character-choices
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The Daily Grind: Do you worry about making the wrong choice?
It's generally very difficult to make wrong choices in an MMO. You can make choices that are less than optimal, definitely, and even choices that you later regret, but there's almost always a way to respec and try again. Even if you can't do that, you can always reroll and transfer most of your stuff from one character to another. Despite all of this, as I sat down to choose my first powers in Champions Online, I found myself very nervous that I'd pick the wrong thing for my character. I'm pretty sure that level 5 is far too early for me to have any chance of ruining my character forever, and I can always drop a few bucks and try again if that turns out to be the case, but I still couldn't help but have that fear that making the wrong choices would be disastrous. So what about you? Do you occasionally worry about making the wrong choice with your character, even if you know that most of those choices can be remade if it turns out you were wrong? Or do you forge ahead without fear, confident it will all work out in the end? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Storyboard: Playing the role and playing the game
Roleplayers are usually keenly aware of the split between roleplaying in the game and actually playing the game. Roleplaying does not tend to play nicely with the actual game, see. The game expects you to perform a variety of tasks to accomplish things, and none of those tasks is accomplished when you're sitting in town and talking about metaplot elements with RPers. At the same time, you want to roleplay, and roleplaying is not really accomplished by just playing through the game's content and reaching the level cap. You have to strike a balance between the two, something that's often very difficult when you compare the nature of the game to the nature of the characters you play within the game.
The Daily Grind: Ruining the blank canvas
It's the start of the new year, and that means you've got a huge number of days stretching out before you in which you can do almost anything, at least once you recover from your hangover. It's a sea of infinite possibilities, which is a good thing... for some people. Sometimes, when you roll the dice and you can be almost anything, you wind up... well, with a large man with freakish hands wearing a scarf and what appear to be cannibalized Gundam shoulders. We're not sure either. Since we have a sea of choice ahead of us for the new year, we're wondering how you approach games and situations where you have a wide variety of options. Games like Champions Online and City of Heroes give us a wealth of options in character creation, and games such as Fallen Earth let us build our characters in myriad ways as we level up. Do you build your character based on outside information, or do you try and make a decent guess at reasonably synergistic abilities? Or do you just pick things at random and hope it forms a cohesive whole in the end?
