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So, sitting here, alone, on Christmas Eve, my thoughts turn towards the topic of wasted time and life. Naturally, MMORPGs figure prominently in this thinking. So I was wondering, what is the biggest single time sink in all of MMORPGs? What one achievement to unlock, item to earn, stat to max out, or storyline to clear takes the most time out of the whole time wasting field, either in total playtime or real-life days from start to finish, assuming no dawdling? I'll lead off with my candidate, from the MMO I am most familiar with: Final Fantasy XI.
The first nominee, for the "total playtime" category, is completing the Trial of the Magians necessary to upgrade a mythic weapon from its level 95 version to its level 99 version. For this trial, the Magian Moogles, pretentious little kupo-ing floating twerps that they are, want 500 Mulcibar's Scoria. These things, which look like ordinary rocks, drop one at a time from a boss called Pandemonium Warden. Does this name sound familiar to you? He should. He's the infamous superboss that got Final Fantasy XI its greatest media attention in years when a group of hardcore players put in 18 continuous hours trying to beat him once and quit when they were too physically exhausted to continue. Square-Enix was sufficiently stung by the negative media from this to remove a number of his alternate forms, lower his hit points by quite a lot, and add a two hour timer to change the nature of the challenge from a marathon to a sprint. Furthermore, the level cap has been raised from 75 to 99 since PW was first put in (although this is less impressive than it sounds, as raw stat gains slowed down considerably past 75; the main benefit is having the "level correction" functions work for you instead of against you).
Anyway, so 500 fights x 2 hours per fight = 1000 hours, so it still sounds like a lot of work, right? Well, actually, that's the least of it. You see, you can't just waltz up to ole' Pandy and challenge him anytime you want, you have to trade a "Pandemonium Key" first. How do you get the key? You need to kill three lesser bosses for a trio of items to trade an NPC for it. These bosses in turn require special pop items of their own to spawn, which require yet more bosses to be spawned and killed and trades to be made, and so on. It turns out that you also need to kill a total of 12 of these sub-bosses for each and every single time you fight the Warden. You'll also need to run back and forth between the town where the item trading NPC is and the middle of nowhere where the bosses are fought every time. Sound bad? No, two paragraphs and several thousand hours in and we haven't got to the bad part yet.
Here it is: you know that NPC that I mentioned that you need to trade items with? Well, he won't do it for free. This isn't a charity, sonny. And don't think you can weasel out of it by coughing up ordinary currency either; this guy wants his own very special form of currency called "zeni". How do you get "zeni"? Well, this same old geezer will give it to you in exchange for pictures of monsters, which you must go out and take with a special disposable camera (that in turn needs its own special currency to purchase, but never mind that; it's actually the least troublesome part of the whole thing). Now, you can only turn in ten pictures per game day, which is a little shorter than a real-world hour. So, we find the maximum amount of zeni we can reasonably expect to get per picture and multiply by ten to get our basic hourly zeni earning rate. We then tote up the base zeni costs (they increase from the base cost based on demand, by the way, so this method will actually lowball our time expenses somewhat) for our twelve bosses (don't forget to add the cost of the salt you need to teleport to the tier 4 boss battlefields!), add the cost for the Pandemonium Key, multiply by 500, and divide the total by the hourly zeni rate to get our estimate of our zeni farming time in hours. And that time is (drum roll please)...
Twenty. Six. Thousand. Hours.
This is not a typo. This is also not a readily comprehensible figure. Let's start by figuring how many hours there are in a year, 365 days per year times 24 hours per day = 8670 hours. 26000 hours is just a hair under three years. That's three years of doing nothing but taking pictures--24 hours a day, with no sleep, eating at your keyboard and defecating in your chair. (I hope you installed your PC in your bathroom.) Ok, so doing it in a "mere" three years isn't practical, or even human for that matter. Let's try treating this like a job. How many hours do people work in a year? Well, this game was made by Japanese people, so let's see what they would consider a reasonable work-year in hours. According to the book The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, the highest estimate of the work year for the average Japanese male (and the FFXI dev team management are all men) is 2617 hours. Meaning that treating this like a job where you are a workaholic will get it done in about a decade. (Note that this is as much time as the game has been open to the public since its launch.)
Now, what else could you do with all that time?
According to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, the key to success in any field is practicing a specific task for 10000 hours. (Note that this is just a fraction of the time you'll spend on this trial.) He specifically mentions that the members of The Beatles spent that long playing in Germany before returning to England. (So by the time you're done, you'll be the FFXI equivalent of half of The Beatles, with time left over for Yoko Ono to boot.) 10000 hours is more than enough to get a degree. 10000 hours, if worked at a paying job, will earn you enough money to buy a brand new car, or make a down payment on a house--or you could move to one of the cheaper parts of the country, and buy the whole thing with one lump sum payment and no mortgage necessary (be sure to give the banking system the finger for me). So if you are insane enough to undertake this senseless trial, you will spend the equivalent time of multiple brand new cars, or houses, or college degrees.
So, how will putting in 26000+ hours of grinding work in an MMO compare to putting in the same amount of time in something more practical? Not very well, obviously, but it's worse than you think. You see, this isn't even the time to earn one item; no, this is the time needed to earn one UPGRADE to one item. To earn the ultimate form of a mythic weapon, one has to complete multiple trials of greatly varying difficulty (you will be relieved if confused to note that other than this one, all the trials are trivial and could be done in a weekend). But to even start the trials you must first earn the base form of the weapon, which prior to this was the worst time sink in the entire game (it took months of grinding plus hundreds of millions of gil worth of items). Not only that, but of the three types of ultimate weapons the game unnecessarily has (but that's a whole other rant), mythic weapons are the lousiest type. As for whether this will be true once the trial is completed, well, no one knows at this point because no one has seen the stats on the final weapon yet let alone got to run any detailed comparisons. But hey, we know that after all this, it finally glows, and that's pretty cool, right?
As long as I am going on at length about the final mythic weapon magian trial, I might as well include the reaction of the playerbase to it. There are a tiny handful of people claiming that it will "separate those who worked for their weapons from those who got them handed to them", and similar nonsense. At least one of those is a poster generally supposed to be posting for no other reason than trolling; as for the other two, I have learned from my work on the 2000 U.S. Census that if you encounter enough people, at least a few of them are bound to be crazy. The reaction of the rest of the playerbase mostly resembles the Kübler-Ross model of the Five Stages of Grief: Denial ("it's just a placeholder number that they put on test server, the real number will be more reasonable", Anger ("They're crazy! Tanaka should be fired!"), Bargaining ("Ok, five PW kills would be fine. Maybe ten?"), Depression ("It's 2005 all over again. They're ruining the whole game..."), and finally, Acceptance ("I quit. See you guys on WoW!")
So that's my nomination for "Worst Single MMO Time Sink". What's yours? Surely some Korean grinder MMO out there can top this! Come on South Korea, we're counting on you! You can beat the hated Japanese, we know it!
The first nominee, for the "total playtime" category, is completing the Trial of the Magians necessary to upgrade a mythic weapon from its level 95 version to its level 99 version. For this trial, the Magian Moogles, pretentious little kupo-ing floating twerps that they are, want 500 Mulcibar's Scoria. These things, which look like ordinary rocks, drop one at a time from a boss called Pandemonium Warden. Does this name sound familiar to you? He should. He's the infamous superboss that got Final Fantasy XI its greatest media attention in years when a group of hardcore players put in 18 continuous hours trying to beat him once and quit when they were too physically exhausted to continue. Square-Enix was sufficiently stung by the negative media from this to remove a number of his alternate forms, lower his hit points by quite a lot, and add a two hour timer to change the nature of the challenge from a marathon to a sprint. Furthermore, the level cap has been raised from 75 to 99 since PW was first put in (although this is less impressive than it sounds, as raw stat gains slowed down considerably past 75; the main benefit is having the "level correction" functions work for you instead of against you).
Anyway, so 500 fights x 2 hours per fight = 1000 hours, so it still sounds like a lot of work, right? Well, actually, that's the least of it. You see, you can't just waltz up to ole' Pandy and challenge him anytime you want, you have to trade a "Pandemonium Key" first. How do you get the key? You need to kill three lesser bosses for a trio of items to trade an NPC for it. These bosses in turn require special pop items of their own to spawn, which require yet more bosses to be spawned and killed and trades to be made, and so on. It turns out that you also need to kill a total of 12 of these sub-bosses for each and every single time you fight the Warden. You'll also need to run back and forth between the town where the item trading NPC is and the middle of nowhere where the bosses are fought every time. Sound bad? No, two paragraphs and several thousand hours in and we haven't got to the bad part yet.
Here it is: you know that NPC that I mentioned that you need to trade items with? Well, he won't do it for free. This isn't a charity, sonny. And don't think you can weasel out of it by coughing up ordinary currency either; this guy wants his own very special form of currency called "zeni". How do you get "zeni"? Well, this same old geezer will give it to you in exchange for pictures of monsters, which you must go out and take with a special disposable camera (that in turn needs its own special currency to purchase, but never mind that; it's actually the least troublesome part of the whole thing). Now, you can only turn in ten pictures per game day, which is a little shorter than a real-world hour. So, we find the maximum amount of zeni we can reasonably expect to get per picture and multiply by ten to get our basic hourly zeni earning rate. We then tote up the base zeni costs (they increase from the base cost based on demand, by the way, so this method will actually lowball our time expenses somewhat) for our twelve bosses (don't forget to add the cost of the salt you need to teleport to the tier 4 boss battlefields!), add the cost for the Pandemonium Key, multiply by 500, and divide the total by the hourly zeni rate to get our estimate of our zeni farming time in hours. And that time is (drum roll please)...
Twenty. Six. Thousand. Hours.
This is not a typo. This is also not a readily comprehensible figure. Let's start by figuring how many hours there are in a year, 365 days per year times 24 hours per day = 8670 hours. 26000 hours is just a hair under three years. That's three years of doing nothing but taking pictures--24 hours a day, with no sleep, eating at your keyboard and defecating in your chair. (I hope you installed your PC in your bathroom.) Ok, so doing it in a "mere" three years isn't practical, or even human for that matter. Let's try treating this like a job. How many hours do people work in a year? Well, this game was made by Japanese people, so let's see what they would consider a reasonable work-year in hours. According to the book The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, the highest estimate of the work year for the average Japanese male (and the FFXI dev team management are all men) is 2617 hours. Meaning that treating this like a job where you are a workaholic will get it done in about a decade. (Note that this is as much time as the game has been open to the public since its launch.)
Now, what else could you do with all that time?
According to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, the key to success in any field is practicing a specific task for 10000 hours. (Note that this is just a fraction of the time you'll spend on this trial.) He specifically mentions that the members of The Beatles spent that long playing in Germany before returning to England. (So by the time you're done, you'll be the FFXI equivalent of half of The Beatles, with time left over for Yoko Ono to boot.) 10000 hours is more than enough to get a degree. 10000 hours, if worked at a paying job, will earn you enough money to buy a brand new car, or make a down payment on a house--or you could move to one of the cheaper parts of the country, and buy the whole thing with one lump sum payment and no mortgage necessary (be sure to give the banking system the finger for me). So if you are insane enough to undertake this senseless trial, you will spend the equivalent time of multiple brand new cars, or houses, or college degrees.
So, how will putting in 26000+ hours of grinding work in an MMO compare to putting in the same amount of time in something more practical? Not very well, obviously, but it's worse than you think. You see, this isn't even the time to earn one item; no, this is the time needed to earn one UPGRADE to one item. To earn the ultimate form of a mythic weapon, one has to complete multiple trials of greatly varying difficulty (you will be relieved if confused to note that other than this one, all the trials are trivial and could be done in a weekend). But to even start the trials you must first earn the base form of the weapon, which prior to this was the worst time sink in the entire game (it took months of grinding plus hundreds of millions of gil worth of items). Not only that, but of the three types of ultimate weapons the game unnecessarily has (but that's a whole other rant), mythic weapons are the lousiest type. As for whether this will be true once the trial is completed, well, no one knows at this point because no one has seen the stats on the final weapon yet let alone got to run any detailed comparisons. But hey, we know that after all this, it finally glows, and that's pretty cool, right?
As long as I am going on at length about the final mythic weapon magian trial, I might as well include the reaction of the playerbase to it. There are a tiny handful of people claiming that it will "separate those who worked for their weapons from those who got them handed to them", and similar nonsense. At least one of those is a poster generally supposed to be posting for no other reason than trolling; as for the other two, I have learned from my work on the 2000 U.S. Census that if you encounter enough people, at least a few of them are bound to be crazy. The reaction of the rest of the playerbase mostly resembles the Kübler-Ross model of the Five Stages of Grief: Denial ("it's just a placeholder number that they put on test server, the real number will be more reasonable", Anger ("They're crazy! Tanaka should be fired!"), Bargaining ("Ok, five PW kills would be fine. Maybe ten?"), Depression ("It's 2005 all over again. They're ruining the whole game..."), and finally, Acceptance ("I quit. See you guys on WoW!")
So that's my nomination for "Worst Single MMO Time Sink". What's yours? Surely some Korean grinder MMO out there can top this! Come on South Korea, we're counting on you! You can beat the hated Japanese, we know it!
So, is this about accurate?
