The recent weeks didn’t see much of MMORPG playtime. I was sick, playing singleplayer games, sick again and on vacation. I briefly considered taking an MMORPG sabbatical for some time, because right now i just feel i’m not in the mood of playing regularly. Gaming, and especially MMORPG-related gaming, tends to become so much of a focus in the private life that launching a game becomes the standard option of things to do in free time- and i don’t want that to be the case anymore. I don’t want to “automatically” sit in front of the PC as soon as i have some room to breathe, because in these last weeks, i found that to be suffocating. I don’t know if you can relate to this, but that’s where i’m coming from right now.
So now i’m going to give gaming a lesser focus in my free time. It won’t be the standard option anymore- see, raising a child for the last two years saw me getting out of touch with some other hobbies of mine- reading and watching tv-series or movies, for instance.
Anyways, this is still my gaming-related blog here, so let’s take a look at what i’m planning right now.
Final Fantasy XIV
As it happens, each and every time i play this game, somehow when i lose focus and momentum, interest goes full on zero. There are reasons for that, of course, the main one being that this game, despite its mechanics, also doesn’t appeal to me on many levels- the relatively small zones, the kind-of-grindy gathering/crafting, the cuteness and the fact that it is- well, i don’t know how to put that in words, but i find it cumbersome, sometimes- it’s almost as if everything in FF14 needs to be done in a deliberate manner.
Another reason is, of course, that i don’t have social ties in the game. Right now, i’m kind of waiting for my current guild to kick me for inactivity (they will, despite me being in the community) and i will look out for other groups when i return to the game next month.
Now, having already bought the expansion (it’s quite cheap on greenmangaming VIP, by the way), i plan a return somewhere around may to make an effort and see where i will be when the expansion hits. Having done that is one of the reasons i didn’t make the titular deliberate choice of going buy-to-play yet, but i kind of expect to do so come the end of the year. Or maybe not. Deliberate choices in MMOland don’t go particularly well for me.
EVE online
Now that’s funny, considering the above paragraphs and the contemplation to go buy-to-play (i’ll muse on that later), but as of today, i returned (if you can call it that) to EVE online. See, EVE is the only MMO out there that provides the features i’m looking for in an MMO- the local/regional markets, the player driven economy, distance being a part of gameplay. They had an offer to reactivate for some discount, and this time i took it- after being three years absent from the game.
Most everyone will tell you that EVE is not a game to play casually and/or solo, but to be honest, i don’t really believe that. EVE is a game where you set your own goals, so when i set my goals accordingly, i don’t see why one couldn’t play it casually and/or solo. Of course, i don’t know the game very good, the learning cliff is still waiting for me, and i fully expect to fall off of it again, but i’ll give it a try nonetheless.
Here are my loosely drawn-up goals:
- get some capital by doing the tutorial(s) and maybe some mission running to get a feel of the game
- start mining
- at some point, i’ll do station trading- when i feel i have some money to play around with (the mining should help with that)
- way further down the line i want to become a manufacturer- as far as i understand it right now, miner – refiner – industrialist is my preferred “progression path”, if you can call it that- the goal is to become an industrialist and trader. The path should help me getting an understanding of the process involved as well as capital. I also don’t know if being an industrialist really is soloable.
- maybe i’ll take a look at exploration
I’m at the beginning of this process, my current capital is 8 million ISK (haha! :D) and i’ll need to learn a lot. It’s going to be slow, as well, but this time i didn’t want to miss the offer- i missed it two or three times already and every time i wanted to get back into the game it wasn’t valid anymore. We’ll see how it goes.
Elder Scrolls Online
Some project also “requires” me to play ESO, and i’m glad for it. I’ll not talk too much about it now, but i’ll start a Templar (continue my level 7 Templar) in an attempt to re-explore the game and try to be a combination of healer and dps, as i always try to be in MMOs.
Age of Conan
The guild project will move to AoC tomorrow. As it looks right now, we’ll be almost two groups of people who play and i’m really looking forward to it.
The Secret World and Guild Wars 2
TSW brought itself back into my MMORPG diet with its New Player Experience. I like what Funcom did there and plan on playing TSW on an irregular basis.
Guild Wars 2 fits into my “going buy to play” plan and would be a good addition to the other two b2p games out there- Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World would be a great combination of games to play- if one was in the mood to play, i think these three games combined provide almost everything an MMO player needs, if paying a subscription fee is not what this player is looking for.
Going buy-to-play
Yeah, the title is misleading in this way. I’m not. But remember when i wrote about priorities in the first paragraphs? Subscriptions really don’t fit into this- for me, at least. When i’m paying a sub, it’s not that i want “as many hours as possible” out of the games, but there’s still the nagging feeling of “i’m paying a sub. I should play that game (if i’m playing at all)”. It seems a waste to pay a sub for FF14 but launch Guild Wars 2, for example.
Most free-to-play games are hybrids with an optional subscription. When i play, say, SWTOR, i will sub up because i find the experience to play it without subbing severely lacking. The same would go for ArcheAge, if i were to play that game.
So that’s when i thought about going buy-to-play, and if my EVExperiment doesn’t work out, i might still do just that. The b2p games out there are of a high quality, they don’t have intrusive cash shops, they don’t try too hard to make you subscribe. Buy-to-play is the business model that fits best with my priorization of gaming in my free time.
If i were to make the deliberate choice of only playing b2p games and it would make my (gaming) life so much easier- first, i might not always be tempted to take offers the f2p/p2p games put out, there would also be a very much smaller selection of titles that i’d consider to play on a given night when i want to play and there would be no pressure at all- imagined, self-imposed or otherwise- to play more often than i’d really like to. It would be a good choice for me.
For now, though, there’s still the EVExperiment and Heavensward in my plans.
Party Business 
I can relate to a lot of what you are saying in this post, and I agree that in most cases B2P is the sweet spot between subs that create a sense of obligation and F2P which detract from gameplay with their imposing cash shops. B2P is gaming as it used to be when the media type was new; you bought a game for one price and you owned that content forever. I hope we see more and more MMOs choose this model.
As for FFXIV, I know exactly what you mean. I’ll be really into it for about a month or two and then I hit a wall and just move on. At times I wish I had stuck with it though, as I now regret how little time I’ll have to experience the end game content before the expansion (just hit 50 last Saturday, btw.)
Great post though, I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on eve. I’ve never played.
Thanks! Unfortunately, i think i’m “doing it wrong”. MMORPGs should be games to play for years on end, at least in my opinion. And yet, i just can’t seem to find peace in one of them, as much as i’d like to. Also, i’m somewhat of the opposite to Syp, who also plays a lot of different games but manages to stay up-to-date content-wise. I always hit a wall in the early midlevels.
Well, the quest continues and i’m eager to see where it takes me next. I’d like to find a solution, though, and don’t know if it’s the games (all being great in some ways and disappointing in others), the missing social ties/a good guild, my personality or whatever that is in the way of just being happy where i am.
When all I knew was WoW and was not involved with (or aware of) the broader MMO community it was easy to play only one game. Now it’s much more difficulty because I know how much the genre offers and there are things I like about every game I rotate through. Plus being aware of what is going on broadly through MassivelyOP and the blogging community entices me to try out first hand what others are enjoying. So I think part of the “problem” (at least for me) is simply being aware of the broader genre context. It’s hard to close that Pandora’s box once it’s opened.
When I grew dissatisfied with WoW because of that awareness for a while I was looking to replace it with a new MMO home. But I never found one. At the time I thought it was because I was still searching for the perfect one. Now I think it’s simply a preference of diversity over depth.
I do agree that this can have an adverse affect on how we approach MMO socializing- consider the MassiveyOP think tank on changing guild structures from April 9th- but maybe with that we need to change the way we organize ourselves socially. Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and community involvement with sites like MOP I think can become the new guild structure for people who love the genre but not a specific title.