In brief:
No face to face gaming.
No CoH.
A little progress on Mountain Witch, but I’m still working to get the momentum back up to the pre-holiday level, but for myself and the players.
Did some WoW stuff with Grezzk (who’s now level 30 and was ‘halfway’ for about three days… until the new expansion came out and made the ‘halfway’ point level 35.) Ran Blackfathoms Deep with him and the guys from NYC, using Ventrilo, which was really really cool — sped things up tremendously, allowed for quite complex tactics, and really eased the delivery of good smack talk.
Also played some on Kayti the dwarven paladin. She’s level 26 now and heading into the same zones as Grezzk, but from the Alliance side of things — it’s really impressive how much the contested areas of the world really FEEL contested — I’m told that on a true PvP server the areas I’m in now with both these characters are effectively non-stop killing fields… feels plenty dangerous to me anyway.
Anyway, The Burning Crusade expansion came out today, so I took all my characters and moved them to Inns and/or major towns so that they will accumulate Double XP time for being well rested, so that when I get back on they’ll get all ‘caught up’ to where they will be.
Subject change: that double-xp system for logging your guy out in ‘safe’ areas is just genius. To put it in CoH terms — if you log out in your Supergroup Base — assuming that was possible — and each chunk of time your there, online or offline, you’ve got X amount of ‘combat’ xp that will double when you get back on. Instead of ‘double xp weekends’ when you feel like you HAVE to log on, you can take a week off to get other stuff done, knowing that when you DO get back on, you’ll ‘catch up’ super fast because you’re xp will be doubled — that means you’re leveling faster, per hour spent playing, getting more quality out of your play time, and DON’T feel compelled to be on every single minute.
It’s so smart — Blizzard gets paid the same amount of money whether I’m on every single day or two days a week, so why not give me (almost) the same amount of leveling progression, either way, provided that my character was resting up somewhere safe between adventures? Contrast that with “It’s a double XP weekend… On Valentines!” and I think there’s a clear marketing winner there for people with grownup stuff to do.
ANYWAY: I’ve got two major and one minor writing project that I either MUST or really want to get done by the end of this month, and since the WoW servers will be getting hammered for a week or two thanks to the Burning Crusade, with level 60’s trying to get to 70 and a slew of brand new characters of the two new races (available via an expansion pack that I’m not getting right away), I’m taking a break and writing writing writing.
… and reading Odd Thomas. *Creepy* book.
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Hmmmm.
On the one hand, you’re right — that’s a spiffy idea, no skin off the company’s nose, and something that keeps the “MUST … GET … ON … FALLING … BEHIND!” feeling for either players *or* for alts>
On the other hand, it seems somehow unfair that someone gets “as much” as I do if I’ve been playing constantly and they’ve been spending half their time “off.”
On the gripping hand … so the hell what? It doesn’t take anything *from* me, so where’s *my* bitch. 🙂
WoW has this little ‘tip of the day’ thing that displays on the splash screen when you log in… usually it’s stuff like “did you know that if you shift-click on blah blah blah”, but every so often, the “Tip” is this:
“It’s great to log on and play with your friends. It’s also great to log OFF and go to OTHER things with your friends. Too much anything, even WoW, is too much!”
This XP thing sort of supports that.
Don’t get me wrong, the every-night gamer will still get ahead… because they’re also probably logging out in a town or inn. Someone who only plays 2 nights a week will only keep up with someone who plays 4 nights a week if the 4-nighter isn’t logging out in town.
That said, you start out at level one with a once-an-hour, interruptible, 30-second activation, “Hearthstone” that teleports you back to your currently designated home base… so it’s not like logging out in a same place is HARD.