I was thinking about this the other day due to my experiment with the AIR Career Program on one of my characters in EVE Online.  I ran through it because the rewards were tangible and it wasn’t all that difficult.  I ended up with the 750K in skill points and all the little rewards along the way.

It went smoothly enough that I figured I should do it again.  I had five more characters who sat with various states of progress towards the end goal… you can’t do much in EVE Online and not check off something on the AIR Career Program list… so I picked one that I had done some of the paired activities with already and set out.

And then gave up on it shortly thereafter.

It wasn’t that I had any particularly difficult bits left.  There isn’t a lot on the list that is that difficult to do.  I was just done with it.  I had no enthusiasm for carrying on.  The bubble of motivation had burst and I just wanted to do something besides that… even if I had nothing else to do in EVE Online.  I’d rather log off and do something else.

This happens to me in video games… and especially so in EVE Online, which lends itself to these sorts of ventures requiring patience and a stretch of time… where I am all in on something until I reach my goal, then I am no longer interested.

For example, mining in EVE Online.  That was one of my early paths in New Eden.  There is a whole series of posts from about 17 years ago with me mining away, skilling up into to mining ships, gaining efficiency, getting to the final exhumer at the time, the Hulk… and then being bored with the whole thing once I got there.

There are not a lot of posts since then about me mining in EVE Online.

And it isn’t just EVE Online.

I remember way back in the Need for Speed World days, doing the daily gem hunt for 180 consecutive days in order to get the top achievement for it and the reward.

New Car

The reward was somewhat tepid… but more importantly, I felt no need to do the gem hunt on day 181.  I was done.  I let my streak break.

It isn’t just a matter of the task not being fun.  I often enjoyed the gem hunt or mining in EVE Online, or doing the AIR Career Program, so it isn’t like the game became unfun for me, like LOTRO in Mirkwood.

The whole thing also made me tentative about things like WoW Classic.  Always in the back of my mind was the question of whether or not I was really going to be up for the whole thing, so I was kind of surprised when it turned out I was, that there were things I was keen to do again.

I mean, I wasn’t having the whole of the Outland content.  But I wasn’t having that back in 2007 either.  But I ground up to level 60 with the group, we did all the instances, and when we got to Wrath of the Lich King I did all of that I could, including the Argent Tournament Daily quests.

It all fell apart in Cataclysm… but again, I wasn’t a fan the first time around there either.

And I wonder about it with things like my current venture into LOTRO and what the replayability of something like Enshrouded, which has been great the first time through, might be.

It is one of those things that I can often only spot in retrospective, points where I drop off and stop playing a game because the bubble… or maybe the “meta immersions” or something, I am not sure what the right term is… has burst and I just stop launching the game and find something else.

But I am also interested in how other people let go of things long before I do as well as people who seem to be immune to the grind or whatever.

As an example of the latter, I return to the AIR Career Program where I started.  Too dull for me to even do twice, there are people out there who do it every day… who do the entire thing, on two characters, in a 12-48 hour recurring cycle, with a break where the delete the characters they have run it on… deletion, or biomasses, has a timer on it so you cannot instantly replace a deleted character with a fresh one… and start over again.  They just keep doing it to collect the skill points in their redemption queue to inject into another character, either to improve their skills or to then extract and sell on the market.

I would clearly rather play another game that do that, but given the stats in the MER, there are a bunch of people who do that as a regular part of their time with EVE Online.  It makes me feel almost flighty in my lack of desire to even finish it up on a second character.

So I can’t really say where my level of determination sits.  Some people think I am hard core because we ran through Valheim three times or because I played WoW Classic.   But I see people playing WoW Classic Hardcore and know I walked away from it because that was way too much of a grind.

Where do you think you sit?  What grind have you done that others walk away from?