ATITD addiction

I’m still in a relative state of disbelief. Pulled an all-nighter last night, with my body about ten years too old for those sorts of stunts any longer.

And all for what? A computer game. An online computer game. An MMO, to be exact. And ATITD in specific.

Strangest thing is, it wasn’t even for a group activity. I mean, you hear about people staying online way too long (11 hours?) because of raids and stuff – the social pull of peer pressure plus folks relying on you type of responsbility, your ‘kewl’ always-ready-to-raid reputation that you want to cultivate, your personal greed at wanting a chance at the loot jackpot… that sort of thing.

Well, I stayed up for none of those things. I don’t derive much joy out of this sort of group activity. Perhaps I just haven’t met the right group of offline (or online) friends yet, because the groups I’m comfy fooling about with never seem to last, and PUGing with strangers/new guildies always fills me with performance anxiety, of not wanting to look like an idiot, or the weakest link, or horrors, a girl. (See a hilarious take on the potential perplexities of inverse gender role revelation with Tripod’s song Stuntman.)

Even at its most enjoyable though, it is like herding cats. Or self-absorbed ADHD kids. Nooo, get out of the green slime! Don’t stand there! Aieeee, etc.
No, what made me stay up last night was a combination of the “Just One More Turn” factor that usually turns up in civilization-style games and the attractive Progress Quest achievement buzz from clearly stated shopping list goals.

Y’see, despite ATITD’s slow pace at the time I got bored of regular camp chores and quit, two months of absence has yielded quite a few changes to learn/adapt/get used to.

For one, my compound is gone. Someone swiped it and salvaged it in a hurry. Or a number of someones apparently (as later social conversations would reveal.) I am (perhaps) uncharacteristically sanguine about this turn of events. I think there are a number of factors behind this calm.

Since retiring from RoD, there has been an underlying understanding that gamestuff is not forever. It is ultimately all electronic bits in the end. What turns out to be important to me is the memories and sentimental emotions represented by those things I have hoarded/collected, as well as some of the social ties formed within the game. So in a sense, easy come, easy go, be it in ATITD, or the KoL crap that I am not using at the moment, or even an LOTD or other hoarded valuable that I may have left in the Wentworth auction house and forgot to check back within 60 days.
Nor is Achievement everything to me these days, so I don’t need to be better than the next guy. Or have more shtuff than the Joneses.

More specifically, the whole notion of communal property and having lucked into one of the biggest, strongest, hardcore guilds in ATITD with a laissez-faire boss/GM has protected my sense of self-worth and perceived ability to progress in the game.
My guild has everything. Times 500. Or 50,000. I looked in the automated brick machine and found 50k bricks. There are four of these automated brick machines. (Talk about feeling extradaneous). There are greenhouses that can produce 1000 grass (futurestraw) at a go, and basically, these automated buggers can churn out enough resource to support a number of needy members. Me being one of them. I don’t see soloist bottlenecks as a problem because I’m sure as hell not going to reinvent the bloody wheel and start from scratch, the machines are freaking there, unused 80% of the time, it’s a criminal waste to let them rot really.

I’m not going to rob the guild. I think they trust me not to rob them blind. I do contribute where I can, and replace what’s taken/borrowed and so on. So yeah, it doesn’t really bother me that nearly all my ‘personal’ stuff is gone because the resources have just moved on to help someone else.

Ultimately, it seems ATITD is a game less about accumulation of resource, and about the building up of social networks. With the social network of my guild in place, and being a cheerful citizen, things fall into place with some patience. There’s what, 50 people in the region or less, people know each other, people talk, and yes, people recognize names and even feel a little guilty for looting someone’s compound dry and then seeing them turn up two months later.

One of the culprits who sucked up all my resources chatted me slightly sheepishly and offered to help me rebuild, and that they owed me some wine, etc. I basically shrugged, told ‘em no foul, no harm done, fairly salvaged, and that I was going to live out of my guild for now because I didn’t really want to reinvent the wheel. They offered to let me drink some of their alcohol for my wine notebook at some point, and we got to talking about other things and essentially, I have made a social inroad to another group that I wouldn’t have chatted with otherwise.

In a sense, I’m almost relieved that there is no accumulated clutter left behind. All the reminders of the horrid chores I locked myself into doing are now gone. Presumably, those folk put the crap I had to better use (whether it was for the region or themselves) than sitting hoarded and unused in my chests, which I anally labeled and sorted and organized by item type. It all boils down back to the community in the end.

I set my newly in-game sights on building an aqueduct tower for a Test. (This is the goal that obsessively kept me up the whole bloody night.) Normally, this would be nearly impossible for a newbie with no connections without lots of time and effort. Well, my guild had practically 5x the supply of most of the resources required, the aqueduct community guild provided the other resources, the only thing in short supply was a resource that is normally accumulated in a group activity – except I fucking hate the group activity because it’s so damn boring to stand in one place and click endlessly, while having to persuade other people to stand and click with you in the same place.

Fortunately, another community institution came to the rescue in the form of The Goods, a barter trade organization where one can buy and sell small amounts of items. Turns out they had enough of the group resource that I needed, and I just had to find other valuable things they needed that I could produce from the plentiful stock that the guild had.

Well, one thing led to another, the next clear path was so temptingly in place, I ended up spending hours just working on each step, and I caught one of the aqueduct guild elders online long enough to get some help toting stuff over to the preplanned tower positions and before I knew it, it was 7.00am and I was the proud owner of a new aqueduct tower.

I also happen to be very fortunate in the way the RNG rolls for me in these games, because it turns out that my particular 31st tower has a desired vegetable bonus. Carrots grown in the vincinity grow at 3x the usual rate. So by fuzzy wuzzy good feeling chance, the entire region has now benefited from the expedited raising of this tower.

In a sense, I have totally reaped without needing to sow much of anything. In another sense, I also feel altruistically obliged to hang around and work to build up more of my guild’s resources once again. And I suppose the more ties I build, and if I can ever resolve my ATITD playstyle into something less obsessively addictive and more balanced 1-2 hour a night gameplay, the more likely it is that I am going to trade in my LOTRO subscription for a permanent ATITD one some point down the road soon.

Once I get out of Moria and to Lothlorien, perhaps.