[Steely Jim]

I haven’t gone anywhere, but it sometimes seems like I have. I don’t generally spend a lot of time playing anyway, but I’m not even hitting 2 hours per week right now. Personally, I’m not likely to leave on the basis of being bored with the supplied content. My attraction to this game was generically out of interest in developing a pirate character, and specifically related to how much I enjoyed the ride the first time I went to WDW in 1977; the movie has relatively little to do with it, except that I do feel it feel it’s an authentic expression of the narrative shown throughout the theme park ride.

Neither “Leveling,” nor Questing, really drives much of my interest in MMOs. My interest is in developing characters that feel “authentic” in the context of the game world. I also gravitated to PotCO due to its “MMOG lite” nature, as I know I don’t have the time to play a hardcore MMORPG. Just like is commonly mentioned in this game, as it pertains to guilds, people are usually looking to maintain a repeated high density of social interactions with the same people within the game. Since my play style is never to spend long stretches in the game, and because I regularly come and go on multi-week cycles (i.e. I play for a few weeks, then don’t bother for a few weeks, then go back to it for a few weeks, and so on), I long ago relegated myself to just amusing myself by socializing with whomever happens to be around rather than a finite group of players.

I know that most of the mainstream games make much out of “level grinding” and “group memberships,” but not all MMOGs are so dependent on content additions to drive interest in play. My favorite play experiences have been on games that were often still technically in development, and after expansions characters were regularly stat-wiped; no one cared in those games because their relationships were built on the personalities they gave to their characters, not the stats/completed quests associated with those characters.

For now, PotCO is the best fit for me; however, the flashy, high-speed grindfests will never seem as appealing to me as the role-play driven concepts like the Eternal Lands, PlaneShift(s), and Illarion(s) of the MMO universe.