Busy Doing Nothing. Again!

After yesterday's long, meaningful post, here comes today's short, meaningless one. That's what I call progress!

And progress is what it's all about. Well, progress of a kind. There haven't been all that many mmorpgs where the number next to my character has gone into three figures and in the few I can think of, EverQuest and EverQuest II being the ones that come immediately to mind, it took me years and years to get that far, not to mention a good deal of concerted effort at times.

In Noah's Heart, getting to Level 100 took me just over seven months, with pretty much no effort at all. 

Oh, it took some work at the start, back when I was treating it just like any other mmorpg. I followed the main storyline, took all the missions, cleared all the instances, explored all the maps... generally ran around like a good adventurer, doing whatever the NPCs or my own whims suggested. It was fun.

I still do that, on occasion. Last night, for example, I found and opened every chest in Olmec Rainforest, a large island between Innis Volcano and the Tasim Basin. A week or two back I did a chunk more of the MSQ, which I'd paused back before Christmas so my levels could catch up. 

I'd gotten myself into a state where I was underlevelled for the content, which must prove I'd been concentrating too much on the story, I suppose, although I didn't realize at the time that's what I'd been doing. The story is gibberish, partly because that's just what it is but mostly because the translation is so terrible it's hard to tell what's going on most of the time but I was still curious to see what was going to happen next.

Despite the shortcomings of the storyline and the exigiencies of the translation, there's a perfectly playable mmorpg in there, somewhere, but as I discovered after the first two or three months, you don't need to bother with it to keep on levelling. All you have to do is log in in regularly. Maybe not even that.

Noah's Heart has a passive xp system that trundles along behind the scenes no matter what you do - or don't do. It even seems to tick over when you're offline. Every day, when I log in, a whole load of red dots tell me all the things I'm entitled to claim and one of them is something called "Trial Rewards".

Of course, since this is Noah's Heart we're talking about, nothing can have one, consistent name. When you open the window, you'll find the word "Trial" has been replaced by the much more revealing "Idle" and as you can see, most of the presents you get for doing sod all are a bunch of xp points for some of the key progression systems - character, phantom and constellation levels. 

In this way, I've been leveling up steadily even on the days when I haven't been doing anything much at all. But it doesn't stop there. At a bare minimum, each day I complete enough Activities to make sure I get my maximum 200 Active Points. I need to do that to get the tokens to continue the Seasonal storylines, something that started out as relatively coherent, significantly detailed and rather entertaining sub-plots but which are now little more than poorly-disguised, scarcely comprehensible time-fillers. And yet I still do them. 

Pretty much every one of those Activities also gives xp. They give a load of other rewards too but if I was to start trying to explain all of those we'd be hear 'til next week. Even though the amount of xp needed per level has been truly enormous for months now, this steady drip drip drip of xp will wear that mountain down.

For a while there also appeared to be a cap on the level range of the specific server you played on and that may well still be the case but if it is I've never quite managed to catch up to it to find out and there's not much chance I ever will, since it appears to be an ever-moving target. I saw someone on my server a while back, who was Level 105, I think. It may have been Level 103. It was definitely over a hundred.

Now I come to think of it, though, I'm not sure where I would have seen someone's level. It isn't visible either over the heads of characters in the world or even on inspection. It must have been in the Fantasy Arena, a hands-off, automated PvP battleground, where two teams of four, each comprised of a player-character and three Phantoms, duel it out. Your level and that of your Phantoms is clearly displayed there and marks a significant element in matchmaking.

Now that I've turned 100 myself, the really strange thing I've discovered is that the level I see against my name on my character sheet isn't "100" at all. It's the delightfully ethereal Transcender 3. Whether this is an entirely new, post-100 leveling system or merely another example of the game's obsession with having at least two names for everything I guess I'm only going to find out by playing.

Or, indeed, by not playing, since it seems I'll level up whether I do or not. Given the choice, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, I guess I might as well play.