Decided to take the night off of Second Life the other night, and go for a bit of a wander. I’m still quite surprised how much of a draw the ‘Metaverse’, as they keep liking to call it, has on me actually. Getting on for seven years into The Grind, in various different guises, I sometimes wonder if SL wasn’t the sort of thing I’d been looking for all along.
It stems from not really having the temperament for long sustained repetition activity I guess – I’ve never really been able to knuckle down and actually grind mobs for any length of time. I don’t think it’s ADHD as such, more an over-developed awareness of how futile the pursuit of that kind of achievement is, to me at least.
By ‘grind’, I mean purposefully go out to a controlled spot, with a known monster, and kill it over and over as fast as respawn and downtime allow, with the sole purpose of increasing level/power/score. Invariably, I’ll crack after about half an hour, if that, and go find something else to do, quests, crafting, sightseeing, anything. It means that I do badly in terms of measurable success, by most game’s standards, and get frustrated by the whole thing quite often. "Why not quit and take up Morris Dancing instead?" I hear you ask. Good question, the answer to which probably has something to do with addiction and dependency, and pathological Pogonophobia.
Of course I have enjoyed many MMOs, or at least parts of them, and the more I look back, the more I realise that those parts are mostly the ones to do with creativity and self-expression. Specific examples include; lavishly self-indulgent roleplay story telling in early Everquest and Anarchy Online, (back when I naively thought anyone else cared – the entropy of metagaming wears everyone down in the end), the poignant solitary exploration in the lavish, but now-deceased Asheron’s Call 2, the entire Architect profession of SWG-Classic, the labyrinthine and intricate markets and manufacturing of EVE and the frenetic strategic ebb and flow of Planetside and the smorgasbord of questing in World of Warcraft.
Very few of those experiences have tended to involve me taking some hapless creature, a little less powerful than myself - minding its own business - out behind the woodshed and beat the snot out of it until I transcend, I notice. Perhaps Second Life, which to me is the ultimate expression of the SWG-Classic Architect profession, and has no mobs at all, is a good online home for me nowadays. That said, it is nice to take a break now and then, so a whistle stop tour of My Other MMOs ensued. Enough rambling navel-gazing – on to the wandering!
First stop was GuildWars. My principal affection with this game comes from the ongoing cut-scene and mission-based overarching story that is central to every character's journey through the game. It’s a nice touch and not something I’d seen done elsewhere. The plot tends toward the high-fantasy cliché in places, but with enough personal touches to be interesting. I’d just reached the Crystal Desert last time around and I’m fascinated to find out what happens next. Friends speak in mysterious tones about some kind of ‘Ascension’ close ahead, and that in particular has always been an RL ambition of mine, so am quite keen on finding the time to forge ahead.
The actual gameplay itself isn’t mind-blowing, especially when you’ve forgotten as a much of how to play as I have, but the world is a beautifully constructed place. I forged off into the Salt Flats with optimistic abandon, and got my arse handed to me in short order, several times. Clearly something I need to work back up to, in particular the wandering speed of mobs, and aggro radiuses – effectively meaning that pretty much *everything* on the mini-map either needs to be cleared, or will bite you in the bum while you’re trying to fight something else. I’m not bitter though, and intend to work back up to competency there soon, if only to progress the interactive novel.
Next a quick mission in EVE Online. My last outing there saw me desperately trying to solo the COSMOS Archaeology content in an Assault Frigate. Not so difficult, but you must have the right type of AF. i.e. one with an optimal range of much more than 6km. I did wonder why everyone else was in Harpys (The Caldari Sniper Railgun one), rather than the Vengeance (The Amarr Hybrid Close Combat Rocket/Laser one), and found out soon enough. Actually, everyone else was in Eagles and Cerberuses, much bigger and much more expensive types of ship altogether, farming. Ho hum.
The Archaeology stuff (And the Hacking) seems to be widely regarded as not being worth anyone’s time and effort, being very difficult due to arbitrary maximum ship-size limits, and not very well rewarded, giving very limited-run copies of blueprints for ‘alien’ tech that isn’t a great deal more powerful than common market items, and which required further farming to find the compoenets to build. I guess it was an experiment in ‘Explorer Content’, which strayed too far down the ‘Enforced Grouping’ path, and got badly hit by the ‘Pre-emptive Nerfing’ truck along the way. Dungeons In Space, in effect, in a game where joining a pickup group could not only get you verbally abused and potentially cheated on in a ‘Need’ roll, but possibly shot in the back by group-mates, robbed blind and cost you ‘xp’ in the worst cases. Very few people bother with it, last I saw, aside from a few massively over-powered farming duos – I was only there because it was something a bit different, that I thought I could do alone.
Anyway, two Vengeanceses (Vengeii?) down, I gave up, went and bought a Vexor (A drone-specialist cruiser), parked up at Jita (EVE's Ironforge) and left. I’m still paying and doing the skill training though. It’s an insidious system that rewards offline, yet subscribing, customers with the promise of greater power upon their return, and I expect I will be back one day. My current training regime is focused heavily on Drones, the little remote-control ‘pets’ of the game, and eventually, I’ll be trading in my Typhoon for a Dominix, to take best advantage of these fun little guys.
My 'easing back in' mission this trip was only an Agent 2 combat run, but already my drones have become satisfyingly powerful, and having no decent equipment lying around, I managed the mission comfortably with no modules at all – just a drone bay full of Tech 1 Hammerheads! I’m also quite interested in the plans for revised Exploration that seem to be in the works. More on that another time.
A quick dip in the Puzzle Pirates Doubloons ocean, mostly to kill time while another game was patching. Not much to report there to be honest. The game is fun, in a Solitaire kind of way, but not really the stuff of heroic anecdotes. I bilged for the Sakejima Navy mostly – a strangely soothing experience, but not something anyone can manage for four hours at a time, I wouldn’t think. The Bar Brawl game was new since I last played, being a variant of the 'Puzzle Bobble' mechanic – a series of baubles hanging from the top, and you shooting more balls up at them to make clumps of the same colour. Like most of the puzzles in PP, it seems simple at first, then inexplicably difficult, and then you figure out The Trick to it, and beyond that lies increasingly perfected mastery. Still not figured out The Trick to the brawl game yet.
Rounded off my tour with a few hours of PlanetSide. Numbers in there seem down again as far as I could tell compared to last time out, and while a little higher than before the Reserves deal, still nothing like just after the Reserves deal and I can only conclude that the majority of people trying the thing out under that deal were either not impressed, not good enough, unwilling to put the hours in to get good, or a combination of all three. I suspect many Reservists now treat the game much as I do these days – a lot of fun, but a 'Sometimes' Game.
I was mostly on Combat Engineering detail this trip – scurrying around making sure all our team’s important structures were festooned with landmines and sentry turrets. Didn’t kill a huge amount of people - most people in there are catuious enough to spot the traps now – 4/6 over a few hours, but having the traps there at all slows them down, and one particularly well placed cluster of mines along a main road did managed to obliterate a fast-moving Vanguard (NC Medium Battle Tank) before he could hit the brakes, killing the driver and gunner outright, which made my evening. We at Van Hemlock do not condone speeding in a built-up area! I'm sure I'll continue to pick away at the game, the odd evening here and there.
All fine games, and I’ve been promising myself a go at any existing Auto Assault or Dungeons and Dragons Online free trials there might be as well, but there’s only so much time, and the pine cubes are demanding masters…