Oops! There goes a week and a half!

Woopie. Didn't think it would take this long when I left for a short Autumn vacation. I was away for a week and then I had one hell of a headache for three days. And nights.

What a bliss it is to be without constant pain. It's really one of the minor things you don't notice when you are ok. But when the pain starts to bother your everyday life, it easily destroys every joy you have in your day. For me it effectively took away my playing, as I couldn't sit and watch the screen even for ten minutes without hoping to die.

I had enough time to check the 3.0.2 patch of WoW. And after an hour of play (including the darn addon scherade) I can say that I love the new Achievements. If only I knew what I can do with the Achievement points... they are a pointless e-peen enhancement, I think. But it would be nice to be able to use them for something. Like the Honor points, for example?

I'm also a bit torn about the Blizzard style of making the achievements tied so tightly to whole of the content. There are only few meaningfull achievements that cover the Old World content, but combined with Outlands (later Northerend) they yield concrete rewards. To me this seems that Blizzard is enforcing people to purchase TBC and WotLK... coercion which I do not like. But like any good addict I'm going to comply with this.

I have been having good, clean fun with the browser based MMO I mentioned earlier, The West, which has already launched the third world for players to explore and conquer. The frontier life has never been so fun and furious. And the best part of it is the fact that the quests and jobs take real time to complete. I can put my character to dig graves for 2 hours, play something else during that time and return and reap the benefits! What an easy way to make things work.

A comment on the 'news': people are already burning out from WAR, nothing major but Tobold already quit, Hudson is having difficulties to motivate himself to only WAR and some other CoWs have claimed similar things. To me it seems to be the forerunner's dilemma: there is always something new and spanky around the corner. It was AoC, then WAR, now Fable2, next Fallout3 then WotLK... and they all fight for our gamers' spare time, not giving nor yielding for the others. And the forerunners have to be in the front line, experiencing it all before others. Are they the Explorers or the Achievers in Bartle?

Oh, and obviously the next 'Big One' is also around the bend: Star Wars: The Old Republic. Or SWTOR for short. Will it be the next hype mill ála WAR? Time will tell, but for me the combination of BioWare, LucasArts and Star Wars is really something to keep eye on. Especially as they promise Story-driven MMO, in which every decision counts and converstations have multiple outcomes... Did I mention something earlier? I think I did...

Anyhow, I'm back, maybe twice or three times a week. Time to run.