Short (?) Break

There’s been several small reasons why I’ve been turned off to the game lately:

• Multiplayer-only challenge dungeons
• Jewel invades in 10x
• No new collab
• No major update (skill inheritance, etc)
• No new ranking dungeon
• Arena 2 being shit
• Several old friends have appeared to stop playing
• Tamadras in the mail

However, they’ve all coalesced in a single week and when combined with a few other circumstances they’ve made me reconsider what I was doing. Where before I could distract myself since there was enough things to occupy my attention, it wasn’t like that this week. So I’ve decided to take a break from hardcore play.

The overarching reason for this break is that I have little reason to continue the grind. While 10x was a blessing, it’s also a curse as I basically finished hypermaxing everything remotely useful in the game. This really only leaves two long term goals for me: ranking up and vanity hypermaxes. All my rank EXP comes from grinding skill ups and +eggs, so when the +egg grind seems pointless all that’s left are empty rank ups only for the sake of ranking up. I was somewhat excited to get 10x + Goemon again, but the jewel invades gave me just enough of an excuse to give up on the entire process.

So, in short, GungHo has failed to keep me engaged through a combination of poor decisions and coincidence. Now it’s up to them to give me a reason to play hardcore again. Until then, I’ll be cutting down my play time significantly. The game is still great at its core, but at least in the short term I won’t be devoting as much time (and money) to it.

If this is like any other game I’ve played hardcore in the past, I know there are some people out there that would think I ruined the game for myself by pouring so much time and money into the game and advancing too quickly. This may have been close to a rational thought a decade or so ago when there was much less game selection, but nowadays getting through a game’s content is almost a good thing as it frees time to visit other options. Which I intend to do (Tree of Savior, Uncharted 4, etc.).

What does this mean for this blog? Well, I’m sure most have noticed that I’ve put significantly less effort into it as of late. Some of that is laziness, some of that is being busy, but in most part I feel like there just isn’t anything interesting to talk about anymore. Teams are boring now, much in part due to MP cards and skill inheritance. Latents are mostly pointless. Skill inheritance is so circumstantial that there’s little point in discussing it. Co-op trivializes content, especially after one obtains MZeus. Even ranking dungeons have lost their luster due to preset teams, skill inheritance and most of the scoring mechanics being solved. So, in short, regardless of whether I decided to take a break or not I think the blog would’ve slowly continued to ramp down anyways.

I intend to continue the tier list posts since they’re so easy to do due to the script. I’ll still probably do the godfest help posts as long as there’s interest, but I anticipate less interest as the overall blog viewership dwindles due to the lessened activity. I’ll still likely do collab reviews if only for my own research. Outside that, most posts will cease, at least until the game becomes more interesting again.

Will I quit the game? I don’t think so. Unless PAD actually does go full co-op, the beauty of the game is that you can pick it up whenever and get a few dungeons in. However, PAD really needs to step its game up to get me to play again in earnest.

See you next week.