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Storyboard: Time is not on your side
I don't know about the rest of you, but these days it sometimes seems like I just don't have the time to roleplay any longer. Don't get me wrong -- I love roleplaying with a passion normally reserved for romantic partners, or in rare cases, a particularly awesome game. (Or potential romantic partners within a game, but there's a time and place to talk about Merrill, and it's not here.) But by any deity you care to name, roleplaying can be a time-consuming and tedious affair. It's not such a big deal when you're in college and your primary responsibilities consist of actually attending your stupid Thursday class this week, but at this point, I'm lucky if I'm logging in by 8 p.m. and I might be up for another three hours at best. That being said? I still find the time to get a lot of roleplaying in along with playing the actual game, and it requires a delicate dance between saving time and glossing over the unnecessary. So today's column, coming right before the one-year mark, is all about finding the time to actually sit down and roleplay in a functional fashion while still getting to sleep and shower.
Breakfast Topic: How do you make time for WoW?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. There is such a wide variety of WoW players. Everyone from college students to 70-year-old gaming grandmothers play. Some people play for an hour or two every few days. Other people play for hours every night. No matter what your play schedule is, you more often than not have to find time to play, and that can be hard. School, work, family, friends, other commitments ... All those things and more make a huge impact in finding time to play WoW without interruption. Making time to play can feel like planning a rocket launch sometimes. If you're a full-time college student, you spend a good portion of your day in class, you have to study almost daily, and when exams roll around, you live in your books. Someone with a full-time job and a family might as well feel like planning a rocket launch. There are so many things to do in one night that you can't even begin to list them all. I knew a nurse who was working full time in the trauma room of the ER, going to school full time and had three kids. She was not only in one of the best raiding guilds on the server but also managed to do arena and go just over a 1,900 rating. I asked her how she made time for everything. Her answer? She took her laptop to work when she knew there would be a slow night and could do arenas. She would rotate on her nights off with the kids. Her husband was also a raider, so they would take turns getting the kids to bed for the night. Luckily, they were both gamers, so it was easier to find time to play. How do you make time to play WoW? Are you limited to a few hours every night, or do you plan for a weekend of WoW?
Community backlash leads to Global Agenda review score being pulled
GameSpot was not so nice to Global Agenda -- a 5.5 out of 10 was fired against the game earlier by the gaming website. However, that didn't stop the Global Agenda community from doing some digging and turning up the reviewer's in-game character. A character that only had six hours of play time attached to it, no alliance, and no agency for conquest matches. The resulting evidence was provided by Global Agenda's player statistics system -- a pretty robust system that allows anyone to pull up a character's statistics simply by typing in their character name. Once this evidence came to light, the community began to send e-mails to both the reviewer and GameSpot's Justin Calvert, who has since removed the review. Calvert has apologized (post confirmed by Hi-Rez Studio's Michal Adam) to the Global Agenda community and Hi-Rez Studios, and has reassigned the review to a new writer. GameSpot's internal policy is to spend 30 hours on an MMO before publishing a review. [Thanks to Antilogic for the tip!]
The Daily Grind: When's your MMO time?
We're all busy people. (Well, at least some of us are busy people.) We'd all love to play our games all day long, but we just don't have that luxury. (Plus, your eyes would probably explode out of their sockets.) So, in lieu of playing endlessly, we play for the times of the day that we have free. So today's question is: when do you sit down to play your MMOs? Are you an after-work person? Are you more of the before-and-after-dinner type of gamer? Or do you play MMOs so late at night that you worry about Dracula breaking into your home and sucking out your blood before you get done with your raid? You guys know the drill by now. Think up an answer, smash it into your keyboard with the help of the comment box below, and clicky-click the send comment button. We're waiting!
The Daily Grind: Your longest MMO bender
We're not going to advocate spending a ridiculous amount of time playing an MMO non-stop, particularly due to some highly publicized unfortunate incidents. However, we can't turn our back on the fact that certain MMOs seem to inspire those extended play-sessions, and we bet there are a lot of you with a sizeable "high score" that you feel a healthy mixture of pride and shame about. Today, we're all about the pride! Unless your stint ended in a similar fashion to poor keyboard-face pictured here. Perhaps it was the launch of a new MMO that caused you to break your personal play-session record, or maybe you had some time off work and wanted nothing more than to log some serious hours into your favorite game. In the comments section, we want to hear about your most impressive MMO sessions, including the name of the game and what particular event sparked the bender.
The Daily Grind: You were on my mind...
MMOs have a tendency to be very addictive, arguably more so than other game genres. Even if you are very strict with yourself and try to limit your play-time, we bet you can think of a time when you were super excited about a new MMO you had just started playing, and experienced something similar to the opening lyrics of the song in the video above: "When I woke up this morning, you were on my mind." Okay, so they're talking about loving a person and not digital entertainment, but MMOs weren't so big when that song was written in the 1960s.This morning, we would like you to share how much you think about your MMOs when you're not actually playing them. Simply being at this website means there's a good chance that you are invested in your games beyond just logging in and playing. Do you talk with friends and co-workers about your gaming exploits? Does thinking about your next play session ever get in the way of your productivity in daily life? Perhaps you can turn it off like a light-switch, never allowing yourself to be distracted any more than you want to be. Or maybe you simply find a way to get online whenever you're jonesing. Let us know in the comments section.
The Daily Grind: When is your gaming primetime?
No matter what hour of the day you log in, there's generally always someone around. Early morning? People are checking the auction house, maybe trying to finish one last mission, checking game mail, or doing some quick tradeskilling. Come the evenings and weekends of course, the server population goes up as folks get off from work and settle in. Some stay up late to game with friends, others get up earlier to enjoy a quieter server. As for our team here at Massively, we've got a bit of everything from crazy wee morning hours gamers to a pretty hardcore late-night crew. We figured we'd ask you; when is your gaming primetime? Are you a fan of early mornings, enjoying gaming with your morning coffee? Perhaps you're an evenings and weekends gamer, with all those adult responsibilities keeping you away from the keys? Maybe you like to grab an hour of gaming with lunch (seemingly very popular here at the Massively offices) or have some combination of them all?
WoW Rookie: Putting a leash on playtimes for young players
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.When school's out, WoW's in ... Is that the usual state of affairs at your house? If you want to limit the times when your kids can log in – protecting evening study time and bedtime, or setting weekend, holiday and vacation limits – then you need Blizzard's parental control feature. Parental control settings allow you to choose blocks of time that an account is and is not accessible for play. Players cannot log in during restricted hours, and they'll be automatically logged out if they play past their allowed time window.The parental control is part of the account user interface on the web. Anyone who has access to an account's log-in and password can set up parental controls on the account. Once parental controls have been created, they may be modified only with access via a parental control password.
DS Daily: How long do you give it?
There's a saying in the gaming industry. A game has 15 minutes to hook a player in before they'll decide whether this is worth their time or not. Does that apply to you? How long do you give a game to hook you in? Usually we'll give it about an hour, but that's just us. How about you?
Wii Warm Up: A question of family
In discussing yesterday's topic, we noticed a lot of readers talking about family obligations when weighing gaming time. For those of you with spouses, live-in significant others, children, or other family members around (the folks, extended families, the aunt who drops in all the time), how does this figure into your time with the Wii? If you have children, do you let them play? If so, what's acceptable? If significant other/spouse ... do they play? What about other family members?
Wii Warm Up: Play time
For those of you who own other systems besides the Wii -- and here we mean handhelds, other consoles, PC gaming rigs -- how's Nintendo's latest stacking up lately? If you're not playing your Wii, what's pulling you away? If you are, what's holding you here? What has, of past releases? We assume there are a few upcoming titles you're looking forward to as well, but when you're sporting multiple systems, it can sometimes be hard to decide what to play first ... or most ... or at all.
