...but that's all been done before.
See Nick Yee on Player Life Cycles and Google for a wealth of spare time reading material on "MMO burnout cycle" and more generally "burnout cycle", which suggests how many people out there are sitting around in those stages thinking about burnout.
Today, the image in my mind that I prefer to think about is a MMOcycle.
As in, you get onto one, ride it around for a while, have fun with it, go to interesting locales with it, maybe get into a competitive game or two with it, maybe habitually take it out for a spin every evening, or every weekend, or whatever your regular schedule is, tinker around with it, and then get bored with it and chuck it to one side for a bit, or maybe you outgrow it and it no longer fits, or whatever.
And then again, maybe you think of it after 3 months, 6 months, a year, whenever, and then go take it out of the storeroom, clean some of the rust off it, hope everything still works, and take it for another ride.
And maybe the ride is more bumpy than you remember, or the seat is way too goddamn small now, and it's not as fun as before, so you stop once again. Or maybe the feel of the wind blowing your hair back is just as exciting and interesting as before, or hey, you're bigger now and can finally go across that hill or fence or boundary that you could never get past before.
My point? I don't really have one.
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It's just the image that keeps floating around in my mind that describes what I've been doing with MMOs (and other games) this past week or two.
Took a long break. Tried to clean my rooms some. Read some library books.
Had an ADOM phase where I went through about 10-15 random characters, one or two per night, depending on how rapidly they died of poison, paralysis, bitchslapped by a monster way too high for them, etc.
Played Terraria a lot. Went through the whole item progression phase. Killed Eye of Cthulu. Killed Eater of Worlds. Made the nightmare pickaxe. Went splelunking around Corruption to break Shadow Orbs to officially earn my own Ball O' Hurt. (Fenris left a gift that night.) Also took down the half built Chaos symbol ebonstone eyesore that was the other "gift" left over. Broke more Orbs, got a Vilethorn and some other things. Extended hellevator to get to Hell. Mined hellstone pre-patch and made a fiery greatsword, tinkered around with the Jungle and got a flower of fire somewhere, went after Skeletron and dived into the dungeon and scored a Muramasa and a bunch of other things, including my first (already obsolete) gun. Made a dinky storage room with 20+ chests neatly labeled.
Postpatch, went delving around in the Underground Jungle again. Scored a bunch of stingers, jungle spores, and whatever. Crafted a blade of grass, thorn chakram, ivy whip, the works. Made the uber sword Night's Edge, though not without some lamenting as I lost the Muramasa, Fiery Greatsword and stuff. Went into a new dungeon on another map to try out the new improved 'tougher' dungeon, braved a bunch of traps, scored a bunch of keys, unlocked chest after chest until I picked up a Muramasa again - some other spells scored in the meantime. Dived into hell again to mine more hellstone. Which now turns into lava. Earned enough for a molten pickaxe, though I stilll need another round for another fiery greatsword.
Basically getting bored, because now one is too uber for anything. The second Skeletron went by much easier than the first. There's still pixel art to attempt. And an Ocean exploration at some point. And presumably somewhere there is a shadow chest with the really uber Sunfury and what not, but yeah, I'm not much for ultimate pinnacles. I tend to settle for near enough.
Peeked into Rift again, did a few collect-token-quests, they weren't BAD bad, they were functional if repetitive and had some nice rewards to build towards but I got bored of the progression cycle after 2-3 hours, so I stopped. It will keep until the next time I feel like doing those. If I get the rewards, cool, if I miss them, so be it. No point shackling my life to someone else's timetable, to "own" digital art assets or increment some stat some amount.
Got back into Guild Wars yesterday. As usual, there was way too much to figure out what to do all at once. So first on the agenda, pimp out the 7 hero build. I splurged on 3 mercenary hero slots, but honestly, my mains are the wrong class. Having the ranger main tag along was pointless. My baby necro is exactly that. I got no mesmer or ritualist characters, let alone max level ones. So it ultimately boiled down to my Factions warrior now accompanying my Nightfall paragon main. On the bright side, he was already pimped out in (cheapo but good looking) Kurzick armor. Gave him a pvxwiki approved triple chop axe build with a side of assassin shadow stepping.
A prior attempt at Guild Wars had gotten me three necromancer heroes with Discord. But they weren't true Discordway because I had no proper ritualist skills and the wrong necromancer ones, so I had temporarily shored them up with a sortakinda half-monk build. They were ok, but not great. And my survivability left a lot to be desired.
So round about the Senji profession changer way we went (after a serious temptation to put down 50usd for all the skill unlocks and to be done with it, but sanity reigned. The unlocks are half the fun, and for a pvx build, you don't need to unlock 330 skills, just 5 or so.) and two hours later and 10+ platinum poorer, all three necros were Discordway certified.
Also, the ritualist SoS build looked very tempting. Except I had no ritualist heroes. There are only two in existence, and one of them came off the second round of the Norn fighting tournament (eek, solo challenge?) and besides, Razah looked cooler, so a quest for Razah it was. Then captured the elite skill, went round the skill changers again, and badabing, one offensive SoS ritualist healer/buffer.
This seemed already like overkill, but additional offensive capability couldn't hurt. I have sucky luck with Barrage rangers though. They just don't seem to barrage enough to make it worthwhile. Maybe the starting gear is insufficient. I had Margrid set up as a R/P but she wasn't very kill-y. Just buff-y. Then I found Gwen lurking around the hero list. Aha. Mesmers are good. Enter another offensive pvx build based on illusion, with a side of domination interrupts. And I had previously kitted out Vekk as a Searing Flames pyro-elementalist, so what the heck. Rain of fire always looks cool.
By the time my 7 hero build was ready, I'd already played 6+ hours.
There followed some distinct leaping before looking as I faceplanted trying to defeat hard mode Rotscale in a Zaishen vanquish of the area, and peeked around the Domain of Anguish determining the place was still beyond hard as fuck for someone ungeared, ungrouped and unprepared.
Eventually, it became obvious that I still needed to walk the paragon through the Prophecies campaign, and maybe after that Eye of the North, so that more stuff is unlocked at the proper time. So that's next up on the agenda...
...until I get bored and fall off that MMOcycle, that is.
2 comments:
It's more or less the social aspect for me. I have enough in "work" to break my head over. Log in (preferably to a game which someone I know is playing) to tag along. If I see no-one on, log off, do something else, try again later.
Didn't even get to the dungeon before I got bored of Terraria. My threshold is considerably lower :P
*Would* be more fun if there were two other people running around tricking me into falling into lava...
Still wanting to play Alien Swarm, but need an uninterrupted stretch of time since the thing doesn't save halfway through maps.
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