Comparing Played Times
402 words.
I found an old, old screenshot of my main Asheron’s Call character from near the end of my playing time:
What MMORPGs looked like when they were more work than fun.
There’s some interesting things to note there. First of all, my /played time was 17d 11h 26m 22s. I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing that game… it seemed like my entire life was spent in that game for about a year. (I was playing AC when everyone else was playing EverQuest.) Yet I only reached level 35. In AC, your character “level” wasn’t much except a measurement of how much you had played-your power level came from your skills. Level 35 seemed like an impossibly high number to me back then. I knew people in their 40s and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could get there without giving up sleep entirely.
I never thought I would ever wrack up 17 days of playing time on one character in any other MMO in my life, but then after my main WoW Hunter reached level 98, I noticed this:
The total time played for my main WoW character is now over 19 days! Two more days than when I had an arguably unhealthy addiction to Asheron’s Call! Fortunately that 19 days spans over about eight years, so that’s not too bad. (Altoholic reports that the total playing time over all of my WoW characters is about 35 days.)
Then I started to think about games I’ve played more than WoW and I started to wonder.
I played a lot of Guild Wars 2 after it came out.
GW2 doesn’t make this easy, but that comes out to almost 12 days of playing time for my main Necromancer character, and almost 31 days for all of my characters together. Not as much as WoW, but most of my GW2 time was crammed into that first year.
But that pales in comparison to the game I’ve probably played more than any other MMO in my MMO-playing life: Rift.
Yes, that’s 35 days on one character in Rift since, what, 2011? The next three highest /played times on other characters are 13 days, 11 days, and 10 days on my other level 60s, and I have numerous characters 40 and under on various servers. So yeah, I’ve played a lot of Rift if you add it all up.
Shut up. It’s a good game.
Archived Comments
Wilhelm Arcturus 2015-01-21T17:08:49Z
My first EverQuest II character (created November 13, 2004) shows a played time of 197d 7h 35m 36s. (Thanks to EQ2Wire that lets you view characters via their EQU page.)
Big number, and all the more so when you consider I haven’t really played him all that much since maybe 2007.
However, the real reason that number is so big is that to sell in the EQII marketplace way back in the day, you had to be online and in your house. So I would log him in before I went to work and leave him there all day… and all night too when I wasn’t using my computer.
I forget when SOE finally put in offline selling, but it wasn’t before I probably racked up 150 days worth of “play” time sitting idle in my house.
bhagpuss 2015-01-21T21:24:19Z
I have two GW2 accounts. The one I’m logged into now shows 2,940 hours played. The other would be, at a guess, 2/3rds of that so call it around 5,000 hours in total. That’s over 200 days (full, 24 hour days) out of two-and a half years. Sounds like I spend nearly all my waking time either working or playing GW2.
In fact I spend most of my waking time while not working LOGGED IN to GW2. If I’m home, the first thing I do each day is switch on my PC and it stays on until I go to bed. After I log in I usually log into GW2 and leave it logged in whether I am playing or not. I have it logged in while I’m writing or reading blogs, doing research, web surfing or answering emails. If the game logs me out for inactivity I immediately log back in.
I stay logged in when I cook, eat, have a bath and often even if I go out of the house on an errand I expect to last less than a couple of hours. I stay logged in if I’m in another room chatting to Mrs Bhagpuss, if I’m on the phone or if I’m doing pretty much anything. I often have GW2 logged in while I am playing another MMO!
Consequently I really have no idea how much time I’ve actually spent playing GW2. It would still be a lot though.
UltrViolet 2015-01-21T22:39:08Z Wow that’s hardcore. :) In my old, old UO days I used to tape down keys to gain skills while I wasn’t playing, but I probably still wouldn’t have come close to those hours. I kind of admire people that can stick with a particular game that much… I just lose interest too fast these days.
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