For Science!

Rude Awakenings

At this point I have been up since right around 7 am, and have now walked almost 2.5 miles for the day.  Why on earth have I done a thing like this.  Over the summer months my wife has been getting up every morning and going for a walk, figuring that even if she is sedentary the rest of the day she has at least gotten a big chunk of steps in that can then be added to that evening by another walk.  Last night she asked me if I wanted to go with her on the early morning walk, and I thought at the time it was a good idea.  During the work week I am up at 5:30 in the morning, and get up and around pretty leisurely over the next hour or so.  On the weekends I tend to allow myself to wake up naturally and then stumble to the QuikTrip and get breakfast.

This morning I was woken up by two things… first the weight of one of my cats not so gracefully deciding to plop down on my stomach, and moments later my wife petting my eyebrows.  In the grand scheme of things I really don’t know what she was doing with them, but it sure as hell felt like they were being petted.  I think she was bored of waiting for me to wake up and was trying to “annoy” me into coherence.  So I stumbled out of bed, attempted to wet down the cowlicks in my hair and pulled on my walking shoes.  I do a lot of complicated things in the morning, one of which is write a blog post, and almost every morning that is done well before 6:30.  Apparently physical activity is not one of the things my body is willing to tolerate.

As I started down the path outside the house, it was immediately conscious of how hard it was to keep anything resembling a straight line.  We were going extremely slow as compared to our normal pace, but it felt like my wife was racing on ahead of me and I was struggling to keep up.  Nothing was really cooperating… not my thighs, shins, ankles… all of which screaming at me wanting to know what the fuck I was doing to myself.  By the time we had made it most of the way through the first loop, my body was starting to wake up enough to keep moving forward on its own without me forcibly concentrating to move my legs one at a time.  It wasn’t until we had finished the second loop that I was really ready to introduce speech into the equation.  My wife kept saying things, and I would have to have her repeat them because I just couldn’t concentrate on both walking and listening at the same time.  I feel awesome for getting up and walking a triple loop already, but damn did my body not want to play along with this notion.  Here is hoping tomorrow will be easier.

For Science!

WildStar64 2014-06-25 22-03-03-871 This title is extremely misleading, because in truth there is very little scientific about my poll.  For starters the sample size is too small to really be meaningful, and the fact that I chose to distribute my poll through twitter and Google plus means the sample will naturally be skewed towards social gamers.  All of that said…  yesterday was the day that all of us day one Wildstar players got billed for our first month of playtime.  In my case it was months of playtime because generally speaking I give every new game three months to hook me.  From a standpoint of an Dominion player, I watched our guild turn into a ghost town over the last few weeks so I was curious to see just how many players were choosing to stay subscribed to the game.  Additionally of the players who would be subbing… I was curious to know how many were doing it with a monthly fee and how many were trying to use the CREDD system.

I opted to use Strawpoll.me because I love the way it gives you instant results, and you can just simply watch the page as the responses roll in and it automagically refreshes itself.  Firstly I want to thank all the helpers I had yesterday in spreading the poll.  I got so many people willing to retweet this that it greatly improved the success of the results.  If you look at the results above, we had at the time of writing this 238 total votes and of those 30% chose to subscribe to the game.  Quite honestly this is about the conversion rate I was expecting just based on what I was seeing on the social networks.  There were a lot of supposedly diehard wildstar fans that didn’t make the month.  Of those that are subscribing 11 players are trying to pay through the use of CREDD, and I am assuming those folks were smart and bought several months in advance when they were still roughly a platinum per month.  I have been watching the CREDD market over the last few days and it is slowly increasing, and at least on our server right now is roughly 4 plat per month.

We Are Not the Average Player

WildStar64 2014-06-25 20-39-45-594 One of the things I think we as bloggers, podcasters and gaming pundits seem to miss however, is that we are in no way the average player.  I think it is safe to say that the reach of this survey at least is firmly locked in what I keep calling the “internet zeitgeist”.  This is a binge and purge cycle of latching onto a new thing and tossing aside the old one never to return to it.  Wildstar was the new hotness for roughly a month, and now it appears that Divinity:  Original Sin is the next hot thing.  After that there will be something else that is a shiny bauble to draw away players attention.  I am just as guilty of this as anyone, so I am not judging… just explaining that the way we play games does not represent how most people tend to play games.  There will never likely be a game that stops our fickle ways, or at least we will never again have another multi-year long game like World of Warcraft.

I think the “average joe” I still enjoying Wildstar, and I think personally I just had the back luck of picking the wrong server/faction combination.  As a result I have been flirting with rolling Exiles on Evindra, because the bulk of twitter seems to be playing that server/faction combination.  I am still enjoying the game personally, but am just going through one of my down cycles right now.  I will engage and be socially active for a very long time… but eventually I hit my threshold where I simply cannot take anymore human interaction.  When this happens I duck my head into my shell and “turtle” for awhile, playing nothing but single player games.

Eventually I get to where I miss people again and venture back into society, but I figure I still have a few more weeks of turtling before I am ready to return to any sort of normal social interaction.  I claim that I am an introvert, and folks have disputed that claim…  but I think I just simply have built up more stamina for human interactions.  That said there is always a point at which I just can’t handle any more, and this is one of those periods for me.  So while I on one level I want to be playing Wildstar or Elder Scrolls Online, when I actually log in and encounter other players my fight or flee instinct kicks in and I log right back out.  So I realize I am adding to the feeling of the server being empty, but right now at this moment there is nothing I can do about that.  I can only hope people will be around when this current funk fades.

#Wildstar

8 thoughts on “For Science!”

  1. I’m back to “servers and factions are stupid” mode. Or maybe “people should talk to each other more” mode. Part of the way they structured factions means that certain people would be more drawn to one than the other, and I don’t know if there’s a good way to resolve that without using the dreaded “C” word.

  2. I think the 30 day mark of a game is always a depressing time. It’s hard if you love a game and see so many fleeing and on the other hand if you followed a game for so long just to be disappointed it sucks. I’ve seen lots of HUGE Wildstar fans that said this was their game for a long time not even make it 3 weeks. A lot of those people do that all the time though. Once the hype attention wears off on them they move on to the new game to get that rush again. I know I do it. I swore ESO was the best game ever and I got too frustrated with it I stopped enjoying it. It happens and our little community rides the beta hype train like a drug. I know I love the drug.

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