The Reachable Carrot

Short muse about the value of hype and a reachable goal and the expectations set up therein.

I was thinking of giving up LOTRO, but I missed the cut off date for my 3 months by a couple days. Looked at the credit card bill later and shrugged, well within my $600 a month max budget on luxury/hobby crap. I barely scrape a third of it most months, comes of spending half one's life at work, and the other bit of that not sleeping MMOing, I guess. :P

I might check back on it when their new update/expansion turns up. For more nickle and diming. :/ Or I might not. Dunno. LOTRO does a nice hype job now and then.

ATITD might be getting the short end of the stick this time around. I still love the crafting mechanisms. Even if a few are distinctly insanely long term. It's just visually quite boring, the pacing very slow, and most importantly, it seems to lack any long term pull. It's the hamster wheel balance dance.

Alone, solo, you fall behind the competition in ATITD rather fast - unless you have no life. So soon, the goals become insanely unreachable, and you lose interest and quit.

Naturally, people start to group up and pool resources and thrive as a big gang. Taken to its crazy edge, it means that any challenge is suddenly trivial, huge stockpiles of shtuff are gathered, and things become very easy... finite content is consumed, leaving grindy goals remaining... And people get bored, and move off.

Neverending cycle.

The hilarious thing about the WoW leveling game is the length of its levels and the fecundity of xp gained via quests. If you 'worked at it' for 2-4 hours a night, you could easily get a level or more, like clockwork, every night.

WoW is a master of the dangled carrot.

If I wasn't so suddenly caught up with Aion, I'd certainly be happy touring and sightseeing WoW for a while longer.

The new game cycle is killing me in Aion. But killing me softly and happily.

The happy crowded lands of a new game is always fun to muck about with, with plenty of groups desperate for anybody that could conceivably help push them through their group quests, and plenty of choice and freedom to screw up in one place and still get groups from somebody else.

My Achiever pride, newly woken by a stint in WoW, is making me want to catch up to the 'average' level. I'm never going to be as fast as the fastest folk who are unemployed and gaming 24/7, but I want to be roughly even levels with the hardcore gamers who log on every night - else it's just a lot of lonely catching up. For a group-dependent game (at higher levels), this seems quite important.

Aion is tougher than WoW, but easier than the oldschool MMOs. So it's a level a night if you really work at it, and if you're lucky - two, but maybe you'll need an extra night past level 15 or so.

I like the availability of their crafted gear (if you grind out tons and tons of work orders, aka semi-afk time). Getting a decent set of weapons and armor took from lvl 18-20, in between a period of grouping for the first elite area.

It's better than random loot drops, at any rate. Something I can work towards alone, happily chopping down mobs by myself.

There's still random loot, often available for decent prices at the AH, but there's something quite cool about making it yourself and getting slightly better stats if you crit, over the loot drop armor sets.

I like the loot sets, actually. They're all named with a certain prefix "Restless, Midnight" etc, and separated by armor type, so you know which ones you want to be aiming for, within a certain level tier.

While I'm sure WoW's raid gear is quite clearly itemised, I can't help but find their leveling gear quite messy. Quest stuff is sometimes not worth shit. (Let alone spit.) If you're really really lucky, an "Of the Animal" thing drops that you can use.

And the clearly demarcated, uber desirable blue gear (when everything else is a miserable green) comes from dungeon instances... which take repeat runs in a proper group to MAYBE get a chance at one piece of the set, by which time you have outleveled the whole level range in a couple nights anyhow, so why bother... Get a lvl 80 to run you through it a couple times for a chance drop, and that's good enough for leveling until THE REAL GAME of raids and heroic dungeons.

*sighs*

I like Aion's "if you spend some effort, you can equip yourself decently at this level range" for a while.

Much better than LOTRO's "we were trying to be really fair with the quest itemisation, but as we put more and more classes in, we got confused and now you've rewarded with a choice of two items you can't use anyway" or LOTRO's "craft some progress bars long long time, and craft some more for crit chances for good gear, and by the time you're done, you'll be just in time to twink your alt for your next go around."

This might change as we go up exponentially through the levels. I think the grind/time/effort factor will make itself more well known. But as of now, it reminds me a little bit of RoD, where you could get twinked, but you could also find decent equipment for yourself when you first start out.

Only thing they don't have from those good/bad old days is the reliance of kill this mob to get this item drop.

It's now 'craft this for something reliable' or 'kill stuff this level range for an uncontrollable chance of having it maybe drop' or 'kill the boss of this elite instance for a random chance at a predictable item dropping' (Damn WoW for the last one. Or EQ. Or SMAUG runs. Or diku in general.)