Hell Week Over, Going There Anyway

The annual student babysitting period is over. Yay!

We're headed for ever so slightly less chaotic times, though school holidays now bring their own set of troubles in the form of a dysfunctional volunteer system that I am now, unfortunately, in charge of.

Still, it was a good opportunity for me to grab some time to take a day off, stack it right up to a public holiday and a weekend, and indulge in a 4 day no-work stretch before jumping back into things.

Work-life balance and all that.

A brief attempt at putzing around with Aion some week ago have confirmed that I no longer feel that much of a draw toward it. It's a decent enough MMO grind, but the emotional payoff from being on top of a leaderboard, griefing and being griefed, and prancing around in uber-kewl armor doesn't really fulfill anything for my gamer type, which certainly isn't Killer-Achiever.

I get a far bigger serenity kick out of putzing in A Tale in the Desert, where my Explorer-Achiever tendencies work in tandem to grind out 210470 resources in order to play a relatively persistent SimCity.

The thought of being able to change the landscape of a world up to the point where it ends/resets somehow thrills me in a way that staying up 3 weeks at the top of a leaderboard wouldn't.

While being on a less competitive, emptier server is advantageous, it magnifies the problem of the group-reliant bottlenecks. There's less people around my timezone to do anything.

Let's be deadly honest. There's not that many people around my timezone in any case, original ATITD server, or any other game for that matter. This has ultimately been an interest killer for me in umpteen games which have a fundamentally group-reliant component, be it an MMO, pen n' paper D&D, tabletop wargaming or board games. Poor ol' adult Singaporean mundania.

As you grow up, it seems you end up with more spending money, less game-playing friends and less time to get together.

Nor am I much of a socialite anyhow. Having to interact with so many people to function in an acceptably normal fashion at work means my highly introverted side craves burial in the solitude of my room over the weekends.

So I find myself in ATITD approaching an interesting slippery slope. Dual-boxing has always fascinated me. Not the least because it is both legal and non-ToR-breaking in most games (who are only too happy that you've bought a second box and a second subscription), as well as a massive macro / control challenge.

I've always found it a supreme thrill to be your own functioning team, getting past the artificial group roadblock, and having all your characters work in tandem in fantastic cyborg fashion. It captivated me from the moment I watched Rathain and Axius and other such pioneers on the MUD vroom their 8 stacks of characters from place to place, and #all circle a mob.

I never took the habit to MMOs in part because I've always been too stingy to buy a second copy of the game, and in part because the hardware required is often too prohibitively expensive in cost and in space. (My one computer takes up a good part of my room. I have no place to put another CPU or mount any more monitors anywhere, let alone buy special hardware to control two mice/keyboards at once.)

Didn't stop me from secretly admiring all those husband-wife teams and dual,triple-boxers who did though.

ATITD, though, is a game that makes dual-boxing easy. Most likely by purposeful design. An alt account allows you to navigate all those pair challenges placed for husband-wife teams with ease. Having experienced the convenience of spouse warp with two alts whose minds I control, I definitely can never go back to a single character.

I swapped beetles between my alts without having to beg someone else and wait for them to run to me. I got my worship initiation done on my own time, without having to PUG it. Unsoweiter.

Ah, but, but... a pair cannot achieve everything in ATITD. Obviously, those requiring 7 or 21 characters will still necessitate me social schmoozing a little. Everyone else has to too, because those numbers are too big and force them to look outside their mini-groups.

BUT, what of the magical number 4?

A husband-wife team who run dual alts each make up their own self-sufficient ATITD unit. Ditto a good pair of friends who do the same thing. There are also many social-seeking people who get themselves into guilds that provide opportunities for size 4 PUGs to form.

I could always just ask for a group on the global channel. I'm sure there are many broke loners who are stranded just like I was on the previous server. I could practice my powers of observation and make friends with those who dual-alt or are best-friend or husband-wife pairs.

It's not impossible. The problem with the above solutions is that I run into the curse of playing with multiple people. WAITING. For other people to be ready. For other people to need the same thing as I. And if they play in other timezones, they find their own PUGs to feed their resource need far more easily than I.

Then there's having to divide the cut after.

Dual accounts showed me that I could spend half the time to get a resource I wanted when both characters are controlled by me and thus willingly donate to the 'make me benefit' fund.

I suppose it was inevitable that the next thought would follow.

I've grown comfortable with the idea of paying for two subscriptions for this game. While I certainly would not run 4 subscriptions for a whole year (even though I could afford it, it objectively is about the cost of subscribing to the overpriced Starhub World Cup channel), no one said that you cannot cancel whenever you want.

What's to stop me from paying for 2 more characters for a month, and milking the 4-person team for all the group resources they are worth?

Essentially, it would be paying $40 sgd extra for how ever many group resources I was going to commit to digging up. A kind of DLC or premium content, if you will.

The only thing half holding me back is a naive and vague notion of 'morality.' Nay, morality is the wrong word. Call it a set of social mores that suggest one character=one player is the only proper way to play a game, and that anything else is 'cheating' or 'gaming' the system.

Whose expectation is it really? Is it carried over from some other game's culture?

"Other people do it too" is, of course, no real kind of defense. Other people do all sorts of things too, right, wrong or otherwise.

Is it really so important to do the morally 'right' thing in a game? Or the socially-perceived 'right' thing in a game? Or because this is a multiplayer game, I shouldn't be using the word 'game' for its implications and replace it with the following questions:

Is it really so important to do the morally 'right' thing in social interactions with other people? Or the socially-perceived 'right' thing when interacting with other people?

To make things doubly interesting, I'm not really directly interacting with other people if I were to quadruple-account. What I would be affecting is the game world, and the proportion of resources to belonging to various groups of people. I would be placing myself nearer to the proportion of folks who powergame, and stick in large corporate or communal style guilds.

And I would be making myself self-sufficient (I hope.)

It's an experiment with a different kind of gaming experience. I'd have to run two clients on my laptop and two clients on my desktop.

I already set out on my road to damnation a couple days ago by creating a third character and paying for him. Amusingly, by having my established character feed him resources and making use of the beginner teleport ability, I finished the "Welcome to Egypt" part in under an hour.

Very soon now, once I gather enough quarry resources and hit a few more milestones, I'm going to make the fourth character and drag them all to start marble quarrying.

Mwahahaha...