Forever Downwards

It’s a rainy Thursday morning here in Oklahoma, and it took everything I had to pull myself away from the covers.  The constant rhythm of the rain was absolutely intoxicating, and was calling me to stay in bed and sleep.  Unfortunately with my boss still out, I am thrust into the role of his proxy and end up having to attend all the meetings he was supposed to attend.  The biggest positive however is that since it is Thursday, there is only one more day in the week.

Rewarding Exploration

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One of the things that the Elder Scrolls games have taught me is to explore every corner of the map.  You never know where something extremely cool is hiding.  I’ve always appreciated it when a game likewise rewards players for getting “off the path”.  When Rift launched, it quickly became known for all the explorer moments that occurred on the tops of mountains, bottoms of the ocean and forgotten dungeons.  There were a number of things that could only be found by straying from the path.

I can still remember the first time I stumbled onto a puzzle, or a cairn and remembering how cool that felt to have found something in the game on my own.  It also reinforced the gameplay style of wandering all over the map looking for possible Easter eggs.  From that point onwards I was traipsing across the tops of mountains, just because I could and just to see if there might be something to be gained from doing so.  I have been glad to see that Storm Legion if anything has ramped this instinct up.

Forever Downwards

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Yesterday I stumbled onto a hidden path and experienced one of the coolest of these “Explorer Moments”.  I had been doing a few quests in what appeared to be a partially submerged Brevanic ruins.  Leading off to the side of the entrance tunnel was a non-descript path that truncated in a flooded room.  This just screamed to be explored, so I started swimming downwards into the abyss.  The tunnel continued to wind downwards through bend after bend, with no sign of stopping.

I had been through what felt like a dozen of these turns when I reached the point of no return.  My breath meter was at the halfway point, and I decided to push on ahead…  because surely there had to be a reason for the tunnel to exist even if it was just an instance zone in.  At roughly the 1/4 of my breath bar mark, I noticed the tunnel straightening out and a break in the water leading up into a chamber.

The Patient Sentinel

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Upon breaking out of the water and entertaining the chamber, I was rewarded with an achievement: Deep Learning.  Across the room waiting on me, was a holographic construct with a quest, and a lever that appeared to enable a teleport to the surface.  The quest was actually part of a chain, and ultimately lead to some pretty cool storyline.  To me however, the coolest piece of this whole experience is that now I apparently have permanent teleport access back down into the bowels of the Storm Legion base.

It is little moments like this that make games worth playing.  This type of stuff is why the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are so much like crack for me.  There is always something cool off on the horizon, that I know I can go over to and explore.  Rift does a really good job of lacing the gameplay with little discoveries that you can only find if you deviate off the path. 

ARAMination

Originally I had plans to run dungeons with the Alea Iacta Est folks, but as the night wore on my friend Plasmodia to to feeling woozy.  Seems as though her supervisor had brought back some form of the “convention crud” and she was beginning to run a decent fever.  We all agreed that she should be ushered off to bed, but with that we had lost our tank but more importantly our 4th member.  I have not minded our instance runs where we pugged a single person in, but the more you add the more unpredictable the process becomes.

Throughout the week my friends have been diligently playing League of Legends matches every night, and I’ve felt bad for not joining them.  In large part I had been coaxed into playing the game, so that I could be a stable fifth player for them.  With my resurgence of Rift, I have been anything but that.  I think part of the issue is that I just do not like the game nearly as much as they all seem to.  I have fun, and it is enjoyable when I am playing with a full group of friends, but I am often times thinking about other games.

Not Competitive Enough

This shows badly in my game play, and my lack of improvement.  I am not super competitive, and I just don’t seem to get the adrenaline rush they all do from killing other players.  When we have scrimmaged against each other, I have enjoyed beating someone I know far more than I have enjoyed beating any of the random players.  I have learned to assimilate a lot of the language and phrasing that has come with the game, but it rarely if ever is the thing I am looking to discuss as a group.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy the game and I enjoy playing with my friends when we play the game together.  However I just find myself lacking caring about things like build order, and last hitting, and all the other trappings that come along with the game.  I have watched a friend go from not knowing the game exists, to super hardcore about it, and all the while I am just struggling to understand why anyone would play the game if not for others.

The prime example of this difference really came up last night.  We had managed to pull out a “back door” victory in the ARAM gameplay mode.  What this means is a player hides in the bushes from the other team, and then when they are charging down the lane, sneaks back and takes out their nexus ending the match.  It essentially catches the other team with their pants down, and steals a win.  It is extremely cool when it happens for your side, and extremely defeating when you have it happen to you.

A Difference in Motivation

After this whole chain of events, while I thought it was cool… she was talking about how pumped she was and that she would not be able to sleep after that.  I seem to lack that adrenaline rush entirely, because while it was nifty that we had won, and I was proud of her for her maneuvering…  it was just another match to me.  The problem is, because of this lack of adrenaline and craving for victory… I still make the same bad decisions and still fall for the same traps.  Winning the map just doesn’t mean that much to me.

This is my problem in every game I have tried to do any player versus player gameplay.  I just don’t care about the outcome as much as other players do.  When there is not a direct correlation between money and loot on the line, winning over another player for sheer bragging rights doesn’t mean much of anything to me.  Now on the other hand, I have always had the drive to push to kill that raid boss, or clear that raid instance… because I knew there was a chance at tangible goodies awaiting me.

While I try my best not to be, I am very loot driven.  If you lay out three paths before me…  one gives tokens, one gives nice gear, and the other lots of experience…  I will always go for the one that gives the nice gear.  One of the reasons why I have so much bloodlust in these games and literally kill everything walking, is I know that any single mob could have the chance of dropping something really cool.  When you remove loot from the equation, you remove a ton of my motivation to achieve.

Since I am very focused on improving my character through gear… League of Legends feels like rerolling a new character, getting it to level 10, and then rerolling something else… over and over and over.  You never reach that point that you can do amazing things, because you’ve built up your character in the process.  I think the methodology of the game works and levels the playing field for all players.  But the fact that I start over at square one in each match really drops my enjoyment whether or not I want it to.

Rambled Long Enough

Well I’ve rambled on at length about League of Legends, and how generally ill suited I am for the game.  The tail end of this post feels like me thinking through things on paper.  I enjoy League still when we have a voice server full of people playing together, but if given a choice I will always choose to play an MMO.  I just feel extremely bad for abandoning my friends, when they really have needed a stable fifth person.  Looking at my calendar, it looks like today is going to be super busy with my boss being out of the office.  I hope all of you out there have great days that are far less stressful than mine looks to be.

2 thoughts on “Forever Downwards”

  1. First off, you should NEVER feel bad for not playing with us. The point of playing a game is to enjoy it. We play to have fun with friends, so if you’re not having fun whilst playing, you’re defeating all of our purposes 😛

    I definitely see your perspective on all of those issues involving LoL. I never PVP’d in any kind of game before (a little bit in WoW, but it was always special characters oriented at being good at PVP) because, like you, I came into the game world with a very PVE experience. The goal was to try and kill the boss without dying. There was a rhythm to it. And dying to a boss didn’t mean defeat—it was just a rehearsal for success 🙂

    I definitely did go through a minor blood-lust phase (ok, maybe it wasn’t so minor…) when I started getting into LoL. I developed tunnel vision on destroying all my enemies without dying, and got cranky when this didn’t work out—especially if I felt it was due to another player on my team. However, I definitely have worked on sating that aggression, and now work at trying to master each character I play 🙂 I get joy from pulling off crazy stunts (like being the last person on my team alive and back-dooring the enemy nexus for a win (on a full AP character (GO CASS!!!))) and executing a champion’s play style effectively 🙂 With all of this, I find that I can still enjoy games that I lose primarily because I do my best to play well even when my team is behind.

    I definitely see the pull of having one character to solidly invest in, but I’ve certainly had fun being able to bounce around so frequently 🙂 I would liken it to wanting to put together a raid for the weekend, and being able to power-level a new character up the Friday before just to compliment the group composition.

    In any case, I’m sure my enthusiasm will wane soon enough (or at least I hope it will…)—probably in time for ESO to launch 🙂 And then MMO-mode will switch back on. And then we will ALL THE THINGS!!!!

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