Okay, I want thinking about stuff on the twitters, and came the the realization that in every MMO I’ve ever played, I have a very similar strategy.

It’s a horrible strategy, and I’d really probably be better off not wasting my time with MMOs, but I love them, despite never liking that 2nd M at all.

So, the first thing is character creation – specifically here, I tend to pick the ‘Magic User’ class. I like playing magi, I think they’re cool. This isn’t a problem yet, but soon enough, you’ll see this is a horrible choice. >>;;

So I enter the game – and I start to level. Solo. As covered in this post I’m not exactly crash hot on doing dungeons, and as they’re not required, I happily ignore them. Usually I have a pretty slow pace of leveling (not because I’m particularly slow, just because I’m trying to make the fun parts last as long as possible), and I’m usually not even half-way to the level cap before the vast majority of players have started on endgame content (meaning simply at-cap content, probably instances preparing for raids).

Once I’ve made my way to the level cap, the game changes somewhat. I lose my goal. At the level cap, I’ll do the following tasks:

• Explore the world (or as much as possible for a solo character)
• Solo low-level dungeons (if possible – playing a mage makes this double hard, BTW)
• Maybe PvP or something?
• Buy several months or more of subscription for a game that I barely play.

Now, the obvious answer would be “hey, asshole, get over your stupid fears and do some fucking group content”.

I… I don’t like that idea. I mean, even when I have friends or I’m in a guild or whatever, it’s hard for me to initiate group content (as usually due to the tiered nature of end-game content, I need to do things that are completely useless to these other players). This means that I don’t/can’t get geared enough to actually get to the stage where I can do content with said friends/guild (that they want to do).

It’s a pretty painful cycle, but it doesn’t get me down, much. A lot of this level-cap stuff comes directly from my experiences with Cataclysm, but also applies to other games I’ve played. Specifically what happened with Cata was that I was a week late to 85 (it took me 10 days instead of 3-5), and everyone was into Heroics before I had a chance to start working on the horrible 85 normals. And they didn’t want to go back. So then I kept paying for a year despite not playing or doing any group content at all, ever.

Anyway, it’s looking at behavior like this that makes me wonder why I’m considering ordering ToR – and considering how much of a pain in the ass it is to get a copy of that game (because EA/Bioware actually don’t want people to play it – I must admit that it makes me think their game probably is terrible), I’m thinking I’ll import a boxed copy, as the idea of downloading a 30+ GB client makes my Internet connection cry tears of blood. (Stupid download allowances…)

Anyway, my wide range of concerns about ToR is probably another post or 3 worth of content, and it’s not like anyone from Bioware is going to read this anyway! (Let us be honest here – I don’t expect anyone from Blizzard, or Trion, or Riot or Bioware or Valve or anyone else to read this blog – why would they care about my opinions?) (Not that I don’t want people to read the blog… but you know, pessimism and all that jazz – also the wide amounts of feedback I get totally help me think that I’m reaching a wide audience (I’m not trying to guilt trip you into commenting))

Well, whatever. The next part of the “Games I Play” series should be up relatively soon. Like, tomorrow or maybe later today, but don’t count on that. (I still have to do an MMO entry for that, don’t I? Well, it can wait till later in the series)