Are you the type of gamer to make resolutions? I’m not, but I know a lot of people who map out their year ahead of time. They have a plan! This week for Overthinking, I’ve asked the Massively OP team about its own gaming resolutions or just basic MMO goals for 2017.
Andrew Ross (@dengarsw):Â Gaming wise, I want to try the two games I’ve Kickstarted and have updated in the past year but I couldn’t find the time for in 2016 (Nova Blitz and Grave, the VR version and regular games/demos). Maybe hit up my list of Mother-esque/inspired games.
But MMO wise, I only have one: don’t Kickstart any MMO. I’ve supported a few now and I barely keep up with them. Unless I suddenly gain awesome employment, I need to hold on to my cash, and sadly that means not investing in a game that may not come out till 2020.
…unless WB or Turbine does something with Asheron’s Call. Then all bets are off.
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna, blog): I rarely make resolutions at all, but I have one big one for real life and one for gaming, and the gaming one is just to game more the right way: to make sure that when I do carve out time to game, I’m actually enjoying it and not just, well, working. Over Christmas, I had so much fun playing an MMO that I woke up the next day thinking about how I couldn’t wait to log back in again. That kind of giddiness doesn’t happen to me so often anymore with games when I start to see them as objects of detached investigation — I want to change that.
Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog):Â I do actually have a few resolutions for this year, although I suppose they’re more like goals than anything.
1) Devote more time to roleplaying. This is important to me, and I tend to do it a lot, but it often comes in extended bursts or with odd time distribution. It’s even easy for me to start overwhelming myself with too much roleplaying in a given day, which in turn makes me want to take an extended break… in short, I need to start orienting my time a bit more diligently. Fortunately, I’ve got several months of Stormblood prep ahead of me, so I’ll have lots of time to get that discipline down. I’d also like to break out of some of my comfort zones there, as well.
2) Be better with projects. I far prefer projects in MMOs to waiting for luck; if I can make a bit of progress toward a goal every week, I prefer that to just hoping that I randomly get a good drop that I’d like. Sometimes I can get scared off of projects because I know they’re going to take me a while, though, and that’s all the more reason to smoothly pace out the projects that I’m undertaking across various games. Sure, a given project might take me a few months to put together successfully, but that just means I need to have a plan of attack and a straight line to completing that goal.
3) Try more things I know little to nothing about. Since I’m doing Choose My Adventure, this one pretty well takes care of itself.
4) Continue getting better at learning about systems, see how they tie together, and understand why things work or do not work. This is always something I’m doing, but every year I want to be better at it; if I look at the past and see things I missed in previous years, I know it’s going well.
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog):Â The important thing with resolutions is to be aspirational without being delusional. Don’t set the bar impossibly high, in other words. I don’t envision having any more time to game in 2017 than I do now (and probably a little less), but I do want to forge forward with trying at least one new game a week (MMO or non-MMO that I’ve never played before). I enjoyed doing that for part of 2016 and at least got to see titles like World of Fishing and Meridian 59.
I would love to catch up on my blog series to document all of The Secret World’s solo missions by the year’s end. I want to keep a character in LOTRO, RIFT, and World of Warcraft right at the edge of the casual content so I’m constantly poised to experience new patches when they release. I will finish RIFT: Starfall Prophecy. I will play and finish LOTRO’s Mordor expansion.
I will be more helpful and social in games, sacrificing some of my time to being there for others and offering my assistance on a more regular basis. I’ll try to attend more player events and document the life of the community.
Larry Everett (@Shaddoe, blog):Â I do make goals at the beginning of the year and revisit them periodically throughout the year. But I don’t make the goals to achieve them per se. I tend to make goals so that I can remain focused. If I don’t know where I want to be, then I’m easily sidetracked.
I think the key for me is to remain focused but flexible. I know that some of the things that I want to do each year are not easily achievable, so I usually work on an overarching idea or feeling. For instance, last year, I set a goal to have more energy. I felt that I wasnt able to do some of the other things I wanted to do because my energy was so low. At first, this meant going to the gym and exercising more, but as the year went on, things changed. My time for the gym lessened, so I figured out other ways to increase my energy like changing my diet.
I don’t think that I ever hit 100% of my goal, but I do have more energy now than I did last year. And I feel that I’m more focused in my gaming, which is the ultimate goal here, right?
Matt Daniel (@Matt_DanielMVOP): Man, I give myself enough anxiety by making (and almost inevitably failing to keep) standard, non-gaming-related resolutions. Honestly, the idea of making New Year’s gaming resolutions has never really occurred to me until just now, but I don’t reckon this is going to be the year I take up the practice. Although I obviously tend to set goals for myself in the MMOs I’m playing, they’re usually too broad to be proper “resolutions,” as it were, and they change with my mood–that is, rapidly and arbitrarily. And the idea of planning my year in gaming is laughable, especially in regard to MMOs, the launch dates of which tend to shift and fluctuate in manners beyond my ken, thereby making them poor foundations upon which to base my yearly schedule. I prefer to just wing it and play whatever crops up or catches my attention.
MJ Guthrie (@MJ_Guthrie, blog):Â I can honestly say I am not really the type of gamer who makes resolutions with my games. I like to keep my gaming as enjoyable a pastime as possible, and giving myself deadlines for accomplishing things pretty much does the opposite of that. Then I feel pushed and stressed to accomplish something; I’d rather do whatever my mood strikes me to do instead of shoehorn some activity in because I feel I “have to” by making it a goal. If I am not in the mood to play a specific game or engage in a particular activity, then feeling forced into it just makes me resentful and not enjoy my time there. Then what is the point of even gaming?
That said, I do have things I’d like to do, such as finishing some decorating ideas I have in EverQuest II and making more of an effort to make it to certain game festivals. I have levels I want to get in games and content I want to experience. I also would LOVE to get my guild concept working in the right game, but first I need a game with the right features for it to work! For me, it will be more of little goals as I go, when I decide there is something I want to accomplish at the moment and set out to do that. Overall I am aiming to try and play my favorite games more regularly, but that can be difficult and truly depends on what is happening in life at the time. I want to spend more time with friends in games. I am also planning to stream much more often on my own channel.
I do have actual established goals I have set that are related to gaming, however. They involve personal projects like developing different creative endeavors (podcast, comic) and diving fully back into content generation on LookingForShinies.com. I also need to get all my personal streams finally uploaded into my YouTube! Oh, and convince Bree to let me go to even more conventions and studio trips this year!
Your turn!
