Casual Gamers

A casual gamer is the term I came up with to describe people like me who play MMOs, but only activate accounts every few months to as little as once a year. Why would people do this? Well…

How it works

• To make the casual gamer method work for you, first find a month in the year that you know you'll have minimal demands from work, projects, and family. Vacations are good as are business trips if you'll have several in a month or the trips will be long. For example, my wife and kids went to a friend's wedding in another state giving me 10 days of only work to deal with (plenty of spare time to play).

• Consider buying a good laptop for playing the game. Trips away from home don't help you much if you can only play at home.

• Plan ahead for day trips, activities, or other ways to keep the family busy while you play. Maybe that would be a good month to activate one of those "Movies by Mail" schemes so the family can catch up on the kid and chick-flick movies that you wouldn't want to watch anyway.

  Another good use for the laptop is that you can play and join the family for a movie at the same time. This is useful because you're still spending time with them and if it's a movie you want to watch, you can often play and pay enough attention to the movie to get the major points anyway.

  This does not work for movies that you really want to see, only for ones that you have a bit of interest in, but that doesn't need your full attention.

• Make sure that you plan ahead to devote time to projects, family, and work as needed. If you don't pick certain days to play and others to get stuff done, your plants will die, the humane society will collect the pets, your kids will whine, and your back will start to hurt from the various kitchen tools embedded there by your frustrated wife. These events all make gameplay less fun.

  Plan ahead to put the game down and deal with real life. For example, maybe the weekend is coming and you promised to take the family somewhere. Pick Saturday morning to go to the zoo and your family will be happy to get out while you can spend a good portion of the rest of the day with the game.

  

  Zoo inspired characters
  Note that the zoo is also a good place to get inspiration for new characters.
  Never schedule chores, family activities, or other non-game stuff for late in the day if you can avoid it. It can be very frustrating to have that deadline hanging over your head while you play rather than getting the real life out of the way first and having the rest of the day free.

  If it can't be avoided, make sure to quit at least a half hour (probably more) before having to leave for whatever it is. Don't put your spouse in the position of having to nag you for help or start walking out the door while you "finish this last mission". You will make your family start to resent the game and they'll be far less likely to leave you alone while you play in the future.

• Expect and plan for interruptions. Granted you can't pause online games like you can with consoles, but there are ways of handling this. When teaming, people will understand if you have to go afk for the baby or to help with dinner etc. If you're Soloing, you can park your character somewhere safe, deal with whatever came up and come back.

  Worst case, if you take too long, it will just log you out and you can continue where you left off.

  Make sure to use proper Jordan's Teaming Guide when leaving a team to do something temporarily and be careful about taking timed missions or TFs as you will most certainly fail to complete them if you don't plan ahead to have the required amount of time.

• You can cancel the recurring billing any time even immediately after you activate to prevent accidentally being billed for a second month.

Cryptic and casual gamers

Fortunately, there are several ways that Cryptic supports the casual gamer.

• While your character names become available for use by other players after a month or two (which is another reason to think of really creative names), your characters are never deleted no matter how long you remain in-active.

• The low monthly fee is also a great help. With it you get to play both CoH and CoV as well as get free game updates (Issues in CoH, expansions in other games).

  This is particularly important for casual gamers since it would be really hard to only get one months worth of play then have to pay additional costs to get the most recent version before activating again.

  Attention Cryptic and PlayNC: Good job on the pricing scheme so far

There are a few ways that Cryptic could support us better which I know would bring me back to the game more often and they're all related to the pricing scheme.

• It would be beneficial to offer a weekly rate since time off usually comes in weeks, not months.

• I know they're already working on time-based cards and that can be good depending on the price they ask versus the time.

My CoH Experience

My dad let me play his account when he wasn't using it when I was home for Spring break in 2004. I built a Dark/Storm defender that really wasn't very good, but I was enthralled with CoH style and gameplay. A little over a year later, I realized that there would be a one month gap between my graduation and the time I started my new job. Wow. What would I do with myself for a whole month? Hmm….

I really wanted to play right away, but had to wait until that month came so I filled the time by studying the game. Based on the advice I found in the City of Heroes forums, my first hero was a Dark Melee/Regen Scrapper since it was listed as an excellent solo play character. Thought I took a few Alts up to level 14 or so, my scrapper was my main who I got up to level 36 by the time the month was over.

Since then, I've had the time to reactivate my account one time during December and February of 2005-2006 where I pushed one of my Alts to level 41 and made several more heroes and a few villains. With one more month of play in Summer 2006, I took my beloved defender, Jordan, to level 50 and started both a PB and a WS. I've learned a lot despite the very short amount of time I played and would love to share it.

About my guides

Perhaps your story sounds similar to mine. You like the game, but can't play very often and deactivate and reactivate your account every few months.

If you are a casual gamer, or even if you're not, you may find my guides useful for getting the most out of the time you have to play.