Every time I've fallen behind on my friends list in the past, I've always caught up with it eventually. I'm not entirely sure I will this time. I don't suppose it matters that much, since I'm unlikely to comment much even if I do manage to catch up.
It's oddly addictive, once I get started. Hard to tear myself away from reading to take the time to write.
The rest of my Florida trip was wonderful. Wednesday,
koogrr and I hung out with gwendelkitty at Panera, where we traded MMORPG stories. I told some of my favorite "war stories" from the early days of EverQuest. World of Warcraft is similar in a lot of ways to EQ, but there were so many inconveniences intrinsic to the original EQ that WoW has spared their playerbase. I'm half-tempted to do a post full of some of the silliest and most annoying features* of EQ. However, both WoW and EQ still require their players to do some things that enhance some of the "flavor" of the game (
jordangreywolf set a treadmill in front of his computer after realizing that he'd be in really good shape if he spent as much time walking as his characters did in WoW). I commented that Puzzle Pirates had eliminated virtually all of these "downtime" elements from their game (they used to have more, but those were ditched in the last release; the only remaining one I can think of doesn't affect most of the players). Which is not to say that Puzzle Pirates is for everyone or that it's better than WoW; it's just that in PP, if there're only a few things you want to do in the game, odds are you can log into the game and just do those things and nothing else. This has odd downsides: PP is the least social of the MMORPGs that I've played, because most of the puzzle-games absorb all your attention, and you can choose to spend all of your time puzzling -- there's no enforced "You must gather a group to puzzle" or "you have to spend ten minutes walking to the puzzle location to play". There's still some social elements (gathering a group to puzzle often is more profitable than doing it on your own) but not nearly as much as EQ or even WoW.Anyway, Gwendel expressed an interest in seeing Puzzle Pirates, which I'd already loaded on John's machine. So we went back to his place, where I proceeded to get both of them signed up for accounts. Gwendel's played some since, but mostly by herself (thus proving my point about how little you need to interact with other people), while John may be approaching "hooked" status. I amazed my crew by actually taking my sloop out with Sasta last night. (I own a ship in PP, but I dislike the battle puzzle so I almost never take it out).
And I should get back to work. So more later.
* "It's part of the vision!"
