what was worse, the pb started to support her and say, ok, stop, give her a chance to do it. *sigh* So we stopped. And we watched. And we waited. And she crept up with her superior invisibility (with phantasm out, by the way) and she used her precious...DECEIVE! And I'm sure you can guess what the pet did. Incoming return fire, everyone caught by surprise, mistimed aoes, bad damage on us, unsoweiter.

And then she wanted to do it again! And this time we team wiped, though I did try my bestest to run off, died from DoT a room away, oh well. So anyhow, by now I'd pretty much lost my patience because I'd come back from the hospital 200 yards away and ascended two floors, and there was still one scrapper lying dead and our darling Mariah also dead and saying 'gimme an awaken and I can rez!'

So yeah, when the lvl 40 blaster said over team that he'd found the hostage, I went over and single-pulled and both of us duo'ed the hostage spawn. Then me and the other blaster and the other scrapper partial pulled the last DE spawn we had wiped on and killed them, causing the pb to go into a panic and mutter about 'geez, wait for everyone!'

Ah yes, wait. Wait and play 'strategically,' no doubt. You see that DE spawn charging you as you exit the mission? Why don't you tell them to wait for you? Fast reactions = skill, okay? I'd spotted the ambush, announced 'ambush inc' and still had time to superspeed to one side to AoE safely as they were still looking about getting their beartings... Obviously, once that mission was over, I made my excuses and quit the dysfunctional team.

(As a hilarious ender to it, as I settled back into my personal FF CoT street hunt, I got a tell from the same PB leader asking if I wanted to join the team. 'lvl 39 DE mish, LFT?' *blink* Oh my god, he can't even recognize the people he was previously playing with!

I snapped, by the way. I told him point blank 'I just quit your team' though I did leave out any expletives.

That led him to apologize and mention that it was late, and we had a fairly civil conversation about different playstyles and how some people would prefer less 'strategic' waiting to actually fighting -with common sense- and ended off wishing each other good luck.)

So back to spawn camping CoT in Founder's Falls. A Pangean Soil dropped. I nearly swooned and reflected on how right I was to quit the team and enjoy my personal street hunt. Tucked it away safely, waiting for the right time to sell. (A little SG bird told me that there may be impending price-fubaring of Pangean Soils in the near future...*coughs*)

As enjoyable as it was, it wasn't doing anything to get me luck charms, which I needed for a Piston Boots recipe that had dropped during the TFs. So I took a break and dived into Bloody Bay to go hunt magic mobs there. 4-5pm S'pore time on a deserted server is a nice time to go into pvp zones - though I notice that there were still a few stalwart pvp'ers around. Maybe less villains though. No stalkers hurt me anyhow, which makes me happy.

Filled up on random magic salvage, but no luck charms. Offloaded on WW, realized I'd made enough to actually afford the price-fubared luck charm, and went, oh what the heck, and bought one for 50k.

Then I thought I'd newspaper CoT missions for a change. Ran through one or two on invincible and felt the drops weren't quite as desirable. Dropped to tenacious, and stuff suddenly started falling out of their pockets.

Of course, a couple of things got rather obvious. A mission complete on invincible is 14k xp and 482 prestige. A mission complete on tenacious is 8000xp and 322 prestige.

An invincible mission is nail biting and I have to be super careful and super alert and super skilled and even a little bit lucky because the slightest mistake puts me in the hospital. And yes, I do die on the blaster, but I take note where I screwed up and try not to do the same thing again. It's fun in that you learn as you go, it's somewhat punishing and a little bit hardcore, and even the teeniest bit unfair because the difference between life and death is sometimes whether you have a green or a breakfree at the right time and whether you used it.

But it's also kind of fun. Which is why I'd been on invincible since the 30s and slotted my IO sets.

A tenacious mission has mobs that pretty much crumple up and die when I hit them. And then they drop salvage for me like a Monty Haul campaign. I can be pretty careless and heedless of what I'm doing. The only thing that keeps me paying attention is that there's more of them so I get to spread my blows and pump aid self after every spawn, and there's a boss at the end still.

And it's also kind of fun. An easy superhero mode fun. And a 'ooh lootlootloot' fun.

Except that a part of me feels a bit uneasy. Two parts, actually.

One part is the 'purple bar rising' = fun Achiever. Must gain xp. Must gain maximum xp effectively. While still playing the game. And it's wondering, omg, you just practically halved your xp, your purple bar isn't really rising, is it?

(And then my rejoiner is, exactly what did you get out of hitting lvl 50 except a sense of "yay, it's complete, NEXT"? I'm rather enjoying this current phase of the game and I actually don't want it to end that soon... to which, the XP Achiever part doesn't know how to reply and it just bangs its head on the wall in total incomprehension.)

The second part is the 'tough game = skill = I'm leet = learning is cool" Explorer/Achiever. This part of me is a bit rougher to debate with. Because it makes up a good part of my ego. We do play games to get better at them, don't we? To improve oneself, to gain skill, and basically play better than that 1-3 month newbie that just started a subscription.

And one of the ways I do this is to set my difficulty to punishing levels so that I get a sense of satisfaction out of 'beating' it with my well-chosen build and powers and playstyle. Blasters die a lot, don't they? Well, I don't! (Except for some occasions of very human mistakes, and soloing is the best time to learn and keep on one's toes so that one can play excellently in a team...) And that makes me cool and elite and speshul... says this second part of me.

Except there's other bits of me that say "Look, I enjoy easy mode and god mode from time to time. It's cool to feel super. It's cool to just blow shit up and not worry about it. It's nice to relax and not be constantly on hair trigger alert or face another walk back from the hospital.

"And look, what are your current goals here? You want magical salvage. You want more recipe drops. You want to get the SG badge for 'thwart the thorns' just cos you can (2 birds, 1 stone, all that jazz). You want more influence for that matter. And you don't really want it to end all that quick. So what's the hurry?

"And hey, when you're not dying or being cautious to avoid dying, that purple bar is actually filling up anyway because you're essentially doing 2 tenacious missions in the time it takes you to do 1 invincible mission.

"It's still fun, right?"

And then I make a face and hem and haw because I -am- having fun...

...except I don't feel quite so leet any more.

And that's not really a bad thing.

Is it?