First I want to take a quick moment to talk about the awesome avatar adorning the right side of this paragraph. Some time ago I talked about doing the Icecrown Challenge and to the best of my knowledge most of the folks I challenged have since completed their own and donated some money to the cause. I still feel slightly sorry for Mort who ended up taking almost 50 minutes to get through the raid because had apparently never actually raided during Wrath of the Lich King. I did the challenge because one… I end up doing Icecrown Citadel almost every week anyways, and two because of the weird connection that Ratsel and I just found out that we have. Then of course there is always the part that it is a good cause. Of all of the reasons however… none of them was to win any prizes but apparently I did. The prize I happened to win was the amazing Faebelina doing an avatar, and instead of my character I chose to have her do a “Me”. So I supplied her some images and set her loose in a specific direction… and largely wanted to see what she came up with on her own. The end result is something really interesting that so far everyone has said “yup, that looks like you”. In the end though I really need to get the hat, hoodie and shirt so I can cosplay myself. I am mostly using it on my “real life” accounts but I wanted to show it off nonetheless because I think it is really cool.
Last year I realized that with the whole daily blogging thing that I had a decent way of telling exactly what games I had played during the year. Like I often do I took to Google Sheets and started a spreadsheet trying to track what games I played during what months. This year I went sorta overboard with that concept and you see the image above as a result. Essentially if I talked about a game during a given month… I put a 1 in that square and ultimately colored it it. Then in the last column I did a calculation that added up all of the months that a given game appeared in… and as a result you have the sort above… by number of months played and then alphabetically. The first thing we can take away from this graphic is that there is no denying the fact that I am an online and MMO gamer. Based on the data above I played the following MMOs…
- World of Warcraft – All Twelve Months
- Destiny – 10 Months
- Final Fantasy XIV – 10 Months
- Rift – 8 Months
- Diablo 3 – 6 Months
- The Division – 5 Months
- Guild Wars 2 – 4 Months
- Overwatch – 4 Months
- ArcheAge – 3 Months
- Elder Scrolls Online – 3 Months
As far as non-online games that I played… you end up dropping down significantly into single digit territory with only a handful of games like Fallout 4, Skyrim, and No Man’s Sky making that repeat list. The big shocker for me is always seeing all the various singlets I end up playing throughout the year that I completely forget about. All told I played 57 different games during the year… which seems like a lot but is a bit down from last year and it’s 67 unique games. So I feel like the real tale of the year is just how much World of Warcraft and Destiny I wound up playing. Sure FFXIV is up there at 10 months but some of that is a technicality while I was subbed but only logging in once a week or every few weeks. Destiny and World of Warcraft really were constant things throughout the course of the year. This was the year I feel like I really learned to love WoW again, more than just a passing fancy that let me play with my friends. With the launch of Legion I was legitimately and unabashedly happy to be playing the game for the first time since the launch of Cataclysm. In fact Destiny dropped off the Radar only for the blip around the launch of Legion because I was just playing that game so damned much.
Even More Madness
The problem with spreadsheets is that they crave more data… and once I start down a path I tend to go into really insane territory. I had data that I had collected for 2015, and now data that I had collected for 2016. I wondered what would happen if I went all the way back to 2013, the year I first started the daily blogging experiment. Now of note… the 2013 data is super spotty given that I did not officially start the daily blogging thing until April. However I managed to piece together some data based on my archive of screenshots mixed with actual data from the blog. The end result is a view of the games I have played since 2013 copied into my weird google sheets format. Once again you can see that I really am an MMO Gamer overall. The top ten games played in total number of months is as follows…
- World of Warcraft – 37 Months
- Final Fantasy XIV – 35 Months
- Rift – 35 Months
- Elder Scrolls Online – 24 Months
- Destiny – 19 Months
- Diablo 3 – 16 Months
- ArcheAge – 13 Months
- Wildstar – 12 Months
- Everquest II – 11 Months
- Guild Wars 2 – 9 Months
- Trove – 9 Months
Of note… Trove and Guild Wars 2 are technically tied for 10th place with the same number of months. The only one that gets a little weird is Elder Scrolls Online, because I am counting time spent playing in the Alpha and Beta process which I could not of course talk about on my blog. However I entered that process in February of 2013 and we had one or two events a month through launch. During that four year period I played 172 different unique games. Again however if you look at the distribution of titles played… you have to go pretty far on the list until you get into single player territory with Minecraft, Fallout 4 and Final Fantasy V leading there. Minecraft technically can be a multiplayer game, but generally speaking I go on single player building binges. Final Fantasy V pretty much accounts for all of the years I have gotten talked into participating in the Four Job Fiesta thanks to Ashgar.
At some point I want to true up the data even further by going through my screenshot archive and sorting it by dates. I have literally every screenshot I have taken over the last several years archived and sorted by game sitting on a network attached storage device. I am maybe a little obsessive about such things, especially since screenshots tend to play such a large role in my blog. I like having a deep archive of things that I can go back to for getting reference material. From that I should be able to get a few more games that maybe I played but didn’t actually write about. However I think for the most part this represents a pretty true picture of my gameplay for the last four years. It took awhile to compile, but much of it was done while hanging out downstairs on the laptop as we watched something on television. The end result gives me a really interesting tool to use going forward, and I plan on keeping the spreadsheet up to date as I go through 2017. The biggest thing we can take away from this however is that… firstly I am a creature of habit and keep returning to the same games over and over. Secondly I tend to be one of those players that keeps returning to MMOs that I have played in the past to see how they are getting along. Lastly… I really do not play the number of single player games that I would like to play, mostly because while playing them I get lonely. It feels strange to roam around a world without lots of other people sharing it with me.
