Woot. L4D2 sale is FINALLY on. I nabbed it. Cleaned out enough of my hard disk to download it. Happily, it downloaded at a blazing 1.2 mb/s. I see Valve has a nice huge fat wallet and pipeline.
Ironically, I haven't had time to play it yet.
Hence the post topic's title, which also refers to other things.
Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising expansion is taunting me on Steam for $29.99. I greatly desire it. I am a complete Warhammer 40k fan. It's actually not that much in the larger scheme of things - canceling the LOTRO subscription, small as it is, managed to make my dad comment, "wha, spent so little this month?" as he looked through the credit card bill. (And yes, there is no such thing as privacy in this household.)
It's just that after buying THQ products at full price for 3+ games and expansions, to see it offer 50-66% sales on Steam practically every quarter last year, it is quite galling to buy their next game at full price.
If I exercised a little patience, it would be mine. Course, I wouldn't get to play it until -later-, but that is the advantage of buying full price versus discounted. *sighs*
In other news, Aion seems to be falling further and further off the radar. I might stop. I think I will check in on the NCsoft page and see how many months I have left to go on that. I can always renew when I get the urge. (Vanity in leet armor only goes so far for me, I guess.)
At the same time, we have the last survivor on the MMO backlist. City of Heroes. Call me greedy, but the vet awards they are dangling are too appealing to let go of my subscription at present. I like the insider factor of getting first dibs at closed beta access and what not.
The question is: should I pre-order? Honestly, I'm not so sure anymore. The advantage of pre-ordering is to unlock dual pistols and demon summoning earlier. Except I'm not playing and not likely to play seriously until Going Rogue opens out new content - I might check out the spiffy new graphics of Dark Mirror, but...
If I wait, I get Going Rogue, 30 days, and the Item Pack for $39.99.
If I buy it now, I get Going Rogue and preliminary access to the stuff they might dangle first for $29.99. And then I have to upgrade with a separate purchase to the Item Pack, with no 30 days. Let's face it, the price point is going to be at least $5-$10. Likely ten bucks, following all the other packs. So I'd lose out on 30 days and gain pre-access to dual pistols and demon summoning for the same price.
Ie. paying a month's subscription for the privilege of pre-access.
At the moment, I rather get another free month as I'm not currently playing.
My current online poison is doing quite well. There is something terribly appealing about dual-alting and macro'ing on a game that actually legally allows it (as long as you're not AFK macro'ing - at which point they have grounds to do horrible things to you. There are folks who push the boundaries, but I am not the type, I'm not in a hurry to be first at anything in the game anyway.)
The keys are patience and self-defined goals.
The first key I understood in the first Telling I played. Time is a resource. All subscription-based MMOs would love folks to remain subscribed longer. So the best way to avoid any kind of fight is to let the most competitive guys win and lose interest, at which point you step in opportunistically before the lackadaisical ones, and voila, ding ding.
The second key, alas, gave way to laziness and expediency the first time around. Being new and not able to pre-anticipate the oncoming changes, I found myself trailing further and further behind the vets. To the point that my dinky little compound became quite pointless to maintain, and it was easier to sit and share Zfree's guild facilities.
Except... for the burden of social obligations. A shared resource warehouse means you feel obligated to replace the stock as quickly as possible, lest the others think you are a parasite. You feel obliged to do more in order to look good. You end up having to say "Hi" every time you log in and engage in chitchat.
The faster folk get all the building and hard stuff done first. Leaving nothing to do but maintenance chores. The layout is not decided or controlled by you, so you have to adjust to somebody else's decor.
There are advantages too, of course, I'm just laying out the one-sided perspective of why it got burdensome.
So this second try at the fourth Tale has been an eye-opener in different ways. While I'm now coming from a large guild background and desire that sort of layout, I get to build it incrementally all by myself now.
I don't have to worry about falling behind for a while, because there is a humongous guild known as Camel Sands who has set up explosively huge public works at the centre of town.
There's no way I'm catching up with their level of industry, but I don't need to. I just need enough stuff to keep myself going.
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