Winnaaaah!
Pro G: French WoW Player Reaches Level 70 in 28 Hours (via MMOG Nation)
Good grief! Something of a study in obsession, Monsiuer Gullerbone there took the rest of his guild out to the Outlands, and in a feat of determination as much impressive as it is frightening, organised a 28 hour marathon, with rotas, a shift system and some highly dubious use of the Mage's AOE spells 'tagging' monsters around him that were then taken down by his guild chums, and has finished in just over a
day, what Blizzard were probably hoping would take a month or two at the least.
I'm trying to think back to the longest continuous span I've ever spent in an MMO, and I'm guessing it's around the 11 hours mark, on the occasional dull Sunday here and there, and even then, it's very rare that I'd spend that all of that time working at one single game task, grinding xp - I'll be harvesting, crafting, exploring, a bit of PvP, questing, and wandering off altogether to do the odd bit of housework, mostly to stop my bum going to sleep. By the end of it all, I'll be fidgety, and often quite despondent, actually 'gamed out' from such a protracted span, and welcoming a bit of TV or a walk in the park. I'm certainly an obsessive (and perhaps addicted) gamer - can't deny that, but clearly, there are degrees of obsession, and I'm not sure I even could stay logged in and playing for such a terrifying duration as Gullerbone, who seems to have taken WoW from game or hobby, to almost a competitive sport or feat, akin to triathlon or polar expedition.
Still, for the price of the box, a typical single-player offline game would most likely weigh in at that kind of duration (continuous or otherwise), and in any event, what was happening here wasn't gaming, it was record-setting. I doubt I'm helping matters much with the Oxygen of Publicity here really.
Fascinating, but not surprising, and the real feat of WoW Mastery remains untouched - killing whatever insanely difficult end-boss calls Mount Hyjal it's home. A look at the
System Process Flowchart Diagram over at The Common Sense Gamer, (which may or may not resemble the one needed in the actual released game), shows that our french Ironman has only filled in the first out of about thirty-eight bubbles required before you can even zone into the place, so this battle may have been won, but the war remains, and there's still everything to play for! He'll need the rest of his guild at 70 before he can tick off many of those bubbles - not to mention the faction grinding required for many of them.
Get grinding gang! I'll be the one pottering about with rock-climbing, having only now reached a high enough EQ2 level to start on the Desert of Flames content. More on that another time, but it really is quite good.
Just go on without me...I'll only slow you down...