How much time would you say you've wasted?

If that was during one entire play session, I think 3 hours trying to connect is too much. I would probably quit after 3 minutes and try again some time later (maybe 1 hour later) to see if it connects, then try again later if that doesn't work. If it's cumulative time spent connecting to servers (every once in a while during some days over a long time span), then I guess it wouldn't be too bad; I just think putting a large dent into one day is terrible.

 

Probably isn't worth it then. I think what's disappointing is when AE comes up with better alternatives, especially months after players have already wasted entire days farming for things.

An example is the dye craft shop that was released not long ago. Instead of wasting days waiting for bosses in the daily boss map just to earn dyes (which already have a low drop rate), players now have the option to turn in Daily Boss Trophies in exchange for dyes. Oftentimes, players are stuck at 30 Daily Boss Trophies, and don't really have anything else to use them on, and now the dye craft shop offers an actual purpose to spending those trophies... and the thing is, you can early 2 Daily Boss Trophies in a single day (by waiting for the day to roll over at midnight, then doing the quest... and then relogging to do the quest again).

It's definitely unbalanced, because the new alternative is a lot better than the way players had to farm dyes previously. Just earn two trophies per day, and now you have the ability to exchange for two dyes. Sometimes it can take up to 6 hours, sometimes even longer, just to earn two dyes, and some dyes are worse to farm than others (e.g. Sandy Orange Dye is probably the worst, since the boss spawn time is a lot longer, about 5 minutes). Pretty much anyone that forced themselves to farm dyes before the latest update wasted a lot of time, and it's probably the biggest timewaster compared to anything else currently in the game, especially for players that bothered to craft every armor variant in Yokai Isle.

 

I can appreciate the easier and more reasonable content, because I believe no MMORPG, or any game for that matter, should induce players to unhealthy levels of farming, but at the same time, I think the alternative should have been brought out sooner than later, so players wouldn't have wasted so much time in the first place. I think it's ridiculous that some video games, especially an MMORPG like AQ3D have to excusably categorize difficulty as "time wasters" rather than actual challenges that require skill. It's the lack of depth and implementation of features that prevents AQ3D from moving on to more enjoyable, less time-consuming content, so the game has to provide alternatives like timewasters to fill up a week's worth of content (or longer than a week). If I was really desperate to play a game for long hours, I'd much prefer it to be something fun like PvP, or something that has a constant reward factor.

 

I think taking frequent breaks is important for maintaining any form of sanity and it's an overall balance of good health. Some gamers take things way too far, especially doing 24-hour challenges (or longer) and consuming energy drinks and junk food. Just going outside for a stroll and some fresh air after an hour of playing a game feels a lot better than doing more internal harm to yourself when sitting and staring at a screen.

And when you factor everything together, it really is a waste of time spending hours at a screen, because even if you think you're utilizing your time wisely at that given moment (for digital "eye-candy" that doesn't matter at the end of the day), you're really just cutting out the longevity of your life and removing future opportunities, which is a bigger loss. But as the saying goes, carpe diem!

 

I didn't say every moment had to be productive, and productivity also varies. For instance, going outside instead of working can be seen as productive to one's health, but work can be seen as productive as well since it means getting things done; it all varies from point of view what productivity means.

What I'm saying is that people shouldn't be tormenting themselves to wasting several hours on things that won't make much of a difference later on (grinding for long hours or doing ridiculous in-game objectives), especially if it means spending 12 stressful hours on playing a video game just to achieve one thing. If people enjoy that sort of stuff and actually think it's fun without experiencing stress, then their time is worth while, but if people are only stressing themselves and making it worse on their health, then that's just a bad use of time.

And I really do think any video game should be designed with entertainment prioritized first, not stress, because then it'll cater to more people; otherwise, it just isn't worth a lot of people's time, and that's just one of the biggest issues with AQ3D. It's an MMORPG designed with hours of filler on a weekly basis. Oftentimes there aren't really items and useful objectives that can be farmed for within 20 minutes of gameplay (and farming for a set could take several hours), and the only thing that ends up being short are the stories, and sometimes there's barely any introduction or even a hook in those stories. It's sort of backwards, when you think about the game's design process. Usually captivating stories and intermittent farming is the tour de force of a successful game, and AQ3D just does the opposite of that.

 

PvP isn't even well-balanced. It's just 1v1 dueling for whoever has the gear with the best stats and has potions and other item buffs. You don't even have the option to fairly PvP with low-leveled friends or "rent your own gear" for some fair equalizer against players you would normally lose and win against 99% of the time, and you don't even get any reward out of PvP. For some players, it's their only way to pass time since they don't have anything else to do, but it's ultimately a lackluster feature just like a lot of other features in the game. The majority of the game is bare-bone... like recently, they patched the hotkey bind for the travel menu to include the map graphic, but what even is the point of including a map graphic, when you as the player don't even interact with it to access areas? There are a lot of poorly-implemented features that don't even coagulate in a robust way, but simply exist as an "idea," and that itself is a waste of time, both for development and for the players that anticipate something grander.

It just seems like the game's regressed over the year that there's no point in investing a lot of time into the game. And sure, the company puts out a lot of ideas, but that has always been part of the main issue. These ideas never get realized into anything big... it just gets spread out even more. The company has one idea, then abandons it by not further improving upon it, then works on another idea, and then the core features of the game get entirely neglected or slowed down for these little experiments. I've even talked about how fishing has been one of those lackluster features. The game has mostly been a sandbox of ideas rather than a progress of implementations, and you can really tell how much the company struggles with providing a platform that players can enjoy. Even so that you can see it from some of their past staff members (e.g. LikeTheSauce and Vesper); these past staff members have shown faith in the development of the game, but they never really exemplified any desire to play AE games at their own will.

 

Sure, if the game even makes it through those several years, but I do think what they're doing to the game currently (pushing weekly releases and laying out ideas without transforming them further) is a hindrance, and ultimately the downfall of any new game startup. New players are going to want that first impression, and if all they see are storyboards, ideas, and unfinished products, they're not going to care as much, and that'll delay further progress, because having new players means getting more financial support (and more positive reviews).

But despite that, AE is fortunate to have old fans that are willing to support AQ3D, even if the game will ultimately flop. If they were a fresh company with no prior game established, then they would really be nowhere, but I do think they were lucky to put out early games in the turn of the century when video games weren't as big, because that's exactly what brought them the foothold to the gaming industry.

And the gaming industry is a constant evolving industry, so it is vital than ever to keep up with demands, especially finding the right target audience for the right game... and even though they've hit the nail to suggest that games are going mobile, where their realization becomes disjointed is at the complexity of their game (controls aren't simple for mobile players, being cross-platform puts a huge divide on both audiences, and there are just more things to manage because of that choice).

And that's sort of where the other half of the problem lies. AE as a company has built its infrastructure from its own foundation (using Adobe Flash and Actionscript), and with the decline of Flash, they're venturing to a new territory and exploring new risks. If Flash wasn't on the decline, it's likely that we would have seen AQ3D developed solely for Flash, and it started out that way for a while, but there were definitely things preventing that fulfillment (Flash's performance hits, the rise of HTML5, the blocking of Flash by modern browsers, and Apple's large influence to disallow Flash on mobile devices which Google and other companies have adopted for their mobile device operating systems). What that means for AE is that they have to adapt, and so far it's been a learning progress for them, and it still is.

 

They've experimented with a lot of mobile games in the past (e.g. Battle Gems, BioBeasts, etc.), so the mobile market isn't alien to them. But what makes those games different from AQ3D is the simplicity of the games and the relatedness to other mobile games on the market.

When people are searching for mobile games, they aren't necessarily thinking about a full MMORPG or a complex game with complex controls. The big games on the mobile market are generally simple swipe and tap games. What makes mobile games stand out from a lot of other games is specifically the unique controls. In a way, platform really does shape the target audience and the success of a game. For instance, you're not going to see successful shooter games on a Wii console because the platform's control scheme is designed for more of the casual, general audience, but you will see more success primarily on keyboard-oriented platforms (PCs). So the platform, coordinated with how the game is intended to be played, really does matter, and going cross-platform doesn't necessarily yield success.

The second instance, relatedness, also matters. Maybe someone enjoys Candy Crush that they want to find a game just like it, so they search on the App store under the puzzles category and find Battle Gems. It's so easy to build on top of success of other games and gain that inspiration from other games, and sometimes inspiration-seekers even get to collaborate with the original developers of a successful hit. AE's done that by collaborating with Orteil on their own Cookie Clicker inspired game, so AE definitely has some level of understanding on the mobile market.

But aside from those two points, the real main point to be made is that there are games that are excellent time wasters, and there are some that are just outright bad, or don't do as well with portraying gameplay to an audience. If the goal of the game is to immerse the user, you want that time to be well-spent and addicting. For instance, there are a lot of games of the "idle game" genre that are "time wasters", but a lot of them aren't aggravating and over-the-top repetitive, and part of what makes them unique is the incremental stages. For instance, you're always perform similar tasks, but every once in a while (usually at a reasonable time), you unlock something new. What you definitely don't want is for the player to spend an exorbitant number of hours to unlock task 2, so pacing is also important, and that's one of the things that largely separates fun time wasters from bad ones. The goal of a time waster shouldn't primarily focus on just wasting time, but it should also be entertaining.