New Year!

I had completely forgotten about the Wild Pie bonus for Slayer. I ate one of those and took off to the dungeon by Port Sarim, went into the ice cave and killed my first Skeletal Wyvern. Got my revenge from stupidly wandering in there ages ago at lvl 50 or so. Then I used my pingu points from the week on Runecrafting, made a few rounds of crafting Nats and got to 66 Runecrafting. Collected my rewards, Falador Diary done. I also, temporarily, cracked the top 50,000 overall on hiscores. I was at 49,996 last night and knew that wouldn’t last. I woke up this morning, 50,026. One or two more levels should do it.

Last May I started keeping track of my levels on Excel. I did this because I wanted to see how I was progressing, which skills I was neglecting and that I’m a huge nerd and use Excel for pretty much everything. In the last 7 months, here’s how I have progressed:

Attack 74 – 81
Defence 72 – 80
Strength 80 – 86
Hitpoints 75 – 83
Ranged 62 – 77
Prayer 61 – 70
Magic 73 – 82
Cooking 92 – 96
Woodcutting 66 – 81
Fletching 73 – 75
Fishing 98 – 99
Firemaking 53 – 86
Crafting 66 – 79
Smithing 71 – 73
Mining 62 – 73
Herblore 50 – 63
Agility 57 – 74
Thieving 61 – 65
Slayer 58 – 71
Farming 67 – 77
Runecrafting 51 – 66
Hunter 50 – 66
Construction 52 – 63
Summoning 43 – 68
Overall 1567 – 1834

Looking at those original levels, I can tell that I had just completed the Varrock Diary. Close to 300 levels in a span of 7 months sounds pretty good, but at the time, skills like Summoning, RC, Hunting, I wasn’t really working on and some of those skills in the low 50s and 40s are pretty quick levels. Some people would ask why I’ve only gone from 92-96 Cooking when its such a fast skill to get xp in, and I’m so close to a cape. The easy answer, I kind of hate cooking. I find it boring. I don’t have any desire to go buy 5k sharks and tuck away at the Cooking Guild for hours on end. I’ve only ever cooked what I’ve caught and I really only cook when I need food. The cape is nice, but I’m not a big fan or purple anyway. Why do I bring this up? With the new year approaching, its about the time that everyone sets goals for themselves. While we’d love to be optimistic, we also need to take a second to be realistic.

While I’d love to sport that beautiful Hitpoints skillcape in the next twelve months, let’s see what it would take. In the past 7 months I’ve gone from level 75 to 83. 8 levels. That’s a little more than a level a month. As we all know, you need more and more xp as the skills get higher. Even if I continued at that rate, that would still only bring me to the mid 90s. To break it down even further, I look at xp because level numbers can be deceiving. I have 2,820,904 xp in HP as I write this. The magic number for a skillcape is 13,034,431. That leaves me with 10,213,527 xp until 99. Divide that by 365 days and I’d need to get about 27,982 xp per day. Maybe for some people that’s do-able, but I know how I play. I sometimes neglect cb altogether for weeks at a time. That’s not happening.

It kills me when I see people fishing at Piscatoris and they state that they are going to get a level that day. However, they need 550,000 xp to that level. You make roughly 30,000 xp/hr fishing monks. If you break it down, that level is going to take you over 18 hours to get. I love your enthusiasm, but its already 5pm…

That said, for 2009 I’m going to keep my goals pretty simple and not do anything to really burn myself out on the game. I have 14 quests remaining, so I can see myself getting a Questcape. This will also, hopefully, serve as motivation to do quests as they’re released. I’d like to get 75+ and 2000 total levels. These are probably going to be the biggest goals that I have. However, 170 levels isn’t a lot to achieve in the span of 12 months. That’s 13 levels a month, which I feel is attainable. Runecrafting will be a pain, but with the pingu points, and other xp bonuses in the game, I can do it. It won’t be easy, but that’s the point of setting goals, right? With that I think will come 2 skillcapes. I have about 4M xp left til my Cooking cape and over the span of 12 months, I can see needing that much food. That’s roughly 19,048 sharks cooked. That works out to about 1,587 sharks a month. That’s attainable. Getting 75+ will give me 1907 levels alone, putting me in good position to finish out the year with 2000.

As for the other cape, I have a suspicion that it might be Firemaking. As much as I would love for it to be another time consuming, no easy way to buy levels one, like Woodcutting, I’m only 81 in that currently. I don’t realistically see going from 81-99 in a year’s time. My short term goal is the Inferno Adze. In the past week I’ve gotten 84-86 and the experience is super fast. I just use Maples from my kingdom or train it in synch with WC when chopping Yews and chatting to friends. Also if I’m going to get it to 92, I can see myself saying “what the heck” and continuing on with it. I’ve gotten over 2M xp in it this month alone and it wouldn’t be that much of a strain to get the remaining xp.

I wish you lots of luck and happy playing in the year to come! Set some goals, just be realistic about it. Don’t think that you’re going to get from 75-99 Fishing before March because you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment, and you’ll probably end up hating the skill and burning yourself out on it. Take your time, enjoy it! It is a game afterall.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

Real life needs to take priority over online gaming. Spending time with friends and having fun needs to take priority over most things even in real life. Sure, we need to work for a living but when it comes down to either spending a night out for a friend’s birthday or wanting to wake up early to go for a long run, you can rest assured I usually wake up late with a headache. Some things can wait, but friends might not always be there.

That said, going to baseball games (Go Phils!), bike rides, days at the beach, camping trips, etc. have all taken up time I would normally spend playing RS. This is fine with me. My playing always takes a dive in the summer, every indoor activity does. I spend 8am-6pm in an office and when I get home I want to be outside. I’m convinced I am solar powered. I hate being inside, except to either watch the Olympics, the Tour de France or baseball. In the winter I can’t stand to fight the slush and wind and generally stay inside more. When I first moved to Manhattan, people thought I was from California because I was so adverse to the cold. I would tell them I’m from 99 miles south of this glorious island, they would tell me I should be used to the winters. Let me just say, you do not get used to it. All that time indoors those months drives me to stay outdoors these months.

That said, I travel about 2-3 weeks a month for work. Being in these strange cities has made me play a little more often than previous summers. This leads to a few different things. The first is, playing more makes me want to play more. The second, playing more makes me want to be inside playing more. I would have no problem with this if the conditions were miserable outside. However, its gorgeous. Some of this has been alleviated by being able to play outside on the deck using my laptop, while firing up the grill. The other point this brings up is that the more I play, the more goals and ambitions I set for myself in the game.

Playing roughly an hour a day, more on weekends and maybe about 2-3 hours when away on work trips has definitely made me into a “better” player. By that I mean, I’ve gotten more levels than I normally would have. However being less than 100k from an Attack level, and instead of being able to bang it out in a session, it takes about 3 days is incredibly frustrating. With that limited time, I try to get in the chores I can (definitely battlestaves, might sacrifice the pineapples though), then I’m usually indecisive as to what I should work on because its too insignificant to make any real kind of impact. My RS life has been hectic and part of me feels a little bad not devoting time to it. New friends meeting old ones (worlds collide!) and getting along, new friends in general, fun new clan events to places I’ve never been before, enough 99 parties to almost match the amount of real life weddings I’ve had to attend lately.

Part of me just wants to take a week off. A week off from work. A week off from all obligations and just play the game. Would I then be satisfied? A week is a long time with all those hours to play each and every day. I could get so much accomplished! I only have 30 quests left and I haven’t quested in about a month, I could easily finish that with a week off. 7 days, roughly 4-5 quests a day, definitely do-able. Think of all the Agility tickets that I could have. All the Cooking xp that would lead to my cape trimming. All those steels just waiting to drop a dragon face that I’ve wanted so bad. I guess this is just the mindset of your addicted player. Maybe the playing less is making me appreciate it more. Since I have so little time, I’m spending more time preparing for what I want to do as to not waste any time when I log in. Those 15 minutes of dazing off at work are usually RS induced by glancing at high scores. Since I get this much xp/hr, I can level at that in 15 mins, then make the quick hop over to *insert skill here* where I can almost level, but I’ll definitely get it tomorrow.

Maybe a vacation from real life is what we all crave at some point. Escaping reality is a major factor in a lot of players. So here, while I file state forms and call clients, I’m daydreaming of being at home, phone off, tv on, perhaps sipping a cold one and slaying some dragons because I am a mighty warrior. You feel that way too, right?