I’m starting to find it increasingly hard to keep writing a blog post daily. Mostly because I’ve come to the point that I simply don’t know what to write about. I know I can turn to other people’s blogs for inspiration, but right now I’m just not in the mood.
I’ve been struggling with the “schedule” I set for myself for during the week. Mostly because I come home and am really tired. Work is slightly soul destroying at the moment and the only thing I want to do when I get home is sit infront of the TV and vegetate or just straight up head to bed. Most of my gaming “plans” are falling through because of this. Logging into Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft seems like a chore, unless I actually sit down and start playing. Then it’s fine. It’s more the whole having to sit down and actually start playing part that is bothering me. I have the same when it comes to single player games. A few months ago I managed to (finally) finish Kingdom Hearts 3. The reason I managed to do it was because I forced myself to just sit down and start playing. The moment I did that I had trouble putting down the controller and would clock in 6-8 hour play sessions at some point because I just wanted to see where the game went. But just sitting down, starting up my Playstation 4 and start playing for some reason just took me so much effort… And I may think I have found the cause (besides the obvious being too tired to want to do anything).
I’ve been stretching myself a bit thin when it comes to gaming and gaming goals. Not only am I trying to actively keep up with two MMO’s right now, WoW and FFXIV, I want to casually get back into Guild Wars 2. I want to play two single player games at the same time and am actually playing a third on my way to and from work (Final Fantasy IV on my modded Gameboy Advance). Not to even start about the shows I’m trying to keep up with and the reading I’m trying to get done. Every time I try to decide what to do I’m kind of overcome with this “decision anxiety”. Because if I do my dailies in WoW I probably won’t have the time to do anything else for the rest of the evening. The same goes with pursuing leveling in FFXIV or GW2. When I pick up FFIV or Spider-Man I won’t get any progress in anywhere else, especially my MMO’s. As you can see I’m going in circles. I do X and then I can’t do Y. It’s why I try to set up goals for myself on a monthly basis and then need to step away from said game. Right now I’m doing this with FFXIV. I’ve gotten my crafters to the level I want. I leveled my Black Mage to 80. I’m not touching any new crafters for the time being. That leaves me with doing ex-roulette five times a week and half an hour of leves on my Botanist/Miner when I get round to it. If I want I can just set aside a day and powerlevel those to 80 in an afternoon, reducing the time I need to spend on FFXIV even more. I’m working hard to get into this mindset, that it’s okay to roulette in and out of games. It’s okay to put things aside once I met my goals for the month.
I guess it’s still a small part of me that struggles with MMO addiction in a way. I kind of envy the people who just play one game and are perfectly happy doing so. At times I curse the day I got introduced to WoW because it’s sucked me in to a gaming genre that just consumes so much time… And it’s caused me to grow my backlog of single player games significantly. I’m still trying to find balance in these things and although I’m much better at it than a few years ago, I still feel like I’m quite far off the mark.
Oh, I have learned the hard way that I cannot maintain more than one MMO at a time – sometimes even one feels like just another chore on the list!
Which is unfortunate, because I also feel like I’ve missed out on some great games. I barely dabbled in Wildstar, despite loving the aesthetic. I’ve been keeping up – more or less – with Guild Wars 2 expacs, but I haven’t devoted more than a couple hours here and there to it since before the first expansion was out. I have a bunch of friends playing Final Fantasy, and I won’t even let myself try it out, because I’m trying to focus all my MMO energy on ESO.
I do better with my single player stuff – if I’m not enjoying it, I stop and try something else. I keep a few casual games installed when I just want to decompress without actually thinking, and sometimes, I take a week or more where I game very little, if at all. I don’t really plan my single player stuff either – if it looks like The Thing, I’ll install it, run it, and if it doesn’t hold me, I’ll just go on until I find something that does.
It’s kind of funny because I do really well in single player games… If I don’t have access to my MMO’s. It’s just the pull of the MMO’s really that kind of screws me over. And make me feel like I’m missing out on something.
*raises hand for Gw2 casual*
I haven’t played in a long time (even though I’m currently working on a fanfic again which will be published soonish), but I should at least finish this season and explore some of the new maps or level an alt. Maybe I’ll get to the point where I can finally craft a legendary…
I’ve never gotten to the vanilla level cap haha. I don’t think I’ve even done a dungeon there yet. I really want to see more of the game.
I’m sure I can find two more and we could do a dungeon together. I like doing them, but PUGs irk me. Most of them are easy to do (some people solo them), but I’m not one of them. I’m too casual 😛
Haha yeah well. With GW2 being a completely different game than the traditional tank/healer/dps stuff I’m used to I don’t think I’m really ready to face anything serious yet. I kinda want to dabble in leveling up my Elementalist and unlock areas and hearts and things I’ve not seen before. This would require me to actually log into GW2 and play though, so let’s start there.
I feel the same way a lot of times about MMOs and single-player games. They do take a lot of time and a lot of it just doesn’t feel fulfilling the same way as a single-player one does. And my backlog is already insanely big as it is!
It is a hard balance to find and I haven’t found any good way to keep it either.
Just dabble. Drop in here and there, so a bit, move on. I “played” four MMORPGs yesterday. I logged into Riders of Icarus just to get the login daily. I was afk for the required 30 minutes then I logged out. I did dailies on two accounts, which took me maybe 45 minutes active play. I played WoW for a couple of hours and then in the evening I played another couple of hours of FFXIV on the endless free trial.
Little bits off stuff got done, it was fun, mostly relaxing. I’m not working now but when I am and i get home tired I just bimble about doing easy stuff, maybe just for an hour or two. I rarely blog on days I work. I save it for weekends and days off.
There’s really no rules for any of this, though. If trying to meet goals you’ve set isn’t working then change the goals. Gaming and blogging are hobbies, leisure activities, not jobs. If they aren’t giving back what you need from them then take a break and do whatever is. The games and the readers will both be there, waiting, whenvever you feel like trying again.
Geez typos. “so” should be “for”. Dailies on two accounts was in GW2.
Thanks for the wonderful comment. I try to do this whole dabbling in different games thing and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I think the big culprit for me is just MMO’s in general. With single player games there is a clear beginning and end and if you want to put in the effort/time extra unlocks that don’t do anything for the bigger story. With MMO’s there is ALWAYS something to do. Limited time events, leveling, collecting stuff. It just kind of feels that, when I choose to play something else I miss out there. And it’s just really hard to get out of that mindset.