Fun With /Played

This week I discovered a long-standing and very prolific SWTOR blog in German that I'd never even heard of before. Sadly it doesn't appear to have an RSS feed that would allow me to always show its latest update on my blogroll, but I still added a link to the blog itself at the bottom of the list. (EDIT: Never mind that, found an RSS feed after all.) So if you're one of my German-speaking readers (and I know there are at least a few of you), go check out Pfannenstiels Welt.

In yesterday's post, Pfannenstiel did some musing on which Jedi and Sith classes he likes more, and as part of this he looked at his /played time for each class. The slash played command is always an interesting subject to discuss among MMO players, but at the same time I think a lot of us more dedicated players actually tend to shy away from consulting it, because being told that you've literally spent hundreds of days in game can be a bit sobering in a bad way.

Personally I was intrigued though, since I haven't played much attention to the /played command in SWTOR, other than on a couple of occasions where I was wondering how long it took me to level up a particular character. So I decided to log through all of my alts on The Red Eclipse and catalogue my time spent on each of them. I do have a couple of alts on other servers, but none of them are at the level cap or had a lot of time invested in them, so focusing on the many characters on my home server should paint an accurate enough picture.

When I added it all up, it said that I had played 290 days, 19 hours and 48 minutes of SWTOR on all my characters... which does sound like quite a lot, but I can't say that I regret any of it. Also, I'm pretty sure that this is still less than the amount of time I spent in World of Warcraft over the years, especially since back then I didn't have to spend nearly as much time on real-life distractions such as work.

The numbers also show that while I have a pretty impressive stable of alts, there is absolutely no doubt about my attachment to my main. Shintar the Commando has more than 109 days of played time to her name alone, which is more than a third of my entire time spent in game and more than twice as much as I've spent on the next character down the line. That would be my Sage Golu, whom I've considered my "main alt" for a long time and who clocks in at a still impressive 42 days. After those two follow a bunch of alts that I've had for a long time and that I feel fairly attached to, who all have between 10 and 20 days of played time to their name.

The alts with fewer hours played mostly demonstrate how much the game has been sped up since 4.0 in particular. My DvL "event main" Shilu for example has been played for only about two and a half days, during which I played through the entirety of her class story, did lots of flashpoints and even some operations by now... yet I've got the same amount of time spent on an old Sage alt that's still in her forties because I never bothered to level her up any further.

Other interesting observations I made while recording this info:

Of my currently 22 characters on TRE, only three have a valor rank of 1, meaning that they've never set foot into a warzone. This shows that while I'm far from being a hardcore PvPer, I do like to at least dip my toes into PvPing on each new alt that I make.

My ten most played characters all have a social rank between 8 and 10, with the exception of my Operative, who's still only social 6 after years of play (nearly 16 days of raw playtime), since I was always a bit of a loner while playing her.

Looking at all these numbers also reminded me of a post I did about my WoW playing once, where I counted the number of dungeons I'd run during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Apparently I did nearly nine hundred of them in that expansion alone, which is a crazy contrast to SWTOR, where in the three and a half years since the achievement system was introduced, I still haven't got the "run this 25 times" achievement for any flashpoint (except for one, and that was clearly a bug because I hadn't actually run the instance anywhere near that often). That is not to say that I don't enjoy SWTOR's flashpoints - the opposite is the case - but even though most of them aren't very difficult and can be completed quite quickly these days, they still strike me as something to be savoured every now and then instead of something to be farmed for daily rewards the way people treated WoW's WOTLK dungeons.

Do you dare look at your /played time?