Nightlife Grind Update

Initially I was going to use "gamble" in the title again, but since I established in my last post that clicking on a virtual slot machine a thousand times to eventually claim your guaranteed prize at no financial cost is really more of a grind than a gamble, I edited it accordingly.

Over the last few days I managed to click my way through all the free tokens I'd accumulated on my Commando main and one of my Shadow alts, but more chips keep pouring in from every "normal" play session regardless of my efforts. Still, just this first "round" of clicking my way through the chips already resulted in me getting the "rare" Rodian companion and speeder on both characters, as well as a couple of extra speeders and almost two hundred certificates. Fortunately all the prizes bind to legacy so you can send them to other characters, which is nice. I don't think this was always the case, as I have this vague memory of winning a duplicate speeder that I couldn't use years ago, but I may well be mistaken about that.

I also got the achievement for blowing up a slot machine, but it was a bit disappointing as there was no animation to go with it. I can't tell if it's supposed to be that way or whether it's just another bug.

Keeping busy on my second monitor while going through the click-grind eased the tedium somewhat, but I still wouldn't call it a fun experience. In fact, once I'd cleared out one character's tokens, I barely felt like playing for several days after.

As the event is running for another two weeks I'll undoubtedly end up with several dozen more free chips, but I think at this point I'll just let them pile up. Maybe I'll come back next year for whatever the new prizes are then, but at the current rate it costs me almost as much time to use my free chips as it takes me to earn them, and the former is just not enjoyable to me.

As I said before I'm usually pretty good at not succumbing to artificially created pressure to engage in in-game activities that aren't really fun to me, but I'll admit that the promise of free stuff got me this time. Looking at the negative effect it's been having on my overall fun levels though, I at least know to take a step back from that now and to re-focus on doing things that actually bring me joy.