I’m sure there are studies about this topic but I’m still drinking my coffee and feeling lazy this morning. Maybe I’ll find and link some later. For now, I’m just happy to be sticking to my guns about blogging again on a regular basis.

I’ve played my female Sith Warrior through the initial 9 chapters of Knights of the Fallen Empire in SWTOR. I wanted to play the dark side and loyal Emperor’s Wrath, so she knelt when he offered her the option. Now, I’m preparing to play a Sith Warrior through the content again, because he romanced Vette and she will be added back to the game next week. Funny how I’m willing to play through repeat content when there is some small and specific reward at the end of it. Goals and motivations, there must be gaming development science to this stuff.

Did I mention the whole “preparing” part of playing the content with him? Yep, instead of leaping right in and hitting the “play” button for the Outlander story, I decided that I’d finish up Rishi, I was really close to being done with it. Then I got sidetracked thinking I’d try for the Rishi datacrons while I was there… what a rabbit hole of unfinished business I fell down. I finally gave up on farming for the data packets, there is only so much drudgery I can take to pursue an achievement, and that hit my limit.

Finished Rishi, you’d think then I might hit Play? Nope, for some reason I decided to just go do Yavin 4. And now my Warrior sits on a station over Ziost. I am terrible when it comes to leaving things unfinished. Call it perfectionism, but I’ll bet many of us have the same problem with unfinished business. It is undoubtedly tied up in the science of creating achievements for games.

Goals and motivations sure make you do strange things and put up with drudgery. I was on my ‘Slinger one night decorating my 5th stronghold, when my guild was putting together a gearing Operation. I hadn’t been on an Ops for a while, so I filled in a slot for them. To my great surprise, I had fun. I also ended up leaving with a 2 piece set of raid gear. Oh dear… now I’m going down the rabbit hole of gearing up my Gunslinger, which involves crafting on multiple characters and additional Operations runs. But I’m playing and I actually finished Temple of Sacrifice, an Operation I’d only done part of before. I saw Ops content I hadn’t seen before, bonus!

I even found myself running around with a bunch of folks gathering datacrons. Yes, nice people took pity on sad “can’t jump” people like me to help us get some of the harder ones. Datacrons are one thing where I never balanced my need to complete them against my absolute loathing for missing jump targets.

So, where was I going with this? While content schedules in games never seem to give us “new” group content as much as we get solo achievement content, it still needs to be put into game as often and as frequently as possible. Even though I know all about the gear treadmill that is MMO raiding, it still manages to hook me and give me goals. I feel compelled to complete my gearing up, to see all the boss fights, and kick my support staff/alts into gear. I sit here with hope in my heart than the next set of updates in the game involves fun group content again. I need it to get motivated.