I just enjoy falling down rabbit holes, it seems!

My addiction to Smite has gradually worn off, as well as my addiction to Puzzle & Dragons.

In Smite, I kept getting matched up against teams of players while everyone on my team was solo, and so we'd obviously get demolished unless the other team was rubbish (which is incredibly rare).

Our little group of friends playing it also somewhat died off, due to schedules not matching, other games coming out, and just life in general. It's hard once you get older, to schedule things with other people.. any adults reading this will instantly understand, but for the youth who don't have much going on in their lives outside of school (which all of your friends will go to with you) this will be an enigma. Even I, growing up, didn't understand why people seemingly stopped gaming or just couldn't find the time.

When you work, that eats up about 8 of your 24 hours in a day. Assuming you sleep ~6 hours, that's 14 hours of 24 hours gone, so you have 10 hours a day to do whatever you want. That's PLENTY of time to game, but then when you're living on your own, you have other things to take care of. Errands, cleaning the house, laundry, groceries, all of that stuff... and you never realize it while you're living at home, because your parents take care of it all for you, but once you get old and shoved out into the real world, all your time just evaporates. It's pretty insane. If you're like myself, you say fuck that noise and still try to dedicate a minimum of 8hrs/day to gaming, buuut when you throw other adults into the mix, who will have a significant other they want to spend time with, and other activities like hanging out with friends, all of that extra time becomes less and less, and then trying to work with their schedules and things they have going on, and make it mix with what you have going on, it's just a big mess.

Moving along from that tangent, PUZZLE & DRAGONS. I hit a wall in the game where I need to start building a team and leveling up / evolving my monsters, or spending money on the premium gacha machine for a team of super powerful monsters (which will still require me grinding to level up enough to use those monsters..) and I just kinda started losing interest. I still log in every day to collect the daily reward, and get my daily magic stone incase I do decide to come back to it, but I've just seriously kinda given up on it as a whole, and am instead waiting for the 3DS release.

As an aside, I actually haven't been doing the Smite daily login at all, because their daily rewards suck. In Puzzle & Dragons, the daily gives you 200 PAL points (which is a free spin on the free gacha machine that gives you crap monsters) and 10,000 credits (which is negligible, but they also fairly often give you magic stones, which are the premium currency). Smite gives you 50 gems per week (15 on day 6, 35 on day 7) which is a hilarious amount considering that characters and costumes typically start at 200, with the most common being 400. So 1-2 months of logging in every day to get any sort of reward, completely ignoring the 600 gem costumes, (which would be 3 months of logging in every day) if you decide you want to play for free. Outside of the end of the week daily bonus, there's really nothing except credits, which is very bland.

Marvel Heroes, (which I intend to discuss in length in another post) on the other hand, has a full 1000 days of rewards listed for you to scroll through and examine any time you'd like, letting you know fully what you'll be getting on each day. Additionally, missing a day DOES NOT RESET YOU BACK TO 1! This is most likely because if they did, you would be able to get the 400 Etenal Splinters (free currency used to buy heroes and the like) from day 2 (new player reward), but it has the added benefit of respecting your time. If you lapse and decide to play something else, you aren't being punished by getting stuck with the "crappy" rewards, instead you're only being rewarded for logging in every day. It's a system like that that has made me want to log in to their game every day, even if I've gotten bored and no longer play it, because down the line when I do decide to revisit it, I'll be all the richer for it. It's a daily system done RIGHT, and I'm incredibly happy with how they managed it.

I'll talk about Marvel Heroes in detail later, and I'll write up a post discussing what I'm going to be reviewing & playing down the line just so people aren't left in the dark! I just thought it'd be nice to post some regular blog updates every once in a while to keep people informed.