Post #100
This marks post number 100 that is going to be published on this blog, 59 of them this year. All in all, i think one can call this blog “active” and i have to say that so far, it’s been a great ride. I’ve had some ups and downs with the ups mainly being my experience with the larger blogging community- they’re great people that are very welcoming and help out, sometimes knowingly, sometimes just by clicking “like” here or there on one of the scribblings i tend to publish. The downs are just stretches of time when i don’t know what to write about or don’t have time.
Thankfully, this year so far hasn’t had any major breaks in posting. I’m just coming out of a time of lower activity due to some private stuff, generally not playing any one MMO with enough investment to warrant a post and other things. Right now, though, things are looking good since i started what i from now on will call “Project trinity”- selecting three MMOs to play each month and ignoring all the rest, even if they have updates or somesuch. I just hope i won’t be in a situation at some point where either an expansion (GW2) or a business model change (Wildstar, not confirmed of course) hits one of the other MMOs i’m interested in while i chose different ones.
Anyway, back to the round number of posts. I want to thank every one of you who made my blogging experience a pleasure- all those who linked to one of my posts, came here to comment, like, conversed in some way via Twitter and of course all who still read that.
My personal top highlight on this blog is the “Dual Wielding” series Ironweakness and i are doing in cooperation. The first edition has been great fun and i’m very, very positive that it will continue to be so in the future, as well. So i want to take that opportunity to thank Ironweakness for the suggestion and sharing this path with me!
Going forward, i’ll try and put some structure in place here on this blog, as well. Dual Wielding is one of these projects, the “Milestones” – series with its first post being published yesterday is another one- “Milestones” will simply be a project to share some ingame-progress i made, like another 5-level-span, for FFXIV it will be about the MSQ (Main Story Questline)…whenever i feel i have reached another interesting step in venturing through an MMO, it’s a Milestone, to me. Other things are on my mind, as well- guilds, roleplaying, community and ingame stuff not related to progress to name a few. We’ll see how it works out in the end, since i only have so much time to spend here and last time i shared my projects, it didn’t work out so well.
Again, thank you for being here, for making me feel welcome and maybe even liking what you read.
My endgame
Now why would a person that only reached max-level once in an MMO care about endgame? Why would a notoric game- and character hopper look for an MMO to settle nicely into? Well, we’ve been through the reasoning, i tried to make it work in one game or another and lately, i’ve been thinking about how to find “that game” in a different way. Even for someone like me, who doesn’t reach endgame quickly or ever, it is important to know what’s waiting at the end. The options on what to do- either delivered by developers or by making my own fun. And you’d be surprised (i was) how very few MMORPGs would really work as a home MMO for me when viewed through this perspective.
Credits. Gold. Pax. ISK. Call it what you want, but that’s where my endgame is. But if i can’t do anything with it (Pax), the currency given to us in an MMO doesn’t really matter. If your gold has but one purpose- for instance, to buy a sub for a month, it doesn’t work for me. So on the other side of the coin there have to be.
Gold sinks. Housing (Strongholds), Crafting, Unlocks, cosmetic outfits and so on- there should always be something i can spend my ingame gold on, to try and achieve some measurable goals in a way i like. See, Gold as endgame really is the only currency to allow us players to choose how we want to play by ourselves. If it’s dungeon gear, you have to do the dungeons. If it’s crafting, well, you have to craft. If it’s luck, you have to grind.
So gold it is. An MMORPG that i’d consider as a candidate for my personal “home MMO”, it needs to offer stuff in exchange for gold- and multiple ways to earn said gold. All those alternative currencies you gain by doing dungeons, pvp and whatnot might allow you to choose the way to play and get you rewarded- but it’s a tunnel system- you get rewarded for doing stuff you like with stuff that helps you perform better in said stuff. There’s a reason we use money as “universal currency” in the real world instead of giving tools to the handiman, computers to developers, frying pans to cooks and so on. Virtual worlds should follow suit.
When you think about that, there really aren’t that many MMORPGs that offer this- i could list a few. I know prompting for comments is a cheap move, but i’m really curious and might get some suggestions for games- so i ask you; which MMO lets you spend your earned gold/pax/credits/ISK in multiple (ingame) ways? On what can you spend this gold? How do you earn it?
Party Business 
So, this is the first blog Ive read today as I sat down with my coffee. It’s been raining like hell all night with a ton of lightning so sleep has not been my friend. What is nice is waking up to friendly faces and folks like yourself that take some time out and do a bit of writing. I’ve enjoyed your posts so far and find them quite engaging, GOOD WORK and KEEP UP THE WORK lol.
As to the in game money sinks, there are a lot of them out there, but the one I am happiest to Earn and Burn is probably SWTOR. I’ve been constantly upgrading personal and legacy cargo holds, upgrading Legacy level perks, working on my first fortress build but waiting for Yavin house which will consume a tome of time and resources. Of course now there is also the appearance tabs for the characters as well to spend credits on. The only thing I wish they wouldn’t do is charge so much to learn the crafting skills. THAT is a serious endeavor towards the higher levels. But over all very pleased with what I am spending and saving for there.
Thank you, glad you like it!
I agree with SWTOR- not only is there much to spend credits on, but it seems to me that there is something for all levels of characters and player experience. Personal bag storage, bank storage, all this legacy stuff, strongholds and so on. I don’t know how much they take for the crafting skills, but could it be that this is as expensive as it is because they basically had to deal with a population that played the game at least for a year without serious credit sink?
I don’t know when they started to introduce the more serious sinks, but prizing is important when you have a rich population already- it’s the same reason for houses in FF14 being so expensive and even more so on the legacy servers.
I understand the expense. I thought about it and its true what you say. The problem I have now is the expense vs resale value. Most people do KDY runs and daily instances to get commendations which often negatess the need for Cybernetic enhancements…same with dropped gear. My only Solace is that over time, I want to re engineer every type of crafted item all the way up to purple rares. this of course is part of my crafting endgame on all my characters. Damios happens to be the first I’m making a focuse for it.
When Nightmare Tide first came out for Rift I remember reading there was going to be one end game currency earnable in a variety of ways. Looking at it now I don’t think that is quite true but that is something I have always wanted from an MMO. I enjoy diversity in my gameplay and I think it would be nice to earn the same currency in all formats so that I can then buy what I would like by earning in whichever way I like. And it could change from week to week which would prevent me from getting bored and moving on to another game or abandoning in game goals.
I read about that, as well. It seems ok, but doesn’t fit my needs. I missed to point out that ingame gold is tradeable between players. Those currencies, even if they reward you for pretty much everything you do, are character or account bound. They won’t tie into the economy of the game. Even if we’re talking about things that work as gold sinks by spending the gold on npc merchants, as a player you could still try to earn it by player-to-player trade.