In the category of being stress rather than slack

[brynndragon]

So, A Tale in the Desert is not a game you can play if you're not willing to put in at least an hour or three a day. I hadn't been able to play during the week and came back to find that everything I had gained and made since the game began had degraded into being either inaccessible or unusable. That medium stone I got for spending two hours on a dig for research? That onion seed I got from a neighbor? My one jug for water? Can't get to them at all. A nice Catch 22: I could get to learning the skill needed to repair those things if I could get to/use the things.

That's plenty enough to make me uninterested in playing anymore. I'm going to stick to Rune Factory, which doesn't punish me for having to do homework and see patients.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Damn. I have stopped playing games for that very reason...it is very easy for someone to out-free-time me. And you're nearly as much of a multi-classer. ;)

I'm'a'gonna steal this incident for WWG, of course. (There's already some thoughts along this line in there, in the early going.)

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

But this isn't even about other people. This is the game itself punishing me for not spending enough time with it, indicating that it was designed to filter out people who are insufficiently addicted at the very beginning (it gets more forgiving as the game gets out of the initial growth phase - a single item would have prevented my problem entirely, an item I had been simply given upon finishing a task I did on the first day [ETA: the previous time I played this game]). I guess they only want the out-and-out extroverts who had a ton of free time on their hands first the first phase of the game. I wish they'd fucking told me that before I paid them.