played-time
Latest
Log into Aika, win fantastic prizes
If you're one of the lucky souls who doesn't need to work over the summer, or just a discerning player with an eye toward conserving your online time, there are a lot of games clamoring for your attention. Aika's newest event is hoping to entice players with a fairly routine but no less efficient approach: the team is offering players prizes. And all you have to do as a player to earn them is to show up for at least an hour a day. From August 5th until September 8th, players will be automatically granted rewards after logging in for at least one hour. Tears of Aika are the most common reward, with special prizes coming at each five-day interval. Players who manage to log in for an hour a day over the full run of the event will also be entered into a drawing for several powerful in-game rewards. It's not a bad spread for just showing up, so take a look at the full list of rewards, check the FAQ, and start setting aside some time for your Aika characters.
Breakfast Topic: How much of your played time is really played?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. If you have been around WoW for a while, you probably have gotten the urge to type in the dreaded /played command. For any who still don't know, that command will show you the amount of time you have played on that particular character. For a player like me who has been around since launch, that number can be significant. But it did get me to thinking, how much of that time was actually spent playing? Scenario: It is a Tuesday night (last Tuesday, as a matter of fact). My guild is off for the night, since we don't raid on Tuesdays. After a nice dinner and a bit of quality time with the wife, I make my way down to the man-cave to log in and see what's doing. I recently leveled jewelcrafting, so I am collecting the daily tokens for the cuts my main will need. That is reason enough to bring me online on non-raid nights. While I am there, I pick up the fishing and cooking daily. Since both are in Dalaran (love me some Disarmed! and Cheese for Glowergold), I grab them as well. A few conversations with guildies, three daily quests, one Flame Leviathan weekly run and a few TV sitcoms later, I look up and see it is bed time. I have been logged in for somewhere between two to three hours, and all I have really accomplished are a couple of dailies. My biggest victory of the night was convincing a guild mate that Treme, while not as good as The Wire, is still worth catching if she has On Demand. Hardly what even the most casual player would consider dedicated playtime. Still, it all goes against the total.
Survey says 15% of overall gameplay time is in an MMO
Our friends at Joystiq reported on this fascinating survey by GamesIndustry.com that broke down responses from 13,000 US and EU citizens about how they spend their gaming time. While they don't have specific numbers for World of Warcraft, the survey says [PDF link] that overall, 15% of gaming time is spent playing MMOs. US players spend about 14% of their gaming time on MMOs, while EU players range from 8% to 16% by country. In the EU, 14% of all players have played an MMO, and in the US, 21% of everyone playing games has played a massively multiplayer online game. Again, these numbers aren't specifically for World of Warcraft (and because the survey went down to age 8 and up, they do include the vast virtual worlds aimed at children, like Club Penguin and Disney's Toontown, which probably throw the numbers off quite a bit), but they do show the effect that WoW has had on the gaming population over the last five years. Five years ago, MMOs were definitely a niche -- some hardcore gamers played them, but most people didn't have the Internet connections to play an online game, much less pay a subscription for one. Nowadays, MMOs represent over one out of every ten minutes of overall playtime, and those numbers are only going to go up.
The Queue: Judgement of Light & Day
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.Today's music comes from a viewing of Scrubs I was, at the time, forced to watch by the girlfriend Katie. They had this great band playing at the end called The Polyphonic Spree. Today's featured reading music is the aforementioned band performing Light & Day ("Reach for the Sun").It really doesn't have anything to do with anything, but they're hippies and jump around a lot while making some rather cool and unique music. Plus they have this cultish vibe to them. The Leader is good, The Leader is great, we surrender our will as of this date.Hey look! World of Warcraft related things coming up now...Many people asked... "The PTR you download from the official WoW site is still 3.1! How are people getting on the Patch 3.2 PTR?"
The Daily Grind: Not there and repeatedly back again
"I think I'll cancel for awhile, why the heck not?" We've all shared that brooding thought at one time or another when it comes to our favorite MMOGs. Take your pick from the reason tree: the game cleaves your brain matter with boredom; various lovers to herd, or the one significant other to placate; the expansion or patch won't be out until the end-of-days; real-life aggro's and it slays your played time; thousands of others. Eventually, you're back trundling about in that same MMOG again. It can be a brutal, and yet, hilarious cycle. I think my break and return record is probably around a dozen times with EverQuest. I was finally able to drop it for good when a shiny alpha invite popped up in the mail one day inviting me to a new magical enchanted land called WoW. Admittedly, not to make this post a debate between which MMOG is the best, I suffered a huge case of burnout -- raiding tastes like burning after you eat it for a few years no matter what MMOG you play.How many times have you taken a break from a MMOG only to return again later? What were your reasons? Did you actually quit for good only to return later for a specific reason? "They fixed my class! Count me back." 10 months later a flurry of nerfs strike. "I'm out!" Good times.
