Weekend Versus Weeknight Characters

4 June, 2014

It just occurred to me that I am a completely different MMO gamer on weekends when compared to weekdays (weeknights, actually). For me, weekends are about exploration and discovery and lore, but on most weeknights, I just want to “grind” and avoid a lot of mental engagement.

This WildStar launch weekend has given me a great example of the distinction. On Saturday and Sunday I spent a fair amount of time reading lore and quest text (or trying to, with that microscopic, reader-unfriendly font) and looking around at things.

But on Monday night I was pretty tired, and when I logged into my main Esper, I was staring at the beginning of that zone east of Thayd with all that warfare going on, and I couldn’t remember who was fighting or why, and I just didn’t feel like dealing with any of it. So I logged out and played with my Engineer and Warrior alts, mindlessly running around shooting things and/or clicking on interactable objects in the starter zones, and that ended up being more satisfying.

This could definitely explain why I’ve drifted away from ESO. That game is best played with a strong mental engagement with the quests that you’re doing, and I can’t muster that after a typical work day.

So perhaps I need to revise my character strategy. Instead of “main” and “alt” characters, perhaps I need to make “weeknight” and “weekend” characters. Weekend characters can do all the crafting and exploration and housing stuff, whereas weeknight characters would simply kill stuff and gather resources.

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