Why I'm Not Playing Landmark

I'm trying to avoid playing Landmark. Couple of reasons. If you look at the purchase information for the Founder's Pack it still leads with "You will receive these items on or before March 31 2014" and the first item on the list of those you'll receive is "Unlimited Closed Beta Access". Therefore I take it that closed beta begins in no more than three weeks and we know there will be a minimum of one full wipe at the end of Alpha and very probably another before then, when they add new biomes.

At least that was what we were warned, although SOE managed to add new biomes this week without a wipe, Tundra and Old Growth Forest on a dozen fresh islands. We also got two extra claim flags to make claims that adjoin our main claim and the ability to craft all the shrubs, flowers and trees currently in the world, pending the addition of the collection system, which I'm guessing we'll eventually use to play Combat Botanist.

So, that's one reason I'm trying to avoid playing, even though the new biomes look spiffy and I suddenly have three times the available space. I was thinking of starting my own ski-slope cum arboretum, only it would take me dozens and dozens of hours to build and I'd never get it done in time. And even if I did it would be gone come April.

There's a long thread on the forums full of replies to the question of why so few people are playing. Most of the answers are some form of "I'm waiting until we reach the stage that interests me, or there's new stuff to see/do and/or until what I do will have some permanence". Even the relatively minor new content in the recent patch was sufficient incentive to send all worlds from Low to Medium so I'd anticipate a huge surge when beta rolls around, which brings me to the second reason I'm trying not to play Landmark.

I'm a little nervous about beta. When it arrives, pretty much everything starts to count. Almost all progress carries over to Open Beta and thence to Live. That means I could start building in earnest and building in Landmark is a dangerously addictive activity. I can all too easily lose an entire evening just fiddling around with some railings. I am genuinely apprehensive about how much time I might end up devoting to piling up voxels.

Creativity is a fearsome thing and one of the attractions of playing MMOs for me has always been that they act as a very effective surrogate for a creative urge that, in the past, I have sometimes found difficult to manage. This feels a little too much like the real thing rather than a surrogate and I'm wary of waking the sleeping beast. Moreover, if I'm going to start putting MMO-scale hours into a genuine creative project, well there are probably things I could do that would better use that time than building eccentric and poorly-finished imaginary buildings.

I have a strong feeling I'll feel a lot more comfortable with Landmark when it turns into a proper MMO where I can just go out and kill monsters and collect flowers. By then I should be able to face it with equanimity. Right now I hardly dare log in.